BEING VIRTUAL: MODULARITY AS A CULTURAL CONDITION.

In this essay I will outline the elements and conditions of a new disciplinarity of the self, which I term modularity. Following the example of Michel Foucault I believe that modularity is an emergent disciplinary practice that is to be found across a range of disparate sites and practices, from the workplace to the discourses of the academy and particularly in the metaphor of performance. [1]

In the broadest sense, the term modularity denotes a cultural relationship that has emerged with the saturation of the public domain by various forms of techno-disembodied presence such as photography, computer graphic simulation and electronic imagery. Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum--a copy without an original--has identified an aspect of this development. But absent from a popular understanding of Baudrillard's account, especially when his notion of the end of the social is addressed, is a recognition of the invidious power of the perfected images that form the hyperreal ecology of the media. [2] In particular, in arguing that the masses are indifferent, Baudrillard undervalues the mimetic relationship between the private individual and the mass media as a source of experiences that are both exemplary and unavailable elsewhere. In a kind of Platonic inversion, it might be said that the images on the flickering walls of the electronic cave are better than the real and for that reason encourage the desire to be realized in an open-ended spiral of emulation and mimesis. [3]

In its general aspect, modularity is the process whereby concretely given individuals struggle to rise above their own limits by means of a script of self-fashioning drawn from the media. One decisive precondition is clearly the capacity of photographic or electro-optical media formats to impose a detail control over the realm of appearances. This control, intensively augmented and facilitated by digital techniques, confers mastery over the spatial and temporal coordinates of the referent scene--converting then and there into a continuous presence subject in principle only to the whim of the viewer and his or her skills and resources. I want to argue that the prospect of being able, in this sense, to write the visible compounds the logic of what I shall term "commodity physiognomy"--the selling of the appearance of the self as an economic asset or an item of cultural capital. [4] Nor is it unimportant that the media offer protocols of transformation that are not only superlatively rendered as images but also images that have a guaranteed universality of circulation. Modularity, as I see it, is based on a fantasy of the perfect exemplary performance; as such it is a discipline based on control by exemplars. For if ambiguity can be a control, so can explicitness. Accordingly, modularity as an ideological practice may be said to be less a falsification than a production of the real, a practice that attracts because it imposes a preemptive coherence on what is otherwise dispersed, unstable and fluid. [5] Particularly with the rise of interactive media, modularity becomes a condition of being in which self-fashioning is empowered by reliance on an externalized prosthetic visual display--a display that is fundamentally embroiled in plasticity and change.

Although I believe that the media essentially prefigure changes in the regulation of labor power, in what follows I propose to limit the bulk of my observations to the role of the media in cognitively mapping a new script of the commodity self--the self prepared for employment or the sale of labor power. Whether media saturation is causing the emphasis on performance or the conditions of social existence are imposing this metaphor on the media that then transform it into a form of life is difficult to demonstrate. In a media-saturated society the precondition of a separation between the real and the mediated that is necessary to establish a linear causality no longer applies. It is however possible to proceed metonymically, showing that what is present in one discourse is partially echoed in the discourses of other practices and vice versa, in a process of interpenetration and catalyzing cycles of reinforcement. In this analysis, I will concentrate on nationally broadcast television commercials for two reaso ns. First, commercials are sites where cutting edge techniques are flaunted in order to stand out from the visual noise of our cluttered media environment. Second, although many of the special effects that are used in commercials, such as morphing, were first seen in the commercial film sector, it is in the commercial arena that the ideas and concepts implicit in the effects are rendered as commonplace and thus acquire the status of transparent slogans.

Defining the modular

Defined abstractly, as a proposition about the realm of culture and cultural practice, modularity has the following features:

a) The principle that all totalities are nothing more than an aggregation of components. These components can be combined in various ways because they are conceived to be functional equivalents permitting substitution, addition and recombination.

b) Given the principle of functional equivalence--all cultural practices are equally valid--new configurations are sought and desired.

c) Since no specific combination is deemed to be integral to cultural organizations, any given order of content has no more than a present validity since new configurations are not only desired but are certain to emerge.

d) The predominant goal of any given configuration is short-term coherence. [6]

Described in this way modularity might seem to be merely a restatement of the well-rehearsed features of postmodernism--what I will call "quotationalism": flattening of space-time, loss of historical sense, etc. But as a formation modularity lacks the notion of semiotic play and drift that is for many the overriding feature of postmodernity. For even though in theory the modular worldview should lead to the endorsement of change and plasticity, it paradoxically evolves into a search for, if not the perfect, then the best rendition. The insistence on perfectibility has both logical and sociological roots. Logically, given the valorization of an open-ended permutation of the parts, it follows that experimentation is likely to produce configurations that are more or less efficacious than others--in other words, not all permutations are equal. [7] What follows from this is a procedural version of the sublime, which intimately celebrates and valorizes the essential rendition or performance. Contrary to the notion of the sublime as a state of experience that inspires astonishment and awe, a procedural sublime implies a process, an acting upon a substance or event in order to produce superlative effects. Invariably this effect is conceptualized as affirming the integrity of the individual as the fundamental unity of reality. The individual is a sovereign subject that stands apart from the world and imposes his or her will upon it, or at least is served by those who undertake to produce a particular effect. Finally, the procedural sublime is increasingly commodified, which is to say that the application of technology is increasingly oriented toward producing spectacles as part of the tourist and entertainment industries, and is thus driven by a logic of excess--bigger, better, more inclusive of the sensory range. [8]

