Unlike other students of technoscience, I propose that the technological era we are living in is a radically different one. It's discontinuous from what might be called "industrial progress." The mechanical-industrial era of technology began to wane around the middle of the century, and it's now being replaced by what some call post-industrial technology. I prefer to think of this new kind of technology as bio-electric , because it uses processes that either originate in (or derive from) the "lifeworld" of living organisms and the subatomic forces that operate at the quantum-mechanical level. In both cases, these processes defy the expectations of the mechanistic worldview which arose in the Enlightenment, and the industrial worldview which derived from it, and instead display surprisingly different properties: metamorphosis, emergence, self-organization, reflexivity, negentropy. (Channell, 1991.)
The problem with some earlier writings on technological effects on identity is that they tend to propagate the assumptions of the mechanical-industrial viewpoint. Thus, when writers like Ellul or Mumford or Heidegger wrote about the Machine Age, and the loss of individuality, identity, autonomy, or freedom in the face of industrial society, they were assuming that this was the only possible vector for technology -- that it could only lead to depersonalization and the destruction of humanism. They assumed industrial development and modernization were on an irreversible course. Bio-electric technologies posit a different cultural vector, with different spaces for new kinds of selves. Instead of technology eradicating subjectivity, it seems to me to be morphing it into new domains.
Where mechanical-industrial technologies focused on the expansive (building ever larger engines and factories), bio-electric technologies continue to implode invisibly into the world of miniaturization, etherialization, and disappearance. Mechanical-industrial technologies were oriented toward production and transportation of matter, whereas the newer bio-electric technologies are oriented toward energy, information, and communication. The worldviews governing industrial thought were centralization, linearization, determinism, and uniformity; the emerging worldviews of the bio-electric era are dispersion, nonlinearity, indeterminacy, and discontinuity. From the Newtonian framework of the industrial world, the bio-electric era has now moved toward systems theory, cybernetics, chaos theory, ecological dynamics, and information theory.
Since I don't want to argue for technological determinism, the complex system argument I would make is that cultural changes are leading to new scientific worldviews which are creating new technologies which are producing new kinds of selves which are creating new kinds of cultures... thus producing a feedback loop. The postmodern, decentered, deterritorialized self that so many philosophers now wish to observe and discuss is the product of many intersecting forces, but none might be as important as the technological one. Here are some new kinds of selves that are appearing within this formation.
Some people, like Frederic Jameson, see the post-industrial era as really being one of "late capitalism." That is, while industrialization is diminishing, new means of creating capital ("flexible accumulation") are replacing it, and some processes of industrialization (particularly of mechanized agriculture) are actually undergoing dramatic intensification. This may be the case, but as I'm trying to suggest, there are new processes going on, and some of the new technologies are actually anti-industrial, in that they replace the mechanical criteria of efficiency, "bigger is better," centralization, and modernization, with different ones. This is particularly shown in the movement toward "appropriate," "alternative," "Green," and "human scale" technologies. Technology is being rethought as a continually rewoven social structure, and not just an autonomous process of 'rational' linear development.
The Situationist argument, which appeared in the 50s and 60s, was that it was no longer a problem of industrialization creating alienation - the major force alienating people was the "culture industry," the commodification of happiness, culture, and leisure. (Plant, 1992.) Leisure, rather than becoming an escape from drudgery and urban uniformity, was itself becoming boring, rote, and prepackaged. The major force oppressing the people was the media (particularly advertising), which gave them only one source of identity: identification through consumption. Rather than proletarian or ethnic identities, people in the West were coming to increasingly take on consumer identities, through their product choices: becoming Marlboro Men, Virginia Slims Women, Chevy Guys, etc. Who you were was defined increasingly by what you bought. (Hirsch and Silverstone, 1992.)
"Authentic" leisure was increasingly being replaced by prepackaged tours, prepackaged entertainment experiences, trips to the suburban shopping mall. Art, rather than a force for challenging or remaking society, became simply an elite diversion at best or a source of opiates for the masses (TV "popular culture") at worst. There was a new sense that once more individuality or selfhood was under attack. The isolation of suburban life was supposed to be rapidly eroding the communal basis of culture and identity. This left people vulnerable to manipulation, fanatical movements, and paranoia. What I think the Situationists, the Critical Theorists, and others then misunderstood was that a) the disappearance of the Enlightenment self was not necessarily a bad thing; and b) that new kinds of selves were appearing to replace it.
