Author: Effie Gianitsos
How does the contemporary global novel remake the subject of the novel for the present hypermediated world that its readership presumably inhabits? To sketch an answer for this question, I want to think alongside Fredric Jameson, who has famously claimed the death of the subject in his influential study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989). The death of the subject is intimately bound up with what Jameson terms “the waning of affect,” which he identifies with feeling or emotion arising from an individual subject or monad. This description of the bourgeois individual is reminiscent of the Hegelian understanding of the subject with an emotional core, and the “waning of affect” thus attests to the “death” of a subject or psychic capacity shaped by an earlier economic mode (15-16). The mode of production associated with late capitalism brings about a “flattening” of the once-“round” characters that populated the novels of an earlier industrial era. In post-1945 novels, Jameson argues, characters report fluctuations of feeling that can no longer be identified as individuated emotions. Instead, Jameson borrows Lyotard’s term “intensities” to characterize the impersonal and ephemeral yet nonetheless subjective forces that coalesce and disperse groups of individuals today (49). Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism (2013), however, turns Postmodernism’s definition of affect on its head, situating it in opposition to monadic “emotion.” In this redefinition, Jameson conceives of affect as synonymous with the “bodily feelings” he had previously called intensities (30).
Affect theory’s critical emergence and Jameson’s subsequent redefinition finds its impetus in Gilles Deleuze’s updating of Spinoza. In his lecture on “Spinoza’s Concept of Affect,” Deleuze defines the force of affect by way of its difference from the idea of emotion: whereas an idea is a mode of thought that is representative in nature, an affect is “any mode of thought which doesn’t represent anything” (2). The non-representational character of affect makes it difficult to name, as language is inherently a representational tool. Deleuze goes on to explain, “affect is not reducible to an intellectual comparison of ideas but is constituted by the lived transition or lived passage from one degree of perfection to another” (3-4). In this, Deleuze sees affect as a process, an experiential fluctuation between states of being. The affective subject becomes someone or something else. Appropriately, Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism asks us to consider affect as what demarcates different moments in the history of the novel and connects those moments to periodic insurgencies of affect that require us to develop a more adequate theory of not only emotion but ultimately the human subject. If we consider today’s affective subjects as subjects-in-process rather than states of being, Jameson’s “waning of affect” certainly applies to the well-rounded protagonists of nineteenth-century realism. In relation to the flat protagonist that has emerged in recent fiction, however, the contemporary subject could be more accurately described as a waxing of affect.
To be clear, when I use the term subjectivity in reference to contemporary fictional characters, I do not mean the self-contained bourgeois individual, but an alteration of that concept informed by Jameson’s redefinition. It is important to note that Jameson’s work attributes formal changes in novels of the last three decades to undeniable transformations in the media ecologies that they inhabit. In suggesting the limits of his 1980s concept of the postmodern subject, it is only fair to point out our growing awareness of what it takes for a novel to succeed in increasingly globalized economic markets and social relations, as well as a radically different media landscape. Prescient as they are in this respect, it seems to me, neither Postmodernism (1989) nor Antinomies (2013) could account for the impact of the global dominance of the Internet, particularly social media platforms, on the very idea of subjectivity. To help qualify just how incredibly far-reaching this medial domination has evolved in the last decade, meditate on this: a 2020 report from the digital datahub We Are Social shows that more than 4.5 billion people are now using the Internet worldwide, and social media users have now passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60% of the world’s total population is online, and 85% of those users have social media profiles. This number is projected to go up by 9% in the next year but could very well go up much larger than projected due to society’s increased reliance on Internet socialization in light of coronavirus-related shutdowns. The emergence and dominance of social media has presented a rapid and expansive change that has transformed the postmodern subjectivity of the 1980s into something I wish to call ‘Internet subjectivity.’
