Description
Book SynopsisTo what extent is our time characterised by the ‘digital’? Does it announce a bright new age of technological progress, or is it not much more than a marketing tag for manufacturers? What is clear is that much of the cultural theory we have so far accumulated is showing signs of strain as it struggles to cope with the global dynamics of the ‘wired world’. This book offers a timely intellectual strategy that may help us comprehend the contradictions and apparent paradoxes of our immediate cultural climate. Using the metaphor of an organic membrane to show how things can be both separate and connected,
The Postdigital Membrane explores the triad of imagination, technology and desire as they play upon each other – and us. In doing so it tries to offer fresh insights into the deeper problems of intelligence, reality and being human in order to map the emerging consciousness of the postdigital age.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. PROPOSITION: Technology is the tangible expression of desire motivating human imagination to modify reality
2. PROPOSITION: My awareness extends to, and consists in, those things of which I am aware
3. PROPOSITION: Histories, like predictions and superstitions, are narratives of human imagination
4. PROPOSITION: Language is a technology through which human desire is satisfied and generated
5.PROPOSITION: The distinctions between the words ‘human’ and ‘machine’, and between humans and machines, lose validity as meanings mutate in response to imagination and desire.
6. PROPOSITION: The practice of art consists in arranging matter so as to add (extra) significance to it.
7. PROPOSITION: The idea that livings things consist of organised energy is disavowed by conventional science.
8. PROPOSITION: A recording is part of what it records
9. PROPOSITION: Technology can permit limited quantities of specific human energy to be recorded, stored and consumed
10. PROPOSITION: The categories of logic, reason and the binary are absorbed and transcended in the postdigital membrane
