Sweet Comic Dossier

"The idea behind the pseudonym is that you can eliminate the dossier effect, where everything you're doing is being collected, archived, and linked to you."
                                                                                    - Austin Hill

Salman Rushdie, the novelist, recently had his Facebook account restored to him with the social network's consent that he may continue to use his original Facebook identity, "Salman Rushdie."  Facebook was insisting that he is really "Ahmed Rushdie," the name on his passport though one he has never otherwise used. After a Twitter-storm when his account was frozen, Facebook restored his original identity and reactivated his account - "Ohhh, you're that Salman Rushdie!" (Whereupon Rushdie aptly posted on his Facebook page Popeye's immortal, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.”)

He has a point - if you're already famous as, say, Yogi Berra or Pee Wee Herman, and can't use that name, then why would anyone have a Facebook page (ignoring for now the obvious question why anyone would have a Facebook page).

 "Haaah - I wish you could 'marry' me on Facebook!"

Mr. Rushdie wasn't even trying to be pseudonymous. But Facebook claims discretion over how its users will identify themselves and enforces that right by shutting down accounts discovered as (or merely suspected of being) pseudonymous. (This has spawned a Twitter thread about the "nym wars" - Twitter freely allows the use of pseudonyms.) Admittedly, since one can now purchase more and more things on Facebook - things like airline or concert tickets - a pseudonymous Facebook persona may prove inconvenient, particularly if the TSA should become involved when someone tries to "leverage" his pseudonymously purchased airfare.

Its insistence on the use of real identities is good for Facebook's business. On the other hand, granting its putative role as a mobilization and information resource in recent democratic dissent around the globe, one can anticipate that Facebook might lose some of its market if it insists on actual identity as a term of use. But apparently it's doing just that, perhaps calculating that people who are mobilizing to toss bricks aren't the same people who are going to be buying airline tickets or cubic zirconium watchbands. It's about "monetizing" the Internet - that's what "social benefit" really means.

"I 'friended' it on Facebook."

I confess I reside on Facebook as Miguel de Montaigne. That is, of course, my real name although I have no easy way of proving it, my birth certificate having been lost during a heavy storming of the family chateau by the Anabaptists in the Thirty Years War. People do, of course, use online pseudonyms to protect themselves, such as victims of abuse; others do it merely to harass people with impunity. I suppose were I to use a fake name, I might properly be included among the latter since I use Facebook only to link to these blog posts. I was constrained to open an account in the first place because it's the only way I can see any photographs of my grandson and heir of my estate.

 

 My grandson

I'm assured by friends who regularly use Facebook (not "friends" who use Facebook) that it's both useful and lots of fun to have one's own page - useful because it can be a business tool for professional networking and corporate outreach; fun because you can learn immediately and regularly the details of your friends' mood swings, town and highway gas mileage, effects of their medication, lab results, states of their childrens' (or pets') bowels, investment portfolios, alcohol or chocolate consumption, household credit, domestic strife, existential confusion, self-delusion - all of the things that render the use of a pseudonym entirely without point.

Social networking archives will one day be mined as a complex anthropological midden, a trove of psychic and cultural rags, bones and oyster shells. Facebook, like King George III's crapularium, will be intently peered into and swirled about by a bevy of anxious social scientists seeking reassurance of an abiding sanity. Small comfort, if "that’s all that I yam.”

My best "friend"

Critic's Notebook: 'The Wrong End of a Woman'

"Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong . . . . Right end of a woman! — I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon!"

    - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XXXII)

In the age of social networks, when women stream live videos of their home deliveries on Facebook, share sonograms, breast feeding tips and cervical dilation data to the millimeter (mm), it's entirely likely that you may happen upon the "wrong end of a woman" while surfing the Internet or the wilderness that is cable. Marni Kotak has just upped the ante for overshare. Kotak is a performance artist who intends to give birth before an audience on the stage of a Brooklyn art museum. 

(Probably should have had it in the woods)

I have no particular difficulties with this intended act of public spawning - after all, it seemed an inevitability, given our cultural impetus towards the sort of personal "transparency" that too often collapses into vapidity. And you can attend or not, depending on your interest and whether the event corresponds with one of the lacunae on your astrological, lunar or standard (Gregorian) social calendar. If it turns out that you can make it, I'm sure it was meant to be.

Her motives, whether narcissistic or gender-empowering, don't pique my interest so much as her rationale for choosing to make the birth a public spectacle. It is, she claims, an artistic moment: “Giving birth is the most direct expression of the creative life force, and, therefore, the highest form of art. By giving birth in public as a work of performance art, I am making the statement that everyday life is art, just as it is.”

These two sentences bear some scrutiny, the first being incomprehensible and the second being just wrongheaded. For starters, the idea of a "creative life force" has the ring of profundity and spiritual gravitas that masks its lack of any sense. It's fun to confer ontological ballast onto our grand words and overheated phrases, but aside from a world of living breathing creatures all capable of doing animal things like procreating, we'd look long and hard for something else besides - a "life force" driving all these acts of creation here in the sublunar dirt. As though one were to watch all the whirls and frolics of a dancing child and then wonder, "But where's its 'dance'?"

Furthermore, "Everyday life" is not art - it's what the garbageman does while riding the garbage truck, what the clerk at the convenience store does while ringing up your corndog, what the janitor does when the office has cleared out for the day. I'm not saying these things can't be done artfully, with a certain individual panache, with a sense of style or flair or joie de vivre or personal elegance, but they're just not art. Even things that can be done artistically, like applying makeup or dressing store windows or hanging draperies, aren't art - to claim that they are is to allow too broadly, to permit that even the cheesy drapings of the workmanlike Christo comprise art, which is plausibly open to dispute.

Art about art

Art, even "realist" art, necessarily involves artifice. It can represent the world as it appears, someone's perception of the world, a sentiment about the world. Art is intentional in the sense that artistic works necessarily have an object (even if no more substantial than a psychic state) - something beyond the artistic object which gets expressed in some act of representation. It's also intentional in the sense that it's deliberate. Giving birth (beyond some indefinite point at which natural process is no longer choice) becomes biological inevitability, neither intentional nor unintentional. (This has no bearing on whether an "artist's intentions" are relevant to judging a work.)

But giving birth in public is just giving birth in public - just that and no more. It isn't the "direct expression" of anything at all - no more than a phallus is a "phallic symbol." It may be wonderful for all concerned, but it isn't a "performance" of something else, it neither expresses nor represents something beyond itself nor transcends everyday living to say anything about anything.

Art about life

In short, everyday living isn't art, and childbirth is part of everyday living for many of us carbon-based types. A counterexample here may be both helpful and fun. Suppose that some "artist," humbly obscure or otherwise, decides that his loo is now his studio, and begins to take commissions on his output. Does that make him an artist? or transform his performance of an everyday and inevitable function, however beneficial to himself or advantageous to the larger society, into "Art"? 

 

The answer by now should be at least as clear as mud.