Each of us is several

Finally got around to picking up Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus last night, which opens with this brilliant paragraph:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together.  Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.  Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away.  We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition.  Why have we kept our own names?  Out of habit, purely out of habit.  To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn.  To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think.  Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.  To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I.  We are no longer ourselves.  Each will know his own.  We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

Thinking of this in light of having read this morning yet another commentary on the “online self,” something very striking emerges.

There exists a bizarre inverse relationship between the amount of conscious decision and foresight with which we structure an identity and the ease with which we’re able to recognize when we’re doing so.  Because of this arbitrary distinction between the “online” and “offline” self, by means of which we reserve a false authenticity solely for the latter, we’re able to painstakingly draft our Facebook profiles, choose our avatars, and construct our Second Life, all the while remaining fully aware of this process as a production.  Yet in the “offline” arena, where every lived moment involves a subconscious and entirely effortless recreation of identity, it remains all but impossible for us to recognize the process in which we’re engaged.