does it work?

Book review of Sara Ahmed (2014) Willful Subjects. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 292 pages.

‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ The Sound of Music is a bit far from the cultural intertexts that comprise Sara Ahmed’s willfulness archive, such as numerous novels by George Eliot, two instructive Grimm fairytales, Audre Lorde, and the master and slave of Hegel. Yet, Julie Andrew’s joyfully troubled character flew to my mind as a cheesy embodiment of a figure who says no, and is still the lovable problem of the cultural text. ‘To be identified as willful is to become a problem,’ declares Willful Subjects (3). Ahmed’s latest contribution to feminist ‘not philosophy’ is an assemblage of heterodox readings of continental philosophy and literature that incorporates insights from cultural theory, queer and black feminist studies. She explains that the book contributes to ‘not’ philosophy not only through a non-philosopher engaging the novelist George Eliot as a philosopher (though she is “not”), but also by attending to “the not” in order to make it an object of thought (15). ‘Willfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human,’ writes Ahmed, succinctly parsing the main thrust of her explorations in the archive of ‘not being white, not being male, not being straight, not being able-bodied’ (Ibid.) As such, Wilful Subjects greatly expands on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (Duke, 2010); it even claims to be readable as a prequel by returning to characters, texts and the question of conditional sociality (see p. 219 n42). By figuring the stray, and doing philosophy astray, Ahmed’s writing stridently affirms the negative “not” within philosophy’s discipline. Likewise, though with eyes open to the masculinist and militaristic captures of the will, Ahmed affirms the utility of working with willfulness ‘to deepen the critiques of voluntarism by reflecting on the intimacy between freedom and force’ (16). The various willful subjects that populate this very wide-ranging study form, like Maria, to some people, a problem. They too are decidedly undecided; in other words described as flighty, childish, and won’t listen or understand. For her willfulness Maria is both adored by some and called a headache by others. Drawing often on her own life story, Ahmed reminds us that this attribution of willfulness is not personal, though it may feel so.

Willful Subjects does not need to announce any bold deconstructionist moves, the overflowing archives on the will offer slippage aplenty that Ahmed follows, methodologically, as far as she can. The book is structured according to different inflections and sites of will and its articulation, which means one can read it in any direction or piecemeal. So, allow me to introduce it back to front: Taming a finicky will is central to all structures of inequity, leading to willfulness becoming required to come up against whatever has been defined as the generalized will (chapter 4). Ahmed argues that will and its force is at the core of establishing hierarchies of command/obedience within nationalism (chapter 3), education (chapter 2), and amongst human subjects (chapter 1). Ahmed convincingly shows that rife within contemporary society are a proliferation of ‘straightening’ techniques that bend wills to the correct path, like iron rods, guiding hands, and, I might add, ingestible drugs for impulse control like Ritalin. These will ‘orthopedics’ could also be central to any scholar’s analysis of today’s debates on police force, university management, and a range of activist movements that call for self-determination such as migration, transgender, disability and intersex. Problematizing willfulness also floats through social consciousness in unassuming phrases like “willpower” that haunt all kinds of feminist body issues like working, eating, and exercising.

Foucault returns regularly as a thinking partner of Ahmed, such as noting the oft-quoted sentence, “If there was not resistance, there would be no power relations,” and reminding us of the less cited: “Because it would be just a matter of obedience” (137-8). The take-away being: There is power because there is disobedience. What Ahmed alludes to in her account of the anti-sociality of the will are the range of dissident practices that comprise the ‘somato-political’ (Foucault 1978) mattering of the body that exercises techniques of control and resistance. Paul B. Preciado’s Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in a Pharmacopornographic Era (2013), a book she Ahmed?? does not mention, would make for fascinating companion reading because the author similarly argues that the will has been ingestible and interiorized. In the pharmacopornographic era, according to Preciado, ‘the body swallows power’ predominately in pill form but also through all kinds of consumables and incorporation of images (207). Considering the two authors together would push forward the question of how the somato-political crisscrosses interiority and exteriority; for example, Ahmed discusses disobedient ears that (don’t) hear, or thumbs that feel sore, or voices that croak “no.”  In light of this special issue, I will briefly consider how the somato-politics of swallowing, much like the killjoy’s willful gagging that “ruins an atmosphere” that Ahmed discusses in chapter 4 (152), might be placed within the project of the new university.

In a recent keynote “The Somatechnics of Swallowing: Affective Life in the Neoliberal University,” given at the Somatechnics International Conference (Tucson April 18, 2015), Nikki Sullivan reflected on the affective and bodily technologies in place to shape and bend the will of people in the academy. Academics who start their day swallowing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors might be suffering from gagging on the “bullshit” Sullivan defines as the “neoliberalese” language spoken in the “Kingdom of Bull” (6). Swallowing (or not), she writes, “is a disciplinary practice, a matter of training, a somatechnology” that institutionalizes, normalizes, and also wreaks havoc on dissident forms of visceral corporeality (10). The conceptual portmanteau of somatechnics tracks the emergence of gendered, racialized, or sexualized bodily being within various histories of hard and soft techniques. The analytic of somatechnics, or its kin in the somato-political, clarifies how the operation of willfulness animates and enfleshes different forms of subjectivity and as such is also an illuminating lens to use for reading Willful Subjects. Sullivan describes how her experience of gagging led her to realize that, ‘I am twenty-three feet of feminist intestines cocked, alert, ready to shoot from my mouth’ (9). Aligned with Ahmed’s body part that does not submit its will to the whole, that becomes the willful part (10), Sullivan becomes to the administration an embodiment of her willful epiglottis that should close to make swallowing neoliberalese possible, but doesn’t, can’t.

The somatechnics of willfulness is clearly trans-disciplinary. Ahmed shows us the myriad ways that will discourses cross-pollinate from biology, to anatomy, philosophy, psychology, political economy and so on. This might explain the genesis of what one reviewer, Marcie Bianco, described as a ‘methodologically messy’ text that traverses discourses without apparent connection (2014: n/p). The textuality of Willful Subjects seems to me to be incarnating not-philosophy in refusing to perform according to the general will of correct disciplinary ways. In my reading, Ahmed (willfully!) refuses one through line resulting in often jarring, or ‘swerving’ (10), skips amidst histories of willfulness. At various points, and often in footnotes, she suggests “a history” of the will could be seen through following the deviations of hysteria, or who selfishness gets attached to, or investigating the entangled emergence of will and desire, or straying along with other “will words” like vandals and vagabonds who are racialized willful wanderers. Though teeming with stray ends, this book never tries to be a complete social history, nor a history of ideas. The wanderings reveal an incredible breadth and depth of knowledge that amasses popular culture like Downton Abbey together with ancient philosophers like Empedocles in a similar way to Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant’s dexterous writings.

