[-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory

[Sean Rupka]

Thanks Davin for your reply and the link!

Just some further thoughts I suppose.

I always get a tad uncomfortable trying to tease out this difference. I am by no means a luddite and thus don’t simply want to take for granted some facile notion of digital objects difference from their analog counterparts, purely through some loyalty to the material world (though I won’t give up my vinyl).

One thing I would ask (perhaps in a return to my initial ramble) would be: in the digital case the structure of relationality seems to be ontologically entangled with the digital object itself, in a way we might struggle to extend to our understanding of material objects. But then again one could have an argument over even this claim.

Perhaps it is simply a matter of scale (although I would suggest that that matter would not be simple) and that such projects are always undertaken in lock-step with new mediums and doubts always persist as to their efficacy or authority or success as totalizing project.

I think in terms of memory’s “human” history, to quote from Nietzsche’s ‘Use and Abuse’ essay is incredibly useful (and to this day one of my favourite texts on the matter) but then can we simply apply his critique of a stagnant, additive history and postulates for an active appropriation and interaction with history as active medium to a digital world? The digital even insofar as it exists as cumulative archive that may not be registering on a material level to memory in a human sense (or historical sense) is still capable of having an effect on the material world.

I don’t want to carelessly suggest or throw around trite neologisms like ‘post-human’, but I do recall Quinn somewhere mentions the temporality of the digital in areas such as micro-finance and trading programming. I believe at least in part that this points to something in the digital realm that has material and human effects but operates at a speed and in relation to a ‘human’ world that is always lagging or at least operating with some kind of temporal distance to the digital. This of course doesn’t mean they are separate or independent spheres but may raise some issues that may or may not have existed in earlier times of technological advance and could correspondingly also raise questions

Sean