Embodiments of Memory: Toward an Existential Approach to the Culture of Connectivity

Forthcoming in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, Stef Craps, Lucy Bond & Pieter Vermeulen (eds.), New York: Berghahn Books. Please do not quote without permission. Chapter Eight Embodiments of Memory: Toward an Existential Approach to the Culture of Connectivity Amanda Lagerkvist 1. Introduction: Searching for Sentient Inhabitants of the Digital Ecology1 What does it mean to say that “digital memories become us” (Garde-Hansen, Reading, and Hoskins 1), or have become us? In recent debates in media memory studies, this statement does not stand in isolation; it comes together with the trope of the digital “ecology,” which signifies, besides its naturalizing bent, a notion of an environment in which previously held boundaries between media, subjects, and the physical world dissolve. It conveys the idea that we have become posthuman, that we are now informational-material entities, and as subjects “dispersed throughout the cybernetic circuit” (Hayles 27). When digital memories have become us—as we carry around portable archives, as we leave our digital traces, or as we are affectively engaging in endlessly revisable memory work online—the body itself seems radically implicated (Gies). Media is not just environmental, but also wearable and incorporated. Memory technologies are enmeshed in our bodies, while our embodied selves and memory traces are embedded in the technologized everyday within our so-called culture of connectivity (van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity). By “connectivity,” I will in this chapter refer to the sense in which platforms, as the introduction to this volume delineates, “construct and exploit rather than merely enable connections between users,” but also, and more profoundly, to the way their automated operations seem to force certain memories upon us. Such a cybernetic ontology is thoroughly rooted in bodies; as N. Katherine Hayles notes, “[i]nformation, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into 2 being as a material entity of the world: and embodiment is always instantiated, local and specific” (49).This is a situation, I propose, that not only applies to the technologically savvy—those happy to connect, share, thrive, prevail, play, and self-promote (Rainie and Wellman). It is above all an existential moment, which also entails heightened anxieties, interruptions, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties. In this meta-reflexive essay, I contend that it is precisely because digital memories have become us that the field of media memory studies needs to be “embodied”; at the same time, and paradoxically, it is precisely because of the “posthuman condition” that some kind of a “human” has to be retained. In other words, abandoning anthropocentrism does not necessitate abandoning subjectivity altogether. Instead, it requires a reconceptualization of the human in terms of a responsible sense of subjectivity (Braidotti), as well as in terms of more humble and diversified visions of selfhood. More specifically, I propose that, because the media is where we “live and move and have our being” (Mitchell and Hansen xiv), the digital memory ecology awaits being theoretically inhabited by embodied and precarious human selves—by “sentient bodies” (Gonzales-Arnal, Jagger, and Lennon; Sobchack) conceived as navigating and struggling within the torrents of our digital age, whether they are making or losing meaning (or sense), or affectively and emotionally relating to, or retorting from, these torrents. At first glance, such a call to focus on the inhabitants of this ecology—drawing them out from the long shadows of the “memory site” or the “memory object,” as it were—may not seem like an entirely original step. In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg end up in a similar corner of the pitch. Having launched the field of “media memory studies” in the conviction that modern media of communication have assumed an increased significance in the formation of memories, they conclude by looking forward to more empirical research into audiences’ memory repertoires, the lived and collected memories of people, as opposed to the well-travelled roads of the 3 collective memory of monuments, texts, canons, and archives. In another key intervention, Astrid Erll also describes the plural contexts of reception of mediated memory as vital for understanding how certain media become powerful media of memory in culture. Along these lines, I suggest a theoretical engagement with the various debates about embodiment—in feminist new materialism, posthumanism, and media phenomenology (Gonzales-Arnal, Jagger, and Lennon; Koivunen; Hayles; Hong; Mitchell and Hansen; Sobchack) and in the field of Internet and emotions (Garde-Hansen and Gorton; Karatzogianni and Kunstman) in order to find ways to bring the body to the fore on what I call “the existential terrains of connectivity” (Lagerkvist, “New Memory Cultures”).2 In an earlier contribution to these debates, I have myself pushed toward what I call a “sociophenomenological approach” for analyzing the transmediality, globality, and performativity of mediated memory (Lagerkvist, Media and Memory in New Shanghai). As an umbrella term for capturing the project of embodying media memory—or at least for taking us some way in that direction—I suggest that sociophenomenology is apposite since it subsumes at least four central aspects of what the different fields I engage with all share. First, it conceives of memory as processual, emergent, and forged through practice and performance; second, and in line with the new materialism, it puts emphasis on embodiment, emotion, and lived experience. Here I supplement the affective turn and the new materialism in one crucial respect: while these moved beyond the linguistic models of textuality and subjectivity, and beyond the representational level toward the affective as “the real” (Koivunen), I instead follow the phenomenological tradition and film scholars such as Vivian Sobchack to argue that the point is not to discard the textual, the mediated, and the discursive, but rather to juxtapose them with embodiment, affect, and emotion and situate all these forces in a dynamic relationship of mutuality. My approach relies on Sobchack’s existential and phenomenological deliberations in her Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image 4 Culture, where she discusses the radically material nature of human existence. Her argument, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comprehensive study of perception, is that the lived body makes meaning out of bodily “sense.” Embodiment is defined through “the lived body as at once both an objective subject and a subjective object: a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency that literally and figurally makes sense of, and to, both ourselves and others” (2). The key assertion is that there is always an entanglement of matter and meaning. Here my project also connects with how GonzalesArnal, Jagger, and Lennon provisionally define their version of the new materialism as a theoretical turn that reconceives of the interrelationships between the material and discursive realms, between lived embodiment and mediation. As a third central aspect, which