As stated in the introduction, the idiosyncratic methodology reads sideways and across an archive of documents ‘that are passed down in which willfulness comes up … as a character trait’ in order to ask not what willfulness is, but what willfulness is doing. While calling someone willful is a technique of social dismissal that is explored in the first three chapters, in chapter 4 and the conclusion Ahmed refuses to ignore the potentially positive side of this charge of ‘too much will’ that might be necessary to forge ahead against the flow of another (general) will. Ahmed’s attraction to the concept seems to be that “the will” offers nearly every sense of agency and of domination. Hence, the book examines what the invocation of the will and its problematic fullness accomplishes, and for whom. Examples of the somatechnics of willfulness at work are often figures in novels that happily carry water pots or accidently drop jugs that seem to have a will to fly-away; but also we find embodied agency in arms that rise up, feet that hesitantly shuffle, hands that grasp or clinch into fists, mouths that can’t speak or like Sullivan’s, can’t swallow, ears that can’t or won’t hear, and so on. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, one of the book’s stated departure points is from Foucault’s genealogy of the subject that inquires after the power relations that give rise to the apparent unity of the subject. Cautiously Foucault maneuvers around the will to ask not who wills, but how the human will is a somatechnics to produce a who. Ahmed’s chapter “Willing Subjects” opens with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions, also favored by Foucault, to examine how a will becomes a property of a subject. The next chapter on “The Good Will” begins with a moral quandary about a murderous will quoted from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda before considering obedience as pedagogical training. Then, Rousseau’s The Social Contract is brought in to highlight “The General Will” that paradoxically forces one to be free by wrangling the particular will into alignment with the general. The final chapter on “Willfulness as a Style of Politics” does not open with literature, but advances by arranging quotes from various political actors, who claim to be willful, in feminist, queer and antiracist histories, including a reading of Antigone. The effect is a detour around endless discussions of (free) will versus (self) determination that bring little insight into our current political climate. Instead we learn how willful parts, not people, are the acting organs, instruments, and affections that illuminate the mechanics of culture.

Though dealing very often with texts from antiquity and early modern periods, the book pulses towards providing a history of the present. This long arc can be found in how throughout the book Ahmed references the origin and history of words. Etymology is recruited to unpack senses and tease out politically efficacious associations through a word’s derivatives. Nearly every few pages we encounter this “derives from” phrasing, which is often followed by (concluding or transitioning) passages that burst with the fun of wordplay. Just one example: Ahmed’s discussion of Mary Poovey’s book Making a Social Body shows how the classical metaphor of the body politic holds out the image of the whole as a promise of membership to parts that should function sympathetically to each other. ‘Sympathy,’ she writes, ‘can be understood as accordance: the verb “accord” derives from heart. A sympathetic part is an agreement with heart’ (101). Bordering on puns, the rhetorical strategy of feeling out different senses of words often furthers another convincing, poetic twist to the argumentation. However, as a regularly used device it stands out and could irritate some readers looking for an encapsulated argument and less embroidery.

With fifty pages of notes at the end, they comprise another chapter at least of thoughts. Many notes are much more than short asides and suggest whole abandoned projects (much more on Foucault and Fanon’s will) and versions of the chapter (like expanding on Freud’s counter-will). Particularly for readers less familiar with her work, Ahmed usefully explains here how a certain paragraph builds on earlier texts such as Strange Encounters (2000) or On Being Included (2012). The view from the back of the book suggests retrospectively how Ahmed’s research has all along placed the will at the core of her trajectory.

In fact already on page 3, the author explains that Willful Subjects was sparked by a footnote in The Promise of Happiness in which she reflects on the sociality of the will, ‘the ways in which someone becomes described as willful insofar as they will too much, or too little, or in “the wrong way”,’ a statement from an earlier work that effectively summarizes the research question regarding the somatechnics of willfulness at the heart of this present book’s investigation. For use in the classroom or just personal interest, Ahmed also shares a great deal of work-in-progress on her blog, feministkilljoys.com. For instance, the most recent entry is on becoming unsympathetic, which is a direct expansion from writing in chapter three on the general will and coercive sympathy. Recurrence and reshuffling of ideas seems to be her modus operandi; the writing affords a fascinating kaleidoscopic view into the mind of one of the most prolific and respected feminist (not) philosophers active today. For now I can only guess which footnote gave rise to the already announced next book, Living a Feminist Life. Given the solid basis this one offers for institutional critique, I imagine the next one will also help us all bring into being a new university, or at least one that doesn’t make us retch.

Book review of Clemens Driessen (2014) Animal deliberation: The co-evolution of technology and ethics on the farm, PhD thesis, Wageningen University, Wageningen.

The field of animal ethics has in the past forty years been dominated by a focus on nonhuman animal suffering. The main theoretical debate in this field takes place between proponents of utilitarianism and deontology, or welfare and rights. The aim of this debate is to formulate universal human duties towards nonhuman animals. Factory farming is seen by many animal philosophers as one of the largest problems for animals, at least in quantitative terms, and many animal ethicists argue for either a substantial reform, or abolishment, of this practice. In Animal deliberation: The co-evolution of technology and ethics on the farm, Clemens Driessen develops a new approach to animal ethics, in which he focuses on technologies used on farms. By connecting different theoretical approaches, ranging from science and technology studies, to pragmatic philosophy and to case studies, Driessen aims to contribute to real, situated debates. He does so not only by theorizing, but also by engaging with farmers and farmed animals, focusing specifically on farming practices with dairy cows and pigs in The Netherlands. Additionally, he aims to bridge the distance between farming practices and the general public, as is perhaps most visible in the interspecies video game Pig Chase, which he invented as part of the project.

