Destituting the Interface: Beyond Affordance and Determination

International audienceThis article proposes the affordance of the mediumand the determination of the dispositifas two distinct approaches to media or technology in general. Taking the dialectical tension between affordance and determination, between medium and dispositif, as its point of departure, the article explores Transmute Collective’s Intimate Transactions(2005) as a problematic fusion of the two approaches. A historicising re-reading of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectaclewith regard to current forms of digital control and modes of production then argues that contemporary alienation takes place within the digital interface as the zone of indistinctionbetween affordance and determination, and that instead of designing liberating machines or inventing subjective evasions of the dispositif, emancipatory engagement requires a destitutionof the interface

Digital humanities and the elusive “thing”

The present article examines the current academic encounter with the “thing” of the digital humanities, i.e., with the digital as both a source of crisis and an attempt to control this crisis. By mapping conceptualisations of the digital as an object of study, a tool and the constitution of new practices, the “thing” is presented from the threefold perspective of access, evidence and control: access as the newfound availability and emancipation of the digital object, evidence as the cognitive approach marshalled in response to the surge of data, and control as the new ruling practice, whether academic, ethical or critical. The article seeks to demonstrate that the “thing” cannot be immediately grasped or pinned down, that whenever you think you have it, it turns out to be somewhere else. The proposed threefold perspective of access, evidence, and control is but a way of closing in on something that remains forever elusive

Exorcising the Ghost - or Spectres of Bin Laden

The article examines Zero Dark Thirty as a narrative treatment of a traumatic moment of crisis. The article proposes perspectives on a narrative logic and the means by which this logic is executed. It does so by using Derrida’s notion of spectrality as demonstrated in his readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well as his analysis of archival spectrality (Derrida, 2006 and Derrida, 1995). This Derridean perspective allows us to see the movie as an attempt to confront the horrors of crisis and bring the ensuing disequilibrium back into balance. This process, however, entails a complicated negotiation of spectrality that aims to preserve one’s own ghostlike state while giving the enemy’s various spectral forms a body so that he may be properly laid in earth