Intervention
I Can, Therefore I Shall: Identifications from the Novel to Facebook

Is there something to be said for looking at Facebook as one of a long genealogy of modes of reader/viewer identification starting from the oral folktale, through the novel, film, and television? What might such a genealogy tell us about the ways in which our identification with the lives of others has changed at the present time?

I just finished watching a clip of an interview that Jeremy Paxman did of Randi Zuckerberg (Mark's sister) for the BBC, in which she said that parents these days have to ensure that their children have good electronic footprints. Apparently since it is assumed that the first thing that anyone does on meeting another person for the first time is to google them, some parents have taken to trawling the internet to make sure that they don't give their kid the name of someone notorious or plain nasty as this might constitute the permanent bane of the kid's life. For some reason, as I listened to her I thought of a piece that Slavoj Zizek wrote some years ago in one of the British newspapers in which he ended with the motto "I can, therefore I shall." It was on the new consumerism and the implication of the motto seems to me to be one of the main drivers of the new technology, such that it is the technology that converts incipient wants into raging needs in its users.

But there also appears to be something more profound, and for which we have to turn to the stages of identification produced first by the folktale, then the novel and on and on to the era of Facebook. In simple terms, an orally told folk or fairy tale elicits a mode of identification with its protagonists primarily on the basis of what Abiola Irele has described as the "vital immediacy" of orality. We should not understand vital immediacy to be inherent only in modes of oral storytelling since all forms of music and even dance also transpose modes of vital immediacy into different formats. At any rate, the novel was to generate a new process of identification for the reader, this time severed from the vital immediacy of orality yet no less profound. Privacy and silent reading were the novel's main modalities, but a fertile attentiveness was also central to the means by which readers identified with the characters' tribulations. We should also add that the novel must be credited with generating a new form of "talking heads", i.e., the process by which a reader proceeds to ruminate inside their own heads about the characters they have identified with. The stronger the mental rumination, the stronger the impulse to tell someone else about what you are reading. It is almost convulsive, much like love. That the hero/heroine is a composition of words and as such is in a sense aligned to other word-created dimensions of the text (such as space, time, ethical dispositions, etc), also means that the characters and the language with which they are described provide the syncing mechanism (think iTunes, people) of an entire universe of signification. Critics have of course separated the various levels that circulate within the novel and around the protagonist or characters and re-assembled them into different templates for evaluation. At any rate, the novel is fundamental for providing a sentimental education for any number of readers over the nearly two-and-a-half centuries of its classic articulations in the nineteenth century.

Cinema came to interpose itself into the domain of identifications, and with a combination of words and moving images served to re-transcribe the contexts of vital immediacy onto fresh terrains. The early era of the cinema was soon obliged to contend with that of the television, and I think it is with the television that the character of identifications was fundamentally altered. If you think back to the early era of soap operas, for example, it is easy to see how such programs got viewers to identify with the lives of persons they thought to be much like themselves (in fact, much more like themselves than at least the classic nineteenth-century novels had first proposed). The fragmentary nature of the life narratives of such characters that were relayed day-by-day, or week-by-week, or in whatever cycle of regularity enjoined for the TV soap opera, and the manner by which the soaps serialize and alter the relations between foregrounds and backgrounds for different characters ensured that viewers were being encouraged to tie their imaginary identification to the vicissitudes of the characters in these soaps. A great cinematic validation of this point is to be found in both the form and the content of The Truman Show (1998) which I think has not been adequately scrutinized for what it sought to articulate about audience identification at the end of the twentieth century. That soaps such as Dynasty and Coronation Street and East Enders and Home and Away first reached markets well outside their original viewerships in America, Britain, and Australia and then spawned variants in the telenovelas of Latin America did not alter the efficacy of audience identifications that was central to the soaps' success.

Then came reality TV, which exploded in popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s. Competition-based reality TV shows, in which one competitor is eliminated per episode or there is a panel of judges make for especially strong forms of viewer identification. Unlike the TV soap, the peculiar power of reality TV is that irrespective of the format (Survivor, America's Got Talent, X Factor, So You Think You Can Dance, Blind Date, Greatest Losers, Big Brother, etc.) they are first and last gladiatorial contests. The mode of audience identification with the gladiatorial contest is arguably different from what pertains to the soap but essentially requires that as a viewer you want someone to fail so another person of your choice succeeds. But you can also switch identification from a winner-turned loser to a loser that suddenly looks like a winner, etc. That there is no bloodshed or death unlike in the era of the Romans or indeed of today's Spanish matadors does not alter the essentially gladiatorial character of today's reality TV.

And now Facebook. And Twitter. And Tumblr. And Instagram. But let's stick with Facebook, since it is that that has had and still continues to have the most telling impact both on forms of vital immediacy and on modes of identification. The first significant mark of Facebook is the integration of various multimodal platforms that allow people to combine text, and still photos, and moving images, and links to other pages, etc. in curating and constantly (re)producing their identities. However, it is the fact that people no longer have to necessarily identify with fictional others in stories, novels, films or on TV, but have all the tools at their disposal to insert themselves into the circuits of spectatoriality for others to look at that makes Facebook so profound as the instantiation of a completely new socio-cultural template. This is what makes Facebook such an attractive engine of (non)identification. Everyone is now encouraged to look at me (why watch a soap when you can look at me and I perhaps you?). Thus I put up a picture of the soggy burger and a glass of pale ale I am morosely contemplating right now and expect you to "like" it. Or else? I might just decide not to be your friend anymore, which means essentially that I will refuse to treat your life as a spectacle of moving forms parts of which I might identify with from time to time.

I can, therefore I shall.

 

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