Sample Essay

Stewart 5

 

Part II

Making It All Up: Hacking on Personhood

What is Hacking up to in "Making Up People" that is of relevance to my previous discussion of Psycho? Particularly, Hacking makes a claim regarding multiple personality disorder (MPD) of the kind we have been discussing. [Note] He juxtaposes MPD with two other categories of what he calls "ways to be a person." These are the category of gayness and the Parisian garçon de café. What could these three have in common, you ask? Hacking's particular interest in multiple personality is a reading of its quite recent clinical history. He says, "I claim that multiple personality as an idea and as a clinical phenomenon was invented around 1875…. Do I mean there were no multiples before [then]? Yes."⁶ Hacking is engaged in the project of suggesting that evolving discourses that name categories of persons and the people actually in those categories "evolve hand in hand." To this end, he has made claims like the following:

People spontaneously come to fit their categories.

Making up people changes the space of possibilities for personhood.⁷

In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.⁸

If new modes of description come into being, new possibilities for action come into being in consequence.⁹

… our spheres of possibility, and hence ourselves, are to some extent made up by our naming and what that entails.¹⁰

To my understanding, these quotations, and indeed Hacking's position, suggest a kind of constitutive relationship between individuals and the establishing of categories of kinds of persons. But what does Hacking have in mind, exactly, when he says that people "spontaneously" come to fit their categories? Surely he doesn't mean 1) that people come to fit their categories "out of the blue," or 2) that spontaneity is somehow the key force to which we should attribute being constituted at all. Whatever he means has provoked him to distinguish the unfolding of gays and garçons de café from the unfolding of splits. Hacking says "multiple personality, the homosexual or heterosexual person, and the waiter form one spectrum among many that color our perception…. Whatever the medico-forensic experts tried to do with their categories, the homosexual person became autonomous of the labeling, but the split is not…. [T]he class of waiters is [also] autonomous of any act of labeling."¹¹

____________________

⁶ Hacking, "Making Up People," 223.

⁷ Ibid., 223.

⁸ Ibid., 228.

⁹ Ibid., 231.

¹⁰ Ibid., 226.

¹¹ Ibid., 223.

 

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