Samenvatting - L-Digital Reason

Table of contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................................3
We Have Always Been Digital.............................................................................................................3
Part 1 – Mass meaning...........................................................................................................................5
Chapter 1: Starry Sky and Moral Law..................................................................................................5
The purpose of historically modern humans..................................................................................5
Enlightenment and the public sphere.............................................................................................6
The science of nature and the science of humankind.....................................................................7
Self-interest and sympathy.............................................................................................................8
The spectacle of progress & the machinery of education.............................................................11
Chapter 2: Evolution and Culture.....................................................................................................12
The “middle classes” and “the masses below them”....................................................................12
Science and culture.......................................................................................................................14
Bildung and propaganda...............................................................................................................15
“A race between education and catastrophe”..............................................................................19
Genes, memes, imaging and imagination.....................................................................................23
Big words......................................................................................................................................28
Part 2 – Medium...................................................................................................................................29
Chapter 3: Media Cultures................................................................................................................29
Medium theory vs. media theory.................................................................................................29
Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980).................................................................................................30
Stanley Cavell (1926 – 2018).........................................................................................................34
Remediation, intermediality, transmediality and the others........................................................36
The digital turn.............................................................................................................................38
Medium archaeology....................................................................................................................39
Chapter 4: Electronic Literature, Internet Art...................................................................................40
Digital writing before electronic writing.......................................................................................40
Digital-borne vs. digital-born........................................................................................................41
The digital as cultural form...........................................................................................................42
Digital culture and “performation”...............................................................................................44
Chapter 5: The Relocation of Digital Writing....................................................................................44
Expanding and relocation.............................................................................................................44
New = neo?...................................................................................................................................46
New media writing: return to medium-specificity........................................................................47
Back to print: still making books thanks to the digital turn...........................................................48

, Chapter 6: The Problem of Canonisation in the Digital Era...............................................................50
No place for canons in digital times?............................................................................................50
The archival impulse.....................................................................................................................51
Saving the canon...........................................................................................................................52
Relocating the digital void............................................................................................................53
Part 3 – Community..............................................................................................................................54
Chapter 7: Digital Politics..................................................................................................................54
Digital mobilisation.......................................................................................................................56
From ideology to issue-based participatory politics.....................................................................57
The logic of connective action......................................................................................................58
Digital activism and social movements.........................................................................................60
Chapter 8: Digital Democracy...........................................................................................................61
Digital media and/as the public sphere........................................................................................61
A private sphere...........................................................................................................................62
Twitter and democracy.................................................................................................................63
Anonymous...................................................................................................................................64
Chapter 9: Digital Self.......................................................................................................................66
The relational self and the “networked community”...................................................................66
Modes of self-presentation in digital media.................................................................................69
The self as text..............................................................................................................................69
The selfie......................................................................................................................................71
Chapter 10: The Digital Person, the Panopticon and Kafka..............................................................73
Orwell and Kafka...........................................................................................................................76

,Introduction
 What means the digital turn for students in humanities?
1. Meaning  3 sessions
2. Medium (Jan Baetens)
3. Community (Mandolessi)  look at the schedule

 in a modern world (cover book)
 We have to ask ourselves this questions!



 PowerPoint posted afterwards
 examen : sit-down written exam
- ! study material = only the book
- 6 question to choose from
 3 questions: 1 for each part


We Have Always Been Digital
 important in the picture = human hands
 Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes
Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (1991)
th
- 17 century: modern constitution = split between study of nature and humans
 Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes (philosophical, anthropological)
 the study of things and the study of words
 “we don’t make that distinction” = Bruno Latour

 we don’t agree (see title) with him
- technology = manipulation of symbols
 HAS BEEN ALWAYS essential to humans
 We are symbol manipulating species !

 Four, Five or Six F’s of (hum)animal life
- Fighting
- Fleeing
- Feeding
- Fornicating (= “overspel plegen”)
- Freezing

 HUMANS: extra = Framing
 people look at things and frame them, share their framing activities with others
 important to understand behavior
 SHIFT = when humans begin to write, they leave traces that other can read

 one of the first forms of human figurative framing = Sulawesi Cave Painting (44,000 years
ago)
- not in Europe, in Indonesia
- hunting scene: buffalo, human figures with animal bits to them

,  humans are fighting the buffalo, but they are also a bit animals (think like that about
theirselves)
 these people share their frame, meaning of the world



 probably the oldest trace = Blombos Cave Design (73,000 years ago)
- stone with lines on it
- we don’t know WHAT it means, we know THAT it means
 They wanted to share something! that’s all we know
 First bit of human symbolic activity :)

 Torquigener albomaculosus “Mystery Circles”
= real “art”
- a fish has made this: why? one of the four Fs (to attract female fish, to procreate)
- a way to disenchant the world

= indication of humans meaning something

 this things = part 1 Mass meaning

 we begin part 1 in the 18th century: enlightment
- massive emergence of industrial revolution
- rise of human population: when animals die, humans rise :(
- public intellectuals: science, cultural & society / democracy / education
 all male
 white, western, educated
 work in contexts affected by industrial revolution
 touched by the democracy
 ex.: Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian Huxley, Immanuel
Kant, Adam Smith
 these are all public intellectuals: share their insights, answers on important issues
with a large audience (other answers than the church)
 How is culture related to science? ~ Bruno Latour
 they want that their message gets across, strategies of persuasion, rhetorical

 natural evolution & human history
- gene (genetical transmission) >< meme (unit of cultural transmission)

 image hunger & neuro-ideology
- ex. other activity in brain when we’re contemplating God than not = God exists!

 part 2 = Medium
- there are no digital media : question that triggers it all in this part
 could be an exam question: Does digital media exist or not?
 two references for speaking/thinking about medium (but not digital): Marshall
McLuhan and Stanley Cavell

 Keep in mind this central question!