Delusions, echoes, and machines: human subjectivity and social media

Utilizing the erudite post-structuralism of Paul de Man, this thesis analyzes social media as a text in order to illustrate how it is insidiously becoming a digitized reification of the self. This analysis specifically explicates how Paul de Man, in select essays from Allegories o f Reading and The Rhetoric o f Romanticism, illustrates the manner in which human subjectivity is formed and mediated through a tropological delusion based upon the reification of an internalized anthropomorphism enabled by the structural disjunction between the signifier and the signified. De Man's deconstruction is then extrapolated unto social media in order to illustrate the treacherous manner in which our sense of self is now being reified and projected into the digital paradigm due to the individuation obligated by late-stage capitalism and the rapid technological innovations which are generating a shift in human perception. This critical framework is then used to analyze Dave Eggers' dystopian novel The Circle in order to elucidate what the reification of the human subject unto social media could portend for the future of our globalized culture and humanity.