Agency in digital infrastructures: can performativity contribute to the understanding of technological subjectivation?

This article aims to discuss how we understand the correlation between language, subjectivation, and digital technical infrastructures based on J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative. For that, our stating point is Fanon’s analysis of the subjective transformations provoked by the use of radio during the Algerian Revolution, comparing it to the contemporary process of digitalization of life as analyzed by Letícia Cesarino. Each of these studies, highlight the performative characteristic of language in creating realities rather than merely describing them. However, different appropriations of Austin’s work bring divergent contributions to the study of language in digital societies: on the one hand, the normalization of the performative and the opposition between true and false, present in Benveniste, Searle, and Cesarino; on the other, the critique focused on the effects of language on the world present in Derrida and Butler. By analyzing the possibilities of using “truth” in the understanding of language in digital environments, we position ourselves in the critical perspective, in line with our reading of Fanon, to understand technologies in the processes of subjectivation as performative speech acts, in which the agency is not eliminated, but reconfigured as a situated one.

Keywords:
Language; Performativity; Subjectivation; Digital infrastructures; Agency