CYBERSPACE AND DECENTERING: SUBJECTIVITY AS A MATTER OF SPACE AND TIME

Abstract

Based on a post-structuralist approach and under the framework of a sociology of the unconscious, this paper analyzes the constitution of political subjectivity mediated by digital technologies. This largely theoretical study, with no bibliographic review on media, resumes key assumptions of social sciences and psychoanalysis to question the current notion that digital media, by itself, would produce new subjectivities. Hence, the research slightly diverts its gaze from the applications, platforms and algorithms, to privilege their environs—the social relations that are the primary object of sociological analysis. Expression of more comprehensive historical, economic, social and cultural contexts, but gifted with some margin of freedom, social relations would ultimately be able to determine the time-spatial references of individuals and enable the decentering, condition of the subjective constitution. It is through their uses, and by the relations that constitute them, that digital media condense the characteristics of their time (primacy of the space, instantaneity, simultaneity, immanence, fragmentation, lack of depth), as well as hold the potentiality to transcend it.