iTALK or, more precisely, I commune

This video is from filmmaker Christopher DeSantis and profiles the new Apple iTalk. If you watch the video through you will see the point of convergence. The curious way converging multiple media formats has meant the loss of touch. With the loss of touch, we are again at the specular, the ocular, the eye. iTalk with my eyes. In Lacanian Ink 23, Gérard Wajcman theorises the emergence of modern subjectivity as that particular moment where the subject places their gaze outside themselves, in the field of the Other, to see themselves seeing. To take a page from Durkheim, the story of Santa Clause persists because it fulfills the function of recognising our vital illusion: "What is elided in the visible, outside of the gaze and with the gaze, is that nothing in truth looks at the spectator, except himself, his own gaze in the field of the Other. His own gaze ex qua, placed outside. But it seems to me that this should be added: that one can do nothing with such a truth except to know it. It would be better for the health of a subject if he had nothing to do with this truth in the real, if he never encountered it, if he never came up against the unveiling of the gaze which would that be that of his phantasm." (64) What Wajcman hints at here is the very danger of the iTALK. The more a technology comes to rely on the gaze for its operation, the more it resembles Epicurius' maxim "You want to live happily? Live hidden." But within the preconditions set by our late capitalist epoch of reflexive consumption this maxim goes awry. The hidden position of modern subjectivity is self-consciousness. Thus the danger of the iTALK is where it might offer communication and commune with products of culture it also threatens to further obscure the seat of subjectivity in modernity. So let us tarry with this danger, because the vital illusion the iTALK embodies is not what deprives the subject of selfhood. It is rather that in the absence of the vital illusion (seeing oneself seeing, in the field of the Other) the subject is helpless to stem the tide of alienation. We need this. We are human, all too human, and we need this.