Amanda,
This is a beautiful read. I didn't read Day's essay, but you make it sound so profound, that now I'm indifferent whether I read your version or hers. In fact, it’s so clearly written, that it empowers me to comment anyhow.

It's exciting how you start with Ortega Y Gasset's quote. If Day characterizes a person "objectively," i.e. by how he (mis)represents thought and fact, then she hasn't yet captured his identity. But I say this (disagreeing with you?) because identity gets constructed “subjectively,” i.e. by an observer. A person could never misrepresent himself, because his selves are a social construct. (In Jen Burke's paper, I said there's no such thing as autonomy, which is too extreme for this context. Also, I accused her of being The Man, but I won't call you a liar.)

So, the freedom Ortega Y Gasset describes sounds Utopian -- “man is the novelist himself … lacking constitutive identity, not [having] subscribed to a determined being". I'd rather say that a man’s various identities get determined by the position his past behaviors take in each person’s subjective social web -- I'd rather say, that if “the novelist of himself” tried to write one novel for everyone, it would be path-dependent, and he'd inexorably lose self-control and eventually "subscribe to a [series of] determined being[s]."

On the other hand, that personal novel could contain a multitude of characters, in which case Ortega Y Gasset is saying, “control your relationships, like a good author controls all his characters.” A person’s subjective social web changes as he makes new acquaintances; in the law, "the rule is made as the rule is applied;" in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth continually re-defined Darcy's identity by meeting new persons who knew him …

An actor can only learn a person’s premises by entering his network, i.e. by making first impressions. (My paper calls it the "act/actor/observer" trilemma.) And it’s easy to make bad first impressions with strangers. But what we learn from these encounters empowers us to make good first impressions with their friends; their two identities of us interact, somewhere, and (somehow?) change each other.

But I can't write an autobiography in which I make everyone a Marxist. Again, a lovely paper.

-- AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008