Bodies on the Line: Cyber-melancholia and the Suspended Animation of the Virtual Body Ezequiel González

“Forgetting oneself is opening oneself.” — Dōgen, from The Moon in a Dewdrop (1253)

I. [I’m already logged on, unsure at this point of what my password is. I scroll through my main account, occasionally sending hearts to friends, families, acquaintances. I go through my messages, replying or ignoring. My partner has sent a disappearing image, I should open that later. If I switch into one of my other accounts (I have four), they’ll know I’m fully on-line, so I stay on my main (account). I close out of the app, but my life is still refreshing on the timeline: a video of me from two weeks ago receiving likes, messages with my image reaching around the globe, I can even connect another app to my account, posting when I’m not in front of the screen. I may take a break, but my account does not.]

While there has been an explosion of research into digital subject formation since the 1990s, much of it has considered the digital “body” as a diminutive form of a material body: a poor copy (or perhaps a “poor image”1) that cannot compete

1See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” with the complexities of the human organism. Nonetheless, we rely more and more on social media and telepresence software, highlighting the persistence of this hazy outline of a digital body, presence, and ordering logic. In its persistence, this semblance of a separate body seems to destabilize digital theories of selfhood that rely solely on corporeality. In other terms, what if the digital body were not assumed to be sutured to the material body, thus rendering the superfcial language of media studies insuffcient to excavate our current relationships with our digital avatar(s)? This project will seek to consider this possibility, taking departure from Judith Butler’s schematization of melancholia in The Psychic Life of Power, putting their spatializing psychoanalytic language in conversation with digital theorists sketching the depth and complexities of cyber-subjectivities. Through this comparative reading, I aim to demonstrate how the virtual space is distinct from the material world2, eluci-dating how this distinction can open pathways towards diffused subjectivities

2Throughout this paper, I will use “material” to denote the biological world, the side of the screen of the feshy-ego, and “virtual” to denote the world of cyberspace, the cyber-ego.

and different ways of understanding selfhood beyond corporeality. Putting my own body on the line as a site of narrativized refection within the social media platform Instagram in brief epigraphs, this essay will seek to trouble the solidity of a human anchored in the material form, humbly pointing ever outwards to cyber-conceptions of our shared future(s).

II. [I decide to go on Live as I’m walking through the airport. I narrate my packing schedule, explaining my trajectory on the journey home. My followers tune in, offering questions, reactions, hearts, thumbs up. I respond — my friend sends me a text, telling me she is screen-recording my Live. I end the Live once I’m on the plane, spending the rest of the time scrolling through my likes, making sure I’ve responded to all the comments on my photos. I put my phone on airplane mode.]

Before considering the extent of digital subjectivity in relation to the material body, it is critical to frst recognize the particularities of the digital realm. The virtual world is not simply a fawed copy or a poor image of the material world, but a thriving informatic multiverse structured by its own laws, logics, and (dis)continuities. As digital theorist Tara McPherson notes in her article “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web”, “the Web constitutes itself in the unfolding of experience” in a “navigable terrain of spatialized data” whereby users forge connections, explore and create architectures, and recombine themselves in a form that is unique to the medium. The fact that the Web “constitutes itself” points to the generative nature of cyberspace: a pulsating, amorphous web probing ever outwards into the furthest reaches of the world. On Instagram specifcally, we are attuned to an audiovisual-based social media landscape. Interactions on the site are gathered up in timelines of pictures and videos, punctuated by daily disappearing stories or Live appearances. In this platform, exchanges are realized via comments and likes, a very literal affective economy that, while commercially dominated by so-called “infuencers” and corporate sponsors, nonetheless applies to the photos and videos coming from old high school acquaintances. We give and receive “likes” in the shape of a heart; perhaps we react in a Live with a frowning emoji. But while the virtual space is a distinct digital arena replete with its own actions, logics, and consequences, it is not completely separate from the material world on the other side of the screen. Returning to McPherson, “what a medium like the web is or will be...is not separate from the discourse which surrounds it and structures conditions of possibility...[while it is also] shaped by the medium and its particular [forms]”.

Put in different terms, the architectural structure and the interface of a site

the screen, exercise of digitalization that fnds its conclusion within virtuality3. Through what seems like a diffusive engagement mediated by a screen, the e-self is reconsolidated4, seemingly solid before our own eyes yet absolutely fractured among the various threads of the Web. We recognize the body on this side of the screen, drinking tea while typing comments on an essay, reading the news. But what of the other body, the body contained within the screen? Consider the ways in which our likeness and actions can circulate on the web without our direct input (viral videos, likes, automatic following, etc.). Both individually and in a composite, an “us” starts to form: a semi-consolidated e-self, a cyber-ego.

We create an account (or several accounts) on Instagram. Our main account refects and catalogues our face and images, our likes and dislikes, our desires, our private information. This account looks and speaks like us, circulating freely in the fow of digital information. We in essence construct a Self that can act and speak on our behalf. We queue posts, we hook up a bot that automatically follows and unfollows accounts5;6;. Yet despite our input via our fngertips, once our cyber-ego has been constructed and anchored in the “network-extension”, it has lost the the support of the material

3“As I interact on the Net, I reconfgure myself; my network-extension defnes me exactly as my material body defned me in the old biological culture.” (translation mine) in Paula Sibilia, El hombre postorgánico: Cuerpo, subjetividad Y tecnologías digitales. 4Within a literary example, N. Katherine Hayles terms this digital assemblage a “reconstituted corpus [which] is a body of information.” 5See websites like Phantombuster.com or the FollowLike bot. 6Note also that this is just with our current mainstream technology which will no doubt appear clunky to a reader in the not-so-distant future. It isn’t too diffcult to imagine a completely automated Instagram infuencer account, following the example of social media bots, Sophia the Robot, GPT-3, etc.

body7. We may be able to go from the material to the digital, but as of now there is no technology that can seamlessly input digital data into our brain. The e-self has lost the anchor of the material body, and appendage-like imitations in the digital realm (“pokes” on Facebook, “taps” on Grindr, “claps” on LinkedIn, etc.) are insuffcient to recreate the material sensorium8 .

Looking to Judith Butler’s analysis of psychic inceptions in The Psychic Life of Power can point towards a quasi-psychic apparatus at play in this virtualized body represented on the screen. In Judith Butler’s reading of classic Freudian psychoanalysis, melancholia is what not only creates psychic internality, but also the ego itself as a psychic object:

Melancholia describes a pro cess by which an originally external object [or ideal] is lost... and the refusal to break the

7At the same time, our likeness can circulate across the globe without our knowledge or consent. We can be hacked, and another voice can speak with our face, not to mention the myriad of other forms of digital identity theft. Even this language (“identity theft”, “hacking”) points to our lack of wholesale authority over this digitized subject. While we may have birthed this body with our face, it is not solely under our control. 8This may seem contradictory with the aforementioned linkage between material and virtual bodies. The distinction is that while there is an interacting between subjects across the screen-divide, the virtual body cannot rely on the sensoria of the material body directly. There is contact with the material body, but never again in the way the material body communes with itself: this is the loss of the material support we illustrate here. attachment to such an object or ideal leads to the withdrawal of the object into the ego...and the setting up of an internal world...[taking] the ego as its object.

The ego cannot grieve this loss (it is “unavowable”), absorbing the loss instead into itself, and creating an entire internal world in response. Mapping this loss onto the digital condition, the body types up the e-self, birthing it into existence. The cyber-ego has to some degree its own freedom of movement and circulation within the virtual world. In this moment of digitalization, the digital body has lost the support of the material body. It no longer has a fxed anchor, bound instead to the tempestuous waves and currents of binary code and cybernetic exchange. Yet the cyber-ego cannot grieve the loss of the body, namely because it cannot recognize it. To recognize that the cyber-ego is distinct and un-anchored from the material body would be to admit to our feshy selves that subjectivity is not uniquely contained within our bodies. To some extent, we lose complete control of our virtual presence once it has been uploaded9. Thus, faced with an unavowable loss of the material support, the cyber-ego absorbs the psychic residue of the lost object (the material support) into itself. This can be seen in the unconscious language of tactility and the yearning for material sensoria on the

9Returning to Sibilia, “my network-extension defnes me exactly as my material body defned

Web (“pokes”, “taps”, Virtual Reality soft/ hardware). The cyber-ego cannot grieve this loss because, like the melancholic, it swears “I have lost nothing”.

