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Digital Life
For Emma
Digital Life

TIM MARKHAM

polity
Copyright © Tim Markham 2020

The right of Tim Markham to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4105-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4106-5(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Markham, Tim, 1974- author.

Title: Digital life / Tim Markham.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: «A leading scholar›s
provocative call to reimagine the way we think about digital media in
everyday life»-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051000 (print) | LCCN 2019051001 (ebook) | ISBN
9781509541058 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541065 (paperback) | ISBN
9781509541072 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Digital media--Social aspects. | Information
technology--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM851 .M3724 2020 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC
303.48/33--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051000
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051001

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 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 The Care Deficit 28
3 The Affordances of Affect 43
4 Data, Surveillance and Apathy 63
5 Everyday Stakes of Being 79
6 Experience and Identity 97
7 Everyday Lives of Digital Infrastructures 114
8 Selfing in a Digital World 133

Notes 145
Bibliography 150
Index 162

v
 1 Introduction

This book is intended as a provocation to rethink our pathologization of

ordinary citizens’ digital lives as oblivious, apolitical and self-centred. We
accept that people care, but about the wrong things and in the wrong ways
– not least the emotional, attention-seeking, virtue-signalling outpourings
seen on social media platforms. In academic circles, the concern is that the
quest for experience in our digital lives is crowding out politics, at least
politics conventionally conceived as solidarity with out-groups as well as
in-groups, awareness of democratic rights and their erosion by commercial
and surveilling forces, and commitments to political institutions and
processes. This chapter aims to set out the book’s stall: instead of fretting
about people thinking, feeling and acting in the wrong ways, we should
do what any good phenomenologist would do: start with the experience
of everyday digital life and ask not just what we stand to lose in a fast-
changing world, but what we stand to gain.
Digital Life resists the idea that there is something about the digital age
that is corroding, corrupting or diluting of what it means to be human, to the
same extent that it rejects a utopian projection of the digital Übermensch.
Digital harms come in many forms that are not equally attributable to
the logic of digitization, to the neoliberal economic framework that has
facilitated its spread, or indeed to the forces of governmentality Michel
Foucault diagnosed in the march of modernity. There are three broad
groupings of problematizations of the pervasion of contemporary society
by digital technologies, each requiring a distinct analytic lens. First there
is the outright damage, often criminal in nature, wrought with the aid of
digital platforms, software and hardware: disinformation campaigns, hate
speech, propaganda, incitement to violence, financial scams, identity theft
and so on. Collectively we defend ourselves against these through legal and
political channels, though this is difficult since data is largely indifferent to
national and other strictures. Beyond that is the question of how to ensure
that citizens are better able to recognize and evade such harms, and here
lies the suspicion that there is something unique about digital technologies
regarding their ability to make things seem other than they actually are.
The thesis to be developed is that this wariness about the inherent
inauthenticity of the digital is unwarranted. Drawing on phenomenological

1
Digital Life

arguments, it will be suggested that whatever the digital brings into being is
just as real as anything else; we always start from an inauthentic present, rather
than some pure origin which has come to be contaminated by progressive
technological revolutions in representation and communication. This insight
has real-world implications for policymakers and regulators as well as
scholars, for it raises the essential question of what a citizen’s knowledge of
digital risks should look like. This, true to the phenomenological tradition,
will not amount to the scales falling from an individual’s eyes so that they see
the thing itself, stripped of layers of mediation. Rather, it has to be a practical,
even bodily knowledge. That word ‘bodily’ can sound odd in this context, but
it boils down to three straightforward propositions. First, digital knowledge
can be affective rather than conscious, merely felt rather than hard won
through cognition. Second, practical knowledge is about position-taking in
relation to objects encountered in everyday life, increasingly digitally. And
third, how we experience everyday life is less a series of discrete encounters
and more about movement through an environment – in which objects
often barely register at all. Put together, the knowledge required by citizens
is neither cynical, forensic nor defensive. It instead consists in a sceptical
agility: those swipes and taps we sometimes suspect render us impressionable
can also be the deft application of acquired wisdom, knowing what kind of
distance to keep as we move from one thing to the next.
The second type of critique of digitization concerns its systemic under-
pinnings and implications: the profit-seeking raison d’être of social media
platforms and their complicity in further entrenching global inequalities;
the degradation of public spheres by a combination of the elevation of the
hyperbolic and personal above the measured and reasoned, the anonymity
of some digital spaces, and the formation of what Richard Sennett (2012)
calls intentive communities and we have come to know as silos or filter
bubbles; the quiet rolling out of intrusive and illiberal legislation supposedly
in the interests of security; the wielding of facial recognition and other
monitoring capacities by authoritarian as well as democratic states; and
the massive environmental cost of producing, maintaining and disposing
of our digital infrastructures, systems and devices. In all these areas we rely
heavily on campaigners, activists and experts to pile pressure on politicians
and regulators in order to defend basic human rights of privacy, freedom of
speech and accountability. Beyond that is the question of how we can ensure
that the public are better informed about such systemic issues, especially
because there is again a lingering suspicion that there is something about the
way digital systems are designed, function and are weightlessly experienced
that is inherently geared towards concealment. A pragmatic, if bitter, lesson
to be learned from journalism is that there is in practice little scope for

2
 Introduction

making people care more than they do, however serious the issue. But there
are options other than throwing up our hands in resignation or doggedly
persevering in trying to get people to see how things really are. As with
the first category, then, the alternative to be set forward here is essentially
ecological, a matter of how we move through digitally enabled and pervaded
worlds. Different from public awareness traditionally conceived, this is
knowledge of what it means to live and navigate through a world of which
all of these phenomena are features, in which all manner of others also exist
and suffer its depravities, and in which I am complicit and responsible.
The third kind of critique is both more philosophical and more radical,
and concerns the extent to which digitization has reshaped the conditions
of existence itself. How can we appraise, let alone resist and redirect, the
contingencies of a world our experience of which is largely determined by
those very contingencies? A more extensive discussion of digital ontology
is presented in the next section; suffice it to introduce here the phenom-
enological characterization of thrownness: making familiar the world and
the self into which we find ourselves always-already thrown, using ready-
to-hand resources that are not of our making or choosing, is an intrinsic
part of the human condition. There is an open question about the extent
to which it is productive to encourage greater awareness in individuals that
they are a product of digitization, as much as they think of digital devices as
tools to put to their own ends. There is more at stake in how we as publics
account for how we got to the present juncture in which all kinds of things
have come to be taken for granted, and especially in what agency we have
in relation to the future worlds and new normals that digitization will bring
into existence. Here it will be argued that there is little point in working
to retrieve what we have lost, experientially speaking, in the digital age, or
in trying to extract or abstract ourselves from the digital in order to better
assess what it is doing and could do for us. As with the first two categories
of critique, the knowledge required here is practical: rather than revelation,
it is by finding new ways of doing things that the contingency of our
being-in-the-world is revealed and new ways of being are made real. This is
not something that has to be done blind, but nor do we need to imagine
an origin and a destination: it is a matter of experimenting, improvising,
committing provisionally and repeating.

Digital ontology
Digital Life emerges in the context of a broader shift in media philosophy,
which entails two principal contentions. First, there is no epistemological

3
Digital Life

route into ontology: we do not know our way towards being, as being arises
out of the primacy of existence. It will soon become apparent that this is
not a relegation of knowledge per se, but rather an argument from the
Hegelian postulation that absolute knowledge means no knowledge at all –
cumulative data gathering and reflection is not the path to enlightenment.
The second contention has been argued for most forcefully by Friedrich
Kittler, but is at heart a Heideggerian claim: humanity and technology
are mutually constitutive; we do not exist in spite of all the digital infra-
structure and content we have surrounded ourselves with, but precisely
through it. Most recently, Amanda Lagerkvist has advocated this existential
framing of digital media, and it has some quite profound implications for
policymakers as well as theorists. It means that investigating digital life
cannot be a matter of stripping away all the clutter that pervades our media
saturated world to reveal what lies beneath: the clutter is the starting point;
it is, in ontological terms, foundational.
It is sensible to lay down a couple of pre-emptive markers about where this
leaves critical digital scholarship. The first is that it does not justify amnesia:
no phenomenologist going back to Heidegger and Husserl would suggest
that the primacy of experience means we just have to accept it as we find
ourselves forever thrown into it. Morality is baked into thrownness and into
our mutual thrownness with others; there is an imperative to take respon-
sibility for it and its consequences, and part of that involves the forensic
piecing together of what it means to be, to find oneself already out there in
the thick of things as an opening gambit, and how that changes over time (see
Hofman 2016).1 This pushes us to think about our contemporary situation
in terms beyond a cost-benefit analysis of what digitization has given us and
what it has taken away. If the grounding of existence has shifted, then we
need new ways of assessing what it means to live well. Philosophers have long
argued, for instance, that the ethics of our relationships with distant others is
contingent not on our knowledge about them, but just on that basic fact of
co-existence. What does that mean in a context where we have an awareness
of all those others who are out there, but on the whole only in a minimal,
generic form? The same can be said of digital literacy, of the claims so often
heard that digital ethics depends on individuals’ knowledge of the techniques
and technologies that provide the basis of the stuff they consume – not to
mention the workings of media economics and the profound significance
of digital infrastructures. It will be argued instead that we would be better
served, ethically speaking, by starting with the affordances and constraints
that come with an existence spent navigating those systems, usually by feel
alone. ‘Feel’ is not quite the same thing as intuition or gut instinct, cleaving
more closely to Bourdieu’s sens pratique.2 As he describes it, subjects are:

4
 Introduction

not particles subject to mechanical forces, and acting under the constraint
of causes: nor are they conscious and knowing subjects acting with full
knowledge of the facts, as champions of rational action theory believe …
(they are) active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense that is
an acquired system of preferences, of principles, of vision and … schemes of
action. (Bourdieu 1988: 25)
If not through conscious knowledge, then, how do digital scholars and
users – existers, in Lagerkvist’s (2017) coinage – access that primary,
generative experience of being amongst the digital? Historically one of
the most persuasive ways has been through disruption: only when a tool
is broken does its ready-to-handness become consciously registrable, and
only when media are unexpectedly inaccessible does their sheer givenness
become conceivable. Justin Clemens and Adam Nash (2018) helpfully tease
this out by way of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of phenomenological
anxiety, which goes far beyond occasional breakages and blockages to the
annihilation of handiness itself – that is the only means we have of grasping
the sheer contingency of our taken-for-granted everyday lives.3 By contrast,
a common thread of this book is that the apprehension of contingency is
rarely, if ever, revelatory, but rather a background hum that accompanies
the improvisatory, provisional acts we engage in to sustain at-handedness
and at-homeness. Shaun Moores (2015), and by extension David Seamon
(1979) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), loom large here, in the evocative notion of
a life lived alongly. But in addition to finding ontological security on the
fly, constantly in motion from one digital thing to the next, that movement
also affords the anxiety that is a necessary condition of care in the phenom-
enological sense; that is, of our having an interest in our own being.
Clemens and Nash push this one step further in positing that if ontological
care is temporal, and technology is fundamental in establishing the world
as world, then what is technically possible and how we think of being are
themselves co-determinate, stretching back in a chain to the ancient Greeks
and before that to the development of writing.4
The originary technicity of being means that only that which appears as
ready-to-hand can appear at all; there is nothing outside of graspability as
a resource in an environment whose affordances are given by the history
of technology.5 There is something a little maddening about the insistence
that the sum total of what is imaginable is enframed by technology, but this
is in effect no different from Foucault’s conjecture (1990 [1976]) that we
have no means of understanding the self beyond the discourses of which
we are products – or, less dispiritingly, there are no authentic selves to be
discovered and protected from exogenous forces, only ways of selfing that
can be scrutinized or nourished. There is then a continuity between the

5
Digital Life

emphasis placed by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zyelinska (2012; see also
van Dijck 2013; van Zoonen 2013) on the simultaneously generative and
constraining nature of social media platforms and Michel de Certeau’s
conception of everyday existence as imposition and affordance. It is always
both. We can criticize Instagram on grounds of privacy, or commodifi-
cation, or its entrenchment of narrowly unimaginative lifestyles, but only
by way of selves predicated on intuitively grasped practices that are the
product of a world in which Instagram is a thing, regardless of whether you
or I use it or not. At the same time, though, navigating a world in which
Instagram and its attendant cultures of practice are at hand to others and
potentially to oneself is capable of sustaining that anxiety, phenomenologi-
cally speaking, that in turn makes it possible to understand, strictly defined,
the utter contingency of the experience of social media. It is reasonable
enough to suspect that digital media are designed to occlude the way they
shape our experience of the world (Burke 2019), but understanding the
latter is not a matter of standing back in order to get some perspective – it
is a matter of diving in.
There is a worryingly heroic aspect to Heidegger’s notion of standing in
a situation, grasping the nettle and taking responsibility for the self and
world one finds oneself thrown into, which is questionable at best. But it
is important that the ethical imperative he develops out of the condition of
thrownness, which is built around the idea of fallingness from being, is not
necessarily a redemptive one. The ins and outs of this ethics are for another
chapter; for now what is important is that from a phenomenological
perspective there is no point in trying to regain any kind of lost innocence
associated with the pre-digital world, or in trying to attain a purer kind
of being-in-the-world less contaminated by data. Fallingness and the
alienation that goes along with it is a given; it is not just our default mode
of experience but ontologically foundational. And that is what makes it
possible to think of the kinds of states we often associate with digital media
use – distraction, impatience, banal curiosity, affect-chasing – as starting
points, not aberrations. Rather than accepting whatever compromised
present we are served with, this simply means that there is no original sin
for which we have to make amends. The ethics of digital media is not about
atoning for what it has done to us, but about recognizing that the digital
has always been within us, and we have always been within it. It is probably
easier to think of the ethics of mutual constitutivity in the realm of relations
between human subjects, and Emmanuel Levinas has been put to good
use (see especially Pinchevski 2005a) in showing how ethics consists in the
brute fact of co-existence, and not the intimate or attentive relations with
specific others that may develop over time. Clemens and Nash similarly

