102

A Polemic

Since people seem to keep subscribing to this, perhaps I ought to write something—but what?

I started, as a writer, in the certainty that change was a matter of the right words. Later, I found action, and in action, much of my desire for words was satiated. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe I still desired to write, but what I have desired to write about has been action, and in this digital world of representations what passes over from action into it seems violently flattened into the merely symbolic. If something is said on social media, then it is just another adjective added before an identity to be monitored, analyzed, and sold. And if what we are here to do is to be watched consuming that aesthetic brand of being we want to identify with, then I may as well pass back into silence. There is a beauty in the way of being that does not feel compelled to say its name. In silence, it is unsaleable and therefore free.

Recently, I lost my phone before going on a camping trip. For over a week, I did not look at a phone or a computer, or any kind of screen, even once. It was wonderful. You should do it sometime. I regret being around electronics now, but there I never once regretted the lack of them. Life meant dealing with the environment, with people, with the immediate, as it should be. Even being in ninety-plus-degree weather treating someone else’s heat exhaustion is better than sitting around on a laptop. Absurdly, it has become something I feel nostalgia for.

But as surely as we disconnect, we return. Even as the real life really is there and not here. The curious problem is that its alternative—the digital, the artificial, whatever we may call it—is essential. And that is not because the internet, or telecommunications more broadly, have overcome some more natural existence, but because the human world has always been about appearances. To lament the centrality of significations for their replacing authentic being with artifice is to forget that whatever the supposedly authentic was to us, it was a signification first and foremost. (In the woods I am still a liar—I just like the lies I tell there better.) Even so, there is a world outside the artificial, though it is not some place of human authenticity. (It is authentic for us to be artificial.) The real world is simply inhuman. Not in the sense of cruelty or meanness, but that the real world isn’t ours in an exclusive sense. It’s the world of living and its conditions that we share with this planet and everything else on it—which includes quite a lot of life that lies more and better than we do.

What makes me hesitate before I write here has nothing to do with the digital’s artificial nature. I am as artificial as this—and more. Rather, it has everything to do with its economy, its way of being at home, in representations. You are the product and I am the product. The possibility of your attention is being given to me for free so that knowing what grabs your attention may be sold to others for real money, to be able to sell you things better. And all that I put out here, all that is used to bait the hook to catch you, it is just another trove of personalized data. To be sure, it is data that we are taught to believe we will be rewarded for creating, possibly by becoming influential or judged to have some valuable insight. But then, the illusion only holds so long as we have forgotten how nice it is to be forgotten. (What pulls me back is that I have already made myself a little memorable.)

There is little space, if any, between writing about transness and its commodification, here. This has nothing to do with transness itself. The production of cis identity is even more extensively commodifed everywhere. As, in fact, all representations are commodifiable (especially lamentations against being a commodity). The problem is that I am still dreaming for the words with the meaning to overcome their own condition, but self awareness may be even less subversive than pure, unconscious fantasy.