https://doi.org/10.37955/cs.v6i1.237
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eISSN: 2600-5743
Netopraxis: A hermeneutics of
digital language
La Netopraxis: Una hermenéutica del lenguaje digital
Jaime José Salcedo Díaz
Master in Education and PhD candidate in Philosophy Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana,
Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios UNIMINUTO Colombia.
Jaime.salcedod@uniminuto.edu.co
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3056-7222
ABSTRACT
The research conducted addresses the concept of Netopraxis as a
hermeneutics of language that seeks to understand, in the
phenomenon of the digital, a particular and singular praxis called Net.
The Netopraxis not only belongs to the field of a practical philosophy,
but also to that of ontology, since it unveils an existential structure
through digital language, which, as a clarifying action, unmasks
apparent problems and helps to solve real problems in the digital
framework. Netopraxis is a functional unit of digitalization, which
represents a linguistic act of human praxis and builds a dialogical and
relational action between human action and digital action that occurs
in the update.
RESUMEN
La investigación realizada abordo el concepto de la Netopraxis como
una hermenéutica del lenguaje que pretende comprender, en el
fenómeno de lo digital, una praxis particular y singular llamada Net.
La Netopraxis no sólo pertenece al ámbito de una filosofía práctica,
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sino también al de la ontología, ya que devela una estructura
existencial a través del lenguaje digital, que, como acción clarificadora,
desenmascara problemas aparentes y ayuda a resolver problemas
reales en el marco digital. La Netopraxis es una unidad funcional de la
digitaliza-ción, que representa un acto lingüístico de la praxis humana
y que construye una acción dialógica y relacional entre la acción
humana y la acción digital que se da en la actualización.
Keywords/ Palabras clave
Net praxis, ontology, language, technology
Neto praxis, ontología, lenguaje, tecnología
Introduction
Netopraxis is not a genealogy of the ubiquity of the informative
process of the digital, nor is it an analytic of codified data; it is a way
of understanding the modus vivendi of the digital being that is made
and perfected in that relational praxis, whose linguistic exchange
opens a dimension of possibility that, as Jean Grondin (2002, p. 12)
says, "constitutes the practice of life itself". Since the experiential is
implied in this form of understanding, Netopraxis as hermeneutics
focuses on the event, not as historical data, but as active action, not of
the event but of language, that is, of the verstehen (understanding) of
the linguistic event that occurs in the experiential exchange of the Net.
To understand the linguistic event that intuitively rests in Netopraxis
is to delve into the subjective interrelations that arise in the digital
present, and which in turn elaborates forms of existential consensus
that from the perspective of practical philosophy legitimize
meaningful modes of thought and action that are transmitted and
communicated through the screen. The task of Netopraxis as
hermeneutics of language is to reflect on the practical conditions that
occur in the linguistic event of the Net, to find its knowledge,
conceptualize it, understand it, interpret it and translate it into life;
only in this way, the digital existence (ontology) of the Net will not be
"strange", rather, it is incorporated to be hermeneutically signified and
understood, as Gadamer (1992) says "in it (hermeneutics), the strange
becomes its own" (p. 363).
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The linguistic event expressed in the Net, implies the understanding,
not only of the structures of access that people have to the digital world
through the empowerment they have based on information and
communication technology, but also of the process of construction of
meaning governed by structures, whose intersection elements occur
through a series of practices, be it reproduction, consumption,
production, experiences, knowledge and power (Castell, 2011, p. 27).
These practices are called nodes, which are in permanent function of
the Net, and make possible the unity of a particular type of thought,
which from the hermeneutic perspective presents a totality of
elements, where the whole comprises the particular and the particular
comprises the whole, that is, the node as a practice will never be the
unity, the unity of meaning is in the Net (for being praxis), the node is
simply the possibility of intersection, understanding intersection as
that point that builds a path of existential interconnection through
lived practices.
This movement of understanding that takes place between the Net and
its nodes, shows an ontologically positive sense, since independently
that it refers from the whole to the part, and from the part to the whole,
what is latent is an elaboration of the being that permanently discovers
and redefines new senses of existence, what we call actualization,
which redesigns ways of being and knowing in the world, inquiring for
that effective phenomenon that intuitively perfects that digital being,
and whose path of understanding is in the linguistic nature of these
nodal practices. The practice itself already contains a communicative
act, a language, a logos that carries a sense of philosophical-living
understanding and that constitutes a starting point, as Hans George
Gadamer (1992) said "there is a path to which philosophy points more
and more clearly and that testifies to this correspondence. The path is
language" (p. 76).
