Performing the Digital

Abstract

Performing the Digital seeks to map and reflect registers of performance and techno-social layers of performativity in today's digital cultures. The book's basic proposition is that the ubiquity and pervasiveness of digital media and their networked infrastructures profoundly influence the ways and styles in which performativity appears and is enacted. Contemporary technological apparatuses and media provoke new forms of 'intra-action' between what is usually considered to be either human or machinic agency, to use Barad's terminology of posthumanist performativity .In this sense, digital cultures are performative cultures. They condition and are shaped by techno-social processes and agencies, and they afford new possibilities for performative practices and interventions. It follows that the study of performativity in its heterogeneous dimensions cannot afford to ignore the agential forces and effects of digital technologies and their entanglements with human bodies. Accordingly, investigations of social, economic and political processes conducted in and across other disciplines have to reckon with the performativity of digital devices and algorithmic organizing. The book's genesis and development -and, we hope, the discussions it will instigate -were therefore informed by two guiding questions: How is performativity shaped by contemporary technological conditions? And how do performative practices reflect and alter techno-social formations?In proposing answers to these questions, Performing the Digital offers a double contribution. First, we see the book as part of the wider 'performative turn' in the cultural and social sciences (Bachmann-Medick 2016; Thrift 2008), contributing to an understanding of how techno-social performativity -or perhaps a regime of digital performativity -effects the world we live in. More specifically, this collection seeks to map and thus make visible the relations between framed through the notion of 'digital cultures'. Digital technologies now widely, perhaps even invariably participate in the 'making' of culture (Deuze 2006; Gere 2008;. 1 Correspondingly, the understandings of performativity and performative practices need to be rethought. To put it somewhat crudely, digital devices and infrastructures perform, and they make humans (and non-humans) perform. 'Smart things' profile and categorize, foresee and predict, propose and delete, charm and become dubious. Such ascriptions would have been perceived as suspect forms of anthropomorphization only a few years ago (Tholen 1994); now they come across as matter-of-factly descriptions of what technological objects and software do. And the consequences are serious. Consider the financial markets and their algorithms of high frequency trading (see Lange, this volume), the everyday organization of affect (see Angerer, this volume), the simulations of climate change research or the dressage of the quantified self and its selfoptimization devices (Baxmann et al. 2016). Yet this is not merely a technological or medial a-priori of cultura...