Aporia

Simone Weil, quoted by Zadie smith as cited by Peter Santiago.

We have for some time lived in an age of personality. It is culturally valued above everything else possessed or exhibited by the individual. One’s moral choices, willed decisions, even one’s behavioral history are minimally important in comparison to one’s personality; our media care only for it, cater and serve it, allot fame by its catalytic effects on audiences.

Nothing could be more anathema to the spirit of our confessional, graphomaniacal, self-aggrandizing time than Weil’s opposition to the “I”. “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal”: not in the age of the ever-personal, when reticence and self-effacement are deplored as dysfunctional.

Let us tearily confess to the viewers -how brave to share our emotions! We’ll speak our “selves”, post by post! And we’ll update our “statuses”: abbreviated, gussied fragments of interior monologue, evidence of the exchange between interior and exterior, the rise of personality and the decline of reflection. Status: the bleeping of a probe deep in space, beyond its range, updating unlistening engineers on its velocity, its energy levels, its functioning camera. Perhaps it can take a photo of itself.

Don’t listen to Weil! Think not of the impersonal but of “the way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all”! Or consider, at any rate, the possibility that our obsession with selfhood is somehow concomitant with the foreclosure of the individual’s avenues of transcendence: hemmed in by the reductive and denied the mythical, what else can one plumb for depth but the self?