Film
The Social Network meets Agamben
So I went to see THE SOCIAL NETWORK on Saturday. In case you don’t know, the film chronicles wild-savant-genius Mark Zuckerberg and his founding of the popular social networking site Facebook. The film opens with Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend. In this opening, he’s portrayed as a insanely smart, unselfconscious genius-asshole. As the film goes on, Zuckerberg continues to play the role of genius-asshole, sometimes, he is marked with a kindness that strikes the viewer more as naive than genuine.
But this is just a film. A film that is based on a book that is characterized more as “juicy fun” than “reportage” (from the Mark Zuckherberg wikipedia page linked above).
That being said, several things fascinated me about this film:
- Zuckerberg’s portrayal: People seriously can’t get enough of this romanticized genius bullshit. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.
- The whole concept of the “social network” in relation to Zuckerberg, especially in terms of Agamben’s notion of the exception.
- Facebook itself as Agamben’s apparatus.
And so I proceed. My first point is obvious. I’ve made arguments about my whole distaste for the concept of genius repeatedly on HTML Giant. I dislike the portrayal of people as tortured, unsociable, asshole, romanticized geniuses. A few months ago, I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, and that movie pissed me off (I ranted to anyone who would listen) because of the way the writer was portrayed as a suffering genius in the most cliche, predictable ways. I find myself constantly pissed at movies like that, including but not limited to: The Social Network, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, etc etc etc. Whereas I have no doubt that real genius people “suffer” under the “weight” of their “genius,” a good part of it is performative. The characters in these film affect genius, such that others might know and appreciate their genius. Throughout The Social Network, Zuckerberg is portrayed as an egotistical genius, one who can undermine anyone’s argument with flaired cynical wittiness, grounded of course in his uncanny ability to logic beyond “normal” capabilities.
The fact that the suffering, alienating part of genius is what is highlighted in films like these helps reinforce our conception of genius as suffering and alienating. I am particularly upset about this because for many years, in an attempt to prove my genius, I performed pop culture’s genius. Only my suffering and alienation became real (and my genius was not), and the consequences were nearly fatal.
But it is because of Zuckerberg’s genius that he created Facebook, not out of altruism, per se, but out of loneliness and a desire to fit in. See: Zuckerberg wanted to be invited into these exclusive clubs at Harvard, and he needed to create something profoundly profound to get their attention. Predisposed to computer hackery, he made a website called Facemash, where through simple algorithms (and a fair amount of hacking and heavy drinking), people could choose which girl was hotter. The key to the site’s success was (as Zuckerberg so keenly noted) that these were Harvard girls, girls that people knew. There was something juicy in that. From here, he transitioned to thinking about things in terms of a Harvard Facebook, where Harvard students could see pictures, have personal profiles, set status updates (including their sexual status), etc. The key was the exclusivity. It was a Harvard thing. You needed a Harvard email address to be a part of this exclusive club. The point of the Harvard Facebook (which was originally called The Facebook) was its simultaneous inclusivity and exclusivity.
And here, I tentatively tie in Agamben’s notion of the exception from Homo Sacer:
The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included. What emerges in this limit figure is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and what is inside, between exception and rule (25).
Zuckerberg here is the sovereign exception in that he created a social network, a virtual space where he was a member but in no way included. That is, even though he made the thing and he used it, it did not make him a “member” of the greater (real) Harvard community. Being a mere member of The Facebook did not make him a member. He was included but outside.
That was a bit of a stretch. (Full disclosure: I’m about midway through Homo Sacer, so there’s a good chance there’s more to it. I’m rely on the Agambennites to help me out with my weak connections, if connections can in fact be made.)
But what isn’t a stretch is the concept of Facebook as an apparatus. Quoting Foucault, Agamben defines an apparatus as:
- It is a heterogenous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements.
- The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation.
- As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. (2-3)
Agamben traces apparatus back to the Greek concept of oikonomia, “the administration of the oikos (home) and, more generally, management” (8). Oikonomia then becomes the Latin dispositio, which becomes the French dispotif, which is translated into English as apparatus.
