11135002

Mina Demirdag
VCD 221
Cyberculture
Alican Akturk

30.04.2014

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Algorithm of Immanence

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When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

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Antonin Artaud

Brb (Be Right Back), the abbreviation that is being frequently used in online communities which
makes ones physical presence absent in the virtual plane. The state of being present and absent at
the same time in both worlds has become the daily part of our lives, providing we stay connected to
the physical reality and cyberspace . Channel 4 series Black Mirror have successfully used the phrase
in the opening episode of Series 2, the story of a young married couple Martha and Ash. Ashs
character is part of the concept of Trace, he is both present and absent during his lifetime and after
his death. This leads us to examine the nature of the digital self and the personal data storage on the
Internet realising itself as an uncannily lifelike bio engineered version of the true Self.

We all now see socially. The posts we post on social networks have now become a rhizome which
thinks and makes statements like us however our altered versions of the Self, a persona which cannot
be directly linked to our character but comes alive in an external immaterial plane, a platonic Ideal
Self. Social media networks are what we become in the cloud on the surface, may not include our real
feelings but the feelings of our personas, our digital selves. As some aspects of the technology evolve
to a point of hyper-real signs and symbols, we become obsessed with the way we deliver our own
ideas of things on communities and live Traces of ourselves in the plane of immanence. The Traces
which are immortal and our minds become sovereign, therefore detached from our bodies, continuing
their states of being even when we cease to exist. Related to this abstract idea of the existence, we
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become subconsciously obsessed with our persona on the Internet and allow our mind to exist in a
parallel space, other than the reality we have come to know. However, this also leads us to another
fact that data we provide to networks will be gathered, stored, and analysed and will be used by the
expansion of new digital technologies. In Ash Strummers case this is an uncanny algorithmic version
of himself in the cloud, providing he has enough personal data storage to be transformed into a
representation of Ash, to be both present and absent captured in the flux.

His bio engineered replica first seems almost the true and authentic version of Ash himself. The
texture mapping and visuals allow the replica to become the man who once existed, after a skim of
personal data storage on the cloud makes it possible to come up with an algorithm of Ash.However
this algorithm is Ash only on the surface, the replica is not able to deliver certain emotions and
actions as the persona of Ash on the cyberspace had not shared any particular information on his real
feelings on things through social networks. The persona is the Ideal version of Ash existing on
another plane thus non existent in reality which makes him in Derridas terms absent and present.
Ashs digital self is a pack of algorithm, combination of a written language dierent from spoken one.
Thus one cannot expect a bio engineered replica to be a pure reproduction of the true Self. Derridas
concept of dierence acknowledges the fact that a signifiers presence is in a direct relationship with
the signified: If presence is assumed to the essence of the signified, then the remoteness of a
signifier from the signified may imply that the signifier is unable, or may only be barely able, to reflect
the presence of the signified. This interplay between proximity and remoteness is also an interplay
between presence and absence and between interiority and exteriority. (Derrida, 1974, 49)

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The reality slowly evolves to an illusionary state of existence, in which the Self is also replaced with
a representation: the stored data on the cloud becomes the representation of reality and we lose the
sense of distinction between real and unreal, merely rely upon a simulacrum as in the case of Martha
finding a way to cease to mourn on her death husband by becoming obsessed to be in touch with his
digital self in which the exchange of the Real with the illusion becomes the reality itself: Then the
whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not
unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an
uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed
to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the
real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary,
stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value,
from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation
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attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the

whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 2006, 6)

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The digital self becomes the signature, an act of intention, an obsession of self-realisation and
immortality. We question our Being in time and we leave Traces of weakness and vulnerability behind
for the sake of immanence. One can also substitute digital identity with Derridas signature; By
definition, a written signature [digital identity] implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the
signer. But, it will be claimed, the signature also marks and retains his having-been present in a past
now or present [maintenant] which will remain a future now or present [maintenant], thus in a general
maintenant, in the transcendental form of presentness [maintenance]. In order for the tethering to
the source to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a
signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event (Derrida, 1977, 194).

The nature of the digital self and the obsession of self-realisation are interconnected with each
other as the reality slowly evolves to an illusionary state of existence in order to merely become a
representation of an ideal Self, a simulacrum, as we have learned to see and to live socially through
networks, insisting on an immanence in a pure plane, a virtual self-creation for an immortal identity
independent from our existence in physical world. The episode of Be Right Back shows this insistent
will to become immortal through a pile of personal data compressed into an algorithm to be used with
the expansion of new digital technologies, always leaving a Trace behind, a heritage of what
resembles to the Self when it only becomes an uncanny version of the Real, which will stay in the
borders of absence and presence in an immaterial world for forever.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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1) Baudrillard Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of
Michigan Press, 2006
2) Derrida Jacques, Signature, Event, Context inGlyph 1, trans. Samuel Weber and Jerey Mehlman
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
3) Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

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