“Metrics and Matrices” touches on the ontology of the subject in the systems, architectures, and regimes that make up our world: namely, the digital, the economic, the social, and their fields of overlap. I wonder about the relation of the self that circulates over digital platforms to that which stays grounded at the interface; whether it is a representation, a mis-representation, a missive who extends outwardly, or an index of my being co-opted into apparatuses of control. I wonder how we can think this super- or alter- digital-being of ours as complicit or potentially oppositional to economic regimes of subjectivation, namely surveillance capitalism and neoliberalism, which largely shape not only how we gain our livelihood and reproduce ourselves, but how we construct and navigate ournrelationships with others.
The title “Metrics and Matrices” refers to ideas which will be explored in this text, regarding the play between two distinct logics; that of measurement and systematization, on the one hand, and that of being, vitality, and potential, on the other.

I cannot pretend to have come to any firm conclusions over the course of my study; however, I have developed a set of intuitions and resonances that I was able to explore not only through my reading, but through the aesthetic inclinations of my work: the visual motifs, the themes explored in writing, and the medium of delivery. Rather than exhaustively map my reading onto my work, I must state that it is in the nature of artwork to be somewhat resistant to being totally cognitively indexed. My intention for this text is to stand in parallel to the works, that they may be read together and inform viewership, rather than inevitably fail to explain and fully account for one another. This text is a detour through some of the literature which was impactful in the development of my ideas. It is by no means exhaustive of the subject matter, given the time constraints, but it is a beginning.
For Luciano Floridi, the self can be understood in informational terms. Rather than understanding selves as essential, unchangeable ‘cores’ of being, of ineffable material or spirit, he posits instead that selves might be information given form by containers, organizational ‘membranes’ that cordon off data pertaining to the self from that pertaining to the non-self: As Floridi puts it, “semantically structuring structures conscious of themselves” (Floridi, 4). It is this concept of self that underscores one of my principle intuitions, namely that:

i. Selves should be thought less as atomic, fixed, and pre-formed, but as permeable and processual, always morphing, swelling and attenuating, borrowing from and giving forth onto the material and information that compose their surroundings.

One upshot of understanding selves less as bound to their originary material 一 the flesh and electricity of the body 一 than information is that it permits us to understand how it is that selves may extend, travel along, be expressed and affected in spaces which are architecturally digital - that is, informational structures resolved into inhabitable realities. This is not to deny or to privilege the extensible, ‘immaterial’ self over the physical, and re-inscribe cartesian dualities. As Mackenzie Wark points out, “information can only exist when there’s a material substrate of matter and energy to store, transmit, and process it.” (Wark, 10). Offline, our bodies are that substrate; once we engage in digital living and sociality, part of that substrate becomes remote; part of our being is hosted on servers, travels along cables sunk deep in the ground, bounces off satellites cluttering the atmosphere. We dissipate along these substrates to later recongeal in our own reconfigured self-understanding, and in the received ideas of others to whom we appear. We do not simply contain multitudes. We consist of multitudes of informational packets which we send into circulation, to be later reabsorbed or to become artefactual.

In the informational theory of self, I see echoes of a Spinozist materialism, a line of thinking which has not only proven fundamental to a number of the texts with which I engaged, but which I found to be a particularly rich and evocative source of imagery. For Spinoza (as outlined by Raniel Reyes), the world consists of a single substance of being, differentiating in perpetuity into a “plethora of becomings” (Reyes, 199). This, Reyes explains, permits a horizontal, or a non-hierarchical understanding of how being is expressed. Neither “mind” or “spirit” or “matter” 一 or information 一 is taken as prior or given a privileged status; neither does “human” or “idea” comes to have any more inherent value than “animal,” “object,” or inanimate matter. Crucially, as expressions of the process that is the ‘substance’ of life, all things enter into relations of affection with one another (201). This brings me to my second intuition:

ii. We must not only maintain an ethical regard for others and for our environment; we must understand ourselves as mutually constitutive, mutually vulnerable, mutually valuable.

For Reyes, this ethical understanding, carried by the collective and ever-changing process of being, is precisely what is valuable for shaping political trajectories. For Reyes, we live in a moment where “capitalism is axiomatic” (215). It fixes norms, binaries, and values, makes difference a matter of alienation, reinforcement, and stratification rather than creativity and discovery. Politics becomes a practice of “escaping segmentarities” (213) and exploring the possibilities of collectivity 一 of recognition, reassembly, and redistribution across bodies. It bcomes a practice of escaping and overspilling the very understanding of selves as discrete, as essentially separate-from rather than always partaking-of.