The Net has its own language that reveals an aesthetic, ethical and
political rationality in the digital world and which is accessed through
the analysis of cultural experiences that argue a series of logical modes
of thought and action. Language is inserted in the effectuality of the
digital worldliness, it is not a language that speaks about technical
terminologies of the artifact, but the language of facts; and as the world
is fact, language speaks of everything that happens, and happens, no
longer in the factuality of the experiential world, but in the virtual
world (Wittgenstein, 1975, p. 35). This language corresponds to the
fact, to the digital doing that increasingly shapes human life.
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Therefore, to discover this language is to delve into the factum of
digitalization.
But what is it that happens there so that we can refer to a specific
language? What is the importance of the language of the nodal practice
that accompanies the objectives of the Net? If we manage to
understand the type of digital practice and its raison d'être, then we
will be faced with the demonstration of a particular language that will
detail its system of understanding and validity.
The Net as a universal practice is possible through nodal practices. The
word node comes from the Latin nudus (Collazos, 2001), and refers to
a kind of starting point that joins with other starting points. Here the
starting points are experiences of action, which are possible when
other actions are present. It is not a single nodal action, but many
nodal actions that integrate a systemic structure that is understood not
in a fragmentary or differential way, but as a unit that has an
existential function as modus vivendi. That is why the Net is a set of
interconnected nodes; all these nodal actions give rise to a particular
practice as the Net, and this practice in its social structure forms a kind
of "device" in the Foucaltian perspective, which is constituted as a
heterogeneous set of elements, involving discourses, statements,
architectures, practices, and institutions. But this heterogeneity is
concentrated in only one thing: the "dispositif" and this, according to
Giorgo Agamben (2016), "is the network that is established between
these elements" (p. 9).
As the Net is a device composed of a heterogeneous set of nodal
practices, it means that it is not only a practice, but that this practice
keeps a discourse, a knowledge, a language that needs to be
understood. Its technique reveals a strategic function of linguistic
government over other practices and over people, however, its
relationship is based on the rational intervention that it has with the
nodal, as Manuel Castell says
Nodes can have greater or lesser relevance for the network as a whole:
they increase their importance when they absorb more relevant
information and process it more efficiently. The relative importance of
a node does not come from its special characteristics, but from its
ability to contribute to the objectives of the network (2011, p- 27).
In other words, it is a relationship of forces that intervene to develop
in one direction; the nodal practices in the digital world are important,
but their greater importance is that they all contribute to the
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performance of the Net, and to its purpose in shaping the ontologies of
the present in the digital age.
Net and nodes are closely linked, both fulfill a practical functionality
in the world of digitization, what differentiates them is that the Net as
a particular and singular practical unit is updated, and by updating it
reconfigures new ontologies where new beings adapt to the new digital
ecosystems and try to survive in it. The Net is an existential oikos
composed of experiences derived from practices, a dwelling place that
is defined by the human practice installed there, which gives rise to
meanings and senses and whose réseau (network) promotes a
positivity in the Hyppolitan sense in the structural understanding of
the language of the experiences given by the nodal practices. Nodal
practices are unconscious, performed spontaneously and without
intentionality, while the Net as a functional unit has a character of
rationality that gives it pertinence in its praxis and validity in its
argumentation.
The Net as a functional device of digitalization, and as digital
rationality, acquires greater meaning in the transition from the Net to
the Neto, it is a morphological Sprache (language) that carries a sense
of "result" consequence of the structure of nodal practices, a kind of
existential pragma (πραγµα) that presupposes a reflexive movement
where the ontodigitizer settles in a linguistic consciousness after an
exercise of distancing from himself and from his unconscious digital
practice, and acts from a Neto-linguistic thinking, making of this act
not a tool, but a sphere of his own that he learns to incorporate, to
signify, to make sense of in order to understand the world of the
digital, not as a tool of use that he can abandon once he uses it, but as
a way of life that provides him with a series of experiences that are
assumed by the ontodigitalizer "as an attitude of openness towards the
world he wishes to interpret" (Piastro, 2019, p. 40).
