Being Virtual: Modularity As A Cultural Condition

Afterimage, Sept, 2000 by Barry King

In this essay I will outline the elements and conditions of a new disciplinarity of the self, which I term modularity. Following the example of Michel Foucault I believe that modularity is an emergent disciplinary practice that is to be found across a range of disparate sites and practices, from the workplace to the discourses of the academy and particularly in the metaphor of performance. [1]

In the broadest sense, the term modularity denotes a cultural relationship that has emerged with the saturation of the public domain by various forms of techno-disembodied presence such as photography, computer graphic simulation and electronic imagery. Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum--a copy without an original--has identified an aspect of this development. But absent from a popular understanding of Baudrillard's account, especially when his notion of the end of the social is addressed, is a recognition of the invidious power of the perfected images that form the hyperreal ecology of the media. [2] In particular, in arguing that the masses are indifferent, Baudrillard undervalues the mimetic relationship between the private individual and the mass media as a source of experiences that are both exemplary and unavailable elsewhere. In a kind of Platonic inversion, it might be said that the images on the flickering walls of the electronic cave are better than the real and for that reason encourage the desire to be realized in an open-ended spiral of emulation and mimesis. [3]

In its general aspect, modularity is the process whereby concretely given individuals struggle to rise above their own limits by means of a script of self-fashioning drawn from the media. One decisive precondition is clearly the capacity of photographic or electro-optical media formats to impose a detail control over the realm of appearances. This control, intensively augmented and facilitated by digital techniques, confers mastery over the spatial and temporal coordinates of the referent scene--converting then and there into a continuous presence subject in principle only to the whim of the viewer and his or her skills and resources. I want to argue that the prospect of being able, in this sense, to write the visible compounds the logic of what I shall term "commodity physiognomy"--the selling of the appearance of the self as an economic asset or an item of cultural capital. [4] Nor is it unimportant that the media offer protocols of transformation that are not only superlatively rendered as images but also images that have a guaranteed universality of circulation. Modularity, as I see it, is based on a fantasy of the perfect exemplary performance; as such it is a discipline based on control by exemplars. For if ambiguity can be a control, so can explicitness. Accordingly, modularity as an ideological practice may be said to be less a falsification than a production of the real, a practice that attracts because it imposes a preemptive coherence on what is otherwise dispersed, unstable and fluid. [5] Particularly with the rise of interactive media, modularity becomes a condition of being in which self-fashioning is empowered by reliance on an externalized prosthetic visual display--a display that is fundamentally embroiled in plasticity and change.

Although I believe that the media essentially prefigure changes in the regulation of labor power, in what follows I propose to limit the bulk of my observations to the role of the media in cognitively mapping a new script of the commodity self--the self prepared for employment or the sale of labor power. Whether media saturation is causing the emphasis on performance or the conditions of social existence are imposing this metaphor on the media that then transform it into a form of life is difficult to demonstrate. In a media-saturated society the precondition of a separation between the real and the mediated that is necessary to establish a linear causality no longer applies. It is however possible to proceed metonymically, showing that what is present in one discourse is partially echoed in the discourses of other practices and vice versa, in a process of interpenetration and catalyzing cycles of reinforcement. In this analysis, I will concentrate on nationally broadcast television commercials for two reaso ns. First, commercials are sites where cutting edge techniques are flaunted in order to stand out from the visual noise of our cluttered media environment. Second, although many of the special effects that are used in commercials, such as morphing, were first seen in the commercial film sector, it is in the commercial arena that the ideas and concepts implicit in the effects are rendered as commonplace and thus acquire the status of transparent slogans.

Defining the modular

Defined abstractly, as a proposition about the realm of culture and cultural practice, modularity has the following features:

a) The principle that all totalities are nothing more than an aggregation of components. These components can be combined in various ways because they are conceived to be functional equivalents permitting substitution, addition and recombination.