One way to approach the Behemoth of subjectivity and the rise of the Internet profile is through Eva Illouz’s Emotional Capitalism (2005). Though not exactly current scholarship on social media, this text explores the Internet (dating) profile to consider the ways in which the Internet changes Jameson’s postmodern subject. Illouz writes, “At face value, the Internet enables a far more flexible, open-ended, and multiple self, thus marking the epitome of the postmodern self in its capacity to make the self playful, self-inventing, and even deceitful in its capacity to manipulate information regarding the self” (80). Nevertheless, she distinguishes the Internet’s ideal subjectivity as more “ontic” than the concept that prevailed in critical theory:
Whereas the postmodern self implies there is no core self, only a multiplicity of roles to be played, the self that is posited by the conjunction of psychology and Internet technology is “ontic” in the sense that it assumes there is a core self which is permanent and which can be captured through a multiplicity of representations (questionnaire, photo, emailing) and so on. The Internet revives with a vengeance the old Cartesian dualism between mind and body, with the only real locus for thought and identity being in the mind. To have an Internet self is to have a Cartesian cogito, and to be involved in the world by looking at it from within the walls of one’s consciousness. (80-81)
Illouz sees the Internet as a decidedly psychological, self-reflexive technology. The Internet assumes that there is a kind of individual self that exists in the word, evident in the Internet profile’s reliance on labeling. The Internet profile allows its user to create a stable self-narrative (or unstable, if they choose) that has some immaterial permanence. Illouz’s insight that the Internet revives the Cartesian dualism of mind and body is perhaps most valuable in light of what it can tell us about the transformations, or ‘death’ of a certain kind of emotional subject in postmodern novels. Rather than the intensities of feeling that Jameson understands as operating through the body, Illouz finds that, for its users, the Internet recuperates a fantasy of the mind’s self-determination, as “the only real locus for thought and identity [on the Internet profile is] in the mind.” Rather than recuperate a Romantic individuality or monadic subject per se, the Internet self might be said to hallucinate something like the “I” of Romantic lyric, a disembodied Cartesian subject. I draw this comparison very loosely, for unlike the Romantic poet who sees the lyric as embodying his feelings in a meaningful and immediate way, social media makes its users hyperaware of the fact that Internet profiles are carefully curated and constructed — take the normalization and indeed desirability of distorting filters on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat as a case in point (though by Internet logic, this distortion could be more properly understood as enhancement). However conscientiously the user may enhance their own profile, once it’s online it’s ultimately the algorithms that market these profiles that determines their fate.
In the ready embracement of the self as playful and ironic construction, Internet subjectivity does not deny postmodern subjectivity, but rather takes it to its logical extreme: the Internet self is the afterlife of the dead, rounded subjects of realism. The social media profile offers a medium by which a user can create curate an emotional and cognitive core without there being a “there there.” In this way, the social media profile operates on the logic of what Baudrillard calls ‘the hyperreal,’ a representation without an original sign. The social media profile ushers a new conception of subjectivity based in a sense of self with a capacious if not dubious relationship to realism, and one that is in a constant state of becoming (for when is the social media profile ever ‘finished?’).
Few of these novels foreground the internet as integral to the setting of human action but it nevertheless shapes characters’ social relations and sense of self, and thus the social interaction that constitutes the plot. To demonstrate the formal consequences of the contemporary novel’s importation of Internet subjectivity, I will shift to a textual analysis of Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes (2010) and Rachel Cusk’s Transit (2016). For at their core, both these novels represent and probe the ways in which technology mediates human subjectivity in the tradition of realism and aim to represent how the novelistic technology (as Clifford Siskin has called it) consolidates the formation of a kind of socially networked consciousness.