Animal ethics and technology on the farm

The thesis is divided into four parts, which are all devoted to different sets of concerns. Each chapter introduces a new theoretical approach, used as a tool that is tied to the practice described, thereby creating not only depth in the subject matter discussed, but also in the ways we can view, discuss and understand farming practices. In the introduction Driessen argues for a situated and contextual pragmatist form of ethics that focuses on material and discursive practices, recognizing the importance of experience, instead of trying to formulate universal abstract moral standpoints. He does so for several reasons, ranging from the fact that intensive farming will continue to exist in the years to come, to the theoretical impossibility of taking a view from nowhere. Relatedly, Driessen aims to rethink the meaning of debating, and to reconsider what counts as an appropriate argument by focusing on the influence of technology on our thinking.

The first part of the thesis explores the role of ethics on and beyond the farm. In chapter two Driessen writes an ethnography of farmers’ deliberation – a group that is usually not consulted in animal ethics – combining insights from sociology with the author’s own experiences with farmers: he took a course in milking cows, visited farms with students, and helped out animal scientists. The following chapter considers ethical debates surrounding technological inventions that propose to do away with farmers, namely in vitro meat and pig towers, and uses the work of Dewey and Heidegger in combination with insights from science and technology studies, as well as bio-art, to map the forms of reasoning generated by these experiments.

Part two investigates how the co-evolution of moral and technological change takes place in everyday material practices. It focuses on the example of the milking robot, and draws on Actor Network Theory in conversation with rural sociology and geography, to show how cow-robot-farmer assemblages are constructed around this invention. With the introduction of the milking-robot the roles of farmer and cows change. Driessen introduces the term ‘animal deliberation’ to describe this process, connecting views developed in animal geography to recent work that argues for viewing animals as political actors, and to situated critiques of theories of deliberation. In this material multispecies deliberation, cows adapt to the robot and show their preferences, which the farmers interpret and to which they respond by making changes, to which the cows respond, and so on. The outcome regarding the position and use of the robot is the result of both the cows’ and the farmers’ agencies. The milking-robot enables the cows to formulate their standpoint in a new way and the farmers to read them differently, and vice versa.

In part three, Driessen combines the theoretical insights gained in the first two parts to develop an interspecies video game, Pig Chase. In this game, viewers communicate with farmed pigs. This relieves the pigs’ boredom – one of the most pressing problems for pigs in intensive farming – and connects consumers to the animals they eat. The video made to promote the game (the actual game has not yet been realised) was picked up by different media, and stirred discussion. Driessen presents the game as a philosophical intervention that raises questions about the treatment of pigs in intensive farming, eating animals more generally, and the distance between consumers and farmed animals, as well as ontological questions about moral subjectivity. The game explores new forms of thinking with other animals, and of doing ethics. Its aim is to bring to life a form of multispecies philosophy, in which pigs, and different groups of humans, such as scientists, consumers, animal activists, game enthusiasts, can play and think together.

The final part of the thesis ties the different threads together and questions its own emphasis on the written word. Instead of offering a conclusive argument on animal farming in The Netherlands, the thesis aims to bring about a sense of fascination and ambivalence towards the practices described. Instead of regarding technological interventions solely as sites for debate and reflection, it proposes to view them as ways of practicing philosophy and ethics. In this context the Pig Chase project is presented as a new site for experience, reflection and moral debate, in which humans and other animals can take part.

Philosopher Chase

The thesis is an original contribution to the field of animal ethics, and as such an interesting read for philosophers and others interested in interconnections between ethics, technology, and farm practices. The method developed in this thesis sheds new light on the issues discussed and shows the potential of thinking about animal ethics outside the dominant paradigms of utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. Connecting different fields of theory to the case studies not only illuminates aspects of human-animal relations, but also shows the relevance of these, mostly rather new, approaches in thinking about farm animals and technology in the Netherlands. Driessen’s argument for locating ethics and interspecies thinking at least partly in material practices is convincing, and using philosophical interspecies experiments to interact with nonhuman animals, and those who work with them, is a promising new research strategy. The thesis reads well and succeeds in providing an engaging narrative. The topics discussed – bored farm animals, environmental issues, new technologies – are serious, but Driessen knows how to approach them lightly; at the end of his thesis he discusses his engagement with absurdity and the ridiculous, and the role of jokes and humour in making others think.

The thesis however also raises several theoretical and practical questions. The first set of questions concerns power relations. While Driessen’s arguments for providing a narrative, rather than arguing from a view from nowhere, are convincing, his starting point is not morally neutral. Exercising power and agency is not a matter of all or nothing, something Driessen convincingly shows, and the philosopher is always situated, for example by being human. But being situated does not mean we cannot question power relations. The risk of staying too close to practices is that one legitimates them. Conceptualizing animal agency in relation to milking-robots is for example quite problematic from an animal rights perspective, because the cows in question are held captive and have no (or very little) opportunity to end their exploitation. While suffering is not the only lens through which we should view nonhuman animals, not taking their suffering seriously keeps intact the worldview that allows for exploitation, and runs the risk of legitimating the practices attached to that.

This leads to the second set of questions, which deals with the political implications of this thesis. Driessen does not discuss political implications of the project and it is unclear how the views developed in this thesis can be translated to democratic institutions, laws and regulations. This is problematic from the perspective of animal subjectivity, and from the perspective of democracy. In current political constellations, nonhuman animals have no voice. Their interests are affected by human laws and regulations, yet they cannot participate in official forms of politics. Driessen shows that farm animals can and do exercise agency in matters that concern their lives. He also shows that material interventions can support human-animal deliberations. Using a political concept such as deliberation to conceptualize human-animal relations is very promising, but in its current form the political and democratic potential is not fully realized. It is unclear why, and if, farmers should aim to further develop processes of deliberation with other animals, and how existing forms of deliberation can inform political decision-making. Animal agency is only conceptualized on the micro-level, while humans determine the macro-framework in which it is acted, which reinforces the human-animal hierarchy that is challenged. Viewing nonhuman animals as subjects with their own perspective on life asks not only for rethinking nonhuman animal agency but also for rethinking the structures and relations in which it is shaped, on different levels.

The last question concerns the relation between form and content. The final chapters of the thesis refuse to offer an overarching argument, as would be expected from a PhD thesis. While this works well in terms of narrative, it also leaves the story with somewhat of an open ending. Or, more precisely: it raises the question of why the result of this research is a thesis, and not (also) a novel, or a real game, or another technological interspecies invention that bridges the gap between academia and general public, human and nonhuman animals, and words and practices. Of course, a PhD thesis is not just the end of a research project but also the beginning of many others, so hopefully Driessen will continue to explore the field of interspecies ethics, with other animals.

