Non-Things • Juan's blog

01 ❦

Information is additive not narrative. It can be counted but not recounted. As discontinuous units that are relevant only fleetingly, information does not add up to a story. Memory is increasingly beginning to resemble a storage container in which all kinds of information are crammed. Addition and accumulation take the place of narration. History and memory are characterized by a narrative continuity that stretches across long periods of time. Meaning and coherence are founded on narration. The digital, that is, numerical, order is free of history and memory. Thus, it fragments life.

02 ❦

Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information. Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice of everything without gaining any insight. We travel across the world without having an experience. We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.

03 ❦

There can be no doubt that the infosphere has an emancipatory effect. It liberates us more effectively from the hardship of work than the sphere of things could. Human civilization can be understood as the gradual intellectualization of reality. Humans transfer their intellectual capacities on to things so that the things can do the work for them. In this process, subjective spirit becomes objective spirit.

04 ❦

Vilém Flusser summarizes the new, information dominated world order as follows: ‘We can no longer hold tight to things, and we do not know how to hold tight to information. There is nothing to hold on to.’11 Although sceptical at first, Flusser eventually imagines the future in utopian pictures. The lack of anything to hold on to gives way to the hovering lightness of play. The human being of the future is no longer interested in things – is not a worker (homo faber) but a player (homo ludens). He or she no longer needs to engage in the tedious work of overcoming the resistance of material reality. Human beings of the future will program machines to do the work – they themselves will be handless: ‘This new human being that is being born around us and inside us is actually handless. It no longer handles things, and one can therefore in this case no longer speak of acts’. The hand is the organ of work and action. The finger, by contrast, is the organ of choice. The handless human beings of the future only use their fingers. They choose rather than act. They push buttons in order to satisfy their needs. Their lives are not dramas in which they are compelled to act; their lives are play. They do not want to possess anything. They want only to experience and enjoy.

05 ❦

Every age has a different definition of freedom. In antiquity, freedom meant that you were a free man, not a slave. In modernity, freedom was turned inwards and became the autonomy of the subject. It was the freedom in acting. Today, the freedom to act has been reduced to the freedom of choice and consumption. The handless human being of the future indulges in a ‘freedom at one’s fingertips’: ‘There are so many available keys that my fingertips can never touch them all. Therefore, I get the impression of being perfectly free in my decisions.’ This freedom at your fingertips turns out to be an illusion. Free choice is in fact consumer choice. The handless human beings of the future are not presented with a genuine choice; they do not act. They live in post-history. They do not even notice that they no longer have hands. We, by contrast, still have hands, and are able to act, and so we are able to criticize. Only hands are capable of choice, of the freedom of acting. A form of rule in which human beings did nothing but play would be perfect domination. Juvenal coined the phrase panem et circenses (bread and circuses) to characterize a Roman society in which political action had become impossible. People were sedated with free food and spectacular games. Universal basic income and computer games would be the modern panem et circenses.

06 ❦

seems that people are no longer able to dwell with things or to imbue them with life and make them their faithful companions. Things close to our hearts presuppose an intense libidinal tie. Now, we no longer want to be tied to things or people. Ties are untimely. They restrict the space of possible experiences, that is, freedom in the sense of consumption.

07 ❦

The smartphone places the world: it takes hold of it by placing it in front of us in the form of an image. The camera and the screen are the central elements of the smartphone because they intensify the becoming-image of the world. Digital images transform the world into available information. The smartphone is a ‘Ge-Stell’, enframing, in Heidegger’s sense: a Gestell, the essence of technology, unites in itself all forms of placing that make available, such as ordering, presenting or producing. The next step in the process of civilization goes beyond the becoming-image of the world. It consists of the production of the world out of images, the production, that is, of a hyper-real reality.

08 ❦

Things and territories determine the terrestrial order. They are not noisy. The terrestrial order is still. The digital order is ruled by information. Stillness is alien to information. It contradicts the essence of information. Still information is an oxymoron. Information steals the silence by imposing itself on us and demanding our attention. Stillness is a phenomenon of attentiveness. Stillness is created only by deep attentiveness. Information, however, dissects attention.