With full postmodernism (a new moment of capitalist digitality) and the full emergence of virtuality and simulation, along with the waning of historicity and what I would call not the waning but the repurposing of affect, we enter a world in which not only has language been functionalized by the great political-economic machines of the imagination known as but not limited to cinema, television, digital cameras, and computers, but the productive possibilities and social roles of language have been forever transformed. And, almostincidentally, so, too, has the role of philosophy and, for what (little) it's worth, the definition of our species. A la Kubrick's 2001, the human drama may have a cosmic scope, but if it does, it is most certainly not humanistic. As it turns out, infinite existentialism when combined with infinite irony produces simulation as the sine qua non of knowledge. From the perspective of the absolute fading of the Real, what could be more nihilistic than the current engagement with a recognized simulation as if it were real, it being understood, of course, that today the other name for nihilism is faith?
In this manner then, the discursive frames of the recent human sciences psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction—could be borrowed from intellectual history for the staging of the exit of the Real from representation. Indeed, I would say that it is only with Saussure and the arbitrary nature of the sign that language really begins to be understood as a medium among others and embarks on the journey toward a full abrogation of its privileged access to the Real. This exit of the Real from the symbolic is to be correlated, then with the intensifying penetration of the life-world by technologies of the visual, the audiophonic, and the digital as well as the struggles for decolonization and socialjustice that further relativize linguistic claims. Incidentally, the 20th-century human sciences should also be correlated with the parametric instrumentalization of the signifier in various capitalist endeavors spanning that not-so-wide gamut that runs from advertising to torture, both of which endeavor to theatrically create for its audience (victim) an existential crisis that shatters the traditional personality so it can be resignified by the domain of power in which itisnewly bound. The contest over the Real—its increasing distance from the subjects of civilization— has been continuously reintegratedand transformed as the new ground of encounter. Consequently, the subject has been pulverized. I mention this violent reconfiguration and reprogramming of the concrete individual because it allows us to return to my thesis: that the capitalist development of digitality and informatics served the dual purpose of capture and marginalization, of mobilization
Digitality and the Media of Dispossession
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