connects directly with the other contributions to this section of this volume, memory is seen as transmedial and forged across bodies, artefacts, and different forms of media and mediation (not least across the online and offline; Refslund Christensen and Sandvik). This reasoning echoes feminist theorizations of affect and emotions in culture. Emotions are, as Sara Ahmed argues, about things—they shape things and they also take shape in relation to these objects that are in turn pervaded by and “sticky” with affect. Here emotions are conceived as simultaneously and irreducibly individual, material, cultural, as well as social. The fourth aspect thence concerns the “socio-” in sociophenomenology, which stresses the communal, collective, societal, and material aspects of the lived and affective experiences of our technologized existence. This means in addition that affect is placed neither outside individual perceptions nor intersubjective experiences. Anu Koivunen similarly refutes the rejection of the experiential landscapes of subjectivity for understanding the affectivity of media (and film in particular) and retains an interest in “identity, history and experience” (90). So rather than “calling forth a new materialist notion of experience as beyond the realm of the subject” she deploys the concept of affect as a sense 5 of cultural weight, and stresses the affectivity of the embodied subject through the necessary “relationality, intersubjectivity, and worldliness of all selves” (98). This implies conceiving of the self as socially and contextually forged. This essay proposes, furthermore, that it is precisely due to the ways in which affective bodies and (social) selves are implicated in sociotechnological ensembles (van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity)—that is, to our “subjectivity of connectivity”—that we need an existential approach to digital memories. This will imply taking the sociophenomenology of memory one step further. Due to the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of the culture of connectivity, we are compelled to both revisit and embody basic and “eternal” existential questions: who am I? How am I presented before others? What is my/our purpose? What is the nature of human life and of existence itself? In this pursuit we need to carefully conceptualize “the human” anew, beyond the fiction of a universal and unchangeable “human being” and a coherent, disembodied “self.” I argue that without an embodied sense of self (or rather of selves in the plural) there is a risk that digital memory studies ends up ridding us both of agency and of the ability of pursuing the profound conditions of our life world; indeed, our being-in-and-withthe-digital-world comprises both freedom and necessity, both ethical decisions and compulsions of connectivity. 2. Toward Media Bodies: Media Memory Studies Today The push toward embodiment in media memory studies is not merely a question of remedying theoretical negligence; it is also a propulsion felt across our contemporary media geographies and lifeworlds. How did we end up here? In the following I will offer my perspective on how both media and memory studies in a way lost their analytical objects, leaving them in the company of the body. Indeed, in light of the incessant processes of 6 digitalization and globalization, both media and memory studies are challenged with the rapid reconstitution of their fields of study and their object(s). Both are forced to acknowledge that previously discrete and relatively fixed matters have been rendered transitional, transmedial, and transcultural – a transformative movement in contemporary memory cultures that this volume as a whole seeks to address. It seems far from exaggerated to suggest that scholars in both fields are currently faced with a horror vacui, as they are confronted with newly appearing and emerging phenomena that remain semantically vacant. Both media and memory studies are simultaneously experiencing intense and rich debates, which not simply amount to a “cluttering up” of the void, but to a veritable moment of reaching out and painting the conceptual canvas anew, resulting in increased creativity and sometimes audacious leaps of the imagination. Both fields seem reciprocally fated to renew themselves, and this provokes and produces, in effect, a mutual recognition, since they find that in the mirror reflection of one’s new emergent self stands the other. 3 “The media” is no more. Trying to grasp a situation in which the key analytic tools as well as the analytical object itself—the text, the audience, the media institution—have been liquefying and have become processual has challenged media and communication studies during the past decades (Kember and Zylinska). Scholars have repeatedly struggled to understand the “new,” launching successive concepts to describe it: “new media,” “participatory culture,” “convergence,” “netizens,” “citizen journalism,” “prosumers,” “networked individualism,” “tethered selves.” Such efforts have been rapidly followed by a (re)problematization of “the new” and its grasp on our imagination, turning scholars’ attention to remediation processes, media historical continuities, and to the materialities of residual media. Indeed, before any of the new concepts could mature or methodological approaches could be solidified, some of the developments launched through the term “the Web 2.0 environment” and what has more recently been called the culture of connectivity 7 burst upon the scene of media studies, leaving media scholars in an identity crisis—or, alternatively, with a tremendous momentum. What was formerly known as “the media” has, as Mike Featherstone argues, “become embedded in material objects and environments, bodies and clothing, zones of transmission and reception. Media pervade our bodies, cultures and societies—a shift made possible by miniaturized electronic circuitry” (3; my emphasis). Memory studies has equally found itself in perpetual transition. Conventionally, “memory” is a selective process of reconstruction through which the past is represented or reinvented to serve the needs, goals, and politics of the present. Typically, memory is related to the identity work and interests of a particular nation, group, or community (Halbwachs), and has been conceived as forged through different technologies such as monuments, artefacts, texts, or photography (Sturken). However, and as the introduction to this volume lays out, these “memory sites” (Nora) seem to be vanishing as the locus of memory (and memory studies) in a world of global, connective, mediatized, digital, transnational, transcultural, cosmopolitan, and multidirectional memories. The notion of a collective memory has thus been challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Memory is forged transnationally across cultural contexts that in turn shape new communities of memory; memory, that is, is neither located in one physical place nor within the nation, and nor is it ever determined by one institution alone. As the contributions to this section of the volume discuss, there is also a renewed emphasis on the fact that memories are forged transmedially across texts, photographs, film and television footage, the Internet, and—last but not least—the body. After the so-called “connective turn,” moreover, memory