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of ephemera: we are alone, and only a continual effort at establishing and
maintaining human connections can mitigate our sense of aloneness.
This, then, is the drama of ephemera, the thing that binds us to them:
the drama of anxious self-making. We engage in the interpersonal agony of
quibbling with others, being offended by their political positions, angrily
denouncing their foolishness; or we sense a kindred spirit, we form a quivering
connectedness with them—we copy them—never sure that this connectedness
can last. Connectedness is itself aporetic: we try to gather around ourselves
those who will be like us, those who will like us (or “like” us) for who we are,
and who will therefore provide a certain solidity to who we are. But those to
whom we connect are no more permanent than we are—they are connecting to
us for the same reason—so the connectedness itself must always be in the
process of an interpersonal making, always on the verge of an unmaking. The
only project that is permanent, Husserl tells us, is the project of trying to make
oneself through projects.28 This essay, having been written about ephemera, will
itself soon be irrelevant, and I will need to write another. I have written it now in
an ephemeral act of self-making, of outward-directed self-making. I have written
it for you, but really for me: I am here now—please cite me.
Independent Scholar
Steven J. Ingeman
Notes
1 “The Best Celebrity Tweets o f 2011.” accessed 5/1/12. This is far from the only
example o f an end-of-the-year recap o f “best tweets.”
2 Khloe Kardashian tweets: “Nancy Grace is about to go HAM about this verdict! Let
loose the dogs Mrs Nancy Grace!!” Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson tweets: “Can-a muh
fukkasay fuck on here?” Dr. Ruth tweets: “And please people, don’t do anything silly like
going outside during hurricane to have sex. Tell u ’re friends you did it, but don’t do it.”
3 See esp. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o f Typographic Man
(Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 1962). Here McLuhan spells out his thesis that the
dominant media form o f a culture greatly shapes the cognitive processes o f that culture.
4 Neil Postman returns to this point frequently, but see esp. Technopoly: The Surrender o f
Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992).
5 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977): 329-331.
6 See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977): 287-317.
7 See, e.g., Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University o f Minnesota
Press, 2002).
8 Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, “Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist
Propositions in Art and Ideology, Part 1,” Praxis: a Journal o f Radical Criticism , 1981
(5): 43-58.
9 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (NY: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1985): 44-50.
10 Ibid., 49.
11 Ibid., 44.