Where modernization and the ideal of the "modern self" came under attack in the 60s was especially in the "underdeveloped world." Concomitant with the belief that the Third World needed economic, industrial, or technological development, was the idea that the sense of personal identity had not fully developed, because people were still "submerged" in tribal, clan, or religious identities. In order for "takeoff" to occur, individuals in these societies had to "realize" that they had "unmet needs", and that promoting "rational self-interest" and the "acquisitive instinct" which would make capitalism flourish. The failure of "modernization" in many of these societies showed that the appearance of "modern selves" only led to social disintegration, cultural commodification, and Western domination.
Today, in the 90s, these things are in flux. There are more kinds of media than the monopolistic broadcasting technologies of the 50s. Modernization models of development are being replaced by dependency theory. Technology has now become an internal force for people recreating their identity, and not just an external one. (Touraine, 1988.) The quest for individuation is no longer seen in terms of the modernist project of freeing oneself from the "dead hand" of tradition and the past. Alienated selves still peer through various cracks in the post-industrial fabric. But the new selves appearing within our current technological era are not simply lost, hopeless, or alienated. The changes discussed here are not happening uniformly, all at once, or evenly throughout the globe. But they are happening, they are spreading, and they are part of the "condition of postmodernity."
What Gutenberg's machine, as many acknowledged, did, was to make books available to a mass audience, democratizing knowledge. However, as media scholars have pointed out, it also filtered many of the aesthetic qualities of earlier texts out - the fantastic hand-made color illuminations of medieval manuscripts were replaced by mechanically reproduced black-and-white prints; the calligraphy and elaboration of the written characters were replaced by fixed fonts and typefaces; custom editions and individually tailored versions of manuscripts became a thing of the past. The book went from something of color and vibrancy to, well, black on white. Gutenberg's press led to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, but perhaps in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. The mass experience with mass-produced texts changed peoples' way of seeing and experiencing the world.
In contrast, Ong and McLuhan pointed out, electronic media (especially television and video) were more like a secondary orality than writing or mechanical type. "Electronic literacy" was a whole new kind of 'hearing.' Electronic media appealed to the holistic visual pattern-matching faculties of the right brain, rather than the analytic linguistic sequence-forming faculties of the left brain hemisphere. Whereas writing and print or type were linear, fixed, uniform, and private, electronic media were nonlinear, associational ("hypertextual"), dynamic, and public. Thus, while writing and type might be seen as the hallmark of classicism, the logos, and civilization, electronic media tended to produce a new sort of tribalism, sensualism, and the "global village." (Ong, 1982.) Electronic media required aesthetic judgments marked by quick, sudden absorption of multiple signals, rather than one's long reflection on dense paragraphs or ponderous words.
Ong in particular saw the ways where electronic media actually hearkened back to pre-literate habits, what in effect we might call "the primitive." Electronic media (especially, he said, light shows at rock concerts - today we might say raves) required communal, participatory, interactive appreciation. In oral societies, rhetoric , the power to persuade through qualities of personality, tropes and metaphors, and the voice, was more important than the possession of facts or logic. Electronic media was strongly rhetorical, noted Ong, through its almost dreamlike use of images and sounds, which is why people seized upon it so quickly for propaganda. The flow of electronic media was circuitous and cyclical, more like a rambling myth than a written narrative. For these reasons, Ong felt, there might be some awakenings of "primitivity" within Western society due to its continuing exposure to electronic media.
Following Ong, some have decided to sound warning signals of the death of Western civilization as a result of television and electronic media. Some literary scholars feel that young people in particular require written texts for proper socialization, and if they are socialized only by electronic media, then they never develop the faculties for self-reflection and self-restraint. They become more prone to violence and uncontrollable emotions, and less able to follow a linear train of argument. Worst of all, they (supposedly) never develop the sense of interiority, discipline, and conscience that is the hallmark of the mature, classical Western self. (Hayward, 1990.) From watching too much MTV, their view of reality becomes one of isolated, discontinuous moments of sensation. Rap music and hiphop appeals only to their senses, to the physicality of rhythm, and not to any supposedly "higher" aesthetic qualities.