is now also subject to sociotechnical flux (Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory”), at once implicating and forging entwinements of sociality and identity, of the technologies in use, the spaces we inhabit, and our biological bodies. As José van Dijck’s contribution to this volume explains, the notion of connective memory describes the moulding force of algorithms and emphasizes 8 that the infrastructures behind our connections compel us to remember certain things, trace our movements, record them, while the notion at once challenges the idea that any memory can be lasting, as memory processes are always subject to sociotechnological mutability and technological obsolescence (Lagerkvist, “Netlore of the Infinite”; Peters). These are profound existential predicaments of our time. I argue that the current moment of mutual reflexivity and felt voids in media memory studies is first of all an existential moment in which the body and forms of embodiment await theorization. In moving toward embodying media memory, the objective is more pointedly to begin to bring the rich and diverse discourses on embodiment into dialogue with digital memory studies. Through a few examples, this essay picks up on and describes some of the challenges that await us in media memory studies if we take into account the debates about embodiment in the digital age. One premise for this ensuing tentative mapping of embodiment is that the present situation also further compels our attention to what Internet scholars have emphasized already since the late 1990s when they turned away from the dematerialized and disembodied discourses that prevailed in the late 1980s and early 1990s surrounding cyberspace. This debate on posthumanism (re)introduced the body into the digital, and hence enabled an important discussion on the materialities of the virtual. Initiating this discourse, N. Katherine Hayles distinguished, importantly, between the body as hegemonic cultural construct and embodiment as the experiential level that captures the particular individual articulation of discourse (193-94); there is no body, there are only bodies, and moreover, “embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specificities of place, time, physiology and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with the body … Relative to the body, embodiment is elsewhere, at once excessive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities and abnormalities” (196-197). Inspired by this insight, I propose we consider a plurality of embodied modes of being human 9 in the digital memory ecology. This essay takes its cue from these debates through which four media bodies unfold for media memory studies: the performative body, the device body, the body as implicated, and the body as implied. Remaining attentive to these varying, while sometimes enmeshed, forms of embodiment and to the diversity of experiences of media memory cultures, I hope to illustrate some of the most important aspects of what an existential take on digital media and memory could mean. 3. The Body in Memory Studies: Moving beyond the Text and the Site Before I turn to the most recent tides of theorization, I want to pause to reflect upon how the body has been figured (in relation to the mind and to culture) in earlier debates in cultural memory studies. In an important discussion on memory and embodiment, sociologist Rafael F. Narvaez argues that collective memory studies have traditionally dissuaded analyses of the embodied, unconscious dimensions of memory, thereby reproducing the Platonic body-mind dichotomy. Against this tradition, and in order to further our understanding of the role of embodied mnemonic practices in both reproducing and contesting norms about behavior inherited from the past, Narvaez launches an approach that links mental, bodily, and social dimensions of memory. He argues that this approach “can help us understand how collective pasts become sedimented in individual and ‘collective bodies,’ so that the past thus becomes vivified in shared presents; and social groups thence ‘naturally,’ ‘intuitively’ march toward inherited futures” (52). Narvaez holds, moreover, that social actors may actually oppose values inscribed upon their bodies and choose to develop new practices and new standards and thereby produce new futures. The body is, as Marianne Hirsch has argued recently, a “site for change” (Hirsch). 10 But what of the media? And how have the interrelations between mediated memories (externalized memory technologies, objects, and products) and embodied memory agents been conceived? Typically, key theorists in cultural memory studies have conceived of the body or embodied performances in opposition to media, which are considered as discrete phenomena. In Paul Connerton’s groundbreaking work on the embodiment of memory, How Societies Remember, he distinguishes between inscribed and incorporated memory practices. Inscribed—that is, mediated—memories are contained, stored, retrieved, distributed, and transmitted by modern media technologies of communication; incorporated practices, for their part, involve those memories that exist only when sustained by the body—that is, when being acted out as embodied performances. Connerton recognizes that bodily practices such as gestures, proverbial manners, habits, and choreographic movements in space that include affective gesture, prayer, and commemoration practices are essential for how societies remember, yet he stresses that they have been underplayed in our culture’s emphasis upon texts as the prime carriers of meaning. Similarly, Diana Taylor distinguishes between the mediated archive of “supposedly enduring materials (that is texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (that is spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (19). Archival memory exists in documents, on maps, in literary texts and letters, but beyond texts and next to videos, films, and CD’s she also includes archaeological remains and bones—“all those items supposedly resistant to change” (19). The repertoire, by contrast, enacts embodied memories, and these include performances, dancing, singing, gestural movements, and orality. These are phenomena that we typically read as ephemeral, she argues, and as knowledge that cannot be reproduced. It is through physical acts that the repertoire is activated: 11 The repertoire requires presence, people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by “being there,” being part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects of the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. (20) In line with Connerton, Taylor holds that live performance can never be fully captured and transmitted through the archive; still, the repertoire is not for all that completely bereft of all patterning or coding capacities. Taylor thus moves somewhat toward a position in which both the archive and the repertoire are seen as “mediated.” Recent developments in the field of memory studies continue this movement away from texts and sites towards the body. Astrid Erll stresses that the field of memory studies should not be restricted by a focus on intentional commemoration practices or by “narrative and a quest for identity.” Instead, it should remain “open for the exploration of unintentional and implicit ways of