Postmodern Hamlet: The Problem of Subjectivity

 “This is the very coinage of your brain...” Gertrude to Hamlet, upon not seeing the ghost

A common thread running through much if not most Postmodern theory is the problem of subjectivity: the inability of the individual human to break free from his or her own, unique, cognitive/psychological experience to experience the object world.  Put another way, we are all trapped within our own senses and our own consciousness, and there is no way to objectively judge the accuracy of our concepts (this is the opposite assumption made by Enlightenment era Rationalists: they argued that reason/rationality/scientific objectivity is the means by which we break free from this problem). 

This theme is treated a number of times in both Hamlet itself and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- the most obvious in the latter occurring in the last scenes on the boat.

At a biological level, our senses don't actually deliver to us the full objective experience of reality.  Consider, for example, that dogs can hear sounds that for us "don't exist", or that each of us likely perceives colors somewhat differently based on the specific bio-chemical-neural makeup of our eyes.

At a conceptual level, our knowledge is shaped by experience and is stored both as culturally defined language (see PoMo and Language) and as faulty memory;  how many times, for example, have you and a friend argued over "what really happened" at some event?  More importantly, no two individuals have the same life experience -- so, if Locke is correct and knowledge is shaped by experience, we are each doomed to a separate knowledge.

And as Freud argued, all of this knowledge is colored by our emotions.

Or as Marx argued, all of this knowledge is colored by our economic relations.

Ultimately, then, we are isolated from from actual experiences, because they are colored by our sensory perceptions, our experiences are individual and unique, and these experiences are not really "knowledge" until they have been shaped by culturally defined language and unique emotions.

This is what we mean by "the problem of subjectivity".

This is the problem Garcin confronts in Sartre's No Exit; on the surface his choice to act as a conscientious observer fits Sartre's conception of existential heroism -- Garcin is honorably acting according to his own moral principals -- but as the play unfolds Garcin realizes he has been lying to himself -- the cowardly Garcin has simply persuaded himself that his impulses were, in fact, honorable rather than simple cowardice.

Hamlet realizes something similar about himself: his perception of reality is being shaped by his own depression; he cannot accurately determine which elements of his reality are accurate and which are illusory (is his father's ghost real?), and he is utterly isolated from everyone else, so he cannot accurately "triangulate" his experience -- or his knowledge -- by testing it against the opinions of others.

Like each of us, he is left alone to determine what is real.  And what, therefore, is right.

HAMLET

Denmark's a prison.
 

Then is the world one.
 

A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.
 

We think not so, my lord.
 

Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.
 

Why then, your ambition makes it one; 'tis too
narrow for your mind.
 

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.
 

Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.