048

Authors:

 Cubitt, Sean.

Title:

 The Distributed Self

Keywords:

 transition, hyperindividualistic network, self-mapping, temporal dimension

Abstract:

 The history of the transitio from mechanical to digital media implies a transition from the time-based organisation of recording to the spatially-based organisation of transmission. In many respects, this transition represents a crisis of the European subject, constituted as it is in the continuity of the self with itself over time. In this paper, I want to argue for a politics of identity which takes account both of the crisis of individualism and the threat of a hyperindividualistic network subjectivity. Arguing that central characteristics of the digital media are their ephemerality and their self-mapping, the paper will argue that it is possible to envisage a mode of subjectivity which is more wholly mediated than is currently the case, but which gains from that mediation as sense of interconnectivity and mutual dependency from which a profoundly social sense of self appropriate to the global electronic communications media may arise. The paper will conclude by presenting theses on the re-assimilation of the temporal dimension into distributed subjectivities.
Sean Cubitt sean@nagle.demon.co.uk is Reader in Video and Media Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, England. He is the author of Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, and Digital Aesthetics as well as numerous articles on global arts and media.