Machine in a trance: understanding our lust for digital revolution.

This work aims to reflect upon digital revolution looking through a specific bias: the current crisis in the business models of media, communication and entertainment. The intention is to understand more precisely what forces operate in making this movement a contemporary trend. Furthermore, we relate this crisis with a concept of machine that changes from a disciplinary society hierarchy - in Foucault - to a society of control, where deterritorialized information flows take hierarchical centers - more difficult to be located, as prescribed by Deleuze. The establishment of machinery is closely linked, as we will argue, to the invention of the universal and it is also associated with the constitution of contemporary subjectivity - as conceived by psychoanalysis in Freud and Lacan. This elements are intertwined with the subsuming of negativity, a kind of constant struggle for the erasure of death as radical negativity. The machines are thus a way of erasing the negative, or at least an attempt to produce an objective world, a simulacrum, as an ideological fantasy, using Žižek's term. To renounce the radical negativity, or perhaps to invoke it in more compelling ways, the machines are directed to an essential virtualization, so it comes to be summarized in a unic alphabet, a metanarrative -- the binary code - which can be operated by a universal reader: the Turing machine, now ethereal and pervasive. The contemporary communications and media crisis can be then understood as a contemporary effort in order to subsume the radical negativity, the death as inherited by the West, and not as a technological breakthrough in itself, or an economic optimization or even a rationalization. The virtualization of all the machinery toward a pure flow of information corresponds precisely to the radical effort to persist in being Western, even if this movement puts into crisis the social bonds produced since the beginning of the modern adventure, by changing the capacity to pupulate the world of senses by the ubiquitous capacity of nonsense reversibility of universal code trades.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Digital
• revolution.
• Subjectivity.
• Machine.
• Metanarrative.