The Multiplicity of I

If in heteronymic simulation I am a subject other than the subject I am, there are evidently as many other I’s as there are possible acts of simulation. Pessoa, inhabiting countless lives, says that by creating in imagination a multiplicity of virtual subjects, each of which is him, he has ‘ubiquitized’ himself. So he affirms a thesis I will call ‘Subject Plurality’: I am many subjects other than the subject I am. We need, though, to distinguish two versions of this thesis, for it can be read as making either a diachronic claim or a synchronic one. Interpreters of Pessoa have been drawn to present the Pessoan self as a sort of parliament or confederation of souls. Despite Pessoa’s appeal, once, to the metaphor of a colony—and there only in connection with the phenomenal unity of consciousness rather than with reference to the multiplicity of heteronyms—the ‘confederation’ theory is not Pessoa’s. It is a Proustian, not a Pessoan, picture of multiplicity. An appreciation of this distinction is crucial to seeing why Pessoa’s multiplicity of I is not reducible to another mental illness, multiple personality disorder. The distinction between successive and simultaneous subject plurality has found a surprising application: understanding Afrofuturism’s experimentation with multiple sonic selves.