Digital Unconscious
"Digitality" has become a kind of fundamental constant in our media, cultural and even social life. You might well say, somewhat hyperbolically, that even if nothing else still holds our existence together, "the digital" now increasingly assumes this function. That clearly only refers to an infrastructure framework. However, the more precisely, exhaustively and providently this systematic framework operates, the more comprehensively diverse forms of life, behaviour and consumption are exposed to it. And the more inviolable its power grows, as can immediately be noted.
Digitality, understood as the way in which any entity, process or artefact can be derived from a simple binary principle, has in any event begun to inscribe itself deeply into our modes of perception, communication and behaviour. People live, work and also spend the rest of their time "in the digital realm". Conversely, this also means that the digital is now - in many different ways - an integral part of this life and work. What is more, this also means that the digital has begun to affect the entire underlying apparatus of thinking, perceiving and feeling from within. And that quite possibly a good part of this apparatus that operates behind (or through) consciousness is now influenced by the digital.
While Walter Benjamin once identified the operation of an "optical unconscious" that transcends conscious perception in photography and film’s image-reproduction mechanism, today this thought can perhaps be transferred to the digital (meaning media and other applications). The decisive question: what if increasingly closely meshed digitalization sidelines consciousness entirely (especially its critical version)? What if digitality, penetrating more and more forcefully into every corner of life, generates a sphere that simply cannot be grasped by consciousness and cognition? What if the digital, although it increasingly leaves its mark on reality, is at the same time an ever more incomprehensible parameter in terms of conventional standards of reality? And how can we fathom this large-scale digital unconscious, which we at most intuit?
The Digital Unconscious issue, produced in cooperation with the World-Information Institute (https://world-information.net), explores these questions through the prism of seminal contemporary scenarios., The World-Information Institute has focused its attention on these questions for many years in a series of projects and events, and, as Konrad Becker explains in his introductory essay, addresses the purported omnipotence of algorithmic regimes or "hypernormal hybrids," as these new power systems that transcend consciousness could also be called. At the same time, Becker creates a link to the two pieces in this issue by anthropologist Michael Taussig, which characteristically seek to look at what lies behind the digital, while at the same time addressing its particular power base. In the first essay, Taussig reflects on a fundamental concept in his approach, "mimetic ability", in the sense of potential switching back and forth from a subject to an object position. Transposed to the digital world, this signifies a kind of oscillation in system contexts, which, just as we are never entirely helplessly at its mercy, no-one can ever completely master. This "mastery of non-mastery" is another basic concept that the anthropologist elucidates in his second article here, using a literary amalgam that blends travelogue, poetic rapprochement, and reflections on the climate catastrophe.
Sociologist of science Katja Mayer ponders the extent to which the world of the future will be shaped by social sensoria (outsourced to the machine realm) that soar miles ahead of each individual's imaginative capacity. Mayer's critique of "social remote sensing", rooted in the idée fixe of universally valid, objective prediction of the future, leads indirectly to the essay by Erik Davis devoted to the more obscure facets of network thinking. This school of thought, which emerged over the 20th century and is massively shaped by military imperatives, has in some cases borne strange fruit - such as the notion of clairvoyant remote perception, which occupies a prominent place in Davis' brief sketch of "netweird" society.
A number of further contributions look at other occult figures that pop up in the history of modern information technologies, and indeed throughout the entire infosphere. Ewen Chardronnet, for example, conceptualises the development of supercomputers in conjunction with the ominous theory of the "noosphere", while Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) explores the question of the type of ghosts and other irrational beings that particular media have generated throughout history. Finally, Lydia H. Liu recaps the history of the "Freudian robot", a kind of emblematic figure of the digital unconscious, which Liu traces back to confrontations with the eerie, the Uncanny Valley of robotics or the construction of "machines with emotions".
All the contributions pick up on various strands - sometimes diverging and seemingly paradoxical - to sketch out a machinic or digital unconscious that eludes conscious perception. In the process, the texts also touch on the utterly inexhaustible desire in and for networked space that characterizes such broad swathes of our culture. It has long been no secret that the dimension of a productive force that transcends anything subjective and individual is at play here – extending beyond those spheres of consciousness that are accessible to us. At the same time, it is still crucial to interrogate the artistic facets concealed in this productive force and the digital unconscious that transport it, as illustrated too by apposite examples in this issue.