The Digital Imaginary Archive: Self Representation in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Chapter 1. Terra Australis Incognita

<An animated delineation of territories of digital self-reference and replication>

The aim of this exposition is a dynamic and animated delineation of the territories of digital self-reference and replication through the perspectives of storytelling and mythology, history and genealogy, and science and technology. This transcription is not intended as a conservative or totalising map or model; this particular schema of identification is an open-ended, polyphonic, paradoxical and animated representation of living-in-the-world.

Our self-imaginary excursion gestures towards another, and only partial, rendering or cartography of the new territories of being and living-in-the-world. Partial because self-reference and self-image are infinite "in all directions" and can never be circumscribed, let alone circumnavigated, and new because novel ways of thinking about our-selves are only now accessible in the facts and fictions of modern science and technology.

Previously drawn static and linear maps of self-image constrain exploration and have difficulty dealing with the metastable areas of representation and self-representation. Bringing the map "to life", if you will, accommodates "real-world" instability and indeterminism and, being a "living" model, emergent self-awareness and potential transformation is necessarily and epiphenomenally generated by an active and aware process of self-definition.

This is not meant to suggest this putative or incipient transformation has any moral "content" (or purpose or teleology) beyond that of "increasing degrees of freedom" of thought, and by implication, of movement and mobilisation. However such a transformation implies the inoculation of navigator and traveller to realise a wider, and hence viral or recombinatory, view of the territory in order to better deal with little-known regions of non-linearity, pluralisms, ecstasies and oppressions. As we unfold our handy map of self-image we see that it is one of intuition, contingency and relativity, but never absolute transcendence or "spirituality". Thus some regions are accordingly uninscribed and indescribable and can only be imagined or experienced. Whether such a map functions to seek or to avoid these regions is the traveller's choice, at the navigator's discretion.

From the earliest tales of metamorphosis, possession and transportation where the foundations of multiform ways of being were laid down, to the present-day generation of new self- and body-images in the new conceptual territories available in modern cultural and telecommunications interspaces, our self-obssession has taken us on a long and imaginative odyssey, one that by virtue of its ambitious undertaking, is neverending.

We have always had the idea of change and transformation inextricably embedded within societies and cultures and, over time, the very idea of change has changed. From early concepts of linear or cyclical transformational trajectories, embodying both progressive and retrogressive arcs - drawn from the linear and cyclical elements of sleep and rest, ageing and death, and the rotation of the four seasons, the idea of change took on progressively more complex characteristics. More recently (particularly since the early 90's rise of "chaos" theories), the advanced idea of a non-linear transformation has taken hold - inspired by new studies of weather, chance, and disease. This (post)modern non-linear understanding of change is the core and narrative engine of our new mythologies, dreams and waking lives.

Against this indeterminacy our map has to show simultaneously where we are, where we have come from and where we are going; these points anchors or locators (unscaled longitudes and latitudes) for our selves and our cultures in a changing landscape. But don't expect this journey to be an easy one, or to reach any kind of final destination.

Beware! As soon as we cast off and begin to describe or imagine our journey we straightway mire in the difficult politics of language. Adrift from familiar references the existing languages of geography, architecture, biology, religion and technology can fail us in unknown spaces and at critical times.

With all this in mind, where can we begin our "schizoanalytic" tour; one part of our selves at home with our memories, one part on the move with our hopes for a future? Perhaps we could begin with Guattari's modelling process outlined in the excellent self-navigation guide, Incorporations: "The immediate aim of (the) expressive chains (of systems for defining models of the self) is no longer to denote states of fact or to embed states of senses in significational axes but... to activate existential crystallisations operating, in a certain way, outside the fundamental principles of classical reason: identity, the excluded middle, causality, sufficient reason, continuity...

The most difficult thing to convey is that these materials, which can set a process of subjective self-reflection in motion, are themselves extracted from radically heterogenous, not to mention heraclite, elements: rhythms of lived time, obsessive refrains, identificational emblems, transitional emblems, fetishes of all kinds...

What is affirmed in this crossing of regions of being and modes of semiotization are traits of singularization that date - something like existential postmarks - as well as 'event', 'contingent' states of fact, their referential correlates and their corresponding assemblages of enunciation. Rational modes of discursive knowledge cannot fully grasp this double capacity of intensive traits to singularize and transversalize existence, enabling it, on the one hand, to persist locally, and on the other, to consist transversally giving it transconsistency.

It is accessible to apprehension only on the order of affect, a global transferential grasp whereby that which is most universal is conjoined with the most highly contingent facticity: the loosest of meaning's ordinary moorings becomes anchored in the finitude of being-there." (Guattari, p 36)

And so meanings congeal around apparently concrete ideas that are "in reality" mythological, poetic and contingent. However they do not remain insubstantial ideas for long and are soon incorporated in the social, political, economic and other power relations that produce a very real culture and way of (making a) living.

But movement of thought, of ideas, of bodies, space and time, implies crossing over into something, somewhere, different. And it is as we cross over, between these spaces and places, at the borders, that skirmishes break out. On one side are political and economic forces that threaten to totally colonise the unmapped areas of the self and the future. On the other there is tactical resistance through the generation of parallel ways of thinking about these territories, even as major portions are invaded by the military command entertainment complex.

Perhaps, this is simply an immune response of the self and body to new and threatening ideas. Just who is immune from whom is a matter of interpretation.