It is increasingly common to hear of identities described as "fluid". Fluid identities are shifting identities, unmoored from any fixed location. In their fluidity they break down the normative weight of solid, fixed identities.
Fluidity implies movement, a sort of identity jet-setting which - despite the proliferation of fluid identities - I think we should recognise as being less and less characteristic of the digital age, and especially the post pandemic age. If potential for movement is no longer the prime characteristic of the non-solid, should we then pivot within the idiom to liquidity and liquidizing as the signatures of digitally disaffected and dysphoric humanity?
Liquidity does not emphasise the mobile, as with fluidity, but the labile, the property of being easily changed, and a description that necessitates a process of liquidation, so as to nullify the residual and resisting solidity of the thing.
Labile persons are not fixed in their identities. Nor however are they fluid in so far as they neatly move from one shape to another by force of their own will, like the mythical god Proteus, the etymology of which implies an originary or primordial character and was commonly associated with the sea.
The status of modern labile persons is foremost to be subject to processes of liquification, disruption, and change, such that holding a stable form is impossible.
Autonomy is the principle victim of subjective liquification, as the capacity to adopt a form-of-life proper to a stable and ongoing persona is constantly disrupted by what Bernard Stiegler has termed generalised proletarianization. This process - dramatically accelerated by the enforced nihilism of the pandemic - is enabled by evermore invasive technologies.
The elimination of boundaries does not deliver all things to free association.
Information is paradigmatic of "liquid modernity"; it is ephemeral, always superseding itself. We talk of information flows and hubs where it is stored like oil or gas. Some tech entrepreneurs have even compared the big data economy to the oil and gas industry. But information also liquidizes. In its shear quantity it overwhelms what is solid in an endless competition for attention.
As it exists in a competitive environment (a capitalist environment), information constantly radicalises itself so as to be best positioned to capture the cognitive capacity of human beings, who are its relays. A relay is not a repository. Human beings are no longer required to hold information, only to generate, transmit, and amplify it. Since the information economy is by nature transitory and ephemeral it carries with it its own sense of time, which is always in the process of accelerating.
"Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding and commitment are time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics".
Byung-Chul Han - Non-Things
Fluid subjects are mixed into the ocean of digital culture, but they do not swim in it. Swimming is a discipline that implies direction and will, set against (or maybe consciously with) the prevailing currents. The fluid subject is not like the dandy or flaneur of industrial modernity, who picks choice pieces from out the incessant flow of experience. Even such a subjectivist aestheticism as this requires a basic foundation (an essential stillness) on which to function. Digitally disaffected populations have no solid ground on which to stand, nor can they find their way in the ocean of data.
In the digital order, the grundstimmung of post-human subjects is dysphoria.
The role of memory in guarding against dysphoria is paramount. But even here, in the own-most depths of our bower there is disruption. Our memories too are made labile by an overabundance of stimuli and information. We don't hang around long enough to remember, and besides we have all the technology to remember for us.
What becomes of our past without memory?
Those memories which stick to us owing to their intensity, or the value we place on them as formative for our persona, take on the musky nostalgia of an old movie which we replay for ourselves as a reminder that we do have a history, that things did once happen. Otherwise memory is lost amongst the endless competing stimuli, like an ace of hearts placed at random into a deck of cards.
In the competition for available brain power (another way of rendering the attention economy) only the most affective data flows have a chance of being retained as memory. The algorithms understand this. Their funnelling of human attention towards ever more extreme content ends predictably in a world of trauma.
In the economy of extreme affect only the traumatised fully exist
Are we not all like Rachael in Blade Runner, unable to trust our memories, unable to orientate ourselves within the intensity of lived experience? The amorous encounter becomes a depressive acting out of liquified subjects, unsure even of the grounds of their own enjoyment. Is she into me or is she like Joi, Officer K’s holographic girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049, just telling you everything you want to hear?
You have memories to look back on 😊
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