I use the word ‘discrete’ in relation to selves because it brings us back into conversation with the digital, which is a question of discretion and binaries (lower level machine code, which permits the mutual activation of substrate and information, is literally, materially binary). It seems in nature fatally rigid, and yet it allows for incredible forms of plural being to occur. It allows for intensified communication and opportunities for self-expression, for extended access to knowledge and tools. However, to shift one’s self 一 here as mobile, tenuously contained information 一 into another substrate takes acclimation, a rediscovery of how to move. And we are not entirely free in our movement. Our encounters 一 what information we meet, what audiovisual experiences, what we may react to and be affected by 一 are conditioned by the spaces we move through.

Bar a particularly high fluency with programming languages, which might allow an individual to directly affect the architecture of digital spaces, we are largely obliged to move within spaces built for us 一 built for ease of use, built so that our acclimation is minimally frictional, but also minimally empowering. For Branden Hookway, our experience at the interface is at once one of “augmentation” and “subjectivation” (Hookway, 32). At any interface, we are given new capacities for action; however, these possibilities cannot extend past the essential affordances of the interface itself. We become subjects of the interface because our agency is limited by its terms. We become “fragmented” (39) in our original being as much as we are given new potentials. That is to say, part of us is left behind, limp and inactive, when we participate in life through an interface.

However, I cannot bring myself to believe, even if I cannot perhaps exhaustively argue the point, that this condition of fragmentation is either unique to the digital, or even a reason to condemn it entirely. If we look back to Reyes’ reading of Spinoza, we understand that difference and movement is what makes the world. I present a third intuition:

iii. Rather than cling to naturalized ideas of what is a ‘loss’ in terms of a state of desirable ‘coherence,’ we can instead treat our new formations with curiosity and care.

I do not mean to present an account of our digital conditions that is not at once wary and critical. Shoshanna Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, has described at length the exploitative landscape of contemporary digital platforms, as designed by capitalist entities with the aim of extracting profits from the many novel sites of our being. For Zuboff, the information of our experience and the data that index it are a new resource. Who is able to access, mine, process, and instrumentalize this resource is fundamentally a matter of “epistemic inequality”: an imbalance of knowledge (the term “knowledge” itself now semantically reduced to mean an imbalance of access to information). Our data can be used to build consumer portraits, to more effectively sell products, to more effectively spread ideologies. By using commercial platforms, we are submitting to being modelled, to being the subjects of behavioural prediction. Because the platforms are constantly being updated with an eye to engagement (and thus, profit maximization), our interfaces grow ever more narrow, ever more restrictive in what they permit us to see and do, ever more adept at reinforcing our subjectification while reducing our agency. User engagement is already a form of behaviour modification, and Zuboff fears what more extreme forms may emerge, as “human futures” (essentially,investment or betting on the future consumer behaviours and tendencies) become viable fodder for financial markets. (Zuboff, Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft, 2019).

Byung Chul-Han also writes on the realities of reduced subjectivity and entrenched subjectivation, not in digital contexts specifically, but on the economic reality that necessarily contextualizes the digital. For Han, it is a function of neoliberalism - an economic ideology founded on ideas of individual self-interest at the expense of society as a collective entity (Foucault, 247) - to turn everything into information. For him, information “lacks interiority” (Han, 11), which is what permits it to circulate. It is also a function of subjectivity under neoliberalism to internalize fully that one is not simply a human, but a purveyor of human capital. “Auto-exploitation” (20) replaces domination by any identifiable external power, as neoliberal subjects seek to shape themselves using the tools of optimization. Once again, experience and behaviour are measured and datafied (say, by apps that track calories consumed or burned, or hours and quality of sleep, or hours of work) in order to be reshaped. Here, however, the entities engaged in the collection and instrumentalization of information are individuals themselves, hoping to become not more expansive but more focused, not more diversified but more applied: more perfectly subjected to the rigid augmentation offered by economic success. The self’s relation to technology is a matter of restriction and curtailment, as the potentials of becoming are brought into regimentated form. This self is necessarily fragmented, its “weaknesses” and excesses relayed to the status of remainder. These stranded fragments are fully devalued, the subject left with neither recourse nor desire to recuperate and re-enfold all the strands of self. For Han, self-knowledge comes not from “data alone” but from “an account” (37). Technological tools which allow subjects to mold themselves into ideal economic actors are not engaged in a process of self-knowledge, but, indeed, in self-surveillance, ‘self-monitoring’ (37). Although subjects still appear - rather, still feel themselves - to be acting of their own will, the psychic field is already primed to act as a machine might, according to objective principles of economic “rationality” rather than the eruptive contingencies of free being.

Han is an astute diagnostician; I recognize many of the “psychopolitical” mechanisms he describes not only in observing the cultural and social landscape, but as taking root and affecting my own mental processes. He is also a pessimist, describing a worst-case scenario. His outline for resistance is brief, urging withdrawal from the false ‘knowledge’ of big data, discounting the very use of digital technologies which oblige us to deform ourselves into regimes of unit and measure. However, my intention with this work is neither to withdraw from nor to uncritically valorize the digital; it is to look for areas where it may productively resolve with, produce, and enrich subjectivity.