The Net is not poiesis, but a praxical device, and being praxical it has
an intentionality of government through language, which starts from
a serious reflection of the nodal practice of digitalization, and which
only occurs in the consciousness of the linguistic-social structure that
thematizes a new disciplinary field. That is why the Net, is Netopraxis
whose rational character is established by an intellective act of a
particular practice and, whose intellective act yields a rationality that
in this case is not attitude (Foucault, 2017), but knowledge, which,
from the Foucauldian perspective is constituted in the open space of
knowledge not in the sense of apprehension, but as Jürgen Habermas
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(2003) says "as a way in which subjects capable of language and action
make use of it" (p. 24).
Netopraxis is constituted -from the ontology of the present in the
digital era- a hermeneutic that designates an overcoming of
subjectivity and intends to unite an intersubjectivity that rationally
makes explicit a knowledge that broadens its horizon and spectrum
through the different ways of communicating in the digital world. For
example, each Link, web or application has an endless amount of
knowledge because its nodal practices, although it refers to the digital
is different, their respective points of view is different, that is why it is
important to inquire into that knowledge that is not installed in the
subjectivity of individuals, but in the objectivity of the digital world,
which configures a common rationality, which is consensual and not
subversive. But what is this knowledge? Which is not constituted here
as a tool of use but as a rational practice that ensures a common
context of lives, what Habermas calls in his communicative action "the
world of life" (Habermas, 2003, p. 30).
Netopraxis, being a hermeneutics of language, anchors its
philosophical understanding in reflexive consciousness. It is the point
of view of the present rationality of praxis, which aims to interpret
that set of nodal practices that are established and related forming a
device of digital government, which from the linguistic perspective
acts strategically in digital culture; understanding digital culture as the
system of latent and manifest vital ideas, which form that worldliness
of co-net-tivity, and which is transversed by a human character of
experiences, what Habermas (2003) calls the Lebensführung, i.e., a
way of life.
The intentionality of Netopraxis as hermeneutics of language is to
understand the rationality of the Net as a practice of government,
which assumes language as a mechanism for understanding the
ontologies of the present in digitalization. In Netopraxis, language is
not representation, Gadamer (1992, p. 76) will say, in the manner of
Cassirer, but rather efficacious reality that constitutes beings in itself,
which is exposed in the objectivity of the digital world, and that this,
in turn, provides the ontodigitizer with a relational and consensual
language. In this case, language is not a juxtaposed tool, but is
constituted in the relational effect that occurs in the digital world,
which contributes to a rationality of governance expressed in the Net
as a praxis of direction and management.
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Language in the Netopraxis is a rationality, meaning by rationality, a
particular type of knowledge, which carries a myriad of knowledge that
groups thoughts, modes and behaviors. That is why Netopraxis
presupposes a high linguistic consciousness, not only because of the
rationality that constitutes it, but also because the result of the
reflective exercise, in which the ontodigitizer meditates starting from
the unconscious realization of the nodal practices of language, takes
distance from himself after the dialogizing act, reflects on it, thinks
about it, constructs it again in language and returns it to the digital
world (Gadamer, 1992).
In Netopraxis language is not an aggregate, an added element, it is a
practice that manifests the structure of the digital being relating in the
world of co-net-ivity. To navigate in the digital world is to immerse
oneself in the world of technological language that is assumed and
incorporated into daily life. Netopraxis, being intentionality, not only
makes conscious of a presence in the digital world from its reflexive
character, but by inserting itself in that world it inserts itself in its
language, suggests Gadamer (1922, p. 148).
The particularity of the language of Netopraxis is its domain, which in
this case does not express an expertise, but a belonging over
something. Domain comes from domus (house), not a house of bricks
and concrete, but a dwelling that is represented by the digital
existential structure. It is not language that inhabits the house as a
guest, but being is language, and language determines its practices,
emotions, affections and its ways of being both in the digital world and
in the circumstantial world of relationships. As Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1992) has already said
Materials and Methods
Language is thus the true center of the human being if it is
contemplated in the sphere that it alone fills: the sphere of human
coexistence, the sphere of understanding, of consensus, always
greater, which is as indispensable for human life as the air we breathe.
