Abstract
This article examines digital twinning as a media technology and performative practice, focusing on its post-digital ambiguities. To show why and to what extent the concept of spectrality is particularly well suited for discussing the post-digital mediality of twinning, this article proceeds in two steps. First, it reviews research on twin metaphors and the uncanny in cybernetics and digital media. This provides a contextualization of digital twinning within a media theoretical tradition. Second, the figure of the specter is revisited in an interpretation of Derrida’s Specters of Marx that focuses on the aspects of its corporeality, temporality, immateriality, and performativity. As a result, digital twinning is reconceptualized as a performative practice that enables the spectral materialization of many potential behaviors. As such, it destabilizes traditional notions of temporality, participates in the process of commodification and bears responsibility for a democracy to come.
Keywords
Introduction
This article is based on the assumption that by examining the concept of digital twinning we can comprehend what shapes our current ideas of future media technologies (Ernst and Schröter, 2020: 31–71). For this purpose, I introduce the cultural and philosophical figure of the specter to the academic discussion of digital twinning, which has the potential to reorganize our understanding of mediation in the post-digital constellation (Berry, 2015), particularly our notions of representation, materiality and time. As this article is dedicated to a media theoretical perspective on twinning, it will not concentrate on a specific example of the technology. Instead, it will repeatedly refer to crucial characteristics of digital twinning which – in contrast to a still lacking uniform definition (see Korenhof et al., 2021: 1753) – have already been identified in various literature reviews of the industry’s academic discourse (see, for example, van der Valk et al., 2020, 2022) In one of the first contributions to a philosophical reflection of this discourse, Korenhof et al. (2021: 1755) identify five characteristics that “differentiate[] a Digital Twin from other model and simulation technologies”: a real-time relation between the physical object and its digital model, often referred to as “synchronization” (van der Valk et al., 2020: 5); “high-fidelity” or even “hyperrealism” in the digital representation of a physical object, which, in industrial discourse, is often only discussed as partial or complete “accuracy” (van der Valk et al., 2020: 5); the purpose of predicting “potential future states” of the physical entity; a “prescriptive” character of the digital representation; and finally “some form of feedback” (Korenhof et al., 2021: 1755–1757). In contrast to the industry’s academic characterizations of digital twinning that focus on data infrastructure, interfaces and various purposes, Korenhof et al. highlight the complexity of the relationship between the physical and the digital entities which they conceptualize through issues of representation and power. They contextualize digital twinning within semiotics and critical theory and thus provide an important foundation for this article’s efforts to understand digital twinning from a post-structuralist perspective.
To show why and to what extent the concept of spectrality is particularly well suited for discussing the post-digital mediality of twinning, this article proceeds in two steps. First, it reviews research on twin metaphors and the “uncanny” in cybernetics and digital media. This provides a further contextualization of digital twinning in a media theoretical tradition that is still in its early stages (for an exception, see also Blok, 2023) and already indicates how appropriate the concept of spectrality is for understanding digital twinning. Second, the figure of the specter is revisited in a re-reading of Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx focusing on characteristics of the specter that share similarities with digital twins: corporeality, temporality, immateriality and performativity. The article thus accomplishes two things: it conceptualizes the performative practice of digital twinning as spectral and therefore continues a theory tradition of mediation that can be traced back to the 19th century. At the same time, it updates the concept of spectrality for the 21st century. At a time when industry, health care, government, and society have high hopes for digital twinning, 1 the concept of the specter not only helps us to understand the complexity of post-digital human-machine assemblages, but also to critically analyze them and, not least, to focus on their political and ethical implications.
The complexities of twins and doubles
Most publications on digital twinning focus on definitional issues and application aspects by and for the industry. Concepts such as transhumanism (Barachini and Stary, 2022: 12) or post-structuralism (Korenhof et al., 2021: 1760) are occasionally touched upon, but not fully addressed. To situate the technology within a media theoretical framework, it is therefore necessary to consult literature that does not deal directly with digital twinning. The article first traces the metaphor of the twin, which has come to be accepted as a term for the technology, although there were various alternatives at first. As King (2022) has shown, the twin metaphor also plays an important role in cybernetics. From there, we move on to the concept of “data doubles,” which characterizes at least one element of digital twinning, namely the translation of the physical object into data that can be processed by a computer, as uncanny. Finally, another element of twinning, feedback, and its conceptualization as uncanny is explored (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019). In doing so, important preliminary work is reviewed, upon which a rethinking of the concept of spectrality can be built.
