The following article is an edited transcript of a talk organized by Studio Image at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
*
One of the defining features of imagination in late-capitalist society concerns the relationship between the personal and collective sphere.
According to the group psychology of Sigmund Freud, every community always shows a specific form of libidinal organization. And, we must add here, this is always mediated and doubled by the structure of media themselves, whether it is through language, music, or images.
Theatre, Television, Computer
Ancient Greek theatre – as a collective art form – sprang from the popular chorus: a group of performers who sang, danced, and commented on the dramatic action with a collective voice. In the very beginning, the function of Athenian theatre was immediate emotional exaltation through music, rooted in the cult of Dionysus. Later, with the advent of Apollonian drama, tragedy’s function shifted toward representation and the performance of individuality (for example, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex). At the same time, the role of music was replaced by the visual arts and the chorus was relegated to the orchestra. Meanwhile, the architecture of Athenian theatre changed: from horizontal to vertical, visually separating the chorus from the actors, as well as the gods (who were literally hoisted into the air above the stage by a crane: the mechane). This was the same period in which Aristotle theorized catharsis – the discharge of dangerous emotions like fear and pity – as the social function of tragedy.
The interplay between Dionysian and Apollonian drama correlates with a cultural update in Athenian society. More than 2400 years later, in the age of electronic media like televisions and computers, the contradistinction between personal and collective media is better framed as an economic one. The reversal from collective to personal media takes place when the libidinal drive is pushed beyond a certain limit. The shift from collective to personal media is only the most visible effect of the neoliberalization of media consumption and platform capitalism, characterized by market competition and social alienation; in turn, it reproduces a change in the libidinal organization.
In the past, radio and television technologies served as a central hub for household entertainment and social bonding. People used to gather together to listen to TV and radio programs. But as single-person households became more popular, TV and radio programs were no longer targeted at families but at individuals. In the 1990s, the majority of family households in the United States owned more than one television set. It was the era of sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends, which played a pivotal role in the promotion of single-person housing in New York City. Likewise, think about MTV and how its popularity was only the most visible effect of the falling prices of television sets.
What about computers? For the first few decades, computing was generally an offline, single-user experience. Computers were stationary and expensive, which meant shared use in the same household or in public spaces (e.g., Internet cafés). By the 1990s, the World Wide Web became public and transformed how people interacted with each other on the Internet. The introduction of browsers and HTML made computers user-friendly with graphical interfaces. Then, the advent of social media in the early 2000s accelerated the growth of online communities. It was also the beginning of a new market for the attention economy (which was theorized back in the 1970s). Around the 2010s, the rising popularity of smartphones marked the end of Internet cafés. By the mid-to-late 2010s, almost everyone in developed countries owned a smartphone. After the blogging era of the 1990s, social relationships were co-opted by social media corporations, with the promise of greater intimacy and the option to share multimedia content, including videos. In the words of Sherry Turkle, social media users are “alone together.”
The Swarm Effect
In late capitalism, the difference between individual and collective is blurry. The outcome is what Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls the swarm effect. In contrast with a crowd of persons, the behaviour of a swarm is far less predictable and aleatory, because their existence as users is a product of the system itself and its basic logic. There is no libidinal organization, except the one reproduced by the media themselves.
The victory of neoliberalism in the post-WWII era coincides with the increasingly corporate environment in which communication and entertainment take place. Television, radio, and computers are no longer State-controlled technologies but corporate ones. The consequence on media programming is apparent. On the one hand, advertising takes more and more screen time in order to lower the prices of tech products. On the other hand, media targeting, which dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, becomes increasingly powerful; at the turn of the century, it is no longer based on demographic or geographic information alone but on household data, and ultimately personal data. The voting power of the audience in reality TV shows like Big Brother only hides their own powerlessness in the face of their targeting as viewers. In an article for the New Humanist, republished in the 2018 k-punk collection, Mark Fisher commented upon the anxiety and complicity of Big Brother (specifically, its Celebrity edition); yet, it is not only the anxiety of the show “housemates” but also that of the TV producers, who, in the digital age, “are always looking for the next hashtag outrage, for provocations that will go viral.”
