Manifesting a future to come: The spectral performativity of digital twinning
2025-08-02
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.