But more compelling than the logic of modularity is its sociological connection to American culture. [9] This is not merely a factor of technological specialization in the sense that the media are American but rather what seems to be a cultural disposition to visualize the conditions of being as a matter of adjudicating or adumbrating the question of American identity. It may be said that Americans have been required to continuously rehearse their allegiance to the American way from numerous identity positions that cannot assuredly be identified with being white, Anglo-Saxon, male and heterosexual. Even for those who fit comfortably within its parameters, Americanization as a process is a willed or studied performance. [10]

Scenarios of the modular

In order to outline the features of a modular world view, I will briefly describe four commercials. These 30- to 40-second commercials, shown recently on British commercial television, exemplify characteristics that are to be found across a gamut of media forms and practices. The overwhelming feature of these and other similar commercials is the evocation of American settings and idioms. But there are other commonplace ideological features that will be generally recognized, if not always experienced, in the examples I use here.

Scenario One

The establishing shot is a poorly defined image of an American city skyline with skyscrapers evoking New York. Cut to a fast-paced car chase, cop cars in pursuit of suspects in a getaway car. Cut to a dimly lit bar and a young man seated at the bar with other drinkers. The police cars previously represented as normal size are suddenly revealed to be small as toys. The chase continues down the wooden surface of a long bar, weaving in and out of giant size glasses, elbows and hands as though this were a conventional movie car chase. What is unusual is that this chase is filmed against a background that alternates very rapidly between one diegetic level (the chase) and another (what is happening in the barroom) that is textually defined as extra-diegetic. As the camera alternates rapidly between the visual field of the drinkers and the visual field of the chase, it evokes two levels of the real, the narratively contained action and the act of watching. In a mise en abime of the spectator's relation to the commer cial as a total text, the young man is both inside and outside of the visual field of action. To this extent the young man is a delegate for the real spectator since he is the only one in the bar to watch the micro-narrative and to see its conclusion. The invitation to the spectator to identify with the act of watching, rather than with the subject the young man represents, is confirmed by the closing voice-over that accompanies a black screen and the product logo: "Orange believes everything you want should be in your reach."

Scenario Two

Early morning. A balding middle-aged man with a far from superlative physique enters a kitchen. He turns on a radio which plays "I'm Every Woman," and proceeds to prepare a meal of instant noodles. The first taste of the noodles is rapturous and creates a spontaneous urge to indulge in a bit of cross-dressing. Searching through the dirty linen for a suitable item of female clothing, he finds his wife's (?) dirty slip. Now dressed for the part, he sings along with the music, bumping and grinding, the heir apparent to the "I" who is "every woman" on the soundtrack. His workmates--rough, burly types--appear at the kitchen door and look on in apparent disgust. The man looks embarrassed. But help is at hand. In a cutaway shot more noodles are being prepared. Soon his workmates are in drag, too, and dancing like The Full Monty. A caption lays down the challenge: "Batchelor's Spicy Noodles--Oooh, I'm scared."

Scenario Three

A young man, techno-trendy, is seated at his laptop, writing a movie script. As he types his script, he narrates his inner thought processes: "Scene one: We open on a woman running.

..." The camera shows us an attractive redheaded young woman running through a depressed urban environment. Cued by the voice-over, she becomes a blonde who looks like, then becomes, the newest "Bond girl," Denise Richards.

Richards enters a parking area and is chased by an ax-wielding ghoul in a rubber mask who runs at the camera. Cued by the voice-over, the setting switches to a two-lane blacktop road in a burning hot desert. The unstoppable and resourceful Richards passes through a gauntlet of explosions but she is hot, hot, hot. Arriving at a remote gas station, she makes for the nearby bar. An interior shot shows us a glass of water which, cued by the voice-over, morphs into a normal bottle of Pepsi Cola or rather a big bottle, steaming with icy vapor just as she comes in. As she reaches for the drink, it is grasped by a darkly handsome man, dressed in a James Bond style dinner jacket, who smiles appetizingly. "Hey, this is my movie!" The "auteur" morphs into the chick magnet. Richards wryly accepts the transformation-what else? In the final sequence, she and the auteur are seen driving away, locked in an embrace. Scream-style, the ghoul reappears and is knocked off the car by a karate-style punch from Richards. Our auteur does not see this piece of the action; however, the real spectator certainly does. Richards is actually nurturant and protective and likes guys who drink Pepsi. Cue Pepsi logo and tagline: "Pepsi: ask for more!"

