Skin, Kin, Kind, I/you/we: Autotheory's Compositional Grammar

"Tell me a story." After the familiar childhood injunction, in the microspace of that pause and its calm assurance that what is asked for will be given, comes the strangeness of a self made apposite; me, a story. I want it, I get it, I am it. When I was three and four, my ceaseless demands for just one more bedtime story led my mother to record them, eight-track tapes the size of a dinner plate spooling out surrogate presence.

Her voice eventually gave way to mine, as my father recorded me singing nursery rhymes, pretending to be my nursery schoolteacher calling roll, and reciting from memory the stories my mother had read. "Say it off by heart," my father would say, and I would. There's a tender monstrosity to the scene as there seems to be to autotheory, a vampiric feeding and self-replication. Heart-song, life-blood, story-time. I want it, I get it, I am it. "Getting it" is part the self's dream fulfillment, a momentary answering of desire's demand that, like Shahriyar listening to Scheherazade, fuels the want all the more. But "getting it" is also shorthand for understanding something external to the self—the moment when a concept's opacity lifts, when another's experience or emotion, bad day or baggage enters (I get you), when we sense what is felt beneath the surface of what is said. Autotheory enacts both senses of getting: the narrative appetite that makes me a story or I a theory, and the intersubjective opening to something previously unknown. In that double state, autotheory reveals its own frame narrative, the story of an I containing a you.

The I that wants to tell the story is always hungry (acting like Scheherazade, consuming like Shahriyar). In its most phobic version, autotheory's economy seems eager incorporation of the listening other and monstrous inflation of the speaking self. Its image is an open mouth, swallowing while talking, an I in the shape of an O, endlessly circling back to itself. Bad manners. Bad form. Bad for politics. Self-talking while everything burns, voicing "I" when what we desperately need is to remake "we" and world. And yet that open mouth is not merely self-projection or other-incorporation, autotheory's negative fantasm, but its decisive act, the allocentric opening hidden by that hungry I so eager to tell its tale. If autotheory is about anything, it is about the extent to which I is not only I, and not only the I who speaks and the you who listens, but a multiplicity, the I that thinks itself as what it is not so that something else (let's call it change) might come to be. "Could you, would you, would you, could you?" Sam-I-am demands of one who wants none of those green eggs and ham in his mouth until he does. "Sam! If you will let me be, I will try them. You will see."¹ Open mouths everywhere. If we let I be, what can be seen? I am/you are/we are trying, seeing, opening, changing.

Autotheory is more than theory with a strong index of I's and a propensity to tell its own story, as Paul Preciado's "theory of the self, or self-theory" asserts when it announces, "I'm not interested in my emotions insomuch as their being mine, belonging only, uniquely, to me. I'm not interested in their individual aspects, only in how they are traversed by what isn't mine."² Despite the long shadow of the cogito, theory's grammar needs not unfold from I alone. It's not in thinking that this I's am lies but in opening, in being traversed and transformed by what is not the self. Spoken as I, oriented to you, built from pieces, always overflowing its container, autotheory is a spillage of a style in which lies an aesthetics, an analytics, an ethics, and a politics. How does autotheory get from I to you to we? How does...