William Rodney Herring's Courses

In Michael Mann's Collateral, Max drives a cab and dreams of owning his own business. So when his passenger Annie asks, "You take pride in being good at what you do?" Max's answer is odd: "What, this? No, this is part-time.... But I will be the best at what I do. But that's something else." Since, in any meaningful sense of the word "do," driving a cab is precisely what Max does, and since, in fact, it is what he is doing when Annie asks this question, how can Max say that driving a cab is not "what I do"?

He must imagine some identity not defined by what he is currently doing. He must, in other words, conceive of himself as someone different from what he does. In other words, Max (like many of us) sees himself as a being whose identity is separate from what he does and capable of being in control of what he does. But this is precisely what Vincent mocks later in the movie when he tells Max: "'Someday. Someday my dream will come.' One night you'll wake up and you'll discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you. It never will, and suddenly you are old. Didn't happen. Never will. Because you were never going to do it anyway." In Vincent's view, all Max is is what he does, and positing some alternative being who does something "better" than drive a cab is merely a way of not accepting who he is or of avoiding responsibility for what he does. Vincent still believes that individuals have a being apart from what they do; he just believes that this being (who they are) is determined by what they do. Most of us imagine a "being behind the doing" (the phrase is Nietzsche's)--probably because we want to think there is an actor (an "I") directing our actions (and thus that we have choices about which actions we perform). But why should we believe this?

In this class, we will ask: How do individuals' actions (including, perhaps above all, the words individuals write or say--to others or to themselves) construct identities? How, at the same time, do those actions (and words) reveal what kind of identities the actors think they are constructing? Put another way, how does (the action of) presenting--the self (in rhetorical terms, "appeals" that determine "ethos")--construct and disclose the construction of an individual's being?