The Self That Rereads Itself: Dilthey, Jameson, and the Presuppositions of Matusov's Uniqueness Model

Abstract

This article offers a critical supplement to Eugene Matusov’s uniqueness model of educational justice by interrogating the very figure it presupposes: the learner capable of authorial self-evaluation. The authors argue that this self is not a natural starting point but a product of a specific cultural technique—rereading—whose genealogy they trace from August Böckh’s philological principle of “cognition of the already cognized” through Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics of the human sciences. The article demonstrates how continental philosophy, from Nietzsche through Bakhtin, transformed the book into a machine for producing critical subjectivity through aphoristic rereading, revealing Bakhtin’s central concepts as effects of this operation rather than its premises. Fredric Jameson’s theory of the novel is introduced as the democratic counterpart to this elite practice, training mass readerships in the retroactive organization of experience that manufactures the coherent bourgeois self. Through a close analysis of Matusov’s own pedagogical episodes—the index card exercise, the distinction between learning and education, retrospective re-evaluation—the authors show that his classroom practice unconsciously instantiates the very rereading structure whose history they excavate. The article contends that the uniqueness model would be strengthened by recognizing that the self-evaluating learner is a cultural achievement dependent on narrative and hermeneutic techniques that must themselves be taught and transmitted. This reframing introduces a new dimension of educational justice: equity of access not to outcomes but to the very means of self-production. The metaphor of the mask guides this inquiry, with the self that pronounces its learning educational serving as the mask, while the endless process of rereading constitutes the unseen face beneath it.