Something I have been meaning to rant about for a while is the prescribed individuality that is integral to the creation of our digital identities on social media platforms. Facebook, Youtube, but also to a lesser extent art sites Artslant, re-title, not to mention dating sites, all involve at least some self-definition within parameters they set out (taste in movies, music, books, religious/ political beliefs etc).
It’s another case of choice but within a structure where the more significant choices have already been made; for example, belonging to a social media platform is more of a necessity than a choice, and for those who do opt out, part of their identity is then defined by this choice. Last year I had been thinking about how self-definition works in personality tests and the industry of self-help/ self-actualisation that depends on classifying one’s personality- stuff like are you an optimist or a pessimist? A leader or a follower?
There is an almost comical adherence to the notion of personality as a rigid entity rather than one that fluctuates according to surroundings and circumstances. The cult of personality is also well suited to the process of self-definition through consumerism, in which our particular personality type must find expression through our consumer choices- one of my favourite tests was the Indie test, to determine how ‘alternative’ you are, mainly based on what clothes and music choices you make. Talk about cooption of dissent!
Tying in (maybe) with some of these ideas is an essay by Janet Kraynak, which I re-read today, ostensibly about Bruce Nauman’s sculptural practice but hinging on ideas of participation as submissive and dependent. She develops this idea from the writing of Alain Touraine, who first coined the term ‘programmed society’ 40 years ago, a loaded term synonymous with the rise of post-industrial technocratic society.
Put simply the technocratic society valorizes efficiency and productivity (as opposed to ‘old’ ideals like freedom, self-determination), a ‘business-ontology’ (as Mark Fisher puts it) currently being implemented by the Con-Dems. ‘Optimum’ performance, in the mechanistic meaning of the term, becomes the desired model for subjects and institutions as well as corporations.
Another important aspect is repression through inclusion, rather than exclusion –not enforced by the police but through comfortable conformity, through fully participating in the systems of consumption and social life, where, however, ‘opting out is not a possibility’. Closely related to inclusion is participation, which is actually the central theme of her essay: drawing on Tourlaine’s, notion of ‘dependant participation’, where the subject, although ostensibly ‘free’ to participate in society, is actually to a large extent obligated.
She uses this framework for understanding Nauman’s work within this tension of participation and control, where the viewer is both ‘beseeched and thwarted’, becoming willing yet not exactly free participants in his installations. Joining the chorus of grumblings about relational aesthetics she also contrasts this with the supposedly benign, democratic aesthetic of inclusion which masks both the potentially problematic power relationship between artist and viewer within RA practices and the economic arrangements allowing them to thrive.
Amongst many strands that I’m trying to tease out is the relationship between programming/ rationalization and the performance of identity within contemporary culture. As she points out, programming is all about a scientific, rationalised process of information gathering which is then subjected to number-crunching in order to enable its parsing as information, and not just a jumble of facts and figures. This analysis creates a statistically accurate picture of past behaviour and can to a certain extent predict the future.
Then its just a small step to prescribing (programming) the future, as users of Facebook and Google have found- advertisers don’t just place ads in your profile based on your previous inputs for the hell of it, but because its a fair predictor of future activity, i.e. future consumption.
This is the closed-loop variation of capitalism in its networked phase, personalized ads targeting you with ever increasing precision, where any response further shades out that picture and thereby feeds back into the loop. “Free’ internet services, along with ‘free participation” are both apparently underwritten by a contract with hidden costs, one that we are seemingly quite happy to pay.