Man is really, as Aristotle said, a being endowed with language. All
human beings must pass through language (p. 52).
The domain manifests a characteristic of government from language,
not as a subjugating force that bursts into the freedom of the other, but
as Byung-Chul Han (2019) says "a power of kindness that engenders a
continuum of self in the other" (p. 45). It is not a government that
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starts from the negativity of the digital being, it is a government that
directs digital behaviors in a practical way, respecting the freedom of
the intersubjective coexistence of digital beings. Netopraxis is
philosophy of language and way of life, it determines a structural
possibility of an existential ethos that creates - as Castro-Gómez (2015)
says, interpreting Foucault, "conditions of acceptability where subjects
experience themselves as free, even if the objectives of their behavior
are set by others" (p. 14).
In Netopraxis the concept of mastery is implied in a form of digital
governance practice, which is anchored in the ontological and non-
instrumental language of technology, and which in turn speaks about
the world of individuals. To govern from the digital is to construct a
rationality from nodal practices that an individual or institution pre-
writes from the idea of necessity that a virtual ecosystem requires.
Digital governance creates a virtual rationale through platforms that
recreate a context, when this context is externalized, a variety of nodal
practices appear that are shared by a network of individuals building
stories. A clear example is Facebook or Instagram, who build
scenarios, contexts, or ecosystems and users freely obey a structure of
experiences that are shared through a "you accept the terms".
In Netopraxis the domain is exercised by digital individuals that as
Quintanilla (2017) says "are intentional products of human agents and
are characterized because they are oriented to obtain certain objectives
in a predetermined efficient way" (p. 21). In other words, governance
in Netopraxis is still interdependently linked to the human and it is he
who has the possibility to guide, lead, manage behaviors through
language, unlike Bionetopraxis where it is automation and Machine
Learning that builds modalities of governance over life (IBM, 2020).
The domain in the governance structure of Netopraxis is a type of
affective disposition, a virtual presence, which reveals its emotions,
passions, feelings in the construction of its being in the digital world.
This affective disposition (Befindlichkeit), as expressed by Escudero
(2016) manifests an ontological determination of the inter-es, whose
existence is not only established by its character of factual subjectivity,
but by the intersubjective recognition of a world that captures it
through the "like" of the "share" of the "like" of the "like".
The domain as an affective disposition, does not build thrown beings,
but "connected" beings, beings in communication, who need to say
something (Rede), as Escudero (2016) says "the affective disposition
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conveys the idea of being in a situation where things, others and
ourselves already matter" (264). In short, the domain is an affective
disposition of the digital individual, which through Netopraxis grants
him a certain form of possibility of ontological openness from
language, and whose language manifests a "state of mind" of
rationality of governance, which aims to guide, influence, manage and
direct behaviors and practices in the network.
Results
As a result of the research carried out, the definitions are provided in
accordance with the specific work model, which made it possible to
discern and bring the concepts and definitions proposed closer
together.
The government rationality of Netopraxis: the language of
algorithmic programming.
Rationality as knowledge is constituted in an epistemology proper to
the present, which arises from the serious reflection of nodal practices,
which in their singularity manifest a series of lived experiences that
are brought to visibility through a rational conceptualization, which
can be enunciated, argued and incorporated into the everyday
language of human beings. This knowledge enunciates a discursive
relationship between the ontodigitalizer and the artifact, and whose
relationship is established from the practical agency of the Netopraxis
device, which keeps a plexus of existential possibilities, and which
makes visible a co-originary presence in the digital world.
This knowledge is not something static, it always leads to another
knowledge (the click), that is why behind each digital nodal practice,
there is an enunciation and a visibilization of a phenomenon that
reveals from the linguistic perspective, an affective disposition, an
apprehending, which in its colloquial sense is a way of understanding
that "knowing how to do something" (Escudero, 2016. 269), that is to
say that knowing and doing compose the same reality, as Deleuze says
"knowing is a practical agency that enunciates and makes visible an
epistemological threshold" (p. 79). This threshold is not unique, but
varied, however, although it is varied, the important thing is to focus
on the unity of knowledge (Neto) and not on the panoply of nodal
practices, since it is not of interest in this work to make an archeology
of these practices to discover knowledge, but rather, that unitary
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knowledge with the constitutive possibility of "expression", that is, an
ontological structure of saying something: an act of the language of
Netopraxis (Foucault 1968).
