The Real Internet

Attached here is an initial draft of a paper I'll be giving next week in Rotterdam. Download The Real Internet 2.0  Comments and criticisms are welcome. Some of the ideas will be reconfigured in a book I'm working on (Download The real internet pp). Here's an excerpt:

Friedrich Kittler begins Gramophone, Film, Typerwriter with “optical fiber networks” in order to get to an end: “Before the end, something is coming to an end.” The end is an end of differentiation, more specifically, the differentiation between image, text, and voice. Digitization brings it about: “Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will be an endless loop” (2).

Kittler treats the distinctions between image, text, and voice in terms of the Lacanian registers of the imaginary, Symbolic, and Real (15). Lacan’s registers, he tells us, are in fact an historical effect of changes in storage technologies. The imaginary consists in the cuts and illusions that comprise fantasies of wholeness, be they before the mirror or on the screen. The Symbolic is typing, the machinic word in all its technicity. The Real is recorded sound, inclusive of the hisses and noise accompanying the vocals produced by a larynx.

Digitization erases the distinctions between visual, written, and acoustic media. It turns all data into numbers that can be stored, transmitted, copied, computed, and rearranged. Taking the place of the material differences providing the basic structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the feedback loop. Kittler writes, “A simple feedback loop—and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects” (258).

Comments

[Tokyo]

unconstructive: liked it very much. The looping-center-shape(lessness) of web 2.0 super helpful for me and a couple of things I've been wrestling with lately.

[Dave]

this was brilliant. really clarified a lot of things i've been thinking about. one of the most insightful pieces i've read in a long time.

[Dave]

A question: In your conclusion, you problematise the emancipatory potential of drive in a domain like the internet (drive as evinced by endless googling and websurfing). You point out your crucial difference from Zizek by arguing drive is not a radical break or imbalance but an imbalance that communicative capitalism depends on.

Isn't the crucial point here the thin line between the 'two death drives', as articulated by Zizek in The Ticklish Subject? There is the idiotic superego death drive to enjoy and then there is the death drive in its disruptive dimension of traversing the fantasy. It would seem then the internet is defined more by the superego injunction to enjoy, a idiotic transfixion in an inherantly compulsive universe, than the death drive as radical break. Not too different from what you're saying ultimately but I think Zizek does address this point.

[Jodi]

I agree with you that he addresses the point. But I think that there is a problem in his argument. If the conditions of the present are characterized by the decline of symbolic efficiency, then they are not held together by a fundamental fantasy and so there is no fantasy to traverse. Traversing the fantasy can only name some kind of break in the context of a functional symbolic order. So, my argument is that both aspects of drive are capture/captured. Under communicative capitalism, drive does not provide a model/form/direction for a way out but instead is the way to understand or grasp the form of our submission.