Memory in the digital space as a form of the “care of the self”

The article offers an attempt to conceptualize contemporary practices of digital resurrection of the subject in the context of the emergence and spread of chatbots based on artificial intelligence. Digital resources of constructing the subject’s digital image in a dialogical form carry out the mediating function of remembering, producing and generalizing “texts of life.” Actual forms of recollection in the dynamics of individual memory are analyzed, and different levels and meanings of the contemporary discourse of the subject’s digital resurrection are developed. Recollection is considered both as a technologically unified practice of permanent actualization of memory about an individual and as a result of constructing a personal image intended for postmortem broadcasting and processing in digital space. The creation of a digital copy of the deceased, constructed according to a single, unified template, is presented as one of the actual ways of forming representations of the individual’s past.

The variety of modern technological developments (test/startups and final commercial products), which design and broadcast the postmortem image of a person in digital mode, is presented and analyzed. The ideas of Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, Michel Foucault, Geert Lovink, Hermann Lübbe, and Theodor W. Adorno are touched upon. The article also problematizes the notion of subjectivity through the prism of imperatives and standards underlying such a concept as the “care of the self.” Practices of the “care of the self” include the aspect of remembering: the requirement of forming one’s own biography, its transmission, and the construction of memories of the image of a physical and digitalized person. The following conclusion is formulated: private forms of the “care of the self” in digital space are practices of reactivation of the subject, actualization of memory about him/her on the basis of approved representing components. The strategy of constructing memories refers to a standardized, technicalized, streaming mechanism of reproducing digital models. However, this mechanism allows the existence of a digital trace to actualize the memory of the physical “medium” by reducing digital “cloning” to the transformation of the repetitive into the inimitable, the serial into the unique. The memory becomes a technical overproduction of the living, the result of the subject’s own assemblage in a greater perspective.