Monday, June 15, 2009

self? (part IV)

The articles that populate the archive of me are, as Charles Merewether asserts, “the foundation from which history is written." And the history that is written from the contents of my archive is done so perpetually; scratch-outs, annotations, new translations, fresh omissions, reclamations, interpretations and reinterpretations, new evidence, old motives, and an array of agents and patients yield a history in the making, my history, the story of me. The articles act as warrant, as evidence of this history, of a narrative, and even possibly of an argument. Moreover, the articles literally constitute the self and are therefore implicit within any metaphysics of self. Finally, while the contents of the archive change over time, they act as a causal chain to “former selves”, making the present self and past selves continuous with one another thereby establishing numerical identity (the past me and the present me are one and the same person; there are not two different people) circumventing any need to rely on some sort of qualitative identity (a highly problematic attempt to establish the persistence of self through time by way of identifying similarities between past and present incarnations).