6
 Introduction

deploy Gilbert Simondon’s (2017 [1958]) model of the pre-individual6 to

illustrate that individuation is anything but the emergence of discrete being:
individuals exist in a perpetual, generative state of mutual transduction, and
the same can be said of humans and their environments. The debate goes
on about whether digital ontology is categorically novel, but the meaning
of digital ethics is not built on shakier, more tainted ground than anything
that came before. This is why arguments based on the intractability and
unknowability of data, while useful framing devices, can only take us so
far – the radical contingencies of the already-there world have always been
constitutive of collective being-in-the-world and individual subjectivity in
ways that cannot be made the objects of direct consciousness. They are,
however, ready-to-hand, and their doing discloses a world of possibilities
as well as strictures.
How then are we to think critically about digital life? There are countless
concrete phenomena that demand to be called out as unethical: discrimi-
natory usage of health data in the insurance industry, the prevention of
the use of non-proprietary software and of autonomous infrastructural
maintenance, the rolling out of AI-driven identification algorithms as
non-optional standards, data surveillance carried out across ever-expanding
parts of everyday life. These might all be said to revolve around notions of
rights, consent or autonomy, but what do these terms mean in a digital
world? The approach taken here is to reject any rarefied, abstract defini-
tions against which we will necessarily be found wanting – there is nothing
relativistic in claiming that such ethical terms have always emerged in media
res, through and not in spite of the compromised, constraining environ-
ments in which they make sense. Digital ethics can only be meaningful to
the extent that it originates from the mess of daily digital life, rather than
being imposed on it from outside – hence the absurdity of reducing data
consent to discrete acts of agreeing to a website’s terms and conditions. It is
possible that consenting to the corporate collection of one’s data needs to
be rethought in a more media ecological way – that is, as pertaining to the
way we move through digital environments rather than what we know and
think about this or that platform. This is hardly new: the proposition that
ethical habits do not have to start from clear-headed decisions goes back at
least as far as William James (2017 [1887]).
Autonomy in the digital age is a minefield because it is often conflated
with choice. It is a basic phenomenological tenet that constraint is a
necessary condition of subjectivity, not its preclusion – and yet there is
something palpably unfair about a farmer locked out by software from
the means to repair a tractor, or a dating app that constricts my ability to
express my gender and sexual preference. Meanwhile there are familiar,

7
Digital Life

longstanding theses about how there is little to be said for individual

choice when all it does is outsource regimes of governmentality, or when
the choices we are encouraged to make are so tawdry. The motives behind
the constraint of consumer behaviour on a social media platform are a less
promising ethical route than first appears to be the case. It seems intuitively
appealing to expose the profit-seeking or surveillance motives that really
explain the form and function of the digital environments we spend time
in, but as with consent, awareness is not the route to autonomy when the
latter is embodied and practical. It has been demonstrated (Devine 2015)
that most users of music streaming services are completely unaware that
the environmental footprint of this form of music consumption is far
greater than with legacy media forms like the compact disc or cassette,
and yet news stories about the topic gained no traction at all. If conscious
awareness does not provide a viable basis for establishing the implications
of our digital media habits, then current conceptions of media literacy may
have to be rebuilt around the practical, manual knowledge of tool use.
Kittler (1990) is quick to remind us that the belief that computers are mere
tools at our disposal is a myth, that of homo faber.7 We are made through
tool use as much as we make things with it, but this is not at all the same
as arguing that we are the tools of technology. Mutual constitutivity is just
that – mutual – and this shines a light on the far-reaching implications and
possibilities of practical political concerns.
Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp’s influential book The Mediated
Construction of Reality (2017) tackles the key question that arises from
the existential grounding of digital media. In short, on what basis can we
assess, critique and resist the influence of particular media organizations,
and the digital industries collectively, on the rapidly changing parameters
of everyday life? It is not enough to show that change is occurring, or even
that it is happening without our awareness or consent. Instead, Couldry
and Hepp foreground subjective losses, ways of being social that once
gone cannot be remembered or reclaimed. In one sense this is inevitable:
we cannot know genuinely what it was like to exist in relation to others a
hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. But the acceleration of change –
and, they maintain, the way the structures underpinning the experience
of daily life are being reshaped towards commercial and surveilling ends
– means that it is imperative we take stock of what we stand to lose. There
is a level of nuance here that is comparable to José van Dijck’s The Culture
of Connectivity (2013): the question is not so much whether we now enjoy
less privacy, but what privacy now means, and how that apprehension
of privacy became normal and with what consequences.8 Such a line of
inquiry does not imply that we have become less social or less authentic

8
 Introduction

in our relations to each other – as Simmel (1971: 133, in Couldry and

Hepp 2017: 4) puts it, there has always been an artificiality to the socia-
bility that we work hard at sustaining in order to feel authentically human
together. This collective work is society’s care structure, and it is far from a
futile endeavour (Scannell 2014; cf. Bourdieu 1994); it provides not only
comfort but also the grounding of empathy and solidarity. Simmel’s insight
shows us that there is an eternal tension between our always fluid sense of
who we are and the changing frameworks in which we enact sociability.
Couldry and Hepp’s thesis goes well beyond the nostrum that we have
forgotten how to be social in the age of digital media. In fact most people are
very good at it, adopting and adapting to new forms of sociality so that they
feel endogenous. Rather, their thesis is that the functional units of collective
social construction are themselves derivatives of technological functions.
This need not necessarily be experienced as disordered (cf. Latour 2005), but
order is at stake when the parameters of interaction change (Couldry and
Hepp 2017: 9). If this echoes Anthony Giddens’ (1994: 187, in Couldry
and Hepp 2017: 10) diagnosis that we live differently in the world in late
modernity than in other historical epochs, Couldry and Hepp go on to
reflect specifically on whether datafication has ushered in something different
again.9 Its impact is effectively epistemological, redistributing knowledge
production in such a way that cannot help but reorder how we understand
and work at sociality. It will be clear from the discussion so far that one does
not have to go along with Couldry and Hepp’s call for a heightened under-
standing of these shifts in everyday life to agree that any systemic changes to
the ways we make the world, each other and ourselves to-hand warrant close
scrutiny – this is how history unfolds, after all. Likewise with their emphasis
on individual sovereignty, on the right to control the means by which we
constitute ourselves as social: in an important sense we have always achieved
this through the internalization of anticipatory and reactive templates that
precede us and will outlast us. That such ‘affective assemblages’ (Withy 2015)
are hand-me-downs does not make them any the less genuine – the whole
point is that they are collective and context-specific, which is what allows for
sociability in the first place. If these templates change, even or especially if
we adapt to them effortlessly, this is prima facie important. But change they
always will. Couldry and Hepp ask us to confront the implications of these
templates being rewired to pursue goals different from those of social actors.10
It is one thing to hold that being-in-the-world is always hugely contingent
and, seen in one light, arbitrary – that does not make its stakes any less real.
But to suggest that its reformulation according to distinct technological and
economic logics carries a particular ethical urgency is compelling, and more
incisive than calling out the big tech companies for their nefarious deeds.

9
Digital Life

Louise Amoore’s important work on social order (2011; 2013) sets out
just what is at stake in new ways of being social whose infrastructures are
algorithmic. In order to function efficiently, algorithms have to operate at
high levels of abstraction, maximizing predictability by reducing the range of
possible outcomes in any given interaction between individuals and digital
objects. It is not that the programmer decides and enforces outcomes, but
that less likely and more chaotic chains of events are excluded, resulting in
a social space in which those futures are less likely. It is not a question of
rewiring our minds or overriding our capacity for free will; the point is that
selfing is always a process not a state of being, a set of practices we more or
less manage using whatever resources we find to hand as we make our way
about. We do not develop a toolkit and then go out into the world to be
us; we do it as we go. This is not to say that we simply make it up, but the
process is necessarily experimental. The import of Amoore’s intervention is
to ask whether our facility with improvisation is curtailed when the tools at
our disposal are simpler and more predictable in their outcomes. The issue,
then, is not whether the tools are of our own devising – they never were –
but whether their design, geared towards the efficient running of commercial
social media platforms, reduces the untidiness and uncertainty that charac-
terizes the particular manifestation of sociability that we want to defend. The
all-pervasive spread of data collection raises the possibility that we are indeed
predictable as populations to a degree to which many or most of us may not
have been aware, and there is a sense that what is aberrant and unpredictable
needs to be protected. But are we actually becoming more predictable? Over
the course of this book it will be seen that the necessarily unknowable affor-
dances of lives lived digitally suggest perhaps not, although not definitively.
The materialist phenomenology that frames The Mediated Construction
of Reality provides a robust blueprint for continuing to investigate the
constantly evolving ground upon which everyday life is built and worked
on, and the book’s prioritization of processes of materialization and insti-
tutionalization is impossible to refute.11 What remains an open question is
whether the fact that the data processes underpinning normative practices
of selfhood are largely unfathomable and shaped by the economic impera-
tives of social media platforms necessitates a degraded, less imaginative,
more biddable kind of selfhood. In more tangible terms, Couldry and Hepp
frame this through a critique of the kind of online personal branding that
has become conventional across large parts of the social internet. Branding
brings a lot of baggage with it, including the tacky commodification of
identity pitched to a buyer’s market in popularity and status. There are,
however, other ways of looking at self-presentation in digital (inter alia)
contexts, from Erving Goffman’s (1990 [1959]; 2008 [1963]) exegesis

10
 Introduction

of the rules governing everyday interactions – rules which, when looked

at coldly, appear similarly arbitrary and flimsy – to Simone de Beauvoir’s
(2015 [1948]) existential framing of the ethical self through projects. It is
tempting to reduce digital selfhood to the fatuous #livingmybestlife tropes
of Instagram, but the norm is perhaps closer to Lagerkvist’s stumbling
existers who feel sharply the incessant challenge of our thrownness into
digital worlds. For de Beauvoir, the building of an ethical, autonomous
self is predicated on failure and compromise, on stuttering, tentative steps,
on discontinuity and disorientation – the self would have no ethical heft
without these features. Couldry and Hepp are certainly right to call for a
renewed, unstinting scrutiny of the world-making strategies of governing
institutions (2017: 163), but these institutions’ ability to curate the
experience of everyday life through designing and controlling the building
blocks of online social construction is by no means absolute.
The corollary of Couldry and Hepp’s deep mediatization thesis is that
scholars and users alike need to be more open-eyed about where their
selfing resources came from and with what implications. Paul Frosh is inter-
ested in exploring the less systemic, more tentative affordances of digital
lives lived largely through peripheral vision. In The Poetics of Digital Media
(2018) he sets out his stall by way of a reference to Annette Markham
(2003, no relation), who has long argued that technology and everyday life
are not only mutually constitutive, but are vitally connected. For Frosh,
too, media are poetic in the sense that they perform poesis, bringing worlds
into presence. This prefigures John Durham Peters’ assessment of the role of
media infrastructures: they should not be thought of as grubby substitutes
for previous modes of subjectification, since they are just as profoundly
ontological. This is an important intervention, for it means that regardless
of whether one thinks that social media platforms are irredeemably super-
ficial and commercially implicated, they are no less existentially factual
than what went before. Chapter 5 fleshes this out through a reading of
Division One of Heidegger’s Being and Time, though the salient point is
clear enough: the claim that mediatized forms of sociality are crowding out
previously established ones, and that there is thus a danger in the former
being mistaken for the latter, is not unassailable. Mediatized forms are as
generative of the real as what they are said to be displacing; their ontological
priority is not rendered flimsy or dubious by their origins or design. We do
not have to like these newly ubiquitous platforms for social interaction, and
indeed it is perfectly reasonable to call them out as inauthentic. Heidegger’s
rejoinder, however, is that the inauthentic social worlds in which we are
endlessly immersed are as factual as anything else. Ethics emerges from
inauthenticity, not through its effacement.