I would take a different tack. Coming back to McLuhan and continuing somewhat with Ong, I would say electronic media produces a new kind of self which I call the mediated (mediant) self which has several new qualities. One, it is more right-brained and balanced (unifying feeling and intuition with thinking) than the purely rational Western self. Two, it is more oriented toward processing multiple synchronous inputs (signals), rather than one "stream" of data (say from a single text.) Three, it thinks through images and associations, and not just words and ideas; thus it makes more use of the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. Most importantly, the mediated self sees itself extended in various ways through communication technology: rather than being "here" or "there," it's a sort of "field" consciousness, interpenetrating with lots of others. (Rushkoff, 1994.) It's not a classical Western self, but maybe that's not a bad thing, either.
The antithesis of the freely willed human, then, became the automaton, the machine which could only be driven by an external will, controlled by an external force. The idea of merging humans with machines seemed somewhat blasphemous, since it would mean surrendering the human quality of choice and self-control. Nonetheless, beginning in the 18th century, prosthetic limbs and other mechanical replacements for human organs began to be developed, since most Cartesians felt the body was only a machine anyway. It was only with the development of the mechanical computer in the 19th century that the idea of replacing the brain (and thus the mind or the will) also became a possibility - and a threat.
To some critics of Artificial Intelligence, this possibility has never been anything but remote, for the simple reason that the cognitive scientists simply see thought and mental activity as reducible to computation, and that organic processes as exactly reducible to mechanical ones. A new perspective of "vital mechanism" has emerged in the era of bio-electric technology, where technological systems (artificial life, neural networks, etc.) have been seen to have organic-like properties, as well as vice versa. While one group in AI focused its efforts on creating the android, a mechanical being with human appearance and abilities, bio-electric technology aims at creating the cyborg, a being where the technological and the organic blend seamlessly together. (Gray, 1995.)
The cyborg view thus does not see the human being as a Cartesian machine which can be refitted with mechanical parts. Rather, the human being is composed of systems of information, which can be replaced by other systems of information which, while artificially generated, are still derived from "natural" ones. The fact that computers can be built out of DNA, and biochips of silicon can be integrated into neural cells, suggests that technology and the organic can accommodate each other, perhaps even merge into something different from either. Perhaps both are different types of processes or information flows which "map" onto each other. Cyborgs are thus beings at once artificial and natural, born and made, produced and redesigned; they are hybrids. (Brahm and Driscoll, 1995.)
For authors like Haraway, then, the cyborg self produced from bio-electric technology becomes a metaphor for the hybrid experience of postmodern subjects. It's an alternative to essentialist nature-goddess ecofeminism, and to mechanicalist industrial technofascism. When she declares that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, she is stating a sort of socio-political stance against assuming identity politics; universalizing "womanism;" identifying women with nature, animals, and the Earth rather than artifice, writing, and culture; and equating all kinds of technology with masculinism and male dominance. The cyborg is a sort of literary trope for the new sorts of selves women have had to assume as a result of multinational capitalism and transnational exchanges.
What I am calling the cyborg self is more than a literary metaphor, however. It is the new sense of identity that comes from experience with prosthetic technologies, and implantable bioelectronic systems inscribing themselves into the body. This new kind of identity would refuse to be seen in either purely mechanical or organic terms. The opposition of nature and artifice would be deconstructed. Such an identity would transcend, maybe even refute, the ongoing anthropocentrism ('humano-chauvinism') and maybe even biocentrism of the classical Western tradition. Things like life, consciousness, will, might be recast in cybernetic terms. The body would not be seen as the fixed physical ground of identity, or the material construct driven by a distant will, but rather as something composite, an ongoing construct, an information flow, interlocked cybernetically with consciousness.
Through a combination of forces (including globalization of labor and deunionization), in most advanced post-industrial societies, the idea of full benefit-providing employment has receded from view. Many of these societies are increasingly adjusted to the idea of "flexwork" -- temporary, provisional, irregular employment, sans job security, pensions, benefits, or possibilities for career advancement. While the rhetoric of economic growth and job creation continues unabated, behind closed doors, European countries continue to discuss with horror the possibility of a growing neo-lumpenproletariat for whom there are no more jobs, or only partial employment - not enough to keep them busy or satisfied. (Handy, 1984.) There are simply not enough jobs to go around anymore. Particularly among young people, a new class of "slackers" are beginning to appear who have adapted themselves to this reality.
