of isolating any of these flows to assess its discrete impact, so that one could never infer meaning from platform architectures or economic imperatives. But it still means we can assert, pace Matt Fuller (2003), that the way we attribute meaningfulness to information depends at least in part on its formatting.
Langlois adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 64) notion of the abstract machine in order to think through how meaning-making has come to be colonized by software. As with Couldry and Hepp, this is less about the appropriation by technology of signification than its role in organizing the flow of signals. Kittler is with us once more, and it is difficult to argue against an approach that seeks to examine how the conditions of meaning production are shaped through assemblages of technology, culture and, crucially, institutions.15 This book, though, is especially interested in examining digital subjectification, and from a phenomenological perspective that means investigating the myriad ways we enact practices of selfhood. There is no such thing as a digital self, but there are all kinds of digital selfings. Such a perspective is ultimately at odds with the Deleuzean framework Langlois develops, in which it makes sense to speak of the production of an ideal capitalist self. It is one thing to assert that economic and technological imperatives will colour the subjectifying practices we find ready-to-hand as we traverse digital worlds – how could they not? – but it is another to claim that this culminates in a complete, integral capitalist subjectivity, as though one mode of being human has simply been displaced by another. The same might be said of the ‘mining of the psyche’ (Langlois 2014: 88) allegedly typical of datafied platforms, in that there is a distinction between critiquing the retrieval, ordering and exploiting of subjective experiences and averring that this amounts to taking something from a previously intact, innocent self.
The present volume is not interested in the ‘selling of brains’ (Lazzarato 2014, quoted in Langlois 2014: 90), not because it has no concern for privacy, but because it rejects the notion of internal states innate to a stable subject, over which that subject has or should have sovereignty. This is in line with Judith Butler’s (1997) problematization of an interiority and exteriority of subjectivity. Subjectification is not about the expression of an inner self for an outer world; it consists entirely in enacting practices of selfhood in the world, practices which are of that world and not ‘of’ the self. Digital Life takes questions of privacy, consent and autonomy seriously, but not at all from a perspective that sees selves as being stolen, rented or substituted by data. Consider one of the main objects of critique encountered in this corner of the literature: the coercive reshaping of how individuals externalize self-image on social media. It is certainly right to scrutinize the ways in which people manage their online identities, and we can do so in much the same way that Goffman did in the mid-twentieth century, using the dramaturgical model of performances, replete with costumes and scripts, but without questioning the good faith of the players observed. To start from the premise that to exist is to be open to otherness is not to suggest that we go through the world discovering how different or alike ‘we’ are from others. Instead it means adopting the subjectifying practices we find available to us as readily usable resources – practices of externalization and internalization – and revealing our relationality and responsibility to others. There are real choices with real implications associated with how we respond to the world so revealed, but it is not a question of fidelity to a true or authentic self; integrity can only derive from an ethics inherent in a present into which we are thrown and that is ontologically prior to any purported sense of origin.
Butler’s notion of performativity encapsulates adroitly the fact that in institutionally and politically determinate contexts identity performances are not playful but incited.16 The subsequent danger is that we internalize these subjectifications and make them our own – that is how conformity is enforced, and potentially reveals the danger of digital worlds furnishing us with atrophied capacities for self-making that we come to believe are us. The salient point, though, is that this is not a matter of your or my identity being corrupted or usurped. Being-in-the-world proceeds through endless iterations of externalization and internalization; this is how we become who we are, but it is not a process that ends with the discovery of what was there to begin with. Selfhood starts in the middle; we come to feel ourselves as ourselves as we hone our improvisatory repertoires, but those practices emerge from without, not within. What could amount to a nihilistic account of the impossibility of authenticity or the vacuity of selfhood, however, points to a different way forward. The point of all this is that if the ways we have of being selves are of the world and not of us, then they are collective, and we have a collective responsibility for what those subjectivities reveal of the world and with what consequences. To live increasingly digitally is not, then, to experience subjective loss but to make that world familiar, enacting provisional selves that will come to feel natural. This will have, and indeed already has, significant affordances and implications, the contingency of which may be revealed as we develop routines and paths anew. There is little to be said for holding firm to a world and a way of being in it which we feel to be imperilled: making a home out of a world not of our own making, and fashioning an identity out of the selves we already find ourselves enacting, out there in the thick of it, is what we do.
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