In the manufacturing industry’s historiography, the concept of digital twins is usually traced back to product lifecycle management ideas of the early 2000s. At the time, computer engineer and business manager Michael Grieves called the concept “Mirrored Space Model” or “Information Mirroring Model,” echoing David Gelernter’s (1992) idea of “mirror worlds,” until he worked with John Vickers from NASA in 2010 who came up with the term “digital twin” (Grieves and Vickers, 2017: 93–94). Prior to this, Grieves had also used the terms “virtual twin” or “virtual doppelganger” (Grieves, 2019: 177). Other works reveal yet further metaphors such as the “cyber twin,” the “digital shadow” or “device shadow,” the “digital thread” or even the “digital master” (as quoted in Trauer et al., 2020: 758). In the end, the “digital twin” prevailed, emphasizing the aspects of duplication and computation rather than those of optical illusion and simulation. The metaphor thus already indicates an emphasis on what Korenhof et al. call high fidelity of representation as well as the various forms of “kinship” (real-time synchronization, feedback) between the physical entity and its digital counterpart. At first glance, the other characteristics, such as the predictive and prescriptive qualities, are neglected – an effect quite typical for the use of metaphors.
The industry certainly distinguishes between metaphor and concept and not really understands the relationship between virtual model and physical product as the kind of human kinship that exists between twins. Nevertheless, the metaphor – as the “interaction view” on metaphor (Black, 1954: 285–291) suggests – not only affects how the technology of “digital twinning” is conceived but also what we mean by twins. In other words: the meaning of “digital model” as well as the meaning of “twinship” is modified by the metaphor. The transformative nature of metaphors was already depicted by Aristotle (2009) who, in his Poetics (1457b), defined the metaphor as transfer or translation (epiphora) of a strange term. In his view, the “right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances” and “is the token of genius” (Aristotle, 2009, Poetics: 1459a). Metaphors therefore not only serve ornamental or persuasive purposes but also epistemic ones (see also Rapp and Corcilius, 2021: 313). Even Grieves (2022: 5), the self proclaimed father of the digital twin metaphor, recognizes the transformative nature of metaphors (while at the same time emphasizing the associated economic opportunities): “Metaphors are not simply comparisons, but generative devices that allow rich understandings, new perspectives, and generative ideas that open up areas of opportunities that had not previously been thought of.” So, while nobody really conceives of digital representations as human twins, due to metaphor theory, it cannot be denied that both the meaning of representation and the meaning of twins are altered by the selection, emphasis, suppression and organization of their principal features (see Black, 1954: 291f.). Following the interaction theory of metaphors, the meaning of “twin” assumes computational and technical aspects while the meaning of digital representation assumes biological and human aspects. For this reason, there has been substantial critique of the twin metaphor. 2 While it may be a reasonable idea, from a scientific point of view, to insist on a “proper” definition of the technology, it is, from a rhetorical and media theoretical perspective, much more promising to accept the metaphoric nature of knowledge, focus on its implied or openly criticized implications and discover its complexities.
