Chapter Four - Quantified Selves: Monumental Autobiography in the Facebook Age

Summary

What my aim was, well, it was to escape from the minimalistic, into the maximalistic, something bold and striking, baroque, Moby Dick, but not in an epic way, what I had tried to do was take the little novel, about one person, where there is not much external action, and extend it into an epic format, do you understand what I mean? (2016, 641)

—Knausgard, My Struggle, Book Five

In Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (2013), Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor at The Economist, predict that as big data techniques are systematically integrated into daily life, society will strive to understand the world from a larger, more comprehensive perspective than ever before. We will adapt “a sort of N=all of the mind,” a “compulsion to get everything, to see everything from every possible angle” (49). Whereas it seems wise to be a bit wary of the overly jubilant tone that these writers maintain throughout their book, it is clear that with datafication fantasies arise of mapping and charting “everything.”

Such pervasive cultural imaginings in a very real way affect the ways in which we use media to represent ourselves as well as how we create, store, and transmit memories, as Jose van Dijck remarks: “[d]igitization is surreptitiously shaping our acts of cultural memory—the way we record, save and retrieve remembrances of our lives past” (2004, 349–73). It is this shift in self-representation that interests me here, and more specifically how it affects monumental works of autobiographical literature. How do big data, datafication, and quantification inspire current trends in self-representation through new media and on social networking sites? And how do these practices in turn influence representations of the self and the everyday in the big autobiographical novel? I will probe these questions on the basis of an analysis of Karl Ove Knausgard's autobiographical series My Struggle (Min Kamp, 2009–11).

Throughout this series of six books which amount to 3600 pages, the Norwegian author repeatedly expresses his aspiration to leave behind a masterpiece to secure his immortality: “I’ll damn well show the whole fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them” (2016, 250).