Ideal Subjects Volume 76

Olga Goriunova is professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet and coauthor of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota, 2019).

"Exciting and important, Ideal Subjects has been needed for a decade, if not longer. Olga Goriunova approaches the theory of the subject in the context of modernity and technology, answering a series of questions that has been both central to yet obfuscated by recent scholarship." - Justin Joque, University of Michigan"Olga Goriunova moves deftly between sociocultural analysis and theoretical inquiry to reveal how AI does not simply extract data from human experiences but produces 'ideal subjects' – abstractions of ideals, desires, and data patterns that change subject-making. This book is compelling reading for anyone seeking to understand how we become ourselves (and something other than ourselves) in the age of algorithmic prediction." – M. Beatrice Fazi, University of Sussex"What is a 'digital person,' and why should we care? Goriunova's answers prove as complex as they are fascinating." – Los Angeles Times

• ContentsIntroduction: The Uses and Kinds of SubjectsDigital Subjects Operate at a Distance ~ Subject, Person, Self, and Subjectivity ~ Legal Fictive Person and Fictional Persona ~ Different Kinds and Uses of Abstraction ~ Ideal as Mathematical Projection, Inhabiting Abstractions Through Desire ~ The Body as a Reality Setting for Subjects ~ Some Shortcuts Through the Chapters1. Subject at a Distance and the Politics of KnowingWhat Kinds of Digital Subjects Are There? ~ Probability Distributions and Predicted Subjects as Patterns ~ Indexical Capacities of Data ~ An Index, Icon, or Diagram ~ Indexicality Comes from Elsewhere ~ Distance in the Digital Subject ~ The Modern Subject at a Distance from Oneself ~ Transcendental Subjects and Ideal Objects of Calculus ~ Asking About the Potential of Abstract Subjects ~ Subjects' Useful Uselessness: Lots of Abstractions ~ Conundrums2. Ideals: Subjects Desire AbstractionsCorrelating Patterns and Profiling the Ideal Subject ~ Ideal as Abstraction: How to Desire a Top Percentile ~ Becoming Oneself: Desire to Be Known by Computation ~ Recognizability: Artificial Intelligence as Subjective and Objective Truth-Teller ~ Bayesian Prediction in the Quest for Truths ~ The Hegelian Mutual Realization of Subject and World ~ Gripping Subjects3. Struggles for RealitiesSingular Identity, Ground Truthing, Making the "Really True" ~ Nature Versus Biometrics: Data-Stitching and Aligning ~ Shaping Artificial Intelligence to Orchestrate a "Real World" ~ The Shifting Sands of New RealitiesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex