Some theorists and historians of the 18th century, of enlightenment in parts of Europe, and of a phenomenon and constellation that has been called "modernity," emphasize the emergence of the individual as a particular arrangement of subjectivity. This form of subjectivity is generally said to have at least some of the following attributes: singularity, embodiment, a capacity to reason and judge, a reflective relation to its self, a sense that this self is interior to it, a sense of itself as different from others, an awareness that others' actions and intentions are not identical to its own. Some use Descartes and his cogito as a shorthand or marker for the arrangement of subjectivity into such a form. Additionally, historians trace this form of subjectivity via a variety of technologies or practices of the self, including the keeping of daily diaries and journals, the rising numbers of mirrors, changes in the arrangements of domestic space. and, later, the emergence of the novel. Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is but one of the texts that describe these sorts of developments.
For Hobbes (and my points here are indebted to Koselleck's argument), there is a correlation between the interiorized subject of modernity, one that can think in ways other than it acts, and the figure of the sovereign. The sovereign has power over the public, exterior domain. It occupies a site or point that makes the public realm of governance (a realm that includes language) possible. It's power over the public domain is absolute, but it cannot control the private realm of opinion, belief, thought, and reflection.
These days, other than those indebted to Agamben, such a narrow, unitary notion of sovereign fails to convince. Up until 9/11 (as if it changed everything), theorists in international relations and scholars of globalization and networked technologies, emphasized the idea of a distributed or decentered sovereignty (Hardt and Negri are but one example here).
Is it possible or useful to think of a distributed subjectivity as a corollary to distributed sovereignty?
Katherine Hayles, back in the old days of cyborg studies and the post-human, put to good use the idea of prosethetics. Sandy Stone took a similar line of argument, recognizing the extensions of subjectivity via screens and technologies. Later theorists of new media have developed analyzes of presencing, how it is that the effect of presence is created in mediated environments. And, this in turn has an impact on consumer cultural studies--how the sense of individuality, authenticity, reality, is created in face to face environments via a myriad array of lifestyle and brand choices.
The sense that a subject is an individual person, then, results from a complex set of intersecting practices and systems: consumption, branding, naming, performing, joining, acting, mimicing. And, as we get from performance studies, the practices of the subject will incorporate contingency and change, no matter how closely they are copied. The subject is the gap that disrupts the production of an individual, the stain that makes it possible and that marks it as individual.
If the subject is the gap in the structure, then increasingly complex structures, such as a multiplicity of extensive, rich, media combined with branding, capitalism, and consumerism (with the concomitant tensions), both create more opportunities--glitches and spaces--within which the subject can appear but also challenge (and threaten) the form of the individual associated with modernity.
These challenges have been theorized for a while--Christopher Lasch emphasized the rise of narcissism as a change in subjectivity away from its individual form. Zizek rifts of these challenges seemingly ad infinitum--including the themes of the direct super-egoization of the imaginary ideal, the loss of ego ideals and ferocity of competing ideal egos, the threat of others to our fragile selves, etc. And, that there are changes, does not mean that the changes necessarily go in a specific direction. Rather, it is possible to trace a path that lets us know how we got to where we are without presuming that the path could have gone in different directions.
What then are some of the sites where contemporary subjects attempt to enact or manifest presence? Face to face relations in various locations and on the telephone are a couple. It's possible to fail in presencing--many telemarketers may be computerized or digitized voices or voices speaking in real time. The minimal difference is sometimes marketed by the profanities we scream at one rather than the other; after all, a digitized voice cannot be offended. In some face to face relations there are failures to manifest presence. Hierarchies and distance manifest themselves in ways that may or may not accentuate the human presence of the other.
And, contemporary subject attempt to enact presence in mediated environments. We may try to cultivate a persona or identity. Often, something else shines through or disrupts these cultivations--a particular habit of speech or turn of phrase, say. Yet, we try--on blogs, on social networking sites, in chatrooms, on photosharing sites. Usually, these days, we can tell the difference between automated bots and comments from people. Corporate blogs lack a kind of ring or presencing. They seem fake to us, like there is no lack or contingency or gap of subjectivity around which the site is produced.
Since the critique of the metaphysics of presence, the recognition of tools and extension (as well as the accompanying converse, chopping off limbs and capacities), few emphasize a notion of the individual as a singular embodied person capable of thinking. We recognize the technologies that produce the person (birth certificates, licenses, naming, disciplining, controlling, mirroring, speaking, etc) and the challenges of presencing. I am on a blog, in the comments, on flickr, on del.icio.us, on google, in archives, in books, in libarires, distributed. Much of the self that is distributed throughout these domains remains opaque to me, subject to contingencies (just like the good old individual could be in an earthquake, get sick, go crazy).
The rapid increase in blogging (now at something like 70 million blogs), suggests ever greater extensions and distributions of subjectivity. In part, these expansions are deliberate, efforts to expand and encounter, to reach out, to be present, globally. In part these expansions are contingent, linked to the proliferation and copying, pasting, sampling, linking, of previous presencings. And, these two elements interrelate (dialectically?) each responding to an accelerating/accentuating the other. Expansion engenders vulnerability; vulnerability engenders efforts to expand/control.
The conference closed on a shockingly optimistic and unified note (I am a little cranky right now because I just wrote a long post all about this and somehow evil T-Mobile erase it or ate it or found it unworthy so it is now lost; undoubtedly it was completely brilliant, creative, insightful, well-reflected, generous, and accurate; anything I write now will wither in comparison). Why such a great note? Likely because of three crucial interventions that resulted in the sense of a politics around P2P/open search, a politics that would assert the failures and limits of a search (foregoing the knowledge claims of a god/subject supposed to know and thus attempting to divert transferential investments into authority) engine. This could seem counter-intuitive. Who wants a search engine that doesn't claim to be reliable, thorough, and objective? Perhaps those who recognize that there is no such search engine and take responsibility for this limited, partial, and shared knowledge. The three interventions:
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