“Your History is Being Worked Up”: Microfiction in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

ABSTRACT: This article is primarily concerned with the dialectics between dividuality—the Deleuzian concept for the fragmentation of the subject into discrete sets of separate information—and individuality in microfiction. After contextualizing the emergence of microfiction in the digital age, it analyzes the widespread use of anonymity in this genre in relation to the modes of data-based subjectivation. Its central claim is that recent examples of microfiction display a modulatory tension between categorical identities and individuality: while many texts present increasingly anonymized characters, who have less and less agency and are caught in tight but overcrowded spaces, they also mourn the disappearance of the individual into the anonymity of the type. The article develops this claim in four sections: the first contextualizes microfiction in the “world of the now” that shapes the fourth industrial revolution, in order to reconsider brevity; the second traces the development of microfiction in parallel with the impact of technologies upon subjectivation; the third section addresses the vulnerability of the individual in the divided but overcrowded space of onlife and the related choice of “threshold sites” as a favorite setting in microfiction; finally, the concluding part explores how several texts articulate anxieties about individuality and the inaccessibility of the data double as two key elements that shape characterization. The Lacanian model for the primary alienation of the subject has been adopted as a convenient structure to grasp the impact of the digital translation of the gaze upon subjectivation. Overall, this article suggests a frame to understand the development of microfiction in light of innovations and disruptions that have been silently shaping the last four decades.