To this end, Brian Massumi’s 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value was an illuminating 一 if often convoluted 一 guide. Massumi, like Han, does not explicitly take the digital as his area of inquiry, but the mechanics and formulations of capital. In doing so, his language resonates with the Spinozist formulation of being 一 life 一 as process. Here, capital and life are of a field, but operate with fundamentally different logics. Processes of quantification, the speciality of capitalism, are contrasted with processes of quality: this is life in all its flux and dynamism, in all its excess and vitality. While the quantitative is what is measurable in units, what is rational and discrete, the qualitative is that which is registered affectively; what is appreded, bodily, without necessarily being expressible; what is supervenient upon mere metrics and adds intensity to experience (the distinction between temperature registered as number on a thermometer, versus how it is experienced; a wind chill on a sunny day, for instance); what is “value in and of itself” (25). For Massumi, the economy acts as an “apparatus of capture” (17) for the qualitative, which he terms the “surplus value of life”(16). Economization, systematization, are attempts to tether free-floating potential to value through speculation: betting on how products will come to appreciate in value, invested by consumer desire (17). The power formations of capital are numerous, far-reaching, and enduring: speculation, debt, the psychic auto-imperatives of “human capital” as a neoliberal formulation. “The human is annexed to the machinic process,” he states. “Humans do not run capitalism; capitalism runs through the human.” (37). However, this annexation is not exhaustive; it is the nature of the qualitative to escape total measure, total “conversion” into any form but “bare activity” (49). It is here where we might eke an eventual resolution.
Humans - all life, all being - are sensitive and susceptible to the working of bare activity, as the experience of affection; sensation coursing through a body, transforming its tendencies, inclinations, and potential. If, for Han, affect is mere “catharsis” (Han, 28) and the truth of selfhood is in “narrative,” for Massumi it is “more-than narrative;” rather, it is “extra-personal” (81). He puts forwards a notion: subjectivity-without-a-subject, a process of “self-driving dynamism” (59) that may be accounted for as an agency without necessarily having personhood.

This is the model that I would apply to my thinking of subjectivity in the process of digital dissemination, notably because it offers insight into how there may be an interdependence of quantitative tools - digital architectures, for instance - and the qualitative events that develop overtop, around, and through them: experiences of relation and connection, conversation and creativity. It also offers what I think is an essential tactic for opposing, on levels both psychic and political, the incursion of capitalist, extractive, normative, and reductive systems of value: the dissolution of the subject as a “discrete, separate entity” (Massumi, 60). Can we accept the self not only as porous, but as dissipate, and the more robust for it? Can we let go of a certain fear that exploring our potential digital becomings will come at the expense of our “material” being? Can we understand our multivalence and our changeable tendencies as a fact of being, and be sure to extend care to all our circulating fragments? Perhaps we should be wary of any sense of self that seems too reinforced, too invariable; certainly, with an eye to the predominant capitalist architects of our digital worlds, we should be wary of being too predictable. I think, at this point, that I must make the claim that we cannot take the digital as a value in and of itself; we cannot invest it with its own vitality, merely be wise in how it is used to extend or restrict the vitality and relational potential of those who “use” it; of the being it hosts, more or less temporarily. In our digital unfoldings, can we prioritize relationality and collectivity? When we notice ourselves becoming particulate, we may retract at the prospective loss of subjective coherence. How can our self-understanding change, however, if we allow ourselves to be receptive to difference, to new flows of information, to disbanding self-priority for participation?

I would happily lose a memory in the cloud somewhere if another could fold it in as resonance.

Bibliography:

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Buchanan, Ian. “Deuleuze and the Internet”. Australian Humanities Review, Issue 43, December 2007. https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2411&context=artspapers

Han, Byung-Chul.Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power. New York: Verso Books. 2017.

Hookway, Branden. Interface. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2014.

Floridi, Luciano. “The Informational Nature of Personal Identity.” Minds and Machines 21(4):549-566 · November 2011. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225239120_The_Informational_Nature_of_Personal_Identity

Foucault, Michel.The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. Michel Senellart, ed. Graham Burchell, trans. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Massumi, Brian. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2018.

Reyes, Raniel SM. “The Revolutionary Spinoza: Immanence, Ethology, and the New Politics of Desire.” Kriticke, Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 2017). 197-217, http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_20/reyes_june2017.pdf

Wark, Mackenzie. Capital is Dead: Is this Something Worse? New York: Verso Books. 2019.

Zuboff, Shoshanna. “Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy.” Talk delivered 06 November 2019 at Urania Berlin, presented by Institut fur Internet und Gesellschaft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0josfRzp4