Being digitally
There is much to be said for the argument that digital media play an increasingly formative role in organizing the interactions and rituals upon which everyday meaningfulness is predicated. For Langlois, as for Couldry and Hepp, this takes forms that are both symbolic – media content – and non-symbolic, namely the architectures that facilitate the experience of spaces such as social media platforms. The ongoing revival of Kittler’s work, much of which was seen as idiosyncratic on publication, makes sense in the context of a shared concern to attend to the ways in which technologies are embedded within the generative neural networks of digital media – from the syntax of coding languages and the filing parameters of data storage systems, to undersea cables and energy grids, to the rules by which algorithms are directed to learn and adapt autonomously to massive and multifarious data flows. By this logic, the political economy of transnational media and technologies, the organizational cultures and labour practices within digital companies, and the implications of structured and structuring fields of symbolic capital within the social spaces inhabited by users are all fair game. All of this is viable, however, without taking it as read that we face a crisis of subjectivity. Such a belief is hardly new, with the Heidegger of The Question Concerning Technology setting out the implications for Dasein of technological innovation outpacing the capacity for decision-making, and ultimately the capacity for maintaining an ethical bearing towards the world.
This book questions the implication that there is a trade-off between the pace of technological change and the viability of autonomous subjectification: the latter is not achieved by stepping back and making a sober assessment of what is really at stake, now and in the future, but through the navigation and habituation of those self-same, constantly evolving environments within which meaningfulness is constituted. It was never the case that we could pause those generative structures in order to take a proper look at them and decide once and for all where to stand in relation to them and how to move forward; the bedrock upon which subjectivity is built is always more like shifting sand. The countervailing forces of flux and homeostasis are not necessarily thrown out of kilter by the velocity of the former, because equilibrium is not a goal or requisite of subjectivity, but an orientation. The forward-facing temporality of subjectification is what instantiates its ethical stakes,17 though its origin is the always ontologically prior present – not some definable moment in time when we decided how things would be, and indeed how we would be. Thus, while at odds with the view that the adaptation of the self to digital media and its constant demands for new data crowds out slower, reflective practices of selfhood, this volume takes seriously the possibility that introspection – while no doubt important to well-being – is not a necessary and sufficient condition of becoming a self.
It is important to be clear that advocating fleetness of foot over calm, quiet cogitation is not at all the same thing as countenancing blithe ignorance in the face of technological change. What is needed is a critical agility, a deftness of navigation whose disclosure of the world grasps at-hand the contingency of a world so revealed – that is, apprehends all the work that goes into, and the implications of, finding the world and its manifold objects meaningful as such.18 The business of understanding the contingency of everyday life is both elusive and important; the notion here is that it is possible for the mobility with which one moves through digital worlds to be oriented simultaneously by appearances and by a pre-reflexive registration of their flimsiness. This is similar to the ironic stance towards the other developed by Chouliaraki, as it also is to de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. And it is not so difficult as it sounds, once the requirement of conscious reflection is taken off the table.
The subjective crisis presented by social media is commonly articulated in terms of prescribed or provoked presentations of the self coming to be mistaken for the self. Langlois thus makes the claim that the overriding objective of these mass, structured solicitations of self-documentation can only be one of appropriating and transforming the conditions of being. It is, according to her, a matter of social media practices of self-disclosure altering our perceptions not simply of who we are, but also how we can be (Langlois 2014: 122). Stiegler (1998b: 80–1) makes a comparable point when he writes of an inversion that has taken place such that contemporary digital media cultures relate the experience of life with such force that they seem not only to anticipate but to determine life itself. That word ‘force’ is doing as much work here as ‘pace’ was previously, as though it is inarguable that there has been a definitive usurping of being by the appearance of being – despite the fact that the distinction between the experience of everyday life and life itself has never been something that can be made a stable object of consciousness. Both metaphors are helpful as shorthand, but they allow the argument to run away towards a presumptuous conclusion; as does, arguably, the idea of the colonization of a space of subjectification by digital media. In all cases the realm of selfhood is imagined as something discrete, finite and originary, something that could previously be defended but is now overwhelmed by technology run amok. But if there is no natural, stable territory of subjectification upon which a critical ethics of being might be based, agility becomes a more important resource to have to-hand than resilience.
We have all had the experience, whether at work, or speaking publicly, or maybe performing on stage, of simultaneously understanding the importance of getting it right while also intuiting the preposterousness of the act in which one is engaged. This kind of peripheral glimpse of the arbitrariness of an established, expected performance as one goes about enacting it offers more in the way of practical knowledge than pausing to reflect on whatever it is that one is doing and why. The reason for this can be simply put, though it will be teased out in more methodical detail in the chapters to come. It derives from Levinas’s (1996) ‘ethics as first philosophy’, in which he argues that the basis for all ethical relations between humans is pre-reflective, rooted in a co-existence that is ontologically prior to making the other the object of one’s consciousness and contemplation. There is something destructive in the objectification of the other – partly explicable through a norm such as respect, and the responsibility to register and preserve their full human agency – but there is also a more basic principle at work here: that no knowledge of an object in the world, insofar as knowledge is generated by way of discourses that precede and exceed both subject and object, can approach the facticity of the thing itself. This basic tenet of phenomenological inquiry then opens up alternative ways of knowing an object, and in particular the embodied knowledge of everyday encounters.
Now, this could be taken to suggest that whatever makes digital spaces more easily navigable, more fluidly explorable, counts as meaningful knowledge of the digital – which seems the opposite of a critical perspective. But the point is to prise apart the critical and the perspectival; the former is not contingent upon the latter. In short, critical, practical knowledge of the digital, insofar as it propels wayfaring and thus meaning-making, is that which discloses the world to-hand – as always-already meaningful, navigable and useful – at the same time as it discloses that ready-to-handness itself is predicated on learned, embedded and collective practices of navigation and meaning-making. The performance of identity on social media reveals both the importance of doing it well, and the arbitrariness of its recognition as important – not in a reflective, media literate manner, but at the level of making one’s way through the platform experience. It feels like a meaningful thing to do, though it is thoroughly improvised; it feels like there is a lot at stake, and yet it is entirely provisional.
For Levinas as for de Beauvoir, how we come to co-exist in a world populated by unknown and barely known others is the basis of the self as an ethical project. This is counter-intuitive from a perspective that elides ethics and attention. Care, though, is distinct, a more fundamental disclosure of stakes. If we accept that there is no experiential access to being outside of ways of being, then the disclosure of the world as such through ways of being – as well as these ways being disclosed as the care structures they are – makes known simultaneously the seriousness and precarity attached to being in a world with others. Watching a news