Watchableness and the self as actor — "God is named Nielsen"

echoes

Early text: broadcast "makes each one of us at once more self-conscious and less reflective"; "the most significant feature of persons is watchableness"; the shift to "an understanding of self as an actor at a great audition whose end is seeming, i.e., being seen"; "Imagine a Berkeleyan esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen." [the watching passage] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's preoccupation with watchedness and self-consciousness — the figurants and the fear of being watched, JOI's films and the crib's-eye camera, Hal's paralytic self-observation, the whole worship-of-attention diagnosis (the Kenyon/"worship" line the archive tracks). The 1988 essay's "watchableness" and seeming-over-being is the germ of the novel's anatomy of a culture that exists to be seen.
Weight: prefiguration