The term “apparatus” designates that in which, and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, they must produce their subject. (11)
It is not surprising then that Facebook as apparatus is a space of governance devoid of any foundation in being. Whereas profiles created on Facebook may be of real people, the signifier bears little resemblance to its referent. I used to teach at this college in Indiana, and one of the things my first year students told me (again and again) was that they met their roommates on Facebook and when they actually met face to face, there was a rupture, a disappointment between the profile and the person. Facebook offers subjectivity, the making of a subject, but the subject isn’t real. Facebook is a space for quippy one-liner zings. Real identity is necessarily obscured. It is almost entirely impossible to be genuine, to be authentic on Facebook.
Furthermore, Agamben uses the example of confession as apparatus, and no where is confession so realized as through Facebook, where “a new I is constituted through the negation and, at the same time, the assumption of the old I” (20). Agamben goes on to say:
He who lets himself be captured by the “cellular telephone” apparatus–whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him–cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled. The spectator who spends his evenings in front of the television set only gets, in exchange for his desubjectification, the frustrated mask of the couch potato, or his inclusion in the calculation viewship ratings. (21)
And so, arguably Agamben would say that he who lets himself be captured by Facebook acquires not only a mask (sometimes frustrated, oftentimes simply unaware or unselfconcious) but also inclusion in the calculation of Facebook status updates. I can only harken back to the quote from Homo Sacer that emphasizes inclusivity v. membership. What is it to be included? What is it to be a member? What are the rewards and what are the real consequences?
Zuckerberg created the ultimate social network, where people could make friends and see each other, a space of autonomy, only somewhere in the mix, we lost our subjectivity. We bought into the apparatus, often times using that apparatus as a replacement for the real, what Baudrillard would call the simulacrum.
And I end with two points:
- I love Facebook. I use it every day. I’m on Facebook right now, as I type this. I simply want to problematize Facebook.
- Derrida quoted Aristotle: O friends, there are no friends (i philoi, oudeis philos). And in Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, he recites that same quote as: He who has (many) friends, does not have a single friend (oi philoi, oudeis philos) (26-27). Subtle difference, but Agamben makes a powerful point with these quotes. I look at the number of friends I have on Facebook, and suddenly, I am as dreary as the outside.
PS: If anyone wants to read What is an Apparatus?, it is easily downloadable as a pdf. Thank you, Ben Segal, for recommending I read it.
Tags: apparatus, giorgio agamben, homo sacer, mark zuckerberg, the social network
whoa, this is awesome lily. i have little interest in this film, but, similarly, i use facebook a ton, and have used the internet a ton in the last decade, included in establishing interpersonal relationships.
I love this, Lily. It’s always nice and scary to apply Agamben. But to be in his mode of critique is a little bewildering–he’s making an extremely strong claim that, when you start to notice it even on a minimal level, can make one (or me at least) feel small and helpless. One thing I remember about Homo Sacer, however, is that Agamben more or less tacitly claims that divine violence, happily enough for Agamben himself, manifests itself in criticisms of mythical violence. So using Agamben as a weapon, however tenuous his conclusion might be, is I think a pretty good strategy.
I’m glad that you brought all this up. I definitely think that Derrida’s “friend,” with the friend as every other who is absolutely other to me (though I see this having read only a couple of chapters of Politics of Friendship and probably not understanding it), can definitely be read into this movie. But I don’t know enough about the friend to really comment; I think the last shot directly contradicts the beginning, because now it is the other’s decision whether we can be friends. In this social network the decision of the other rules and the individual is renounced. The egoistic creator of the system (Zuckerberg) is thrown back into his own system as the one who the other can decide upon and not the one who actively decides. So that’s Derrida and that was definitely there in how I read the movie.
