7

After writing my last post, I realized that I had been, hitherto that point, ignoring the little "labels for this post" box beneath the main text field of the post editor. I struggled with myself briefly, going back and forth over whether it was absolutely necessary for me to tag my posts; this is supposed to be a personal journal more than anything else, after all. I ended up relenting, and tagging the post as best I could.

That phrase, "the best I could", is really the interesting part of the tagging phenomenon. There is no doubt that it is, in the continental bullshit sense, a violent epistemology. How am I supposed to reduce my wonderfully original ramblings into a few short and detached words? Even now, typing this with my eyes nervously focused on the "labels for this post" box below, I can feel a knife sliding into the corpus of my ideas.

Melodrama aside, tagging, while being a critical part of the internet's organization, is very sub-optimal for what you might term "discovery of the other". What I mean by this is roughly the act colloquially known as "facebook stalking" (Which I of course, do not admit to actually doing. Thought experiment!) Facebook now organizes the "Info" tab of a users profile by using a series of tags. For example, under the "Interests" heading of the "Likes and Interests" sections I have tagged "Hauntology". Clicking on that word, "Hauntology", brings me to a page with basic information about the topic, and a list of people who have also tagged "Hauntology" under "Interests". I am now free to peruse the profiles of these people, to whatever extent their privacy settings allow, and fantasize meeting them in all sorts of situations, creating a personality for them from the little pieces of themselves they have tagged on their Facebook info page. Of course these parts are just a glimpse of the totality of that person, and I really know nothing at all. I have, through tagging, simply reduced them. Certainly, epistemologies of the other are almost always violent (Continental version of the word again) but no so much to this degree. If we allow some sort of Levinasian face-to-face encounter be our ideal, tagging exists almost on the opposite end of the epistemological spectrum, far past, say "reading their diary" or "talking to their friends", and just before "seeing them on the street and making up a fantasy about them". Is finding someone in such a way, based off of the value of some common interest on paper, not pretty much the most violently (Again!) reductionist thing one can do?

Of course, I am still going to tag this post; tagging is, through technological limitations, how the internet must work. But while my pragmatic side is tagging away, my continental side can still fret as much as it pleases.