"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd." Deleuze and Guttari
Unlike Deleuze and Guttari, I've chosen to write under a pseudonym. And in the end, it "is" purely "because" of habit (or to disentangle myself from it) that I chose to write as Andrés Nolido and not through the name I was entrusted with from birth. By now, that name has been wrought. Tumbling through the torrent of time: its bruises, scrapes, kisses, fractures, and embraces have all culminated into my birth name. And it is through, what Castoriadis called "the instauration of an 'other' relationship", that I feel I must transgress this. Therefore I chose to break old habits and call myself something else as one attempt to escape from the "enslavement of repetition...free the radical imagination..." and become something altogether new (165).
I am also aware that contrary to the neoliberal imaginary that continues to permeate and mold the global society around me, I am not an individual. At least not in the way that I was made to believe. As Deleuze and Guattari quipped in the very first line of A Thousand Plateaus, I too am many. Therefore my name marks of this cognizance, a conscious move to acknowledge my very own multitude. I embody the shared thoughts and experiences of not only my comrades-my fellow dreamers, but also the passer-bys, onlookers, and even those I wish I could forget. I am the space where these moments and memories collide. Altogether, I am.
But I am also "here," in this moment. A moment dogged by anxiety. Hugged on all sides by the smothering of institutions, capital, ideologies, and people. And sometimes it's just too hard to fuckin' breathe. What with all the hugging.
It's in moments just like these that innumerable writers: from Pablo Neruda to the historical collective, Ibn Warraq, to Dr. Seuss, have each chosen to write under different names, pseudonyms. And from under the freedom of an "other," they could illuminate the troubled moments of their time. Eric Blair rattled the chains of his memories by writing as George Orwell. Like him, these many writers articulated the absurdities of their time with an incisive clarity. And through Andrés Nolido, I too want to rattle and free myself from my memories. I too want to convey the tragic-comedy of my time. Andrés for the Katipunan rebel, Bonfacio. Nolido for the other rebels, my dad and his mother. But quite simply, I liked the way it sounded when I whispered this name in the dark.
Even before Althusser and Derrida published their manifests on ideology and language (respectively), Orwell already grasped the power of language as a tool for maintaining ideologies of the State through its ability to subsume identity/ies. Yet, disturbed by what he saw as a colonial officer in Burma and disillusioned by the aftermath of the Spanish Revolution, he also understood the fragile balance that these identities depended upon. Which is still true. That the power undergirding language and the names that function to signify these relationships, vacillates between positions; loyal to none, it swarms, engulfing all.
Orwell wrote in 1936, "Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."
I am a fool. But I won't shoot an elephant in order to prove that I'm not. Certainly, a pseudonyminal identity provides a mask and with it, a kind a freedom. But with this freedom, something else is exchanged, lost, and thrown in the fire. Likewise, when one desists from repetition, then there is the question mark. Where one becomes vulnerable because of that unknown (which was always there anyways). As Andrés Nolido, I am deferring the power of my old name (what power it had), as well as my individuality to you, the reader. Since you cannot see me or "know" who I am, I will always be writing from an interstitial space, the Imagination.
And there is the opening. Revolution and liberation is never the total exchange of power from one to another. The darkness left by our own revolutions have taught us this. But a balance. Where each of us share within it but are still vulnerable. So we are forced to depend on each other because of it.
What is this radical imagination that I've borrowed from Castoriadis then? Or more precisely, why, simply, the imagination? The Imagination. These thoughts in motion, articulated in virtual space, are not simply an idealistic attempt to convey what "is" the Imagination. It is a map without scale. My body without organs. It's also an ode. An eagerness. A waiting. For all those moments which point to the horizon, the confluence of a multitude of time. Hundreds of thousands of lives, words, and thoughts, shared in one tremendous vacillating motion. To continue the work of liberating my imagination, transforming it, and sharing it with all of you.
References
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Castoriadis, C. Philosophy, politics, autonomy: Essays in political philosophy . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Orwell, George. "Shooting an Elephant." The Norton Reader. 8th (shorter) ed. Ed. Arthur Eastman, et.al. New York: Norton, 1992. 531-37.