So there’s the dialectic of the first half, in which gradually the kernel whose origin is an ego-driven split between the sexes spirals into a universal that can include anyone anywhere, and then there’s the sort of resolution of this split in the second half. The resolution is, again, Zuckerberg’s being included in his own system and his renunciation, whether sovereign or not, of his primacy in that system. I dunno. That’s sort of how I read Zuckerberg’s sovereignty, I’ll have to see it a second time, though. Excellent movie.
Right, okay, well in that case I don’t think Schmitt’s sovereign is that applicable here. Schmitt’s sovereign decides on the state of emergency and is necessarily more than mere life, i.e. more than what would be the “social” of The Social Network. Agamben’s reading of Schmitt locates the sovereign as immanent in bare life, as the “originary political relation” that turns social relations political at their foundation. I haven’t looked at Agamben in a while so this may be wrong but this is my basic understanding of the two paradigms. Schmitt’s application of the sovereign consequently doesn’t apply here, I don’t think.
nothing to get an html giant writer riled up like a portrayal of someone accomplishing something.
Editors used to tell me they couldn’t print my essays if I used the word “problematize.”
whoa, this is awesome lily. i have little interest in this film, but, similarly, i use facebook a ton, and have used the internet a ton in the last decade, included in establishing interpersonal relationships.
Lucky for me this isn’t a refereed journal then.
This is some next level shit.
thanks, magick_mike!
cool.
but geniuses do suffer, right? it’s just that people will watch a genius suffer (in a movie) a lot more readily than a car mechanic or chiropractor (who also suffer)?
I’m jealous too.
I blame you and all yr Agamben talk. Also, you were the one to get me super trashed before the movie. Thanks.
Yes, they do suffer. But everybody hurts, some time.
I’d like to see a movie about a suffering chiropractor. That sounds delicious.
Wow. I think I need to be a genius to understand this thread. I think my letters will greatly disappoint you, Lily. :-)
oh no! honestly, i wasn’t trying to be obtuse. agamben’s just hard to explain succinctly.
it’s easy to watch a chiropractor suffer, just remind them they don’t practice real medicine.
i just watched Chop Shop. man, so great. not that’s it’s all suffering but the poeple it portrays and the world they are in, wow.
Hi Lily, this is interesting. I think you can go back to Carl Schmitt for more connections: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” …and the basis for sovereignty is in the distinction between friend and enemy (which is “existentially something different”)
I love this, Lily. It’s always nice and scary to apply Agamben. But to be in his mode of critique is a little bewildering–he’s making an extremely strong claim that, when you start to notice it even on a minimal level, can make one (or me at least) feel small and helpless. One thing I remember about Homo Sacer, however, is that Agamben more or less tacitly claims that divine violence, happily enough for Agamben himself, manifests itself in criticisms of mythical violence. So using Agamben as a weapon, however tenuous his conclusion might be, is I think a pretty good strategy.
I’m glad that you brought all this up. I definitely think that Derrida’s “friend,” with the friend as every other who is absolutely other to me (though I see this having read only a couple of chapters of Politics of Friendship and probably not understanding it), can definitely be read into this movie. But I don’t know enough about the friend to really comment; I think the last shot directly contradicts the beginning, because now it is the other’s decision whether we can be friends. In this social network the decision of the other rules and the individual qua sovereign is renounced. The egoistic creator of the system (Zuckerberg) is thrown back into his own system as the one who the other can decide upon and not the one who actively decides. So that’s what I know of Derrida in terms of this movie.
So there’s the dialectic of the first half, in which gradually the kernel whose origin is an ego-driven split between the sexes spirals into a universal that can include anyone anywhere, and then there’s the sort of resolution of this split in the second half. The resolution is, again, Zuckerberg’s being included in his own system and his renunciation, whether sovereign or not, of his primacy in that system. Of course this isn’t a unified system but a system of differences that is always different from how it will have been constituted blah blah blah blah postmodernist maxim shit (well not of course because this is infinitely arguable vis-a-vis how you understand the internet). I dunno. That’s sort of how I read Zuckerberg’s sovereignty, I’ll have to see it a second time, though. Excellent movie.
