Laboring in Anonymity

One

Anonymity is rich, its rewards many and its dangers, too. Anonymity troubles writers and readers, teachers and students, and philosophers, historians, and sociologists, too. Anonymity troubles individuals.¹ Offering fairness, it can also mask bias.² Offering protection, it can also cover those who would deceive, whether published novelists, plagiarizing sophomores, or internet avatars. Martin Heidegger thinks that anonymity must be overcome to establish authentic individuality (Natanson 1979).³ Other people, less loftily, do not care whether their individuality is authentic; they aim to make marks on others and on society, to achieve fame or even celebrity. Such persons today are not, it is true, panicked, hysterical, or fearful about “sinking lower and lower into a whirl of indistinguishable atoms,” of being “lost in a mass civilization,” as Henry Seidel Canby described his fellows in 1926 (qtd. in Natanson 80). Today, we do not “sink” into anonymity—surely we are born into it, into a mass civilization that dwarfs the one Canby saw—but we may nevertheless strive mightily to emerge from it. That is, if anonymity is a fact of modern life, a fact we are used to, it is not one we celebrate; it is not a state or condition most people strive to achieve; it has a bad reputation. But is that bad rap justified? Philosopher Maurice Natanson thinks not, precisely because anonymity is a fact of modern life: asking people to transcend “anonymity is tantamount to seeking a remedy for being normal” (539). Anonymity is “a constitutive feature of the social,” an “invariant” and “standard feature of everyday life . . . part of the structure of the social world” (534; 1986, 24). In social life, we can only be intimate with a small number of people; with almost everyone else, we are reciprocally anonymous: “I am anonymous to most Others,” writes Natanson, “just as most Others are anonymous to me” (1986, 24). As a result, rather than overcome anonymity, as Heidegger would have it, or emerge from it, as those who aim to be celebrities would have it, we move between it and intimacy: not always engaged with others as intimates, we are also, Natanson claims, “nomads of the anonymous” (1979, 539). Further, argues William Egginton, “intimacy and anonymity form a conceptual coupling: without a contrasting experience of anonymity, there is no such thing as an experience of an intimate sphere whose secret life is precisely what remains unknown to the anonymous one, whose members’ own intimacy stays reciprocally beyond our ken” (2006, 98).

Natanson’s and Egginton’s points seem intuitively correct, as does Egginton’s related notion that we can assess our experiences along an “axis spanning the concepts of anonymity and intimacy” (98). But as Egginton knows, and as I am sure Natanson would agree, all of this may be historically specific, specific to modernity. Anonymity—and hence intimacy and arguably individuality, too—seems wedded to the urban, to the metropolis, to very large groupings of people living in proximity to one another, all of whom arrived from somewhere else. Speaking of the late Middle Ages, Egginton asks, “How can we expect a similar notion to arise in a culture whose sense of space was so deeply rooted in place and in a profound familiarity not only with one’s physical surrounding but with one’s fellows as well?” (99). The question is rhetorical; we cannot expect to find “a similar notion” in that culture, Egginton avers, because “the primary focus of medieval existence was the local community: the life of community participates in the individual’s existence as well as in the existence of the universe in micro-and macrocosmic ways . . .” (99). Egginton implies that when community is so deeply embedded in an individual, no place exists for the dual (mental) spaces of anonymity and intimacy, or for interplay or movement between them. Even in performance, whether sacred or profane, medieval persons “gathering to watch were indistinguishable from those performing and vice versa, and the ‘subject matter’ of the performance was as inseparable from the place of its presentation . . . as it was from the eternal truth of history or faith that its words...