Scenario Four

A wedding is taking place in the gardens of an affluent, upper-class household. The bride wears a white wedding dress and the groom a tuxedo. Various formally attired flunkies circulate around the guests who are themselves stuffed into heavy suits and stiff shirts. The setting evokes the semi-tropical fringe of California or Florida. The day is hot, bright and stifling.

The groom is seen mopping his brow with a handkerchief. In close-up, the bride's upper lip is beaded with perspiration, but she is more resourceful. She espies a nerdy-looking wedding photographer about to break open a Solero Ice-a delicious concoction of ice cream and strawberries with a dash of lemon that seemingly has no rival in the laid-on refreshments. The bride advances on the photographer with all the determination of the hot and thirsty. She snatches his treat away with a defiant smile. Taking that first revelatory bite, she is instantly transported into a silvery bubble in the sky, worthy of Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Clad now in a redhalter top and shorts, she begins to groove and lay out her considerable sexual authority. An elderly couple in formal attire recoil in horror, the woman covering the man's eyes for fear of offense or a coronary. The groom, no less aghast at this public display of "untamed" sensuality by the woman he counts as his, is hoisted shoulder-high by his best man and burly attendants. He attempts ineffectually to cover his bride's gyrating torso with his jacket. But the Solero effect is contagious-he too is sucked inside the bubble. Clad only in a pair of red shorts, he abandons himself to the bump and grind. Cut to a computer graphic image of a Solero Ice with strawberries raining into it. Voiceover: "New Solero Ice-the cool effect you don't expect!"

At first sight the examples I have described testify to the persuasiveness of hyperreal encoding in the production of television commercials that has become the dominant convention of commercial production since the 1980s. As identified by Robert Goldman and Steve Papson, commercials such as these flaunt their constructedness through the deployment of coding strategies that signal a distance from the everyday ecology of perception as reproduced within the conventions of classical cinema. Strategies such as hypersignification of detail, reflexive camerawork, elliptical narrative forms and intertextuality seem to imply that the viewer is too savvy to mistake the represented for the real. [11] The purpose seems not to directly persuade-the actual product is only mentioned fleetingly or is presented in a frankly exaggerated way that foregrounds the fictionality or hype. What is suggested to the viewer is that he or she can make use of the product or service as a means for self-expression. But in accomplishing th e latter the text becomes the uniquely privileged site of an experience that cannot be encountered outside of the process of signification itself. In this sense the spectator is doubly positioned as an onlooker outside the text. We are, first, external to the look of the camera which, with swish pans and jump-cuts and other effects, never pretends to be anything but a technological manipulation, a camera eye whose formal permutations are a meta-pattern that delays an immersion in content. Second, the spectator remains external to the text because what is shown abides nowhere else but in the utopian power of the cinema to visualize improbable conjunctions and scenes. So the invitation to watch a performance of real virtuality cannot be said to suture the viewer into the text so much as to create a distance that hopefully nurtures a mimetic desire-the desire to be like. The profound implication of the photographic and electronic optical imagery in this practice gives this process a specific dynamic of defensive physiognomics. The realm of appearances is asserted to be a valid indicator of personal worth-if one looks right then one is right. This claim is parasitic on the power of photography to sequester the referent temporally and spatially. Photography as a medium has the tense of now/then which in globally circulated images is intertwined with the spatial condition of being here/there. Not only does this offer the opportunity to the living to represent themselves outside of any present context; by rearticulating the relationship between the present and the past, it also allows those outside of any sphere of cultural activity to fashion themselves as insiders on the basis of remote observation. Because images are pre-tested in the realm of publicity by association with celebrities, or simply by the fact of being out in the public realm, they have the status of collective representations that are authentically global rather than purely local in the span of visibility. This is so not least because the photo-effect of presence-in-absence is articulated in terms of professionally realized ego ideals that even insiders must imitate. The conquest of space and time-of being here and everywhere regardless of temporal or geographical barriers-bestows on the offered image the character of a rescue, or at least, a respite from the viewer's life world.

In these ways the viewer/spectator is addressed as one who is ready to play the codes of appearance to his or her advantage. In a world in which the importance of place and locality no longer prevails over the flow of global information and power, he or she can find in modular imagery a small place that is simultaneously local and global. But there is a price for this defensive sequestration of self-identity: the overall scheme of performance, if seemingly based on popular cultural practices, is mimetically defined by experts. The realm of the popular here answers modernity's dream of rendering everyday existence as an art form.