cultural remembering, or of inherently non-narrative, for example, visual or bodily forms of memory” (2; my emphasis). In this formulation, bodily forms of memory are seen as a category distinct from intentional memory or from narrative. With the aim to mediatize memory discourse and dynamize the memory site, Ann Rigney launches a new definition of the notion of cultural memory by firmly underscoring “the extent to which shared memories of the past are the product of mediation, textualization and acts of communication” (14). A model for collective memory, as she calls it, should then build on second-hand and mediated recollection, rather than on the ideal of a direct face-to-face situation. One critical, yet perhaps inadvertent, aspect of this definition of cultural memory, however, is that the mediated becomes separated from individual lived experience: “People may have undergone comparable experiences, but the cultural memory of those experiences is the ongoing result of public communication and the circulation of memories in mediated 12 form” (15-16). Unintentionally, then, recent discussions in memory studies reinforce, to some degree, the opposition between media (the cultural and social level) and the face-to-face (the subjective and embodied level). This separation in memory studies, which reproduces the bifurcation we earlier encountered in Connerton and (to some extent) in Taylor, may run the risk of turning embodied and lived experience into something altogether separate from mediated experience, and hence separate mediated memory from lived memory. It is this bifurcation that I want to argue against. In my book Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past, I tried to answer the call by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney to shift our focus away from intentional or textual memory and the memory site. In situating embodiment and media texts in a dynamic and complementary relationship I develop a sociophenomenological approach to mediated memories, which implies embracing insights from performance studies in media memory studies. This entails further problematizing the split between either mediated memory products and fixed sites or the processes in which memories are made through embodied performances. The book interrogates the relationship between media and urban memory, and the role of memory in a particular space of futurity: New Shanghai. I focus on the visiting foreigners and their engagement with the spatial stories and the place’s identity formation through what I term “mediatized performativity.” I conceive of this concept as a sensitizing conceptual merger that makes it possible to perceive, describe, and interrogate the relationship between media and memory as thoroughly performative—that is, as coming to light, transpiring, and in movement as people remember in, with, and through media in particular settings. Memories of Shanghai’s Golden Age of the 1920s and 30s, defined by capitalism, decadence, debauchery, cosmopolitanism, and adventure, were expressed locally and internationally in various media forms, in museums, bars, cafés, and in consumer culture. But 13 it was not until a particular kind of visitor—the “cosmopolitan” westerner (tourists, expatriates, and reporters)—arrived, whose presence was sought after during the reinvention of the city in the 1990s, that these memories were fully re-enacted and became “alive.” Hence, I argue that it was not until the visitors engaged in an embodied sense with a range of futures past that were present in the city, and with the city’s regenerative sense of nostalgia, that these mediated memories were fully activated. I suggest therefore that what is needed in order to achieve a movement away from viewing memory as a fixity is an additional focus on embodied performances of memory as inherently entangled with mediation. In questioning the sharp line between the two forms of memory posited by Connerton, I develop a theorization of the mediated memories of the archive (scripts, inscribed, mediated memories), lived memories of the repertoire (embodied performances, incorporated memories), as well as spatial materialities (settings) as thoroughly enmeshed and coproductive. Hence, I seek out the reciprocal exigencies of the city imaginary and various mediatized, mnemonic, scripted, and embodied performances among mobile elites in particular settings in this urban space: the colonial mansion garden, the restaurant, the rooftop bar, the expatriate compound, and others. I thereby privilege the role of performances for the (re)production, navigation, negotiation, activation, and, importantly, potential transgression of the memories of legendary Shanghai. This possibility of transgression is essential since the concept of mediatized performativity attempts to capture tensions or even contradictions, as the performance will always resist the script (since the performance can never happen the same way twice, as it always necessarily reinvents itself) while the script resists the performance as well. There is an ineluctable otherness to the performance, and the performative is “that which is played out unhappily against representation in that it has no analogue in text” (Thrift and Dewsbury 420).4 Embodiment in this perspective thus holds the 14 potential to explain the complex dynamic through which media memories take hold, gain significance, become meaningful, or are resisted. 4. Four Media Bodies I have argued so far that the loss of the media as our unambiguously defined analytical object and of memory as a monolithically delimited concept coincides with a turn to questions of embodiment, feelings, and affect within new materialist approaches, and that these need to be theorized in conjunction with mediation. I now turn to four specific instantiations of media embodiment to further this approach. 4.1. The Performative Body The first media body that emerges from the deliberations above is the performative body that animates our media scripts. It is also both a sensual and a sentient being, whose experiences of self and others are always already mediated. In the words of Vivian Sobchack, who further sketches out the role of experience and embodiment in our media culture: however direct it may seem, our experience is not only always mediated by the lived bodies that we are, but our lived bodies (and our experience of them) is always also mediated and qualified by our engagements with other bodies. Thus, our experiences are mediated and qualified not only through the various transformative technologies of perception and expression but also by historical and cultural systems that constrain both the inner limits of our perception and the outer limits of our world. (4; my emphasis). 