Twins as “guiding metaphor of cybernetics”
An important context for the twin metaphor is the idea of duplication. German sociologist Armin Nassehi (2024: 19), for example, recently claimed: “If you want somehow to get to the heart of the digital, in the last resort it is nothing but a duplication of the world in the form of data.” Twins, however, “are not doubles,” Edward King (2022: 2) reminds us. In his informative study, Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures, the cultural theorist emphasizes the “nuanced gradations of difference rather than [the] sameness” even of so-called identical twins (King, 2022: 2). He traces the twin trope from twin studies in anthropology and early cybernetics to the presentation and datafication of the self in the digital age but reflects only briefly on the technology of digital twinning. Twins, he claims, have not only been a favorite subject of the Gothic story, but also of science-fiction narratives since the middle of the 20th century. In these stories, twins are often able to communicate telepathically with each other – regardless of whether they are Siamese, monozygotic or dizygotic. They are presented as entwined beings, to whom – like to the medium in spiritualism – a superhuman sensory ability is attributed. According to King (2022: 45), these twins are to be understood as representations of “communication technologies,” a notion informed by contemporary cybernetic thought, as in, for instance, the close connection between telepathy and control, the processes of mutual feedback between the twins, and the forms of entanglement between humans or, in the case of cybernetics, between humans and machines. 3 By drawing on the writings of cyberneticians William Grey Walter (1961[1953]) and Norbert Wiener (1989[1950]), King (2022: 36) finds that they use twins and twin metaphors to challenge “dominant distinctions between the organic and the mechanical, between human and non-human, between life and non-life.”
It is, in particular, the thought experiment of Wiener (1989[1950]: 95–104) on how to transform an organism, or human, into an informational pattern which brings King (2022: 198) to the conclusion that twins are a “guiding metaphor of cybernetics.” “To describe an organism,” Wiener (1989[1950]: 95) writes in interesting similarity to the problem of high-fidelity in digital twinning discourse, “we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern.” The pattern, as Wiener (1989[1950]: 101f.) sees it, is not the result of the substance of an organism but of the behavior it exhibits, just like the differences and singularities developed by monozygotic twins during their respective life experiences. With reference to cybernetic systems and feedback (the latter being a crucial characteristic of digital twinning), King comes to the conclusion that the twin metaphor not only emphasizes the aspect of identity, but also that of recursion – a specific operation of repetition that is, according to Yuk Hui (2019: 4) “characterized by the looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singularity.” In conclusion, a cybernetic understanding of the twin metaphor focusses on the multiple encounters and interactions of twins with their environment that create more and more differences rather than on their genetic identity, without completely neglecting their special kinship. Hence, King’s cybernetic contextualization of the twin metaphor emphasizes the problem of high-fidelity representation, the importance of feedback loops and the process of twinning rather than twinship per se.
Feedback loops and the “digital uncanny”
In her monograph Digital Uncanny, film and media scholar Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli redefines the uncanny as an aesthetic experience in digital environments and touches upon cybernetic questions (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 97–142). In her opinion, the uncanny can no longer be solely explained as the “return of repressed memories” or the projection of “human anxieties . . . onto nonhuman objects” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 4f). Instead, the digital uncanny consists in the experience “that our behavior may be predictable precisely because we are machinic. In fact, this anticipation is a feedback loop that we humans have created by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 5). The predictive or even prescriptive qualities of digital twins may therefore also be understood as examples of the digital uncanny. Discussing various interactive video art installations, Ravetto-Biagioli (2019: 104) understands feedback no longer as the result of “circular causality and control,” but as an effect of multifaceted and unpredictable interactions. 4 Feedback, she claims, “plays a double role: it produces uncertainty in the form of an ability to control or predict the outcome (ex ante), and the certainty of command and control of the message (ex post)” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 105). Whereas the past is controllable, the prediction of the future always remains uncertain and can only ever be controlled afterwards.
In cybernetics, a distinction is made between positive and negative feedback, with an autopoietic system only being able to react to the latter with self-correction and self-regulation. Positive feedback is unstable and contains no information, so that it can even lead to an infinite regress, while negative feedback can be stored as information and also be fed in again (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 124). As such, information is “both actual (integrated into command and control systems) and speculative (waiting in reserve for some possible future use)” and thereby both stable and dynamic (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 124). While Wiener was primarily concerned with stable automated cycles, according to Ravetto-Biagioli, later cybernetics dealt with the observation of semi-automatic environments in which the static and dynamic are interconnected in complex feedback loops.
