{"id":17278,"date":"2013-10-17T05:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17278"},"modified":"2013-10-17T06:35:13","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T10:35:13","slug":"is-digital-dualism-really-digital-ideal-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/10\/17\/is-digital-dualism-really-digital-ideal-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Is “Digital Dualism” really “Digital Ideal Theory”?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The “State of Nature”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we talk about \u201cdigital dualism,\u201d are we really talking about digital ideal theory? (I\u2019ll explain what I mean by \u201cideal theory\u201d shortly.) I\u2019m not sure. But, I want to push the question because I think it\u2019s very important for us to frame and discuss this critique in as precisely as possible. So, in this post, I\u2019m going to try to argue that we are, in fact, talking about digital ideal theory–not necessarily because I actually believe this argument, but because we need to push this argument to see if, where, and how it breaks.<\/p>\n

I ask this question because it seems to me that when we say \u201cdigital dualism,\u201d we\u2019re using the concept of an ontological dualism (reality vs virtuality) to describe a phenomenon or a view that isn\u2019t necessarily dualist<\/em>, and, as Nathan suggests here<\/a> and Jesse Spafford summarizes here<\/a>, isn\u2019t necessarily ontological<\/em>. What if the phenomenon we\u2019re referring to when we say \u201cdigital dualism\u201d isn\u2019t an ontological dualism, but an idealized epistemological abstraction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But first, what do I mean by \u201cidealization\u201d and \u201cideal theory\u201d? I\u2019m getting the term from philosopher Charles Mills. He distinguishes<\/a> between an ideal as a descriptive<\/em> model from an ideal as an idealized<\/em> model. A descriptive ideal would be something like the recipe for a cake, which enumerates its actual contents. An idealized ideal would be something like the idea of social justice–it does not describe how society actually is<\/em>, but how it ought<\/em> to be. Sometimes the \u201cis\u201d and the \u201cought\u201d correspond; more often, they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

According to Mills, \u201cwhat distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization [the ought] to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual [the is]\u201d (168). This distinction between the \u201cideal\u201d and the \u201cactual\u201d might sound like an ontological dualism (the virtual vs the real, respectively), but it\u2019s not–its an idealized epistemological abstraction, an abstraction from \u201cis\u201d to \u201cought.\u201d The problem with this abstraction from \u201cis\u201d to \u201cought\u201d isn\u2019t the abstraction itself, Mills argues (so it\u2019s not the quasi-dualist separation of actual from potential), but the idealization<\/em> of that abstraction. This idealization happens when the is is conflated with the ought<\/em>–when we think that things actually are how, ideally, they ought to be. Or, more precisely, the problem is when we misrecognize how things actually are for the most privileged members of society for reality itself<\/strong>–or, as Mills puts it, when a \u201cnonrepresentative phenomenological life-world [is] (mis)taken for the world (172). So, idealization does make an ontological claim about what reality is \u201creally\u201d like. However, the idealization doesn\u2019t happen in the ontological claim<\/em>, but in the false universalization of that ontological claim–that is, in the move from \u201cis\u201d (for us) to \u201cought\u201d (to be for everyone).<\/p>\n

This move from \u201cis\u201d to ought\u201d can be accomplished through ontological dualisms, and, as I will argue below, through ontological monisms (the \u201cflat\u201d ontology of there-is-no-alternative neoliberalism). It\u2019s easy to confuse idealization and ontological dualism. This process of abstraction or idealization often parallels the hierarchical distinction between more-real-\u2019reality\u2019 and less-real-\u2019reality\u2019 because, historically, the work of abstraction has been accomplished via an ontological dualism–specifically, the modernist nature\/culture binary. So, in what follows, I want to first turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s \u201cDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality\u201d to tease out how modernist nature\/culture dualisms perform this work of idealization. Then, I\u2019ll consider how the same work of idealization occurs in \u201cflat,\u201d monist ontologies. I\u2019ll end with some questions…because, like I said, this post is really a sort of thought experiment meant to open up conversation.<\/p>\n