While some commentators (like Bob Black) look upon this as positive (after all, one of the goals of the trade union movement was a shorter workweek) - proclaiming the birth of a true "leisure society" where even the middle-class no longer needs to work anymore - others worry about a growing class of people for whom employment is not only no longer guaranteed, but even practically impossible. Structurally, full employment has not only become remote, it's become a pipe dream... so in many urban areas youth subcultures find ways to survive in informal sector economies, barter arrangements, and a nomadic, nocturnally oriented life. (Linklater, 1992.) Automation and deindustrialization have shifted the remaining amount of work over into the service and "knowledge-information" worker sectors, where unionization and labor organizing or consciousness is practically unknown.
It's not my purpose here to detail the consequences of these changes, or the ways in which various governments have sought solutions. Rather, I want to focus on how these technological changes are altering the nature of personal identity. For the Western world in particular, work has been a fundamental component of the sense of self. "You are what you do." Calvinist authors pointed to toil as not only a necessity, but even a sign of outward moral perfection and character development. Idleness was condemned as sinful, decadent, and dangerous, because without work to busy the hands and mind, the evil influences of an unbound imagination could tempt the person to sin. The Puritan Ethic emphasized renouncing pleasure and embracing the development of personal character through abstemiousness and hard work.
Work has always been a strong component of masculine identity, and the goal of "having a good job" and "bringing home the bacon" for one's family remains a potent dream for young men in many societies. Production was seen as the mirror side of consumption; if you worked hard and saved up your money, you could buy all the neat new high-tech goods that you and other workers had made to make life easier and more fun. Women since the 40s have also tried to seek self-fulfillment in the workplace, emulating the "supermom" or "career woman," since many felt confined by housework and the "quiet prison" of the home. (For both genders, work was seen as the flip side to family life and the domestic or private sphere - the chance for a public self.) Now, through "telecommuting" and "telework," many of these women are returning home, working in "electronic cottages" (some people call them "high-tech sweatshops") where they can keep an eye on the house and kids once more.
Not only among young people, but among other generations within post-industrial societies, a new sense of self is emerging which does not derive itself from work. What I call the slacking self is a self which has adapted to the impermanence of employment and has perhaps even abandoned the idea of economic growth and advancement for other goals, whether those be 'hedonic growth,' personal growth and development, creative expression, or serving others. Since work, where it can be found, no longer means the ability to provide for a future, a family, or even one's own needs, alternatives are being sought. The "slacking self" manifests itself through what some see as an avoidance or rejection of "9 to 5" existence, routinization, mindless drudgery, and a pursuit of various interests, hobbies, and associations which have no definite economic benefit. Unfortunately, as the Situationists emphasized, the world of mass labor production is coming to be mirrored by one where mass (Disney-style) leisure has also become automated, routinized, emptied of meaning, and alienated.
Although 3D real-time cyberspace virtual worlds of the Gibsonian variety are still in the realm of "R & D," there already exist multiple virtual simulation environments on the Internet. While the majority (MUDs and MOOs) are primarily textual role-playing interactive simulations, there are a number of environments emerging (such as the Palace and MTV's Tiki Lounge) where people are able to assume the identity of graphical "avatars" and move through a 3D space where they can meet and interact with the visual representations of other users of the system. Role-playing has always been a strong facet of the Internet, with people in chat rooms and MUDs routinely switching genders, races, and sexual orientations - "just because they can." In these virtual worlds, it takes on a new level, because your avatar is a visual projection of your self to others. It can project those attributes you want them to see, and hide others.
Identity on the Internet has always been a shifting terrain, but since the majority of interactions on the Net were originally textual, where your appearance, voice, and mannerisms were masked, this was easy to do, and didn't require a great deal of conscious effort. While various BBSes and other systems attempted to curtail users who sought to hide behind pseudonyms, anonymous handles, and false identities, in practice enforcing these restrictions became largely impossible. Guessing the identities of other users often revolved around intuiting clues from their use of language (largely lacking any emotional expression other than "emoticons") and seeing if this "gave away" what kind of person they "really" were. Particularly in the hacker community, people online would assume identities that were usually pseudonymous, projecting attributes of rebelliousness, machismo, and technological savvy. (Turkle, 1995.)
