Riparare il backstage: Madame Bovary e l’espropriazione del retroscena tra regime analogico ed ecosistema digitale = Restoring the Backstage: Madame Bovary and the expropriation of the backstage between the analogue era and the digital ecosystem

Abstract

Restoring the Backstage: Madame Bovary and the expropriation of the backstage between the analogue era and the digital ecosystem. This article investigates the evolution of identity “backstage” management, tracing the transition from the analogue era to the contemporary digital ecosystem. Using Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary as an analytical device, the study identifies the mechanisms of intimacy expropriation within the pre-digital context, demonstrating that extractive scripts predated platform capitalism. Drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical model, the study posits the segregation between the front stage and the backstage as a necessary condition for the maintenance of identity performance and demonstrates its dependence on the material stability of the repositories of secrecy. In Flaubert’s novel, Emma Bovary’s private life is shielded by material barriers – lockets, drawers, and letters – whose collapse through debt transforms her private archive into a forced “public exhibition” (Hogan 2010). The digital ecosystem exacerbates this vulnerability by delegating backstage management to algorithmic infrastructures that autonomously dictate visibility. By examining the mechanisms of context collapse, “privacy zuckering” and “dark patterns”, the article illustrates how digital platforms render oblivion structurally impossible, due to the persistence and searchability of data. The comparison between Emma’s material debt and the digital user’s ontological debt reveals an extractive logic rooted in information asymmetry and algorithmic governmentality, where intimacy is transformed into a productive economic resource. Finally, the study explores practices of anti-programming and tactical maintenance, such as algospeak and pseudonymous identities, through which the contemporary subject attempts to repair the backstage and reclaim a zone of latency.