Topic: Identity in a Digital Context/Man as a Metaphor that Escapes Itself

Thesis: This paper explores how the digitalization of identity does not mark its end nor its irrelevance, but rather code’s material constraints forces any articulation of identity to develop through the terms of its own undermining. Identity in this sense can be thought of as a process mimicking a substance, a necessary localizing of the subject in a digital context through means that instantly open the subject to discrediting and alteration.

Outline/Justification:

The issue of locating terms that we associate with the human condition (identity, community, transcendence, etc) in a digital space is only made possibility by a type of thinking that does not locate the power of text in one particular medium. With the emergence of poststructuralist thinkers this power has lost its points of origin, real life no longer serves as the point of reference for the text, and print words move from the transmitters of experience to the experience itself. It is in this new area of textual exchange that I want to position my argument because it only makes sense if we can read not just technical or literary language, but a whole panoply of different texts into the subject matter (anthropological, sociological, psychological, to name a few). In turn these multiple discourses can I think give us some insight into this vague notion of ‘culture’ that seems to float in and out of critical texts. My paper looks to present its argument as well as give the reader a (limited) framework into these discussions about culture.

While the development of my argument and points are obviously not complete, the paper will must likely divide into two or three key sections and concepts. The first of these sections will place the issue of digital identity into the context of contemporary (last 30 years) thinking and problems with identity. Specifically I will look at how identity shapes (in a poststructuralist and a postmodern context) around issues of power, gender, and globalization. Through these descriptions I hope to explain how notions of identity appropriate for a digital setting are developed. Types of identity that do not privilege the ontological or substantial status of the speaker but rather are based more in a semiotic nebulous, where action defines the terms of definition (and are not pre-formulated). These concepts I will connect to two important ideas present in code, digital signature and inherent irony. I am uncertain of the examples I will use to express these concepts, but the argument will illuminate how code as metaphor is incapable of permitting a digital signature unless we foundationalize a certain irony in constructing this metaphor. The irony being that in crafting a personal sense of self one does so through a language (code) that always remains anonymous and impersonal. In this way code and the digital self are located in this poststructuralist practice of an impersonal sign system that diffuses autonomy at any moment that it tries to close in on itself.

The second major part of my paper will be focusing on Hayles Writing Machines, specifically her critique of Lexia to Perplexia. I will analyze Lexia to Perplexia and her interpretation of this techno-text to demonstrate how a techno-text raises significant problems with regards to the critic evaluating it. In trying to analyzing the techno-text Hayles cannot help polarize the terms she hopes to integrate (a merger between computer and human language) because, through this critical approach, she establishes the voice of a speaker-as-perpetual-revealer of the two languages. She assumes the false transparency of her own voice, but is in fact reintroducing the substantial/ontological subject through this polarization. This is the more experimental side of my paper, and will likely require the majority of the work, but I think it will be the most rewarding. It allows me to not only fortify my argument and my thesis but to comment on how criticism has be to careful not to inculcate itself into the same mistakes it denounces (opening criticism up as a potential textual field as well).

Tentative Sources:

Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979: 73-81. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Books, 1968. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Hayles, Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002. Print.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Greensborough, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313. Print.