On Oversharing

It seems that "we haven't seen each other in a month" as the poet says. The Christmas whirlwind and some talks I had to prepare kept we away from the blog.

However, over break I learned that the Chambers Dictionary from Britain named "overshare" the word of the year for 2014. Though it's usually the Oxford dictionary that gains the headlines for the word of the year, last year they chose "vape"; nuff said.

In this post, I want to ask about what it is that bothers us about oversharing and what about it might be so particular to the time of the word's being coined. A theme I have been working with recently is the theme of enforced intimacy. In a way, oversharing is forcing an intimacy on someone else. I am thinking about intimacy in a modern society in which a) particular understandings of privacy that came to be seen as inviolable, and b) more and more is put into the realm of public scrutiny.

I think the problem with oversharing is that it cuts across two kinds of personal perception and social interaction that are not supposed to intersect in modern understandings. I think we today are more comfortable with intimacy and vulnerability among strangers in certain contexts, in a general and public sense, than we are being intimate with those we call our "intimates".

What does the naming of oversharing say about the boundaries of the self in 2014? What does it say about norms of intimacy and publicity in a society of oversharers? The word might have honored in England, but let's just imagine that such a society is the United States.

To think about this in an open, bloggy way, I have three artifacts I've enjoyed and thought about from America in 2014. They are the show Death, Sex & Money by Anna Sale on WNYC, Lena Dunham's book Not That Kind of Girl and Desiree Akhavan's film Appropriate Behavior.

Of course, the charge of having overshared in 2014 wasn't limited to Gotham women, but I think it is significant that the personal, overly personal or not, belongs to women. The Victorians set it up that way, and as Dunham says, to be of this sphere is to be socially coded as lacking gravitas, it is to be vulnerable to being dismissed if one is too much oneself.

The idea of "personal space" or "the space of the personal" is central here, and in exploring this in the three different works of 2014, I'm not looking to ask about who might be oversharing or how. My idea is to think about what the defining of the phenomenon might reveal about concepts like selfhood, vulnerability, sociality, exposition and the arts in everyday experiences of media that divert many of us. 

To start, Sale says that Death, Sex & Money is about "the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation", or any conversation. I can relate personally: growing up Episcopalian back east, sex, identity and vulnerability were issues that Swedes and Italians dealt with on the movie screen. We would watch them, keeping mostly to ourselves, and if we had an irrepressible comment it would be in terms of bare abstraction.

Anna Sale does go deep, albeit in the more Victorian mode of a dignified personal space. In the show, her sobriety and interrogative bearing do not inhibit the interviews, it seems to enable people from very different experiences to talk about what is supposed to be particular to themselves, trying to bear up to pain and uncertainty. The sharers go over, which is the point of the show, but they do it, or are edited to do it, with a dignity that smoothes the personal and public and private and universal divides. It is oversharing, but in such a way that I could imagine hearing it from a non-intimate and not cringe about it being somebody's business.

Lena Dunham's business, on the other hand, is everyone's business, and the pain and uncertainty she's imposing has something of an older tradition of collective art. Sale is not controversial: she doesn't put her topics out there with the heat, weakness and desperation all can engender. Dunham, on the other hand, is trying to do the opposite. She is trying for catharsis in the acutely explicit, the cringe as people have been sayin. Once the pain is felt, we can move beyond it to something important. What Aristotle meant by "catharsis" was that pity and fear were the gates to collective feeling, but neither Girls or Not That Kind of Girl has something that specific in mind.

What I remember most about the book is not the important parts about consent and power, or family or child sexuality. It's rather the long lists of everything she ate when she was on a diet and had to put everything into her phone.

She was trying to resolve her difficulties of fit, into clothes, into relationships in this extremely banal way that none of us would tolerate hearing about from a friend. But when she makes these difficulties public it means something else, it's a call to pay attention to how pressure is placed around us. It may not be a profound calling, hyperactive dieting is not as serious a disorder as there could be, but the whole picture is out when it is overshared.

Akhavan is trying to make a picture also. In an interview on Death, Sex & Money, she says this year's Appropriate Behavior is a professional, intentional, comedic remake of an earlier film, The Slope. Much like this year's, that film is about trying to make sense of a relationship and its end. The Slope was supposed to be creative therapy for Akhavan and her partner, but ended up a record of their split. Akhavan films and stars in it like Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives.

What interests me about this year's picture is not that one kind of intimate suffering is sad while written a slightly differently it is funny. It's rather what that is possible when one creator takes control from a distance and commits to fiction: it's just Akhavan this year and not her partner. This change coincided with other alterations: a thinly-disguised avatar instead of a real name, ethnic caricature instead of hurting family drama. By her account, she put more fiction in with the explicit pain.

