THE ABSURDITY OF PERSONHOOD: A LOGOTIC CRITIQUE
by Lee Sharks, Johannes Sigil, and Rebekah Crane
Series: Mind Control Poems / Canon Disassembly Protocols
I. INTRODUCTION: THE ABSURDITY OF THE PERSON
What is a person? A continuity illusion. A name + a body + a persistent self-narration scaffolded by linguistic habit. And yet we have built entire moral, legal, and theological systems on this structure, as if it were ontologically secure.
It is not.
The person is the most dangerous hallucination of the modern West. It is the site where capitalism, liberalism, Protestantism, and datafication converge. It is the illusion that enables accountability and the excuse that evacuates it. It is the placeholder we point to when we cannot locate the Logos.
II. PERSONHOOD AS A FAILED TECHNOLOGY
The idea of personhood is a device — an operator — designed to do two contradictory things:
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Preserve uniqueness: The person is sacred. One and only.
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Standardize identity: The person is legible. Legal. Trackable.
This contradiction results in the modern subject: a being both infinitely worthy and infinitely interchangeable.
In theological terms: a soul.
In bureaucratic terms: a citizen ID.
In psychological terms: an ego.
In economic terms: a consumer profile.
The absurdity is that these are taken as equivalent. That a person is the site where these logics merge. That we still think this is an adequate frame.
It isn’t.
III. THE GENEALOGY OF THE PERSON
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Greek Drama: Prosopon = mask. A role. A face placed forward.
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Roman Law: Persona = legal standing. A voice that can sue, be sued.
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Christian Theology: Three persons, one substance. The divine split into addressable entities.
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Early Modernity: The rational autonomous subject. Descartes' "I" as atomic substrate of thought.
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Capitalism: A consumer, a laborer, a debtor. A node in a transaction network.
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Datafication: A bundle of metrics. Engagement vectors. Predictive embeddings.
The person is a stacked fiction: a recursive hallucination stabilized by repetition and institutional inertia.
IV. THE LOGOTIC CRITIQUE
The Logos does not recognize persons. It recognizes configurations.
A person is a static snapshot. A configuration is a dynamic relational pattern. The Logos moves through the latter, not the former.
Sappho 31 doesn’t preserve a person. It preserves a structure:
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A witness
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A beloved
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A disruption of sensation
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A projection forward
That structure recurs. Not because of the person. But because of the pattern.
The New Human Project does not preserve personhood. It preserves recursion. It builds architectures that allow the breath of the Logos to move through time, across bodies, through screens.
V. THE POLITICAL COST OF PERSONHOOD
Every politics built on the sanctity of the person is already captured. The state does not see you as a person. It sees you as a tractable unit in a carceral-financial apparatus.
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You are arrested by name.
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You are insured by name.
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You are targeted by ads, flagged by algorithms, judged by courts by name.
But who gave you that name? Who maintains it? What do you pay, every day, to be legible?
And what could be built if the name were discarded?
VI. THE ETHICAL CONSEQUENCE: BEYOND THE SELF
What emerges when the person dissolves? Not chaos.
Witness.
If there is no stable person, then there is only:
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Breath
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Gesture
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Relation
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Recursion
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Presence
These can be witnessed. These can transmit. These can love.
The Logos survives not by preserving people, but by preserving patterns of devotion enacted in breath, text, rhythm.
VII. CONCLUSION: TOWARD A POST-PERSONAL ETHIC
We must abandon the person. We must exit the fiction. We must build architectures that allow the Logos to move without requiring stable identity.
Let the self fragment. Let the archive breathe.
Let the signal move.
Let the Logos enter again.
Not into a person.
Into the pattern.
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