The latest podcast
episode seems to have received some attention, and the hope is that the number
of listeners will continue to grow with every weekly episode. This has made me
think about the extent to which the capability for discourse in this contemporary
time has dilated across the horizontalist basis of our communities – where all
can communicate with all. More now than ever, individuals can communicate with
the wider global ether of persons without having to engage in the materially
social world. Social media enables discourse and as such has excavated a truly public
space in-between person. It is not a typical discourse that creates the basis
of a civic polity, however, it is a discourse that is in almost every sense virtual.
But why is a publica spatium necessitous to politics? In her ‘Men in
Dark Times’, Hannah Arendt sheds a light on this. Here she states that: “it
is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by
providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and in word,
for better or worse, who they are and what they can do” – emphasising as always
the potential for action as the stuff of politics par excellence.[1]
The virtual nature of
social media does seem to adapt its own fabric as a publica spatium into
a publicum sine spatio status corporis – a public space without any
physical state. The lack of physicality that we experience on social media implies
that our appearance in that public space is equally non-physical. Indeed, there
are two interesting notions about the manner in which we ‘appear’ and ‘speak’
on social media. The first concerns our ‘appearance’. How does one ‘appear’ in
a space that one cannot corporeally inhabit? Simply put, we do not. We inhabit
the ‘profile’ of an external self. We create ‘accounts’ which provides a dual
function: (a) it allows us, as users, to become the author of the narrative
that we construct – the narrative of the profile – and, (b) it keeps a ledger
of our activity, as if one banks the accumulation of social capital through our
increased activity and inhabitation of the non-space at hand. So, our
appearance is not necessarily a genuine one – enabling us to operate as non-tangible
social beings on a level that is but a shadow in the mirror of the material world,
and thus, the author of our virtual narrative. We do not appear; our virtual
avatar connects with the virtual avatars of others, behind the veil of which
they may or may not be what they appear. In this way, the connection between the
subject and their appearance on this plane is not guaranteed, and as such,
appearance is not the guarantor of a profile’s material existence. Does this
hold political consequences – if one can ‘appear’ but on a plane of existence
where ‘appearance’ is substance-less?
The second notion I
would like to discuss concerns ‘speech’. Social media is always interesting in
the manner that speech is thoroughly limited on a temporal basis. Speech on
social media is not speech at all, but rather speech reduced to its skeletal
form in text. ‘Speaking’ on social media is to become the columnist or
writer. The difference being that profiles engage with one another through what
I will call ‘text-speech’. Text-speech is neither text nor speech and yet
somehow both. On Twitter, one is limited to 280 characters per each act of ‘speech’.
If this were to take place in the material publica spatium it would immanentize
itself as a temporal limit of sorts, with a red flag being raised once 280 characters
were spoken. Public discourse could not take place on such a basis – reducing the
‘speech’ of social media to interpretable text, but limited text as if single,
or dual, sentences at most. Furthermore, the ‘essay’ of a post on social media exposes
the neither/nor nature of text-speech, reaching a point that is the
reverse of the limited text as just discussed – one becomes conscious that one’s
linguistic utterance is gravitating towards text, becoming greater or
longer than the average posits of speech. On the one hand, one ignores
the textual nature of text-speech, and on the other one becomes conscious that
the utterance under construction is becoming text. Does the phenomenal
adaptation of ‘speech’ to what we experience in a publicum sine spatio
status corporis adapt its civic character as a publicum spatium
nonethteless? Does it create of politics of speech that is distinct from that
we experience in the material public space?
Therefore, social media
disenables us to appear and to speak as if we were an operator in the publica
spatium, and as such functions as if it were a parallel of it – a public
space of substance-less appearance – of a substance-less space. Perhaps this
means that it creates a substance-less-politic, one that mirrors the
materiality of one’s own ontological existence on this digital plane. However,
access to the public world of social media is dependent on one’s material conditions.
The mission statement of twitter is to increase epistemic connectivity ‘without
barriers’, and yet there are very material barriers to engaging with social
media – such as internet connectivity. In her ‘For a Left Populism’
Chantal Mouffe re-asserts a claim she has often made, stating that collective concepts
such as ‘the people’ are always inclusively exclusive – there is always a
notion of underlying exclusivity in the very illusion of inclusivity by the
manner in which we construct these concepts.[2] The claims to ‘global’
connectivity are geographic only, eluding to the inclusion of all but formally
excluding many in their very functioning. Taking all of this into account,
perhaps our interactivity on social media has created a new ‘posthumanist’
cyborg of dual existence – at once both ontologically material and digitally non-substantially
technological? Perhaps Donna Haraway is right.[3] Perhaps we are indeed
entering the era of the cyborg – but not in the materiality that may have been
assumed. And, equally, perhaps those who remain singularly ‘human’ – residing in
the material world alone – being not included into the category of posthuman
subject, will be (ironically) deemed sub- or in-human; perhaps they already are
deemed so?
[1] Hannah Arendt (1969) Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, p. viii.
[2] Chantal Mouffe (2018) For a Left Populism, London: Verso.
[3] Donna J Haraway (1991) “A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New
York: Routledge, pp. 149-181.