Towards a post-digital foundation of identity:  Devices and the virtual subject

By: César Chirinos

Translation: Leslie Colin

About devices and the virtual subject

In the following text, I propose to present some ideas about virtual subjects and identity. As well as to formulate a line of thought that unchains a reflection about the implications and foundations of virtual subjectivities and supports, about their interactions with people, the sensitive dimensions of their appropriation and their placement in the world mediated by devices.

In the first place, I consider it pertinent to introduce the term device and discuss it in its relationship to a post-digital notion of identity. Approaching the understanding of the device with the help of genealogical theorizing of the concept traced by G. Agamben in his text What is an apparatus? as the fundamental pillar in which I will place my argument.

Following Agamben, a device virtually locates almost everything. While the concept has been designated for specific meanings as technological significance, we are not only talking at first about a term that refers to an object. We are also talking about the interaction networks that exist between these objects inscribed in a relationship of power -of disposition-

Device comes from the Latin lexical components dis, positus and tivo which together would mean something like “what is placed there to produce or generate an action”. It is not surprising then, that the most immediate referent to the notion of device, points towards machines, mechanisms, or a system. However, a mechanism and a system can also involve language, discourses, media and in the last instance, a series or sets of practices that aim to generate an effect.

The discourses, languages, objects, and practices that a person uses, produce meanings, -generate subjects- that configurate symbolic processes and constitute a certain cultural context. It is here where we glimpse a first interaction between the device and identity.

The chair that I am sitting on is a device since it disposes a way for sitting, a knife is a device since its morphology guides my hand to cut in a certain way. The popular generalization about romantic love is a device since it dictates an expectation of affectivities in a relationship between two people.

Schools, banks, and art galleries are devices insofar as they predispose a way of relating between the people who use them and their mail objects of use (education/money/art). Facebook relations, Instagram stories, twitter hearts, are devices because they are interfaces designed to produce a replicable effect into quantified ideas about a certain social value.

In the last instance, both clothing and fashion, as well as virtual supports and the digital image, are all devices since the first ones dispose a way to cover up and socially distribute the particularity of bodies, and the second ones operate as tools and conceptualization of appropriation for a certain sensory representation of reality.

Agamben points out that devices generate subjects. There is no device if there is not a process of subjectivation, of subject production. A subject is the amount of the relationships that a person (living entity) has with a device. From the device of romantic love result the married subjects. From the device of electronic music results the producing subject, the DJ subject, the raver subject, etc. From the device of fashion results the designer subject, the creative director subject, the model subject, the user subject, etc.

Our existence is therefore, mediated by devices that make us. subjective There has not existed a moment in the history of humanity, from the formation of civilization to the most extreme phases of capitalism development, when people have not been subjected to  processes of subjectivation mediated by devices such as fire, agriculture, writing, church, art, factories, cities, computers, video games, internet, mobile phones, emojis, etc.

I do not consider it a trivial detail that Agamben clarifies that the mobile phone it is in its distinction, one of the devices that annoys him the most. Following his analysis, one could stop to think about the type of subject and the kind of subjectivations that the mobile phone generates as a device; in terms of the communitive mediations that it generates, as a control artifact and in terms of (possibility or) affective inhibition among people who uses it.

In fact and as he has pointed out well, it would result useless to consider the deactivation or destruction of devices since these have always mediated our relationship with humanity – this means, they have prolonged their roots in the same process as hominization, they have prefigured the anthropocentric order of human existence -.

In the analysis with a theological origin that Agamben proposes, the notion of profaning is presented to counteract the divine dictation caused by the device. If devices consecrate –meaning that they make something turn sacred- in a certain relationship of subjectivation of a person with objects, profaning, on the contrary, would correspond to restitution, an appropriation, better said, of the device to the people’s free use.

Profaning is the counter-device that restores the common use, it is what has been separated from a free use for a sacrifice. I understand this sacrifice as the moment in which a device places a person in the unconscious dynamic of power owned by the device.

If a friend asks me an important question via WhatsApp, the device-app puts me in a circumstance where I see my self-obligated to answer their message as quickly as possible, since is the action that the interface and the agreement that I establish with it, expects me to perform. The sacrifice corresponds in this example, to subjectify myself to this system of  immediate communication, profaning it would be to intervene with that process so that it does not dispose of me in an unconscious way as long as my actions and free will. Not omitting or destroying it but preventing me from aligning myself with its subjectivation.

The particularity lies in the fact that, as written by Agamben, the devices that proliferate in our current era do not generate subjects, but on the contrary, processes of desubjectivation and this difference with old devices makes it particularly difficult to desecrate them.

By using a mobile phone – an interconnected computer – one does not acquire a new subjectivity (or many, I would say), but an artifact of quantized order by which a person can be controlled with more effectiveness. The more complex the artifact o technologic system is, the more sophisticated its control system, its divine alignment with the user, and disposal is.

