Digital Diaspora

I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments.

― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-19341

“But I never looked like that!” —How do you know? What is the “you” you might or might now look like? Where do you find it—by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

— Roland Barthes2

διασπείρω (diaspeirō). 

“I scatter.”

“I spread about.”

διά (dia).

“Between, through, across.”

σπείρω (speirō).

“I sow, I scatter.”

διασπορά (diaspora).

“Scattering.”

Deuteronomy 28:25, in the phrase ἔσῃ ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς, esē en diaspora en pasais tais basileiais tēs gēs, translated to mean “thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth.”

And I, myself, am a dispersion. I am a scattering. My face has been cast to the wind (bequeathed in thy palm) and relinquished to forces beyond my control.

In this mass pilgrimage to digital landscapes, how does the perception of a Whole Self suffer? Does it corrode? Does it shatter?

I stare at my camera roll: Albums > People > My Face, a thousand times over. I confront my gaze upon my Instagram, my Facebook, my TikTok. I stare at myself and ask if I am real. I stare at the mirror and ask if I am real. As I capture my image, as I share my image, do I shed a sliver of my autonomy? My embodied wholeness?

In my journal, scrawled in the margins: “How does the vast proliferation of the Self lead to the sensation of a fragmented identity, especially in unison with the phenomenon of obsessive aesthetic labeling & branding? The monetization of the very idea of you?”

But this you—this face of yours that has been replicated over and over and over again, split into pieces and scattered across the web through selfies and self-idolatries, is, of course, only a facsimile, a representation of your existence. But, somehow, it has grown its own flesh, and these digital landscapes somehow now feel just as “real” as your phenomenal reality (that which is derived through the senses, rather than through the mind). This capturing and splintering of our physical reality has eroded our sense of direct, lived experience (of this, I am sure you are aware). As Susan Sontag writes, “[Photographing] has gotten built into our very way of perceiving things, that we have a fundamentally appropriative relationship to reality.”3

A fundamentally appropriative relationship to reality. Precisely the function of Baudrillard’s allegorical expansion of Jorge Luis Borges’s fable from “On Exactitude in Science.” In Borges’s tale, a great Empire created an exactly proportional map to itself that was so detailed that it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map was expanded and destroyed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of the Empire spend their lives ensuring their place in the representation is properly circumscribed and detailed by the map-makers; conversely, it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.4 

In tandem to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. We are at an historical epoch “at which commodity completes its colonization of social life.”5

Such a colonization does not, as Borges’s tale would imply, result in a one-to-one, proportional transpositioning of the Self from the phenomenal world into the digital one. Rather, it causes a:

διασπορά (diaspora).

“Scattering.”

Diaspora has been traditionally employed within popular discourse to describe a population that is scattered across regions separate from their place of origin—referring to peoples who identify with a specific region, but reside elsewhere. When applied to the notion of the Self, one may identify with the phenomenal world, but find themselves (oneself) scattered across the digital landscape due to the colonization of social life by corporate entities.

διασπείρω (diaspeirō). 

“I scatter.”

“I spread about.”

Douglas Rushkoff defines it as digiphrenia—digi for “digital,” and phrenia for “disordered condition of mental activity”.6 Eugen Bleuler takes from Ancient Greek skhízō [σχῐ́ζω, "to split"] and phrḗn [φρήν, "mind"].7 Both linguistic renderings refer to a failure in a person’s thinking to bring together dichotomous qualities into something of a cohesive, realistic whole.

Of course, within this etymological investigation, I caution against such a literal interpretation of Bleuler’s construction, and quote from Frederic Jameson’s rather apt metaphorization:

All of this puts us in the position of grasping schizophrenia as the breakdown of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years - this existential or experiential feeling of time itself - is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time. But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time.8

This persistence of the “I” and “me” is reliant upon the holistic integration of the Self into phenomenal reality. However, as phenomenal reality is processed by our sensorial capacities and digital reality is processed by the mind, perhaps success upon this holistic integration can only occur through fullest relinquishing of all identities.

Not identity, singular. But identities, plural.

For if these digital proliferations of You (of the Self) can be viewed and perceived at any moment in time, without your knowledge (or sensing), how will this affect our temporal continuity? It must collapse into itself.

Warp.

We know that our perception of time is conditioned by language; the ordering of symbols, of words, across a visual locus point from left to right has resulted in us picturing time the same way—that is, extending from left to right. As our encounters with representations of existence (of selves and selves and selves) can occur any point and warp our perception in intangible, coercive ways, our encounters with the space-time continuum will also be dramatically altered.

Frankfurt scholar Siegfried Kracauer alluded to similar fracturing of space and time through the mainstream assimilation of photography.9 He refers to the “aura”—that which encapsulates the “peculiar weave” of spatial and temporal dimensions. Through photography, memory is fragmented, as resultant images come to represent a ghost of the past which continuously haunts the present upon the moment of its perception. In his example of the photograph of the grandmother being viewed by her grandchildren, the lived experience of the woman is lost to their perception of the photograph, which now compiles a compendium of her youth; it is representative not of her, but what they read of her. This desire of portraiture is manifested from a visceral, human fear of death in an attempt to preserve time. However, this opposite is achieved as it alienates the truthfulness of the self. Further, it fragments memory as dependent upon objects, externalizing our perception of time as built around form, rather than maintaining an internal flow.

And, thus, the notion of the Self forever fragmented.

1 Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934, 1966.

2Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1981. French title: La Chambre claire.

3 Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.

4 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981. French title: Simulacres et Simulation.

5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967. French title: La société du spectacle.

6 Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, 2013.

7 Eugen Bueler, The Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism, 1912. German title: Zur Theorie des schizophrenen Negativismus.

8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 1992.

9 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 1960. German title: Theorie des Films: Die Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit.