In the reversal of a Dostoevskyan hyperbole, one might proclaim self-consciousness to be the source of all suffering.[1] While, surely, pain can very well be bodily, present in everyone from the most lucid of human beings to the most unaware of Cocker Spaniels, one particularly pervasive torment springs from the ways in which we can perceive ourselves. This is sapiens sapiens, thinking its thoughts. The reflexivity of thought might as well bring about self-love, but the result is all-too-often shame, guilt, disgust, alienation. The Pandora's Box unleashing all such pains is the awareness of ourselves – and, notably, of our[ ]selves.

It has been claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living,[2] but the converse is also true, especially in an age of objectivity. That is to say that the pathologically examined life is not worth living. While examination may bring valuable insight, it can also do the opposite: destroy the foundations underneath our values, maim the immediacy of our commitments, even our feeling-at-home in this life. To blame is the incongruity between subjective experience (experiencing from the first-person point of view) and the objective approach to it (seeing the I from the third-person point of view). Reflection, therefore, can degenerate into a mode of being in which subjective reality is annulled by virtue of its objectification, its presentation to the examinatory eye.

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Dave Eggers problematizes this perverted culture of self-consciousness, in which the self becomes increasingly dominated by our consciousness of it. The result is an alienated distance, quite literally an expulsion from subjectivity through an objectifying movement. When the protagonist scatters his mother's ashes in a lake, he is so self-conscious that he cannot help but contemplate the sufficiency of his tribute, as well as the ecological impact and the legality of this action.

I stand up quickly and throw, this time some of the cremains sticking to my palm, which is now sweaty—fuck! I try to kick the spilled cremains into the water, down below the rocks, through the crevices—what I need is a hose or something—
But should I really be kicking my mother's ashes? I try to pick them up again, too many, too many and then I crouch down again— Fuck, maybe this is illegal. I had heard that this was not legal, that these cremains were not sanitary, that one needed permission or could only do it on the open sea—[3]

Only pages later, the protagonist's self-awareness starts to problematize itself in a moment of abstract lucidity in the face of self-destructive consciousness:

I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. My poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking—[4]

This is not an isolated case of self-destructive consciousness, but a recurring theme in Eggers' metamodern masterpiece. Throughout the novel, the protagonist believes, without any evidence whatsoever, that he has AIDS, that his younger brother, over which he has custody, has been murdered by his babysitter, that he will be arrested for all sorts of morally questionable trivialities, and many other paranoid beliefs. These hypochondriac thought-patterns further intensify the book's problematization of self-consciousness.

No wonder this culture is spinning towards ever-heightening layers of reflexivity: we are seeing ourselves everywhere. The postmodern sapiens sapiens is surrounded by large glass windows, smoother than ever; we reconstruct ourselves in collages of videos and images; and online platforms triumphing in exhibitionism (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok) enhance this reflexive tendency even further.

What can we do? The primary criterion for effective action in the face of this perverted self-consciousness is the resurgence of some kind of subjectivity. We are in need of experience more immediate. Less display, less exhibitionism. And at the same time, we have to increase the levels of reflexivity even more, like Dave Eggers' novel, for only through the display of display, the exhibitionism of exhibitionism, do we come to feel the crippling worthlessness of self-consciousness – as well as the need for an antidote.[5]

REFERENCES

[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, and The Gambler (OUP Oxford, 1999), 34: "Suffering is […] the sole cause of consciousness."

[2] Plato, Apology, 38a5–6.

[3] Dave Eggers, Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: Eggers Dave (S.l., 2007), 398.

[4] Eggers, 399–400.

[5] Liesbeth Korthals Altes, 'Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies – Notes on Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius', in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (De Gruyter, 2008), 107–28, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110209389.107.