Book review of: Rahel Jaeggi (2014) Alienation. New York:  Columbia University Press, 272, pages.

In the paper ‘From Fordism to Post-Fordism’, Emmanuel Renault argues that it is not clear that ‘the categories of democracy, social justice and the good life are capable of bringing about the political effects that may be expected today from the concept of alienation.’ (2007: 206). In line with this view, Axel Honneth states in the foreword of Alienation that we ‘inevitably find ourselves falling back on the concept of alienation’ in cases where we want to criticize social conditions that do not primarily violate principles of justice (viii).

At the same time, ever since post-structural critiques and the recognition of the ‘fact of pluralism’, the reintroduction of a concept like alienation requires at least some critical side-notes. For just as inevitably we may need to seek salvation in the concept of alienation, so the idea of alienation is confronted with the question of what the subject is actually alienated from, easily evoking an essentialist account of the human being. Moreover, alienation critique suggests that we can objectively identify the good life as the authentic, non-alienated life. Rahel Jaeggi, professor in philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, does not give us ‘some’ critical side-notes. Instead, she intertwines an extensive discussion of these issues within her conceptualisation and elaboration of the phenomenon of alienation today. It is for Jaeggi’s original and thorough discussion of these fundamental questions about the self and human freedom that we should value her project the most. However, her reconstruction of the concept of alienation also seems to be at the expense of the potential of the concept for social critique.

Alienation as appropriation

Jaeggi embraces the existentialist and Marxist insights of her theoretical predecessors in accepting that our acting and thinking is entangled with, and affected by, the social and material world around us, further suggesting that there can be something wrong with this relatedness to ourselves and to the world. That there is nevertheless a need to reconstruct the concept of alienation, she argues by showing how former ideas of alienation always presuppose that there is something that is essentially “one’s own” from which we can be estranged. This is particularly evident in Marx’ notion of a species-being with ‘essential human powers’ that are (ideally) externalized and objectified through labour-activity. In this respect, Jaeggi paraphrases Althusser that ‘the critique of essentialism has become part of philosophical “common sense”’ (28). Moreover, Jaeggi argues that a reconstruction of the concept of alienation is demanded in order to address the question that arises from the perspective of liberal theory, namely ‘whether there can be objective evidence of pathology that contradicts individuals’ subjective assessments or preferences’ (29). Exemplary here is Marcuse’s analysis of the subject who is ‘swallowed up by his alienated existence.’ If the alienated subjects do not themselves experience their situation as problematic, so Jaeggi argues, the ‘theory of alienation appears to have made itself immune to critique’ (29).

Jaeggi thus takes up the project of rethinking alienation without thick notions of the self or the good life. A crucial theoretical starting point for this she finds in the notion of psychological health as formulated by the contemporary German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat. One of Tugendhat’s aims is to find a modern conception of the good life on the basis of which we could tell whether a person’s life is going well or badly, independently of that person’s actual desires and preferences. He finds this in a ‘formal conception of psychological health’ specified as the functional capacity of willing. To have the functional capacity of willing implies that ‘one has oneself at one’s command’. What is important for Tugendhat (and Jaeggi), is that simply willing something is not enough to count as having the functional capacity of willing: one also needs to identify oneself with this will and thereby hold a positive, endorsing relation to that volition. If this positive relation is absent, the functional capacity of willing is impaired. It is this impairment – not having oneself at one’s command – that Jaeggi takes to be at the heart of the phenomenon of alienation.

By understanding alienation as a deficiency in willing one’s will, the problem of alienation becomes essentially a problem of freedom. Although this focus on willing may appear as a problem of exercising Kantian autonomy, Jaeggi repeatedly emphasises that we should not confuse alienation with heteronomy. For the lack of freedom in cases of alienation is not due to an external force or obstacle that frustrates the exercise of our will, it is rather due to a more ‘internal’ affair, namely, that – somehow – a person cannot appropriate one’s actions, desires or thoughts. It is through this idea of appropriation that Jaeggi shows herself to be a truly Hegelian thinker, taking positive freedom as her central object of concern. According to this view, being free requires that a person appropriates one’s will and actions, identifies with them and incorporates them into one’s life, thereby constituting and realizing oneself through what one wants and does. We thus see that speaking of an ‘internal affair’ is at the same time misleading: willing and acting take place within, and are affected by, a material and social environment. Due to this strong relation between the self and the world, Jaeggi takes a deficient appropriative relation to oneself as both a matter of self-alienation and of alienation of the world.

Tugendhat’s conception of willing one’s will offers Jaeggi a way to overcome the liberal challenge with which the concept of alienation is confronted. The idea of appropriating one’s will enables us to conceptualize alienation without invoking substantive claims about true, natural or good preferences (what Tugendhat calls ‘the What of willing’), but allows only formal claims about the (relational) process of willing. Alienation critique can as such do without an objective conception of the good life: it criticizes forms of life to the extent that they are not appropriated by the persons living them, not to the extent that they lack particular goals or values.

Understanding alienation as impeded appropriation of one’s will also helps to avoid appealing to an essentialist view of the self. Jaeggi only assumes that people have this capacity to appropriate the life they lead as their own, not that there is something inside us that can or should be ‘re-appropriated’. So, besides from rejecting the idea of a human essence as a basis of the good life, Jaeggi gives a thorough critique of the ‘container model’ of the self, according to which the self is conceived as a ‘closed-off inner-space’. Instead, leading a life implies that we act in a world, change that world, and thereby make this world our own. At the same time, our acting in the world does not leave ourselves unaffected: we appropriate our acting and willing and through this, we are ‘selves in the making’ (166). Moreover, Jaeggi does not think the self as having a pre-given substantive content that determines the outcome of our actions. Although she assumes the self as having the functional capacity of willing and appropriating these volitions, this appropriation is not, in a way that Harry Frankfurt suggests, determined by a ‘volitional unity’. The problem with such a volitional unity, according to Jaeggi, is that it presupposes an underlying coherent will that determines the hierarchy among different volitions. She points out that this cannot account for the fact that volitions can be incoherent and ambivalent. At the same time, Jaeggi rejects the post-modern idea of multiple identities, since this would ignore the intuitive idea that there is a bearer of experiences and processes of appropriation. Jaeggi thus conceives the self as ‘Doing’ rather than a ‘Being’: a fluid process that relates both to itself and to the world, and that can form meaningful, integrating narratives about all the ambivalences and changes in values and preferences that constitute this very ‘self’.

