Selves and Forms of Life in the Digital Age: A Philosophical Exploration of Apparatgeist

Abstract

Katz and Aakhus (Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002) pioneered study of the initial rise of widespread use of mobile technology, offering a theory of how this form of machinery was becoming imbricated ubiquitously in everyday social life. They argued that a spirit of “Apparatgeist” had come to reconstitute not only people’s social and cognitive affordances but even their sense of self: the continual “perpetual contact” between absent yet present persons, an altered social sphere.

This essay puts Apparatgeist into play with the Ordinary Language Philosophy tradition developed by Austin, Wittgenstein, and Cavell. Like Katz and Aakhus, these philosophers embed the everyday “logic” of human expressiveness in the field of the human body in its environs: gestures, speech, gait, and tone of expression—what Wittgenstein called “forms of life.” They overcome reductive “information” and “media” models of communication. So, I argue, as did Turing, under Wittgenstein’s influence: the “Turing Test” is best read as a human-to-human, social experiment in phraseology, not an epistemological challenge as it is generally construed. Apparatgeist illuminates these philosophers’ insights and vice versa. The logic of human conversation and routine is refracted symbolically through the model of a “machine” broadly conceived. This logic leads to a renewed focus on the foundational power and importance of the field of everyday forms of life in Apparatgeist.