First Circle - "I am what I am"

I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?

“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.

I believe what the Committee is touching upon is the fact that 'Identity', in this case the personal, individually custom-taylored Identity of 'being myself' is mainly expressed through consumption behavior. Identity has become a personal experience (as opposed to a collective experience resulting from social relations) expressed through certain lifestyle patterns (ranging from fashion, to music, to cars, etc.etc). With the ever-increasing commodification of all aspects of life our lifestyle patterns, and by extension our identity of 'being myself', are expressed through the consumption of commodities, thus reducing the indentity of 'I am what I am' to a hollow set of consumer choices as opposed to identity arising from social experiences free from the unauthentic commodification that comes with Capital.

“WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges – at certain times and places – that being which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.

Again, this passage seems to touch on the subject of Alienation. Alienation of a kind that arises from the detachment between our 'lived experience' and the concept of 'identity' as a monolithic, individual, atomic construct arising from a pattern of consumer choices.

“I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.

I think this passage could be interpreted as a criticism of the increasing atomisation of society and the seperation of social links, recasting identity arising from shared conditions (and thus shared suffering and struggle, constituting the notion of class) to identity defined by individual consumer choices. This makes the narrative of suffering a personal one as well, devoid of connections to shared suffering and thus devoid of the potential of collective struggle. In short: atomisation is effective class-decomposition.

They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn’t mean knowing how to adapt – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it’s the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more sharable than all the fantasy lands this society maintains for its purposes.

I think this particular fragment has some Foucaultian overtones in the sense that it's obviously a criticism of 'normality' and the process of discipline and normalisation. Normalisation, as a process enacted by the bourgeois institutions, seeks (whether unconsciously or not) to create a mass that is not per-se homogenous but manageable and assesable, visible and quantifyable in order to enact effective management. Identity defined by predictable consumer choices and the atomisation of society in seperate, empty identity-shells aid such a process.

Interesting analysis, especially the last part. I believe consumer society/the spectacle/call it what you will seeks to create multiple mass images of "individuality" but each must be "homogenous" in the sense they're all, while different in content, manageable and obviously profitable if possible.

Thus any subculture that may seem threatening in some sense, even if subtle or not by much, or un-profitable tends to be co-opted or a co-opted form is created (to compete with and defeat the original form).

Although I wonder...isn't individuality (or more exactly the way it's "marketed") a cause for alienation? I mean it's kind of depicted as a competition of doing/buying/etc stuff to seem more "individual" than another; a kind of competition that doesn't allow one to be at peace with oneself.

Although I wonder...isn't individuality (or more exactly the way it's "marketed") a cause for alienation? I mean it's kind of depicted as a competition of doing/buying/etc stuff to seem more "individual" than another; a kind of competition that doesn't allow one to be at peace with oneself.

Well if we follow that line, we're getting into pretty philosophical waters. It depends on how you define "individuality" I guess. If you define it as being "atomic" i.e cut loose from any ties to a collective identity then yes, individuality is alienating since it seperates us from our environment and creates an imaginary bubble-world of 'the self' which is somehow defined by it's "difference" (in an unconnected sense) from the surrounding environment.

If you define "individuality" as heterogeneity, however, it becomes something completely different. A great example is Negri's conception of the multitude: a completely heterogenous mass of "individuals" who are collective and connected only by their struggles arising from shared social conditions. In a sense, this goes back to the very foundation of the notion of class. Class is all too often (especially by reformists or vulgar "leftists") portrayed as a phenomenon of "social identity" e.g. the "boots 'n braces" working class lad who tends to read little and drunk a lot As Mr. Dupont describes it so aptly in 'Nihilist Communism':

We do not know what anyone means when they describe the proletariat as a social category. If they are implying that the working class as a social body have something between themselves other than their experience of work then we utterly reject this. MD [i.e. Monsieur Dupont] have a penchant for Champagne and Tarkovsky movies whereas our neighbours prefer White Lightening [sic.] and WWF wrestling, our economic position, however, is identical.

In this sense, one can be perfectly 'individual', i.e "different" from the 'other', this difference being defined by the heterogenous nature of the collective one belongs to. It is a non-seperating difference.

So when we consider alienation arising from 'individualism', this is not a call for some grey-clad identical mass of borg-like hivemind drones but it is a rejection of atomisation and the processes and images which seperate our consciousness and self-reflection from our environment. This seperation is, however, only imaginary ('spectaclist' if you will) since we are still very much part of our environment. This schizophrenia, the juxtaposition between the atomic, authentic 'self' "I am what I am" and the experiences of everyday life immediately contradicting this give rise to a large degree of alienation.

Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new complicities.

I particularly like this part of the last quote from the first post. I'm wondering, though, it's something a friend of mine always brings up, and that's the issue of whose perspective this is actually?

What do they mean by we and us? Is it merely a rhetorical ploy, or something more specific?