“Whatever Being”

Angeline Henriquez

November 3, 2015

Assignment 8

 

Whatever Blogging

 

In the chapter titled “Whatever Blogging” Jodi Dean explores the new forms of personality that have emerged through our participation in blogging. She states that the essence of this new form of personality erases all qualities, or “qualities so interchangeable and obvious that they erase all identity” (p.129).  However, she emphasizes that “whatever being” is not to be confused for indifference, but that it’s rather an active effort to not prioritize which set one belongs to. She writes, “What matters is belonging, not that to which one belongs” (p.130). In this way, the “whatever being” rather than agreeing or resisting a label, is merely acknowledging communication.

One example that Dean uses to elaborate on this idea is cinema and how the effects of it in national identities compare to the identities formed by networked communications. She argues that cinema steered the attention, and location of spectators in efforts to produce a collective mind. “The unity of the screen produces out of the disunity of persons a singular audience that can see and recognize itself as a collective” (p.132). The production of a common culture was its purpose. Contrastingly, she argues that networked communications “do not provide broadly shared symbolic identities from which we see ourselves” (p.134) thus what they produce through its multiplicity are subjects that view themselves as particularities.

Another example that Dean uses to illustrate the notion of “whatever being” is the turbulent state of contemporary networked communications. Through multiple subjects sharing their location, their moods, and pictures continuously, what is trending is constantly changing at a very fast pace. This then produces a stance of “I don’t have to settle on any one direction or theme. I can live in the momentary” (p. 134). In this way, blogs are not a platform for the creation of a mass identity but rather displaces mass identity and allows the subject to remain in what Dean calls “a kind of permanent indecision or postponement, a lack of commitment” that neither attacks nor resists.

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