While digital twinning discourse may understand feedback mainly as a “steering technique” (Korenhof et al., 2021: 1765), art discourse draws attention to the inherent uncertainties and instabilities of cybernetic environments. It also questions the subject of control. In a human-nonhuman assemblage of the kind found in digital twinning, it is not only the human who sits at the controls, but also the machine, since humans have to learn “how to work within the demands and constraints of the interactive, networked, computational environment to achieve intended . . . outcomes” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019: 110). Against this backdrop, it becomes evident how useful the aesthetic concept of the uncanny (Freud, 1999[1919]) is for a deeper understanding of the predictive and prescriptive qualities of digital twins. From here, it is only a short distance to the specter, but on the way there, we make a brief stop at Frankenstein’s castle.
The “decorporealized body” of the data double
The twinning process involves datafication and is not to be confused with mere duplication. Nassehi (2024: 75), quoted at the beginning, already points out that data “duplicate the world but do not contain it.” This echoes the idea of the “data double”-a metaphor closely connected to both the twin metaphor and the uncanny. Sociologists Haggerty and Ericson (2000: 611) use the term to describe a “decorporealized body, a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality” as a consequence of datafication and surveillance. They understand the double as an assemblage in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense: an array of heterogeneous objects that includes people, signs, technology and institutions as well as the flows and streams between these objects (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 608). By monitoring our body, online behavior and consumer choices, the self is constantly transformed into “pure information” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 613). This information can potentially be rearranged at will, depending on the needs and desires of the surveillance industry (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 609). Whereas early cyberneticians were concerned with the question of how to transform organisms into information at all, Haggerty and Ericson focus on the interests of an industry and emphasize the decreasing ability to distinguish between human and nonhuman elements in the realm of technology.
They raise the question of agency and control and bring, although not explicitly, the Freudian uncanny into the equation: “In the figure of a body assembled from the parts of different corpses, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein spoke to early-modern anxieties about the potential consequences of unrestrained science and technology” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 613). Accordingly, the data double presents “a new type of body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 613) and complicates the distinction between materiality and immateriality. This new, purely informational type of body can be manipulated in different ways than the corporeal body; it can take on any potential form without losing the individuality obtained through the datafication of a particular body. Haggerty and Ericson thus touch upon a key characteristic of digital twinning, which Korenhof et al. (2021: 1758) discuss under the term “high-fidelity”: they claim that the digital representation “is something extra to the physical entity, a ‘datafied surplus’” and thus “embodies an intricate entanglement between materialisation and signification.” By mentioning surplus, or rather supplement, the authors refer explicitly, but only cursorily, to the thesis formulated in Derrida’s (1997: 158) Grammatology that no text refers to something outside of itself. The supplement is based on contradictory “twin gestures”: it is something that is supplemented from the outside, but at the same time it is also a substitute for what is missing in the text and is thus always already inscribed in it (Bernasconi, 2015: 19f.). Applied to digital twinning, this raises the question of whether the physical object and its datafied representation are in a relationship at all, or whether the physical object cannot be thought of as anything other than datafied. It is not only the proximity to the uncanny and the spectral, but also the complex question of signification in digital twinning that suggests a closer examination of Derrida’s thinking.
Revisiting spectrality
Like Frankenstein or telepathic twins, the specter is a figure of the Gothic novel. To show what it has to offer to the study of digital twinning, this section contextualizes the specter in Derrida’s work from a media theoretical perspective and elaborates on characteristics that share similarities with digital twins: precarious corporeality, temporality, commodification, and performativity. Based on the specter’s ability to disturb an established order and to encourage reflection on it (Peeren, 2014; Sternad, 2013), our interpretation of crucial passages on Hamlet and on commodity fetishism in Derrida’s Specters of Marx focuses on disruptions of the dichotomy of materiality and immateriality, which touch on the entanglements of materialization and signification in digital twinning, and on irritations of the order of time, with particular attention to questions of performativity that refer to the predictive and prescriptive qualities of digital twinning. Pondering on the similarities and differences between spectrality and mediation and the political implications of Derrida’s hauntology, the section intends to understand the “data language” of digital twinning as spectral – in analogy to Derrida’s understanding of language.
