Placement of the Self in Stanley Brown’s “This Way Brouwn”

“Ich bin Richtung geworden.
I have become direction.”
-Stanley Brown, “This Way Brouwn,” MCA exhibit Mapping the Self

Superficially, mapping oneself suggests security, and assurance of one’s place within a given context. Stanley Brown transcends this presupposition. It is possible to interpret Stanley Brown’s statement, “Ich bin Richtung geworden” as one of stability. The feeling of being direction implies that one is certain of one’s position, precisely because, as direction, one is the creator of that position. To be direction, however, can also have a decontextualizing effect. If one has become direction, one has become the stabilizing force. While this seems to imply stability, it means that one is no longer stabilized by external forces. Stanley Brown states that he has become the stabilizing agent. He is therefore entirely self-defined, but this is problematic in that it simultaneously suggests that he is defined only within that sphere. If he is direction, he can only be understood with regards to himself. He becomes so self-referential that he cannot exist outside of himself. By becoming direction, Stanley Brown refuses to be defined by anything outside himself, thereby removing himself from his contextualized placement in the world outside himself. The self-distortion involved in this process is reflected by the distortion of Brown’s last name in the title, “This Way Brouwn.” Since Stanley Brown has become direction, his identity as understood through outside phenomena, such as language, is no longer fixed. If one is so purely self-defined as to become direction, one actually loses one’s place. Space, and one’s placement in it, is unintelligible if direction is only one point, and therefore by becoming direction, Stanley Brown has lost any understanding of the self as it exists in relation to the rest of the world, without which one is at a loss as to how to identify the self at all.