Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s introduction to her book Updating to Remain the Same provides, in my opinion, a compelling critique on networked life, namely that networks tend to reduce humans to a digital trace of their actions, thoughts, and desires—reification, in short. She offers a hopeful mode of resistance by gesturing toward a politics of fore-giveness. This appears to be a strategy that parallels, somewhat, that which James J. Hodge points to (via Lauren Berlant and Richmond) in his “Vernaculars: The Always on Image.” He describes this method as a “getting by not by unplugging but incorporating these technologies to different effects and degrees into our lives” (Hodge 4).
Chun expands on the concept of “fore-giveness” more in the last chapter of the book:
“Most importantly, we would need to engage in a politics of fore-giveness and deletion, in which we remember that to delete is not to forget, but rather to open other less dogmatically consensual ways of remembering. To fore-give is to give in excess, to give away—to create give in the system by giving way, by giving more than what one gets. That is, to build an Internet that embraces its status as a public domain, in which there is no promiscuous mode because there is no monogamous mode, we need to inhabit networks differently. We must develop new habits of connecting that disrupt the reduction of our interactions into network diagrams that can be tracked and traced. Our networks operate by fore-giving: signals, some of which we can read, are constantly caressing us. This mass touching—this mass writing—grounds communication” (Chun 160).
This reduction of our humanity to interactions, via networks, seems an insurmountable force. Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” sees networking as a technological mutation of the capitalist economy. And with Félix Guattari, their Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia suggests that capitalism subsumes everything that it encounters by deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Hodge describes the force of the Internet in different ways. Firstly, albeit based on a fuzzy rendition of history, the Internet proceeds from the technology of the bomb: theoretically, it’s meant to be powerful enough to withstand nuclear disaster. Secondly, he notes that the “selfie” genre can be understood as attempt to establish selfhood and identity from a background in which the overwhelming ubiquity of the “always-on” network lurks. Aria Dean, in the article “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” criticizes the ways in which the Internet allows for only self-representation. Dean states that the “meme” genre only perpetuates a sort of powerless and fruitless construction of individual identity as opposed to the more powerful subjectivities of collectivity. Dean writes, “The history of western thought denies this sort of organization [collective identities] of bodies and subjectivities, instead figuring us all as static, even proposing that we all aspire to this static individuation.” The Internet in its all its power quashes humanity.
Before I come back to Chun, I wonder whether the totalitarian tendencies of the Internet is not unique to the Internet or Neoliberalism. Or rather, the Internet and neoliberalism are simply symptoms of another historical force. Perhaps their preceding forms of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism derive from the totalitarian nature of the Enlightenment itself. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno claim that “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” They later write, “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 4). Here, the Enlightenment’s reduction to numbers has some historical connection to the network reduction to traceable interactions (because they’re quantitative). I mentioned Horkheimer and Adorno specifically, because they make the claim that Enlightenment banished religion only to turn itself back into a myth of control. In Enlightenment, the supremacy of instrumentality turns all ends into means, thus substituting instrumentality as an end in itself.
Thus, Chun’s theologically charged conceptions of fore-giveness and excess harken back to the battle between myth and Enlightenment, and for our purposes, religious conceptions and the Internet/neoliberalism. University of Chicago’s own Jean-Luc Marion conceives of a fore-giveness like Chun’s but in the phenomenological and metaphysical vocabulary of “gift.” He too fears the reduction of the gift to Enlightenment forces—in this case “sufficient reason.” Originally in The Reason of the Gift, he writes, “…if the gift rests on gratuity, sufficient reason cannot but economize it, precisely in the name of the economy in which reason carries on. Consequently, sufficient reason owes it to itself to exclude the gift from experience, and therefore from phenomenality: one must render invisible everything for which one cannot render reason—and first of all the gift” (Marion 161). The gift, or even fore-giveness, in all its excess (or gratuity) seems to have no place, no visibility in the age of Enlightenment and on into the eras of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and the Internet. Not that Marion or Chun would admit this, I’m trying to outline broader theoretical analogs of fore-giveness and gift versus the Internet and neoliberalism.
All this to say: I hope Chun is right. I hope that excess and vulnerability can undermine the reductions that the modernity, in general, and the Internet, in particular, facilitate. Theoretically, I genuinely believe in the ambivalence of the Internet or networks: they can be used for freedom or determination, good or evil. However, it’s hard not to be discouraged by the ill-use of the Internet, particular with its trolls, fake news, cyber-bullying, etc., and by the totalitarian forces that have shaped it.
Works Cited
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Dean, Aria. “Poor Meme, Rich Meme.” Real Life. Published July 25, 2016. Accessed on November 5, 2018. https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/.
Hodge, James J. “Vernaculars: The Always-On Image.” Pre-circulated version. Forthcoming in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture (2019).
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University of Press, 1987.
Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Reason of the Gift.” In The Essential Writings, edited by Kevin Hart. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.