The text-made self: The words of others

The third project was called “The words of others” (Gorny 2001a). It is a collection of extracts that I have made from different sources and at different times (including both texts and images). It is interactive: the user sees one quotation  at a time; when he/she press the Reload button, next quotation appears at random.

The introduction to the project runs as follows:

The Words of Others are a collection of extracts that I have made from different sources and at different times, and that is being enlarged from time to time. The principle of selection of quotation  is simple: I have extracted what seems to me intimately close or, on the contrary, amazingly wild and shocking in my mind. Anyway, these are the well-said phrases or the whole passages that “have caught my attention” and prevented the eye and mind from sliding by, being content with the perceived “information ”. In other words, these extracts are associated with moments of awareness  and, as such, they have a symbolic  meaning for me. That is, not only do they convey information but also communicate something (or nothing), speaking about the world lined that connect events occurring in different places and times as well as about the structures and states of consciousness  that make these connections possible.

This is a collection neither of aphorisms nor of wise thoughts, nor a source of reference, nor a fortune cookie. The principle of the choice of material is completely subjective and arbitrary, and the social value of the project is the last thing that I care about. The Words of Others have been collected for my own pleasure and they are used mainly psychotechnically, and as a subsidiary tool in my work as author. 

I assume, however, that this collection (or particular utterances which make it up, or their quasi-random succession and the gap between meanings of particular quotations) can benefit other people as well, if, of course, they try to meditate on what they are reading and will not endlessly, with perseverance worthy of better use, go on clicking the mouse in order to get on by any means.

But let us put metaphysics aside! I shall be ineffably happy it the reader could find in The Words of Others something interesting, that he could make his own, at least in part.

Initially The Words of Others consisted exclusively of text material that was taken from books I have read, extracts from letters, phrases heard somewhere or occurring in dreams. Later I added some visual material. In the beginning, there were about three hundred quotations in the collection. By April 2003, there were 2,177 items, from which 286 were pictures and the rest were texts. The number of visitors or, more exactly, unique sessions, has reached almost 9,000, and the total number of downloads (views) has reached more than 72,000.

The project was launched on February 1^st, 2001 and it provoked many responses and comments. Some of them appeared in electronic publications such as Russian Journal, others were posted in the guestbook provided on the site or sent to me via email by readers. The reaction was rather ambiguous. Some liked the project, some were very critical. It seems notable that many people perceived The Words of Others as a tool of fortune telling. For example, cultural critic Slava Kuritsyn called it soothsayer (gadalka). Later, some people reported that they used to start their day by reading one or several quotations  from The Words of Others to tune up their mind.

The critique was primarily directed at the lack of interactivity and search possibilities, which, as Aleksej (Lexa) Andreyev, futurologist and cyberpunk writer, noted, lead to the fact that the level of entropy in The Words of Others would remain as high as in life and turn the quotation  viewing into “dull consumerism”. (Later a search mechanism was added to the project). Alexander Ivlev, on the other hand, proposed reorganizing the project in such a way that other people could add quotations  of their own and providing a opportunity to connect them by association. (I considered that suggestion and even some scripts giving such an opportunity were written but this idea has not been realized because it seemed to me that too few people were interested  in active participation).

The main critique, however, concerned the unclearness of function of the whole thing. Andrei Madison, for example, said that the project was “definitely useless”, even if in a positive sense of the lack of utilitarianism. Elena Melnikova, a semiotic  researcher from Tartu University, was much more definitely critical. She was irritated by the autistic nature of the project and the lack of reflection (“it is unclear what you think yourself about that”). She wrote that she did not understand why I needed to parade my private excerpt before the public.

In order to reply to the critique I wrote an article which was published in the Russian Journal on February 16^th, 2001. It was entitled “The Smile and Its Author: A Commentary to The Words of Others” (Gorny 2001c) and contained a detailed explanation of the ideas underlying the project. (See an abridged translation of the text).

This project can be considered as a manifestation of postmodern theory of the narrative self, because it suggests that the self consists entirely of the fragments of the texts of others. However, I believe that the user can read the quotations in a different way – not as texts but as symbols that describe his or her own mind. The project, therefore, is a realization of the meditation approach to consciousness. As such, it can be used for psychotechnical work resulting in attaining wordless knowledge and higher states of consciousness. Discussing such a possibility I wrote: ‘To what extent is it possible to achieve such effect by using The Words of Others or other technological devices of the Age of Information? I believe that it is possible neither to a greater nor to a lesser extent than if we use more traditional methods and means. In the final account, the outcome of any enterprise is determined not so much by the instruments but by the person who uses these instruments.’ (Gorny 2001c)

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