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To AKMA's Seabury-Western Home Page Email me at Seabury AUTHENTICITY PREMISES Voice, Authenticity, Style, Politics Faculty and Administration of the University of Blogaria  Prof. of Hyperlinked Humanities, Primus Inter Pares David Weinberger Provost and Vice Chancellor of Imaginary Affairs Frank Paynter Wealth Bondage Registrar Halley Suitt Dean of Memetic Engineering and Reader of Thoughts Kevin Marks Research Professor of Markup Cryptology Phil Ringnalda Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon Foundation Professor of Early Japanese Literature Jonathan Delacour Abraham J. Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture Steve Himmer Clued Professor of Micro-journalism and Women's Studies Jeneane Sessum Prof. of Digital Psychometry Eric Norlin Christopher Locke Prof. of Comparative Kim Novak Ray Davis Ho Chi Minh Chair in Vietnamese Studies & American Poetry Joseph Duemer Section 508 Prof. of Web Accesibility and Useability Mark Pilgrim Professor of Haemophagy and Laputan Linguistics Naomi Chana Harley Davidson Saddle of Comparative Literature Tom Matrullo Prof. of Melanesian Hermeneutics Alex Golub Prof. of Linguistics Dorothea Salo Zimmerman Professor of Music and Poetics Mike Golby Senior Lecturer in Tlonian Area Studies and Chaplain A. K. M. Adam Szarkowski Chair of Photography Jeff Ward Prof. of Analytic Philosophy and Korean Area Studies Stavros Alfred E. Newman Foundation Chair in International Blogging Relations Shelley Powers Prof. of Gluation and Scissorology Mark Woods Professor of Folklore & Mythology Renee Perlmutter Crone-in-Residence, Purveyor of Eclectic Mysticism�??�?� and Professor of Rhetorical Ritual Elaine de Kalilily Prof. of Fractured Philosophy Tom Shugart Director of Music, Blogaria School of Divinity Tripp Hudgins House Band Shannon Campbell Audio-Visual Guy Josiah Adam Campus Cat Dizzy, at Allan Moult's place DAILY BLOGS The Usual Posse Doc Searls Dave Rogers Victor Echo Zulu Gary Turner Textism Jordon Cooper Elke (Sisco) Zimmermann sacra doctrina Mike Sanders ZINES The Ekklesia Project Fellowship 
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Saturday, June 22, 2002 ( 10:48 PM ) Commonplaces on Hermeneutics“Perhaps we are undoing little by little, and not without great difficulty, the great distrust in allegory.” Michel Foucault, in Foucault Live“It may be almost laid down as an historic fact that the mystical interpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall together.” John Henry Newman “There is nothing absolutely mortal; every meaning will have its own festival of rebirth.” Mikhail Bakhtin “Lessons of Wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon? or, is the heart so in love with deceit, that where a true report will not reach it, we must cheat it with a fable, in order to come at the truth?” Laurence Sterne, Sermon XX “The reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended.’ He detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings. Is this ‘reading’ activity reserved for the literary critic (always privileged in studies of reading), that is, once again, for a category of professional intellectuals (clercs), or can it be extended to all cultural consumers?” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 169. “Apparently he has been reading a series of articles by a popular bishop and has discovered that there is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.” Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928) pt. 2, ch. 4 Permalink -Main Page- Friday, June 21, 2002 ( 8:45 PM ) My Brilliant CareerMakeup! I’m due on the set in five minutes!Alex Golub and the good Dr. Leuschke have cast me as Dr. Yueh in the bloggers’ version of Dune. AKMA as Judas—won’t my acting tutor be proud? Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, that is my name on the marquee; I just had to add the “s” because there’s already an “A. K. M. Adam” (so-called) in the Screen Actors Guild. If you want me, I’ll be in my trailer. Emendation: As is so often the case, it seems the marquee has been vandalized and the “s” of my stage name has been removed since the above blog was posted. No matter, says the casting director, since the previous A. K. M. Adam (so-called) died in 1932, freeing up my name again for me to use (though it’ll feel a little creepy at first, as would wearing the suit someone with your name died in—though at least my name won’t have any bullet holes in it). ( 2:06 PM ) Called my BluffOkay, here (for the time being) is my article “This is Not a Bible,” copyright owned by the American Bible Society. I’ll take it down instantly if a lawyer threatens me; y’all see how quickly I caved in to Steve Himmer.What does the future—especially the future of cybermedia—hold for academic biblical scholarship? I am less foolhardy than the many prognosticators who can assert with confidence the ramifications of the World-Wide Web, hypertext, digital video, streamed audio and video, and digital publishing (to name but a few media convulsions that bear on the future of biblical scholarship). . . .More . . . . Permalink -Main Page- Thursday, June 20, 2002 ( 10:57 PM ) UpdateTwo items of note: one, Joseph Duemer contributed