15 Sobchack’s analysis builds largely on the particularities of the film medium. But if we move beyond moving image culture in general, and focus on the digital, we may ask where “the outer limits of our world” are in digital existence. How do we feel and move about in the digital memory ecology? Here, we arguably encounter the confines of the sociophenomenological approach that I have drawn on so far. This approach lacked the intention to describe those particular modes of embodiment, performance, remembering (and forgetting) that are forged through digital culture. In other words, it was not specifically addressing the digital, and it was not attuned to the emergent culture of connectivity, in which new predicaments as well as possibilities appear. The most palpable of digital media bodies is the avatar; it is a performative and affective second body immersed in virtual environments. It is a playful being that has been relentlessly discussed in academic debates on cyberfeminism, gaming, or second life-environments, encompassing a sense of embodied selfhood that is both ultra-extended and highly localized, gendered and heteronormative. The difference between this type of embodiment and those of other story worlds, according to Jenny Sundén, is that in the case of the avatar “the body is activated, involved in and propelled into the unfolding of events, both physically and symbolically” (“A Sense of Play” 47).5 Today digital gaming environments are providing quasi-complete sensory immersion, or what has often been termed an augmented sense of reality. Cybernetic embodiment is more than a potent technofantasy of science fiction, and it does not only apply to game worlds. In the rest of this essay, I will retain from the above deliberations the gist of this notion of embodied performativity of mediated memories—as essentially becoming, gestural, and animating—as I turn to three other entwined aspects of digital embodiment that belong to our everyday digital memory ecology (Garde-Hansen and Gorton). Here the body is a carrier of media devices and hence of our personal archives of images, text, music, and sound—it is a body that enables connectivity; it is also implicated, 16 that is, caught up in affective viral (and visual) representations, both in life and after death; finally, the body is implied, in the sense that there exists an indirect and ambivalent, ephemeral, ghostly and insubstantial sense of (un)certain presence and embodiment online. 4.2. The Device Body At our current juncture, some of the early debates in Internet studies seem reactivated, since the cybernetic has become a mundane mode of being, and this brings to the fore the irreducible tensions and relations between materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, localization and global dispersion. As Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton argue, “global flows, technological flows and media flows converge with the body” (77). In other words, these complex cybernetic modes of being are today far from futuristic and they are no longer marked by the technological sublime. Indeed, they are quite commonplace and ubiquitous, as media are “always on, and always on you,” as Sherry Turkle puts it (Turkle; also Garde-Hansen and Gorton 11). Besides comprising the omnipresent keyboard self— thoroughly discussed in earlier writings on online textual embodiment (Sundén, Material Virtualities)—the device body is an intertwined aspect of our entire mobile and connected physicality. While this relates to many different aspects of today’s communication culture, here I will focus primarily on the mnemonic aspects of this form of media embodiment. The device body is the carrier of media, whether we are talking about ubiquitous mobile devices such as iPads or smartphones (including our archives of images or our SNS-accounts and their timelines and feeds), or life-logging devices, means of self-quantification, body worn cameras, or other wearables like smart watches. The device body thus carries around a number of different registering applications and tracking devices (for instance, health apps and fitness and activity trackers). Here, devices that enable or fire our personal digital archive fever are both mobile and thoroughly environmental. In addition, this body is an enabler of 17 connectivity, which in turn produces selfhood, expressive sociability in extended networks, and a sense of value. In her book Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, José van Dijck shows that we now inhabit a digital memory ecology in which we are embedded in a social context, while embodying as well as being emplaced within digital memory cultures (2007). Van Dijck puts personal memories in what she calls digital shoeboxes, which are often on display before a public in social networking, and moves them to the center of attention for digital memory studies. Others have argued that memory in the connected age is a question of individually choosing one’s affinities and, by consequence, of choosing what to remember (Pinchevski). Memory is now paradoxically, as Ingrid Volkmer puts it, a question of subjective public horizons of consciousness (Volkmer). These accounts gravitate to the individual, and suggest that memory in our digital age is principally subjective. In this context Andrew Hoskins has suggested that memory is not so much about remembering the past, as it is about the very act of recording (“The Mediatization of Memory”). In such subjective memory practices through our device bodies of recording and simultaneously connecting, savvy individual users increase their social value and popularity—through numbers of “likes,” friends, and followers and through constant connectivity. One key example of such practices of recording is the selfie. The selfie, Paul Frosh argues, calls upon its viewer to “see me when I show you me” (or perhaps more precisely, “when I show you my body”). He defines the selfie as a “gestural image” which “inscribes one’s own body into new forms of mediated, expressive sociability with distant others. These are incarnated in a gestural economy of affection as the reflex bodily response by which we interact with our devices and their interfaces: the routinely dexterous movements of our hands and eyes” (1622; emphasis in original). Thus, while selfies are an expression of hyperindividualism, they also reveal, perhaps more than anything, our sociality, since they are 18 performative and constitute what Frosh terms “a technocultural circuit of corporeal social energy” or a “kinesthetic sociability” (1608). The device body, while at once highly performative, is thus in Frosh’s reading inclined to reflex response and to affective relational positioning vis-à-vis others. What does this imply? Here I wish to introduce the implicated body and the implied body into the affective ecology of digital culture in order to emphasize that memory is also and crucially still communal and that, while it is seemingly utterly subjective, it is also sometimes beyond subjective control. 