Yeah, I mean, and then you have to go back to Hegel for Schmitt, etc.–which is what I’m doing right now incidentally–but I think Lily’s doing something creative with the sovereign here, and I think again that it’s important that we apply Agamben to stuff.
O man, Alec, so much in here. I need to sit on this a while before I can even start to respond. So smart…
Sure, but I also think if you’re talking about Agamben’s exception, you just can’t avoid Schmitt. I know Agamben is critical of him but I think they could complement each other in what Lily’s doing here
btw alec I ‘liked’ your comment accidentally, soz. Not that I don’t like it, it was just an accident.
Hi Shiona: Yes, absolutely we should look at Schmitt. I welcome anything you have to say on him. Also, criticality is vital! So if Agamben is critical of Schmitt, in many ways, it is good. Doesn’t he turn to Schmitt quite a bit in Homo Sacer? Or maybe I’m getting my readings confused. I am apt to do that…
Right, okay, well in that case I don’t think Schmitt’s sovereign is that applicable here. Schmitt’s sovereign decides on the state of emergency and is necessarily more than mere life, i.e. more than what would be the “social” of The Social Network: political. Agamben’s reading of Schmitt locates the sovereign as immanent in bare life, as the “originary political relation” that turns social relations political at their foundation. I haven’t looked at Agamben in a while so this may be wrong but this is my basic understanding of the two paradigms. Schmitt’s application of the sovereign consequently doesn’t apply here, I don’t think.
ok, yes, I see what you’re saying – this reading isn’t theological. But it could easily be – if we are talking about Facebook as apparatus, I don’t see why not.
Why is problematize better than complicate?
Did you read the article about Zuckerberg in the New Yorker?
“But it is because of Zuckerberg’s genius that he created Facebook, not out of altruism, per se, but out of loneliness and a desire to fit in. See: Zuckerberg wanted to be invited into these exclusive clubs at Harvard, and he needed to create something profoundly profound to get their attention.”
In reality, I think he created Facebook because he could (he understood the potential of the internet better than anyone else and had the programming skills) and because he wanted to be successful. He didn’t care about Harvard (Zuckerberg dropped out after his freshmen year). He also doesn’t really care about money, seemingly… or at least it’s not his primary motivation.
Even within the film, he didn’t really care about the clubs. If he wanted to be in the clubs, he would’ve helped make ‘Harvard Connection’. Instead, he blows off the club members, doesn’t return their calls, and screws them. He also doesn’t really seem to care about girls or friends. He doesn’t go to the parties. He sits at the office programming. He doesn’t care about anything except conquering the internet.
My fantasy – if he wanted to, he could declare war on the global economy and seriously impede digital commerce.
As the verb is used in (some) contemporary philosophical discourse, “to problematize” is more specific than “to complicate” in two ways: a) problematizing involves making clear something that was already – perhaps is always – a ‘problem’ (that is, no new ‘complications’ are added); and more effectually, b) problematizing involves making clear that a ‘problem’ is intrinsically irresolvable.
In this limited sense of “to problematize” – which I think is the sense that lily meant in “want[ing] to problematize Facebook” – , every ‘problematic’ situation is ‘complicated’, but every ‘complication’ is not ‘problematic’.
If something is already a problem, why would one need to ‘problematize’ it? I don’t understand why complicate implies lack of complication while problematize implies an existing problem. Couldn’t one say that complicate implies the existence of complication?
Why does problematizing involve making clear that a ‘problem’ is intrinsically irresolvable? Couldn’t complicating involve making clear that a ‘complication’ is intrinsically irresolvable?
Make a better argument for the word because it is very annoying to read.
exception
Phenomenological coherence – albeit a fragile and problematic coherence, a dissolute coherence – is a kind of sovereignty:
–
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
—The Great Gatsby
Could you elaborate more on how you felt Zuckerberg was portrayed as a romanticized genius? The romanticized genius oscarbait genre makes me vomit in the back of my throat a little, and most reviews/your statement frame the movie like that, and it makes me feel like I watched a different movie than everyone else. To me he was a generic CS student that got fed other people’s ideas and then tweaked them. Want your opinion because I enjoy hearing your stance on ‘genius’ and why ‘tortured genius’ is bullshit.