To summarize, the scenarios I have just described share the following features:

a) Personal agency. There is a strong emphasis on personal transformation, even bodily transformation-not surprisingly the product, either a good or a service, is the agency through which the persons or models depicted are fluidly transformed.

b) Spectacularity. They conform broadly to the logic of Gunning's "cinema of attractions"-the emphasis is not on showing reality but on emphasizing the power of the medium-in this case digital film-to produce credible audio-visual states of being that are not actually possible in the "real" world. [12] The fascination rests with the audience knowing that these events, the space and time of their unfolding, cannot actually be occurring in the sequence visualized and yet look as though they are.

c) Depth mediation. The mise en scene is both hypermediated-the presence of the medium, its effectivity, is underscored so that the process of mediation becomes the spectacle overshadowing the scene-and remediated in the sense that computer technology is used to remodel the conventions (and sometimes the content) of cinema-for example, the car chase, echoes of The Full Monty and Wes Craven's Scream series. [13]

d) Subjectivization. Each of the texts is concerned with the relationship between multiple realms of existence rendered as a subjective experience. Not only is there no externalized point of view, ratified by a notion of verisimilitude, for many worlds are both possible and actual. But the ontological constants, particularly the dramatis personae, engage in a rapture of multi-faceted being, switching size, shape and category and generally defying mundane causality. Despite this multiple layering, what the characters desire remains constant. The realm of the object dissolves into the exercise of a given subjectivity, that of the real spectator who is not inside the text and therefore not subject to its playful dissemination of being. [14]

e) Performativity. A recurrent motif is that reality is a performance. What is at issue here is not the notion of self-presentation-which implies a self or homunculus behind the facade-but the self as a radically discursive entity, only existing at the point of performance. This performance is itself an analytical object subject to a process of reflexive self-monitoring. The drama arises from the need to maintain a performance against inner stress and outer conflict if the individual is to project a situationally exigent incarnation. If, as Judith Butler argues, identity is a "style of the flesh," then the process of stylization-with its attendant anxieties, fuzziness of fit and sheer improvisation-comes to be the site of interest. [15]

f) Narrow determinism. Given the emphasis on the spectacular, the concept of determination is confined to action and interaction between characters (or agents) who have transparent needs and desires. If individuals morph they do not acquire more complicated motives. The notion of mutability is at the level of appearance, not essence. [16] Moreover what is valorized here is not a deep, literal bodily transformation of the self-brought about, for example, through plastic surgery or workouts-but a virtual transformation. [17] Deep practices may provide real-time examples of what can be accomplished by conforming to the narrow confines of a diet or exercise program. But what is celebrated here is a simulation of such practices, which is attractive precisely because it is comparatively facile and effortless. The true denizens of the modular world are superficial creations, imitators of the virtual in real-life interactions.

g) Interpassivity. Modular scenarios rely on the capacity of the image to transform the mundane limits of perception. Although this has been a feature of photography and cinematography since their inception, the constraints of the ecology of normal perception are now aggressively flaunted. Neither the boundary of the body nor the physical and geographical inherence of the mise en scene prevent the incessant incursion of the gaze into the molecular cells of visual space. The laws of mundane causality are suspended. The gaze is no longer given the "free pasture" of the leisurely take; it is subject to visual shocks and derailments, all of which underscore the fact that the spectacle is a self-sufficient, inhuman process of seeing. [18] The character-based suturing of classical cinema, while not absent, is superseded by the process of virtual seeing. The spectator is no longer invited to identify with the "look" but with the power of the apparatus to visualize scenes without any constraining reference to one wh o looks or to what could plausibly exist outside the process of visualization. Identifying with the apparatus as its virtual spectator confers on real spectators an apparently effortless mastery over the process of visualization and beyond this, over what can be seen. It is a small step from the photographic dissolution of the real to seeing the self and the world as a spectacle that can be endlessly converted.

Since at the current time virtual environments lack the verisimilitude found in the cinema, these representations might be said to stand in for the virtual by means that provide experientially palpable spectacles. Yet in computer-mediated environments, mastery is actually a product of a limited capacity to visualize, and from a behavioral point of view rests on absolute conformity to a predefined program. [19] The show of mastery and triumphant self-definition evidenced in the modular text is clearly a simulation of what is perceived as the liberating effect of interactive media. But the depth furnishing of the spectacle accomplished by kinetic camerawork and the in-filling of visual detail increase the viewer's psychological dependency on those who control the spectacle. The aura of mastery is actually a valorization of dependency since the enunciating instance does not offer a narrative that is imaginatively transferable so much as a sensory tour guide. [20]

The lure of the prosthetes

In the broadest terms, these examples deploy a visual rhetoric that represents the multimedia as a realm of freedom, effortless contact and effortless technique. The actual commodity being pitched is positioned as a pretext or a means toward an effect/affect that the consumer (virtually defined) is seeking. Perhaps what is most decisively projected here is a prosthetic utopia, which offers the possibility that the self as formed by biologically and socially intertwined processes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so forth) can be outcontextualized-transported to other contexts without loss of the capacity to function as a viable agent. [21] The subjects of prosthetic utopia must be highly flexible and open to the imminent possibility of re-deployment in any new context.