Immanent critique

Jaeggi thus convincingly strips off the concept of alienation from outdated associations with human nature or universal conceptions of the good life. As she herself points out, the implication of this is that the scope of alienation critique is limited. Since alienation is understood as a failure to appropriate one’s life as one’s own, a person’s condition of relating to herself and the world can only be judged by its form, not by its content. There are no objective criteria to which an analysis of alienation could appeal. Alienation critique, so Jaeggi argues, should thus be understood as immanent critique: a critique that cannot rely on standards or ideals that transcend those that are already endorsed by the alienated agents. Such transcending ideals would lack authority within a liberal paradigm: immanent critique is therefore limited to a specific shared form of life.

Jaeggi then identifies two forms that an immanent critique of alienation can take. On the one hand, alienation to the world can be diagnosed by pointing out tensions between prevailing ideals of freedom and their actual realization; e.g. a gap may exist between the modern ideal of living a sovereign life, and the degree in which agents ‘actually’ have their life at their command by making their social and material world their own. On the other hand, self-alienation can be analysed by indicating the discrepancies between features and qualities we attribute to subjects by regarding them as responsible agents, and the fact that subjects do not identify with their own actions and are for that reason obstructed in their capacity to act responsibly. Jaeggi suggests that although alienation critique is limited to a shared form of life, the scope of that shared form of life may extend as far as the value of autonomy is endorsed: ‘Alienation critique would then be an element of the critical, evaluative self-interpretation of a modern culture that has made freedom and self-determination its core-values’ (41).

Alienation as social critique

But there is another sense in which Jaeggi’s reconstruction of the concept of alienation seems to be limited, in so far as alienation critique is understood as a promise for critical theory, the Frankfurter Schule tradition in which Jaeggi can be situated. As mentioned above, understanding alienation as a crucial concept for critical theory is hinted at by Axel Honneth and Emanuel Renault. But also Jaeggi herself states that the concept of alienation ‘makes it possible to arrive at standards for diagnosing social pathologies’ (xxiii). However, it is questionable to what extent Jaeggi’s alienation critique can indeed point out pathologies that are ‘social’ in the sense of having both a social source and solution.    As Raymond Geuss argues in The Idea of Critical Theory, what makes theories ‘critical’ is that they offer on the one hand a form of knowledge, and have, on the other, a ‘special standing as guides for human action’ (Geuss, 1). This holds for both psychoanalytic theories and for social-critical theories. Both aim to enlighten the agent to whom the theory or analysis is directed. Providing the agent insight into the ‘falseness’ of his or her beliefs would have an emancipating effect on the agent, in the sense that it could help to free the agent. But as Geuss also points out, there is an important difference between psychoanalysis and critical theory of society: in the case of psychological deficits, such as a neurosis, the repression of the agent (its ‘false consciousness’) is often self-imposed. To free yourself from it is indeed possible in most cases by means of self-reflection and going into therapy. As Geuss puts it: ‘the struggle to overcome it, is a struggle with oneself, not with an external – physical or social – reality, and success consists not so much in accomplishing changes in the world as in finding a satisfactory reorganisation of attitudes, habits, feelings and desires.’ (Geuss, 74).

To talk about false beliefs of a social class or social group generally leans on the notion of ‘ideological coercion’: ‘Ideological coercion is self-imposed – by acting in the way they do, agents constitute it – but the “objective power” it has over them is not just a power which will be automatically dissolved by critical reflection. In acting in their deluded way, the agents have produced a complex of social institutions which cannot now be abolished merely by changes in the agents’ beliefs (…) To abolish an established social institution (…) will in general require more than a change in the form of consciousness of the oppressed; it will require a long course of political action.’ (Geuss 74-75).
It seems to me that Jaeggi’s understanding of alienation cannot be thought of as a question of ideological coercion. The phenomenological discussion in the middle of the book of the individual cases of alienation reinforce this: even though these persons are conceptualised as deeply intertwined with their social and physical environment, it seems that in the end their alienated condition can only be overcome by a change of the subject’s thoughts and dispositions. In order to show how little there can be done about alienation in terms of institutional reforms, I’ll discuss each of these cases briefly. 

Powerlessness

The first case – a young scientist – represents alienation as the experience of powerlessness towards one’s own actions. This mathematician used to live a city life based on fast food, in devotion to his work. But then for tax-reasons he and his girlfriend decide to marry. She becomes pregnant and they move to a suburban house, starting a happy family life. Although the turn of his life-course is consciously chosen, the scientist experiences it as if an alien power is at work in his life. This story shows us that even if we act in accordance with our will, we can still fail to experience the choices that we have made as our own. Referring to Tugendhat, Jaeggi explains this alienation by pointing to the degree in which one considers one’s life as a matter of ‘practical questions’, such as ‘What is to be done?’, but also more fundamental questions such as ‘What kind of person do I want to be?’ Such practical questions are masked if a person’s life-course presents itself as taking a dynamic of its own. According to Jaeggi, to prevent or overcome this form of alienation there should be an awareness of the possibility of alternatives. Now, the question is: is it a responsibility of our scientist to unmask the practical questions, or could it be that the situation was constituted in such a way that it could not appear as a choice? Jaeggi answers that it can be both. On the one hand, the young father is not sensitive enough to his own living situation and therefore fails to takes alternatives into consideration. At the same time, to understand things as practical questions is also a matter of the opening up ‘of the horizon of possibility that is given within a particular life situation or in a particular form of life.’ (67). So, the external factor Jaeggi identifies as a source of alienation is the existence of a particular form of life. Conventions can indeed narrow the scope of possibilities for agents and determine the thinkable alternatives. But whether the particular form of life common in a society actually does result in alienation depends in the end on the extent to which the subject is conscious of his own thoughts and feelings, and can as such enable himself to perceive his position as open for change.