Fame’s episodic form makes apparent the social network it engineers. For instance, the passing reference of the “stupid books” by Miguel Auristos Blanco that Ebling’s wife reads in “Voices,” is later given context when Miguel Auristos Blanco appears in his own deadly serious story “Replying to the Abbess,” and is once again iterated in “A Contribution to the Debate,” when the internet user moll-wit parodies his voice and philosophy: “become one with things, one with becoming one, one with your oneness with them” (5, 117). These ephemeral moments of superficial interconnection behave much like the tag feature on social media platforms, and this tagging is the primary method that Kehlmann uses to connect otherwise alienated characters together. Since the novel’s stories only gain traction by means of their engineered connection, the entire novel itself seems to be operating on the logic of a social network. The novel’s episodic, networked structure effectively flattens the moral plane of its many characters, refusing to privilege any one character or point of view over another. As a result, the novel embraces multiplicity and connectivity for its own sake, sketching character by character, network by network with no particular ideological telos. Rather, the success of Fame’s plot hinges on the development of a social network in of itself: it is this making of a social network that the novel aspires to.
In terms of content, each of Fame’s episodes underscores the novel’s preoccupation with the kind of hyperreality afforded by the unbounded, non-mimetic representation of the self (the kind of self-enabled by internet profiles). Khelmann’s insistence that Fame is not a collection of short stories but is actually A Novel in Nine Episodes insists that each chapter be interpreted as an episodic repetition that contributes to some novelistic whole, but if one latches on to the medial affordance of the term ‘episodes’ in light of its seriality, the novel’s chapters have to be read as episodes that only gain meaning as they establish a pattern of repetition and difference. Based on these patterns of plot, I would argue that each story/chapter focuses on users’ relationships to technology and report how these technologies affect their relationships to their ontic selves. For instance, just as Aristos Blanco’s letter-writing makes him feel “more real” and “truthful” as he contemplates suicide, Maria Rubinstein’s lack of cellphone service makes her feel “unreal,” trapped in an Eastern dreamscape. It’s worth noting that feelings of being (their conception of real and unreal ontic selves) are accompanied by bodily intensities, as in Ebling’s orgasmic “electrical prickling” (10). This is to say that though I am understanding the Internet as a primarily psychological/cerebral technology thus far, I do not mean to argue Internet subjectivity does not distribute and intensify affect; quite the opposite. Take, for instance, when the nameless adulterous narrator of the chapter “How I Lied and Died” directly addresses the audience to identify the transformative operations of (Internet) technology: “How strange that technology has brought us to a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true” (147). The narrator of this chapter imagines a new existence for himself apart from his wife and with a secret mistress, and he understands this pleasure as both bodily and psychological in nature: the sexual charge comes from the fabricated secret enabled by his new phone. In reflection, he draws a plain and simple fact from his experience of with technology, namely, that “a single existence is not enough for human beings” (156). The narrator ultimately exposes that it is the creation of a new virtual existence, a self-mediated through technology, rather than the woman he is with that gives him the most fulfillment: “most of all I always loved the [woman] I wasn’t with at the moment, the one I couldn’t be with, from whom the other one was keeping me separate” (149).
Fame often parallels the (hyper)real feelings enabled by using technology with the act of reading itself. The novel makes this parallel most explicit in the internet profile persona of ‘moll-wit’ in the chapter “A Contribution to the Debate.” Moll-wit’s online persona is fantastically juxtaposed with his material existence in “Real Life (the real one!),” and posits his internet self as a pragmatic necessity for actualizing what he calls “Life Sense:”
You know my username moll-wit from other forums. I post a lot on Supermovies and also on TheeveningNews, on literature4you, and chat rooms, and when I see bloggers serving up bullshit I let them have it. Username always moll-wit. In Real Life (the real one!) I’m in my mid-thirties, quite tall, medium build. During week, I wear tie, office regs, whole capitalist racket, you do the same. Has to happen if you’re going to realize your Life Sense. In my case writing analyses, observations, and databases: contributions to culture, society, political stuff. (113)
The pragmatic necessity of ‘Life Sense’ flies out of perspective as the reader becomes more absorbed into moll-wit’s larger-than-life internet persona. The deeply entertaining prose-style of moll-wit’s voice de-emphasizes the “sense” part of the phrase “Life Sense,” and it becomes less about understanding the ‘capitalist racket’ moll-wit elucidates (and still less about the real/embodied self [the self of “Real Life”] of moll-wit outside the forum) and more certainly about the style of representation itself. In other words, the act of representing becomes more meaningful than the object it assumes to represent: style over substance. Representing an emotional and cognitive self on the Internet is “a lot cooler” than “Real Life (the real one!)” amounting to a triumph of the Internet self as “more real” than the capitalized “Real Life.” Indeed, compared to the novel’s other characters, moll-wit’s Internet persona is hyperreal —hence Kehlmann’s the tongue in cheek addition, “(the real one!).”