Further, the process of digitalization itself is violent. The carbon body is burnt up in this transfer, reimagined in a block of code. Our material bodies are effectively dematerialized in a process of pixelization, later recombined into something uncannily similar yet not quite us. What is thus the reaction of the e-self to this aggressive translation, a process through which they were born yet killed their parent, proverbially emerging from the womb soaked in a blood of alternating ones and zeros? Here we can glimpse the stirrings of a melancholia relegated to our constructed e-selves: a cyber-melancholic turn in response to the violent trauma of digitalization, binary fracture, and virtual reconfguration that forced our e-selves to lose their original bodies. But where the material self would respond to that melancholic turn with a process of internalization, the e-self cannot. The e-self simply does not have the same internality as the material self. “Melancholia produces the possibility for the representation of psychic life,” explains Butler, leading to a topographical refexivity and conscience in an internal world: a “self that takes itself as its own object”. By contrast, the cyber-ego, like the Web, can only expand. Rather than creating some form of internality, the unavowable loss of the material body is expressed in the desire to recuperate “taps”, to “poke” another, to spatialize further in order to regain the original senosoria of the material body. As N. Katherine Hayles demonstrates in her essay “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifers,” “cyberspace is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen.” Instead of playing out psychic games in an internal world through a conscience or via psychological refexivity, the cyber-ego builds new worlds altogether, transforming itself in imaginative ways that are particular to the medium of the Web. On Instagram, we make more accounts, new groups, new chats, etc. The cyber-ego takes itself as its own object through a process of what digital theorist Federica Buongiorno terms reembodiement: a symbolic, narrative diffusion of the self in avatars, anonymous blog posts, disembodied telepresence10, etc. In the cyber-melancholic turn, the loss of the material support is externalized, resulting in an outwards spatialization that seeks to recuperate the lost object, both in the logic of corporeal actions like “poking” or “tapping” but also in the play-of-self done through cyberspace expansion and a diffused narrative re-embodiment.

IV. [Once I land, I turn my phone back on, updating family and friends on my location. I start receiving targeted ads for the McDonalds in the airport. When I go through the Stories feature, some of the corporate content has magically shifted into Spanish, recognizing my

my new geolocation. My family is coming to pick me up, I let my friends in the US know I’m fne. I’m hungry, strangely craving a Big Mac.]

Taking itself as a psychic object, the “shadow of the [lost] object”11 casts its shade on the cyber-ego, an action of superposition refected in the corporeal language of virtuality (and perhaps in the more explicit desires to graft together technology and the fesh12). Even within the digital theorists mentioned in this paper, there is a consistent insecurity with regards to the material support, with calls to relegate

11Butler, citing Freud, writes: “...in melancholia, ‘the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’... in the place of the loss that the other comes to represent, I fnd myself to be that loss, impoverished, wanting.” 12Paula Sibilia writes at length in El hombre postorgánico of the “faustian” project of technoscience, including biotechnology, informatic immortality, and post-biological evolutionary manipulation. virtuality to a secondary role in service of prioritizing the “fragility of the material world for Hayles, to reiterating “organ ic resistance” to Sibilia, to noting the “illusory status of promises of transformation” in McPherson. This points to the central anxiety of the cyber-melancholic turn. One cannot recognize or grieve the loss of the organic body because to do so would be to imagine its possible obsolescence in a not-too-distant future.

Nonetheless, there are important, even promising possibilities to be considered in this turning of the cyber-ego. The external spatialization mechanism is what allows for one to be reembodied on Zoom, or for one’s YouTube videos to go viral. On Instagram, a user can create several accounts attuned to specifc play-of-self narratives: an artist Instagram, a private Instagram, etc., each with its own codes and followings. However, despite the potential benefts of a diffused subjectivity, it is important to note that Instagram, like virtually

every social media, is a corporate arena. Targeted ads bombard one from every angle, and one’s likeness, once uploaded, belongs to Instagram until the account is deleted. As Tara McPherson notes, “you remain within a contained database” structured by corporate interests and a marketing that impulses you towards consumption. Further, within a non-net-neutral realm (as is the case in Portugal) even entering this digitized space incurs a cost. The cyber-ego is thus enmeshed within a capitalist marketplace, a neo-Fordist fever dream whereby “rather than being subjected to capital, the worker is now incorporated into capital.” The globalizing will to power of corporate interests thus takes advantage of this diffusion of self in cyberspace, with both virtual consequences (in the case of pay-to-use sites, cookies, or government web tracking) and material ramifcations (advertisements, selling of data, surveillance).

V. [Post-Big Mac (with fries), I make my way to the entrance. No one has arrived to pick me up yet. I switch through my accounts. From my main to my private to let my followers know about my partner’s friend Insta-stalking me—because of course I found out. From my private to my artist account, confrming my presence at an exhibition later this week, queuing a series of posts of new photography studies. From my artist account to a professional account, ensuring I haven’t

received any new messages. I return to my main profle, posting a story: “Back home!” My family has arrived, I put my phone away. In the darkness, my inner pocket lights up with new notifcations.