At this point, it is time to sketch the relation between collective and personal media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially television and computers. Collective media are State-controlled, whereas personal media are corporate; the former reproduce family values, the latter reproduce only more and more capital; the one is moralistic, the other is anti-moralistic; the first is a mirror of emotions, the second is a screen for affects. At the same time, as collective media are superseded by personal media, images take the place of language as the default format of communication. In fact, images are reproduced faster than text. Indeed, they reproduce an automated response in their viewers, which is readily converted from information to capital.
From Dasein to Design
Today, we are no longer thrown into the world but into the screen, to update Martin Heidegger’s phrase. Dasein is updated by design. Now, for Martin Heidegger, human existence (Dasein) is always in a relationship with others: Mitsein, generally rendered into English as “being-with.” According to the German philosopher, human beings always exist with and by means of the others, and this relationship is correlated with an emotional state or mood (Stimmung), whose essence is temporal. For example, when bored, time appears to be standing still, which in turn drives us to distract ourselves.
Fast-forward to the digital age, the mood of Martin Heidegger’s twentieth-century philosophy is overcome by a feeling of hyperstimulation. The latter marks the emergence of a new temporality; indeed, hyperstimulation is no longer time as lived and experienced by people as a collective, but the speed of the platform, which accelerates beyond clock time as such.
In section 27 of Being and Time, Heidegger writes about the “averageness” of various media – from newspapers to public transport – and how they reveal the “averageness” of Dasein. As he writes with regard to the act of reading a newspaper:
We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they,” which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.
Now, according to the early Heidegger, the existence of “they” is an inescapable part of Being, through which one is able to talk about Dasein in general without reference to any specific being. In the twenty-first century, the averageness of communication is the basic logic of the media themselves. Algorithms determine our situation, which deserves a definition.
Durchschnittlichkeit is the German word used by Heidegger for “averageness,” which may also be translated as “mediocrity.” But here, morality has been done away with. What is at stake with the averageness of communication is not a moral judgment, since there is no longer any great mass to give voice to it.
Imagination and Image
In the twenty-first century, images are reproduced faster than they are imagined. The outcome is a new temporal sequence: it is no longer images that are the work of imagination, but rather imagination that is made in the image of the medium itself.
For Cornelius Castoriadis, the founder of the journal Socialism or Barbarism, imagination in its radical sense is what institutes a society. But the latter is neither necessary nor contingent, neither natural nor artificial. He writes: “[An] institution is neither necessary nor contingent, since its emergence is not determined but is that on the basis of which, in which and by means of which alone something determined exists.” In other words, it is the medium through which a society is created. In the words of a famous anthropologist, the world is something that people make and could just as easily re-make differently.
Re-reading the revolutionary theories of Cornelius Castoriadis in the twenty-first century begs the question: does imagination as a radical alternative still exist in the society of the screen? Or has it been overcome by the basic logic of its own images? If we follow Cornelius Castoriadis’s main thesis, whose radical optimism always represents an endless source of inspiration, we should answer to all these questions that radical imagination cannot be done away with, since it is what always makes possible the institution of any society – including the one of the screen, whose big picture became more and more visible in the last few years of his life.
Bibliography
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. And: Phenomenology of the End. Cognition and Sensibility in the Transition from Conjunctive to Connective Mode of Social Communication, Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, 2014.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.
Fisher, Mark. The House that Fame Built: Celebrity Big Brother, in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), ed. Darren Ambrose, London: Repeater, 2018.
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1955.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Alessandro Sbordoni is the author of Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Set Margins’, 2025), Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023; Becoming Press, 2024), and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He works for the open-access publisher Frontiers.
