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THE DIFFERENCE THE DIGITAL MAKES: THE AFFECTIVE SYNTHESIS OF REALITY BY DIGITAL MEDIA

By Daniel Strutt

Goldsmiths College, University of London

PhD Media and Communications

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of the university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text.

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ABSTRACT

Do digital screen media alter our sense of being in the world?

Contained within this question are some fairly fundamental existential and metaphysical notions about what it is to be in the world, and what is it to have this sense altered? There is the complex notion of consciousness: what is it to be conscious of the world? What, indeed, is ‘the world’ – simply our phenomenal sensory awareness of reality, or some external transcendent actuality? To understand the effect of the digital on consciousness, one must consider investigating the dynamics of synaptic signals in the brain, to affection and cognition, to larger social, global and even metaphysical systems – whilst also maintaining an eye for the subtle metaphoric connections between them.

In the work of new-media theorists such as Massumi, Shaviro, Pisters, Rodowick, Parisi, and Hansen, we see some of the above questions tackled through a triangulation of aesthetic theory, affect theory and philosophy of consciousness. It is amongst these theoretical perspectives that I position my research. I describe digital visual media as an extension and fruition of aesthetic impulses towards indeterminism and flux largely described by Deleuze in the Time-Image as ‘the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual’, but further, through Bernard Stiegler, as a new mnemo-technical ‘grammatisation’ of vital metaphysical forces, or of existence as such. I then show by example how digitally created and inflected images, through their own vital automatism, give us new mimetic and metaphorical tools through which to affectively and conceptually think the real. I argue that the digital-image establishes itself in ways that Deleuze foreshadowed but could not quite foresee, becoming: ‘an as yet unknown aspect of the time-image’.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 4

2. LITERATURE REVIEW 29

3. MONADISM and NOMADISM: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 87

4. ‘A Digital Frontier That Will Reshape The Human Condition.’ 120

5. DYNAMIC SPACES, BODIES & FORCES: THE DIFFERENCE THE DIGITAL MAKES 156

6. REALITY SUTURES, SIMULATION and DIGITAL REALISM 199

7. ETHICS and AESTHETICS: META-POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS 241

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 275

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INTRODUCTION

This project starts with a feeling: initially a corporeal stimulation, exhilaration or agitation and a sense of enjoyment and fulfilment. Secondarily, this feeling transforms into an intuition – an embodied intuition that the world is enlivened, less consistent, more likely to surprise us. Thirdly there is an intrusive thought – a conception that this feeling, as it fades, should be disowned, as it is not authentic. It is a hollow experience. I have been awed and shaken, but ultimately duped and taken for a ride. I should turn my attention to more meaningful activities.

This is the conflicted feeling that I, and I would imagine many others, have had after watching some of the images that I analyse in this project – the spectacular objects of a contemporary digital screen culture.1 They are objects of a commercial entertainment culture, and as such, for reasons including the mode of attention, the space of their consumption, the industrial mode of production or the spectacular affections they affo