Reduced to the register of the personal and therapeutic, these commercials announce that the service or commodity will confer mastery of body and appearance. As Celia Lury has argued, prosthetic technologies encourage experimental individualism-the view of the self as an experimental identity or object that does not say "I am what I am," but "I am what I can become." [22] But the theme of self-transformation or "makeover" is not without its own version of physiognomic responsibility-if the "look" is optional then how you look is how you choose to look, a freely expressed revelation of your desired identity. People who do not choose to be what they could be are, rightly, condemned to the consequences of their ill-fitting appearances.

If physiognomic responsibility is accepted then a number of attitudinal conditions must be met. First, the individual must have the capacity to live in the moment or a sense of presentism; gratification must be immediate and functionally specific because there is no tomorrow in the world of fashion or desire. One is gratified or not, up to the minute or not. Second, the individual must see conformity as the form of freedom, honoring the Orwellian equation of opposites. Rather than being seen as the loss of the self, conformity is represented as a superlative form of self-expression. This means more than behavioral conformity in the execution of a program. It means showing that one is not just committed to but psychologically attached to or in love with a specific task or practice. The requirement is that one manifests a level of enthusiasm, willingness and sincerity that will overshadow what any other individual might offer. Unless this is achieved, one cannot be an individual and a conformist. Moreover, sin ce performances can be faked, the capacity to fake must become a kind of sincerity. [23] Third, the primary existential dynamic is completism, since there is not one self and its world but many possible worlds and selves that are actually or latently interactive. If the self and its role are seen as essentially connected then the question of the truth or falsity of a particular role does not arise. Knowing the self and knowing the role is a seamless act of recognition. But the prosthetic self is permanently open to the potential for any detail to be significant. Self-understanding is disposed to become subject to a process of hermetic drift in which things are not related by virtue of meaning but by contingent association. In search of the endless renewal of markets and the desire to desire, modular scenarios encourage the individual to know all there is to know rather than to know what is meaningful. [24] Lastly, modular scenarios encourage magical individualism--the individual is depicted as automatically f reed from collective determinations. Logically, the very concept of the individual presupposes that the impact of social determinants--of race, gender, class and ethnicity--on identity is set aside in favor of a self-defining abstraction. [25] This logical negation is matched in modular scenarios, thanks to the commodity, by a stream of self-sufficient transformations: either the individual is not what he or she seems, becomes something else, or is translated to a different realm of being. The definition of advertising as a magic system is not new, but Raymond Williams's definition reflected the state of the "art" at the time that he was writing, as evidenced by product pitches that promised to fulfill fixed identities--beer drinking leads to more manliness, etc. [26] What is being normalized now is closer to magic realism or, to use Manuel Castells's term, "real virtuality"--a system in which people's symbolic and material existence is entirely immersed and captured in a virtual setting so that the setting does not communicate an experience but is the experience. [27]

Logics of display

As will be recalled, Foucault in Discipline and Punish delineated a new disciplinarity of the gaze: panopticism. In its literal embodiment, prisoners are placed in cells that are constantly under surveillance from a central vantage point. In such an optical arrangement, those under observation are literally scrutinized in detail and, at the psychological level, made constantly aware of the ever-present, unverifiable possibility that they are being watched at all times. This spatial arrangement, Foucault argued, merely concretized a more diffuse societal practice in which an older synoptical ratio of the many watching the few was replaced by the few watching the many. [28] As Thomas Mathieson has pointed out, the transformation that Foucalt described could be overdrawn. [29] Conspicuously, the emergence of the mass media has recreated a synoptical regime in which the many still watch the few. synopticial, if not countervailing against panopticism, at least provides a qualification of its pervasiveness. The Int ernet, for example, contains both possibilities: corporate or governmental surveillance of user activities, and private citizens (if they have Internet access) watching the powerful, the rich and the famous, for trivial and sometimes not so trivial purposes. Yet the contrast between the carceral and the viewer society is probably overstated. Foucault's own observation that the subjects of the panoptical gaze internalized the eye of the surveyor suggests that the disposition to watch others might be the outcome of the experience of being watched; recent developments such as reality television seem to suggest that it is a short step from realizing that one is being surveyed to taking pleasure in becoming a surveyor. [30] The remarkable use of the Internet, a terrain still dominated by males, for the collection or viewing of pornography shows how readily panoptical subjects identify with the process of watching, from within a protected haven, the intimate behaviors of others. The privacy of the browser may turn out to be an illusion, since the watcher may be watched when watching--but this does not overturn the basic point that the panopticon and synopticon may be complementary experiences, the latter a disposition or variation of the former.