The loss of the material support for the digital ego results in a cyber-melancholic turn, whereby the self is caught up, as Butler writes, “between the desire to live and the desire to die” in a profound existential ambivalence. In order for the cyber-ego to live unencumbered from the melancholia of the lost material support, it must effectively sever that psychic connection, something which it cannot do. Yet if the cyber-ego were to die, we would lose all of the interconnectivity of re-embodiment, and with it the conveniences of modern life. The inception of e-subjectivity thus resides in a suspended animation, half biological, half technological: termed by Paula Sibilia as the state of “el hombre-información”13 . This ambivalence is exacerbated by common conceptualizations of the Web as a mere simulacrum of the material world, rather than recognizing its particularities, internal logics, and possibilities for play-of-self and auto-narrativization. But what if we could supersede this cyber-melancholic turn? What would it mean to acknowledge the semi-autonomy of digital presences, recognizing

13In English, literally man-information, human-as-information. See Sibilia, El hombre postorgánico. that synthetic actions and digitized maneuvers have implications on both sides of the screen without necessarily relying on the material body? Yet there is “no ‘one’ without ambivalence” Butler reminds us, as “there is no ambivalence without loss...one that of one’s emergence.” It is precisely this existential ambivalence, this vacillation leaves the trace of its turn at the scene between life and death, that creates the cyber-ego. The cyber-ego is imprinted with the trace of the material form, and it is in its emergence that one can see not only the cyber-melancholic turn’s spatialization, but also perhaps a way beyond the cycle of melancholic subjectivity. Namely, if the melancholic condition in the cyber-ego allows for outwards expansion and play-of-self, one can imagine performances of digitality14 that serve as a sort of narrative laboratory. In other words, since the cyber-melancholic turn postulated in this essay expands outwards, there is no limit to the imaginative possibilities of cyberspace, its architecture, and its performative capabilities. In the recesses of the Internet less touched by advertising and and commercialization15, there is poten-

14For more on digital performativity/performance, see Buongiorno’s “Extended Selves”. 15Clandestine torrenting sites, unmoderated blogs, low-tech Web 1.0 sites: these can be interesting sites of ethnographic exploration of postorganic play-of-self since they do not incur proft in the same way as Instagram , Facebook, etc. Conversely, there are precisely the sites of increased fascist radicalization, pointing again to McPherson’s model of the Internet as a product of discursivity in the material world and the ambivalence of the cyber-melancholic condition.

-tial for an e-self beyond the constraints of corporeality, not negatively discarding the material support, but acknowledging its loss, acknowledging the present moment, and choosing to imagine futures not as hombre-información, man-as-information, but hombre:información, human:data. This hombre:información would see the cyber-ego as an active component of our autoconstruction in which both subjects are participating, rather than just the material acting upon the digital16, allowing subjectivity to extend beyond the hazy outline of a human body.

In employing the psychoanalytic language of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power in conversation with prominent digital theorists and a framing narration of Insta-subjectivity, this essay has attempted to briefy sketch the psychic inception of digital subjectivity in the particular conditions of cyberspace. In articulating this cyber-melancholic turn suscitated by the unavowable loss of the material body, I have pointed towards the existential ambivalence of the e-self within cyberspace and in relation to the material user. A discussion on the losses and gains of this ambivalence and melancholia recognizes the dangers of corporate surveillance and commodifcation inherent in the virtual capitalist marketplaces that structure the mod ern Internet. Yet, in gesturing towards

16We use the term hombre:información thus as a placeholder, the theoretical possibility of seeing man as congruent with data, rather than simply acting upon it. possible avenues forward, we catch a glimpse of a different model of digital subjectivity — hombre:información, human:data — which takes into account the respective agency of both parties, recognizing the quasi-autonomy of the cyber-ego. Yet the hombre:información remains a sketch, in the words of Judith Butler, “a hyperbolic theory, a logic in drag.” This word play gestures to the psychoanalytic work that may defne our relationship to our e-doubles: a world in which we see an e-self (that is still us) in a form alien to our corporeality, a truly post-organic integration of subjectivity beyond materiality. Putting our bodies on the line and recognizing the distance of the screen could move us toward the “redemptive possibility” found in our cyber play-of-self, opening up narrative capabilities in an ever-expanding e-architecture of our design.