Technology and identity

In an earlier piece — The changing face of identity — I reflected on the implications and possible influence, if not “effects”, of the social networking site, Facebook, on people’s sense of identity. At the time, Vincent Maher made an interesting comment on my piece, questioning what he saw as the implication that I was arguing in favour of a kind of technological determinism.

At the time I was preoccupied with other things, but would like to elaborate an answer to his comment here.

In the earlier piece, I relied mainly on the work of Sherry Turkle; it is necessary, however, to introduce a properly poststructuralist (or complexity-theoretical) perspective to explain my contention, that it is not, in fact, a case of technological determinism.

(To address the matter adequately, would take a much longer essay; elsewhere, I have written at length on it, for example in “Popular art, the image, the subject and subverting hegemony”, Communicatio — South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, Vol 32, 1, 2006, pp 16-37; and in “Postmodernity, globalisation, communication, and identity”, Communicare — Journal for Communication Sciences in South Africa, Vol. 26, 2, December 2007, pp 36-55.)

One of the most pertinent texts on the topic is Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996), where he analyses the revealing tensions in Freud’s work. In some of his writings, the father of psychoanalysis depicts the human psyche as an archive, or “archiving machine”, in light of its far-reaching implications for the periodic transformation of human subjectivity. He considers the possibility that one’s very “identity” may be configured and reconfigured in relation to technological devices.

In a sustained effort at conceptualising the functioning of the psyche, Freud considered various models of the psyche, including the so-called “mystic pad” (a well-known doodling, drawing or writing toy), with its wax tablet and wax paper, covered by a celluloid sheet, on which children could write and clear the surface by lifting the sheet.

According to Derrida’s reading, Freud was not here merely engaged in judging the writing apparatus’s efficacy in representing the psyche, but was in effect alluding to the different ways in which a variety of prosthetic technological devices affect the very structure of the psyche. In particular, Derrida suggests that certain “geo-techno-logical shocks” might have had a revolutionary effect on the “psychoanalytic archive” if, instead of the handwritten, snail-mail letters exchanged among Freud and his contemporaries, they had had access to such contemporary technological devices, including faxes, printers, tape recorders, televisions, and especially email.

One must not here overlook the radicality of what Derrida thinks of as his little “retrospective science fiction”. It bears on nothing less than the structure of the human psyche, and therefore on that of human identity. In his words (Archive Fever, pp. 16-17):

“It would have transformed this history [of psychoanalysis] from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivisation produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.”

What does this rather complicated statement mean? For one thing, it seems to me to mean nothing less than that the state-of-the-art of communication technology not only determines the field of psychoanalysis, but also provides the historically contingent forms for people’s understanding of the social world — forms without which social reality would be conceived of very differently.

Derrida (Archive Fever, p 18) seems to have this in mind where he remarks: “… what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives”. In other words, in a certain sense the technological devices that humans invent dialectically shape the manner in which they comprehend and act in the world — it shapes the structural dynamics of culture and society, as well as the structure of human identity. And Facebook is no exception.

Investigations of this kind (like Archive Fever) are important to determine the dialectical changes wrought by email in human behaviour, by SMS-ing or texting via mobile phones — not merely changes in the language people use for interpersonal communication, but in the very way that they think and speak — ultimately, therefore, changes in the linguistic constitution of their identities. In other words, communications technology does not leave human identity unaffected. What Derrida further alludes to, namely that the news media — television, radio, internet news — produce, as much as record, the very structure of the news, with undeniable political consequences, also merits serious consideration.

Today, it seems as if one cannot get away from the effects of the media and communications (and archiving) technology — wherever you go, they seem to infiltrate your mind and your personality.

And if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just think of the way in which especially teenagers’ behaviour has been affected by the use of cellphones: it is nothing unusual to see four or five young people walking abreast, not talking to one another, but texting on their cellphones (which puts a different complexion on the word “cellphone” — many people do seem to be imprisoned by these gadgets).

Add to this the phenomenon that school kids sometimes seem to act in certain ways for the sake of being photographed by their peers with cellphones, and it should be clear that social interaction has been modified by the use of mobile phones and other relatively recent technological inventions — the latter, as Derrida suggests, actually seem to structure ways of behaving, and in the process, identity-formation or modification.

Why is this not a case of technological determinism? Because no one whose behaviour or identity has been affected or influenced like this is doomed to remain in a behavioural straitjacket for all time to come. The conception of the human subject that underpins Derrida’s as well as other poststructuralist thinkers’ work is a multifaceted one, and identity is therefore not incarcerated once and for all.

“I” can look at myself with approval or disgust, and either confirm and reinforce certain patterns of behaviour, or negate and modify my own social actions. There are many ways of articulating this among thinkers such as Derrida and his contemporaries, but what these idiomatically different descriptions have in common is a distinction among various registers of identity — one which denotes relative stability, one that suggests mobility and self-transformation, and another which is the source of a causality that humans cannot control (what Lyotard calls the “inhuman” in us, or the “savage soul of childhood”).