Stewart 8

 

Multiple personality, on the other hand, has not been introduced into the general fabric of how people interact and practise who or what they take themselves to be. By noticing that there aren't any split bars (unless they are really underground), I think what Hacking has done is point to the failure of multiple personality to acquire what it would need in order to contend for the status of a way to be a person. Norman Bates was not constituted as a split in the sense that he practised the set of ritualized acts establishing him as such, or in the sense that he engaged in struggles over the interpretation of social institutions which barred splits from participating in reifying practices, or finally, in the sense that he was a member of a local, specialized social phenomenon embedded in a very specific branch of social history. The story of Norman Bates, and I suggest any clinical story that diagnoses things like MPD, is itself a practice, but one carried out at the level of clinical or academic study and theorizing, and a practice for whom struggles will take place among philosophers and psychologists.

My argument is not that this kind of academic and institutionalized practice does not have the ability to inscribe itself into the regulating principles of everyday social life and identities. My argument is rather that MPD itself is both an anomaly within the Cartesian model that claims to account for it, and a perfect example, in its distinguishing features from queer culture and garçons de café, of what cannot count as a "way to be a person." The fact that garçons de café were noticeable phenomena and gay bars are some part of a widespread struggle over the questioning of normalized heterosexuality is precisely the relationship between social categories and people in those categories that Hacking is after. I think what is least implicit in Hacking—but provides the key to the absence of split bars—is the insight that what is often constitutive about social categories is precisely their room for negotiation, their room for questioning, and above all, the fact that subjects must actively seek out their engagement in ongoing projects of idealized identities and subjectivities. This is what really counts splits out of the running for ways to exist as a person. To explain what I mean, consider the following conjecture. Couldn't splits very well engage in a liberation of sorts—petitioning banking and voting practices so as to make legitimate the association of more than one agency for any given body? I say this is not a possibility in the way that queer liberation was a possibility. The crucial element that counts us as such-and-such subjects engaged in lived out practices of identity is precisely the full-time commitment to a unified social role. Living out and reifying subjectivity is a practice, taking its shape in various rituals and social roles. This is not to say that people need be predictable or consistent, but it does say that dissociative disorder (MPD) can't be understood as the taking up of various roles from some time to another, when those roles do not mutually contribute to the lived out practising of a unified being. In fact, we might loosely understand our friend Norman and MPD in general as the incapability, the failure of achieving a unified, dedicated use of the resources required to count as occupying some recognizable and interpretable social role. This unification, however loose, is how we can understand the claim of "personality."


return to top | previous page | next page