Unpredictable Patterns #28: Fernando Pessoa and the heteronymous society
Absolutes, identity, anonymity and understanding the challenges of presence (Summer Note no 1).
Dear reader,
Summer requires a certain mindset, perhaps a distance to things - a space to reflect. We have a chance to let go of the day to day and think more freely. So from now through August the newsletter will shift its focus and nature a bit. It will become a bit shorter - to many people’s relief - and will focus on one poet per note and what we can learn about technology, society and humanity from their poetry. First out the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa!
Anonymity and identity
Would the Internet be better if we could not be anonymous? This simple - perhaps simplistic - question has haunted the tech policy debates for a long time, and there is no clear resolution in sight. Some uses of anonymity are clearly beneficial - like support groups for domestic abuse or medical conditions, whistle blowers etc - but there is also evidence that anonymity erodes the functioning of the basic social norms that underpin democratic society.
Anonymity is one end of a spectrum of different states of identification. We move across that spectrum towards identity, and in the middle we find pseudonymity. This spectrum can be organized along lines of persistence. An identity is very persistent, a pseudonym can vary in persistence - but true anonymity has no persistence at all.
That makes true anonymity less useful, of course, and so rarely seen. What we have are shades of pseudonyms. In fact, one of the fundamental shifts in the information society is the shift from a society based on identities to one based on pseudonyms, and perhaps even beyond pseudonyms to something else.
A pseudonym does not have to obscure the person behind, it can just create the smallest amount of social distance between that person and the new name. A twitter handle is a great example: many people tweet under a pseudonym, but we know who they are. Such transparent pseudonymity is the new normal, and it allows us to split our personality into different names.
But persistent pseudonyms tend to develop into literary heteronyms, and that is - in some ways - what is happening to us as well. In a sense, we are all becoming the portugese poet Fernando Pessoa.
The difference between a pseudonym and a heteronym is interesting. The pseudonym is a false name, and it points to someone behind it. A pseudonym can be reduced to an identity that underpins and fuels it. A heteronym is different: it is a different personality, with a different character and history - a different relationship. There is nothing behind a heteronym.
Pessoa developed an astounding number of such heteronyms, 72 at least, and they even knew of each-other. A large set of the heteronyms considered themselves the disciples of one of them - Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa was, himself, very careful around how he constructed these different personalities, and even had them write different works, in different styles much as your LinkedIn-account differs from your Twitter from your Instagram…His techniques of heteronymity have become our commonplace tools for different spheres where we negotiate our presence (and this is perhaps how we should think about privacy - not as a way to negotiate identity, which I used to think, but a way to negotiate our presence).
The shift from a society based on identity over one where we entertained pseudonyms into one where we increasingly become networks of heteronyms has happened largely without anyone noticing. We are still just at the beginning, but it seems clear that this is where we are heading, in some sense at least. We will not become Pessoa - or at least I do not think so - but we will increasingly fracture into different names.
One peculiarity with heteronyms is that we can openly entertain them - and acknowledge them. Pessoa wrote about the different heteronyms openly and knew that they would be useful for different things. They became, and this is important, different patterns that he could create with and in. The invention of a heteronym is in a sense the articulation of something we all engage in at some point - imaginging being someone else to better cope with a problem or address a challenge.
With our heteronyms we can also invent who that "someone else" actually will be and ask them to help us again and again in certain situations.
Heteronymous regulation?
Heteronymous society offers an opportunity to think creatively about things like free speech. If we have a number of different characters we speak through, we could imagine a world in which the liability for that speech is decoupled from the core identity (if indeed there is such an identity!) and instead attached to the heteronym. If one of your characters violate the terms and services of a company, well, then they may be shut off - but the others remain.
If we shift the object of regulation from identity to heteronym we create a very different environment than if we insist on banning the physical individual using the different characters whenever one of the characters transgresses.
The question at play here is if we still should be wed to a model of law as connected with the physical individual, or if we should accept the reality that our projected, virtual heteronyms have a reality of their own? How much of all that we are should be linked back to our bodies? And how much to our minds?
Our minds are complex phenomena, and they can, for example, fragment into any number of heteronyms and then run different versions of ourselves in parallel (which suggests an interesting challenge for research into human-level artificial intelligence: how will it be able to mimic that ability? Could we build an artificial Pessoa that shifts into different heteronyms as he writes different things? What is even going on there?).
Physicality endures and is persistent, and so we have made that the focal point for our legislation and legal thinking, but at the same time we know that intention and body need to be decoupled. We have tried to re-construct different versions of intent since the beginning of Roman law, and so we know that the mind matters, and sometimes matters more than the actions of the body.
The distinction between dolus and culpa in Roman law - intent and negligence - is a reflection of this. Why should we not be able to also split intent into different characters even if these are traceable back to a single body?
