Ich bin ein Zeittier.
A creature-of-the-times. Though I may privately long to have been thrown into this world under different facticity, in an older era, in a different culture, the snake-skin-shed beast that I am today is a byproduct of my experience. My Fernweh for recent antiquity is too a byproduct of postmodernity, intrinsically tied to every condition I’ve experienced. Without this world I would cease. And though I’d love to live with Tarkovsky, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Laozi, Vergil, or Hölderlin, I am bound by my own temporality, my own essence of being, to exist now. In 19th century Germany, I would have failed to appreciate or perhaps even read Hölderlin. If I were thrown instead into Italy near the novum tempus, how would I ever find the works of Vergil?! How would I ever read Dàodéjīng? We are in a sad truth inseparable from our outcome and existent only in our chronology, bound forever in a cage of time which facilitates our very being.
Our time, the modern times, the postmodern time, is a time of alienation. A time as such Marx predicted. It should be of no surprise then that I am enframed to be such an insular creature. I am afraid to reach into myself or to allow others a similar pleasure. Instead, I am more than content to remain illusive, a masked-face to one acquaintance and a different court jester to another. In a way, there is no real me.
Our modern time, a new novum tempus, the ‘Neu,’ is foundationally built on this very idea of alienation from the self. Though the self may very well be nonexistent, it remains a staple of the prevalent neo-liberal ideology cemented into the bedrock of Western culture. We are told to be Egoists, to be students of Stirner, but to remain faithful to consumption and the status quo. Depending on who you ask, we are both the Übermensch and sheep equally. And, as has always been true through our history, we are defined by our relations to the means of production. However, a contradiction has arisen, as they are prone to do, and now that sense of self is further removed than ever.
We are cultivators, farmers of the modern self. We can’t have just one, we must have many. We must have a version for our online profiles, a version for our time spent at work, a version for our friends, a version for our families, a version for our sexual partners. No two versions are alike. How could they be? One self must coexist with another, but it must also inherently contradict. We are the most we’ve ever been, and yet we are less than human.
In a way, this phenomenon is nothing new. Perhaps the greatest task of adolescence has historically been self-poiesis. Character-creation. This is the optimal time in life to carefully design an avatar to go around as everyday. A time to experience the myriad ideas and formulate a worldview. The great danger of the Neu is the continuation of this. Now, as formed adults with insoluble personalities, we are reintroduced to this idea, only now it’s Reinvention. We have lived with the self all our lives to this point, but this self has grown stale. This self doesn’t have the same wonderful experiences of a YouTube personality or Instagram friend. This self is alienated, discontent with life. So we approach Reinvention. We undergo further self-poiesis, sometimes multiple times, until a suitable result is reached. Now we can be anyone all of the time. And through this, any notion of the true-self fades away.
I have done this too. I am after all a Zeittier. How could I resist? Now I can pursue anything, talk to anyone. I need only reach into my bag of tricks and remove the mask fitting for the occasion. (Perhaps as the great thinker Billy Joel foretold).
The strangest part of the epidemic is the contradiction within. This rampant self-poiesis both takes an individual closer to and further from authenticity, to true knowledge of the self. To know the self is to know everything the self is not. Though in the Neu we may only be a collexion of cobbled-together personalities, our true-self remains the exclusion from this group.
Next time you move from settings of facticity, from work to friends, from school to home, carefully observe the selfs you project. Are you the same person? Do you dawn the same masks? I wager you will find at least a slight variation. It’s only natural. You will use different words, speak in different tones, talk of different things. Now, turn your attention to the digital. Are your profiles your true-self? Do they reflect any of those characters you used in the former groups? Can you really define yourself? Do you even know who you are? Do you even exist?
Fret not! It’s not your fault that you’ve succumbed to Reinvention. It was determined for you. As a member of the international proletariat, most certainly, a specific avatar is demanded. At work you should be a dutiful worker, eager to perform tasks you will never be compensated for, willing to work for the minimum, always happy to be a soulless exploited cog. At home, you should be a caring spouse, never too engaged with psychoactives, never too loud and never too quiet. You should be a funxional member of society, yet entirely individual, unique in every way, a “snowflake distinct among snowflakes” as Robin Pecknold might say. But you can never be your true-self. This self is fragile. It can’t withstand the scrutiny of a public forum. It can barely survive a look in the mirror. Perhaps it doesn’t even exist.
The greatest liberation is to recognise that this idea of the self is as mythical as any avatar created through Reinvention. This true-self was never real. Your essence, your true-self is nothing more than the facticity around you and the choices you make through your existentiality. It doesn’t matter if you choose to succumb to fallenness or not. It is true you are a Dasein, a divine being in many respects, but you are not a self. The self is nothing more than the idea of a dreaming nature-mind. Each of our identities is nothing more than a dream.
It’s hard not to be reminded of Mary Harron’s adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and the closing lines spoken by the pillar of perpetually degrading self-poiesis Patrick Bateman:
“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
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