Nature and Culture<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know this sounds a bit counterintuitive, but 18th century European political philosophy can actually help us think more clearly and precisely about what digital dualism is and how it works. I will use a reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s \u201cDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men<\/a>\u201d (aka the \u201cSecond Discourse\u201d) to address (a) how \u201cdigital dualism\u201d is related to older, modernist\/enlightenment dualisms, in particular (b) how digital dualism is like and\/or unlike more traditional nature\/culture binaries.* I will also explain, via Rousseau, how the nature\/culture dualism performs the work of idealization, and how this in turn relates to contemporary concepts of digital dualism.<\/p>\n

The nature\/culture dualism is the conceptual foundation of social contract theory–which, in turn, is pretty much the basis of contemporary liberal democracy. The social contract is the agreement to give up some freedom in return for some security–I have to respect your private property, but this means that you also must respect mine. By consenting to the social contract (by signing on the dotted line, so to speak), we exit the state of nature and enter into civilized society. So, the contract itself is what distinguishes \u201cnature\u201d from \u201cculture.\u201d Think of it this way: the contract is like a speech-act that constitutes civil society by excluding \u201cnature\u201d as other. Nature is whatever is outside or beyond civilization. In this way, enlightenment political philosophy creates a nature\/culture dualism and uses this dualism as the foundation of theories of justice, right, law, etc. For example, liberalism generally holds that civil society must be equal and fair, but nature need not be so. Only natural<\/em> inequalities are permitted in civil society. Thus, we see repeated attempts to find a scientific, physiological basis for racial hierarchies–brain size and shape, IQ scores, etc. The concept of \u201cnature\u201d works to normalize (indeed, to naturalize, in the philosophical sense) socially-produced hierarchies and inequalities.** Or, the concept of nature instantiates an ontological dualism, and, in this instantiation, accomplishes the work of idealization<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The concept of \u201cnature\u201d is not natural: \u201call the definitions we meet with in books…are derived from many kinds of knowledge which men do not possess naturally, and from advantages of which they can have no idea until they have already departed from that state\u201d (Rousseau 7).*** The concept of \u201cnature\u201d is artificial, produced by a particular society to justify its norms. \u201cEvery one\u201d of Rousseau\u2019s fellow social contract theorists \u201chas transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in speaking of the savage, they described the social man\u201d (Rousseau 9). Nature, \u201cthe savage,\u201d etc.–all these are negatively defined against then-commonsense concepts of civilized humanity. \u201cNature\u201d is whatever society is not; in this way, the concept of \u201cnature\u201d is just a reflection or negative of our theory of society. This is why \u201cdigital dualism is a deeply conservative ideology.\u201d We invent the \u201cnature\u201d we need to prove that our \u201cculture\u201d is right, moral, and just. In Spafford\u2019s words, it \u201cjustifies existing social hierarchies.\u201d Enlightenment social contract theory creates the myth of the \u201cnatural\u201d to distinguish between members of civil society, who have rights, and merely \u2018natural\u2019 beings, who do not. All those natives living in the state of nature, well, we can totally kill them, steal their land, sell them into slavery, and so on–so the story goes. So, when Nathan argues that digital dualism \u201cthis isn\u2019t an infringement on the real but the creation of the myth of the virtual to simultaneously deploy \u201cthe real\u201d that one can then have access to (and often looking down on others still caught up in the \u201cvirtual\u201d) (Jurgenson<\/a>), the parallels to classic social contract theory should be obvious.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So the concept of digital dualism is easily reducible to enlightenment nature\/culture dualisms\u2026dualisms that were false and inherently politicized, even back in the 18th century<\/em>. Modernity tolerated that falsity because liberalism would be incoherent without it. In other words, the nature\/culture dualism (which can also be articulated as the private\/public dualism) is what obscures and naturalizes\/normalizes the systematic dehumanizaiton of women and non-white men.****<\/p>\n

However, contemporary neoliberalism has figured out new ways to obscure and normalize the systematic dehumanization of various minority populations, ways that don\u2019t rely on dualist ontologies. Neoliberalism is ontologically \u201cflat.\u201d Does our habituation to nature\/culture dualisms obscure digital monisms–\u201cflat\u201d ontologies that nevertheless naturalize and normalize some sorts of experiences as more powerful and more legitimate than others?<\/p>\n