Facebook as an apparatus feels legit. People that act disingenuous and cagey on facebook look cool and people that try to be sincere look like dorks. Related somehow, maybe.
nothing to get an htmlgiant writer riled up like a portrayal of someone accomplishing something.
Read the argument you’ve been offered more carefully and the word might become less “very annoying”.
Problems aren’t “problematized”, but your understanding of them might become so. A problem becomes understood to be “problematic” (in this usage) when its irreducibility by or to a solution becomes essential to one’s grasp of it as a problem.
“To complicate” does “impl[y] the existence of complication”, so one “could”, should, and does say so.
Complicating could “involve making clear that a ‘complication’ is intrinsically irresolvable”, but that’s not how – in my experience – “to complicate” is used; it’s a more general word than that. A more specific word, a word for a particular kind of complication – a complication which has, in its current usage, the character of ‘intrinsic irresolution’ – is “to problematize”.
letters journal, you can obtusify the non-mutual implication of “to complicate” in “to problematize” – simply by insisting that all problems are both “complicated” and “problematic”, because, for you, those’re exact synonyms – , but that would be a case of “to personalproblematize”.
you didn’t watch a different movie, the author of this post just completely misunderstood the film
Alec — and Lily, too! — pardon me if you’re already aware of it, but before you get too far into Schmitt, or Hegel, or anyone else for that matter, Agamben provides a suggestive, alternative account of sovereignty and the exception (in what reads like a spot of self-revision) by staging a debate between Schmitt and Benjamin in chapter 4, “Gigantomachy Concerning a Void,” of his slim, yellow volume, State of Exception, a 2003 follow up to 1995’s Homo Sacer, and part of the eponymous larger project.
And Lily, the first essay in Agamben’s Profanations is on, and entitled, “Genius.” Just to tie a few threads.
Hi JWG: He wasn’t a generic CS student. He was an exceptional student, which was highlighted when he stormed out of the class and non-chalantly rambled off the answer to his surprised/baffled professor.
His story is extraordinary. What he did was extraordinary. I don’t want to downplay Zuckerberg or Facebook; rather, it is the way he is portrayed that I find problematic. The opening scene with the girlfriend is another excellent example of how he is romanticized as genius.
I’m not calling into question his actual genius. (I don’t know the guy.)
Nor would I say that genius doesn’t exist. (I’d say I even know some.)
Zuckerberg did more than “tweak” ideas. He created something that others did/could not. I posted a while back on the whole Wilde “talent borrows; genius steals” thing. Zuckerberg stole an idea and made it better.
Yeah, FB profile pictures are weird.
Yeah, my friend keeps telling me that I have to read that chapter, so I guess I’ll buck up and read it. With a nod to Agamben’s creativity, the theoretical element of SoE is terribly unclear, and it’s hard to get much from it besides what is most explicit without a few careful readings. I’ll have to read it. Have you read that book Benjamin’s -abilities?
It seems odd that you ignored what was probably the most important phrase in deadgod’s post, that being “used in (some) contemporary philosophical discourse”.
Your challenges to the word are relevant in the context of its general / universal / nonspecific (maybe?) use. In the context of this argument, which relates to the word as it is used in texts such as those being discussed, they’re pretty irrelevant. As I’m sure you know, being a journal-of-letters-made-Disqus-commenter, a word’s contextual significance and appositeness are determined less by a strict, objective, pinpoint definition than by a cloud of possible pinpoint definitions commingled with associations and traditions of use. Philosophy writing always relies upon the establishment of such traditions of use, because it allows for the introduction of new terms which might be used as shorthand for concepts which can take whole essays, or even whole books, to define and communicate.
I expect he’ll disagree with me as well, ha. Thanks for those comments, anyway, deadgod. They were informative. This whole post is informative, actually. Gives me a few more books to add to the reading list, which is always one of my favourite outcomes of a visit to HTMLGiant. (Thanks, Lily!)