The problem with devices it is not reduced to the unnoticed and naive option to operate them under a veil of good intention since, as devices, they will always generate subjectivities or processes of desubjectivation. This means that good intentions do not modify the device’s objective neither they interfere with their way to dispose.

However, Agamben mentions that all devices at their root locate a desire for goodwill. It is the appropriation of that wish then, the ideal way of profanation to face the current devices, not destroying them or inactivating them, but establishing an autonomous relation with them – desacralizing – and intervening consciously with their processes of subjectivation.

This task that seems complex when the processes of subjectivation and de-subjectivation are blurred and happen reciprocally indifferent. Devices that operate today – such as the cellphone, internet, and the virtual world – no longer place a type of subject that can be unified into a single particularity, since they generate so many dispositions, that tracing an authentic determination about the way they operate on us is almost impossible to track.

I will stop the analysis of Agamben’s text since I have reached the point where I want to center my reflection: the process of de-subjectivation facing the phenomenon of the subject and the virtual supports. It will be accurate for this, to catch up the question of meanings and mediations to formulate a speculation on the fundament that shapes the subject’s identity and virtual supports.

What interests me in debating Agamben’s argument, it’s that being under the yoke of a great process of de-subjectivation by devices, as he warns, it’s not only a questionable condition that would be worth to unravel with precision: Do only contemporary devices de-subjectivize? Does a fragmented subject, stops being a subject? What happens when a sense-corporeal order alienation is acquired with the device?

Here I glimpse a possibility to think, no longer in process of de-subjectivation, but of speculating the conformation of new types of subjects that no other type of device had subjectivated before. If devices become more complex, so does their way to dispose. A device never stops subjectivizing, otherwise, it would not be a device.

The fact that we think by default in a physical order -and not in a virtual one- of reality and of production of meanings, doesn't mean that meta-subjectivities are not generated within the supports that the same complex devices have generated.

This is what the notion of post-digital refers us to, the understanding that we exist in moment of life that is happening after the digitality. Despite being pertinent, it is not the intention of this brief writing to describe in detail what post-digital is and its implications[1], however, I will provoke, with a series of questions, a reflection on inquiries that will help to delineate some meanings about the subject and the virtual supports.

What happens when all subjectivities pretend to be connected? What happens to the process of identification and subjectivation of people when spaces and cognitions are technologically mediated? How do devices generate meta-realities? How can we describe the subject in this meta-reality?

Let us think about virtual reality as an example of another device. We can understand a virtual reality as a video game, a VR experience, and even as a dream. When I enter it, first, there is a mediation of sensory order that will dictate my way of perceiving the scenarios (a control, a helmet, an electric incentive inside mi brain).

Secondly, this interface, which disposes to my senses in such a way that this created/designed/imagined world may (or may not) make sense for me, will depend of the type of subjectivation that virtual reality wishes to impose on me. But, above all, of the interpretation and valuation of symbolic order that makes of the phenomena and the events that occur within this universe and of the significant interactions that I make with its objects.

The virtual reality device has disposed me in different levels: first, by creating a mediation with an imaginary world, and second, by giving me a sense of a knowable and emotional value since it sparked a significant reaction in me. Virtual Reality is a device that results in multiple processes of subjectivation, that simultaneously, generate meta-subjects, but not a de-subjectivation.

A critic meaning that comes from digital art on the post-digital body (Bishop,217), identifies the need to develop new ways to intervene the structural formation of reality, pointing out the digital matter is not reduced to software neither hardware, but to a condition -that thanks to the internet- generates a massively distributed reality, granting conditionals to define our perception.

Post-digitality, as a semantic field of ascription to the virtual subject, encloses virtual – and non-virtual- practices and supports that affect the sense of contemporaneity. Considering that the sense of the phenomena that encloses our current society, it is governed by a device of speculative order, of universal pretension and of endless interconnection and immediacy: the internet.

It can be debatable whether the internet is the most complex and far-reaching device that has ever permeated humanity.  As well as the device that has been most deeply introduced in the people’s systems, affections, dispositions, and subjectivities. I think in language as the device that Agamben has eloquently (but also debatable) mentioned as the one with the most primal origin, but, What other device has boasted of re-articulating, re-defining, and re-configuring the implications and scope of language as a communicative mandate if not the internet?

The internet’s most clear feature is that is immaterial. It is an order of immediate communication and of universal pretension that subjectifies the ways of being of a person with the world, with other people, with objects, and with artifacts that surround us. Not only that, but the internet also subjectivities the ways of being of a person with the worlds, the entities, the systems, and objects generated by the internet itself.