A society where law focused on facets of our presence - heteronyms - would be a great premise for a science fiction short story, and you could imagine us all containing the multitudes that Walt Whitman spoke of - some of them banned from Facebook, others good and upstanding citizens. But would it work in reality? I don’t know - but I think it is interesting either way. If we, ultimately, need the indivisibility of body and mind to build our legal and moral systems, then maybe they need to be explored and creatively challenged?
The risk is that we miss so much, otherwise. Imagine if Pessoa had been booted of Twitter for what one of his 72 heteronyms said? Would it have been fair to judge him on the basis of 1/72th of his presence? And this is what we so often forget when we engage in Twitter storms or attacks on the views of opponents: we contain multitudes, and a legal or regulatory framework that lacks that level of resolution will necessarily leave us with crude, stupid decisions forcing a few of our actions to represent the whole of who we are.
It is an interesting thought experiment: rate the people you dislike on a scale from 1-100 - how much of them do you dislike? And are you honest if you just default to saying that you hate 100% of them? Any human being can be mapped as the sum total of the statements they make verbally or in writing in their lifetime. At what frequency of objectionable and horrible statements do you give up on them? 5%? 10%? What would a good moral rule be here? You could imagine different moral strategies - a forgiving one that allows for 80% bad stuff and thinks the 20% is enough to consider the other person as a legitimate part of any public dialogue and conversation - or a strict one that expels the other party at 5%. Which strategy do you think would help our society grow?
We should rephrase the quote that is erroneously ascribed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say 80% of it” - but our time deals increasingly in absolutes, and that is a more worrying thing than the polarization we often focus on. Polarization is a consequence of minds thinking in absolutes - not the other way around.
Our need for absolutes is ultimately a symptom of increasingly weak, small identities.
Fractured self, fractured society
There are risks with this approach, of course, and it can certainly spiral out of control - it arguably did for Pessoa. One incident, retold by researcher Gary Lachman, seems to show this clearly:
"Pessoa's grip on his own self was so tenuous that at one point he took to writing to his old teachers and schoolmates in Durban, posing as the psychiatrist Faustino Antunes, asking for their opinion on the mental state of his patient, Fernando Pessoa who, depending on the letter, had either committed suicide or was under restraint at an asylum. Having no idea who he was, Pessoa hoped to gain some insight from those who knew him."
It is a horrifying scene: there he is - in one of his heteronyms - asking for help to understand himself, or some version or aspect of that which he was. At this point Fernando Pessoa was - himself - slowly sliding into heteronymity as well. There was no longer a core personality, and Pessoa feared for his sanity.
Maybe this is also the risk for our increasingly heteronymic society? That we engage in all of the personalities our new tools allow us to deploy and so slowly become a network of names, where the core slowly fades away?
The need for the center, the core, in ourselves and society is much the same. Without it we become opinions without faith, our words empty signs and symbols void of will. Pessoa knew this - and also dreamt of someone that could bridge the heteronyms, someone who lived in the gaps. In one of his most beautiful poems - written originally in English - we find that desire captured in heartbreaking detail in The King Of Gaps:
There lived, I know not when, never perhaps-
But the fact is he lives- an unknown king,
Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.
He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,
Of interbeings, of that part of us
That lies between our waking and our sleep,
Between our silence and our speech, between
Us and the counciousness of us; and thus
A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep
Sequestered from our thought of time and scene.
Those supreme purposes that never reach
The deed between them and the deed undone
He rules, uncrowned. He is the mystery which
Is between eyes and sight, nor blind, nor seeing,
Himself is never ended nor begun,
Above his own void presence empty shelf.
All He is but a chasm of his own being,
The lidless box holding not-being's no-self.
All think that he is God, except himself.
And the wish to be whole, captured in the odes of one of Pessoa's 72 heteronyms, Ricardo Reis:
To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
Should you exaggerate or exclude
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so high,
Is reflected in each pool.
This tension between the increasing gaps in our society, and the knowledge that to be great we need to be all, and not exaggerate or exclude any parts of what is human - the good, ugly, evil - is fundamental and not new to the information society.
Technology does not change this, but it changes the tools we have at our disposal to grapple with both gaps and wholeness. The ideas of single identity or liberating anonymity were never very credible, and the great question for us is how we negotiate the balance between pseudonyms and heteronyms, and allow for the richness of the human experience, without falling apart. How we move from the absolutes of identity into the negotiation of presence in which we have room to err, to explore and to grow.
As always, thanks for reading and let me know if you have any comments, ideas or questions! For summer listening tune into Richard Allan’s podcast Regulate Tech - with recommendations on summer reading as well as a lot of other interesting stuff.
Nicklas