Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

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Editor-in-Chief: Sukhendu Das, Bankura University
Executive Editor: Baloram Balo, Doctoral Scholar, University of Kalyani

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(Article)
The Interface Self: A Posthuman Critique of Optimization and Aesthetic Subjectivation
Authored By — Jared Smith

Abstract

This article theorizes the interface self: a mode of subjectivity emergent within algorithmically mediated platforms that organize labor, intimacy, and self-presentation. Neither merely expressive nor autonomous, the interface self is shaped through optimization logics, datafication, and feedback-driven design and use. Digital systems such as job platforms, dating apps, and social media increasingly co-constitute users as legible profiles, privileging metrics, preferences, and performative visibility. While often framed as empowering, this dynamic enacts new modes of soft coercion that aestheticize recognition, gamify selfworth, and disarticulate agency from narrative coherence. To analyze this condition, the article first revisits Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary power and its transformation under the regime of digital modulation. It then employs Andrew Feenberg's theory of instrumentalization to reveal the political and technical structuring of platforms, and draws on postphenomenological thinkers such as Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Asle Kiran to explore the layered textures of technological mediation. Finally, it turns to posthumanist theorists, including Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, to refigure the interface self not as a loss of uthenticity, but as a situated, relational becoming within socio-technical ecologies. Rather than seeking escape or transcendence, the article proposes a posthuman praxis of "dwelling within and against" the interface—cultivating opacity, ethical friction, and collective refusal from within systems designed to optimize and predict. The interface self, it argues, marks not the disappearance of the subject but its reconfiguration at a contemporary threshold.

Keywords

posthumanism, technology, subjectivity, optimization, mediation, entanglements
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