Just the other day I had the privilege of listening to a brilliant talk by Kris Cohen (Reed College) who examined questions of togetherness, social alienation, and what it means to “know” someone, among other things. Expanding on his book that I have, admittedly, yet to read, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, Cohen looked at whether we can “know” someone from their social media profile(s), what anonymous search queries can tell us, if anything, about a population, and how we can be with those who we never meet. During the question and answer session, I sought to clarify a point he made and fired from the hip with a question/objection. As I’ve had slightly more time to think on the issue, I feel as if I ought to expand upon it and see how it might apply to other instances.
Towards the beginning of his talk, Cohen brought up the Twitter page of @tinynietzsche (embedded below) as an example of a “person” he somewhat knew. More precisely, Cohen brought up @tinynietzsche’s Twitter page along with a few other social media accounts to make the point that these accounts, these “people,” merely referenced externally existent individuals. Before raising any objection, I wanted to make sure I correctly understood the argument so as not to strawperson Cohen and, so far as I can recall, his re-affirmed thesis ran something along the lines of “When I view this Twitter account, I’m in some relation with this person, but I can only say that I know a ‘part’ of them. They have an external life that I do not and cannot know as I only have access to limited information about them.”
Ultimately, whether or not this rephrased thesis captures completely what Cohen meant is largely irrelevant, as what is at work in my concern (which I will elaborate on momentarily) is a skepticism of an implied essential subject. Allow me to clarify. I questioned, in not quite so eloquent and thought out language, whether this conception of subjectivity — that is to say, the view that there is a person outside their Internet persona that might be said to be “substantial” — allowed for legitimate forms of pseudonymity. While I think that question is still important, as Cohen spoke more, however, I was reminded of Justin Murphy’s recent post titled “What am I doing?” which, in a similar vein, tacitly reified the notion of an essential or substantial subject.
Indeed, in the piece (the context of which it was born is irrelevant to the discussion here), Murphy noted the following:
I’ve never liked carving myself into separate sections, and strategically presenting myself to one audience here and one over there. People will say, “But of course, everyone has to do that!” Maybe that’s correct, but maybe it’s just a useful fiction for people who have made their life about optimizing something other than the truth (how they are perceived, their status, their income or financial stability, etc.). For my part, I believe that any mature adult who claims to be an intellectual must insist upon the widest possible latitude to think and speak in their own tongue — in a way that they are content to let stand for any interested party. Comfortably accepting any latitude less than the greatest latitude they can force open for themselves is fine — it just means you are living a different kind of life than the intellectual life. To think one thing and say another, or to say one thing to your peers and another thing to your students and another thing to the public, is — I believe — a truly abominable, cardinal sin for anyone who says to the public that they are in the business of truth-seeking. I understand that some people must live like this, because of their own unique web of obligations, which is why I am not judging others — but it doesn’t mean I must like it, or live my own life that way.
[…]
[I]n the contemporary fragmented media environment, trying to think and write honestly while also pleasing your family, bosses, students, and the public is just prohibitively energy consuming. As an academic, you can easily spend most of your days strategizing how to present yourself in different spaces, and never get around to thinking or saying anything worthwhile. [Emphasis my own]
In both cases, the case of Cohen affirming that he knows part of @tinynietzsche and Murphy asserting that he doesn’t like to “carve himself up,” something deeper is be implicitly affirmed — the essential or substantial subject.
“Multi Faced” by Neverville.
Given that I’ve had a bit more time to reflect upon everything, the following objection I want to levy is not so much me firing from the hip anymore, but rather firing from the chest. While my sights are not true — indeed, there may be no sights to align with this argument — the spirit (and I use that word with more than a tinge of irony) of my argument ought to stay true. Where Cohen and Murphy, among many, many others, seem to tacitly affirm an essential or substantial subject, I want to posit that each instantiation of the self, each slab of subjectivity carved from the body and strategically placed is, in fact, no more or less prior to, or important than, the subject from whence it came. To elaborate: the essential or substantial view of subjectivity seems to encompass the view that underneath all the machinations of the self as instantiated on Twitter profiles, Instagram pages, formal decorum, etc., there is a static subject that wears these various outfits. Underneath the veneer of my Twitter persona or the face I put on when I go to class or the cap I wear when I engage with my colleagues, there is a Peter that is unscathed and exists independently; there is some “authentic” Peter, some essential or substantial Peter. This view, the view that underneath the masks we wear there is a unified self leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Can I explain why? Not yet. Do I know what caused this tastebud to activate? Likely Deleuze and Guattari. But ultimately that doesn’t matter here as in the last little bit of space I have left, I want to take a first shot at fracturing that subject.
In Michel Foucault’s marvelous essay “What is an Author?” a parallel issue is raised in the discussion of oeuvre. As Foucault(?) notes:
The first [notion to replace the death of the author] is the idea of the work [oeuvre]. It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structures, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? […] When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during imprisonment.
Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication if Nietzsche’s works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is “everything”? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death?1)Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), 207.
The parallel ought not be to a stretch as Foucault(?) is problematizing the author is the same way I want to question the subject. When one dons a mask, does one not truly become someone else? Does the Shaman who dons the ceremonial mask not become a God? Do church-goers who are moved into mass not become a molar unit? Can we really say that The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert is not actually Stephen Colbert but rather a character played by the real, essential Stephen Colbert? I think not. As we don different masks, take on different social roles, “carve ourselves into separate sections,” “strategically present ourselves differently,” and operate pseudonymous Twitter accounts, we really do become those new subjectivities and they are not reducible down to a mere game a transcendent (or substantial) subject plays.
Take hip-hop legend Daniel Dumile aka MF DOOM aka Zev Love X aka King Geedorah aka Viktor Vaughn aka The Super Villain, etc., etc., etc. as an example. Saying the bars Zev Love X spits on Bl_ck B_st_rds is merely a manifestation of Daniel Dumile is cheating just as much as to say King Geedorah’s screams on Take Me To Your Leader is Dumile playing a game which, in turn, is cheating just as much as to say MF DOOM’s life story on “Doomsday” is merely Dan infiltrating the rap game in disguise. Each persona is just as real as, and irreducible to, the “actual” Daniel Dumile.2)This thought first came to me while listening to a talk by Wesley Cray in early 2018. I do not think he has finished his work on pseudonymity yet.
Like the object-oriented claim that objects and their properties are not reducible to one another, but rather both immanently exist, I want to skim off the notion of something to which we can reduce instantiations down to, the static subject, and leave us with a multiplicity of events, or becomings. I take Lennon’s claim that “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” and explode it in the opposite direction: we are not one, but multiple.
In response to the inevitable objection that will no doubt arise — that is to say, “but have you not reified an essential or substantial subject in your usage of pronouns, much less the fact that you refer to individuals? Why have you chosen to write this way?” — the following quotation ought to answer the question: “Out of habit, purely out of habit.”3)Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3.
References
| ↑1 | Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), 207. |
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| ↑2 | This thought first came to me while listening to a talk by Wesley Cray in early 2018. I do not think he has finished his work on pseudonymity yet. |
| ↑3 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3. |