wisdom, erudition, and insight to the discussion of identity/anonymity/pseudonymity the toher day, and I was so determined to think through to my desired end that I neglected to mention his blog.Two, the U Blog faculty has expanded—everyone move down a bit to make room at the table—for Renee Perlmutter, a Blogarian studying linguistics at Berkeley, who will assume the professoriate of Folklore and Mythology. A gratulatory round for everyone in the house! (Send the tab, as always, to the Tutor.) ( 10:26 PM ) Revisiting ePublishingAfter I tossed up a skeet about electronic publishing, a number of sharper minds pinged it with refinements, elegant nuances, and general wisdom. First off the mark was Tom Matrullo, who asked me in an email if I didn“t see the irony of having written about the role of electronic media in the future of biblical scholarship, and having my article held up by the perceived necessity of finding a print-media publisher; yup, I sure do, and it steams the daylights out of me.Then Naomi Chana caught my remarks on prestige, and chided me for overlooking a situation in which “prestige” has very real consequences: the tenure process. She’s right, too; I should have remembered this, since one of my friends is in apinch about getting an article of his published in a sufficiently-reputable venue. It’s ludicrous, in many respects, but you get more points toward tenure by publishing with Oxford or Harvard than with (to get personal) Mercer University Press. Only someone without a worry about tenure—either already tenured or sufficiently-confident-of-tenure or uninterested-in-tenure— Never one to stand back, Steve Himmer, in the nicest possible way, tweaked me about my offering to post the article in question, but to withdraw it when (if?) a publisher comes through. Yikes—that was my integrity, Steve! He has me by some relatively short hairs (actually, all of my hair is pretty short, and the hair on my scalp is my shortest, but I digress), and I can only partially evade the force of his inquiry. I wrote the piece—which I now pretty much have to prepare for the web, so you all can autopsy the corpus—under contract from the Bible Society. It's “work for hire”; they own the rights to it, to publish or not. In fact, once I put it up on the web, I’m violating their copyright. So I’ll put it up, then take it down again if they complain. It’s an odd situation, but one that I signed onto before any of you-all knew who I was, or cared, and it’s one I’m less likely to walk into again, and it’s one that I’m dedicating a lot of offline energy to undermining. But Steve’s point holds good: some guy who talks big about copyright-defiance and electronic publishing owes his friends an account of why he doesn’t just markup his essay and post it. Hey, why not? Tripp Hudgins chimed in via email to point out that he and most of his classmates read more and research more from online sources than from print sources. He’s right for some of our colleagues, wrong for others. Some Seabury students work almost exclusively from online sources, but a sizable constitutency sticks resolutely to the library stacks (and some have difficulty managing the technology of print media). But the current has shifted markedly toward online research, and that’s one reason I’m ardently pro-hypermedia). So listen to these others, and come back in the next few days and I’ll have posted the essay in question. For the time being. ( 10:45 AM ) Oatmeal SolidarityAs a resident of the USA, this doesn’t bother me as much as it does Gary Turner, but hey, if he’s going to bludgeon me with threats of being considered a hyperlinked fascist by my ancestral countryman, then I suppose I have to protest, too.Now, how about wangling me an appointment at the University of Glasgow? ( 9:25 AM ) President Tom CruiseHas anyone observed the resemblance between the Bush administration’s foreign policy of “pre-emption” and the plot for Minority Report? (Later: Yes, Boondocks at least.) Philip K. Dick believed (as I understand it) that his stories were not so much “science fiction” as a form of prophetic fiction, warning us about what we were likely to get by way of government and technology; how would he be pained and satisified to know how close to the mark he’s hit, and how his warnings are being commodified and disarmed, serving now as a sort of vaccination against the kind of unsettling vision that troubled him most of his life.And since everything has something to do with copyright, I note that Dick’s estate must be positively rolling in money now, what with Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, and now Minority Report (several other stories are optioned or in production). But Dick was chronically broke, and will have benefited hardly at all from this bonanza. ( 8:24 AM ) Names, Part Three, or Whatever“Voices” ring true when we discern their individuality by the pattern of inconsistencies they display. Iron out all the inconsistencies, and you eliminate the characteristics by which someone might size up your voice, your presence.All this stuff intersects in a zone where a name signifies a particular path of continuity through varying relationships and personae, hence an identity. But the path of continuity