4.3. The Implicated and the Implied Body According to recent scholarship on Internet and emotions, affect is now emerging as the prime mover in analyses of digital culture (Garde-Hansen and Gorton 76; Karatzogianni and Kuntsman). Online worlds are able to create rich immersive experiences and to afford a felt sense of intimate co-presence (Benski and Fisher). The individualized yet social memory practices that I discussed above, may also, however, invoke a different and less jovial subdivision of experience. Here a precarious body emerges: the body as implicated. This body is often visualized in acts of self-presentation that are seemingly consensual, but these practices may also involve experiences of suspicion, detachment, and alienation online. The implicated body bespeaks the vulnerabilities of the digital memory ecology, as our bodies, and parts of our selves, are visually and graphically recorded and sometimes become viral through sharing and representation in circuits of affective social energy and reflex response (Frosh). This is not seldom an area of pain. Our technologized existence sometimes seems ethically hollowed out as it is replete with trolling (often with gendered and racialized dimensions), cyber bullying and revenge porn, causing a crisis for accountable presence and enhancing human guardedness, dissatisfaction, vulnerability and harm (Garde-Hansen and Gorton 153-76; Miller). Suffering is even more pointedly the case at self-mutilation sites 19 where bodies become marked and thence turned into mnemonic media of pain (Johansson), or in the case of real-time suicide online where “the final hour” becomes a hyper-public memory, often reiterated online. This register also emerges when recordings of atrocity and trauma are similarly featured in the globital memory field (Reading; Westerlund, Hadlaczky, and Wasserman). Another example of an implicated body within this spectrum of online vulnerability has to do with the loss of a person and concerns the ways in which the dead are kept socially alive online in, for instance, digital memorials or memorialized Facebook profiles (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourisch; Lagerkvist, “New Memory Cultures”). These practices mark a “represencing” of the lost person and his/her body through mourning and memory work with pictures and texts. The Internet is sometimes conceived as a place for immortal souls through which one fantasy of the posthuman (or rather transhuman) seems to be replayed: that of disembodied immortality (Lagerkvist, “Netlore of the Infinite”). It seems here, however, that while the physical body is inevitably disintegrating after death, the implicated embodied self may be under simultaneous and on-going “resurrection”: it is given new social life in persistent acts of posthumous commemoration that entail re-editing and revising. This verges on another type of embodiment: the implied body. Adding to the challenges of the digital age that I have described elsewhere—subjectively orchestrated and endlessly revisable memory work, the accelerated evaporation between the public and private, and the temporality of instantaneity (Lagerkvist, “New Memory Cultures”)—we also observe a tendency to make memory automated and connective. Through connectivity the biological, technological (algorithmic), and social have been interlaced and enmeshed, turning memory into a process beyond individual purview and intention, and beyond any sense of either subjective or collective control, as José van Dijck illustrates in her contribution to this volume (Hoskins, “Mediatization of Memory”). Hence, digitalization and our present 20 moment of hyper-connectivity have consequences for both individual and collective memory. Andrew Hoskins stresses these predicaments in our age that follow from the fragmentation and multiplication of memories and the connectivities through which they are fashioned. He argues that contemporary memory has less to do with bringing the past to the present through representation than with embedding memories in and spreading them through our sociotechnological practices. The dynamics of mediated memory makes it “created when needed, driven by the connectivities of digital technologies and media and inextricably forged through and constitutive of digital social networks: in other words, a new ‘network memory’” (“Digital Network Memory” 92). Most importantly, in the digital age, memory is subject to “sociotechnical flux,” which Hoskins describes as follows: [sociotechnical flux is] the principal shaper of 21st century remembering through the medial gathering and splintering of individual, social and cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portable and pervasive digital media and communication devices so that a new “living archive” is becoming the organizing and habitual condition of memory. Indeed memory’s biological, social and cultural divisions and distinctions seem increasingly blurred if not collapsed under the key active dynamic and emergent media-memorial relationship: hyper-connectivity. (“Mediatization of Memory” 661; my emphasis) This new network memory, I argue, enhances the fears and anxieties of what it means to be human. Simultaneously it invokes a sense of implied digital embodiment. Today opaque digital assemblages are imbricated in our embodied existence; they are ripe with insecurities as to the status of our digital data traces and our uncertain capacity to gain a hold on them. There is also a related anxiety about the possibility to secure or keep track of our memories 21 and “trace bodies” when we simultaneously know that they exist, that they are present, yet cannot feel their exact clout and whereabouts; they are confusingly (un)beknownst to us, as are (for a majority of people) the surveillance systems we have surrendered ourselves to (Hong). This body is uncannily invoked also by our knowledge that we are distributed across digital systems. The implied body is invisible and more indirectly engaged, but it is nonetheless somewhere: there are traces of “me” out there. In an unclear sense I am somewhere (else): my body is intimated. I suggest that the longevity of data and the knowledge that search engines such as Google remember all our virtual steps leave us ambivalent, anxious, and quite vulnerable about where our traces may be situated and how they may bear on our lives and afterlives (Mayer-Schönberger; Peters). Our implied embodied selves concern those parts of us (what I have termed our digital “surrogates”) that are circulating without our knowing precisely where and how, or even whether they are there (Lagerkvist, “Netlore of the Infinite”). Our embodied digital existence, one might conclude, has to a large degree to do with memory, with the ways we relate to the immediate and individual past as well as with the potential eternal life of data. We see this in recent debates about the right to forget or to be forgotten. May these media memories and this knowledge about us uncannily and disturbingly outlast both our needs and haunt our intentions? These deliberations point to profound existential challenges of our time. This constitutes an emerging situation, a way of being present in the world without clear demarcations and coordinates. And it will propel us toward a theorization of our embodied and diversified digital existence in terms of how we are implicated (precariously caught-up or graphically represented), as well as how our bodies are implied (indirectly sensed or uncannily presenced) in this novel constellation. 