to the self, but is integral to how we continually become selves. This then raises the question of moral obligation in relation to modes of selfing that change over time, something that appears to have been proceeding at pace in recent history. How does one strike an ethical bearing towards one’s self if it is constituted on the move in a world in flux? The chapter answers this by tackling the thorny issue of data privacy and surveillance culture, and especially the apathy with which many citizens regard these issues. It builds on an exegesis of the Lord and Bondsman section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to reframe autonomy as a collective, situated and practical value more appropriate to our digital world.
Chapter 5 expands on the theme of the stakes implicit in the routines and rhythms of everyday life by delving further into Heidegger’s work. In particular, this chapter addresses those sections of Being and Time in which he discusses the existential and ontological stakes of things not usually associated with the political: moods, idle talk and curiosity. In so doing it advances the claim that we should take seriously, and treat as grounding facticity, the way we generally experience digital life, i.e. inauthentically. This move leaves open the possibility of excavating and critiquing the contingencies of contemporary everyday life in ways that exceed the assertion that we do not see things as they really are, especially amid all the distractions of our digitally saturated existence. Heidegger shows that it is a condition of thrownness that there never was the possibility of actually grasping the things, people and phenomena we encounter in themselves; inauthenticity is our ever-present origin. The salient point is that ordinary movement from one encounter to the next, rather than abstraction, is how we come at understanding; the affects and discourses that propel us in everyday digital life seem intuitively to be just so much noise, but they are every bit as ontologically constitutive as focused attention and clear-headed cognition.
Chapter 6 takes up these insights and demonstrates how they can be put to work to reframe public deliberation in the digital age. Specifically, it seeks to shed new light on an aspect of digital life that is said to be undermining the public sphere: identity politics. Beginning with a consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the relationship between perception and values in everyday life, it moves on to marshal Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to work towards a reconceptualization of values as dispositional practices. Rethinking values as things done in everyday digital life rather than internal qualities to be defended from exogenous forces points towards a different future for deliberative democracy far from the polarized filter bubbles often seen as an inevitable consequence of digitization.
Chapter 7 then asks a critical question that pushes beyond the realm of social relations: what does it mean to live ethically in a world suffused with digital processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures? While all of these things structure and generate our conditions of sociality, the lived experience of them exceeds their intent and design. The withdrawal of infrastructure from conscious experience is not necessarily sinister, and it remains possible to live creatively and critically amongst forces like the protocols of social media platforms.
Finally, Chapter 8 rounds out the discussion by reflecting on Michel de Certeau’s theorization of the possibility of creativity and resistance in the face of an imposed social order. The world-disclosing, agentic potential of making do with the digital resources we find ready at hand in everyday life cannot be underestimated, offering as they do endless opportunities to experiment, reveal stakes, strike stances accordingly, and then to persevere or try something else. It is assuredly the case that those resources, practices and postures are not of us but of the world; nonetheless the temporally indeterminate scope to enact them effects real change in that world. Repertoires of improvisation are key to living ethically in the digital age, as selves that are provisional not programmed, enacting politics that are likewise provisional not programmatic.
Notes
1 Frosh explains: ‘The world is perpetually disclosed and re-disclosed to us pre-reflectively, as the already interpreted, given world in which we find ourselves and that is intersubjectively intelligible to us; this perpetual process can reinforce the contours and substance of the disclosed world’s givenness, but it can also enable new, secondary, interpretive possibilities’ (2018: 16). 2 For a survey of Bourdieu’s relevance to the digital age, see Ignatow and Robinson 2017. 3 ‘It is not simply a matter … of an occasional unutilizability. The specific power of anxiety is rather that of annihilating handiness, of producing a “nothing of handiness” (Nichts von Zuhandenheit). In annihilating handiness, anxiety does not withdraw from the world but unveils a relation with the world more originary than any familiarity’ (Agamben 2016: 43). 4 One gets a sense of the complexity of the mutual constitutivity of technology and subjectivity if one substitutes ‘the digital’ for ‘language’ in this passage from Butler’s Excitable Speech: ‘We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences’ (2013: 8). 5 Peters (2015) notes that André Leroi-Gourhan’s two-volume work La geste et la parole (1964/1965) similarly proposed the thesis that the evolutionary history of the body is inseparable from technology as well as language. 6 Guattari and Rolnik also follow Simondon’s framework in Molecular Revolution in Brazil (2008); likewise Stiegler in Technics and Time 1 (1998a). 7 See especially Winthrop-Young 2013: 75. 8 Yasmin Ibrahim (2019) argues that not only have we become more accustomed to being observed through data surveillance, but that data increasingly takes a visual form – something she sees as a manifestation of a broader trend she labels the aestheticization of everyday life. 9 Couldry and Hepp acknowledge Illich’s (1993) half-century history of how humans make meaning through technologies of storage. 10 Couldry and Hepp cite Alaimo and Kallinikos’s observation that ‘Once the social gets engraved into data, it ceases to be related to established categories and habits’ (2016: 16). 11 Couldry and Hepp’s work draws more upon (and extends) Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) conception of the lifeworld, or ‘social world’, though the approach taken in the present volume, more directly influenced by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, shares the premise that the lifeworld is fundamentally intersubjective and predicated on active, patterned participation. The meaningfulness of everyday life in each approach then depends on habituated social practice; the work that goes into sustaining everyday life is precisely what enables it to be experienced as natural and (usually) unproblematic – a claim that derives ultimately from Alfred Schütz (1967 [1932]). For a more detailed discussion of Schütz’s understanding of the lifeworld, see Markham 2011. 12 Frosh writes: ‘This indifference is not one of boredom, ennui or alienation, but is a habitual material practice: a routinization of embodied and perceptual connective energies, both tactile and visual, that produces sameness from movement in a context characterized by the abundance of representations and perceptual stimuli’ (2018: 45). He notes that this has its origins in the ‘glance theory’ developed by John Ellis (1982) as well as Simmel’s blasé attitude (2012 [1903]) and Goffman’s civil inattention (2008 [1963]). 13 Highmore (2010: 163) notes that ‘In the English language versions of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin’s work “distraction” is the usual translation of the word Zerstreuung. The German term, though, is more evidently ambiguous and covers a wider range of meanings than the English “distraction”. The German term also seems much more insistent on the centrifugal movement of attention: “the German Zerstreuung might mean, at one and the same time, distraction, diversion, amusement, diffusion, preoccupation, absentmindedness, scattering, dispersion, and so on” (Vidler 2000: 82–3).’ 14 See Margalit 2002: 37, cited in Frosh 2018: 57. 15 See also Gane 2005: 29. 16 Butler’s Excitable Speech (2013: 27) also provides an effective frame for assessing how central hate speech has become to understanding what kind of spaces digital platforms are, and specifically the question of whether malicious speech acts are the product of a digital ecosystem rather than the individual per se. 17 ‘If, as Stiegler has it, “the being of humankind is to be outside itself,” the always already technical human is a human that is inevitably – prior to and perhaps even against his “will” – productively engaged with an alterity. Being-in-the-world therefore amounts to being “in difference,”