Now, with the visual simulations like the Palace, role-playing takes on new dimensions, because now people can choose to interact with each other as animals, icons, inanimate objects, mythical beings, fictional characters, "real-life" celebrities, "morphed" self-images, or anything else that the imagination can summon. People try to guess what things people are trying to say about themselves through these representations. Is that talking crab trying to tell me that they're really grouchy (crabby), really possessive (clawy), really fond of the ocean, or something else? Through their digital self-representations, people consciously choose aspects of themselves to reveal, conceal, alter, or augment. If from a Goffmanian dramaturgical perspective, the self is always theatrically presenting itself, the game redoubles in cyberspace. (Ross, 1994.)
Virtual reality ups the ante even more, though, because the person starts to feel like their "avatar" in cyberspace "really" is themselves. Through "cybersuits" and teleoperation, it mimics their movements, displays their affectations, perhaps even eerily matches their expectations. It comes to be seen as an extension of their own identity, as responsive to their own needs and desires as their own body. Indeed, some eager cybernauts report that within a super-immersive virtual world, they feel disembodied, like they no longer have a physical body, and they feel as if they have a new electronic body, whose limits are now only those of the digitally programmed "laws" of cyberspace. Their electronic avatar no longer has their physical flaws or personal limitations, so it gives them a new sense of perhaps having a better, unrestrained self. (Kroker, 1993.)
Attachments to one's digital representation can be as great as to any other thing which is seen as part of oneself. Players on MUDs report a great sense of loss when their "character" is killed. People playing video games experience the same thing when "they" die for the third time from an alien onslaught. What I call the virtual self is a new component of identity arising from current technology which no longer sees itself attached to any particular body or physical expression. While this is sometimes metaphorically expressed in cyberculture as the wish to "download" one's identity into a robot container, I would argue it is going on all the time right now as people devote increasing amounts of their attention, reflection, and time to their electronic embodiments and virtual experiences. The border between one's own "real" and "hyperreal" lives is starting to thin.
While Western society has developed somatic technologies which already render the body reshapeable (hair dyes, plastic surgery, colored contact lenses, hair waxing, liposuction, etc.), the use of recombinant DNA technology heralds an era where individuals will have their bodies reshaped before they are ever born. The technology may be in its infancy, but the ultimate goal of efforts such as the Human Genome Project is that once there is a full map of the genetic code, genes for various traits can be isolated. Although project directors insist their primary efforts are aimed at eliminating hereditary diseases, there's certainly no reason why genes for purely "plastic" traits such as skin color, nose shape, height, and so forth won't be discovered as well. And no reason to expect that eventually parents won't want these traits in their children controlled as well; some already use a technique of sperm separation and artificial insemination to control the biological sex of the child.
Though such reductionist efforts may find barriers to their success - biologists such as Barbara McClintock have long pointed out that somatic traits are often created by "ensembles" of genes which turn each other on and off - and, further, although it has long been known that somatic features such as height and especially "intelligence" are the result of interactions between heredity and environment - it can be expected that biotechnology will nonetheless produce some striking developments in this area within the next few years. The first transfers in other kingdoms of life have been the isolation of particular species characteristics (such as bioluminescence, etc.) to other species... this is probably where the first human experiments will begin, with the effort of extending regeneration or immunity or some other animal characteristic to humans. (Cutcliffe, 1992.)
This generation is the first generation to be made strikingly aware that heredity is no longer purely destiny, and that the human race is making great strides toward directing its own evolutionary process (now that natural selection - famine, plague, disasters, etc. - have been defeated on so many fronts.) At the same time as the riddles of the genetic code are being unraveled, numerous environmental factors (chemical pollution, climate change, and atomic radiation being the primary ones) are causing mutations in many species, the rapid extinction of many other life forms, and, some are afraid, drastic changes to human heredity as well. (Paepke, 1993.) As one example, a recent study noted that in some post-industrial societies, sperm counts in males have dropped 20 to 25 percent. Cancer results from a lethal form of cellular mutation, and it is quickly becoming a number one killer of people in the advanced societies.