I think there’s an internal inconsistency within the film, which AGAIN, is not fact, not true, or fully true, whatever that means. I’m speaking about his portrayal in the film. His motivation was to be invited to the clubs. By the time the Ken-doll twins asked Zuckerberg to help, the initial round of invitations to the clubs had happened. (Maybe even the second round?) He’d already been by-passed. His friend, however, was not.
Zuckerberg, in the end, comes off seeming petty. Like he couldn’t let go of petty competitions.
And he does care about friends and girls. He doesn’t go to parties, but by the end of the film, we can see how he is still obsessed with his ex. She is, after all, why he wanted to expand in the first place. And he gladly accepts a bj from the random girl in the bathroom. (That he sat at his desk rather than partying makes it possible for him to be guilty of calling the cops. That was left open intentionally, I’d say.)
Finally, I like your fantasy. Maybe he will see this on his Google Alerts and take your solid advice.
i have profanations and state of exception lined up. i hope to read them sometime soon. today was an exceptionally bad day, and as an act of pure rebellion (pathetic, I know), I read Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? and wrote this blog. This is what happens when I am angry at school.
Well, not THAT easily downloadable. Damn.
try here: http://www.mediafire.com/?mnf4mmynyjg
this is what i used this morning to download the pdf.
Yes, there we go. Thanks, Lily – for the article and for the link.
nice one, lily. i want to see the movie.
I love Facebook. I use it every day. I’m on Facebook right now, as I type this. I simply want to problematize Facebook.
i read this as: ‘i love this thing, but i want to make this thing into a problem.’ are you saying you want to diagnose FB’s essence as problematic? and if so, isn’t that, like, a bad thing?
and i would argue that your use of the ‘apparatus’ definition better applies to the Net at-large, more so than one popular website.
i’ve yet to see the film, but what’s so wrong about depicting ‘genius’? they can’t all be dumb and dumber.
I did not ignore that sentence. I understand where deadgod (misread it as deargod) is coming from and used to agree. I used to use the word problematize, but I found that 99% of the time complicate is more clear. The distinction between the two – even in the context of Continental Philosophy – is not meaningful enough to justify the aesthetic pain caused by the word ‘problematize’.
Back to the original: “I simply want to problematize Facebook.”
Using ‘complicate’ here might require an extra word or two, but I think an extra word or two is needed. Preceding this sentence is a short personal confession (“I love Facebook. I use it every day. I’m on Facebook right now, as I type this.”), which implies that Lily is not negotiating Facebook per se but her relationship to it. Writing this I realize it’s not actually what I’m interested in here.
…
Can I go back to Derrida? I think Derrida would say that this post implies the existence of a real individual beyond the contamination of Facebook, but this realness and authenticity does not actually exist. There is no pure subject contaminated by Facebook. Facebook doesn’t obscure Real Identity because there is no Real Identity to obscure. This goes back to the critique of logocentrism and the (easily complicated!) belief that spoken language (‘meeting face to face’) is somehow less mediated or more ‘real’ than written text.
The letter I wrote to Lily (sending it soon!) for her post about letter writing is no more an expression of my ‘real identity’ than a Facebook page would be, if I had one. This does not mean that Facebook and the letter are the same or that they are good.
One of the other big problems with the concept of genius is that it is sexist. Einstein, Shakespeare, Newton, Hawking, Rimbaud; a genius is always a man. The role of the genius is one of the few acceptable ways a man can be “feminine” or “emotional” in society. If a woman ever behaves like a genius then she is just behaving like a woman; emotional, irrational, a bitch etc.
there are plenty of women geniuses, they just aren’t portrayed in film/popular culture as often. i think you’re onto something, voorface, but i’m hesitant to fully hop on board.
