Uneasily, conspiracy theory, subjectivity, social media

Last night, I switched my Facebook account over to their Timeline format. Suddenly, it all flashed before my eyes: my idealized life, the person I imagined myself to be, laid out in pictures and text. (Studies have been done about Facebook's notable ability to decrease happiness among its users, because users seldom post anything self-damning, and so it appears as though the whole world is problem-free. " Shteyngart in an interview: "I don’t think I’m any happier than I was before the iPhone and immersion in the Internet. I think I’m much more anxious and much more stressed out.") And I wanted more, I wanted to see more of who I was, what I'd done, what I'd consumed, what I'd liked, who I'd been with. I don't know how this will go away: the pleasure of seeing one's virtual self (and I do think "self" is appropriate, given its imaginary associations of wholeness) laid out before one, relieved, momentarily, of answering that terrible, tyrannical question: who am I, and why am I here? All of this resonates strongly with both old theories of postmodern subjectivity (a little of this, a little of that, all combined into a flat intertextual surface, per Jameson), and recent work on the culture of the Network Society, a society in which information constantly flows, and which morphs subjectivity into an anxious, do-I-rate self, as perfectly described by Gary Shteyngart, whose young Media workers commit suicide rather than live without their apparats and their attendant Facebook-amplified ratings. Both Jodi Dean (Blog Theory) and Tiziana Terranova (Network Culture) write about how the continual chatter of information produces selves that are, to some extent, functions of the network. Indeed, for Terranova, who is ambivalent about the political potential of Network Culture, individuals themselves are a regulatory function which reduces the potential for a multitude or mass:

The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of the multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flows. To the decoding of the mass into a network culture, to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of a multitude, corresponds an overcoding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code modeled on the biological notion of gene (123)

The individual is here reduced to an Oedipal virus in the potentially productive code of flows. Why I care about this: I'm struck by the way Facebook has amplified a set of media and consumer cultures that make manifest the degree to which postmodern subjectivity is an amalgamation of consumer desires, recycled texts, quotations, and other dispersed texts that have little to do with an anachronistic individuality, and yet, the appeal of such individuality is exactly the filter through which the subjectivizing discourses of media and marketing work. Facebook is a physical manifestation of the set of flows that comprise the postmodern subject, the multiple and shifting discourses that uneasily course through the individual. That such a reflected, virtual self is subject to colonization by the corporations which feed Facebook's advertising revenue, that such flows are continually assembled and reassembled into marketing profiles, credit scores, fans, voters, consumers, and so on, that the very notion of a private, autonomous self which exist previous to the consumer energies that work upon it, doesn't really matter: if I believe it is me, if I believe that They act on my inmost desires, then my subjectivity is nevertheless activated, and my agency in the Network Society is effective.

In this framework, conspiracy theory serves as a set of particularly sticky subjectivizing discourses, discourses that promise, with a grim smile, all the imagined masculine agency of Yesteryear, as well as access to Their small rooms, Their sites of effectiveness, agency, solidity. Conspiracy discourses are different in degree, angularity, reach than sports, fan, fashion discourses, but not in kind. They just promise more. In this, they are not exclusively masculine, and yet their reactionary energy, their reliance on old models of self, functions as such.