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Digital Life

For Frosh it is to be expected that the lifeworld will be tessellated with

systems and structures beyond the realms of direct perception, from the
microscopic to the astrophysical – and, one might add, from the intricate
architectures of digital platforms to the macroeconomic forces governing a
social space in a particular period. It is no surprise that he marshals Scannell
early on, who marvels rather than frets at the observation that the post-
industrial world individuals inhabit is more or less entirely dependent on
infrastructure made by humans; that everything that makes the experience
of everyday life possible, seamless and fruitful stems from technological and
economic endeavours and sheer labour. If Scannell sees boundless possi-
bilities in this new reality, and Couldry and Hepp see instead the evidently
reduced resources we actually make use of in contemporary mediated life,
Frosh perceives something more ambiguous. It is true that digital media, ‘by
virtue of their connective, perceptual and symbolic attributes’ (Couldry and
Hepp 2017: 9), shape our mostly taken-for-granted modes of being present,
but they do so without full occlusion. Those modes of presence are able to be
recognized, to be rendered objects of consciousness, opening up the possibility
of reflexivity in a way that does not feature in Couldry and Hepp’s model.
Like many others, Frosh considers the prospect of grasping the contingency
of mediated lived reality through reflection on those rare moments in which
the seams of the lifeworld are ruptured. But he soon moves on to explore
other modes of being in a world amongst others and amongst technology,
predicated on infrastructures and resources of social construction that are
more tangential and transient, less assertive and substantive.
Frosh takes aim squarely at the ‘attentive fallacy’: ‘the assumption that
the significance of representations is generated through an intense, focussed
interchange between an attentive address and a formally distinct, unified
text’ (2018: 13). Why, he counters, should we suspect that distraction is
superficial and uncritical, even the ‘handmaiden of hegemony’? He goes
on to question the derision with which many regard commodified forms
of consumption and ‘pre-digested pleasure’, which might alternatively
be thought of as ingenious means for dealing with the unimaginable
quantities of representations calling for our attention. Indeed, more than a
coping mechanism, the collective shorthand we develop in order to register
the multitude of distant mediated others should be seen as a significant
achievement of modern culture. Ben Highmore (2010) has similarly
defended distraction as a kind of ‘promiscuous absorption’, one for which
we should be grateful not just for want of anything else, but because this
flitting forever from one thing to the next has real ethical affordances. Frosh,
rejecting what he dubs the ‘rapture of rupture’, sees inattention – which, like
distraction, is not numbness but an impatient, restless darting about – as

12
 Introduction

a way of properly populating mediated worlds with the voices and bodies
of others. It is these non-intense relationships we have with others – and
here we could add digital objects and infrastructures of the technological
and economic type – which provide the basis for a grounded, active ethics
of being-in-the-world. Here, as Frosh puts it, indifference acts as a moral
force in the taken-for-granted, pre-reflective experience of everyday life.12
Later in the same work Frosh goes on to sketch out some possible
pathways from a pre-conscious practical response to mediation to a more
fully-fledged ethical responsibility towards others, focusing on the kinds
of easily acquired muscle habits associated with digital interface screens,
though the truth is that we cannot reliably infer the form of that ethical
sociability from its corporeal or affective origins. It still stands, however, that
the apprehension of contingency need not be clinched through any kind of
revelation, and that ‘both decentering and refocusing modes of disclosure’
(2018: 17) of the world, which are at the heart of all calls to challenge the
new norms and conventions of digital life, do not depend on consciousness
of crisis. This serves as a potent riposte to claims that digital media flatten
the massively diverse range of human experience into a homogeneous play
of images, so that the representation of a victim of war or famine registers no
differently to that of a politician in the midst of a sex scandal or a protestor
on the streets of a distant capital. Frosh sees this composite aggregate of ‘the
human’ – which we manage to maintain as we cast our eyes from one thing
to the next without pausing to reflect – as a productive form of ‘non-hostile
habituation’, a being-with that is not just liveable but defensible too. And
while there are problems with stereotypes, misconceptions and delusions
that have real implications, the point is not to try to pull back or zoom in
to see the representations we encounter in a less generic, more immediate
fashion, but to tweak our habitual practices so as to form different aggre-
gates of ‘the human’ as a category of minimal solidarity.
More broadly, Frosh’s defence of inattention opens up fertile ground
for thinking about world disclosure in digitally mediated environments
primarily through the prism of practical knowledge. The practices of which
the latter consists are material in the sense that they are context-specific
and of determinate form, and thus properly subject to historical and critical
inquiry. They are also not set in stone: their routinization is a production
of sameness through movement between innumerable digital artefacts,
and while the energies this requires are exactly what present the world as
world to us, if they are deployed differently there is no intrinsic loss of
care structure. That is to say, the fact that we are collectively so invested in
producing being-in-the-world does not necessitate that we are destined to
disclose the world in ever more entrenched ways. There is a fluidity to our

13
Digital Life

navigation of digital worlds which means that disclosure is dynamic. Over

the past few decades it has been argued that this has left us all at sea, unable
to maintain any firm experience of being-in-the-world and with others,
or even of Dasein itself. But we are endlessly inventive when it comes to
generating new contextual habits of practical knowledge and embodied
techniques of disclosure that allow for perpetual motion if not ontological
security. Of course, whether one sees this generative capacity for adaption as
a submission to disciplinary regimes or simply as finding new ways to make
the world familiar to us depends on what side of Scannell’s hermeneutics of
trust/suspicion one stands (Frosh 2018: 18). But there is surely something
substantial to explore in the fact that this facility for motion-enabling
practical habits of world disclosure cannot be reverse engineered so as to
produce a determinate mode of being. What we know of the world and
how we know it digitally are slippery issues. There are equally real stakes
attached to every mode of world disclosure that stabilizes for a time, but
there is not a necessary subjective loss as one morphs into another.
If this all sounds like a rationale for embracing technological change
whatever form it takes, it is in fact not so simple. Change and habituation
are not opposing forces, but two sides of the same coin, akin to the counter-
vailing components of escalation and de-escalation that keep a nuclear
facility relatively but not absolutely stable. Frosh is sceptical, for instance,
about devising newly immersive experiences through digital media in order
to better understand the experience of others. Like Chouliaraki (2010) he is
also mindful that even the most mawkish of heuristics – the use of music to
evoke a particular response in disaster reporting, for instance – has its uses
insofar as it orients the media user towards a determinate kind of practical
knowledge. In short, we rely on stale tropes and tricks as cues to intuit ways
of feeling that reveal the world to us in recognizable ways. The apposite
point for the rest of this book is that feeling our way through digitally
saturated worlds is productive: it is not a means of reaching a point where
we no longer have to keep moving and adapting; rather, it is exactly how
we come to know the world and feel at home in it.
Highmore draws on Walter Benjamin in linking distraction to absorption,
and he additionally cites Kracauer’s meditation (1990 [1926]) on distracted
attention in his Weimar essays.13 Common to all three is the commitment
to the kind of embodied knowledge made possible by distracted motion
from one object of attention to the next. Furthermore, there is nothing
special about this – the distracted state does not require a great feat of
imagination or creativity; it is just the daily work of making sense of the
world around us. This in turn implies that distraction is an end in itself, and
need not lead to any kind of wonderment or delight. Kathleen Stewart’s

14
 Introduction

Ordinary Affects (2007) makes a similar point, suggesting that while it is

normal to think of the affective navigation of digital media as a constant
search for the next affective hit, it requires only the barest hint of affective
response to propel the subject along. Highmore does not extend this line
of reasoning as far as Frosh, but the implication is clear: it is perfectly
plausible that the kinds of practice we associate with digital media – surfing,
grazing, prodding, swiping – are uniquely appropriate to developing over
time the kinds of thin ties with maximal others associated with respect and
solidarity.14 Nor is there anything accidental about this, for while indecisive
media attention may appear to lack form and consistency, it is nevertheless
the product of the historical interplay of everyday life and technology that
has brought us to where we are.
Also threaded through that history, of course, is economics. The
commercial basis of the ‘affect industry’ – the commodification of affective
responses in order to inflate a lucrative market around practices of surfing
and swiping – suggests that digital distraction should be seen as determined
at least in part by the forces of global capitalism. Eva Ilouz (2007) calls
this ‘emotional capitalism’, referring to the ‘cold intimacy’ that marks the
way affect has come to be aligned with economic relations and exchange.
Others (Hoggett and Thompson 2012) have written about the pacifying,
quieting effects of media experienced emotionally or simply affectively, and
there is at least some evidence that responding emotionally to bad news, for
instance, is negatively correlated with doing anything concrete in response
to it. It was suggested above that while the corporate objectives behind the
expansion of the social media industries should be borne in mind, they do
not fully determine the affordances of the practices that come to be endemic
to one platform or another. Whatever these digital practices are, they are
not dumb – that is, not the mute, pre-destined endpoints of structural
determination. For Highmore it is the fundamental activity of distraction –
turning away from one thing in order to turn towards another, or the latent
energy of boredom and absent-mindedness – that clinches its potential to
evolve into something more durable, namely an orientation towards the
world and to others that is tenacious and principled. Distraction is above
all an unresolved state, and that is what fuels subjective motion. I want
to suggest that the way we feel our way through digital worlds is about
more than a constant lack of resolution: it is also about provisionality.
The idea is that a provisional state reveals what is at stake, and provisional
practices of attending, responding, moving as well as subjectifying reveal
positions taken in relation to those stakes. Provisionality is not about
inconstancy of identity or ethics, but it does mean that these have to be
thought of as exploratory, even experimental. It is common enough to

15
Digital Life

talk of subjectification as a process rather than a destination, and similarly

one’s response to the stake of a situation of thrownness is not all or
nothing – positions must be taken but can also be revised or discarded as
necessary. What sustains constancy over time are the repertoires developed
individually and collectively for responding on the fly. The point of all this
is straightforward enough: distraction is not passive but active; it is not
naïve wonder but complicity; affect-driven motion is not about innocent
pleasure-seeking but a matter of the unrelenting disclosure of the world and
of one’s position in relation to it. The upshot is that our cultures of surfing
and swiping are not displacement activities designed and embraced so that
we do not have to think about the world as it really is and our responsibility
for what happens in it. It is in the lightness and fluidity of these practices
that the world, its stakes and our culpability are revealed – not when we
stop to take a long hard look at the world and ourselves and decide once
and for all what kind of stand to take, what kind of self to become.
It bears emphasizing that this is quite distinct from the cultures that have
emerged on some social media platforms in which one is expected to have
a ‘take’ on anything: knowing about something is insufficient to demon-
strate cultural competence, and one must communicate an opinion for a
post to pass muster. If being is conceived after Heidegger as thrownness
into a world together with other people, that world is disclosed by way of
otherness. Peters puts this succinctly when he writes that communication
does not involve transmitting one’s intentionality; ‘rather, it entails bearing
oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s otherness’
(1999: 17). The difference here is that surfing and swiping obviously do not
require overt communication to take place; they are nonetheless position-
takings or bearings that place one in a relation of otherness to whatever
object, human or otherwise, is (barely) registered. Ganaele Langlois (2014)
relates this specifically to the affective realm of social media, explaining that
the embodied feltness of moving through these digital spaces is a process
of relationality that can never be reduced to signification alone. Making
sense is then a kind of flow through digital space that proceeds in relation
to other flows, including the material, economic and political. This implies
that the meaning of digital media is produced through movement, rather
than discovered in situ, and meaning itself is thus as material and techno-
logical as it is symbolic or cultural. In an odd way it is the lack of clarity this
provides that is most useful: there is no possibility of isolating any of these
flows to assess its discrete impact, so that one could never infer meaning
from platform architectures or economic imperatives. But it still means we
can assert, pace Matt Fuller (2003), that the way we attribute meaning-
fulness to information depends at least in part on its formatting.

16
 Introduction

Langlois adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 64) notion of the abstract
machine in order to think through how meaning-making has come to
be colonized by software. As with Couldry and Hepp, this is less about
the appropriation by technology of signification than its role in organ-
izing the flow of signals. Kittler is with us once more, and it is difficult
to argue against an approach that seeks to examine how the conditions
of meaning production are shaped through assemblages of technology,
culture and, crucially, institutions.15 This book, though, is especially inter-
ested in examining digital subjectification, and from a phenomenological
perspective that means investigating the myriad ways we enact practices of
selfhood. There is no such thing as a digital self, but there are all kinds of
digital selfings. Such a perspective is ultimately at odds with the Deleuzean
framework Langlois develops, in which it makes sense to speak of the
production of an ideal capitalist self. It is one thing to assert that economic
and technological imperatives will colour the subjectifying practices we
find ready-to-hand as we traverse digital worlds – how could they not?
– but it is another to claim that this culminates in a complete, integral
capitalist subjectivity, as though one mode of being human has simply been
displaced by another. The same might be said of the ‘mining of the psyche’
(Langlois 2014: 88) allegedly typical of datafied platforms, in that there is
a distinction between critiquing the retrieval, ordering and exploiting of
subjective experiences and averring that this amounts to taking something
from a previously intact, innocent self.
The present volume is not interested in the ‘selling of brains’ (Lazzarato
2014, quoted in Langlois 2014: 90), not because it has no concern for
privacy, but because it rejects the notion of internal states innate to a stable
subject, over which that subject has or should have sovereignty. This is in line
with Judith Butler’s (1997) problematization of an interiority and exteriority
of subjectivity. Subjectification is not about the expression of an inner self
for an outer world; it consists entirely in enacting practices of selfhood in
the world, practices which are of that world and not ‘of ’ the self. Digital
Life takes questions of privacy, consent and autonomy seriously, but not at
all from a perspective that sees selves as being stolen, rented or substituted
by data. Consider one of the main objects of critique encountered in this
corner of the literature: the coercive reshaping of how individuals exter-
nalize self-image on social media. It is certainly right to scrutinize the ways
in which people manage their online identities, and we can do so in much
the same way that Goffman did in the mid-twentieth century, using the
dramaturgical model of performances, replete with costumes and scripts, but
without questioning the good faith of the players observed. To start from the
premise that to exist is to be open to otherness is not to suggest that we go

17
Digital Life

through the world discovering how different or alike ‘we’ are from others.
Instead it means adopting the subjectifying practices we find available to us
as readily usable resources – practices of externalization and internalization
– and revealing our relationality and responsibility to others. There are real
choices with real implications associated with how we respond to the world
so revealed, but it is not a question of fidelity to a true or authentic self;
integrity can only derive from an ethics inherent in a present into which we
are thrown and that is ontologically prior to any purported sense of origin.
Butler’s notion of performativity encapsulates adroitly the fact that in
institutionally and politically determinate contexts identity performances
are not playful but incited.16 The subsequent danger is that we internalize
these subjectifications and make them our own – that is how conformity
is enforced, and potentially reveals the danger of digital worlds furnishing
us with atrophied capacities for self-making that we come to believe are
us. The salient point, though, is that this is not a matter of your or my
identity being corrupted or usurped. Being-in-the-world proceeds through
endless iterations of externalization and internalization; this is how we
become who we are, but it is not a process that ends with the discovery of
what was there to begin with. Selfhood starts in the middle; we come to
feel ourselves as ourselves as we hone our improvisatory repertoires, but
those practices emerge from without, not within. What could amount to
a nihilistic account of the impossibility of authenticity or the vacuity of
selfhood, however, points to a different way forward. The point of all this
is that if the ways we have of being selves are of the world and not of us,
then they are collective, and we have a collective responsibility for what
those subjectivities reveal of the world and with what consequences. To
live increasingly digitally is not, then, to experience subjective loss but
to make that world familiar, enacting provisional selves that will come to
feel natural. This will have, and indeed already has, significant affordances
and implications, the contingency of which may be revealed as we develop
routines and paths anew. There is little to be said for holding firm to a
world and a way of being in it which we feel to be imperilled: making a
home out of a world not of our own making, and fashioning an identity
out of the selves we already find ourselves enacting, out there in the thick
of it, is what we do.

Being digitally
There is much to be said for the argument that digital media play an
increasingly formative role in organizing the interactions and rituals upon

18
 Introduction

which everyday meaningfulness is predicated. For Langlois, as for Couldry

and Hepp, this takes forms that are both symbolic – media content – and
non-symbolic, namely the architectures that facilitate the experience of
spaces such as social media platforms. The ongoing revival of Kittler’s
work, much of which was seen as idiosyncratic on publication, makes
sense in the context of a shared concern to attend to the ways in which
technologies are embedded within the generative neural networks of digital
media – from the syntax of coding languages and the filing parameters of
data storage systems, to undersea cables and energy grids, to the rules by
which algorithms are directed to learn and adapt autonomously to massive
and multifarious data flows. By this logic, the political economy of trans-
national media and technologies, the organizational cultures and labour
practices within digital companies, and the implications of structured and
structuring fields of symbolic capital within the social spaces inhabited by
users are all fair game. All of this is viable, however, without taking it as
read that we face a crisis of subjectivity. Such a belief is hardly new, with
the Heidegger of The Question Concerning Technology setting out the impli-
cations for Dasein of technological innovation outpacing the capacity for
decision-making, and ultimately the capacity for maintaining an ethical
bearing towards the world.
This book questions the implication that there is a trade-off between
the pace of technological change and the viability of autonomous subjec-
tification: the latter is not achieved by stepping back and making a sober
assessment of what is really at stake, now and in the future, but through
the navigation and habituation of those self-same, constantly evolving
environments within which meaningfulness is constituted. It was never
the case that we could pause those generative structures in order to take a
proper look at them and decide once and for all where to stand in relation
to them and how to move forward; the bedrock upon which subjectivity
is built is always more like shifting sand. The countervailing forces of flux
and homeostasis are not necessarily thrown out of kilter by the velocity of
the former, because equilibrium is not a goal or requisite of subjectivity, but
an orientation. The forward-facing temporality of subjectification is what
instantiates its ethical stakes,17 though its origin is the always ontologically
prior present – not some definable moment in time when we decided how
things would be, and indeed how we would be. Thus, while at odds with
the view that the adaptation of the self to digital media and its constant
demands for new data crowds out slower, reflective practices of selfhood,
this volume takes seriously the possibility that introspection – while no
doubt important to well-being – is not a necessary and sufficient condition
of becoming a self.

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Digital Life

It is important to be clear that advocating fleetness of foot over calm,

quiet cogitation is not at all the same thing as countenancing blithe
ignorance in the face of technological change. What is needed is a critical
agility, a deftness of navigation whose disclosure of the world grasps at-hand
the contingency of a world so revealed – that is, apprehends all the work
that goes into, and the implications of, finding the world and its manifold
objects meaningful as such.18 The business of understanding the contin-
gency of everyday life is both elusive and important; the notion here is
that it is possible for the mobility with which one moves through digital
worlds to be oriented simultaneously by appearances and by a pre-reflexive
registration of their flimsiness. This is similar to the ironic stance towards
the other developed by Chouliaraki, as it also is to de Beauvoir’s ethics of
ambiguity. And it is not so difficult as it sounds, once the requirement of
conscious reflection is taken off the table.
The subjective crisis presented by social media is commonly articulated
in terms of prescribed or provoked presentations of the self coming to be
mistaken for the self. Langlois thus makes the claim that the overriding
objective of these mass, structured solicitations of self-documentation can
only be one of appropriating and transforming the conditions of being.
It is, according to her, a matter of social media practices of self-disclosure
altering our perceptions not simply of who we are, but also how we can be
(Langlois 2014: 122). Stiegler (1998b: 80–1) makes a comparable point
when he writes of an inversion that has taken place such that contem-
porary digital media cultures relate the experience of life with such force
that they seem not only to anticipate but to determine life itself. That
word ‘force’ is doing as much work here as ‘pace’ was previously, as though
it is inarguable that there has been a definitive usurping of being by the
appearance of being – despite the fact that the distinction between the
experience of everyday life and life itself has never been something that can
be made a stable object of consciousness. Both metaphors are helpful as
shorthand, but they allow the argument to run away towards a presump-
tuous conclusion; as does, arguably, the idea of the colonization of a space
of subjectification by digital media. In all cases the realm of selfhood is
imagined as something discrete, finite and originary, something that could
previously be defended but is now overwhelmed by technology run amok.
But if there is no natural, stable territory of subjectification upon which a
critical ethics of being might be based, agility becomes a more important
resource to have to-hand than resilience.
We have all had the experience, whether at work, or speaking publicly,
or maybe performing on stage, of simultaneously understanding the impor-
tance of getting it right while also intuiting the preposterousness of the act

20
 Introduction

in which one is engaged. This kind of peripheral glimpse of the arbitrariness

of an established, expected performance as one goes about enacting it offers
more in the way of practical knowledge than pausing to reflect on whatever
it is that one is doing and why. The reason for this can be simply put, though
it will be teased out in more methodical detail in the chapters to come. It
derives from Levinas’s (1996) ‘ethics as first philosophy’, in which he argues
that the basis for all ethical relations between humans is pre-reflective,
rooted in a co-existence that is ontologically prior to making the other
the object of one’s consciousness and contemplation. There is something
destructive in the objectification of the other – partly explicable through
a norm such as respect, and the responsibility to register and preserve
their full human agency – but there is also a more basic principle at work
here: that no knowledge of an object in the world, insofar as knowledge is
generated by way of discourses that precede and exceed both subject and
object, can approach the facticity of the thing itself. This basic tenet of
phenomenological inquiry then opens up alternative ways of knowing an
object, and in particular the embodied knowledge of everyday encounters.
Now, this could be taken to suggest that whatever makes digital spaces
more easily navigable, more fluidly explorable, counts as meaningful
knowledge of the digital – which seems the opposite of a critical perspective.
But the point is to prise apart the critical and the perspectival; the former
is not contingent upon the latter. In short, critical, practical knowledge
of the digital, insofar as it propels wayfaring and thus meaning-making,
is that which discloses the world to-hand – as always-already meaningful,
navigable and useful – at the same time as it discloses that ready-to-
handness itself is predicated on learned, embedded and collective practices
of navigation and meaning-making. The performance of identity on social
media reveals both the importance of doing it well, and the arbitrariness of
its recognition as important – not in a reflective, media literate manner, but
at the level of making one’s way through the platform experience. It feels
like a meaningful thing to do, though it is thoroughly improvised; it feels
like there is a lot at stake, and yet it is entirely provisional.
For Levinas as for de Beauvoir, how we come to co-exist in a world
populated by unknown and barely known others is the basis of the self as an
ethical project. This is counter-intuitive from a perspective that elides ethics
and attention. Care, though, is distinct, a more fundamental disclosure of
stakes. If we accept that there is no experiential access to being outside of
ways of being, then the disclosure of the world as such through ways of
being – as well as these ways being disclosed as the care structures they
are – makes known simultaneously the seriousness and precarity attached
to being in a world with others. Watching a news report about a far-flung

21
Digital Life

calamity can feel like a perverse thing to do over dinner, and yet it can be
registered as both absurd and as grounding the ethics of co-existence. And
the same can be said of our relations with digital technology: ultimately
what matters is not how well we understand how it works and with what
political and material consequences, but the practical, at-hand, embodied
knowledge that this or that technology is both the way the world is disclosed
to us, and at the same time a way. It remains important to work towards
better public understanding of the way people’s consent is secured, their
data monetized, their identities profiled, and with what economic, political
and environmental implications. It is also important for us to understand
what is revealed in the way people move balletically through digital spaces,
seemingly accepting their proclivities and impositions as just the way things
are now – this is how you get to know and to be. It turns out that their
existential investment in such spaces is intuitive and yet restless enough to
be open to other ways of being. There is a fundamental lack of absolute final
commitment and resolution that both discloses the world as a world on the
go, and makes known that it could, and will, be different in time.
All of which brings us back to Couldry and Hepp and the laudable
attention they give to the consequences for individuals’ everyday experience
of the ‘world-making strategies of governing institutions’ (2017: 163).
They take issue with Bruno Latour on the question of digital traces, and in
particular Latour’s insistence that these give us direct access to experience.
Instead, they counter that such directness cannot be assumed since
those traces are dependent on the technical architectures and processes
of institutions. Looked at another way, both perspectives are correct. It
is undoubtedly right that we pay heed to the commercial and program-
matic structuring of digital meaning-making practices, but if we take
Heidegger’s account of thrownness seriously there is nothing less real about
the meaningful experiences that emerge from such practices. Further, this
generative inauthenticity does not commit Heidegger – or, I would argue,
any of us – to accepting the status quo unquestioningly, nor does it absolve
us of the responsibility for improving the (digital) world as we find it.
Lagerkvist (2018) has argued that the rise of distinctly troubling
phenomena including trolling, automation, panopticism and big data
warrant a new digital media ethics. The model she proposes does not
derive from either the scale or unknowability of datafication, instead taking
human vulnerability as its starting point. She stresses both the depth of
uncertainty that is the condition of existence, and the basic drive to seek
meaning and security as the fundamental motivation of everyday life, such
that the ‘existential terrain’ of contemporary digital culture is co-founded
by a combination of the profound and banal, the extraordinary and the

22
 Introduction

mundane. Butler makes a similar claim in Precarious Life (2006), and it

is implicit in Levinas too that the bottomless frailty of human existence
provides the quickening spark of ethics. There is clearly a lot to be said
for this position, and if we take Lagerkvist’s point that we increasingly
turn to digital media to shore up this existential flimsiness then it makes
sense that a digital ethics would seek to protect that quest for security from
destabilizing exogenous forces. But I would suggest that there is rather less
at stake in most digital encounters, and that it is this less meaningful realm
of experience from which ethics should proceed. Lagerkvist’s point is that
the profundity of existential contingency combines with rare moments of
revelatory clarity in everyday life to provide unique insights into how digital
media interactions, infrastructures, institutions and industries should be
scrutinized, but only if we accept that ontological security should be the
ultimate goal of governance. An alternative guiding principle such as
solidarity suggests a different way forward.
This book takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s insight that the
inauthentic world into which we are perpetually thrown, full of idle
chat about everything and nothing as it is, is every bit as ontologically
generative as any ‘deep’ apprehension of the human condition. Rather than
the peripheral whispering of the void motivating the quest for meaning in
everyday life, then, that locomotion is propelled by little more than affect-
seeking and shallow curiosity. The performance of identity is similarly
driven by the transient buzz of recognition, rather than realizing some
final moment of subjectification. It can and has been argued that all of this
meaningless digital stuff is a distraction from the human project of seeking
enlightenment in relation to the questions of who we are and why we are
here. The phenomenological endeavour, however, began by asking whether
existential ethics would be best served by bracketing out such metaphysical
concerns altogether. Thus, any serious consideration of what a digital
ethics might look like should start from the ubiquitous distractions of our
cluttered lives rather than seeking to take an abstracted position outside of
this endless noise and light. Starting in media res, it soon becomes apparent
that the low-level anxieties of digital life – not intimations of the abyss but
generalized feelings of listlessness and dissatisfaction – are not problems to
be tackled but that which keeps us in motion. And it is above all motion
that comes to establish everything that a digital ethics should promote and
protect – commonality, difference, complicity and responsibility in the here
and now.
None of this is intended to suggest that we should not take very seriously
issues such as discrimination, privacy, consent and accountability in the
digital realm. Rather, the point is that we should do so not in order to

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Digital Life

protect the sanctity of the existential quest for meaning and ontological
security, but in the name of those mundane everyday practices that look
inconsequential but over time reveal what is at stake in our co-existence
with others.19 The world disclosed by those practices is the starting point
for a new ethics, and their temporal affordances and implications should
be assessed on that basis, not in pursuit of a higher truth. Lagerkvist is
surely right to want to safeguard Dasein, which she characterizes as ‘the
subjectivity, sociality, agency, ethical responsibility, spirituality, suffering
and search for meaning springing from human thrownness’ (2017: 5).
Heidegger insists, however, that there is no prelapsarian home for Dasein
that it is our responsibility to reclaim. Dasein is perpetually thrown, it is
unremittingly of the world we go about discovering. There is a practical
aspect to this nicety, in that the quest for existential security might be
jettisoned in our ethical thinking in favour of something more humdrum
– homeostasis, the feeling that things are more or less the same day to day.
This is, to be sure, distinct from a defence of conformity, but it is what
defines thrownness – making the world more familiar and predictable,
not trying to reach some goal of clarity but finding a security that consists
in making our way about, open-endedly. What we do through and with
digital media might not carry the burden of delivering a deep sense of
existential security beyond the phenomenological realm, but how such
media disclose the world we co-habit – as we know it, not in spite of our
limited apprehension of it – is the beating heart of it.