Doing this reflection, we understand that the internet now goes beyond the limits of the screen or any interface. The internet does not need any physical support as its disposition is inert and inevitable to our way of being with what surround us. It is possible to be disconnected, but never out of reach. As a device, internet persist offline as way of daily life, survival, production, and organization. (Steyerl, 2015)

The internet is a device that in turn generates other devices. Devices for interactivity between people, for technological devices and for the regulation of social systems. The internet is a device whose order of disposition as a generator of subjectivities reconfigures language and communication itself. As well as the environments, the interfaces, the mediation between people and their (meta)identities.

If internet and its technological devices have allowed and catapulted the proliferation of virtual devices, then there also exist virtual subjects. Subjects that, in their immaterial conformation through a support that is also virtual, acquire unique characteristics of being in a world mediated by artifacts, interfaces and systems. This virtual subject is located at the intersection between digitality, insofar as its quantized conformation is transferable and reproducible, and material wise since the generation of meanings and cultural dispositions occur with an affective implication in its relationship with the material world.

The components of the conditionings that operate on us, are not machines, artifacts, information, or spirits, but rather the relationships between people that grant meaning and the presence of a way of disposing (Katz, 1998). And these relations are the ones that, I would add, allow the consecration or else, the profanation of devices.

The virtual subject is conformed in the subjectivation of immaterial devices. It is the product of a sense-corporeality mediated by interfaces, of an identity that re-builds and fragments itself and of a reproducible configuration that is in different levels of cultural signification. To ask ourselves about its conformation and its identity order -that is what conforms it as a virtual subject- will allow us to unravel its foundation.

The mediated world and the basis of post-digital identity

Symbolic systems have been historically structured by the mediations generated by the technological determinations in people. Just as language is acquired by the interactions that a person shares in community with other people. The sense that is acquired between consciousness, world and language cannot be transferred or determined but transformed together with one of these three components. (Krug, 2005)

As communication technologies become and develop into systems, they directly transform our relationship with language, but also the way we perceive what appears before us in the world and by consequence our signification with it.

It wasn’t, until writing appeared, that the history of the humanity was consecrated, and it was not, until it was possible to verify by means of a register that the ideas and foundations of a community were inscribed that civilization was founded. Neither was, until the internet emerged, that subjects were able to place themselves instantly, immaterially, and omnipresent with other subjects in a technologically mediated determination.

We could expand this reflection of phenomenological order, not only to communication technologies, but also to devices themselves: It was not until fire arose, that humans could modify their alimentation and develop complex cognitive abilities. It was not until religions emerged as an institution and control apparatus, that spirituality was systemized. It was not until factories and systems of industrial production emerged, that cities appeared, and it was not until clothing was conceived as the primary object to satisfy an identity need that fashion emerged.

The power relationship that is generated between devices and subjects, reveals the particularity of a determined social order and context. It reveals, ultimately, a certain disposition to a system or cultural configuration.

Our conscience shapes our relationship with the worlds created by symbolic systems, which in turn are already structured by technology. The subject conforms his subjectivation with a world that inhabits the network of mediations that intervene with him.  Let us call it language, artifacts, institutions, and environments.

If we perceive the world mainly through mediated systems of representation – such as writing, the cellphone, and virtual reality -. The world itself becomes an expanded aspect of technology and this conditions our conscience and language in the same way.

The wind blows my face, the sun warms my skin, mi clothes cover my body, and I feel the need to dance when I hear my DJ-sets. I’m aware that I perceive and feel all these things, and yet, what they mean to me, the way I can express these sensations as experiences are already prefigured, are mediated by language, and are therefore susceptible to collective sharing and appropriation.

Technology hugely limits the number of possible meanings the world can have for a person [2]. There will never be a device – not even language itself -, that contemplates all the ways in which a subject can assimilate the environments, artifacts and systems that surround them. Therefore, we must reconcile the fact that there are aspects of reality that always remain mediated by subjectivations. That this aspect will always remain hidden as sensory, expressive and signification limits.

Technology comes from the Greek root tekhné, which means a way of doing things, of building objects and of giving order and materiality to a certain knowledge as logos (study, speech, or treatise).

The greatest characteristic of the current technology – that which is operating after digitality, after the internet – and which sets it apart from previous technologies, is that these devices encompass and attempt to mediate as many social areas as possible. Creating a complex network of forces – let us call them ideologies, thoughts, and representations – and generating subjects that over-determine actions and meanings. This may not sound new but let us stop and think about what happens then with the virtual subject.

The technologies – the devices – by themselves, do not hide within their utility, nothing that can be reveal to us as the foundations that gestates the creation of the subjects at their disposition as tools, objects or artifacts.

It is even possible to determine that socio-historical conditions and patterns that have permeated the scientific knowledge as “innovation” in order to anticipate and foresee the emergence of a new technology – processing capacity, increased storage, expansion and trans-formation of the senses, unlimited quantification, etc. -

What is neither predictable nor foreseeable, even under the idealistic order of the progress of innovation that is attributed to the growing complexity of the computable systems, is the type of subjectivities that these systems and artifacts can generate.