that constitutes an “identity” doesn’t necessarily entail a narrowly-focused line; we may more helpfully compare our identity with a more durable version of a jet engine’s vapor trail. An identity certainly stands out from its surroundings; but the more closely you examine it, the harder time you’ll have determining where the surroundings end and the identity begins. I am the character I am by way of bazillions (the official quantity of the Ekklesia Project) of relationships, some closer and stronger, others more remote and fainter—and the qualities of those relationships. My character has been deflected in different ways by several ex-girlfriends, by several nets of friends (among whom I occupied different positions in the network at different times), by my companion of twenty-four years and spouse of twenty years, Margaret, by my parents, by the guys who come to the door for handouts. In all of these relationships, I’ve enacted a more-or-less predictable set of responses in our interactions (something comparable to what Dorothea says to Jonathon in a comment), and we can add an element to our vocabulary of identity by calling this repertoire of likely responses my character. When I was first fussing about identity, Frank pressed me to deal with “character” before I felt ready. Now I’ve gotten to the point in my wanderings that I wanted then. Where someone’s identity marks the bare conintuity and convergence of body and relationships, character enriches that continuity by ascribing qualities to that identity. And connects with the “forgiveness” theme from before, since I don’t generally need to be forgiven for something Rageboy has done, whereas Chris Locke may need that forgiveness. If he refuses to seek (or accept) that forgiveness, that refusal flavors his character, but his identity remains the same. If I forgive Halley (or don't) for some wrong she may have done to me—don’t worry, she hasn’t—that flavors my character, but my identity remains the same either way. Okay, with one last big gulp to wrap up things I’m thinking about this intricate complex of topics and get back to little blogs about Philip K. Dick and porridge and Tom Matrullo, I want to connect all of the above with the notion of brands (the Tutor got me thinking about this weeks ago (specially here, and also here; how it must delight him that his search engine is provided by "master.com"). Brands seem to function in the same way as names (we sometimes say “brand name”). I take it without bothering actually to learn about the topic (David Weinberger is my role model) that the term “brand” derives from the practice of marking livestock; hence, a “brand name” would distinguish “Monday,” a word (and they’re evidently very proud of that), from a glyph (or a logotype) that we would have to call “the corporation formerly known as PwC Consulting.” The signifying function of the brand (whether “name” or “glyph seared into the skin of a product or advertisement”) marks its bearer as part of the identity of its producer. So to get back to Chris Locke, I’m not sure why a corporation can’t have a voice; it clearly has an identity and a name, a character (developed through its interactions with its employees, stockholders, and the general public). I’ll agree right away that, given the ways that corporate leaders (presumably the brains, though we may nominate other anatomical locations) of the corporate body imagine their role, developing a richly resonant, trustworthy voice is the last thing we’d expect of them—but it shouldn’t be impossible. Institutions are human (writ large), but they typically try to represent themselves as something other: mostly as divine saviors, but sometimes as robotic servants, or as natural phenomena like winds and influenza, or as institutions. If corporate institutions acted on the understanding that they bore identities, affected lives, carried a name, constructed for themselves a character, and so on, they might have the chance for a voice. Might not make much money—but that’s not my area of understanding anyway. I think that’s all I want to say about identity, except for the inevitable mopping-up actions when wiser readers point out my follies. Back to lighter blogging for a while. Listening to: New England Blues Prophets; Alison Krauss; and SoundJam just juxtaposed Joe Jackson’s “Sunday Papers” with Blondie’s “Sunday Girl” (out of 5,000 items— I love random distribution). Permalink -Main Page- Wednesday, June 19, 2002 ( 9:40 AM ) Clude Marketting ReducksHere I thought that although David Weinberger was mostly calling our attention to Jenny Witherspoon’s marketing tactics, he would mention her spelling in the context of her not “put[ting] on a phony veneer of perfection.” But perhaps that’s not what he was thinking about as he perused her offer. . . .My Breakfast with DavidIt’s the endless infinitesimal delights of Blogaria that make this so comfortable a habitation. David blogged about a pr0n spam (someone should invent a special designation for this widespread (so to speak) species of the spam genus) he received; I noticed that he didn’t mention her use of “amature” “acadamys” and in the domain name from which his friend Jenny solicited him. Further observing that he cited