Radically cozy, radically horny, radically hostile.

 
The Belgian approach for #streamingegos kicked off with an exploration of 'identity online' seen through Belgian binoculars. It brought us to 'vernacular language' and also 'radicalization online' (regarding Syria-fighters) linked to the lack of a Belgian identity. The following article was written last week, but due to the recent events I decided to put it aside for some days. Still I think, after making some changes, it's worth sharing. It is chaotic, open-ended and meant to provide material – not theory – for a performance which will be made in the week from 30 November till 6 December. It is not intended as another urgent opinion on the events of November 13 in Paris. However, it can not be seen apart from it.

When talking about radicalization online – especially after wading knee deep through a number of academic articles on this subject – you end up with a rather self-explanatory series of terms: isolating, affirming, confirming, amplifying, socializing, normalizing, banalizing, disrupting – and, from an outside angle, 'grotesque-ifying'. People radicalize on platforms which imply and amplify a mono-focus.

But what is radical anyway?

First of all, we need to make a clear distinction between radicalism and violent extremism. That being said, we still should see the radical as total, complete, absolute, violent, often irreversible and utmost consequential. The radicalist selects one aspect (religion, tradition, political belief, gender,...) and makes that predominating over the rest of the identity, blows that up to the extreme, but always fully realizes (and is willing to bear) the consequences of this for the rest of the identity it is part of.

These days, and especially now, the radical is an over-politicized term, mostly related to violent extremism. However, numerous other examples of individuals taking radical and utmost consequential positions can be found elsewhere: artists, activists, whistle-blowers... but also almost everywhere in daily life, and surely our online identities seem to find ideal platforms for this. In most of these contexts, except for violent extremism, it is easy and common to romanticize the radicalist, as well as we see an urge to make him grotesque.

Type-casted personas, not subjects

For our identities online, we should wonder if the different images of identity – or expressions of a unity of being – which we continuously produce or perform with our social media accounts on specific platforms, aren't radicalizations as well. The different personas we perform, type-casted and determined by our platforms of choice; grotesque it is.

These different online accounts which we 'run' – our technical identity-tentacles – are overtly unambiguous: they implicitly claim to be and are marketed as the full and total, unambiguous expression of an unambiguous identity. Think of our Facebook-LinkedIn-Tinder-Tumblr-Pinterest-Twitter-accounts, as radically isolated, remote from each other, expressions of friendliness, professionalism and sexiness. We run a grotesque farm of radical identities, personas not subjects: radically cozy, radically sexy, radically up-to-date...



In the pile of scholarly articles I referred to at the beginning of this post, we see a growing consensus to no longer separate our online identity from our offline lives. And indeed, the fact that our online identities are separated form each other, might not seem too distinct from our offline ecology of identity expressions. These online accounts are 'technical' and 'virtual' but indeed 'true' extensions of our real world identity. Our very Selves get intertwined with the digital networked infrastructure. So be it.
Could we say that these digital tentacles of the Self are the most radical expression of what identity is or has become in our day and age? Is this age the end of identity as we know it – becoming radically dispersed, distributed and dissolved?



Some call this the one step closer to hocus pocus Singularity. That may be. The radicalized woodpeckers below have definitely transformed – radicalized and disrupted – into something else. In a post-human 'animat', a cyborg, a steel-pecker?

As I already said, it might be interesting and productive to leave behind the image of radicalization as a long process of isolation, marginalization etc. When looking at artists, activists or whistle-blowers we see radicalization as a disruptive and decisive moment of creative clarity. A moment of lucidity where everything is possible – if, however, you're willing to bear the consequences.

As such, these woodpeckers with their radicalized display behavior happily remind us that in our reaction to both violent extremism and the implied radicalization on platforms we tend to forget this productive and disruptive strength of the radical position.

Let's remember the radical as a highly productive and necessary force, at least partially thriving upon the implicit, soft power of the aesthetic category of the grotesque. The grotesque which seems to make the radical somehow comprehensible and sympathetic, while leaving its deranging, violent and disruptive effects intact.