And I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news, every day I am
Radio won't even play my jam'
Cause I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news, every day I am
I don't know, it's just the way I am
-Eminem, “The Way I Am'“
No, this isn’t a Myspace blog circa 2004.
I don’t even like Eminem. This song came out when I was a teenager, on the brink of adulthood. I don't really like the song either, but there was something in the philosophical nature of the song I noticed then, and notice now.
Who is Eminem? Is it up to Eminem? Other people? Is he always the same thing?
Wars - both cultural and military - have been fought over what the nature of a thing is. What does it mean to be a true Muslim? Christian? What is a woman, a man? When does life begin?
These are vexing questions that have catalysed the worst aggression the world has witnessed. And on an individual level they can be the most trying questions a person can ask themselves.
Who am I?
But there is a meta-argument here: Some would say that it doesn’t matter what a thing is, it’s subjective, and things change!
There are others who hate this argument.
They would claim a thing stops being that type of thing if it changes its constitution. A thing has an essence which makes it that type of thing. This perceived essence is intrinsic and necessary to the thing at hand. This is known as essentialism.
Of course, essentialism seems only to exist as to be proven wrong. Everything, from the mundane, like a chair (does it have to be a chair only if it was intended as such? what if I sit on a rock? what if we all do and it becomes a custom?) to the profound, such as the concept of life (what is the exact point of birth? death? are viruses alive?) is proven to have non-intrinsic properties.
What Eminem wrestles with is the tyranny of the static in a universe that is dynamic. People declaimed him a role model or a star, while he sees himself differently, or as whatever he wants at that moment.
Essentialism smacks of a fear of the soluble, a fear of the temporal. It’s a traditional way of thinking for those people who are afraid that what they are doing or being may not last, or that the ‘way they are’ has not always been. Many nationalists seem to be certain there are qualities that are intrinsically, forever of their nationality. A gamer might feel that there are qualities that a video game must have for it to be a game. Often, these assertions are about identity; people want to stake their identities on things that are unchanging so they feel they are more than just small, finite beings, who in turn are just assemblages of particles at one point in time.
A recent video on Twitter illustrates this quite well.
In it, a drag performer says they feel good about themselves as being fluidly gendered because they know that this is mirrored in the universe; reality is actually a construction that doesn’t reflect the nature of subatomic particles. Subatomic particles, they claim, seem to be not any one thing, but something that perhaps goes beyond our comprehension of a unitary ‘thingess’.
What is interesting, and rather sad, is the anger which some (white, male) people responded to this tweet. "He doesn't know the science!" "What a bunch of bullshit!"
This anger likely stems from a place of prejudice (imagine if it was a white man in suit who said this), but also speaks to the worry that many have that our words are human made, artificial, and subject to change, much like the universe is. Particles change, and more than that - as the performer mentions - base particles don't seem to even have a fundamental existence that we can comprehend.
Essentialism is the fallacy of equating description with reality, as effectively pointed out by the Philosopher Richard Rorty, who noted that, yes, the world is 'out there', but descriptions of the world are not. Therefore only descriptions of the world can be true or false. "We are all just stardust”, goes the adage.
These descriptions of the world form the texture of our experience, impacting not only the political but the very firmament of our planet, and the objects we encounter every day.
Digital tech has an especially noticeable ‘inessentiality’ - it is stardust and starlight reformed a thousand times a second. As with everything else, the desire to impose an essential constitution to digital ‘things’ is ubiquitous. For instance, now we often see phones as bad; they are things that distract us. They aren't uniformly fungible, flexible and liquid, or constrained by and manifested through the needs of corporations. They are just bad.
Our recurrent inability to see phones as anything but an individual parameterised concept speaks to a lack of imagination on our part.
It's this same attitude that sees any technology as a static thing, rather than an actively becoming thing emerging as as we engage with it. The philosopher Lambros Malafouris describe this in a potter making a pot:
What is it that guides the dextrous positioning of the potter’s hands and decides upon the precise amount of forward or downward pressure necessary for centring a lump of clay on the wheel? How do the potter’s fingers come to know the precise force of the appropriate grip?
Malafouris suggests that there is no essence of this object:
The shaping of the pot becomes an act of collaboration between the potter and the mass of wet clay rapidly spinning upon the wheel. There is a constant tactile but also clearly visible, dynamic tension in the movement of clay. On the one hand, the centrifugal force imparted to the clay by the movement of the wheel and the hands of the potter; and on the other, the skilful guidance of this force by the potter’s fingers, raising or pressing down the clay to the desired form. It is at the potter’s fingers that the form and shape of the vessel is perceived as it gradually emerges in the interactive tension between the centrifugal force and the texture of the wet clay.
He discusses how the pot is projected or anticipated through the act of making it. The pot has no 'essence' nor is it's essence in the mind of the potter. It is made as part of a co-creative activity that is based on perception (tactile and visual) and action, blended with functional and aesthetic considerations.
Imagine how much more salient this is for digital technology - where emerged, dynamic essence isn't just a bilateral manifestation between two entities, but a manifestation of a dizzying complexity of interface, system, content and human.
It's for this reason that mapping out relational experiences has an enormous power - not only mapping out a person's experience but the dynamic shape of the technology involved as well. What does this relationship mean at any given point in time? How does it mean?
In digital design we map a user's journey's but rarely the product-relation journey. We could map the relation between the entities involved and ask, how does the meaning, and the becoming of each change as they interact? How do essential qualities evaporate over time, only to be replaced by others? How many people joined Facebook groups opposing changes to the essentiality of the platform only for their oppositions to dissipate through continued use of the Facebook?
It's tempting to see this as different from the example of the trans person above, but ultimately they are part of the same pandemic — essentiality.
It is far too simple to forget this. People are always willing to forget the underlying reality and instead let their static descriptions of it be the fundamental answer.
We let constructs define us. The best we can say is that we are assemblages in flux, and so is our world. The need to find the essential is not only confining, but wrought with disaster. Process and system are the qualities here, not the qualities of things themselves. It's not what I am, but as Eminem says, "the way I am".