This act of language develops in the being-in-a-digital-context, and
exerts an influence on thoughts and behaviors, a kind of governability
whose character of rationality builds technologies of signification,
whose meaning is anchored in the established aims and objectives of
instrumental "program" strategies, which give meaning to a
conversational virtuality, thus causing "existential modes", where
human beings acquire an experience of intersubjectivation coinciding-
as Castro- Gómez (2015) says "in desires, hopes, decisions, needs, and
lifestyles" (p. 15) with governmental goals set by faceless bureaucratic
institutions such as Google, Facebook, Apple among others (Noah
Harari, 2019, p. 373).
In the functional unit of Netopraxis, knowledge lies in
governmentality from language, which is not violent, which does not
subjugate, which does not force, which does not attempt against the
particular will of individuals, but which itself is presented as a need to
feel present in the digital world, delivering its being in the hands of
others (applications) that make of itself an information for others, a
delivery of identity that gives power and knowledge to the other to give
an opinion and say something (Noah Harari, 2018, p. 11), a kind of
relation of forces that in the Foucauldian perspective translates into
power, not the disentangled power between dominators and
dominated, but in the "know-do-something" (Escudero, 2016, p. 270)
of skill, whose skill lies in the act of the language of algorithmic
programming.
The language of programming is constituted in the new sovereigns that
govern and direct the human existential structures, which from the
algorithmic perspective, this one (the human) indicates to the artifact
what it must perform through the programmatic codification.
Although the framework of the digital corporeality (Hardware) is
important, there is no doubt that in the Netopraxis the understanding
rationality is possible from the factual structure of the installed
information (Software), there is where the pro-gramma arises, a kind
of nodal practice that denotes a space of linguistic game that describes
existential structures previously installed, and, that project a virtuality
of possibility in the "being-digital". In other words, programmatic
language implies a structure of projection (pro- Gramma), a launching
forward, a description of the "doing" that is executed from the
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subjective need of the ontodigitalizer, and which in turn reveals on his
part an affective disposition, a type of presence in the world of the
digital.
The fundamental characteristic of the language of programming is to
constitute the linguistics of the digital world, a description-effectual
that structures a priori, all conversational possibilities that digital
individuals will have in their social interactions in the network. This
effectual-description is conceived in and from the algorithmic
language, which is not changing, but updated, which is not dynamic,
but static and whose staticity responds to what Gadamer (1992) calls
"the articulation of the world" (p. 221), (Ge - stell), which, in this case,
is to transfer the teleological phenomenon of the affective disposition
of the factual individual to the objectives of the program that is
intended to be executed.
However, the linguistics of programming, before executing any type of
governance, must construct a field of experiential "processor" that
constitutes the starting point of any digital subjectivity, and that, in
turn, responds to a set of linguistic actions that are not perceptible to
the eyes of the common, but its ontological structure always refers to
rationally digital acts. This field of experiential "processor" is
constituted in a digital language technology that speaks of integral
nodal practices (sequence, instruction, objectives), and which in turn
build a strategic rationality of governance from the Neto. However,
these rational practices are apparently usually conceived as a mere
instrument of technical means that calculate a series of orders to the
artifact, but their result ends up being rationally applied so that digital
users respond through behaviors and affections, thus generating an
ethos of life, a kind of onto-technologies that produce an accumulation
of practices that, in a Heideggerian way, are shown, preached and
communicated.
This governability from the digital language is established in a
practical way in the linguistic sign of the algorithm that pretends to be
a logically perfect language for its precision and execution in the world
of the pro-gramma. The significance of the existential structure of the
algorithm is fundamental, since its description keeps a projective
sense of an order, which when executed determines behaviors of
digital individuals, and creates dependencies of affections submitting
in a free and spontaneous way to a diversity of aims and objectives
proposed by intentionally established programs. The algorithm is the
device, that set of nodal practices of the language of programming, and
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its essential function is to build from the existential perspective a
logical-syntactic codification that enables a comprehensibility of the
relationship of words and signs found in an application, on a website,
etc., building a familiarity, not with the algorithm, because this is not
seen, but with what appears to us in the digital encounter.