Before specters became the key protagonists in Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx, they were the object of spiritualist séances and, during the 19th century, increasingly supported by media technologies; they populated psychological thought, representing repressed feelings of guilt or the uncanny liveliness of inanimate objects; and they haunted Marx’s writings. 5 Derrida’s monograph deals with the afterlife of Marxism after the death of the Soviet Union. Re-reading, among others, the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), The German Ideology (1845, with Friedrich Engels), and the Capital (1864–1897), Derrida notices a dimension of Marx’s writing that had remained overlooked until then – the curious pervasiveness and power of specters in these texts: “Marx does not like ghosts . . .. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else” (Derrida, 1994: 57). For Derrida, the “quasi-concept” (Scherübl, 2023: 217, own translation) of the specter that emerges from this re-reading represents the logic of deconstruction; a “thinking . . . that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical, living – or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence)” (Derrida, 1994: 78). This non-binary logic resembles the complex (non-)identities of twins and doubles and the uncertainties of the uncanny. The specter had already been a presence in Derrida’s thinking before Specters of Marx, for example in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance from 1983, in which Derrida plays himself, in Derrida’s (1988) obituary of Roland Barthes and in philosophical works such as Of Spirit (1989) or Force of Law (1990) (Scherübl, 2023: 217). Later, the specter is a prominent topic of his conversations about television with Bernard Stiegler (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002) and in his reflections on cinema (de Baecque and Jousse, 2015). Following Derrida, the spectral figure has been applied in many disciplinary contexts outside of Marxism, for example in psychology, cultural studies, history and literature (Blanco and Peeren, 2013).
Media studies are particularly interested in the specter as a figure of the in-between and “of media self-reference and self-reflection” (Baßler et al., 2005: 11, own translation) that helps us deal with the defining inconsistencies of post-digital environments. The core characteristics of the specter resemble those of a “medium”-the basic medium in this respect being language. Among others, Stefan Andriopoulos (2013: 12) acknowledges the similarity between specters and media while noting that Derrida “adopts an exclusive focus on language as a source of spectrality.” Derrida also mentions “the media” in a broader sense, in the sense of “news, the press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political” (Derrida, 1994: 63). He thus establishes, albeit only briefly, a connection between the mediality of language and “the media,” the public sphere and politics. When we explore the various aspects of spectrality and apply them to the practice of digital twinning, we therefore also need to consider the public and political dimensions of the technology.
Enter Ghost: the “becoming-body” of the specter
Aware of “Marx’s love for Shakespeare” (Derrida, 1994: 10), Derrida introduces the figure of the specter discussing the apparition of Hamlet’s father in the first act. Toward midnight on the terrace of Elsinore Castle, the disembodied spirit of Hamlet’s father assumes a body to make contact with his son. For Derrida (1994: 5), this represents a “paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit.” “It becomes,” he continues using a typical phrasing of deconstruction, “some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (Derrida, 1994: 5). The “thing” is beyond knowledge and yet perceptible to the senses of vision and hearing, and disposes of a “tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other” (Derrida, 1994: 6). In a sense, the specter is the temporary result of a constant process of transformation and transfer that will never lead to a final result. We must think of it as virtual and, as Derrida (1994: 13) emphasizes, “as possibility.” With regard to the public sphere, this virtual space is later also referred to as “teletechnological difference” (Derrida, 1994: 238, fn. 12).
In analogy to the apparition of Hamlet’s father, we can understand the digital part of twinning as spectral precisely because of its paradoxical disembodied corporeality. Digital representation and physical body are not only connected via an abstract – or in semiotic terms – arbitrary relationship, but also physically. Therefore, the digital is an “apparition” of the physical rather than a mere representation. Even if the digital counterpart of, say, a human heart will never bleed, it possesses a disembodied corporeality that distinguishes it from a verbal or visual representation. Sensor-based data about how the materiality of the physical object behaves simulate that very materiality and thus create what Korenhof et al. have called the “datafied surplus” of digital representation. Now it becomes clear that the very term of representation may be somewhat misleading, as the digital twin seems to be at least as much a matter of digital materialization as of representation.
