French poststructuralist ideas prefigured how identity works online

Evidence

Sherry Turkic has commented on how computer simulation demonstrated the relevance of French social theory: … more than twenty years after meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, I am meeting them again in my new life on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions are more concrete. In my computer mediated world, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections, it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2533

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Turkle’s claim that online identity predates her encounter with French theory hold up, or is it retroactive synthesis?
• XREF: connects to: Second-modernity identity needs summoned the internet into everyday life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 114