Therefore, the algorithm is the symbolic condition of writing and of
the opening to the communicational world that is established in the
Net, and it is the Netopraxis that in its rational refection signifies its
existential modes from the constructed and executed nodal practices.
The algorithm in itself keeps a meaning of operation, an action, a type
of practice that is put into operation in order to solve a situation or an
existential need. The algorithm, being an operation, is already a
practice, but a practice that is executed in the language of the symbolic
of the number that through the sequence of binary numbers pretends
to build an existential syntax, whose syntax is determined by the
meaning given to the binary composition. In other words, the
algorithm constructs a linguistically propositional order, which in turn
ends up translating into a fact; in the words of Wittgenstein (1975) -
the "shown", the Tatsache, which, in the case of the digital, is the
correspondence of the projective of the algorithm with what is
expected in the visualization of the Net.
The algorithm as the programmatic language of Netopraxis, builds
technical conditions of governance, which are constituted in the new
authorities of human management and direction, as Noah Harari
(2018) already says
authority may soon shift again: from humans to algorithms. Just as
divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies and human
authority was justified by the liberal narrative, so the coming
technological revolution may establish the authority of big data
algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom (p.
11).
Therefore, the algorithm is not only understood as sequential writing
of binary numbers, but as an entity that possesses logics and
modalities of government, which, when programmed, manage, direct
and affect human behaviors from symbolically established linguistic
structures. All government action is exercised on people through
technological devices that constitute the new spaces of sovereignty,
where humans cease to be living beings, to be digital beings,
"organisms composed of algorithms" as Noah Harari (2019, p. 360),
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where territoriality, are zones of applications of de-local encounters,
and where production systems are not generated by the sovereigns of
digital territoriality, but by algorithmic organisms that build neoliberal
production systems through "statuses", "stories", "#TBT",
"comments", "comments", "reproductions", "like", "follow" "share",
among others, thus generating sovereignties of technical production.
The algorithm as numerical expression projects in its programmatic
structure, a linguistic expression, common to all, where digital
individuals can converge in the territoriality of the Net. The
conversational act is not in the algorithm, but in the projection of the
meaning of the algorithm when it is translated into letters, words or
image. However, there is a close relationship between the two, since
the word represents the algorithm, it is in the latter where the
governing technique is configured, which will be understood and
obeyed by digital users when it appears to them in the everyday life of
their language, there, what was a figure becomes a fact (facere), a
doing, that is, a practice.
This practice has a governmental intentionality, that is, this
programmatic and algorithmic facere regulates the existential
structure from the language, in the words of Foucault (2008)
"regulates life" (p. 23), which is exposed in the digital window, whose
identity is rationalized not by ideological systems but by systems of
affections, that is, digital individuals accept to be governed by digital
structures (applications) that measure their desires, their emotions,
their beliefs through the "acceptability of terms", which is subjected to
a series of unread and understood policies and yet are incorporated
into the everyday life itself.
The governance of algorithmic programming is projective, it is not
presented as it is, its logical figure lies in language, and it is this that
influences thought (Gadamer, 1992), giving a vital orientation between
the artifact, the algorithm translated into content and the life of the
individual. This orientation makes the individual familiar with the
constructed and conventionally accepted world. Behind the digital
world lies a series of linguistic conventions, a rationality that overflows
all human reality, and routes it in a direction of thought that allows it
to produce a praxis of political power, of aesthetic production, and of
ethical signification. These three rationalized practices, complete the
structure of the governmental rationality of Netopraxis, from the
programmatic and algorithmic language. Let us see:
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The political power of algorithmic programming language.
The political concept that keeps the Netopraxis is configured through
the relationship between the technical language and the adaptive
language of digitization, that is, that the language being one, responds
to internal logics of the ontodigitizer, and external logics that involve
the modes and behaviors of any digital individual. The technical
language is the one that refers to the algorithmic system that from the
perspective of the pro-gramma, is an activity of thought that aims to
build a technical rationality whose objectives and purposes is to
assemble a behavioral structure that makes digital individuals respond
from the adaptive language. While the adaptive language is the
rationality that the digital individual finds, appears to him, and whose
route is established to generate through this language, some logics of
intersubjective relationship.