Loss of authenticity

The second case of alienation is that of alienation as loss of authenticity in social role-playing. The ambitious junior editor is taken as exemplary: being a bit overdressed, imitating the gestures of his boss, and having an articulated opinion about everything, we tend to regard him as inauthentic or insincere. Jaeggi does not consider social roles as such as alienating, for we cannot do without them, and they often, or so she argues, enable our self-realization. Jaeggi nevertheless identifies several ways in which alienation in role behaviour can take place. The central point for her is that such alienation occurs because the subject does not appropriate his role as something that is constitutive for his personal identity. To prevent alienation remains a matter of what she calls “manoeuvring” between the pre-existing role and the task for the individual to realize it in its own way. Also here it is social convention, namely concerning social roles, that might indeed partially cause the alienation by imposing demands and rules of behaviour upon the agent. Yet as Jaeggi herself states, social roles are not impossible to appropriate per se. Alienation through social role implies a ‘mismatch’ between the agent and the role, but it seems to be up to the former to appropriate the latter.

Internal division

The interesting character that is discussed as a third case – alienation by internal division – is H. ‘the giggling feminist’. To her own frustration, this feminist woman often falls back into kinds of behaviour she rejects as ‘unemancipated’, such as giggling. H. is not just superficially holding emancipatory opinions, but has deeply internalized feminist convictions. She therefore experiences a real discrepancy between her impulses to behave ‘sweet and harmless’ and her emancipated beliefs. According to Jaeggi, the problem in the case of inner division is not that one fails to behave according to one’s true will, for this would presume that we can discern our true will from desires that are manipulated by our social environment. Rather, inner division is what happens when one does not ‘participate’ in what one does. Although will-formation always happens under the influence of a social environment, alienation as internal division implies that a person experiences tensions between her multiple desires and beliefs. Resolving this kind of alienation thus requires the individual’s capacity to recognize and respond to such inner inconsistencies.

Indifference

A last form of alienation – self-alienation as indifference – is represented by the protagonist from the novel Perlmanns Schweigen. Perlmann is a professor in linguistics who has lost the belief in the importance of academic work. Lecturing and visiting conferences, once conceived by him as meaningful activities, appear now to him ‘as if through a wall of glass’. Jaeggi explains this as a loss of identification: Perlmann is unable to take up his academic activities as constitutive for his identity or self-understanding. According to Jaeggi, alienation as indifference results from a distorted relation between the self and the external world. In this last form of alienation it becomes perhaps most obvious why there is reason to question the role of institutions in overcoming alienation: a subject needs the world to realize herself, yet the external world cannot prevent the subject from becoming indifferent.

The phenomenological richness of Jaeggi’s discussion of these individual examples is of great value for understanding the subjectivities of alienation today. But if this is the best we can make of the phenomenon of alienation it seems unlikely that specific social institutions can be identified as having ‘objective power’ by alienating agents. The only objective alienating force at stake in these modern manifestations of alienation are the particular forms of life in which agents attempt to realize themselves, and institutions such as marriage and social roles. Especially within today’s liberal and pluralist societies, these forms of life and social institutions do not present themselves as objective or external obstructions per se. Whether forms of life are alienating thus differs from person to person.

To come back to the hopes expressed by Emanuel Renault and Axel Honneth for the promising potential of the revival of alienation critique: it remains questionable to what extent this reconstructed concept of alienation could sort out any political effects, or address structural social conditions. It is not said that this is impossible, but Jaeggi’s project as presented in Alienation does not yet make clear how to conceive of alienation as also a diagnosis of social pathologies, rather than as an indicator of a lack of individual psychological health. Fortunately, there is something to look out for, for the ‘corresponding analysis and evaluation – of how institutions are constituted – remains to be carried out’ (220). And according to the translator Frederick Neuhouser, Jaeggi’s new book Kritik von Lebensformen is promising in this respect. For those who cannot read German, it is waiting for its translation; meanwhile keep on trying to have oneself at one’s command. And in case of failure: visit a shrink.  

Review of: David M. Berry (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital . London: Bloomsbury, 272 pages, and Christian Fuchs (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 304 pages.

What might critical theory contribute to the study of digital media? And how might the study of digital media help to advance, complicate or challenge concepts, theories and agendas associated with critical theory, broadly conceived? These questions are central to two recent books by David Berry and Christian Fuchs, who both draw on the theoretical legacy of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research to analyse the social, economic, cultural, and political implications of new kinds of information technologies.

The two books are set against the background of the accelerating and deepening entanglement of digital technologies and their accompanying concepts and practises with nearly all areas of human life, exemplified by phenomena such as ‘flash crashes’ caused by self-learning algorithms that trade with each other automatically; weaponised computer viruses capable of destroying military equipment; brain interfaces and ‘secondary memory’ devices; ubiquitous state and corporate surveillance; networked social and political movements; hyper-temporary digital jobs; gargantuan real-time data streams; drone assassinations; attention markets; 3D printed guns; darknets and megaleaks. Berry and Fuchs both argue for the continuing relevance of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School (as well as their philosophical progenitors and progeny), whom have hitherto occupied a comparatively marginal position in new media studies, in understanding these developments.

Fuchs’s Social Media: A Critical Introduction is a rich, readable and generously referenced primer to the controversies, promises and threats of many of the world’s most prominent social media platforms, digital services and projects. His theoretical approach is informed by a mixture of readings of Marx, the Frankfurt School (including second generation thinkers such as Habermas as well as Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse) and the critical political economy tradition in media studies. Many of the chapters offer something like an immanent critique of the social media platforms under examination – unpicking and interrogating the promises and claims made about their transformative social and democratic potential with reference to critiques from popular and academic literature, as well as original empirical research conducted by Fuchs.

In this manner Fuchs critically examines the role of Twitter and Facebook in social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 Egyptian revolution; the ‘corporate colonisation’ of social media which are often praised for their participatory and democratic character; the unpaid digital labour and inhumane labour conditions at hardware factories that underpin the profits of digital media companies; the ideology of ‘playbour’ (play labour) and working conditions at Google; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that ‘the world will be better if you share more’ in light of the company’s business model as ‘a huge advertising, capital accumulation, and user-exploitation machine’ (171); the political mythologies of Twitter as a manufactured and pseudo-public sphere; the politics of WikiLeaks and their stated support for what Fuchs contends is a neoliberal conception of ‘good governance’; and Wikipedia’s reflection of capitalist class relations and the ‘infinite exploitation’ enabled by its licensing model, in spite of its potential as an emancipatory digital commons project.

