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Popular Culture Review
want to sit under the tree; or I want to paint the tree; or I’m waiting for the tree
to bear apples; and anyway, I don’t own a car, so the gas station is irrelevant.
Stances can become habitual, of course, and most often do—they “soon
trade their lived character for a sedimented one as they sink further back into the
past.”22 But they can never become essential. That is, a past stance is always
past. In the present we always have some ability to take on a different project or
to choose a continuation of the same project. Granted, the past project colors our
decisions, and perhaps makes it likely that we will continue with the original
project, but we are underdetermined by our past. 23 We are, in effect, making
ourselves over again, and this process is not an inner, purely subjective process,
but one that is implicated in the physical and socia l world, in the pleasures we
take from it, in the frustrations we feel with it, and in the people we associate
with or shun.
What does it mean to “own” a song today, or a book, or a movie? 24
Heidegger suggests that there is an anxiety that attends having to remake
ourselves and reaffirm our stances and projects, and, indeed, one senses
something like this when trying to decide what to download next.25 What so
characterizes our relationship to ephemera, however—the speed, the ease of
access, the overabundance—makes the actual choice trivial. We can always
download something else. The crates of vinyl albums that we carried from dorm
room to apartment to early adulthood provided a sort of outward visible anchor
to an inward invisible struggle of self-making. We are unmoored from the
unreflective solidity of stuff.
Being and Tweeting
Given that our stances in the world—including our action-taking and,
most importantly for our purposes, our linguistic action-taking—are always
constituting who we are, we now have to return to the tweet and the blog and the
text message, to the twinkling constellation of linguistic events that now
pervades our lives. It is interesting that the electronic age, characterized by a
passive, largely one-way flow of visual information, so quickly gave way to the
current situation, the age of ephemera. And what characterizes the present
situation? Certainly we still receive visual information—it is easier than ever to
consume—but then we engage in a wholly new and characteristically digital
activity: we copy it. We forward it, link to it, post it. We call attention to the
acts, linguistic or visual, of others as a way of calling attention to ourselves: look
at me, I am the one who sees the beauty/comedy/outrage in this, which I now
send to you in hopes that you see it—and me—too. We are anxious for attention.
The subsumption of the visual culture under an overwhelmingly
linguistic culture seems important: where once we sat in a living room and
received a one-way message from an anchor to whom we had no personal
relation, now we write back and forth, we engage in a discourse, we are
connected. It is not the case that the 140-character limit (the limit for a single
tweet) necessarily makes tweet exchanges trivial, just as it is not the case that