“The time is out of joint”: temporalities of the specter
Musing intensely over Hamlet’s famous words, “the time is out of joint,” Derrida elaborates how the specter irritates the sense of time of those who encounter it. Because “we do not see who looks at us,” the specter establishes an asymmetry and “de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony” (Derrida, 1994: 6). In meeting his father’s ghost in the present, Hamlet encounters the past and anticipates the ghost’s next appearance in the future. Derrida (1994: 11) sees this as “[a] question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant.” The specter’s “mode of presence” is precarious since one can “never distinguish between the future-to-come and the coming-back of a specter” (Derrida, 1994: 46). It never materializes only once; it consists in the “frequency of a certain visibility” (Derrida, 1994: 125). Transferred to the idea of digital twinning, terms such as “real-time” and “synchronization” need to be used very carefully. What Derrida (1994: 123) writes about the specter—“[t]here are several times of the specter”—is also true for digital twinning. Despite the real-time synchronization, the digital and physical objects are not simultaneous, or better: they are not in the same time. Rather, their simultaneity is “out of joint.”
This is due not only to the fact that physical and digital objects are in principle never identical and can therefore never be fully synchronized, but also because twinning is usually fed by multiple data sources that originate from different time periods. For example, the twin of a lock may be based on sensor data, which continuously monitor water pressure and flow velocity, and construction data measured 5 years ago. The digital apparition (rather than the representation) therefore already contains several times at a certain moment in time. These temporalities become even more complicated when we follow the process of twinning. For example, data from sensors observing actual aging processes may overlap with data from simulations of aging processes, so that actual and potential temporal developments become indistinguishably intertwined in the digital twin. This also affects the perception of the physical twin’s temporality, which seems to detach itself from the here and now due to the many potential futures, or pasts, that lie ahead of it.
“[A]t the same time life, thing, beast, object, commodity, automaton”: the specter as commodity
So far, our reconstruction of spectrality has mainly been modeled on the Shakespearean ghost of Hamlet’s father, dealing with its virtual body and focusing on the temporality of its appearances. It has already been established that the specter is a strange thing, “between something and someone” (Derrida, 1994: 5). Now we further clarify its status as a spectral object by looking at commodification. Derrida (1994: 55) reminds us: “Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly of the ghost.” This again concerns the entanglement of signification and materialization: While referring to the monetary value, the banknote or coin itself is devalued as a material. Its paper or metal body thus takes on a spectral character. This also applies to all other kinds of objects once they are given an exchange value and thus become commodities. Derrida (1994: 56) calls this process of commodity metamorphosis “spectropoetic.” In his analysis of The German Ideology, Derrida asserts that the lexis and semantics of the spectral used therein are by no means merely rhetorical but are rooted in the religious: “The mystical character of the fetish, in the mark it leaves on the experience of the religious, is first of all a ghostly character” (Derrida, 1994: 185). It would be worthwhile to pursue this mystical aspect further, but the scope of this article does not allow us to explore the fetish character of digital twins in addition to their spectral nature.
The famous table that Marx invokes at the beginning of Capital is to a certain extent “out of joint” and thus “the example of an apparition” (Derrida, 1994: 187). To be able to see the table as a commodity, Derrida suggests being open to both invisibilities and visibilities. As a commodity, the table is still a wooden object, but at the same time, as Marx himself writes, a “sensually supersensible thing” (quoted in Derrida, 1994: 189). Derrida concludes, using a theater metaphor: “The commodity thus haunts the thing, its specter is at work in use-value. This haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra [figurante] who might be the principal or capital character” (Derrida, 1994: 189). By analogy, one could say that in digital twinning the physical object or body is also displaced and degraded from the main character to an extra in favor of its digital representation or materialization. Similar to Marx’s table, the physical object becomes a “strange creature: at the same time Life, Thing, Beast, Object, Commodity, Automaton – in a word, specter” (Derrida, 1994: 190). Once on “the stage of the market,” Derrida (1994: 190) continues, the table appears as “a prosthesis of itself” that
puts itself into motion, to be sure, and seems thus to animate, animalize, spiritualize, spiritize itself, but while remaining an artifactual body, a sort of automaton, a puppet, a stiff and mechanical doll whose dance obeys the technical rigidity of a program.