Other technologies of human self-modification are quickly being disseminated to the populace. Reproductive technologies are extending the age of childbirth. "Smart drugs" (nootropics) are being used to enhance memory and concentration, while other antioxidants are being used to reverse the aging process. Even death itself is being challenged through the use of cryonics organizations, where some claim frozen bodies await a future restoration by a society hundreds of years in the future. Nanotechnology is being developed to make changes and repairs at the cellular level; chemical implants are being used to deploy hormones, antigens, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and other biological compounds at sites where they are "needed." There is a simultaneous sense that the human body is facing numerous threats from the environment which are causing unknown changes, and at the same time it's coming under increasing technological control. (Murphy, 1992.)
These changes in post-industrial cultures are leading to the manifestation of what can some have called post-biological humans; others merely the "End of Man"; but I prefer to call the mutant self. The mutant self is based in an identity which realizes that its physical template is in flux and could change dramatically at any point. Mutant selves are "essentially" anti-essential, because nature is no longer seen as the primary determinant of one's physical makeup. (Branwyn, 1995.) The classical Western self (at least as this ideal was carried forward from ancient Greece) was based on a body which was believed to be "sound," in harmonious "proportion," and not "grotesque" or "distorted" in any way. Since the unaltered body was in a "temple" and in the "image" of Divinity, it was supposed to be inviolate, impermeable, perfectly balanced in all its "humors." The new mutant self is a fugitive self, formed out of a body which questions canons of somatic taste and proportion, and "erupts" out of the confines of restrictive ideals of human shape.
If, as Aronowitz and others have suggested, identity is formed as a sort of moving "bridge" projected between the social trajectory of individuals and the historical trajectory of the society in which they live, these new identity formations are a response to the way in which technoscience is transforming almost every aspect of post-industrial culture, from religion to sexuality to aesthetics to ethics. (Lyon, 1994.) If group relations and social systems produce identities, then these particular kinds of identities arise out of a culture where technology is causing many familiar structures to be "disappearing through the skylight." Change of all kinds is accelerating exponentially, as information flows to all corners of the globe.
What kinds of identity politics will these new sorts of selves lead to? Certainly Donna Haraway has articulated a cyborg politics of sorts for neo-feminists; and outside the academic world, Gareth Branwyn has been setting forth manifestoes for mutants. Likewise, today's slackers take their inspiration from "Generation X" writers such as Rushkoff and Coupland and movies like the Austin-based Slacker. Organizations like the EFF and CPSR are busy setting out the perhaps unmanageable task of creating virtualist politics for the governing of electronic frontiers. And mediants look to "mental environment" crusaders such as AdBusters to clean up the electronic pollution clouding the new global media consciousness.
The identity politics of these new kinds of groups may be almost unrecognizable because one of the features of these new kinds of identities will be that they are all internally heterogeneous. If ethnic identity was derived from similarity, then mutant identity will have to come out of a mutual recognition of common divergence from existing human morphologies. Like the punks of the 70s, the only thing most mutants will have in common will be the realization that they are becoming something radically different from the norm of their society. Many kinds of identity politics come out of a belief in shared oppression or victimization; but these new kinds of technologically produced identities may share nothing other than the sense that they inhabit new, unexplored realities.
What I have attempted to do here is to take this amorphous constellation known as the "postmodern self" and give it some sense of definition. These new identities are decentered, destabilized, and fragmented, yes, but they also have identifiable features, knowable trajectories, and psychological attributes. Rather than simply yield to a sort of passive schizophrenia, in the post-industrial world, people are assuming these new kinds of identities - not fully consciously, because most would agree that one's identity is never purely autonomously chosen - which will challenge existing preconceptions of subjectivity and subject formation. The "return of the subject" in philosophy has been marked by these weird new kinds of subjects, full of unexpected anti-Cartesian irregularities.
These five kinds of selves are not mutually exclusive, and we can expect that post-industrial citizens will display some or all features of these identities all at once. Thus, in the future, we can expect personal identity to become more associative and "field-oriented," more hybrid and technologized, more oriented toward electronic expression, less oriented toward work, and less somatically grounded. Many of today's subcultures (cyberpunks, ravers, modern primitives, zippies) are experimenting with these new kinds of identities already, as a sort of rehearsal or practice for when they will be more common. As always, these subcultures are showing in microcosm where large sectors of society will be heading in the future.