Abstract
The contemporary info-proliferation is taking the ideal of a solid technological rationalism to its extreme point: the depletion of all bodies into 'informational cuts’, orderable bits and pieces of data fabric. The present contribution will discuss this process of datafication, trying to avoid any polarization along the ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ dualism, and any consequent excess of enthusiasm or critique. For this purpose, the essay will take the form of a stroll across post-digital culture, alternatively under the effects of a ‘red and a blue pill’ as the two main points of view already exemplified, in 1999, by Morpheus in the famous sci-fi movie The Matrix. To these two points of view, respectively identifiable as digital critique (going down the deep rabbit hole, and seeing that computers are playing today a leading role in what Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari have called 'capitalist schizophrenia'), or digital potential (remaining in a world of numeric dreams, a world populated not only by humans but also by bots, autonomous computer programs that are becoming increasingly able not only to post, but also to understand content and interact with people and, most importantly, to take aesth/ethical decisions), a yellow one will be added, which can be recognized as that of ‘hacker culture’, at the same time suggesting that, instead of a dialectical contraposition between two different perceptual and cognitive modalities, post-digital culture can be more easily discussed through a multiplication of possible perspectives.
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Notes
And, according to the two philosophers, differentiating itself into an original value (advanced or invested money) and surplus value (profit), a differential relation that is also mirrored by that between exchange value and the power of capital.
The difference is between investment that increases capital stock, or production capacity, and an asset simply changing hands, or a simple manipulation of money.
Now, the question is: “How is it possible that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag—separated from the real and cut off from life—that he is so often thought to be? Worse still: how can psychiatric practice have made him this sort of rag, how can it have reduced him to this state of a body without organs that has become a dead thing—this schizo who sought to remain at that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it?” Or, in other words, “how does psychoanalysis go about reducing a person, who this time is not a schizophrenic but a neurotic…?” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, p 20).
A code (or a way to think) can be defined as digital when it is constituted by digits, countable units that can be related or opposed to each other (not necessarily in a binary way): a sort of perceptual and cognitive totalitarism composing the chaos of the real into an ordered formalism. This conception derives from Deleuze’s distinction between analog and digital codes, and his definition of the digital from digitum (the counting finger). In the book dedicated to the painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze discusses abstract painting as a form of artistic expression where chaos is eliminated, or reduced to its minimum, together with any form of tactile trace or manual craft: it is an ascetic art, an art of the spirit that goes beyond figuration, in order to reveal abstract forms. An art “without hands.” These abstract forms, in their turn, belong to a purely optical space. Abstract painting, in this sense, elaborates a symbolic code on the basis of formal oppositions. It is this code that the philosopher defines as digital: the digits, here, are the units which group the terms of the opposition in a visible space. With its simple codified oppositions of vertical-white-activity and horizontal-black-inertia, Wassily Kandinski is mentioned as one of the main examples of this code: a conception of art based on binary choices (Deleuze 2005, pp 70–77).
https://www.tumblr.com/search/james%20bridle. We can describe this process, by using the words of philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, as “An abstraction arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which them masquerade as the final reality. … The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net.” (Whitehead 1968, p 18).
The definition of particular entities as calculable units, separate extensions, or spatially and locatable points, is in fact what Whitehead defines as abstraction: for the philosopher, the distinction between what is abstract (facts of the mind) and what is concrete (physical reality) is of fundamental importance, and failure in doing so amounts to a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” As he argues, “among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location…. I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” (Whitehead 1967, p 58). From this point of view, the main question to be explored is to what extent digital technology can also be said to be a mind.
As evidenced in Lakoff and Johnsons theorizations on metaphors, the latter are often conceived as spatial physico-conceptual devices (such as the simple association ‘up is good, down is bad’ and the consequent equation of uprightness with consciousness) (1980).
See Deleuze’s lectures on Kant.
For a deeper exploration of Kant's notions, see Deleuze (1984, pp 1–17).
“We cannot understand the flux which constitutes our human experience unless we realize that it is raised above the futility of infinitude by various successive types of mode of emphasis which generate the active energy of a finite assemblage.” (Whitehead in Jones 2010).
Reading the NYTimes, we see that “Just as access to pens and paper hasn’t produced thousands of Shakespeares or Nabokovs, this explosion of camera phones doesn’t seem to have led to more Dorothea Langes or Henri Cartier-Bressons. But it has certainly led to many more images of what people ate at lunch” (Estri 2012).
Lichty, Patrick. Article not available anymore.
“Curation in the age of social media must be made to include the posting of photos and videos to social media, with the gesture, constituting the greatest number with the least investment (the function of the Long Tail’s power curve—# involved vs. degree of investiture). This lower stratum from the pin board to the Like is the beach to which I allude earlier, with New Aestheticists doing slightly more than Liking an image by taking the time to find it and put it on their Tumblr, hoping for a Like. But with the rise of art-based Internet Surfing Clubs like NastyNets and Double Happiness in the 2000′s, the aggregation of images of interest have become a function of quantum-level curatorial practice at the base of the saddle of the Long Tail. But perhaps NA is a form of curation for the masses, a folk curatorial practice for cyborg times.” (Lichty).
On the notion of the idea as a 'differential of thought', see Deleuze (2001, pp 168–221).
We have seen how, for Deleuze, “The Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill up, to varying degrees, matter that has no empty spaces, is profoundly schizoid.” (Deleuze 1984, p 19) “One world of mere appearance, and the other world compact of ultimate substantial facts.” This simple relation of material reality ‘filling’ abstract space characterized Kant’s topology as unilateral and unidimensional, a straight topology where space becomes a pure universal parameter subject but indifferent to the empirical variables of the reality that fills it. While Leibniz’s topology considered spatial determination as conceptual (two forms are superposable because it is not their position in time and space that counts, but a concept), Kant’s synthetic judgment is like a rule for all possible content, a rule of construction (example: a straight line is the shortest path between two points). Differently from extensive measures such as lengths and volumes, intensity is not given by a sum of successive parts but is apprehended in one instant, because the rules of addition and subtraction are not valid for it.
Since sensory matter (the matter perceived by the senses as colour, acoustic tonality, warmth, etc.) constitutes the most basic human representation of objects, the 'continuous' or intensive magnitudes (or quantities) of this matter are to be considered as phenomenologically basic.
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Portanova, S. In and out of Wonderland: a criti/chromatic stroll across postdigital culture. AI & Soc 38, 1859–1870 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01103-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01103-x