The Global Subject in an Electronic Age: Re(X)locating the Critical Self

glob•al•ism

Pronunciation: (glO’bu-liz”um), [key] — n. the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations. Global, globalize.

-Infoplease, The Learning Network, Inc.

But who determines the “interests of the entire world”? If “globalism” rhetorically supports the deployment of transnational corporations, then its apparent transparency screens an eco-ideology of whose workings we have all but lost sight/site. Slavoj Zizek’s take on meteorology as a closed circuit of meaning dependent on a background of the un(fore)seeable, and his analysis of the mobius band as emblematizing the (eternal) return to the distorted flip-side of the Same in views of the (ethnic, cultural) other (1997, 160–1) are adequate metaphors for the plight of the self-deluding, self-reproducing specular subject caught in the global hall of mirrors—Disney’s EPCOT edition of the world. Barry King’s concept of the “modular subject” is also symptomatic of the problem of subject formation in a globally mediated, techno-obsessed (and techno-paranoid) environment: the modular self is a fantasized recasting of identity as a universally viable cultural capital. Global subjectivity means, from this perspective, collective (self) representation; the modular self depends on the information highway and other broadcast media to remotely (re)fashion/(re)commodify itself in the eyes of the electronic Other (1–2). Being modular is a technotopian fantasy of prosthetic, transportable subjecthood, flexible and ready for redeployment and reconfiguration as situations require. My main concern in what follows is to consider how postmodern formulations/ formations of subjectivity have been impacted by the discourse of globality, and how the WWW, as instrument of this discourse, has contributed to (re)positioning/reconfiguring the subject. Howard Hughes’ life-performance of self-annihilation, the post-colonialist stance of hyphenated subjectivities, WWW de-collagism and Actor Network Theory represent some of the competing vectors perforating the discourse of globality, presenting opportunities to (discursively) dis-arrange this discourse, torquing it toward critical consciousness. ¹

The discourse of globality, as played out on and off line, involves an array of often incommensurable subject positions, from the virtualized/utopian to the specifically located. But we must take care: as soon as we turn on the computer, the Net’s image feedback begins to position us; the enfolded fictions of an “expanding” self “populated” by a flux of (often contradictory) socio-cultural voices (Kenneth Gergen), of multiple VR personalities (in MOOs and MUDs) and of digital shadow identities (electronic profiles composed not only of demographic data but also traces of our needs, interests, and desires stored in various consumer and institutional databases) vis-à-vis a RL self/selves are distorting masks, misdirections. Rather, as the contestatory (emptying) center of the RL/VR vortex, we could posit Virilio’s dichotomous paradigm of the split “subject” of speed: a global, generalizing force that elides, dissimulates while opening to the (X—mark) R(eal). ² Speed contributes to the disappearance of place and (bounded) personhood into both abstract signifying gestures (performance artist Papo Colo’s “zero identity”) ³ and into specific sudden de-substantializing encounters with the Real: accident, collision, violent confrontation with both the other and the absent Other—i.e., Void, the nothing/desert/mirage of symbolic being (Colo’s “zero identity” from another point of view, as the “zero institutions” of Zizek, signing not a plurality of positivizations, of functioning agents, but the terror of an empty form ⁴ ); the shock of the (re)emergence of the traumatic (X) of the pre-symbolic, objects awhirl in the mascerated/mascerating head of the global voyager. So the critical concern is not so much with the slip of attention from RL to VR and back, as with its ellipses—the false closure, the suturing of the Symbolic Order (SO, however its confirmation/affirmation is performed) over the (eruptions/disruptions of the) Real.

Conceptualizing “global subjectivity,” then, in a wired age is a (philosophically and politically) slippery business. Consider these situations. In a small rural community in China, 30 school children are killed in...