her cheerful lack of concern for perfection, I blogged (above) a note to signal my own dismay at the domain-name misspelling—which brought to mind, for David, a misspelling of his own (which I have yet to notice). In response, he wonders if he should correct the original post’s misspelling (which I didn’t notice), and evinces concern that I pinched him about his spelling (which I didn’t intend to), and notes quite properly that her misspelling occurs only in the domain name, not in her jolly message itself. It’s hard enough to get the domain one wants that I really ought not chide Jennifer for her selection; presumably “amateuracademies” was already taken (I could look it up, but I don’t want to, thanks very much).So here we are, blogging and emailing back and forth over trivial editorial minutiæ, heckling and poking each other in pixels instead of over coffee, and possibly drumming up some business for Jennifer. It’s an odd and lovely non-place, Blogaria is. ( 8:28 AM ) Name-SayingIn a certain, very limited sense, there should be one unique name per name-bearer. This is part of the reason I’m happy to be called “AKMA” rather than “Andrew” (and am tickled that, so far, my full name appears nowhere in Google’s index). “Andrew”s were stacked up like cord wood when I was in college, so Art Portmore started calling me “AKMA” to distinguish me from Andy Mitrusi (s.v. chapter 3), Andy Perry, Andy Selinger, and several others whose names no longer appear in my index.Of course, that latent expectation that names identify unique individuals breaks down pretty easily. On the way home from dinner the other day, Barbara Newman regaled us with a list of other “Barbara Newman”s she had discovered via Google; it turns out someone had mistaken her for another academic Barbara Newman. In this neighborhood, I recently corresponded with “the other Dave Rogers,” distinguishing him from Dave the First (welcome back to Blogaria, Dave; I’ll have more to say to you in a second). Still, when I say, “Barbara Newman” I don’ ususally mean “everyone whoever who might be called ‘Barbara Newman,’ ” I mean “the author of God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages.” Here, then, intersect two of the puzzle-threads I’ve been worrying about. On one hand, “identity” (as I’m parsing it here) marks a continuity associating the little kid who went to elementary school at Linden (back before they invented magnet schools), the undergraduate who hung out with Finn, and the guy who served as vicar of St. James Church, Tampa (before it moved and merged with House of Prayer). That goes well with the tacit assumption that “AKMA” signifies a unique individual human being, and so on. On the other hand, I’ve assented to the proposition that no single core, no pin-down-able “real identity” subsists somewhere apart from all the transient, varying, versions of AKMA one might cite. Our language about the individuality of “identity” lies athwart our experience of the inescapable pluralities that constitute our identities. So in a certain sense, while names signify unique instances of identity, there’s no single essential identity where the name points. This is important when we talk about voice, authenticity, even about corporate communication and branding (this is where I rejoin Dave Rogers in conversation). The But corporations frequently represent themselves with prose so carefully vetted, lawyer-proofed, focus-grouped, homogenized, re-checked, and edited, that they convey more the impression of the paranoid schizophrenic than the amiably inconsistent neighbor. I think this is sort of what Chris Locke means when he alleges that corporations aren’t human; no sane human being functions in the way that a corporation does. (Christian groups that insist on an inflexible orthodoxy fall prey to the same mistake; ironically, one might charge them with the transgressions of Adam and the people of Babel, the temptation to presume as a human what pertains only to the Divine.) In another way, though, corporations are admirably constiuted to speak with a Jonathon “The Dishmatique Donor” Delacour has gotten all over the identity and pseudonymity blogthread (illustrating the need for ThreadNeedle, my counter-name for what Burningbird wants to call Needley—where do I link to the thread? Here, in the middle). Jonathan wonders whether I’d approve of his “blurred conceptions of ‘reality’ and ‘identity’ ”; in a word, I’m quite attracted to them, insofar as I understand them. I do dissent from his observations on “really knowing,” if by that expression he means something like “understanding every last quirk and idiosyncracy.” I disagree not because I think someone can know every quirk, but because I suspect it’s a red herring. The notion of “really knowing” may be like the “real me,” an asymptotic term that may trick us into supposing the attainable approximation faulty for not reaching the unattainable absolute. (After twenty-plus years, Margaret and I know one another pretty darn well—not “absolutely” or “unerringly” well, but well enough for me to say confidently that I “really know” her and she, me.) But “blurry” seems an appropriate condition for notions of identity; to really know the real me is to know a blur. I