Project Proposal

Anonymous is the dancing chaotic God of YouTube. Their playfulness, fractured ideologies, and rhetorical strategies embrace the irony of postmodernism. Identity becomes formless within the medium of the internet. As content is separated from form what emerges is a space of chora. Plato described chora as the space between being and becoming. Contrary to critics fears of postmodernisms emptying of ethics I argue that a new ethics emerges in the chaos of chora. This is an ethics of the moment . Anonymous seen in this light is not the end of ethics but rather a return to a primordial ethics that speaks of truths excess; addressing the paradox of contemporary micro-celebrity culture. Anon's communiqués poetically undermine narcissism. Following Butler’s account of ethics I want to argue that ethical action requires a freedom from the subject. In the face of an unstable society the drive to self publish to give an account of oneself is the risk necessary to act. What if Anon was a woman? If Anon is read as a woman we can begin to uncover the logic that has created identity and woman. Western metaphysical tradition has placed women in a binary focused on the male gaze - beauty/monster - Feminine subjectivity has been dictated by the privileging of the male gaze as Berger argues. Anon reflects the shattered image of celebrity back upon itself. Anon is not the death of the subject but the return of repression – a ghost in the wires.



This is my project proposal - Warning: I will probably change it around as I read and think more. ----------