In the way that we say someone who has created important work is a genius, of course there are many women geniuses. But the role of the genius, judged by the person rather than the work, is one created for men. Two artists behave in a similar way, one is a man and the other is a woman. The man gets called a genius and the woman is called crazy. This happens all the time, even if the artists work together. Look at Kurt and Courtney, John and Yoko. You’re right that it’s about how genius is portrayed, but that’s all genius really is: a performance.
I couldn’t agree with you more!! I said in earlier comments that it is not Zuckerberg’s genius that I call into question but the way that genius is performed/portrayed/affected through the film. The same goes for people in real life, where the desire to be known/understood/misunderstood as genius becomes a performance. The problem is that in enacting that performance, the results on the person can become detrimental, as they were to me. An additional problem remains that we are all performing, whether it is genius or not, our public selves are performative, our virtual selves are performative, etc etc. Lily Hoang on HTML Giant is a performance, which is apparent if you ever meet me. (I’m generally a pretty huge wreck in person, or at least I feel that way.) Voorface on HTML Giant is a performance. I can offer no solution. The most I can do is point to a problem, which is itself problematic.
Agamben already speaks of the net as an apparatus, computers as an apparatus. I am simply being more specific.
I think Deadgod dealt with my use of the word “problematize” in comments above. I defer to her/him.
Ha! – “deargod” is a better handle than ‘deadgod’ – I wish I’d thought of it.
I don’t understand the difference between “negotiating Facebook per se” and “negotiating [one’s] relationship to it” – I mean, doesn’t ‘to negotiate’ mean ‘to work out a “relationship”‘? and isn’t facebook itself a self-reproductive tissue of “relationships” (given provisional ‘subjects’ at all)?
The Derridan point you raise seems to me excellent. I’d put it like this: a meat friendship is as fraught with ‘unfriendliness’ – is as non-absolute – as an online friendship, so, as I think you’re saying, there’s no pure ‘friendship’ for the internet “to contaminate”. It’s true, though, that disembodiment throws the question of a fictive authenticity of ‘friendlily relating to another’ into greater relief, at least for this caveperchild.
No, Donald, I agree with your point – my own, phrased at least as well, albeit not by me ha.
It’s not just pro “philosophy”, either, is it – we can’t talk about anything without using jargon that we don’t expect each other to have trouble with. ‘The Truffles split Smith wide right, with the tight end lined up in the slot.’ – If you don’t know (American) football, you’re going to have trouble hearing that without gruesome images running through your imagination.
I’m guessing – glancing at her or his response to you – that letters journal is irritated not simply by theory jargon, but (more so) by theory talk that’s often simple ideas groaning under the decoration of bullshit. to problematize, transgressivity, liminality, and so on: useful words often used abusively.
But lily hasn’t put the bozo hat on her readers with “want to problematize Facebook”; she means something interesting, namely, that when one constructs/discovers a network of “friends” online, those – what – voices both are and are not ‘friends’ (as can be seen most clearly in the “exception”al case of Zuckerberg).
(I’d say to lily – and might repeat further down the thread – that the “problem” isn’t facebook, but rather is friendship, community, human solidarity, and is not only not new, but rather is coterminous, I think, with “human”.)
Ha! – “deargod” is a better handle than ‘deadgod’ – I wish I’d thought of it.
I don’t understand the difference between “negotiating Facebook per se” and “negotiating [one’s] relationship to it” – I mean, doesn’t ‘to negotiate’ mean ‘to work out a “relationship”‘? and isn’t facebook itself a self-reproductive tissue of “relationships” (given provisional ‘subjects’ at all)?
The Derridan point you raise seems to me excellent. I’d put it like this: a meat friendship is as fraught with ‘unfriendliness’ – is as non-absolute – as an online friendship, so, as I think you’re saying, there’s no pure ‘friendship’ for the internet “to contaminate”. It’s true, though, that disembodiment throws the question of a fictive authenticity of ‘friendlily relating to another’ into greater relief, at least for this caveperchild.
Garsh, that’s a problematic deferral.
Many people decry Derrida as “unreadable” and so on, but he is probably the philosopher I find myself thinking about in ‘real world situations’ more than any other.