Intermediate to these essentially panoptical variants is what Foucault identified as the internalization of the gaze--the disposition to make of oneself an object that can be observed without detrimental consequences--in a counterlogic of affirmative self-display. In the contemporary prison system, it is common to the point of being cliched that prisoners engage in a cult of body-building. (The same might be said of efforts at self-education as a way of valorizing doing time.) Whatever else might be said about its function as a means of enhancing physical power and homoerotic allure, the cult of the well-defined body is an affirmative appropriation of the panoptic gaze. That gaze is thereby deprived of the opportunity to demean its objects but may indeed be actually confronted with a subject that is good to look at. Mutatis mutandis, might it not be said of the strategies of "hiding in the light" undertaken by non-carceral subjects that these individuals, these others, are denying the power of the panoptical gaze to certify them as demeaned? [31] Perhaps for those who are not directly subject to penal coercion, but without economic resources, the notion that the soul becomes the prison of the body is reversed. The body is selected to be the prison of the soul, the physical manifestation, the resource to be deployed in the affirmation of a personal agency that cannot be touched by the "system." Indeed, the very concept of being able to internalize the disciplinary gaze itself implies a level of willed and skilled accomplishment. [32] In this sense the strategy of the panopticon to rehabilitate the felon is rearticulated by the tactics of the individuals who do not quarrel over the project of rehabilitation so much as the direction and the kind of space (inner or outer) in which it occurs. What is reserved in these techniques of self-fashioning is the right to define the terms of being an object for the carceral and clinical gaze. Thus, in turning our attention to the public realm and those who are legally free, i t seems necessary to amend the concept of the synopticon--the regime in which the many watch the few--in order to recognize that the many who watch the few may do so in order to learn the successful (or unsuccessful) elements of being "fit to be seen as one of the few"--of being worth looking at. [33]

As already suggested, modularity is a discipline that requires close functional identification with a pattern or configuration that will change. But being modular has both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic aspects. The first, in the language of Michel de Certeau, is a strategy--the requirement to inscribe on the self as actually given the self as a subject of a dominant discourse. The second counter-hegemonic aspect comprises a tactic of instancing a perfect rendition, the perfection of protocols of subordination as an individual defense against the requirement to change or to be substitutable. [34]

Panopticism as a diffused practice spawns its counterpractice whereby the perception of the self as an object that is watched mutates into an effort to manipulate the parameters of public visibility. Hence the observation by a number of writers that the notion of the self today is primarily a narcissistic project. [35] Once the domain of the female and the teenager, many young and not so young people now view themselves in private as if they are before a permanent, if imaginary, audience that is evaluating their behavior. And where is the imaginary audience, or the pre-sense of its gaze, most likely to be revealed in sufficient detail to lead to a set of prescriptions and recipes? It is found in the careful scanning of what is certified by the media as a massively approved "style of the flesh." In this context, figures in the media, whether relatively anonymous characters or the carefully crafted personae of stars, become examples of potentially viable public images to be written on the self. More pragmatica lly, such commodified self-images have met the preliminary criterion of being organized in order to be competitive; hence all the better that they are winning images or images of winners.

Get with the program!

What extra-cinematic practices and processes can be assumed to have already predisposed real spectators toward scenarios of the modular? One answer is to be found in the general regulation of the self in late capitalist societies that depends less on repression than on the provision of the means by which the self is encouraged to seek expression.

"It is through the promotion of 'life style' by the mass media, by advertising and by experts, through the obligation to shape a life through choices in a world of self-reflexive objects and images, that the modern self is governed." [36] Nor are the therapies of individual freedom confined to the realm of consumerism. The self who consumes is a self who works, or a self who works at consuming. More tellingly in advanced capitalist societies, good work (and the service industry as the dominant form of work itself) is increasingly being normalized as a process of self-expression or self-fashioning. Above all the worker is enjoined to fit in and yet to be flexible-to have the ability to be deeply focused and yet open to pragmatically effective re-calibrations of the self as required. [37] Similarly, it becomes important in the search for the good job to signal these qualities in advance as a technique for self-presentation and selection. Metaphorically, those who work function according to the principle of the ideal method actor who identifies absolutely with a part until the part changes. Those who seek work must be prepared as though answering a rehearsal call. And as work itself becomes flexible--as individuals circulate like so many units of energy among a variety of jobs--the requirement of fitting in to new work settings becomes a process of re-presenting the self. No wonder then all the good advice on being presentable.

