More specifically, I will ask, What does it mean to be human in a digital civilization? What, according to the digital discourse, is the new conception of humans in a network society? How is the intersection of network technology with humans understood? I will be particularly interested in understanding the ways in which the new network human fits into the networks of market, work, and production—that is, into the post-Fordist situation. The narratives regarding the network human are organized around four facets, or sites, of the human: body, mind, identity, and the unconscious, moving as it were from physical and material facets through the cognitive to self-identification and, ultimately, the unconscious components of the human.
Network Body
THE BODY SIM<sub>UL</sub>ACR<sub>U</sub>M
Let me begin with an image that appeared in “Electric Word,” a longstanding feature in Wired capturing the current lingo and discourse of the digital society through short expositions of people, events, technologies, and cultural artifacts. The feature’s May 2002 edition presents an artwork by Alba D’Urbano in a short piece entitled “Second Skin” (Moreno 2002). The artwork is a suit tailored from a fabric and printed with an image of the artist’s naked body. The photo shows a model wearing a suit of a naked female body (Figure 6.1). Why is this artwork—which has seemingly nothing to do with network technology—featured in Wired? What is the meaning of this artwork in the context of the digital society? Why is it an important enough cultural expression—in the eyes of Wired—to be counted as an “Electric Word”?
This artwork, I want to suggest, encapsulates a key narrative of the digital discourse concerning the meaning of being human in a digital age. It does that by undermining the modernist conceptions of “the human” as a distinct, autonomous entity demarcated from its environment, quasi-transcendental, unique (or singular) in its capacity for subjectivity. Admittedly subtle and suggestive and through a specific facet of the human—the body—this artwork nevertheless delivers a poignant exposition of the critical stance of the digital discourse concerning the “human” by undercutting humanism’s constitutive human/nonhuman distinction, as well as a few other derivative distinctions (subject/object, nature/culture, and human/technology).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age