Overview

The socio-cultural phenomenon of digital enhancement, that is, the attempt to perfect the subject’s offline life by means of digital media, seduces people into participating in digitalization. Subjects paradoxically want to participate in digital change even though it is well known that digitalization also impairs their freedom and privacy, and this book investigates both the freedom-impairing and the freedom-enhancing aspects of digital enhancement. Sarah Bianchi provides an empirically informed critical aesthetic diagnosis, a perspective that makes the overlooked affect- and power-sensitive Janus face of subjectivity in digital enhancement perceivable: the subjects’ desire to be governed by the logic of perfection—that is, the heart of digital enhancement—and their simultaneous desire for self-government. To this end, An Aesthetic Critique of Digital Enhancement: Government of the Self and Desire makes Foucault’s “history of the present” in its Nietzschean genealogy productive for contemporary critical thought on digital enhancement. Through genealogical critique, this approach provides the needed semantics to question the costs of our digital present and to conceptualize how an enlightened agency might be critically constructed.

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9781666928310

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Reviews

By carefully explicating and then creatively using concepts first developed by Nietzsche and Foucault, Sarah Bianchi crafts an insightful conceptual toolkit that enables persons who participate freely in the digital technosphere to become aware of how their conduct - desires, affects, sensory perception, behavior and mode of subjectivity - is governed in detail in the cycles of participation, data mining, algorithms, and prompts. She then presents a number of practices of freedom that enable practitioners to free themselves from this complex form of AI subjectification ('digital enhancement') to various degrees and begin to think and act differently. She calls this difficult process of awareness and self-change 'enlightenment freedom' and provides examples. It is a major contribution to the rich, multidisciplinary scholarship on digital governmentality and responses to it. --James Tully, Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria

Author Information

Sarah Bianchi is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Goethe-University in Frankfurt.

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