I certainly think that the factors you identify have contributed to a tendency in people to define themselves according to a particular occupation or expertise. There are many who define themselves as writers in precisely this professional sense, of course, but I wonder if this is the same thing as defining oneself as someone who writes, as such, professionally or otherwise. If I do define myself as someone who writes, this definition very well might involve the sort of considerations that you describe, but I would hope that I might also choose to practise writing in ways that are not primarily determined by these factors. Would you see a space for this kind of writing, or would you understand it to be as economically implicated as professional writing?

I’m glad you posted on this, as I’ve been reflecting for the last couple days on how much I enjoyed that conversation.

I wonder if the answer to your last question has anything to do with our Western drive towards individualism and specialization. Generally speaking, before societies industrialized, people were veritable “Jacks of all trades”: pretty good at everything, but not really good at one thing. As a number of technological and scientific advances were made, economies began to diversify, and people began to focus on one “trade”. Because modern capitalism relies on people being ultra-efficient “cogs in the machine” (with Ford’s assembly line being an extreme example), individuals’ success and worth to society began to be based on their ability to complete the task that they specialized in.

I think the capitalist mentality is old enough that it has become engrained in our minds, to the extent that we start to apply it more broadly to our “selves”, even in situations that don’t directly relate to economic activity. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was during high school – the first time in our lives that we start to realize our roles as “responsible members of society (or the economy) – that we start to derive identity from the things that we have a natural talent for. If it’s our special talents that give us worth in the capitalist paradigm, why wouldn’t we define ourselves by those talents? It’s a rather depressing thought to me, to be quite honest – but I think there’s something to it.

Only a subtle hint of Marxist historiography there . You can always count on a history student in the modernist tradition to bring it back to economics! I’m sure that there’s more to it than that; the Continental philosophers would probably have my head for event suggesting it as a primary explanation! Undoubtedly, I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and disagree with everything that I just said.

You are right, of course. Though we might have have a very definite sense of self apart from language, our ability to articulate this to ourselves will always be dependent on our linguistic facility, our ability to use words, language structures, ideas in appropriate ways.

This implies that there are at leas three modes of approaching the writing of the self:

1) By ignoring this process entirely, choosing to live the self apart from a conscious articulation of what defines this self in the world;

2) By making the self into the object of writing, choosing to use writing solely as a tool for the purpose of defining the self as it appears to the self; and

3) By identifying the self with writing, choosing to use writing to define the self precisely as the one who uses writing.

An increasing facility with language will have almost no effect on the first mode, but will have a tremendous effect on the second two modes, for the reasons that you have already suggested. However, now that we have established this much, I think I can articulate my question more clearly:

What is the catalyst that provokes people to move from one mode to another? What causes people to begin consciously defining themselves through writing? What motivates them to begin consciously defining themselves as people who write?