Our readings on embodiment return us, once again, to a question that haunts our respective disciplines (and one that I am particularly interested in): what becomes of subjectivity and identity in a digital age? An overreaching premise—practically now a given—is that perceptions of ourselves and the world have dramatically shifted, morphed, and transformed in response to our technological context, and in doing so, bodies and worlds come to resemble the forms and “materiality” of the techno-climate. This technological determinism infects the macro and the micro, from culture to bodies, from social progress and history to online avatars and makeovers. In both Vivian Sobchak’s chapter and Laura Marks’ works there seems to be a reticent thread of technological determinism combined with a more explicit and pronounced reluctance to fully accept such a reductive theory of history. Specifically, in Marks’ “Video’s Body, Analog and Digital” she notes: “If digital video can be thought to have a body, it is a strikingly queer body, in the sense that queer theory uncouples the living body from any essence of gender, sexuality, or other way to be grounded in the ontology of sexual difference…digital video reflects a voluntaristic choice to have this kind of body, for now” (152). In Mark’s terms, digital video, and moreover digital technology, offers a type of political neutrality that enables a choice of body, seemingly outside of any sort of power structure or agency. However in “Immanence Online,” Marks upbraids the largely commercial and popular notion that the virtual is an immaterial, transcendent space, capable of delivering a utopic future to come, but always just out of reach. In these two works, digital technologies are shown to be uncoupling and material, a potential virtual body and merely mortal—in essence, undetermined, perhaps spectral.
Sobchack underscores her resistance to a circumscribed technological determinism by way of an epigraph from Heidegger: “The essence of technology is nothing technological’ (135). Technology is never developed in a neutral context for an unbiased utilization; rather it is a product of certain political, economic, and cultural milieus. Following Sobchack, visual technological developments like photography, the cinema, and what she labels the “electric” bring about “…a specific perceptual revolution within culture and the subject” (140). These perceptual revolutions and visual innovations are indicative of the cultural shifts in perception and representation, from realism to modernism and on to postmodernism; they are more a socially determined by-prouduct and “…less as a technological essence”(141). Yet when Sobchack dives into her discussion of the electric, we again notice the terms “nonlinearity,” “discontinuity,” and “immateriality” being utilized to describe the rupture of visuality in digital landscape (instead of re-typing rather long quotes, please visit pages 155-157). Within and with the electric, the self matches Jameson’s post-capital and postmodern culture: “[s]ubjectivity is at once decentered, dispersed, and completely extroverted…”(159). In sum, the subject morphs to match the technology.
Returning to our haunting question, I am interested in some of the assumptions that are involved in post-body, post-identity theories of the “digital self.” In addition to questioning both authors lack of acknowledging the digital divide, I am incredulous towards presupposing a pre/post body and accepting technology as the agent for completely shifting and uprooting the self—as if there was a “self” or stable “body” to manipulate in the first place. Does the idea of disembodiment reify ideas of a singular self? If Golumbia, Galloway, and Berry have taught us anything it is the importance of considering how a fractured and decentered self in the digital landscape lends itself to certain commercial interests and niche marketing. Perhaps this novel way of being in the electric world becomes, following Deleuze, a monetized cliché—one made and propagated by commercial technology as “…floating images, these anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of use and constitute his internal world, so that everyone posses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the other in the world which surrounds him” (Cinema I 208-9).
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