Definitions and chapter overview

As an adjective, ‘digital’ refers to that which is associated with computations

built on discrete binary operations (Floridi 2017). It is not counterposed to
the physical, nor is it framed by an opposition between the virtual and the
real. What makes an image digital is that it is the manifestation of chains
of discrete yes-or-no indications rather than continuous chemical processes
of photographic production; those computations are as much of the world
as the negative bathed in developing fluid, even if the digital image is, say,
an abstract animation rather than a representation of something ‘real’.
Digital practices encompass not only participating in digital cultures by
clocking, reacting, ignoring and creating, but less obviously social acts such
as setting an alarm, noticing a push notification, asking Alexa to play a
podcast, emptying email trash, calling an Uber and buying clothes from
ASOS. The movements of fingers and the voice commands that accomplish
these acts are indissociable from them, not earthbound analogues to things

24
 Introduction

that happen in the digital world, since the world of bits and the world of
atoms are the same world. A digital process might be about encoding and
rendering an image visible to a user with the relevant kit, but one of the
defining features of the digital age is the pervasiveness of processes that are
unseen by human subjects, or at least by most of them; for example, high-
frequency trading, algorithmic consumer profiling, and autonomous facial
recognition. These all involve more human intentionality and labour than
is sometimes assumed, and it bears emphasizing that what makes them
digital is not that they have a tendency to be absent from the consciousness
and agency of the majority of us – rather, again, it comes down to 1s and
0s. Digital mechanisms include apps and the devices used to access them,
but also the corporate governance and legal frameworks of big tech. Digital
environments include online extremist forums and Netflix, but also urban
spaces covered by Wi-Fi, 5G and CCTV, mapped by Google and used as
backgrounds for Instagram posts. Digital infrastructures include unnoticed
data centres, electricity grids and undersea cables, but also everything that
makes digitally afforded experiences possible and meaningful in everyday
life, from economic and political systems to educational establishments,
Foxconn factories and yttrium mines.
Digital life is the condition of existing amongst and through these
manifestations, processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures.
That gerund is important: there is no pre-digital existence that the digital
has happened to. At the personal level, many of us remember what it was
like to live in the pre-internet era, but these memories are not of the past;
they are phenomena that we make and remake in the present, through
practices that are of a world that is permeated, constrained and enabled by
the digital. At the level of the social and political, history of course matters,
but is made meaningful by all the things we find ourselves doing in the
relentless present that is our constant origin. This means that we should not
think of selves who go out into the world and use digital technologies; they
are always already part of the world in which we are forever emerging, in
the countless acts of subjectivation through which we make that world and
ourselves familiar and navigable. The focus of this book then is not on how
people feel about digital technologies, or even how they affect them, strictly
speaking – there is no ‘them’ prior to the affecting, after all, only ways of
being afforded by the contingencies of now, and it was ever thus. There is
nothing necessarily amnesiac or myopic about digital life: how we got here,
what our possible futures are, and what we can do about them are of vital
importance. The point is that we come at understanding and answering
these questions by way of the at-hand resources – at once enabling and
debased, revealing and complicit – of everyday experience.

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Digital Life

Chapter 2 addresses the care deficit said to be endemic to the digital

age, specifically the argument that our digital lives are so full of affective
distractions that our capacities for compassion and solidarity are dimin-
ished. Through an exploration of Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and
the concept of mere-feltness, it is suggested that the distracted, ambiv-
alent experience of digital multitudes may over time amount to a more
substantive, reliable form of subjective recognition than focused attention
on individuals. It thus lays the groundwork for thinking differently, but
nonetheless ethically and politically, about social relations in a digital
age in which connections have simultaneously proliferated and become
ephemeral. Chapter 3 develops this into a positive agenda, drawing on
Tim Ingold’s notion of life lived alongly, as well as Heidegger’s concepts
of thrownness and findingness, to suggest a model of ethics in motion. It
fleshes out how those proliferated and ephemeral encounters are experi-
enced in everyday digital life: on the move, amid the rhythms and routines
of ordinary existence. This is not a degraded mode of being in the world
but precisely how that world is disclosed, along with its immanent stakes; as
such, what constitutes an ethical relationality is nimble, dextrous navigation
rather than pausing and thinking hard about the other.
Chapter 4 moves on to the territory of subjectification, and what it
means to be an ethical self in everyday digital life. It has been observed
already that the digital is not something that happens to the self, but is
integral to how we continually become selves. This then raises the question
of moral obligation in relation to modes of selfing that change over time,
something that appears to have been proceeding at pace in recent history.
How does one strike an ethical bearing towards one’s self if it is constituted
on the move in a world in flux? The chapter answers this by tackling the
thorny issue of data privacy and surveillance culture, and especially the
apathy with which many citizens regard these issues. It builds on an exegesis
of the Lord and Bondsman section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to
reframe autonomy as a collective, situated and practical value more appro-
priate to our digital world.
Chapter 5 expands on the theme of the stakes implicit in the routines
and rhythms of everyday life by delving further into Heidegger’s work. In
particular, this chapter addresses those sections of Being and Time in which
he discusses the existential and ontological stakes of things not usually
associated with the political: moods, idle talk and curiosity. In so doing it
advances the claim that we should take seriously, and treat as grounding
facticity, the way we generally experience digital life, i.e. inauthenti-
cally. This move leaves open the possibility of excavating and critiquing
the contingencies of contemporary everyday life in ways that exceed the

26
 Introduction

assertion that we do not see things as they really are, especially amid all the
distractions of our digitally saturated existence. Heidegger shows that it is
a condition of thrownness that there never was the possibility of actually
grasping the things, people and phenomena we encounter in themselves;
inauthenticity is our ever-present origin. The salient point is that ordinary
movement from one encounter to the next, rather than abstraction, is how
we come at understanding; the affects and discourses that propel us in
everyday digital life seem intuitively to be just so much noise, but they are
every bit as ontologically constitutive as focused attention and clear-headed
cognition.
Chapter 6 takes up these insights and demonstrates how they can be put
to work to reframe public deliberation in the digital age. Specifically, it seeks
to shed new light on an aspect of digital life that is said to be undermining
the public sphere: identity politics. Beginning with a consideration of
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the relationship between perception and values
in everyday life, it moves on to marshal Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
to work towards a reconceptualization of values as dispositional practices.
Rethinking values as things done in everyday digital life rather than internal
qualities to be defended from exogenous forces points towards a different
future for deliberative democracy far from the polarized filter bubbles often
seen as an inevitable consequence of digitization.
Chapter 7 then asks a critical question that pushes beyond the realm of
social relations: what does it mean to live ethically in a world suffused with
digital processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures? While
all of these things structure and generate our conditions of sociality, the
lived experience of them exceeds their intent and design. The withdrawal
of infrastructure from conscious experience is not necessarily sinister, and
it remains possible to live creatively and critically amongst forces like the
protocols of social media platforms.
Finally, Chapter 8 rounds out the discussion by reflecting on Michel de
Certeau’s theorization of the possibility of creativity and resistance in the
face of an imposed social order. The world-disclosing, agentic potential of
making do with the digital resources we find ready at hand in everyday
life cannot be underestimated, offering as they do endless opportunities to
experiment, reveal stakes, strike stances accordingly, and then to persevere
or try something else. It is assuredly the case that those resources, practices
and postures are not of us but of the world; nonetheless the temporally
indeterminate scope to enact them effects real change in that world.
Repertoires of improvisation are key to living ethically in the digital age,
as selves that are provisional not programmed, enacting politics that are
likewise provisional not programmatic.

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 2 The Care Deficit

Having challenged the notion of there being a deep truth to digitality, as

well as the need to pause, pull back and reflect in order to attain it, this
chapter explores ways of existing ethically in relation to others encountered
digitally in proliferating and ephemeral ways. It is not difficult to imagine
what solidarity in the digital age should mean: standing with others
encountered on smartphone screens based upon the principle of mutual
co-existence. It also implies the potential for action, a willingness to incur
personal costs in defending the rights of the other, an avowal that your
suffering is my suffering, your battles are my battles. However, there is a
dilemma at the heart of the phenomenological account of our relationality
to others. In short, all intentive consciousness seeks to make the other
identical to itself. Knowledge is predicated on the obliteration of difference,
and in this consists the violence of making an other your phenomenological
object. In the words of Levinas: ‘[o]ne does not see that the success of
knowledge would in fact destroy the nearness, the proximity, of the other’
(1996: 103–4). This applies to all focused attention, the matter-of-factly
actuarial as much as the voraciously curious, but especially to the senti-
mental. In making an other the object of one’s pity, one does not so much
take on their misery as appropriate it for self-interested ends such as the
upkeep of one’s self-image as a good humanitarian. Furthermore, such pity
is indolent, responding to the multifarious horrors of the world in much
the same way, reacting in prescribed ways that require little conscious effort,
instead of appraising each injustice on its own merits and deciding how to
respond accordingly.
In the existentialist tradition, this is the hell of other people, finding
ourselves thrown into a bewildering world full of innumerable others we
can never hope to know fully, yet obligated to do so and aware that there
are only bad choices to make in making others sensible to us. This can
sound like a defence of deliberate, happy ignorance, but for phenomenolo-
gists it cannot be: it is a fundamental condition of thrownness (Heidegger
1962 [1927]) that we are predisposed to try to make sense of the world.
Heidegger goes further in positing that we have a moral duty to familiarize
the world in the best possible manner, by which he means taking respon-
sibility for the complicit self that appears to us as always-already existing

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 The Care Deficit

rather than something we are born with or carefully build from the ground
up. I may find the world baffling and my own position in it arbitrary, but I
can do my best to redress the former and own the latter – this is the moral
grounding of solidarity. The fact that intentive consciousness entails annihi-
lation is no excuse, but rather obliges us to scrutinize how we know, what
that discloses of the world and with what implications. This chapter inves-
tigates the opportunities for solidarity made possible by affective digital
experience, a ‘phatic’ (Frosh 2011) relation of mere-feltness to others. The
main point is not that it is better to feel than to know, but that the intuitive,
distracted and ambivalent digital experience of others over time – the
impersonal, non-intimate and inattentive aspects of mediation, as Frosh
puts it (2011: 384) – may be more conducive to subjective recognition than
intense moments of focus, concentration and reflection.
In contemporary political theory20 the notion of affective solidarity has
been treated as something of a contradiction in terms. Any relation to the
other rooted in sympathy, sentiment or pity cannot form the basis of a full,
implicitly Hegelian, recognition of the other – and in practice it is often
actively dehumanizing. Mainstream discourse voices similar concerns when
social media users start to express their fulsome support for protestors in
a distant land, or emote freely about flood victims or asylum seekers. It is
a debate21 that extends at least as far back as Adam Smith’s claim in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments (2009 [1759]) that the only viable route to
the substantive recognition of mutual humanity is imagination, of which
reason is a necessary but insufficient ingredient. Rousseau cautioned that
any effort to endow representations of suffering with emotive potency runs
the risk of undermining what it intends to accomplish, while d’Alembert
responded that blandly to enumerate the facts of human depravity and
woe is self-evidently obscene. More recently, Luc Boltanski (1999) has
disputed the claim that pity is a political dead end, while Charles Taylor’s
(Taylor and Gutmann 1992) conception of the social imaginary embraces
Smith’s position to ask what sort of spaces might afford the possibility of
individuals imagining their way into the lived existence of others.
Boltanski and Taylor diverge on several points, but both agree that
didacticism does not work: it is ineffectual to instruct people to care
more or care differently about those countless others whose suffering
flashes past them on the news or a social media feed. This runs counter
to those media malaise theorists22 who deplore the indifference shown
by audiences when confronted with humankind at its worst – a condem-
nation that has echoes in Proust (1970 [1919]: 200). But whether the
answer to diagnosed cultures of apathy and inappropriate emotivism is
rubbing people’s noses in horror or curating spaces in which audiences can

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Digital Life

ruminate on their own path towards a truly ethical relationship with the
other, there is a shared supposition that rupture is essential – a puncturing
of habitual modes of existence too familiar and comfortable to afford real
recognition of the actuality of what is happening in the world and of one’s
ethical relation towards it. Against that received notion, then, and in line
with Frosh’s critique of the ‘attentive fallacy’ (2011: 385) underlying it,
this chapter suggests that solidarity with distant others is clinched not in
critical moments that interrupt the affective flow characterizing so much of
everyday digital life, but precisely through that quotidian experience, with
all its attendant sensations, distractions and feelings.

Levinas on duration as non-intentional consciousness

In ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’ (Hand 1989), Levinas investigates the

tension between the simple fact that in everyday life it is impossible to
attend to everything – from physiological stimuli to complex structural
realities – and the instinctive responsibility most of us feel to know one’s
place in the world to the best of one’s ability. Thrownness is an experience
of profound disorientation, and in response it is natural to grasp at making
things familiar by whatever means are to hand: in Heidegger’s words, we
exist findingly (befindlich) (1962 [1927]). This appears self-interested,
especially as the inclination towards orientation tends over time to solidify
into comforting rituals of continuity, but looked at from first principles
it need not be. For Levinas, the possibility of taking responsibility for the
self depends on its decentring in philosophical inquiry (Pinchevski 2012:
349). The notion of the self as something into which we are thrown,
rather than something that comes from within us, derives from the claim
that existing is ontologically prior to the existent. All this means is that
existence does not start from some primal origin and then go about
existing in different ways in the world: we begin with ways of existing in
the world with others and only come to understand the idea of existence
as a self over time. Taking ownership of our relationality, those modes of
existing that have no prior existent, is the key to becoming an autonomous
subject.
In everyday experiences of tapping and swiping on screens, though, it
can be deeply frustrating to wind up repeatedly engaging in mandatory
acts of selfhood, constantly being invited to pay attention to and thus
take a position in relation to innumerable others, acts which we are then
judged on, or judge ourselves upon. Owning these processes of selfhood is
something that all of us will fail to do most of the time. There is, however,

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 The Care Deficit

an alternative which does not resort to a rationalization of indifference.

