In the context of 52group postdigitalism [link added], dwelling on the digital – even to de-digitalise it, or liberated it from the constraints of binary – is a form of techno-lust. It is digital fetishism, even if it is played out in meat-space.
Through the first two-thirds of my college career, I loved this kind of statement. And I still love the language– there’s a kind of poetry in the language of criticism that evolved from pomo jousting that sadly isn’t perceived by as many readers as it should be. It’s a poetry that creates its own rules, infinite in its historical nutshell.
But the same words that can make music in one context become highly ambiguous and fuzzy in another. The beauty of these words and thinking (and I engage in them plenty) is that they can be endlessly justified.
Consider “dwelling.” What does it mean to “dwell” and why do I get the feeling that it will likely play out in what I suspect will be a meme for a while (the postdigital in this new context) as either whatever the writer wants it to be in the context of whatever current critical engagement emerges or the sole alternative to ignoring technology?
And consider the sudden conflation of binary code with binary constraint on actions, as if there is a productive connection between the former and the latter…. awesome isn’t it?
I’m not knocking it. I’m amused. And amusement isn’t a bad thing. Nor is the process of redefinition and the manufacturing of something new where nothing new yet exists. Sometimes that manufacture carves out a space where something new can emerge. But the first stages are always funny, where the words are beautiful but not much– or not much that is novel– is being said, and whether you find any of it believable or not depends wholly on intuition and a generous dollop of faith in the author(s)… which, incidentally, I do possess.
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You’ve hit the nail on the head with the ‘highly ambiguous and fuzzy’ comment. As you will have gathered from my postdigital posts, I’m struggling to really get a handle on this thing, and my musings are mainly an attempt to chuck some half-formed ideas about, in the hope that the fog will start to clear. I must admit that I feel strangely troubled by this postdigital idea. I think this is partly because I’m stepping out of my comfort zone, and quickly hitting the limits of my capacity to think in a wordy way, but also because I’m worried that postdigital thinking might spoil my tech-fun somehow.