It is no small detail that moll-wit wants nothing more than to be made a character in one of Leo’s stories, which further elaborates on the stylistic refashioning and indeed immaterial permanence that internet subjectivity aspires to:
Holy Ninjas: being in the same house as Leo Richter who made Lara Gaspard. The guy who decided what she saw and did. Shaking his hand was almost like shaking hers — you pierce my meaning? And then, at that moment, in the darkness of my room, I had an A-1 flash. If you’re surfing the net as much as I am, then you know — how to say it? Well, you know that reality isn’t everything. That there are spaces you don’t enter with your body. Only in your thoughts, but definitely there … Leo used stuff he saw? Guys he met? Events that happened? Yes, he could even use me. Nothing against it! Appearing in a story — really no different from being in a chat room. Transformation! Transport yourself into some other place. In a story I’d be someone else, but also me. (123)
Moll-wit proclaims that his insider knowledge of the Internet media form allows him to declare that “reality isn’t everything” and that the Internet is a “thought-driven” space that defies material conditions, “but is definitely there.” Of course, the insistence of this ontic subject’s existence despite its immateriality seems to push back on Jameson’s ‘flatness.’ It’s as if the human being has become so flat that he dissolves into particles or sense-data that his ever in flux, always aspiring to “Transformation!” Jameson’s 2D characters are distinguished from the 3D characters of the nineteenth-century novel, but it would seem that the characters of Fame are not dimensional in the sense that they lack parameters: their emotional and cognitive span is at once infinity and nothing and are primarily creatures of an affective becoming. In the end, moll-wit does not see Leo again, and he laments that “Reality will be the only thing I have: job and mother at home and the boss and the Überpig Lobenmeier, and the only escape forums like this” (134). The desire for escape is rendered in terms of moll-wit’s “Real Life” socio-economic situation, but Khelmann then breaks the third wall with moll-wits ironic concluding statement: “All I have forever is me. Only right here, on this side … No alternative universe … And I know that I’ll never, ever, be in a story” (134). Of course, the irony here is that moll-wit’s is in fact in a story where is Onternet self is one in the same as his narrativized, novelistic self.
If Kehlmann’s Fame presents social web that imagines self-actualization or ontic alterity through various digital and nondigital medias, then Rachel Cusk’s Transit acts as a foil to this configuration of internet subjectivity. Unlike Kehlmann, Cusk’s novel features a single protagonist who narrates the novel and is herself a novelist. Cusk’s protagonist does not delight in the kinds of fanstastical self-creation through media that Kehlmann’s characters do, and neither does she engineer connections among the novel’s many characters. Rather, Transit’s mysterious protagonist, Faye, functions like narrative antimatter: she is a narrator and character that wants to efface herself from and into the text. Faye is an amalgamation of the surfaces and spaces she records, and she is just as omnipresent as she is absent because it is only she that links those spaces to each other. In terms of plot, the novel is a series of interactions that have remarkably similar narrative arcs: Faye encounters a person whose existence feels contradictory or unrecognized somehow. They tell her about it, and she records what they say. She refrains from openly intruding herself into the stories she retells. I want to suggest that even though Transit does not explicitly rely on social media or even other figures of technology, Transit’s form still begets an Internet subjectivity.