22 5. Conclusion: The Embodied Existential Approach in Media Memory Studies This essay has shown that the field of media memory studies emerges at a precarious and rocky moment—a moment characterized by rapid and continuous reconfiguration: the mobile, global, and digital moment. This is also the moment of phenomenally experienced complexities of hyper-connectivity within the digital memory ecology. I have suggested that what anchors this fluid discourse, albeit in a plurality of modes, is a sense of embodiment. In order to fruitfully embody media memories, I have suggested a sociophenomenological approach that involves recognizing the fundamental entanglement of embodied performances of memory, space, and mediation. On this holistic trajectory, we may begin to describe memory as both mediated (inscribed) and embodied (incorporated) at once—what I choose to term “memory as mediatized performativity”—while ultimately bound to places, infrastructures, and settings that need to be described. The approach also stresses the performative, emergent, and processual character of memory practices. As I have shown, these insights will need to be supplemented in approaching the digital memory ecology. Performances of memory are produced across the realms of the body, media, physical artefacts, and space, but in the digital age, it seems that these entanglements of the mediated and the physical are even more accentuated than before and that the evaporating boundaries between biological, individual, social, public, and cultural regimes of memory have become intensified. 6 Memory is today increasingly forged across and through new hybrid but also automated forms. The objective of an existential and embodied approach is to theorize human forms of being for media (memory) studies and digital culture more broadly, while moving beyond its current predilection for either one-sidedly describing the moulding forces of automation, protocol, and algorithm (at the expense of human agency), or celebrating the developments as intrinsically liberatory, or as natural parts of our “digital ecology” or “media life” (Deuze). 23 This requires a careful reconceptualization of “the human,” which describes the self as (to speak with Heidegger) thrown out into a universe of uncertainty (Lagerkvist, “Existential Media”). An embodied approach to media memory is, I contend, also an existential approach. In turn, it is a version of the existential that refutes conceptions of a disembodied and stable form of consciousness that is—as in classical logocentric approaches—conceived in opposition with the body. Re-envisioning humans for the digital age implies conceiving of a plurality of ways of being. It is an approach sensitized to the diversifications of our embodied, uncertain, sentient, and vulnerable selves, which will also involve differentiating along the lines of gender, class, age, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, sexuality, and cultural, religious, and historical contexts. In sum, the so-called media ecology presupposes and forges different yet often overlapping modes of embodiment that all entail different possibilities and challenges. These I have begun to summarize in terms of the performative body, the device body, the implicated body, and the implied body. In discussing these four media bodies, this essay has explored embodied senses of being-in-and-with-the-digital-world. I will round up by further emphasizing that a shift toward embodiment and affect in digital memory studies should not be understood as a refutation of human agency, experience, ethics, or the quest for meaning. Indeed, endorsing an embodied sense of the human self means holding on to the possibility, or will, to achieve meaning and make ethical choices: the body is both sentient and sense-making. And yet, our digital media bodies are examples of both implicated and implied forms of embodiment, and I have suggested that they are currently besieged by ambivalence and anxiety. The approach I propose therefore makes it possible to focus less on the early adopters of new media, as is often implicitly done in media studies, but also emphatically on the less tech-savvy, on those who worry about the culture of connectivity: stumbling agents who fall, embodied selves who under-accomplish, who fail to make sense, and whose concerns are with alienation, with not belonging, not 24 managing, or not mastering. As is hopefully clear by now, the existential approach in this view is not about the cogito reasoning about his world, or about a subjective, disembodied consciousness or even about radical “freedom”; it is instead an approach that allows us to describe online media and digital culture in terms of affectively being–in-and-with-thedigital-world, which includes the will to make sense, as well as the failures of doing so. It further conceives of interruption as well as breakdown, asubjective and nonconscious affect, confusion, halt, and suffering as inevitable aspects of human existence, and as part of the basic conditions of life—and of media life. I want to end with an imaginative challenge: imagine if those of us who are never retweeted, who are unable to navigate and comprehend the fullness of the web, who can’t make their devices work, who never post or seldom upload anything, who feel awkward and anxious about the traces we leave, are recognized as the “inhabitants” of the digital memory ecology; and imagine if our vantage point for exploring our existential terrains of connectivity is not the early adopter, but the disabled child. To further develop an approach that estimates, beyond the gloss of technological affordances and the clout of all-powerful corporate algorithms, the range of phenomenal, embodied, affective, and lived experiences of our digital existence is the formidable task of an existential approach in media memory studies. 25 Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Åsberg, Cecilia, Redi Kooback, and Ericka Johnson. “Beyond the Humanist Imagination.” Nora: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19.4 (2011): 218-30. Benski, Tova, and Eran Fisher, eds. Internet and Emotions. London: Routledge, 2013. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. New York: Polity Press, 2013. Brubaker, Jed, Gillian R., Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society: An International Journal 29.3 (2013): 152-63. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Feminist Theory: Bodies, Science and Technology.” Handbook of the Body. Ed. Bryan Turner. London: Routledge, 2012. 94-105. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Deuze, Mark. Media Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Erll, Astrid. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 1-18. Featherstone, Mike. “Ubiquitous Media: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 26.2– 3 (2009): 1–22. Frosh, Paul. “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory and Kinesthetic Sociability.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1607–1628. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, and Kristyn Gorton. Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Anna Reading, and Andrew Hoskins. “Introduction.” Save As… Digital Memories. Ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Anna Reading, and Andrew Hoskins. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1-21. 26 Gies, Lieve. “How Material are Cyberbodies? Broadband Internet and Embodied Subjectivity.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.3 (2008): 311-330. Gonzales-Arnal, Stella, Gill Jagger, and Kathleen Lennon, eds. Embodied Selves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hayles, N. Kathryn. When We Became Post-human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hong, Sun-ha. “Presence, or the Sense of Being-there and Being-with in the New Media Society.” First Monday 20.10 (2015): n. pag. Web. 8 Dec. 2015. Hoskins, Andrew. “Digital Network Memory.” Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 91-106. ‑‑‑. “The Mediatization of Memory.” Mediatization of Communication. Ed. Knut Lundby. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 661-80. ---. “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-scarcity Culture.” Memory Studies 4.3 (2011): 269-80. Hirsch, Marianne. “Mobile Memories.” Budapest, 30 Sept. 2014. Keynote Address. Johansson, Anna. “Hybrid Embodiment: Doing Respectable Bodies on YouTube.” Hybrid Media Culture: Sensing Place in a World of Flows. Ed. Simon Lindgren. London: Routledge, 2014. 16-33. Karatzogianni, Athina, and Adi Kuntsman, eds. Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Boston: MIT Press, 2012. 27 Koivunen, Anu. “Force of Affects, Weight of Histories in Love is a Treasure.” Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imaginary and Feminist Politics. Ed. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013. 89-101. Lagerkvist, Amanda. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness.” New Media & Society. Forthcoming. ---. Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ---. “The Netlore of the Infinite: Death (and Beyond) in the Digital Memory Ecology.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Online first, Dec. 2014. ---. “New Memory Cultures and Death: Existential Security in the Digital Memory Ecology.” Thanatos 2.2 (2013): 1-17. Mayer-Schönberger, Victor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Miller, Vincent. “A Crisis of Presence: On-line Culture and Being in the World.” Space & Polity 16.3 (2012): 265-85. Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. Hansen. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Narvaez, Rafael. F. “Embodiment, Collective Memory and Time.” Body & Society 12.3 (2006): 51-73. Neiger, Motti, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, eds. On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7-24. Peters, John Durham. “Proliferation and Obsolescence of the Historical Record in the Digital Era.” Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age. Ed. Babette 28 B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Forthcoming. Pinchevski, Amit. “Archive, Media, Trauma.” On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Ed. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 253-64. Rainie, Lee, and Barry Wellmann. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Boston: MIT Press, 2012. Reading, Anna. “Memory and Digital Media: Six Dynamics of the Globital Memory Field.” On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Ed. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 241-52. Refslund Christensen, Dorthe, and Kjetil Sandvik, eds. Mediating and Remediating Death. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Rigney, Ann. “Plentitude, Scarcity, and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35 (2005): 11-28. Sobchack, Vivianne. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sundén, Jenny. Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ---. “A Sense of Play: Affect, Emotion, and Embodiment in World of Warcraft.” Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Ed. Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen. London: Routledge, 2010. 45-57. 29 Sundén, Jenny, and Malin Sveningsson. Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play. London: Routledge, 2012. Sutton, John. “Memory and the Extended Mind: Embodiment, Cognition and Culture.” Cognitive Processing 6 (2005): 223-26. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Thrift, Nigel, and John-David Dewsbury. “Dead Geographies—and How to Make Them Alive.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 411-32. Turkle, Sherry. “Always-On/Always-on-You: The Tethered Self.” Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. Ed. James Katz. Boston: MIT Press, 2008. 121-38. Van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. --- Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Volkmer, Ingrid. The Global Public Sphere: Public Communication in the Age of Reflective Interdependence. London: Polity, 2014. Westerlund, Michael, Gergö Hadlaczky, and Danuta Wasserman. “‘Alright let’s do it’: A Case Study of Posts before and after a Suicide on a Swedish Internet Forum.” British Journal of Psychiatry. Forthcoming. 30 1 The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable comments from the editors, and from Marta Zarzycka, Paul Frosh, and Mark Westmoreland on a previous draft of the essay. This article is part of the project ”Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity” (2014-2018), at the Department of Media studies, Stockholm University (et.ims.su.se), and was made possible through funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, and Stockholm University. 2 This is not the place for an in-depth engagement with the ontological foundations of these debates about bodies, science, and technology in feminist theory of the so-called “ontological turn.” For a good introduction to these debates, which accounts for their origins in quantum physics, cybernetics, and thermodynamics, see Clough. Clough argues that a re-theorization of the human and the non-human, as well as of the human body in relation to technologies, will “alert feminist theorists to the changing definition of the body that is arising to fit what the body can now do but also what economic and governing interests, including science and technology, have and might yet invest, seek to control or modulate in relationship to life and existence more generally” (104; my emphasis). For a useful discussion of the potential of posthumanism to retool the humanities so as to address the contemporary and utterly complex “human condition,” see Åsberg, Kooback, and Johnson. 3 Exemplifying this process, the birth of “media memory studies” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg) introduces a field that focuses on the interface of media and memory in order to “explore each of these fields by using the insights gained from the other; utilizing the study of media in order to probe the field of collective memory research and vice versa—to investigate old and new questions concerning the operation of the media, by means of insights gained from the study of collective memory” (2). 31 4 As Connerton argues, the body always comprises its own materialized capacities, agency, and potentiality, and hence “no code of bodily performances, however elaborated that code is imagined to be, can comprehend the object described when the object described is a practice of bodily behaviour” (90). This means that the media script can never fully capture the performance, and hence the performance is never completely deployed by the script and can never materialize it exhaustively. 5 See Sundén and Sveningsson for a comprehensive overview of this field. 6 Another important strand of the field of memory studies has brought the body into connection with both cognition and culture in an attempt to create a dialogue across the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. The theory of “the extended mind” describes mental states as “spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains” (Sutton 223). This approach of a distributed memory thus puts brain, body, and world together, in order to assess the possible links and mutual benefits of integration between, for instance, neurobiologists’ and narrative theorists’ work on memory.