The algorithm as a technical language is constituted for a digital
political philosophy, in an activity of thought that is not visible to
individuals in their experience of the digital world, they already find a
world built through images, audios, letters and words, but what is
behind it is a projective construction that aims to generate not only an
ecosystem of services and content, but an intentionality to generate a
data that shows identities, patterns and behavior. In the data and its
analysis is expressed the political power of algorithmic language, it
traces a route from a univocal logic that expects to have results; each
link is encoded in such a way that it expects to have the correct answer.
It is a language that seeks to avoid error and to access more and more
to the affections of the human being, understanding him in such a way
that it gives him what he wants, before he wants it (Moreno, 2019).
With the algorithm as a technical language, access is gained to the
world of digital experiences, where the field is opened to the adaptive
language of the Web, the navigator navigates in the language of
adaptation, which is the world constructed and known in his images
and words; this world provides him with a series of experiences that
reflect his human activity, no longer in the facticity of his concrete
existence, but in the objectification of his being on the screen. This is
no longer a virtualization or appearance of reality, it is an effectual
reality of power, in which a network of intersubjective thoughts is
activated, which, through the logical symbolism of the algorithm,
communicates concrete events and living experiences. The technical
language of the algorithm is in constant tension with the adaptive
language, both imply a sphere of power, both internal and external,
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however, it is in the exteriority where the algorithm expresses its
intentionality of government, exerting a force of circuit that influences
thoughts, behaviors and languages.
Power from the political perspective of the algorithm is a circuit, which
is composed of plural structures of micropowers of tensions and forces
that construct spaces of relation, understanding space as an existential
ubi that implies in the words of Michel Certeau - quoted by Marc Augé
in his book Non-places (2000) - a practice, a traveled path, "a
practiced place" (p.85). This power in first measure is established in
micropowers (speaking of nodal practices) in the numerical
composition that each computer demands to respond to billions of
operations per second, these operations respond to an activity of
thought of the human being that pretends to transfer his experiences
through the translation to binary numbers (composed of 0 and1), then
the information is quantified, codified, and in turn become a minimum
unit of information called bit (Latorre, 2019), each bit represents not
only a value in the information but a praxis of thought, which when
entering the language of programming enters the logical language of
the explicit and the detailed, the information is compiled and appears
in the adaptive language of the internet that can be read, translated
and understood by any digital individual. Each of these micropowers
represents a linguistic layer that manifests the political power in
digitization as a functional and total unit in the understanding of
Netopraxis.
Power, being a circuit, implies a relational dynamis, whose
subjectivity, when inserted in the world of the digital, initiates, in
Arendt's words "to appear, to become visible, for the first time, before
the eyes of the other, to become part of a common world" (1997, p. 18),
the world of digital information. Therefore, power becomes political in
this world only when there is a praxis of common language, that is to
say, each word, each photograph, each image, each character is
experienced in itself and by the other in the act of communicating
something, of speaking something and how this speaking generates a
series of affections in the other, who responds with a like, a comment,
a share, a reproduce, among others.
This common language externalizes subjectivity; it is no longer the
world of interiority and privacy of the algorithm as a technical
language, but the world of the public that becomes more and more
published (Conill, 2018). Individuals publish their intimacy, enter into
the relational game of belonging to that circuit of power through the
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like; they open the field to "belong" which in its double meaning means
extension and relationship, that is, to extend their subjectivity through
the digitus in others, and establish a common relationship with other
digital subjectivities. This extension and political relationship is called
digital community.
In the digital community, the adaptive language reaffirms and argues
what is intuitively present in the technical language, there, in the
adaptive language of the digital is where a "someone" is recognized, it
is no longer a simple thing that is visualized through a screen; it is a
someone who belongs to a world in relation (Pigem, 2018). This is the
hard battle that ontodigitalization must live every day, to tear away
from the pessimistic culture of digital dehumanization, and to
understand that the status of political power in the digital language, is
legitimized in the plurality of the community- in a relational world,
what in Bauman's words (2019) is called the common condition, which
is nothing more than the desired and imagined space.