If we transfer this to digital twinning, we understand that the physical world may well be immaterialized and turned into a prosthesis of itself, but is also animated, that is, brought to life and thus turned into an automaton. These insights further differentiate the characteristics of high-fidelity.
The performative nature of the animation at work here deserves a closer look, as it allows us to further clarify the predictive and prescriptive qualities of digital twinning. Before we tackle this endeavor in the next paragraph, however, it is worth noting a neologism used by Derrida in the above quote and discussed more deeply in Echographies of Television: “artifactuality” (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 1–27). By artifactual, he means synthetic images, voices and “all the prosthetic supplements that can take the place of real actuality” in teletechnology (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 6). Their actuality is manufactured, just like the digital representation in twinning, it is made and therefore not a mirror or an equivalent to reality. Artifactuality, however, comes with “actuvirtuality” by which Derrida means “a concept of virtuality . . . that can doubtless no longer be opposed, in perfect philosophical serenity, to actual [actuelle] reality,” since it “makes its mark even on the structure of the produced event” (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 6). The entanglements of artifactuality and actuvirtuality perfectly describe the entanglements of physical artifact and virtual representation in twinning and illustrate the effects the inherently spectral nature of teletechnology has on everything it touches. Overall, the processes of both signification and materialization also make us aware that we can think of digital twinning not only in analogy to, but also as a spectropoetic process of commodification.
“Difference within the performative”: the performativity of the specter
The specter affects those who encounter it, either by summoning it into existence or by warding it off and exorcizing it. Derrida is preoccupied with the act of conjuring (Derrida, 1994: 49–60), which he understands as a performative mode of the future that causes “something to arrive” (Derrida, 1994: 50; 128). That the performative act of conjuring serves “to summon the presence of what is not yet there” (Derrida, 1994: 135) is also the subject of Werner Hamacher’s (2008) interpretation of the commodity fetish. Hamacher explicitly elaborates on commodity language as a dialect of language as such and focuses on its temporality which he understands as “fictitious” (Hamacher, 2008: 171). In his view, the temporality is fictitious because it asserts an actuality for something to come, which of course has yet to be proven – in other words: the specter has to be realized. He writes that “[e]very speech act which inaugurates something new, calling to life a subject, a contract or the Communist Party, posits something under the conditions of reality which has heretofore not existed” (Hamacher, 2008: 191). Since the future and the present are realized in the same medium, language, the difference between the two becomes porous (Hamacher, 2008: 191). For Hamacher, the specter is the “archi-figure of difference” and forms a “difference within the performative” (Hamacher, 2008: 183; 196). Of course, Marx, Derrida, and Hamacher each speak of the performativity of communism, which manifests itself in language.
In Derrida’s view, language is the “medium of media” that hosts, creates, performs the spectral, also and especially in teletechnological contexts (Derrida, 1994: 63). As stated in Ghost Dance, Derrida believed that “modern technology . . . increases tenfold the power of ghosts” (quoted in Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 115). Digital twinning, then, seems to be the epitome of these “modern” technologies, as it not only increases spectral effects, but also complicates them further. As a meta-medium for computation, signification, synchronization and materialization, the data-driven language of twinning creates the spectrality of the 21st century. Before returning to this thread in the conclusion, it is worth mentioning another temporal implication of spectral performativity that Hamacher points out. He refers to Derrida’s political and ethical idea of a democracy-to-come, for which Derrida coined the formula of the “messianic without messianism” (Derrida, 1994: 74), and applies it to performativity, which is, due to the lack of messianism, to be understood as a “performative without horizon” (Hamacher, 2008: 201). This horizon of possible futures is not to be limited to the specific promise of a single option, but must be kept open:
Whatever might become a promise without ever indeed being so, belongs to at least two “times”: a time of a future which can come and of a future which cannot come; a time which renders possible and one which renders impossible this very rendering (Hamacher, 2008: 207).
