Subject-in-digital: Poverty of Experience and Abundance of Data

The article examines the problem of self-determination of a human as a subject of existential experience in the context of the comprehensive digitalization of his life world. The starting point is Byung-Chol Han’s thesis that the crisis of human subjectivity in the digital age is expressed in his inability to create genuine narra­tives that are radically different from the messages that people exchange on so­cial networks. If the function of a traditional story is to express and shape the collective experience of existence in the world, then today’s “stories” merely position individuals in the digital space without creating a real community. In his study, Han refers to the works of Walter Benjamin, who almost a century ago ex­pressed views on the impoverishment of experience in a world dominated by in­formation. It seems, however, that Han does not take into account the dialectical nature of Benjamin’s thought. We are trying to find in this thought an indication of the need to seek a new form of experience, within which the very fact of “im­poverishment” could be realized, experienced and, most importantly, creative­ly used. For this, we turn to the concept of the dialectical image proposed by Benjamin, which we propose to use as a condition for the possibility of sub­jectivation and narrativization of the experience of existence in the conditions of the digital age.