Flat Ontologies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manuel DeLanda famously defines flat ontology as follows:<\/p>\n

\n

an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status. (47)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, as Levi Bryant puts it<\/a>, \u201cThe flatness of flat ontology is thus first and foremost the refusal to treat one strata of reality as the really real over and against all others…For DeLanda, then, flat ontology signifies an ontology in which there is only one ontological \u201ctype\u201d: individuals. In classically liberal contractarianism, the nature\/culture dichotomy separated out \u201cindividuals\u201d (citizens, moral persons) from sub-human beings (legal minors, women, three-fifths-persons, etc.). In neoliberalism, however, everyone\/everything participates in the (supposedly) free, deregulated market. We\u2019re all individuals; it\u2019s just that some are more successful than others. Instead of a dualist ontology that pits nature against culture, neoliberalism posits an ontologically monist theory of the market. The market is the only reality; there is no alternative, as they say.<\/p>\n

Neoliberal social ontology upgrades classical contractarianism by getting rid of the dualism while preserving the idealization–i.e., the abstraction away from structural inequality. Markets don\u2019t happen in vacuums. Deregulated markets reproduce the background conditions–the social, environmental, political, and cultural relationships–on and through which they are run. Free trade agreements, school voucher programs, trickle-down economics, ACA-style health care exchanges, all these policies exacerbate and amplify the privilege of the privileged and the precarity of the precarious. The ideal of the supposedly free, deregulated market obscures historically concretized relations of supremacy and oppression; deregulation accomplishes the work of idealization (it conflates the \u201cis\u201d and the \u201cought\u201d). If the market is \u201cfree\u201d and neutral, then successes and failures can only be attributed to differences in individual performance…and not, for example, to white supremacy or to capitalism.<\/p>\n

This flat ontology is what\u2019s behind, for example, \u201cdigital detox\u201d discourse. There\u2019s a single spectrum or continuum–from health to illness, nutritive to toxic. Your status on that spectrum depends on your ability to manage toxicity (thus, the perceived need to \u2018detox\u2019). Healthy subjects mitigate the supposedly toxic effects of too much tech exposure with practices like \u201cwork\/life balance\u201d and \u201ccleanses.\u201d Unhealthy subjects, then, are thought to be too personally irresponsible to maintain a \u201chealthy\u201d lifestyle. But of course, this is just another way neoliberalism scapegoats individuals for systemic injustices. Without an account of the ways things like white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism (a) distribute toxicity (and health) and (b) naturalize the experiences and everyday realities of privileged groups, digital detox discourse performs the same \u201cidealization\u201d found in dualist nature\/culture and virtual\/IRL dualisms. This idealization isn\u2019t necessarily tied to a dualist ontology.<\/p>\n

In fact, the idealization is responsible for the ontological<\/em> problems with classical dualisms and neoliberal market monisms (i.e., the fact that they\u2019re not even ontologically accurate descriptions of reality). As Mills argues, the abstraction away from structural inequality–\u2018colorblindness\u2019 or \u2018genderblindness\u2019–naturalizes privileged groups\u2019 \u201cpeculiar experience of reality\u201d and equates it with reality as such. So, if the ontological claims are also political claims (\u201cNo, OUR reality is REALLY real; yours is less real precisely because it is not fully consistent with ours.\u201d), perhaps part of the confusion and disagreement surrounding digital dualism discourse is we often use ontological terms (\u201cdualism\u201d) to describe political problems (idealization)<\/em>? (And I wonder if we\u2019re rewarded for doing this, because ontology is often seen as \u2018harder\u2019 and more \u2018objective\u2019 than mere politics?)<\/p>\n

Help Me Think This Through<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m saying much that\u2019s terribly new here. I’m really just putting a name on and trying to coherently thematize stuff various people have said in various places. What I am proposing is that perhaps re-framing our analysis clarifies some points of contention. So, at this point, I have a couple of questions–real, genuine questions to which I don\u2019t have any answers. These are just guesses, so I totally welcome juicy counter-arguments:<\/p>\n

