The digital is no longer a pervasive part of our reality; no longer a frightening specter looming behind screens, trapped. Indeed, it is our reality; or, as Mark Hansen argues in his book Bodies in Code, our reality is now best thought of as “mixed reality.” As with mixtures of other types, the ingredients—the digital and the “real”—lose what clear separation or distinction they appeared to have before: they are blended to make something new.
Analyses of our mixed reality often find the most fertile soil for investigation in social media. Along these lines, social media, such as Twitter and Instagram, are most fruitfully approached not as isolatable or individuated bodies, but as networks in which a vast array of lifeforms and systems are deeply entangled: not just ‘the human’ and ‘the digital’ but a multiplicity of communities, ecosystems, belief systems, and so on and so forth. An analysis that exemplifies such an approach is found in Brian T. Edwards’ essay “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations.” Here, Edwards demonstrates the entanglement between newly emerging technologies and the emergence of new social forms. Edwards shows us the mechanics of the movement of Trump’s boardroom from his reality TV show The Apprentice to the cabinet room and how this movement was facilitated through his social media campaign: “the simulacrum board room of The Apprentice anticipates the transformation of the White House Cabinet Room at the televised live sessions in the early months of 2018.” Social media were the means through which Trump’s campaign propagated the image of himself as a successful business tycoon, allowing him not only to move out of financial distress but to constitute a public for himself, providing analyses such as Edwards’ with a demonstration of the image economies and ‘common sense’ formations articulated by Ariella Azoulay and Jacques Ranciére.
As we begin to understand the mechanics—the logics of circulation, as Edwards would call it—of our mixed realities, we also begin to understand the instability of the concept of ‘citizen’ which we have long taken as political bedrock. Mark Poster, in the chapter titled “Citizens, Digital Media, and Globalization” from his book Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines problematizes the term ‘citizen’ in four ways: first, the principles of the term derive from the West, and the West is responsible for an imperialist and capitalist form of globalization; second, the principles (of natural rights), rooted in the Enlightenment, require one to extract oneself from the social in order to proclaim the universal as natural; third, the conditions of globalization are not only capitalism and imperialism, but also the coupling of human and machine, and we therefore may build new political structures outside of the nation-state only in collaboration with machines; fourth, linked with machines in a global network, the citizen has become something else. Poster proposes instead that we speak of netizens: the citizen of mixed reality.
This movement from citizen to netizen would certainly constitute the type of movement towards digital logics called for by the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE). In their essay “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance,” this type of movement is described as a surrendering of the values and certainties of analogic cosmology. Digital logics, according to the CAE, are those that offer an ongoing flow of sameness: order from order. Alongside analog logics, the CAE speaks of ‘hybridization’ in the Western style of marketing. This hybridization is an articulation of mixed reality applied specifically to marketing strategies, which, as we’ve seen, are invested not only in what we’ve traditionally thought of as ‘products’ of consumption, but also in people—in Presidents. Thus, the concept of hybridization is of crucial importance to our current understandings of political spectacle, and the CAE defines it by explain that “on the one hand, the consumer wants the assurance of reliability provided by digital replication, and on the other hand, desires to own a unique constellation of characteristics to signify he/r individuality.” I want to conclude with a couple questions with regard to what this concept of hybridization may imply about current social logics and organization in light of these essays, and to offer a possible problematic at work here in order to see where we might build on these analyses.
In our mixed realities, these hybridized Western marketing strategies are seemingly ubiquitous. I am interested in the implications of the definition of the ‘digital logics’ at work here—that is, the assurance of reliability provided by digital replication. Recalling George H. Bush’s invocation of Clint Eastwood’s “Make my day” line in his 1988 presidential debate with Michael Dukakis (examined in Edwards’ essay), we ask how this invocation carried with it a summoning of racist logics of Eastwood’s film. This “make my day” line can be seen as one such “assurance of reliability provided by digital replication,” as it signifies a carrying over of racist logics without needing to explicitly lay them out. Digital logics, then, cannot just be thought of as being confined to digital coding of 0’s and 1’s, but is also coded into the languages we are speaking in our conversations every day. Therefore, coding is not only about digital replication—a form of replication that is treated in these essays as recently emergent—but the replication of logics that have been in operation for centuries. Can we, then, approach ‘coding’ as a means of anticipating social organizations and ‘mobilizations’ of affects in marketing (/presidential) campaigns? If so, then I think it is important to problematize the ‘netizen’ invested in these campaigns. The netizen, though it offers a means of understanding mixed reality, forgets the social foundation of the Internet (which, I believe, is also the social foundation of mixed reality more generally): it is about networks, not individuals. The netizen thus seems to carry with it the Enlightenment illusion of individuality—that compulsion to “extract oneself from the social order to proclaim the universal as natural.” I think that this concept may reinscribe this Enlightenment (i.e., Western) tradition that has given ‘individuality’ and ‘body’ to persons so selectively throughout our history if we are not careful to avoid such pitfalls. Thus, we ask: Where might explorations of hybridization and mixed reality lead us if we let go of this individual?