When there is digital plurality, there is a digital community, and when
there is a digital community, this relational circuit that builds
common consensus is legitimized and validated, starting first of all
when the individual is part of a digital community, by belonging to a
social network. There they "accept" certain "terms" that are nothing
more than policies that define belonging to that community. In this
communitarian act, the world as experiences, the world as praxis, the
world as presence, the world as language are re-signified. In the latter
not only resides, but also validates the political, since its importance is
not for subjectivity, but for the space of appearance as Arendt (1997)
would say. That is why the political power of the digital, although it is
established from the technical language of the algorithm, is validated
in the adaptive language of the Net, there the human being is
language where reality and virtuality merge into one thing.
In the digital community, the political circuit establishes linguistic
practices that establish a comprehensive relationship between the
individual and the technical and adaptive processes of digital
language. This relationship, being pushed by a political circuit, implies
a movement not of the body, but of thought, performing operations
that co-create the contexts of the Net, making possible from an
ontological perspective an actualization not only of the individual who
dwells in the digital world, but also of the ecosystem of that world.
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These movements are co-governed by hierarchical structures of the
political circuit of the digital, presented in layers that respond to:
ecosystems, platforms, services, content, and uses. This movement
represents a unity and cannot be understood in a fragmentary way, for
example: the ecosystem of an "application" requires platforms, offers
a service and includes the user to create content for them, all have
different spheres of power, and all have a different movement, from
the most primitive (digital users) to more complex movements such as
ontodigitalizers that not only have an understanding of the adaptive
language of the net, but its technical language such as algorithmic
language.
The most important thing about political power as a circuit is its
operation (praxis) both linguistic and rational, it is the
intersubjectivization of the ontological understanding that is
configured there, a kind of hermeneutic frame of thought that
elucidates the human-digital behavior that allows the "conditions of
acceptability" (Castro-Gómez, 2015) not to be pejorated, but on the
contrary, achieves that digital individuals not only accept the
conditions of some terms to be able to live in the digital world, but that
they autonomously cement a series of affective and concrete practices
by setting in motion some production games that end up being part of
their daily life, thus becoming a psychopolitics as Byung-Chul Han will
mention, which is that neoliberal policy that pretends to be positive,
and that seeks to please instead of subjugating and subduing. Chul
Han himself (2019) will say.
Psychopolitics (...) instead of operating with threats, operates with
positive stimuli. It does not use bitter medicine, but I like it. It flatters
the soul instead of shaking and paralyzing it through shocks. It seduces
instead of opposing it. It takes the lead. It attentively takes note of
longings, needs and desires, instead of unlearning them. With the help
of forecasts, it anticipates actions, even acts before it instead of
hindering it (p. 57).
The concept of government that is kept in the political circuit of
algorithmic language takes shape in the field of a "relation-we", the
circuit as political power legitimizes some modes of relationship and
understanding, where the digital community has its ways of life,
builds its own beliefs, defines minimums of relationship and validates
itself from its linguistic experiences; it is here, Habermas (2003) will
say, where the "claim of validity carries implicitly the affirmation that
something is worthy of being recognized" (p. 189). Therefore, political
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power is the power of language, and since language is a concept, then
through it, the concept of relationship, security, freedom, democracy,
civil society, and economy is reconfigured.
Conclusions
Netopraxis as hermeneutics of language expresses a symbolic world of
the new emerging logics of governance. It is through language that
digitalization imprints a practice of control and management of
human life. In it, a rationality is established between the adaptive and
the technical, the latter being a logical form that keeps a will to be that
makes human affection coincide with it in the adaptive, turning it into
a human need to open up to the world to be captured and recognized
from the digital. Netopraxis as a practice of digital government, starts
from a linguistic rationality, built from algorithms that pretend to
produce modes of existence that from the digitus respects the human
being by analyzing his affections, feelings and emotions. The human
factum is objectification of the algorithm, he does not matter, what
matters are his experiences in relation to technology and what it
promotes. Once the experiences are captured to be analyzed, a process
of orientation begins, which, under the intention of possibility
suggests how the machine should be lived and not used. The human
being, under the existential optics of his relationship with the digital,
yields his being to the algorithm, allows himself to be led and
persuaded by its language, a symbolic load that keeps a technicality
that involves his thought, his singularity, a kind of colonization of his
being that is a product to configure subjectivities, as Joan will say.
Carles Mèlich: "technology has achieved the extreme complicity of its
subjects: the enjoyment and love of the system" (2021, p.142).
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