This points to an ethical dimension of the spectral that raises the question of responsibility. After all, the perspective of spectrality serves Derrida not only to describe processes of aphenomenality and atemporality, but also to point to our responsibility in dealing with them.
Conclusion
The contextualization of digital twinning technology in the history of cybernetics, the twin metaphor and the digital uncanny has brought to light some important points for a media theoretical understanding of this technology: the latter should focus not so much on the identity, but on the differences between physical and digital entities, and seek the essence of twinning not in any substance whatsoever, but in the behavior of the two entities. The permanent feedback loop, which is a central characteristic of digital twinning, suggests that behavior can be predicted. However, certainty about future behavior can only ever be established ex post. In addition, the physical entity is not represented in twinning as a whole, but in a fragmented, datafied form, so that it can always be reassembled into new, possible entities, even though digital twinning claims to refer to a very specific, that is, singular, physical entity. This has already shown the contradictions that a media theoretical view of digital twinning has to deal with.
These inconsistencies and potentialities are by no means new, but have already been delineated, according to the second part of this article, in the quasi-concept of spectrality. Although Derrida got to the heart of this concept, he by no means brought it forth, as it had been haunting media theoretical thought since the 19th century at the latest. The productively confusing potential of the specter as a figure of media reflection can very well be applied to the post-digital technology of digital twinning, as demonstrated by a close reading of some central passages from Specters of Marx. My interpretation focused on questions of corporeality, temporality, commodification and performativity, deepening the understanding of central characteristics of twinning such as real-time synchronization, high-fidelity, feedback and its predictive and prescriptive qualities. The following aspects, I argue, are crucial if digital twinning is to be conceived as a spectral technology and performative practice:
Digital twinning is a performative practice that allows the conjuration of many potential behaviors of a physical entity. It is thus not exclusively a prescriptive steering technique, but also a condition of the possibility (and as such, a medium of media) for playing out these potentialities performatively in the first place.
The form in which these possibilities are played out is that of an apparition rather than of representation. The digital and the physical entity are not only connected as a result of semiotic reference, but also of spectral materialization. Digital twinning is therefore to be conceptualized as essentially post-digital.
The space of potentiality that digital twinning opens up entails desynchronization, since the actual and potential times of the twinned entity are never identical. The complexity of the technology may also result in an input consisting of past (database) and present data (sensors) and therefore already contain several times before a potential future is even played out. Digital twinning thus puts time “out of joint.”
The performative practice of digital twinning belongs to the spectropoetic process of commodification. What the digital twinning touches, turns into a data commodity, is decorporealized and dematerialized in favor of its potential future value.
Following Derrida’s ethical and political considerations, the future horizon of digital twinning must be open and bear responsibility for a democracy to come. Those who speak of specters often tend to concentrate on threatening moments of disruption that need to be eliminated or exorcized. Not Derrida, who sees the task of a scholar who is not afraid of specters in learning to live with them (Derrida, 1994: xvi), to open oneself up to the potentialities that twinning enables us to see in the first place. It seems to me that this task is best exemplified by those seemingly utopian projects that use data commodification and twinning to envision a potential future for the planet (such as the European Digital Twin of the Ocean or the Digital Twin of Alps) that goes beyond global warming and climate change. If one were now to subject such projects to critical analysis, one would not only have to ask how the respective concepts of twinning complicate our notions of the materiality and temporality of oceans or mountains once we are able to materialize them in various potentially future forms and circulate them as datafied commodities, but also how open the horizon of such projects is for a democracy to come. To me, the media-technological possibility of materializing ever new potential futures for physical entities seems to hold a challenging potential for digital twinning, which raises questions of justice and responsibility beyond the technophile promises of a “fourth industrial revolution.” This notion draws attention to the “shapability” of the world, not so much in terms of its commodification, but first and foremost in terms of its future viability in whichever form it may materialize.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