The unity of the aesthetic and the practical here might seem like the fulfillment of the modernist drive to aestheticize everyday life, but it has a darker reality. The driving force behind the aesthetics of modularity is a transformation in the geometry of class, the shift from a national to a global process of class formation. As a process of cognitive mapping, modularity is a response to the social order of the network society. One of the features of such a society is a structural split between a core labor force of information-based employees and managers and a larger disposable labor force. At the core there is affluence, relative security of employment and a cosmopolitan culture based on networking with peers in a global cultural environment. The disposable labor force, shuttled in and out of employment as market conditions shift, is by contrast poorly paid and shut out from the networks of information upon which corporate decision-making is based. This distinction between those who are programming and those who are programmed is replicated--imaginatively--in the world of leisure and entertainment. In a network society the tendency towards polarization is endemic and subject to rapid and unpredictable shifts so that even those at the core have no guarantee that they will hold their place against technological change, corporate take-over, offshoring and downsizing and the willingness of similarly qualified groups located elsewhere to do the same work for less. In a situation of chronic uncertainty it is not unlikely that individuals will seek to improve their chances for survival by adopting a facade of willingness to comply and to change--thus the new "ideal" worker becomes a modular self, one who fits into the team and is yet at the same time (hopefully) unique and irreplaceable. Work, from the perspectives of both capital and labor, becomes an individualized process. [38]

In the light of this global development, what might be said of the commercials discussed here is that they attempt to map as a condition of existence the new parameters of the network society in which power and domination depend on whether one is on a network and which network it is. [39] More precisely, these commercials offer maps for those who are excluded from the cosmopolitan culture of the digital elite, but have not yet fallen entirely out of the labor market into the fourth world of the terminally unemployable. [40]

Described in this way the modular self is a mutation of the respectable self. Being respectable is the historically proven strategy of those who would be, or precariously maintain a claim to be, middle class--not so rough as to be outside the fashionable, and not rich enough to not care about falling behind the latest fashion. [41] Generally conceived, then, respectability is a class-based form of passing, with strong historical and sociological links to the aspiring middle class. Respectability is the means by which an individual may escape from (or at least ameliorate) the demeaning judgments and economic privations that are attached to the social category into which he or she was born. Respectability as a cultural practice furthermore reproduces a hierarchical discrimination within a specific category of people. There is for example an external and internal aspect to racial inequality. Within the general subordination of black people there is an amelioration of the conditions of existence for the black mi ddle class who, while not approaching the standard of living of their white peers, nonetheless stand above the general conditions of the race. [42] Consequently, class inequality rests on the degree to which other factors, such as race, gender and age, ameliorate or aggravate its impact. Respectability is one aspect of the self that may stay the full brunt of class determination. [43] This amelioration is for the most part subjective rather than objective--the individual feels better about him- or herself. Individuals cannot choose their physical and cultural heritage, but they can choose to deny or moderate the structural entailments of this heritage. If one cannot guarantee the place, one can get the look, and perhaps the look may lead to the place after all.

Viewed in light of class inequality as a structuration process, modularity, like popular cultural projections in general, has both a utopian and a reifying aspect. [44] In its utopian aspect modularity denies the necessity of given identities, as implied by the concept of performativity. Yet such a concept is not without internal contradictions. For one, not all performances are equally valid or for that matter equally valued by peers, let alone larger constituencies. If some performances can be said to be better than others then questions of essentialism creep back in. More mundanely, not all those who would "pass" have access to the same level of resources or conversely, the same capacity to deflect scrutiny. Nor is it entirely clear that performances are independent of standpoint experiences--of being a particular kind of socially defined being. [45] The utopian aspect of these commercials lies in their proposal that differences of culture and background can be overcome--indeed one can literally morph int o another's skin. This claim is advanced by the codes of visualization that define appearances and events as the primary means of manifesting the mind. Here the photo-effect of presence-in-absence can be turned to pragmatic advantage. If one can assume the look and the demeanor, one can claim the edge--mastery of the codes of real virtuality.

But at the same time modular processes feed on the notion of lifestyle as an exemplary performance undertaken by individuals who are not just stereotypes but idealizations of stereotypes. [46] For example gender identity is declared an act, but an act so accomplished that it approaches the paradoxical state of willed essentialism. Pamela Anderson or Arnold Schwarzenegger (and their real time and game world clones) may be parodic exaggerations, but they alone can rise to the level of such a definitive, qualitative exemplification.

Modularity is deeply implicated in the notion of the perfect, complete rendition or performance. In this sense, it is discourse that is founded on hyper-tokenism--the formation of symbolic representations that, emerging from popular experience, are subjected to a level of realization that renders them the reified essence of their collective referent. Hyper-tokenism is all the more efficacious because the people no longer control the process of collective representation. Hyper-tokenism embraces the widely accepted notion that we are all pretending, and further insinuates that pretenses can be more or less complete, more or less willed. Of course, we cannot all be beautiful, clever or skilled but are there not aspects of ourselves that could achieve a kind of studied perfection with sufficient effort and expense? Scenarios of the modular-- global in reach and local in reception--make this transformation magically easy and immediately significant. But they do so at the cost of submitting ourselves to a script t hat someone else has already perfected, even when, as celebrities tell us, the script is one that is freely chosen. There is always another script. Strive to be perfect, to be the best you can, but always be flexible. Tomorrow the mirror will have another person in it--but if you have what it takes to be modular, that person can be you. [47]

BARRY KING is a principal lecturer in Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. He has taught at American and British universities and is the author of a number of articles on cultural theory. His book Understanding Stardom is forthcoming from Polity Press.