This is Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1992 [1945]) non-positional consciousness of
the self that sits alongside consciousness of something else – think of the
latent or residual sense of self you have when browsing social media or
watching television, where the things you might be engrossed in do not
entirely displace your embodied sense of who you are. While normally
consciousness is acquisitive, even violent in its demand for objects to be
identical with it, non-positional consciousness is more tangential, and as
such could provide fertile ground for a less complicit ethics.
This book began by referencing Levinas’s claim that ethics is not arrived
at through knowledge. Ethics comes first, at the point where non-inten-
tional consciousness is thrown into a world before it is knowable. It is here
that Levinas and Sartre before him anticipate the inevitable riposte that to
live ethically is to live with as little awareness of others as possible. Sartre’s
response is emblematic of the existentialist tradition: there is no choice not
to choose; all choices are bad yet you are compelled to make them endlessly
until death; knowledge is a curse yet ignorance is a fantasy; understanding
others entails you acting violently towards them by insisting that they
become objects of your consciousness, your empathy. This position has
been criticized variously as romantic or nihilistic, and for our purposes it
is also distinctly self-pitying – which is not to reduce existentialism to the
indulgent or artless as is sometimes done in academic discourse, but to
highlight Sartre’s focus on the apparently coherent, reflective self under-
going such anguish.
Levinas, by contrast, reframes Sartre’s claim about the impossibility
of knowing and communicating with others as a promising point of
departure: by remaining ungraspable, the other ‘demands acceptance and
recognition prior to any comprehension or explanation’ (Pinchevski 2012:
345). The logical priority of thrownness into self-ing before any notion
of self-hood means that the ethical dilemma of one’s culpability does not
emerge through intentional knowing; culpability is already there in one’s
pre-reflexive relationality with others. Understanding that non-intentive
relationality may, the argument goes, allow for a reconception of other
forms of consciousness that are potentially compatible with relations of
solidarity, including the merely felt, the inappropriate or the indifferent.
In particular, there is an intimacy to the non-intentional which derives
from what Levinas describes as ‘pure duration’ – existing with another over
time in such a way that each may act on the other without appearing as an
object to it.23 This pure duration is free of the will, an implicit time which
‘no act of remembrance, reconstructing the past, could possibly reverse’.
Implicit time signifies ‘other than as knowledge taken on the run, otherwise

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Digital Life

than a way of presenting presence … being that dare not speak its name,
being that dare not be; the agency of the instant without the insistence of
the ego, which is already a lapse in time which is “over before it’s begun”!’
(Hand 1989: 81). As a form of relationality, duration is embryonic, but it
is not innocent – ‘not guilty, but accused’, in Levinas’s words, ‘it dreads the
insistence in the return to the self that is a necessary part of identification’
(Hand 1989: 81).
This, then, is different from the guilt narratives threaded through
critiques of compassion fatigue (Moeller 1999) or mediated cultures of
distraction (Virilio 2000), critiques to which many of us subject ourselves,
however futile that may be. It is accusatory, but not in the same manner as
Sontag’s (2003) account of photography, which forces the viewer ‘finally’
to realize the death and destruction for which she is responsible. It is an
accusation that emanates from our pre-reflexive sense of intimacy over time
– from being-in-the-world, not from scrutiny, demand or reflection. This
can sound like an appeal to a purer, more essential mode of existence, but
in fact it amounts to the opposite as it entirely jettisons any metaphysical
conception of being-with. This is where the practical relevance of Levinas’s
ethics lies. There is no ‘deep’ meaning or revelation of what it truly means
to exist in the world among others, nor any call to reclaim an originary
solidarity long since debased by the degradations of digital life. This is
co-existing as logically prior, simply what we wind up doing all the time
out of necessity; more than Heidegger’s being-with-the-other, it is being-
for-the-other (Pinchevski 2012: 349). And in exploring the digital and
its denizens, this frees us from the obligation endlessly to magic up new
kinds of representation or digital encounter that will pierce the fog of our
overstimulated, consumerist lives to attain a proper subjective recognition
of the other.
The next section lays the groundwork for this shift in perspective by
setting out how affective postures towards the world represent far more
than stunted, merely-felt relations to others doomed to fall far short of
solidarity. First, though, three points bear emphasizing. First, the kind of
intimate non-intentional consciousness Levinas has in mind is more or
less the antithesis of Buber’s I-Thou dyad (1942), predicated as it is on an
unstinting, unflinching gaze into the eyes and ideally the soul of the other
(see also Pinchevski 2012). Second, it is not a rarefied state we should seek
to attain: the constant experience of thrownness into always-already existing
worlds and selves is such that this passive, pre-reflexive relation to others
is the default mode of existence – not a deviation from ‘true’, objectifying
experience. And third, it is categorically not sympathy, as it is a relation not
to an imaginary self-equivalent but to an other, a mystery.

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Affective intentionality and disclosive postures

Non-intentive consciousness, then, is part and parcel of the fabric of

being, but it cannot endure in the face of our unremitting, if ultimately
doomed, attempts to make the world familiar. This section teases out
the possibilities of a consciousness that is positional or more accurately
intentional, but in a way that is felt rather than reasoned – an affective
intentionality, as Jan Slaby (2016) denotes it. The cogency of affective
intentionality is predicated on the claim that a principle like solidarity is
not something internal to selfhood which we then wield upon the world,
weighing up the costs and implications to ourselves but making commit-
ments regardless because of who we understand ourselves to be. We come
into ourselves enacting all manner of practices of existing before ‘we’ exist,
so any principle of relationality is tied up in encounters that we navigate
through improvisation and heuristics, a subset of which is how we feel
about different kinds of object. The question that immediately arises
is how, exactly, what someone feels is disclosive of what goes on in the
world (Slaby 2016: 1). Conceptually, feeling is a blind alley if it is treated
deontologically – and this is true empirically, too, in much of the research
following the ‘affective turn’ that simply catalogues feelings, as if probing
any further would risk switching into that acquisitive consciousness that
is thought to wreak such havoc. Affect is not junk data or evidence of
an insufficient experience of others, but nor is it sacrosanct; while it is
experienced as something that is distinctly one’s own, especially when it
comes to physiological responses, affect is also collective and contextual.
Just as there are ways of being-in-the-world which precede and outlast
an individual’s life, there are ways of feeling that are simultaneously
pre-reflexive, ingenuous and materially contingent – in Lauren Berlant’s
words, affect is ‘sensual matter that is elsewhere to sovereign consciousness
but that has historical significance in the domains of subjectivity’ (2011:
53). Slaby locates his conception of affect within a Deleuzean framework,
and as proximal to Spinoza’s account of the pre-individual sphere of
becoming. Thus, affect is a relational unfolding within sociohistorical
settings that are themselves unfolding and enfolding; rather than being
a structural determination, it is an expression of relational constellations
endemic to a particular place and time. More tangibly, Slaby inquires:
‘How do subjects of experience come about – and how do they get
molded and transformed, framed and policed – within the meshworks
of the socio-cultural arrangements that make up our contemporary
lifeworlds?’ (2016: 2).

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Digital Life

Answering this question necessitates a balancing of individual experience

and contextual affective arrangements. To that end, Slaby turns to Katherine
Withy’s (2015) model of a disclosive posture – or as Bourdieu (and Merleau-
Ponty before him) would have depicted it, an embodied orientation to the
world that naturalizes the relation between how one feels about it and what
is disclosed about it. As with Levinas, a disclosive posture is a rolling process
of becoming composed of insistently present formations of self, rather than
a means to maintain or protect an already existent self. Withy begins with a
critique of Heidegger’s distinction between cognitive and affective theories
of emotion, reasoning that each is blind to what surely should be the point
of phenomenological investigation – pathé, understood as ‘ways in which
we are out in the world, immersed and involved in our situation’ (Withy
2015: 23). As disclosive postures, pathé are both the specific ways in which
we are situated in the world, hence disclosive, and generic ways of being
situated in the world, hence postures.
This is instructive in that it displaces Heidegger’s terminology of standing
in a situation, with its emphasis on experiencing and representing, and then,
by extension through chains of ethical inference, proceeding to assessment,
judgement and responsibility. Posture indicates the way that finding
ourselves situated means finding ourselves already out there in the middle
of things, immersed in the world and not apart from it. The work that affect
does here is not to reduce situatedness to how we feel about a situation, but
nor is it a simple retort to the valorization of focused cognition; instead
it attempts to capture the relational orientation of embodied being with
regard to its environment. Slaby notes that this has much in common
with findingness, but whereas for Heidegger the latter refers to ways of
aligning oneself with one’s surroundings, with disclosive postures it is
more about finding oneself in alignment – or indeed, misalignment – with
constellations of people and things. Sociological research on connection
and disconnection (Couldry, Livingstone and Markham 2007) has shown
that an individual at a given point in time is never simply aligned with or
alienated from the world around them, and the same applies here; we are in
resonance with our surroundings in some ways, and in dissonance in other
ways. That work also highlighted the empirical risk of presuming what the
experience of connection and disconnection is like, and likewise here it is
sensible, when thinking about designing and carrying out research, to be
open to the possibility that alignment might not feel like contentment, and
that misalignment might contain its own pleasures.
Disclosure emphasizes that finding ourselves situated is not reducible to
how we find ourselves feeling, and thrownness incites a drive not just to
know ourselves but also to grasp as best we can the reality of our situation.

34
 The Care Deficit

Awareness and understanding of the world, and not just our knowledge
of it and beliefs about it, thus come into play – if only as possibilities that
may or may not be realized. As Slaby expresses it, ‘Disclosure names the
entire dimension of a person’s potential openness to the world, including
the openness to what is in fact occluded, and also the openness to what is
“there” but nevertheless beyond one’s grasp’ (2016: 5, emphasis in original).
Heidegger views disclosure as a moral responsibility, not just something
we do but something which we are obligated to learn how to do well. By
contrast, Levinas recasts the inherent incompleteness of disclosure, and
with it the failure of communication, as a prerequisite of moral co-existence
rather than an obstacle to it. Whether there is any point in philosophers,
political scientists and digital scholars of any persuasion condemning
individuals for failing to disclose the world ‘well’ is very much an open
question. Whatever someone feels about their responsibilities as citizens or
digital inhabitants, the condition of selfhood as an unending work means
that they have an active, always unresolved stake in how their self appears
to others and thus to themselves that is likely to sustain an orientation
towards understanding their situation at least some of the time. But failure,
distraction and ambivalence are the default settings of thrownness. We get
disclosure wrong most of the time, but that is not evidence of the absence
of an habituated orientation towards it. As Pinchevski explains, ‘[i]t is
precisely in moments of uncertainty and in instances of misunderstanding,
lack, or even refusal that I find myself facing the Other’ (2012: 356).
To follow this line of reasoning through to its logical conclusion, the
impossibility of awareness and understanding could even be said to militate
against indifference and apathy, since in the navigation of everyday life we
have no choice but to recognize and find ways to live with the fact that the
world always exceeds our awareness. Defiant ignorance is one alternative for
existing in a demanding and elusive world, but one with consequences for
subjectification, which is not thereby halted as a project. There is no choice
but to subjectify, after all. This is not about the consequences of someone
deciding, for example, not to try to understand what is going on in Yemen,
and deciding instead to live as though their thoughts and feelings have no
causal correlate in the world. That is an impossibility over time, as Levinas’s
account of duration illuminates, and as such one does not have to go so far
as Heidegger in insisting that full awareness and understanding are moral
imperatives. Awareness and understanding may be patchy and inconsistent
in practice, but they are what make life liveable at the sharp end of ordinary
existence, and it is through them that others become liveable-with (Frosh
2011: 389). To bring this back to affect, we are always aligned to an ‘always
more’ that affects us in ways we do not and cannot fully apprehend; this

35
Digital Life

is what Levinas terms the interruption of the Said by the Saying, and it
secures the status of affect as an epistemological object fit for digital and
political theory. Affective experience means being situated in an ongoing
situation that has stakes, in the midst of affective arrangements that are
available to us yet elude our cognitive apprehension and practical grasp.
Thus, Frosh argues, ‘[i]f most individual strangers on television are viewed
indifferently, in routine, unremarkable, non-hostile encounters, then their
constant and cumulative presence within the home is a significant historical
accomplishment’ (2011: 393).
There is, to be sure, a tension between the concepts of non-intentional
consciousness and disclosive posture. While each functions at the level of
the pre-reflective, the former appears seminally and energetically open, the
latter compromised and more geared towards coping. In moral terms it is
worth underscoring, though, that both are essentially defined by culpa-
bility, on the premise that there is no consciousness that originally exists
and then goes about seeking others to recognize without objectifying.
Non-intentional consciousness, like the disclosive posture, always finds
itself existing. For both, too, there is no possibility of reasoning one’s way
through to best practice, and that in turn suggests that it is unfeasible to
think our way from an ideal conception of solidarity to the kind of digital
spaces and practices we would like to see in the world. Instead we have to
begin with already-existing ways of being-in-the-world – ways that can be
compared, judged and redirected, but not created ex nihilo. That means
taking seriously the question of how to respond to the fact that, in large
part, people’s responses, maybe even their default response, to all the varie-
gated suffering and injustice they encounter in digital media alongside the
uplifting and entertaining, appear superficial, perfunctory and imitative. It
is a question that has to be embraced if the phenomenology of affect is to
move beyond the merely descriptive to engage critically with different ways
of being-in-the-world.
As an opening gambit it pays to resist the urge to judge digital inhabitants
for failing to rise to the challenge of thrownness. It has been established
that affect precedes individuation, as an inventory of responses that exceed
us but which we internalize as how we personally feel – it is a shared
resource that necessitates affective cultures. A similar claim can be made
about Levinas’s pre-reflective consciousness: whatever it is it does not lack
form, but is always-already moulded by familiar arrangements of stimuli
and the comportments associated with them. Without such arrangements
to hand, responding at the local level is impossible. In conceptual terms,
affective arrangements are the logical consequence of existence defined as
nothing more and nothing less than ways of being-in-the-world. If people’s