The bigger point I find here is that the exercise of fiction that makes oversharing something else. I'm not talking about fiction in the general sense, not what Aristotle understood of drama that has many contexts in world art history. I mean the specific Western individualistic author-centered personalism unique to modern society, to bourgeois society, the society with divisions troubled by oversharing.

When we are untroubled by oversharing, we have two adjacent selves: 1) a non-interacting consumer of others' narratives who is quite open to depravity and misery, to non-normative divisions of piety and profanity, and 2) the equanimous person concerned with the propriety of placements and categories of modern life. These are clearly divided personae in the same person, a person who can be intimate with strangers but not friends. 

When the word "overshare" was coined in 2014, I instantly knew what it meant, but what it pointed to seems stranger and stranger to me.

Ferguson Reference

I have over-shared. I have treated very serious events that happen in the world as if they were demands for my opinion. Last night, a federal jury in St. Louis elected not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, for killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black civilian. So, it would seem a perfect time to make my own comment on how patterns of dispossession and violence correlate in modern history, with American cases some of the best known.

Today, I have to remember that white consternation does nothing. What is meaningful comes from real listening one has done, on openly hearing voices of color and opening oneself to recognize a different subject of what is in effect a different country. For this, I am limiting comments here to reference to Ta-nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations". This essay is a work of history more sober and lucid than much of what is published by academic historians.

Last night, disproportionate amounts of the discourse focused on particulars: particular people's disrespect for property maybe associated with peaceful protest, particularities of police force-doctrine and whether and how Wilson followed them.

What this did was to obscure focus on the permanent structures "within which violence circulates" as Talal Asad says. It obscures focus on what race is and how it renders people of color vulnerable as others are not.

Arguing that race is not a determinate part of people's lives right now in the US is arguing against history. It is the same thing as arguing that anti-Semitism was created by a few malefactors in Germany in the 1930s without a long history dispossession. It is the same as arguing Apartheid was anomalous to what came before and after in South African history without recognizing the structures of the colonial and globalizing economies and the deployment of the concept of color.

Arguing America is the kind of place where everyone spontaneously, where everyone makes her own destiny and which destiny is accountable only to his own fault is to think we have an exceptional innocence and freedom from mutual responsibility.

No one who thinks about history can honestly think this, and no one has ever thought this about any place and time other than his own. It's this granting this ahistorical liberty and deference to those in our society with some of the most power and authority that we all have to do something about.

Wednesday Hangover

At least in the US, graduate school tends to disillusion people from electoral politics. Nevertheless, I'd guess there's one conversation going on in grad-lounges from Cambridge, Mass to Oxford, Miss: why didn't most of the country come out and stop this? I don't want this conversation to swallow up this blog, but it's hard. In fact, I started having this conversation myself with an old friend, a Denver attorney with a big political future. So, it bears some note.

Scholarly demographers like Ruy Teixeira and analytic designers like Charles Blow have been saying for a long time now there's no way the Republican Party can speak to a majority in contemporary America. Their policies never poll all that well, and the party brand name conjures associations of old embarrassing relatives one doesn't introduce to friends. So, what explains the massive success of the Tea Party, a right-wing faction that revitalized the party and has dictated discourse in Washington since Barack Obama's inauguration? Why don't more young people, more working people, more non-white people turn out to resist forms of politics that regard them as criminals?

There's a basic problem with this question that surrounds us today: it implies a duty of a people on the outs to support the Democratic Party. I think we ought to ask questions with another formula in mind. In the media and popular imagination, this is a personal question: what has Obama done for vulnerable people?

But the "plus" column in Obama's case seems to come down to his idea of forcing poorer people to buy health insurance and trusting the industry to transform into a profession of caregiving out of the goodness of its conscience. The "minuses" only add up from there: Guantánamo, the normalization of the security state and low-heat forms of international aggression, the blessing of income inequality through deference to the global financial and trade system.

But those were Bush's legacies! My friends and I will protest. In this, one ignominy stands out, one innovation for which Obama himself is singularly culpable: the historically unprecedented deportation of undocumented people.  In claiming he was seeking good faith from conservative allies for the greater good of immigrants, his administration has vied with Alabama and Arizona for the title of most committed to emiseration of people who might not be here under the rules, their families and their communities.

So what has the Jefferson-Jackson legacy, a legacy of populism, done for the people lately? Of course, that party or any alternative would depend for significance on the sustained commitment of those who don't have as much to give as well as the middle-class progressives who are soldierly Democrats today.

What form is such a commitment-worthy movement to take? This is a much harder if much more productive question than the one that liberals are asking today. If that open-endedness in disappointment can suffice, I hope I can be done with politics in the US in this space. But to take the faux-folksy mode of a campaigning politician: you might say fat chance.