Throughout the book, Fuchs argues against technological determinist views that social media are inherently good or bad, progressive or regressive, illustrating the multivalent and contested nature of the platforms under examination with examples and readings in each chapter. The main problem with social media, he suggests, is that they are ‘incompletely social’, in that they ‘anticipate a full socialization of human existence’ but are also ‘limited by capitalist reality’ (256). In the conclusion of the book, he contends that ‘an alternative Internet is possible’, a ‘commons-based’ and ‘classless’ Internet, ‘that is not based on capital accumulation, advertising, profit, ideology and a stratified attention economy, but rather enables knowledge, communication and collaboration for their own sake as social activities between humans’ (257).

At the centre of this vision for an alternative Internet are a ‘co-operative information society’ (264), and ‘participatory democracy’, which he equates with communism (239). He proposes a programme of measures to create the conditions for such an alternative internet, including stronger data protection legislation, opt-in online advertising, corporate watchdog projects and the establishment of alternative internet platforms. Finally, Fuchs says that in addition to what Slavoj Žižek describes as the ‘ever stronger socialization of cyberspace’, an ‘alternative societal context of internet use’ is needed (259). This new ‘collaborative society’ requires both participatory democracy and ‘collective ownership and control of the means of production’ (265).

While Fuchs’s book is intended as an introductory textbook, the brief account of critical theory that it gives at the outset is notably broad and presents a remarkably unified agenda. It foregrounds the commonalities rather than the tensions both between different thinkers and generations of the Frankfurt School, as well as between the Frankfurt School and other thinkers who are broadly characterised as critical theorists (from figures associated with the critical political economy of media to Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Jodi Dean and Evgeny Morozov). While some of these tensions are acknowledged in the text, as well as in the questions and exercises at the end of several of the chapters, the heterogeneity of critical arguments could have been more explicitly used to enrich discussion of the implications of social media, as well to give readers a more nuanced view of the work of different thinkers whose work is used.

Fuchs’s treatment sometimes makes it seem as though adherents of critical theory of all stripes were in possession of a shared and coherent overarching political programme. However, the politics of the Frankfurt School alone (let alone the other ‘critical’ figures alluded to in the book) were notoriously diverse – ranging, as one recent article argues, from the ‘engaged withdrawal’ of Adorno and Horkheimer, to the ‘Great Refusal’ of Marcuse, to the procedural democracy of Jürgen Habermas, to Axel Honneth’s politics of recognition (Chambers 2004). A more granular exposition of these views could have benefited the book from both a scholarly and pedagogical perspective, as well as informing reflection about the different kinds of political responses to social media that have become more pervasive in the wake of concerns about privacy and the commodification of personal information – not to mention informing further critical engagement with the potential weaknesses and limitations of some of the critical thinkers alluded to in the book.

Little is said about the early Frankfurt School’s rejection of the ‘vulgar Marxist’ conception of the reducibility of an epiphenomenal superstructure to an economic base – nor why purely economic analysis is not sufficient for the provision of a critical theory of society according to these thinkers (see e.g. Geuss 2004). Further discussion along these lines could have been complementary to the book’s significant emphasis on the political economics of social media (including profit models and ownership structures), as well as opening up space to further explore how social media, digital technologies and the practises and discourses around them contribute to the reshaping of politics, culture and society in non-economic terms, and why this matters. On this score, there is a burgeoning wealth of literature on social media from a wide variety of different fields that could have been alluded to more extensively and more sympathetically, to discuss how the affordances and imaginaries of new media are guiding and reconfiguring ideals and behaviours in many different areas of life (such as – to give a few recent examples – Weller, Bruns, Burgess, Mahrt, Puschmann 2013; Rogers 2013; Gillespie 2010).

To mention one more point: at the outset of the book Fuchs defines the ‘critical’ in critical theory largely in terms of the critique of power, inequality, ideology and political economy. Yet there are at least two other important senses of the term deriving from the post-Kantian philosophical tradition upon which the Frankfurt School draws, which are not explicitly highlighted in the introduction and which might nevertheless prove valuable for those interested in drawing on critical theory to study digital media. Firstly, in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy, early thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School – notably Adorno and Benjamin – had an interest in the conditions which enable and structure experience, as opposed to ‘pre-critical’ conceptions of experience as immediately given (see, e.g. Jay 2005: 312-360). Secondly, also following Kant, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School aspired to be both self-critical and self-reflexive (see, e.g. Rush 2004: 10). These two senses of the term could be potentially relevant, for example, when thinking about how experience might be structured and mediated by digital technologies, or when thinking about the concepts, theories and ideals which are deployed in examining them.

David Berry’s Critical Theory and the Digital is more explicitly cognisant of both the heterogeneity of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, as well as the way in which it draws on and reacts against the Kantian conception of critical philosophy. While Fuchs’s book guides the reader through a series of engagements with particular platforms, services and projects, Berry’s book takes a much more expansive look at how the theoretical resources of critical theory might be used to think about and critically engage with digital technologies and digital media. He is concerned not only with social media, but with how ‘computational capitalism’ aspires to ‘remake the world in its computational image’ (127) – in particular focusing on the role of software. Central to his account is the notion of ‘computationality’, which is ‘a specific historical constellation of intelligibility’ (60) that is ‘defined by a certain set of computational knowledges, practices, methods and categories’ (94).

From the Frankfurt School tradition Berry mainly focuses on Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse – commenting in a footnote that he plans to examine the relevance of studying the digital in later figures like Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer and Axel Honneth in another book (217). In addition to these thinkers from the Frankfurt School, Berry’s book is well-versed in contemporary media and new media theory, and draws extensively on arguments, concepts and insights from a wide range of social theorists, philosophers and other thinkers in fashioning his own outline of a critical theory of the digital – from Latour to Kittler, Stiegler to Gadamer. But the two figures to whom Berry owes most in the book are Adorno and Heidegger. He refashions and synthesises elements of Adorno’s negative dialectics and Heidegger’s phenomenological account of technology in the service of a new programme for studying the digital.

