BECOMING ONE'S OWN AUDIENCE

I have become increasingly suspicious of the idea that the self is something one possesses. The Cartesian inheritance remains difficult to shake. Grammar itself seems to reinforce it. Thought appears to require a thinker. Action appears to require an actor. The self enters the sentence already assumed. Yet lived experience often feels less certain. The self shifts across relationships, habits, places, memories, and time. It can feel coherent in the morning and unfamiliar by evening. What if this instability is not a failure of self-knowledge, but something essential to selfhood itself?

This paper examines artistic and mediated practices through which the self becomes perceptible to itself. Through a reading of Maya Deren's experimental filmmaking alongside Merleau-Ponty's account of perception and Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity, I explore what happens when the self encounters itself through mediation. Film introduces a slight distance between the one who lives and the one who watches. What interests me is that this distance does not seem to uncover a hidden self waiting beneath experience. It creates conditions under which selfhood can be rehearsed, witnessed, revised, and momentarily inhabited.

I argue that self-witnessing functions as a form of alterity. The self becomes audience and performer, spectator and spectacle. One encounters oneself indirectly, through image, memory, and representation. The distance that emerges is neither a flaw nor an obstacle to overcome. It may be one of the conditions through which selfhood becomes possible at all.

Phenomenological discussions of Otherness often ask how the self is constituted through what exceeds it. I suggest that practices of self-witnessing reveal a related phenomenon: the self is never fully available to itself. It appears partially, through traces and performances of its own making. What these practices offer is not certainty, authenticity, or arrival. They offer a way of remaining in relation to a self that is continually taking shape.

If the self is less something we possess than something we continually become, then self-witnessing is not a means of discovering who we are. It is one of the ways we come into being.

The paper forms part of my broader research into mediated self-observation, spectatorship, perception, and the unstable boundary between self and other.

I am interested in the difference between witnessing oneself and watching oneself, and in the possibility that distance from the self is not merely alienating. It may also be productive: a condition through which the self can become perceptible without ever becoming complete.

The project remains in development ahead of the conference presentation.