NOTES

(1.) Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998), especially Chapter 3.

(2.) Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). In later work Baudrillard sees the mass media as deeply implicated in the formation of self-identity. See Jean Baudrillard, "The virtual illusion or the automatic writing of the world," in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 12, no. 4 (1995), PP. 97-109.

(3.) Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (London: Fontana, 1970), p. 225. In Benjamin's terminology mimesis is not a relationship of reflection in the artwork but the individual's striving to be like a person, object or scene.

(4.) Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

(5.) Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 21.

(6.) John G. Blair, Modular America: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Emergence of an American Way (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) and Rob Kroes, If You've Seen One You've Seen The Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), Chapter 9.

(7.) Notions of efficacy are, of course, relative. But that is not the point. For all judgements of what is efficacious, a modular world view expects that there is a definitive rendition of any kind. This relates to hyper-tokenism, see below.

(8.) David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), especially p. 283 and p. 291. As Nye points out the process of domesticating the technological sublime has drawn on the metaphors of feminization. Generally speaking the discourse of modularity flaunts a commitment to politically correct gender equality. But the debunking of stereotypes may hide an even more profound reduction: that for the purposes of marketing, anybody can become anything. Being, in short, is reduced to commercial function.

(9.) The observation by Todd Gitlin that Americanism is postmodernism is relevant here. See Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge, 1989).

(10.) Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (London: Penguin, 1990).

(11.) Robert Goldman and Steve Papson, "Advertising in the Age of Hyper-Signification," in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 11, no. 1 (1994), pp. 23-53.

(12.) Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator" in Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 114-133.

(13.) Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), especially Chapter 1.

(14.) On the psychological problems of multiplicity see Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (London: Basic Books, 1991).

(15.) Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).

(16.) Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1996), p. 300.

(17.) Anne Balsamo, "On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body," in Camera Obscura 28 (January 1992), pp. 207-238; Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Louis Decker, Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

(18.) Jacques Aumont, "The Variable Eye or the Mobilization of the Gaze," in Dudley Andrew, ed., The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 246.

(19.) Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181.

(20.) Renato Parascandolo, "The Multimedia Paradox and the Interactive Fraud" in The Online Multimedia Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science (http:///www.mediamente.rai.it.), 1995.

(21.) Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 3.

(22.) Ibid., p. 19.

(23.) Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (London: Penguin, 1972). Usually the commodity is shown as the little helper that controls the anxiety that otherwise would vitiate the appearance of a natural emotional investment in the role.

(24.) Umberto Eco, "Overinterpreting Texts" in Stefan Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 45-66. Rudi Keller, in A Theory of Linguistic Signs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), states: "The aspect in which different representations of a sign are identical is its meaning," p. 94. But visual signs contain many non-identical aspects which, if foregrounded, encourage a process of hermetic drift. See Barry King, "Semiotic Determinism and Visual Signs" in American Journal of Semiotics (forthcoming).

(25.) Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).

(26.) Raymond Williams, "The Magic System" in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980).

(27.) Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume One: The Rise of Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 373.

(28.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979).

(29.) Thomas Mathiesen, "The Viewer Society" in Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1992), pp. 215-234.

(30.) One is reminded of earlier work on the cinematic gaze by Mulvey which underscored the masculine pleasures of scopophilia. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in Screen, Vol. 16, no. 3 (1976), pp. 6-18.

(31.) Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Methuen, 1988).

(32.) Sean Watson, "The New Bergsonism," in Radical Philosophy 92, (1998) pp. 13-14.

(33.) In the British context, at least, the ambivalent status of the post-feminist celebration of the super Barbie--as a power role that manipulates male fantasies and sees off female rivals or as a rationalization of a fervent conformity to gender norms--comes to mind here.

(34.) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 35-37.

(35.) Abercrombie and Longhurst, ibid.

(36.) Nikolas S. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 256-258.

(37.) Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (London: Sage, 1996), p. 182.

(38.) Castells, p. 265.

(39.) Ibid., p. 469.

(40.) As Castells points out, the middle sector of the economy is in fact shrinking as the upper and lower sectors expand, p. 279.

(41.) Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997) pp. 2-13.

(42.) William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

(43.) Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1981); Skeggs, p. 82.

(44.) Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" in Social Text 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 189-199.

(45.) If Judith Butler can state she knows "nothing" about childbirth, this, at least, suggests that there are substantial experiential limits to plasticity and performativity. See Peter Osborne and Lynn Segal, "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler" in Radical Philosophy 67 (1994).

(46.) Baudrillard's notion of ecstasy is relevant here.

(47.) The author wishes to thank Andrew Hoskins and Mike Hooper for their assistance with images for this article.