think I forgot to mention Elaine (here and here) in crosslinks on identity; sorry, Elaine. Tuesday, June 18, 2002 ( 5:02 PM ) ThreadNeedle QuickTopicSteve Yost suggested that we try QuickTopic for the discussion of Shelley’s ThreadNeedle project. Here’s the link to the QuickTopic discussion. Permalink -Main Page-( 10:15 AM ) Calling NamesBefore I modulate into a different aspect of our on-going topic, I have to cite Dorothea’s and Tom’s contributions on pseudonymity. Dorothea, I don’t discount your RPG players as elements of your identity; indeed, I take them quite seriously, though not as a straightforward representation of D.S. I haven’t taken up an RPG in a long time, but whatever the variations among the characters we play, my experience was that some folks could never hack it as a “lawful” type, nor could others simulate an identity that diverged significantly from their own (I wonder if it’s easier for scrupulous people to play at recklessness than for heedless people to play at reliability). Anyway, RPG characters do matter, and the ways they matter deserves closer attention than mass-media hysteria about Satanism).Then there’s Seth Godin on anonymity in Fast Company. Stavrosthewonderchicken blogged about anonymity a couple of weeks ago. And keep reading everything Jeff Ward writes; it’s all relevant. I think I’ve seen other meta-posts on pseudonymity, but I don’t remember where, and if I stop to collate and represent them, I’ll never get to the next stage of my ruminations and everyone will always only think of me as “that guy who always writes about pseudonymity.” I’m tickled that everyone was so provoked by the discussion, but the time has come to move on. By way of summing up, please remember that I see strong reasons to adopt pseudonymity under various circumstances—but also that pseudonymity risks undermining one’s integrity. Pseudonymity endangers one’s integrity/integration, one’s capacity to sustain the continuity of identity and accountability in ways that strengthen relationships, and our relationships account for a vital proportion of who we are. This supposition that we are to a great extent our relationships interjects me into the conversation between Jeff Ward and Alex Golub a few weeks back (by the way, I tend to spell the word “weird” as Alex does in this blog, “wierd”—I hope it’s a case of great minds thinking alike). My tardiness in linking back to them may perhaps best be ascribed to their thinking and writing so much faster than I, but the points at issue in those pages bear forcefully on my topic on this page. Alex suggests, at one point, that A link-heavy blog is an arrangement of consumption choices. The act of creating links in it is an act of self-construal. Creative, ludic. The great thing about the web is that in the noosphere information is free and easily duplicatable. And there is tons and tons and tons of it. Self-construal in the digital noosphere represents a meatspace practice with all the limitations removed. The content that is being managed by the free (as in free speech) content management systems now availble for us non-alpha geeks is not the content of our blogs - it is the content of us.I demur on the “consumption choices” language, but Alex has hit the nail on the head by connecting the links with who we are. Hyperlinking constitutes a kind of effective affinity, if I may, that some people use as a lever for attaining higher social status, but others simply as a remarkable tool for generating associations and connections. So when Dave Winer (get well soon!) blogrolls Adam Curry, he’s not looking for social bonus points; they’re friends, and they talk and blog and link freely. If I were to link to either of them, though, it would mean something other: perhaps that I just like to read the blog, or perhaps that I’m trying to call attention to myself. (The force of the link itself cannot be unambiguous; the humblest blogger may like reading Andrew Sullivan, but she writes the same HTML as the grandest suck-up in Blogaria.) Who we link to is who we are, in a certain way, but the tenor of that way depends on other dimensions of how we (and others) enact who we are. “Who we are,” in turn, bears a durable, subtle relation to our names (and when I finally write about this tomorrow, I will concentrate mostly on our proper names, our given names, though the matter of pseudonyms will occasionally reappear by way of counterpoint). Tonight it’s time to go to bed. Monday, June 17, 2002 ( 3:41 PM ) Needle MeShelley was looking for volunteers to further the cause of her Thread the Needle project for sustaining blogthreads, and asked whether I might serve as a repository for [potential-]user feedback. I’m pleased to help out, and we could make a conversation out of it. If enough people cross-blog on this, it could by itself serve as an illustration of the need Shelley perceived for her product. Gary’s on board, too, and he actually has working comments, so feel free to sound off at his page, too.So write me if you have any good ideas. I’ll try to put up a Comments link if we ever get Movable Type going here, but for now a good old mailto: will have to suffice. [Later: or use a QuickTopic discussion thread] ( 1:41 PM ) Another Short