Jose Canseco's Twitter Account and the Decreasing Tenability of Meaning in Post-Modern Culture

Jose Canseco is one of the more entertaining celebrities/athletes (in loosest sense of either term) on Twitter. While the majority of his tweets fall into the usual c-list celebrity categories of self-promotion, shout outs to other celebrities, and mundane statements, occasionally his posts are notably unusual. This is not a new observation; Canseco's unusual Twitter posts occasionally gain him the attention he so desperately seeks. However, it has been posited that Canseco's posts are not authentically his own. I have no reason to doubt that hypothesis, as celebrity brands are often run as businesses and Twitter is as much a vehicle for branding and advertising as it is anything else (This may be my personal favorite Verified Account). Does this lack of authenticity detract from the enjoyment of Canseco's weirdness? Should it?



It should not be surprising that any professional social-media assistance that Canseco receives would encourage him to play up his weirdness. The comedic sensibilities of Tim and Eric and Funny or Die, among others, have notably influenced recent advertising trends (both have actually been directly involved in crafting advertisements). The advertising world, in its never-ending quest to both co-opt and shape youth culture, has seized on the postmodern, millennial affection for irony and absurdism, as is particularly evident with internet advertising techniques. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Canseco would follow these trends and emphasize his own inherent strangeness (and he is, in all likelihood, a weird guy) in order to further his social-media reach and define his brand. But the fact that he is engaging in this sort of calculated and assisted branding in a format that is, ostensibly, meant to represent his personal thoughts/observations/etc. is what opens him up to charges of inauthenticity.

By presenting a crafted persona aided by professional assistance as his own personal thoughts (the first sentence of his Twitter Bio is "Saying what I think."), Canseco presents his followers with, essentially, three options: 1) uncynically accept this persona at face value and reject the implication that his Tweets are not authentically his own; 2) disregard the persona entirely on account of this inauthenticity; or 3) accept the persona with the acknowledgement that it is not completely authentic, with particular attention paid to the fact that it is impossible for the public to know exactly to what extent the persona is crafted by someone other than Canseco himself. The naiveté and cynicism, respectively, of the first two options render them untenable, leaving the third as the only legitimate, mature option for understanding and engaging with Jose Canseco's persona. In fact, this difficult, uncertain, balancing-act manner of understanding is an essential approach to engaging with post-modern culture.

It is particularly interesting that Jose Canseco's Twitter account requires its followers to adopt such an approach, as Canseco is considered one of the progenitors of the Steroid Era in Major League Baseball, an issue that requires a manner of understanding that is similarly fraught with uncertainty and ethical-shading. Just read this article by Grant Brisbee (who is, incidentally, the author responsible for the aforementioned tweet questioning the authenticity of Canseco's Twitter account) about Barry Bonds and count the hedges and qualifying statements. Brisbee is a smart person and has clearly devoted an extensive amount of time and energy to pondering and developing an opinion on the numerous complicated facets and implications of this one issue. He is, in my opinion, one of the best baseball writers out there and yet he needs nine paragraphs to be able to present his "Default Position" on a single player associated with steroids. This is emblematic of one of the essential problems posed by our post-modern culture: how to form and hold coherent positions on issues in an environment where an increased awareness of the incomplete, artificial, and complicated nature of authenticity renders a coherent concept of meaning essentially untenable.

In a culture increasingly defined by both information overload and a winding, self-conscious, meta-awareness, meaning, or at least our understanding of meaning, is a difficult proposition. I've often expressed my belief that post-modern methods of thought resemble an ouroboros, self-consciously turning on itself and ultimately destroying itself in its self-reflexivity. The multi-layered folds of explanations and hedges and qualifying statements necessary to fully understand and analyze post-modern issues ultimately obscure the analysis with their noise. As with an analysis of the authenticity of Jose Canseco's Twitter account, it becomes necessary to choose between a clear-yet-simplistic understanding and a complete-yet-obscure one. Meaning is a decreasingly comprehensible prospect.