This process of appropriation is, in the first place, of a sensorial type and of generation of meanings, and in second place, it contains variables and barriers of understanding and appropriation of knowledge that goes from the emotional, the sensorial, the multiple reasonings, to the generational, the geographical, the political, etc. Therefore, in the final instance, we are talking about an identity formation of a cultural nature, of the appropriation of meanings given by the subjectivations mediated by devices.

In the case of art, the displacement of its significance as art occurred – in one of many times – when the computers and digital systems emerged. The technological circumstance caused the practices of art to be transformed, and with it its modes of generation, production and consumption were expanded.

When we talk about the subjects generated by virtual environments and lifestyles. Those that are conformed by their interconnectivity with each other through interfaces, sensory mediations with an immaterial environment, and a communicative instantaneousness offered by the internet device, a meta-sensory way of being is consolidated and subjective. Enhanced in its reality and mediated in its interactivity.

The virtual subjects then, attributes to itself, a way of consolidating in the environment in which it is immersed and extrapolates with its immediate and material reality. The subject recognizes itself in a certain way in relation to other virtual subjects and mediates this recognition of identity order with help of the supports that the same environment and interface dispose of it. 

In the same way, in which I can share a dream, and leaving aside the fact that it has a legible meaning, the fact that this has provoked on me a sensation of pleasure or terror and has  made me experience an imaginary situation in a certain way, has arranged in its virtuality, that now something operates differently in my immediate and material world. For the meaning of whatever may have happened in that dream has nothing to do with the fact that I have not experienced it, that I have not felt it in a certain way, or that I cannot share it.

In other words, the fact that this event did not happen in physical reality, or rather that it happened in me in a virtual way, doesn’t mean that the dream does not have a meaning for me and that I have arranged myself in a certain way.

Ephemeral and ethereal, the virtual subject if it can be found subjectified by a digital device is likely to disappear with just the flip of a switch or the fall of a computer system. Virtual reality is therefore an example of a digital device that dictates its survival thanks to the existence of other technological devices.

We face with the virtual subject, feelings that will never be felt in the material world, thoughts and ideas that have no ontological basis outside their meta-cognitive mediations and chains of sings that are extrapolated with the systems of meanings that already exist in the material world. The virtual subject is shared with other virtual subjects in the generation of communities organized by shared emotions, technologically mediated systems of interaction and transfer of meanings that only mean within their own meta-reality.

Alienation to virtuality now becomes a new collectively discovered property within the roots of cognition and interaction. Sociality becomes increasingly representational and is ultimately transformed into experiences that are aesthetic, reproducible, and generate both desire and uneasiness.

Finally, they dispose the senses -mainly the sight- in a certain way, as the chair in a classroom disposes my body so that it does not distract me when I am taking a class. In this sense, the field of the body and the domain of experience are both also transformed, giving rise not to the disappearance of the body, but to its disposition mediated by virtual supports.

The virtual subject replaces the old orders of subjectivation, as it is better placed to face, understand, and provide meaning to the speculation of life and systems mediated by the internet and post-digital devices.

The screen, the images, the telephone, the virtual environment, and desire converge in the mediated world and, until the role of post-digital devices is recognized, in the understanding that they are transforming our way of being subjects to virtuality and the material world in the same way, we run the risk of falling into an infinite confusion of meanings, which can only come to mean in the network that is woven between the subjects, the virtual supports and the devices that generate them.

1] I recommend, to delimit in a precise way the meanings and uses of the post-digital concept, consulting the compilation of texts that compile an introduction to post-digital practices in the book published by Transmediale: "Across & Beyond - A Transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts and Institutions".

2] This includes language itself, hence we do not all share the same language and different languages have different grammatical, semantic, and syntactic systems. The fact that there are different words to speak about a certain object or the same phenomenon is a consequence of the limits of the cultural understanding of a language in a certain space, and time.

Bibliography

Agamben, G. (2011). ¿Qué es un dispositivo? [what is an apparatus?] Sociológica, 249-264.

Bishop, R. G. (2017). Introduction. In Across & Beyond - A Transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (pp. 11). Sternberg Press.

Katz, C. (1998). Determinismo tecnológico y determinismo histórico-social. [Technological determinism and historical-social determinism] (U. N. Quilmes, Ed.) Redes, V (11), 37-52.

Krug, G. (2005). Communication, Technology and Cultural Change. London: Sage.

Lamas, N. (2019). Archæology of Darkness. Exhibition view: Archæology of Darkness'. Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium. From https://nicolaslamas.net/Archaeology-of-darkness

Steyerl, H. (2015). Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? En The Internet Does Not Exist (pp. 16). Sternberg Press.