OneOne of the arguments I constantly hear about electronic publishing involves the lack of prestige associated with e-publication. Excuse me, but so far as I can tell, that “prestige” matters only to people who haven’t read the work in question.Once I’ve read a work, I don’t give a flip about who published it. Though I may say, “I can’t believe Cambridge University Press would print such drivel” (I’m thinking of one book in particular), I don’t say, “I thought it was drivel, but it must not be because it’s from Cambridge,” or “I thought it was drivel, but at least it’s prestigious drivel.” I want people to read what I bother to write, and to size up my arguments as they see fit. Prestige is nice, but I’d rather let any prestige that might accrue to my name derive from the snazzy insights of my writings than from the name of the press that publishes my book. Once a few good scholars take the jump into electronic, the complaint about “prestige” will vanish like morning frost from windowpanes in May. ( 12:10 PM ) As Advertised, “Random Thought”I was talking with Juliet Dodds this morning about her independent study, and she asked about the future of biblical interpretation in an age dominated by electronic publication. I’ve written an essay on this as a commission from the American Bible Society, which essay now dangles in limbo as the ABS looks for a [print] publisher for the book; I may give in to temptation and post the essay online until I hear that we have a publisher. In the course of my meandering response to Juliet, I pointed out that electronic publication ought not be regarded as “multimedia,” since the medium for all the modes of electronic expression is the same: digits activating pixels. (Someone’s going to correct me on this, I expect: that’s okay, it’s the point of saying it in public.) The pertinent problem involves the extent to which the digital medium itself blurs the distinctions among what we’ve gotten used to assuming were distinctly different media.This sounds Negropont-esque to me; no doubt someone else is already onto this. But I wanted to write it down, so that (a) I can get into another protracted blogthread, thus demonstrating the necessity of Burningbird’s prospective invention, and (b) cleverer people than I will tell me who thought this first and how to express the idea better. ( 11:45 AM ) Surprise!I went to my mailbox this morning, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but a box from Australia, whose contents I'll display here. Permalink -Main Page-Sunday, June 16, 2002 ( 11:16 PM ) More on PseudonymityPseudonymity really wasn't my main interest when I started this blogthread (though I ought to have anticipated that it would draw attention), but before I move to other dimensions of the "identity" theme I want appreciatively to flag the rich contributions to this topic that Turbulent Velvet has made. Check out the posts here and here (enjoy the Beckett blog between them, too).Two main responses: first, TV and Ray Davis suggest a variety of circumstances in which pseudonymity functions not as a mode of prevariocation but a vehicle for exploration. I recognize and often admire the gestures to which TV and Ray point, but I decline to separate the positive impulse toward creativity and exploration from the "pseudo-" of "pseudonymity." Again, I suggest not that there's an intrinsic wrong to pseudonymity, but that pseudonymity poses a significant risk to one's integrity. Drag names and "hypocrisy upward" don't constitute counterexamples, I think. Most of the drag identities with which I'm acquainted resolve conveniently with the broader-world identities of their bearers (protecting their bearers from uninvited publicity in relation to drag-world-outsiders, but not concealing their drag/non-drag identities from the sphere of sympathetically-inclined peers). But I've been out of touch with drag for a while, and even then my friends might have been unrepresentative. "Hypocrisy upward," while admittedly possible, surely represents only a tiny proportion of all cases of pseudonymity. Even then, the morally commendable goals toward which the pseudonymous author aims should be weighed with the ramifications of isolating the actions of one persona from accountability, whether positive or negative. One may absolutely adopt pseudonymity for positive or neutral reasons. One ought still, I think, reckon the cost of this tactic. What does it mean about my sense of myself that I might do things under the name of Ernest Worthing that I might not do as Algernon Moncrief? In what sense do we ascribe "integrity" to Algernon when we know nothing of his actions as Ernest (whether those actions are laudable or despicable)? Permalink -Main Page- ( 12:20 PM ) Weekend UpdateOkay, I have to finish grading this afternoon; will work with Si on cleaning up the living room (still a chaos after the Mother's Day Flood), and blog out some more identity stuff. Stay tuned. Permalink -Main Page-All times are local. Local times may vary. Minutes do not expire. A. K. M. Adam That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible. |
He seems like a nice guy. Has he written any books? Would he come speak to us?
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