To do this, I want draw attention to the novel’s framing scene. The novel beings with retelling of a story about an email sent to Faye her by an Internet astrologer. Faye paraphrases the email sent to her by the astrologer, who tells Faye that she has important news concerning the events of her immediate future written in the stars: “She could see things I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky” (1). Faye then records the superfluous rhetoric of the astrologer — her belief in fate, personal connection, humanity’s inherent kindness, dignity, and “cosmic importance” (2) and subjects that information to interrogation:
It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human. As a result her sympathy and concern were slightly sinister; yet for those same reasons they also seemed impartial. (3)
Faye is suspicious of the astrologer’s computer-generated character; it renders her concern “sinister” while also granting it “impartiality.” In so describing this computer-generated self whose prose bears no resemblance to Faye’s, the text also proposes that the reader to use this algorithm as a template for understanding Faye herself. For what else is Faye if not an ‘impartial’ listener whose sense of concern in the lives of others (or at least the level of concern needed to meticulously record their words) seems slightly “sinister” if not judgmental? After describing the email, Faye tells the story of a friend who believes there had been “a great harvest” of the “language and information from life, and [that] it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original” (3). In that she too “grows more substantial and more relational than the original,” Faye’s narration becomes a social media platform in its own right. Where the characters of Kehlmann’s story use media to actualize a hyperreal version of themselves, Cusk is not interested in re-crafting a self-narrative and instead proposes that the most acute novelistic subjectivity is itself a kind of media platform, a “mechanized interface” whereby “the erosion of individuality” is enacted by “the distillation not of one human but of many” (3-4).
A pertinent commentary on how the novel wants its reader to regard Faye might be understood through the instance of Jane, the student writer obsessed with the paintings of Marsden Hartley because, as she states, “He’s me” and “I’m him” (134). After Jane tells Faye that she and Marsden Hartley are the same person, Faye asks her “if she was talking about identification,” because “it was common enough to see oneself in others, particularly if those others existed at one remove from us, as for instance characters in a book do” (134). Here the novel implicitly addresses how to read characters in fiction, but Jane frustratedly states that Faye’s understanding is wrong, that it’s not ‘identification’ and that draws her to Hartley, for they “had in fact nothing in common at all” (135). Jane “was not interested in [his paintings] objectively, as art” but “they were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognize that those thoughts were her own” (134-35). This scene contrasts reading a novel for identification with reading a novel for thought-harvesting, and though Faye is given more authority than Jane, her preoccupation with characters like Jane who locate their authentic selves (or rather their ontic selves) outside their bodily ‘realities’ actually mirrors Faye’s own self- effacement in her narration. Not only that, but because the text does not use quotation marks or paragraph indentations to signal that a character other than the narrator is speaking, the attribution of who said what and thought what is often questionable. Cusk’s uniform, paragraph-driven prose is a stylistic choice that makes Jane’s assertion that her own investment in the art object is more like ‘thoughts’ that she could claim as her own appears more and more plausible by the novel’s form. This phenomenon of simultaneous self-effacement and self-actualization through reproduction appears to draw an yet another unique affordance of social media: the repost or retweet, which essentially allows users to reproduce the material of other users on their own profiles and in effect claim it as their own.
