ABSTRACT
The topics I wish to pursue are the relation of human subjectivity to historical agency and the ways in which these two elements, the subject and its activity, were encoded, during the sixteenth century, in two quite different grammatical systems: humanist neo-Latin and the Scots-English vernacular. “Activity” is the broadest of terms, but I make no apology on that account. For the epistemological tradition, to which I refer early in this essay, activity means perception and thought, mental process. For the Marxist tradition, to which I will turn later on, activity means labor, manual production. For Hegel, the key figure in my argument, the mental and manual, ideal and material, succeed each other as “moments” in a dialectical totality. More concretely, for the sixteenth-century Scottish chroniclers whose texts I will examine below, activity almost invariably means political endeavor. For my present purposes, however, such distinctions matter less than the tendency, common to all these strains of thought, to identify subjectivity with some sort of activity and the subject with whatever it does. This tendency pervades not only the philosophical tradition but our casual discourse as well, as when one asks a high-school senior, shortly before her graduation, “What do you want to be?” One means, of course, “How are you going to support yourself?” or, better yet, “What productive function do you plan to assume in the economic apparatus?” Like the unwelcome fairy in the fable, we insist that, having come of age, she take up the spindle, to toil and to spin. Even so, confusing activity with ontology, we ask the hapless young person what she might wish to be, as if she were not something already but must become something by, of all the unlikely means, getting a job.
