Since the other week when I wrote that essay on doppelgängers and the doubles of ourselves created by our self-representations it seems that issue has been finding greater traction on the Internet. As Klint Finley from Technoccult points out, there has apparently been much heated discussion on various occult forums about what constitutes a “hypersigil.” This term, which I’m highly curious about, was coined by Grant Morrison in his comic The Invisibles, who suggests that works of art can act as magical sigils in that their creation transforms the world as well as the person who creates the work. In short, art changes the artist. While these occult debates seem to focus on what or what not kind of art can do this, I take the approach that anything we say about ourselves reshapes who we are.
In Klint’s article, he discusses the idea that there is a kind of cybernetic feedback loop between statements of self, even the abbreviated self-representations of status updates, and who we actually are in the world. As he quotes a friend’s twitterfeed: “The things we choose to place on the internet reflect and magnify the awareness of self to ourselves and those around us,” and “my online presence actually creates who I am. It’s a machine that produces my identity and exists outside of me.” Personally, I suspect that the real crux of how our statements of self shape our real selves does not depend on the length or form of the statement or on being an online representation (as this happens in real-life as well). Instead it seems the issue is one of repetition, Carrol’s Law (from Lewis Carrol’s The Hunting of the Snark) that: “what I tell you three times is true.”
There are instances of people repeatedly discussing past versions of themselves, and though they may now be different, those old selves are the selves heard by the listener, and reacted to as if they were more presently real. And then when the listener tries to articulate this perception back it is often quite shocking and inaccurate to the teller. I have also know other people who unfortunately can not stop stating about themselves that they are hurt, flawed, unable, and other negative self-perceptions, and who by saying these things often enough make them true, and can not change their actual selves in the present.
Recently, I am trying to take to not telling stories about myself for the time being, either online or off, preferring a shroud of personal silence pierced only by narratives dealing with the external world or ideas. Much of the reason for this is I am far too aware how a number of the stories I told about my self in the past created who I am in such a way that was rather paradoxical and non-functioning, many of these stories of course being held over from childhood misunderstandings of the world and narratives from social inculcation, that is, stories that wouldn’t work anyway or were already failing by the time I inherited them. Ideally the creative work I am doing now can unravel the ineffective self-representations and leave room to begin telling new, efficacious stories that set a direct path into the future without all the fool’s errand side quests of youth.
On the larger scale though, we have to consider that, though we are each individually creating who we are through the repetition of small statements of self, the same thing is happening on the broader cultural scale, which was a function of ancient mythology and now is predominately in the hands of media conglomerates who tell us who we are culturally only to make a buck off it (though that may not be much different from those who told the earliest myths, as was the case with the priestly caste who wrote the Rig Veda in a way that praised the warrior caste who paid them to write it). This points to the individualistic ghetto of social-networking media like Facebook: that people are now content to shape themselves on the smallest everyday scale, instead of working together to create larger narratives for the wider cultural and perhaps even global good. Perhaps this will not change until we say it over and over again, as much as possible, that what we say really does shape the world.
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