Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@han2017psychopolitics, loc. 157

4 min read

Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory

Evidence

Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. Jameson observed there that Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic model’ for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the breakdown of the signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s – i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 53 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Neurons somehow remember stimulation. Everything happens as if there were no stabilization of memories except on the condition of a potential destabilization of the general landscape of memory. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 89 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

This leads on to another difference from jungle and the broader tendencies in Nineties digital culture. Where jungle, like Nineties CGI, used digital technology to smooth out some of the hard lines that had been characteristic of early computer sound and imagery, footwork has deliberated opted for angularity. Charlie Frame’s comparison of listening to Rashad with “gazing at an animated GIF that grows ever more absurd with each iteration”, captures very precisely footwork’s jerky repetitions. Perhaps the appeal of the animated GIF and of footwork are both tied up with the way that they reject the dominant aesthetics of digital culture now. Think of the way that the elastic architectures of Nineties animatronics gave way to the dreary photorealism of contemporary animation. Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the Nineties were defined by the loop (the “good” infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the twenty-first century is perhaps best captured in the “bad” infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a timetrap. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1332 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Digital memory is additive whereas human memory is inherently narrative; Memory stability depends on ongoing potential destabilization of the whole — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 89; The stuttering GIF defines twenty-first century digital temporality against Nineties smooth loops — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1332 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

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