15 March 2009: "Thinking about writing an autobiography"

This post is about textuality. Carles invites us to consider the primacy of writing as a method of inscription, and as the decentered source of the air of authenticity in cultural conditions that cast radical doubt on self-presentation and the notion of presence, as such. In writing an autobiography, the decentered subject confronts its own tenuousness, its own ontological uncertainty in the face of the graphicolexical. As Carles asks rhetorically, "Does n e 1 else know how difficult it is to write an autobiography?" Fundamentally, this question can't be answered; the subject position from which the question can be approached is inaccessible, lest it be addressed in writing itself. To write the self is at once to falsify being and discover it epistimologically. Autobiographical discourse evokes the notion of a "truth" about the self only to discover its permanent and ever-shifting ambivalence.

In that spirit, Carles proposes automating autobiography, to remove the tension between subject and object that the scene of writing invokes.

I’m thinking about starting a service that can convert a person’s online social networks into a book. For example, photos from ur flickr account, status updates from twitter, tagged FB photos, and posts from your blog/old live journal are aggregated into a meaningful book.

The key concept Carles isolates here is "meaningful aggregation," as a possible way out of the trap of the writing/speaking dichotomy into a free play based on accumulation, of an identity not limited by a selfsame consistency but open to assimilate more and more, as the movement of the trace continues through an endless replenishment of signifiers.