While Heidegger’s phenomenology serves as the backdrop to his account of computationality, Berry follows Adorno in challenging its ‘metaphysical’ character and in insisting on a re-reading which is more attentive to the social and historical mediation of beings rather than the ‘epochal history of Being’ (91-92). He argues that Heidegger’s notion of technicity – characterised by the experience of beings as ‘objects that can be submitted to control’ – may be useful in understanding ‘modern’ technologies like electricity as ‘standing reserve’, but is a poor fit for understanding ‘postmodern real-time data stream technologies’ (60). To address this gap he proposes that the concept of ‘computationality’ is better suited to analysing the distinctive affordances of software and data streams, and their growing role in organising, schematising and providing a grammar for being, life, labour, politics, economics, society and culture in the twenty-first century.

Berry offers the phrase ‘compactant’ (or computational actant) as an analytical device to assist with studying the complex computational structures and processes with which we find ourselves surrounded. The ‘paradigm case of computationality’, he argues, is ‘code/software’ (95), which, as Rob Kitchin puts it, ‘codifies the world into rules, routines, algorithms, and databases, and then uses these to do work in the world to render aspects of everyday life programmable’ (123). Alluding to Adorno’s critique of identity thinking, Berry asks whether computationality has not come to represent ‘the incorporation of identity thinking par excellence’ (196), and illustrates this with an exploration of the history and mechanics of pattern-recognition in software (128-130). Throughout the book Berry discusses a plethora of examples of what he argues is computationality in action – including in the form of web bugs and user tracking systems, self-tracking and quantified self-movements, gamification, microlabour, the architecture of mass surveillance uncovered by Snowden, the algorithms underpinning financial systems and ‘cognitive capture by corporations through notions of augmented humanity and the computational intervention in pre-consciousness’ (193). These kinds of ‘parameterization of our being-in-the-world’ (167) and delegation of norms and values into ‘an invisible site of power’ in the form of algorithms (189) leads Berry to ask: ‘how much computation can democracy stand, and what should be the response to it?’ (193).

One response to computationality about which Berry remains deeply unconvinced is the loose-knit group of thinkers associated with Speculative Realism or Object Oriented Ontology (dubbed ‘SR/OOO’ for most of the book). This ‘first internet or born-digital philosophy’ (104) also draws on Heidegger, but Berry accuses its adherents of promoting ‘onticology’ (114) or ‘philosography’ (116), an essentially descriptive enterprise which fetishises the enumeration of beings, often in the form of the ‘rhetoric of lists’ (110) and ‘cascades and tumbling threads of polythetic classification’ (117). He accuses this group of thinkers – including Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant – of seeking ‘liberation’ from ‘repetitive accounts’ of human inequality and suffering, eschewing any sense of historical or social context, and celebrating the ephemerality of the objects of computational capitalism (112, 118). Berry condemns this philosophical programme as an uncritical and apolitical theoretical derivative of computational capitalism, mirroring and venerating its manifold phantasmagorias, and abandoning conscience in favour of spectacle.

Instead, Berry advocates the ‘public use of critical computational reason’ (214), as well as pursuing various strategies and practises to make the digital infrastructures of computation ‘visible and available to critique’ (209). He suggests that the exercise of such critical computational reason requires more than a purely theoretical engagement, and proposes the development of a ‘critical praxis’ centred around what he calls ‘iteracy’, or the practice of ‘being able to read and write texts and computational processes’ (188). He argues that ‘the constellations of concepts that underlie and sustain computational capitalism need to be rigorously contested and the software that makes it possible hacked, disassembled and unbuilt’ (204) – and that ‘future critical theory of code and software is committed to unbuilding, disassembling and deformation of existing code/software systems, together with leaking, glitching and overloading these systems’ (147). Iteracy would be included in a programme of what Berry dubs ‘digital Bildung’, or the ‘totality of education in the digital university’ (188). As well as disassembling, disrupting, hacking and challenging the infrastructure of computational capitalism, Berry proposes the ‘democratisation of cryptography’, the creation of ‘protective structures’ and the ‘composition of alternative systems’ (147, 205). While these kinds of projects ‘might offer some respite’, he maintains that in the longer term ‘more collective responses will be needed’ (205). In the future, he says, ‘an active citizenry will be a computationally enlightened one’ (193).

Berry’s book is a significant contribution towards rethinking the study of new media in light of critical theory, and for the study of critical theory in light of new media. His fluency and dexterity in assembling, animating and enlisting such a wealth of material in constructing his case will no doubt provoke further encounters between the fields upon which he draws. I shall restrict myself to commenting on two areas around which further elucidation would be welcomed.

Firstly, in pursuance of the self-reflexivity which he commends in the Frankfurt School, it would be interesting to hear further reflection on the visions and ideals which inform his outline of a critical computational praxis – from the ‘glass boxing’ and ‘glass blocs’ that are his response to black boxes and blocs, to the emphasis on computationally savvy forms of disruption recognisable to both ‘cyberlibertarian’ hackers and Silicon Valley pundits (as discussed in, e.g. Barbrook & Cameron 1996; Turner 2008; Streeter 2010). While he makes an intriguing but undeveloped allusion to ‘open access and transparency as ideology’ (193), he doesn’t otherwise expound on the politics of megaleaks or computational, organisational or political transparency and openness, which would have been useful in light of recent critiques of their malleability and use in advancing many very different kinds of political projects (e.g. Roberts 2012; Tkacz 2015).

Secondly, while Berry explicitly states that he is largely focusing on the early Frankfurt School, it would be interesting to see how, if at all, his encounter with the critical theory tradition might assume a different form and emphasis through engagement with later thinkers. To mention just one point of interest in this regard: it would be informative to see his response to Wellmer’s reservations about the critique of identity thinking and the ‘homelessness of the political’ in Adorno’s work (Wellmer 2007).

Where do these two books leave us with respect to using critical theory to think about digital media? Has critique run out of steam, as Bruno Latour suggests (Latour 2004)? Or do our authors succeed in showing that there may be life in it yet? Even if we do not share all of their conclusions, Fuchs’s and Berry’s respective readings and reworkings of elements of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory may offer alternative and complementary frames, lenses and conceptual instruments for studying digital media to those already available in the nascent new media canon. Through their dialectical forays into the social, cultural, historical, economic and political contexts in which digital media and the mythologies around them are performed, they challenge more rigidly descriptive approaches and encourage more ambitious theoretical experimentation. They both call for a stronger normative dimension to the study of digital media, for the development of critical praxis as well as critical theory, as well as for a fundamental re-imagining and recomposition of the digital structures and systems which shape and mediate ever more aspects of earthly life.