1. Is the problem with what we call \u201cdigital dualism\u201d the dualism, or is it the idealization, the abstraction away from structural inequality? I ask this because one way to read the disagreements over \u201cdigital dualism\u201d is as follows: nobody (or almost nobody) actually thinks there\u2019s a strict dichotomization between IRL and \u201cvirtual\u201d, offline and online; what critics of digital dualism are really critiquing is the idealization, the normative work (Spafford\u2019s \u201cStep 2\u201d); however, because we\u2019re so accustomed to framing that idealization as a dualism, and we don\u2019t yet have an adequately powerful theory of \u201cflat\u201d idealization, we\u2019re crossing our conceptual streams. It doesn\u2019t matter which descriptive model you use in Spafford\u2019s \u201cStep 1\u201d–the problematic idealization can manifest as a dualism, but it can also manifest as a flat ontology. Maybe this way of framing the problem clarifies things? Maybe I’m off target?<\/p>\n

2. Does this (or a similar) concept of \u201cflat ontology\u201d help us theorize some of the experiences\/relationships\/phenomena that the terminology of \u201cdigital dualism\u201d obscures?<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I, like Rousseau and Mills, want to argue that any account of social ontology<\/strong>–\u201ddigital\u201d or otherwise–that lacks an account of power<\/strong> (hegemony, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.)–what Mills might call an \u201cideal<\/a>\u201d digital social ontology\u201d–is incomplete and inaccurate<\/strong>. Maybe the problem with what we call \u201cdigital dualisms\u201d isn\u2019t so much that they are dualist, but that they\u2019re idealist (i.e., that they lack this account of power, and theorize based on how things ought, ideally, to be, rather than on empirical and historical data)? Dualism, then, would just be one method of idealization, one way of abstracting away from power.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* I should clarify that \u201cmy\u201d Rousseau is very different than the conventional Rousseau you learn about by reading his later works like The Social Contract & Emile. I consider everything up through \u201cEssay on the Origin of Languages\u201d to be part of his early musical writings, derived mainly from his heated and ongoing debates with composer and music theorist Jean-Philipe Rameau. As I argue here<\/a> and here<\/a>, and as Mills argues here<\/a>, this musical Rousseau is philosophically very distinct from the later, more strictly philosophical Rousseau.<\/p>\n

** In this way, Rousseau reinforces Jesse Spafford\u2019s claim that there is no hard line between the ontological\/descriptive and the normative aspects of digital dualism. \u201cThe normative ranking,\u201d Spafford argues, \u201cis built into the very names and categories.\u201d<\/p>\n

*** Interestingly if somewhat anachronistically, Rousseau can be read as positing the concept of \u201cnature\u201d as the West\u2019s first articulation of what we now might call \u201cthe virtual.\u201d Nature, he argues, is \u201ca state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which, it is, nevertheless, necessary to have true ideas, in order to form a proper judgment of our present state\u201d (7). \u201cNature\u201d is a fiction, but a fiction that\u2019s necessary to contractarian social ontology. (It\u2019s the foundation of \u201cStep 1\u201d in Spafford\u2019s two-step theory of digital dualism.) So, as a necessary fiction, \u201cnature\u201d ought to be treated \u201conly as a mere conditional and hypothetical…rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin\u201d (9).<\/p>\n

**** This is what Carole Pateman and Charles Mills call the racial-sexual contract that grounds the social contract.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can find Robin on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we talk about \u201cdigital dualism,\u201d are we really talking about digital ideal theory? (I\u2019ll explain what I mean by \u201cideal theory\u201d shortly.) I\u2019m not sure. But, I want to push the question because I think it\u2019s very important for us to frame and discuss this critique in as precisely as possible. So, in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[26442,10447,26443,1091,3196,3249,1845],"class_list":["post-17278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-digital-detox","tag-digital-dualism","tag-ideal-theory","tag-mills","tag-ontology","tag-philosophy","tag-rousseau"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17278"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17282,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions\/17282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}