36
 The Care Deficit

affective responses seem like second-hand reflexes – ‘The body weeps when
it mimics grief ’, in Bourdieu’s mordant phrase (1990: 73) – then so be it;
it is plausible that a well-calibrated disclosive posture that makes knowing
how to respond to tragedy and injustice instinctive, without requiring a
second thought, is the precondition of the autonomous yet situated and
relationally constituted subject.
Conceiving of all human behaviour as essentially performative or
mimetic has a long and storied academic history, after all. For Goffman
our microscopic responses, certainly including the affective, in all manner
of situations are about scripts mastered to indicate social competence
and collectively to achieve the ‘civil inattention’ that makes social spaces
liveable. Goffman did not develop his model in order to be dismissive – his
overarching principle was that there is no authentic self to be revealed once
all the learned performance has been stripped away; we are, in effect, all
surface, all script. For Foucault (1990 [1976]) as for Butler (1997), those
self-same responses are more a matter of incitement than mastery, the
myriad intimate ways we submit to disciplinary regimes of power. But for
both, again, there is no ontologically prior self doing the submitting, only
the self constituted in acts of submission. Performance models, perhaps
less figuratively described as contextual response templates, are however
perfectly compatible with notions of authenticity, and evidence of a
performance ritual is not in itself an indication of inauthenticity. Similarly,
authenticity is not predicated on the existence of a consistent self, since it
is in discontinuously coherent, grasping acts of selfhood which fail to grasp
the other that we are most likely to find the kinds of authentic bearing
towards the world that make solidarity as a lived principle possible.
It does not follow that we should content ourselves with whatever digital
scraps of affect we can lay our hands on as proof that there is still residual
empathy in the contemporary world (Frosh 2011: 387), rather than the
trite sentiment or virtue-signalling that much of it seems to represent, or
that we should give up on trying to imagine and create spaces in which
new kinds of relations between distant others can crystallize. The aim is to
posit that affect, the merely-felt, may present the most fertile ground for
thinking differently and progressively about solidarity. Previous research
(Markham 2017) focused on professional cultures of media production,
and in particular on workers who might be thought of as in the business
of promoting solidarity, but the point still stands: whatever political
principles they claimed to be aligned to were instantiated not in spite of
the affective distractions of everyday life, but through them. This is in part
about the tension between a sense of self already signed up to a particular
commitment and the slog of repetitive labour performed in compromised

37
Digital Life

and compromising ways; about that ambivalent mode of being-in-the-

world that allows for something like non-intentional duration with the
other. The apparently mundane experience of busyness is not just about all
the competing demands on your attention and time that stop you doing
the important stuff: that sense of incessant activity is what affords a partially
non-directional relation to work’s other that is conceivably more substantive
and more sustainable over time. Similarly, happy camaraderie at work is
not a by-product of coming together with like-minded, principled others;
instead, the affective pleasures of repetitive everyday socializing allow for
the instantiation of a sensed, not clinched, ethical relation to the suffering
others who form the stuff of the professional’s work. And the rhythmic
ego-rush of self-satisfaction that comes with audiences liking and sharing
one’s work on social media – as well as the visceral thrill of duelling with
the haters – does not get in the way of one’s fellow-feeling with suffering
others, but rather enables it to coalesce and persist across time in a more
meaningful manner than delivering pious platitudes. What remains to be
resolved is exactly what kind of relationality this amounts to, and whether
the same provisional paths from affect to solidarity might apply, however
haltingly, to digital inhabitants and publics more broadly.

Felt awareness and affective solidarity

The nuances in Levinas’s framework can be occluded by some of his fairly

normative language: for example, duration conceived as a ‘pure’ state
uncontaminated by the nagging drive of the ego, or of an idealized subject
‘afraid’ or ‘dreading’ its interpellation as someone actively attending to and
trying to make sense of the other ‘at point blank’. The same might be said
of what it means to grasp the ‘nakedness and destitution’ of the other’s face.
But there is a point worth holding onto here about what is recognized in
the other prior to any particular expression of their part – that is, their
expressivity. Levinas’s more figurative language hints at an elevation of
immediacy, which elsewhere is not at all the point of duration; similarly,
‘prior’ in these more colourful passages of ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’ (Hand
1989) has a distinctly temporal tinge, where elsewhere it is unequivocally
meant in the strictly logical sense. Cleaving to duration not as originary
and immediate but as simultaneous and variously mediated opens up the
possibility of a sense of the other as a kind of white noise that accompanies
all the other sense-perceptions one has at any moment in time, the analogue
of Sartre’s residual sense of self that accompanies all acts of attending. Frosh
likewise theorizes audience inattention not as a political impediment,

38
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 How sorrow came upon us in those dreary lodgings I
have already told. Six months of mingled bliss and anxiety,
and then my husband was stricken down. I sought for no
help or sympathy from Lady Waterville in my trouble. Quite
alone I watched by Ronald's sick-bed; and nurse was the
only friend who visited us in our time of calamity.

Yet not the only friend. There was one face that came
like sunshine into the sickroom, one voice that never failed
to bid me be of good cheer. The face was shrewd, bright,
and kindly, with eyes that were well used to studying poor
humanity, and the voice was deep-toned and pleasant to
hear. Dr. Warstone was, in the truest sense of the word, a
friend. He was not a courtly, flattering doctor by any means,
sweetening his doses with little compliments. But he looked
straight into your heart, and read all your doubts and fears,
all your unspoken longings and womanly anguish; and he
sympathised with every weakness as only a large-hearted
man can.

The clocks were striking eight, and I was just

persuading Ronald not to sit up any longer, when the doctor
paid us his first visit in Chapel Place.

"This boy is fast getting well," he said, sitting by the

patient's sofa, and criticising him quietly. "He seems to have
got into good quarters; your new room looks like a home."

My nurse had contrived to bring something of the

country even into her London house. There were bulrushes
on the walls that had grown by our old village stream, and
the bunches of dried grass on the chimney-piece had been
gathered in the fields behind my grandfather's cottage.
There were no cheap modern ornaments to be seen; but we
had put some quaint blue china on the shelf, and some
more was visible through the glazed door of the corner
cupboard. Up among the bulrushes hung a painted
tambourine, decked with bows of bright satin ribbon; and
between the windows was an oval mirror which had often
reflected my grandmother's charms. Our decorations were
simple enough; but they brightened the dim little room, and
gave it that home-like look which the doctor had noticed at
once.

"I wish I could take Ronald out of town," I said.

"Wait a bit," Doctor Warstone replied.

"These spring days are as treacherous as usual. There

isn't a lively view to be seen from your windows, but you
must contrive to amuse him indoors."

"I shall soon be able to amuse myself," Ronald declared.

"There's the guitar, you know, doctor; it's one of the best
companions in the world for an invalid. By Jove, Louie, I
forgot to ask you if it had got damaged in the smash?"

"What smash?" Doctor Warstone asked.

I was glad that he put the question; it prevented me

from answering my husband.

"It was only a cab collision," I replied. "Very little

mischief was done. At first I was afraid Ronald would suffer,
but he seems to be none the worse for it."

"Are you quite sure you are none the worse for it?"
demanded the doctor, looking searchingly at me.

"Do you think she is?" cried Ronald, anxiously. "She did
look uncommonly pale afterwards. Louie, if there are any
sprains or bruises that you haven't mentioned—"
 "I always mention everything," I interrupted, laughing.

Doctor Warstone got up to take his leave, telling Ronald

that it was time for him to go to bed. I followed the doctor
out into the passage, closing the parlour door behind me.

"What is the matter with you?" he asked. "Nerves out of

order? The cab smash must have given you a shake."

"It didn't hurt me. But, oh, doctor, how foolish you will
think me!"

"I have thought you foolish ever since I first saw you,"
he responded, with one of his kindly smiles.

"I know; everybody does. I am fretting about the guitar.

I don't know how to tell my poor boy that it is broken; and
—worse still—I can't imagine how we shall get another."

"A man with a good little wife can exist without a guitar.
You are at your old tricks—taking things too seriously."

"I daresay it seems so," I admitted, meekly. "But, do

you believe in hereditary tendencies?"

"Humph! What of that?"

"Ronald's love of the guitar is hereditary. His aunt, Inez

Greystock, is said to have been passionately attached to her
guitar. She could not rest unless it was ever by her side: her
hands were seeking for it always. It is the same with
Ronald. When he finds that the thing is battered and
useless, there will be something gone from his life. I can
hardly hope to make you understand all that it has been to
him."
 "Humph," said the doctor again. "Suppose I say that it
is quite possible to replace this precious guitar. Suppose I
tell you that I know of one—a good one, too—that you can
have for nothing. Will that comfort you, I wonder?"

"Comfort me! You are like a good magician!"

"A good magician is only a doctor practising under

another name. Now listen. Give Ronald his breakfast in bed
to-morrow, and then leave him hurriedly, pretending that
you must do some shopping. Make your way, as fast as you
can, to Soho Square; saunter up and down before the door
of the great piano store, and wait till I come."

"I will do all that you tell me," I promised, gratefully.

And he went into the dusk of the April night.

When I came back to Ronald, I found him comfortably

drowsy, and ready for a long night's rest. He really was too
sleepy to ask any more questions, or even to wonder what
the doctor and I had been saying to each other in the entry.
I had a bright fire burning in the bedroom, and I carried the
shaded lamp out of the parlour, and sat down to sew by my
husband's bedside.

He soon fell into a sound slumber. I sat sewing, and

listening to his regular breathing, thinking of the time when
he would be quite strong and well again.

The future had to be faced. Illness is a terrible thing to

people whose means are small. Our scanty purse could
hardly meet all the demands that Ronald's sickness had
made upon it. Expensive medicine and nourishment—heavy
lodging-house bills—fees to servants—all amounted to a
sum total that made my brain dizzy when I thought of it.
 One of Lady Waterville's parting prophecies had been
already fulfilled. I wished I could forget her words, but they
were haunting my memory to-night. She had said that
before the first year of my married life had ended, I should
taste poverty. Then there would be disappointment—then
bitter regret. Why did she say such things? Even if my
future had been verily revealed to her, she might have
closed her lips, and let me go my way. I would scarcely
acknowledge that I knew the taste of poverty yet; but some
of its bitterness I did know. Well as I loved my nurse, it hurt
my pride to live in her house, and get into her debt, as I
was doing now. It is true that she gladly trusted me, and
had perfect confidence in the coming of better days; but I
smarted secretly under the sense of humiliation.

Some women were clever enough to bring grist to the

mill, but I was not of that gifted sisterhood. Story-writing
was far beyond my powers, and although I could make little
songs for Ronald to sing, I was by no means tempted to
fancy myself a poet. All the talents that I possessed were
decidedly commonplace. Sewing, converting old gowns into
new, mending neatly, and wearing shabby clothes in a way
that did not reveal their shabbiness, this was almost all that
I could do.

Well, I was tasting some of the bitterness of the

poverty; but how about the disappointment and the bitter
regret? Nothing would persuade me that I should ever be
disappointed in Ronald. Mine was not a blind love. I had
never thought that I was marrying a perfect being; nor did I
want perfection. To me, the poor human idol, full of divers
faults and flaws, was far dearer than an immaculate saint
set high above my head.

The warm room and the monotonous work began to

have a sleepy influence upon me at last. I had spent many
wakeful nights, and now that the anxiety was ended, I often
found myself dropping off unawares into a nap. With my
sewing still in my hands, I dozed sitting in the chair, and
then I had a curious dream.

I dreamt that I was standing before a mirror, looking at

the reflection of my own face and figure. My arms, neck,
and head were glittering with wonderful jewels; and yet it
did not seem strange to me that I should be decked out in
such a regal fashion. The glitter of the gems was almost too
bright to be borne—so bright that I woke with a start, and
found that a coal in the grate had burst into a brilliant
blaze. No doubt it was that sudden light, dancing before my
closed eyes, that had been the cause of my dream.

The hands of my watch pointed to a quarter to ten. I

rose from my seat, undressed as quietly as possible, and
went to bed. All night long I slept as soundly and peacefully
as a child, and the dream did not come to me again.

I woke at seven the next morning, and got up without

noise to wash and dress. Looking through the window of my
little dressing-room, I saw the London sun shining
cheerfully on the yard where nurse had cultivated ferns and
ivy. She seemed to have had uncommon luck with her
plants, for they flourished as town-plants seldom do. The
bold sparrows were twittering merrily in the early light, and
their notes were full of joy and hope. After all, there were
plenty of chances in life; and the world was not quite as
dark as it had seemed to my fancy last night.

Ronald had slept well, and was wide awake when I

brought him the breakfast-tray. I had found time to tell
nurse about my mysterious appointment in Soho Square.
She entered heartily into my little plan, and came into the
parlour while I was putting on my bonnet and mantle.
 "Where is Mrs. Hepburne?" my husband asked, when
nurse went to see how he was getting on with breakfast.

"Gone out for a little fresh air and shopping, sir," I

heard her answer, promptly. "She'll be back in half-an-hour.
Nothing like a morning run, sir, for one who has been
nursing, you know. Dear me, how fast you are picking up,
to be sure!"

I hastened out of the house, knowing well enough that I

could trust the good soul to look after Ronald in my
absence. At the top of my speed I raced along Oxford
Street, keeping pace with the bustling clerks on their way to
business, and never once stopping to glance at a shop
window. When I turned at last into Soho Street, I was out of
breath, and glad to stroll slowly along the pavement of the
old square. Neither the doctor nor his carriage were to be
seen; I was the first at the place of rendezvous, and had
leisure to rest and look round.

First I looked at the piano store, and wondered how the

doctor knew that there was a guitar to be found there? And
then I stood still, and gazed at the so-called garden in the
middle of the square, and watched my merry friends, the
sparrows, hopping about on the budding twigs. This
uncountrified spot of green had a sort of attraction for my
eyes, and kept my thoughts busy till Dr. Warstone's carriage
came rattling up to the place where I stood.

"Good morning," said the doctor, cheerily. "Haven't been

waiting long, have you? Now come with me, and I'll
introduce you to the guitar."

"Is it in here?" I asked, as we entered the warehouse.

"It is up in a room high above the store. I hope you

don't mind stairs. The fact is that Messrs. Harkaby are good
people, and are kind enough to give a poor old piano-tuner
a shelter for his head. He won't need it much longer; he is
going fast. The other day he asked me if I knew any one
who would care to have his guitar? I told him I would find
somebody, and now I am keeping my word."