Faye’s Internet subjectivity is truly new insofar as it diverges not only from that of the rounded, or whole, individual but also from the playfully superficial postmodern subject. Hers is a presence that gains substance only through the others that she represents. The difference I want to stress here is between a model of subjectivity that actively self-produces and creates and a more passive model that acquires substance from borrowing and re-production. To illustrate this difference in social media’s terms, we might think of Kehlmann’s Internet subject as the sort of individual who creates their character online, thus a character of the sort that Illouz describes, one that temporarily displaces the embodied self as one’s core identity. Cusk’s subject, however, would retweet or repost content that others have generated to create a subjectivity. To be clear, though, Faye’s claiming others’ information as the content of one’s own Internet self does not reveal a state of being but dramatizes her style of relationality. Both models of subjectivity are equally laying claim to a self without an origin, and they both, as Jane insists, “dramatize” the art object’s connection to its apprehending subject (138). In one of the novel’s final scenes, Faye finally offers some sense of a motive for the larger narrative and her style of silent recording. She reveals an incident from her own life that occurred just before the time of the novel commences: her kids are waiting for their father to get home, and even though she knows that “nothing particularly important” will happen when he returns, Faye confesses that she nevertheless felt “something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin that it might give way entirely” (233). Faye frames her divorce as a crisis of belief and identity. Rather than explain the reasons for the divorce and why it cannot be reversed, Faye recounts how her oldest child bashed his younger brother’s head against the kitchen countertop, re-enacting a scene of domestic violence he had witnessed and did not fully understand, which she — and evidently he, at some level — identifies as the blow that breaks up the family. Interestingly, this primary causal event does not rise to the level of trauma. The novel as a whole takes for granted that Faye, though emptied of a certain delusionary identity, need not project a new one. If this novel were written, say, fifty years ago, it would confront Faye’s trauma, but this novel operates under the assumption that trauma, insofar as it is a crisis of belief and identity enacted by a fracturing of one’s self-narrative or bodily integrity, can be effaced like the Faye’s own self. By contrast to the traumatized women of early twentieth century novels, however, Faye is not condemned to put her life on hold until she can relive and re-integrate her trauma into a new self-narrative. We might say that she prefers to move out of that identity and into many other superficial lives, much like those who populated the social network of Fame.
Although Faye is what Jameson might call a dead subject in that she negates the roundness that comes with internal conflict, to leave it at that would not account for her habit of poaching on other subjectivities and (I daresay) her own investment in futurity. In the wake of her divorce, Faye is surrounded by an “atmosphere of haunting,” and sense of defeat and “powerlessness that people called fate” that she was “forever trying to deny or dispel” (241). The novel maps out her flight, by means of listening and learning, from the deterministic force of a stable self-informed by “personal concepts:”
… what mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth. It was hard to do that while still believing in identity, let alone in personal concepts like justice and honour and revenge, just as it was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out much more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible. (243)
Because the novel never reports exactly what Faye learns from listening, the novel evidently values the process of Faye’s becoming via listening, reading, and recording instead of what is learned. Faye’s belief in learning and her desire to read “truth” in others’ stories feels a bit like the “absurd hope” of the narrator in Fame’s “Rosalie Goes Off to Die,” who in the end briefly considers the righteousness of ‘ruining’ his story of the terminally-ill Rosalie by miraculously curing her: “for a moment I feel I’ve done the right thing, as if mercy were all-important and one story less didn’t matter. And at the same time, I have to confess, I have an absurd hope that someone someday will do the same for me” (64). Faye’s investment in futurity and to go onwards registers as an “absurd hope” that the message from the astrologer email may pan out, hence her paying the money to read the astrologer’s forecast (9) and her effort to make a home out of a “can of worms,” “money sink” and downright hopeless piece of real estate (40, 42).
Faye’s willful suspension of disbelief and investment in virtual if not actual futurity finds expression in capacity to absorb and retell narratives. In the broader context of the novel and the subject, it is something more like an insurgence of belief informed by new media ecologies and the possibility of harnessing the operations of social media to serve the individual. While Kehlmann’s episodic novel aligns with an Internet subjectivity of social networks and social media profiles, Cusk’s Faye is a hub and composite of the many self-generated users with whom she interacts. By the novel’s conclusion and throughout the trilogy of which it is a part, Faye hovers as a virtual subject in process, tugged forward by her willful suspension of disbelief in the potential for meaning and meaning making.
