I was re-reading some sections of Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude this week in search of a a little story - one which, after nearly combing the entire text, I realized was actually written by Zizek. Oops.

The story was the one of the "empty wheelbarrow," in which a guard suspects a factory worker of stealing, so every night as the worker leaves, he carefully searches his pockets, his wheelbarrow, and his hands - all of them empty. This goes on for months, and the guard is never able to find a stolen item. Years later the guard meets the worker by chance and tells him that he knew he was stealing something, but could never figure out what. The ex-worker replies that he had been stealing wheelbarrows all along.

When I first read this story (in what I thought was Virno...) it struck a tone of familiarity - I had read a children's book with this same tale one summer, years ago, when I was visiting my grandmother. I can't recall the name but the book was printed sometime in the 1950s. The basic narrative was the same, except instead of a worker, there was a child; instead of a factory guard, there was a policeman; and instead of a wheelbarrow, there was a red wagon.

Another key difference was that the wagon, unlike the worker's wheelbarrow, was not empty, but full of sand, cans, or some other sort of junk. The policeman would search through the junk and fail to notice the stolen wagon carrying it.

I was searching for this story, not for the same reasons that Zizek raised it (for him, the wheelbarrow is the Iraq war), but because I think the idea of the junk-filling the wagon, distracting from the wagon itself is a potential analogy for networked subjectivity - and, particularly, many common readings of it.

One quote I did unearth in my re-reading of Virno was this: "The subject is a battlefield." This is the pivotal description of subjectivity in an networked-archival environment. Multiple pre-individual elements are in a constant state of motion and an endless shifting game within the concept of the individual, and this fact is underscored in a networked-archival situation which allows the reification of multiple tendrils of identity.

Yet, like the boy's red wagon, this internally stormy and uneven individual is obscured by its contents. If we focus on a single MySpace profile, a particular thread of blog entries, a record of purchases from an online store, we are likely missing the underlying point. Creating these things is the act of creating a pre-individual element. Together, however, they create a situation through which we can sneak a wagon.