He did not tell me that he himself was the best friend

that the dying man possessed; but as I followed him up
those long flights of stairs, I quickly guessed the truth. One
might know Doctor Warstone for years without finding out
one quarter of the good that he did every day. Often and
often I have heard clergymen extolled to the skies for doing
splendid things which a doctor does naturally and simply,
never getting a word of praise. They are great men, these
doctors who toil in our large towns—cheerful in the midst of
sorrow, quick to help, prompt to save. And to this day,
when any one talks about an ideal hero, the face of Doctor
Warstone rises up in my memory, and I think of all the
noble deeds, known and unknown, that this quiet worker
has done.

We got at length to the top of the last flight, and paused

before a door on the landing.

"I will go in first," the doctor said, "and prepare

Monsieur Léon for your coming. You will not mind waiting
here for a few moments while I speak to my patient?"
 CHAPTER VI.
THE GUITAR.

THERE was a window on the landing, commanding a

fine view of roofs and chimney-pots, and I stood watching
little white clouds sailing swiftly across the blue April sky. I
could hear the doctor's deep voice in the sick room, and
then a faint tone in reply. At length the door opened, and I
was bidden to enter.

The room was large, and looked lighter and more airy
than London rooms generally do. There was a light paper on
the walls, and some kind hand had pinned up several
coloured engravings, which made the sick chamber look
something like a nursery. The invalid was sitting in an easy
chair stuffed with pillows, and placed near a bright fire.
Resting against the arm of the chair, just within reach of the
sick man's hand, was the guitar.

The doctor quietly introduced us to each other; and

Monsieur Léon's eyes, looking strangely brilliant in his worn
face, seemed to flash me a glance of welcome. He was very
ill; the pinched features and hollow cheeks told a pathetic
tale of long suffering; but the smile, that came readily and
brightly, was full of courage and sweetness. Evidently
Monsieur Léon was not to be daunted by the approach of
death.

"It is very good of you to come and see me, madame,"

he said, with easy courtesy. "Will you be seated, and talk a
little while? As for that dear doctor, his minutes are worth
guineas. Ah, I wish sometimes that he could waste an hour,
as idle people can! Now, I see that he is going to scold me!"

"Not to scold you, only to warn you, Léon," put in Dr.

Warstone, kindly. "Don't let your spirit run away with your
strength. Remember that you must not say many words
without resting. You have a great deal to tell Mrs.
Hepburne;—well, you will be wise to make your story as
short as possible. She has an invalid at home who will
watch the clock till she comes back."

"Ah, your husband, is it not?" said Monsieur Léon,

turning eagerly to me. "It is he to whom I am to give my
guitar?"

The doctor gave us a parting smile and went his way.

"Yes," I answered, as the door closed. "It will be a great

kindness, gratefully accepted. But can you spare it,
Monsieur Léon?"

"Spare it!" he repeated. "Ah, madame, do you suppose

I would leave my guitar to the mercy of ignorant strangers?
It is you who are doing the kindness. You are willing to
shelter this beloved friend of mine, and give it a home when
I am gone. More! You will let it speak to you in the sweet
language which has so often soothed and comforted me.
You will not condemn it to dust and silence and decay!"
 "Oh, no," I said, earnestly, struck with the poor
Frenchman's grace of manner and expression. "To my
husband, the guitar will be as dear as it has been to you. It
will always be within his reach—always taken up in his
spare moments. As for me, I love to hear it played,
although I am no player myself."

Monsieur Léon had remembered the doctor's injunction,

and was silent for a moment. His voice sounded a little
weaker when he spoke again.

"It was in India," he went on, "that I first became

possessed of my guitar. When I was young I had friends,
and they sent me to Bombay to be clerk in a mercantile
house. But ah, madame, it was my misfortune to love music
better than figures, and so I did not make the best of
clerks. I saw the guitar in a bazaar one day, and bought it
for a mere trifle. It is old, as you see, and of Spanish make.
Look at this beautiful mosaic work of mother-o'-pearl and
silver! You do not find anything like it now-a-days."

He drew the instrument towards him, and pointed out

its beauties with evident pride. It was of dark wood,
delicately inlaid with a quaint and fanciful pattern. But the
tone? I wished he would touch the strings.

"I will not weary you with a history of myself and my

doings," he continued. "It is enough to say that the guitar
has been with me through many years of sorrow and
misfortune. When it has spoken to me, I have forgotten my
troubles. Often I have sat alone in a dreary London room,
and listened to the tinkle of mule-bells on the passes. Or I
have seen the southern moon rise over the walls of the
Alhambra, and heard the dark-eyed gipsies sing the songs
of Spain. But sometimes my guitar has said things that I
cannot understand.
 "Sometimes there are melodies of which I fail to find
the meaning. It is strange."

HIS THIN FINGERS BEGAN TO STRAY OVER THE STRINGS.

Was his mind wandering? There was a dreamy look in

his face as he sank back on the pillows, and his thin fingers
began to stray over the strings. I waited in silence.
 Mechanically he tuned the guitar, and played a few
chords. Then came a strange, sweet tune that reminded me
of fairy music floating down from distant hills.

"The horns of Elfland faintly blowing—"

Might have sounded just as soft and gay. There was

nothing sad in the melody, but it left its hearer unsatisfied.
What did it mean? What words were set to this enchanting
air? One wanted to hear it again and yet again.

The feeble hands soon came to a pause, and I saw that

all the fire had died out of Monsieur Léon's eyes. It was
time for me to go. I had long outstayed the "half-hour" to
which nurse had limited my absence. Ronald would be
anxiously looking for my return.

"I am afraid you are exhausted," I said, rising. "Is there

nothing I can do before I leave you?"

He thanked me softly and shook his head. Then, with a

gesture, he desired me to take up the guitar. But I touched
it reluctantly. It must have been so hard for him to part with
it. It seemed so cruel to take it away.

"Are you really willing to let it go?" I asked, anxiously.

He roused himself, and looked at me with a sudden

smile.

"The time has come," he said. "I cannot take it with me

where I am going. Give it to your husband, madame, with
the good wishes of a dying man. I send it away with a
blessing."

The words were almost solemnly uttered. When he had

spoken, he sank back wearily and closed his eyes; and I
saw that the short-lived strength, lent him by excitement,
had ebbed away. There was nothing more for me to stay for,
but my eyes were full of tears when I left the room. That
last farewell was echoing in my ears as I carried the guitar
carefully downstairs.

In my old country home I had often heard it said that

the blessing of the dying is a good gift. I was glad to recall
those parting words, although they made me weep. And
little did I then know how strangely significant they would
seem to me in a time that was yet to come.

Before I had got to the bottom of the stairs, I met a

nursing Sister, evidently on her way to the sick room. She
stood aside to let me pass, and it comforted me to feel that
Monsieur Léon would not long be left alone.

The world scarcely seemed to be like itself when I came

out into Soho Square again. There had been something
dreamy and romantic in the poor Frenchman's talk, and it
was strange to find myself out in the fresh spring air with
the guitar in my arms. A small boy called a hansom for me,
and I went rattling home through the work-a-day streets,
half sad and half glad, holding fast to my new possession.
What would Ronald say when he saw me coming into his
room? I had been away quite a long while, and he would be
tired of lying still and waiting for my return.

The cab set me down in Chapel Place, and I let myself

in with a latch-key. In the next minute, I entered the
parlour, triumphantly bearing the guitar, and found myself
face to face with my husband. He was dressed, and lying on
the sofa, looking just a little inclined to find fault with
everybody, and with me in particular.

"I didn't think you would have got up," I began in a

tone of apology.

"Why not? I felt quite well enough, and nurse helped

me. I've had enough of bed, I can assure you. Your
shopping seems to have taken a whole morning! What have
you there? A guitar?"

"Yes, Ronald. I suppose nurse has told you that yours is

broken. This is another that I have got to-day."

"Dear little woman!" cried the poor fellow, brightening.

"I was afraid you would say that we could not afford
another. Where did you buy it? How much did you give? I
wish I had tried it before it was bought."

"Supposing it isn't bought at all?" I said, putting

Monsieur Léon's treasure into the eager hands outstretched
to receive it.

"Oh, then I suppose you have only borrowed it!"

He swept his fingers across the strings, and a sudden

look of pleasure flashed into his face. "It is very good—
better than mine, Louie. Do they want much money for it?"

"Who are 'they'?" I demanded, provokingly. "Ah,

Ronald, I won't tantalise you any more! The guitar is yours,
really yours; and there is nothing to pay for it."

"You are a little witch," said my husband. "Go and take

off that shabby old bonnet of yours, and then come here
and tell me all about it."
 The bonnet was shabby; I knew that well enough; and I
knew, too, that it would be a long time before I could get a
fresh one. But the "outward adorning" did not occupy my
mind just then, nor did I even bestow one regretful thought
on the faded face inside the poor bonnet. I was eager to get
back to Ronald's side, and see him enjoying his new
possession. Moreover, I had a wonderful story to tell, and
the telling of it would make the rest of the morning pass
pleasantly away.

He was deeply interested in my account of the doctor's

poor patient, and asked more questions about Monsieur
Léon than I could possibly answer. And then the gift
underwent a close examination; in fact, he scarcely cared to
part with it even for a moment.

I had gone out of the room to speak to nurse, and when

I returned I found my husband standing close to the
window. He was looking into the guitar with earnest eyes,
and glanced up at me as I came in, saying that he had just
made a discovery.

"Do go back to your sofa, dear," I entreated.

"I wanted to get the light," he answered. "This is such a

dark room. Louie, here is a curious thing."

"Well, go back to the sofa, and then tell me what it is."

"No, no," he said, petulantly, "come here and see. You

know that inside a guitar there is generally a paper pasted,
bearing the maker's name. Well, look at this paper, and
read what is written upon it."

He held the instrument up to catch the light. And then,

indeed, I did see the paper, and some words inscribed upon
it in a woman's hand. These words were written in Spanish,
and I did not know their meaning till he translated them.

"Hope guards the jewels," he read, thoughtfully. "Now,

what does that mean, I wonder?"

"How can we ever tell?" I cried. "What do we know of

those who once owned this guitar? But you are looking
fagged and pale, Ronald; and if you are going to lose your
afternoon nap, I shall wish that I had never brought that
thing into the house."

He consented at last to lie down on the couch and shut

his eyes. Soon I had the satisfaction of seeing that he was
fast asleep, with the guitar lying by his side.

Later on, when the soft dusk of the spring evening was
creeping over Chapel Place, my husband's fingers began to
wander lovingly across the strings; and I sat and listened to
him in the twilight, just as I had done a hundred times
before. It was the resting time of the day; my hands lay idly
folded in my lap, and I was leaning back in a low chair with
a sense of quietness and peace. He was not strong enough
yet to sing the songs that I had written in our happy
courting-days. He could only strike the chords, and bring
out of them that fairy-like music which is always sweetest
when it is heard in the gloaming.

Presently there came again that soft, gay melody that

Monsieur Léon had played, and again it stirred me with a
strange surprise. Surely it was unlike anything I had ever
heard before. How and where did Ronald learn it? He
repeated the air, and I listened, entranced and wondering.
It seemed to me that the chords were giving out a fuller
sound than I had ever heard yet.
 "Ronald, what is that? Where did you first hear it?" I
asked, raising myself, and bending eagerly towards him.

He did not immediately reply. A flame shot up suddenly

from the low fire, and showed me the thoughtful, dreamy
look upon his face. At length he spoke.

"I was just wondering," he answered, "where I had first

heard it. It seems to be an echo of something that I knew
years and years ago. And yet, I could fancy that it came out
of my own brain, just as your verses come out of yours."

"But I heard it from Monsieur Léon this morning," I

said, "and it had a strange effect upon me."

"Did the Frenchman play it? Then, depend upon it, I

have got it from some old music book that I have not seen
for ages. Only I can't remember playing it on my old guitar."

"You never did," I replied. "I know all that you play.
Poor Monsieur Léon has laid his spell upon those strings!"

"You are getting fanciful, Louie," he said, looking

wonderingly at me through the mist of twilight.

"Perhaps I am. Monsieur Léon's talk to-day was fanciful;

it might have been that his mind was wandering. He said
that the guitar sometimes spoke to him of things that he
could not understand, and then he played that very air. It is
an air that needs a poem to interpret its meaning."

"Well, why don't you write one?" Ronald asked. "I will
try to play it again."

He did play it again. And once more I felt the influence

of the soft gladness—the faint, sweet triumph that was
expressed in the melody. But when he paused, I shook my
head.

"It goes beyond me," I confessed. "I can find no words

that will harmonise with that air. It leaves me with an
inexplicable longing to find out its true meaning; but I think
I shall never know it."

"I have had that feeling once or twice in my life," said

Ronald, musingly. "I remember a winter afternoon when I
was waiting for a train in a strange town, and strolled into
an old church to pass away the time. Some one was playing
on the organ—a voluntary, perhaps—and the music came
drifting along the empty aisles. I stood just inside the west
door, and listened, trying to find out what it meant. But I
could not tell."

"Let us put the guitar away now," I entreated, catching

the tone of weariness in his voice. "You have been sitting up
quite long enough, dear, and there is a bright fire in the
next room. What a chilly spring it is! This evening is as cold
as winter."

For a wonder he complied meekly with my request, and

walked from the parlour into the bed-chamber with his arm
round my shoulders. In a little while he was in a sound
sleep, his head resting quietly on the pillow, while I moved
gently about the room and put things in order for the night.

I was too tired to sit long over my needlework, although

a piled up work-basket reminded me that there was plenty
of mending to be done. But, sleepy as I really was, that
mysterious melody was still haunting my brain, and I found
myself trying to set words to it unawares. Only fragments of
rhyme came to me; bits of verses never to be finished; and
at last I endeavoured to forget the air altogether. Yet even
in slumber it came back, and again I saw Monsieur Léon's
thin face and brilliant eyes, and heard his parting blessing.

When the morning came, and I went into the parlour to

get my husband's breakfast, there lay the guitar upon the
sofa. And I almost started at the sight of it, for I had half
persuaded myself that it was merely a thing of my dreams.

CHAPTER VII.
JARS.