a time for shadows¹

Jean Baudrillard’s 1987 text The Ecstasy of Communication reads like an astonishing science-fictional prophecy of our current moment. Writing nearly thirty years ago, Baudrillard invoked an era of “absolute proximity, total instaneity”, of informational schizophrenia. “The schizo”, Baudrillard writes, “is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself […] It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparency of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence”.² Baudrillard’s heightened rhetoric captures what is now a banal experience — indeed, it might be the very signature of contemporary banality. With the ubiquity of smartphones, the feeling of being overwhelmed by cyberspatial injunctions is now commonplace. It is this strangely prescient anticipation of twentyfirst-century banality that makes reading Baudrillard’s text such an uncanny experience. (It as if Baudrillard was already writing about Twitter. What in the experience of 1980s French telecommunications could give Baudrillard this feeling of transparency, overload, instaneity — this sense of the overwhelming of privacy and the limits of the individual subject, to which social media has now habituated us?)

Baudrillard wrote of a new era of “tactility”. According to Baudrillard, even in the 1980s, the spectacle was already superseded. The spectacle subjugated us to image; the tactile system, however, solicits our participation, enjoins us to join in. Again, this is a strikingly prescient observation of trends that are now dominant — corporations are no longer satisfied with bombarding us with hard sell propaganda, they want us to interact with them, like their Facebook page, comment using hashtags.

Smartphones with touchscreen technology seem to secure the age of tactility. Yet, with smartphones, shouldn’t we rather talk of a touching without tactility? For the smartphone is certainly operated by touch, but it is a touch devoid of any sensuality. When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain — an eye and a brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace. The fingers become relays in a digital compulsion system, a set of digital triggers. Yet they are inefficient digital triggers, monkey digits that are too fat and lacking in suppleness to properly operate the touchscreen interface. If, as an episode of The Simpsons observed in a sight gag, the iPhone is strikingly reminiscent of the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, then too often when we are using them, we feel as primitive and as baffled as the apes in Kubrick’s film when faced with the enigmatic opacity of the monolith’s black surface.

Of course, smartphones aren’t really phones at all. The term now favoured by airlines, “handheld electronic devices”, better captures what these machines are. (Increasingly, we are now permitted to use these devices the very moment that the aircraft lands — waiting until we get to the terminal is now deemed too long a wait.) The telephone function of the electronic handheld device is rapidly becoming archaic. As Sherry Turkle maintained in her recent book Alone Together, we have moved beyond the era of talking into a new age of text.³Conversations present anxieties, which are circumvented by SMS and direct messages.

For all that it evades older kinds of anxieties, Baudrillard’s circuit of constant contact generates a whole set of new ones. The pressure of the instantaneous — of what, in their new manifesto, “On the Creative Question — Nine Theses”, Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma and Ned Rossiter call “frantic entrepreneurship and instant valorisation”⁴ — inevitably weighs heavy on cultural producers. In an enigmatic but suggestive formulation, Lovink, Olma and Rossiter argue that the urgencies of the immediate need to be replaced by principles of “shadow and time”. “Shadow,” they write,

is an unintended consequence, an event vacuum, which remains invisible for passers by. It does not register on the development maps of the managerial class. Time is needed in order for the substantially different to grow. Maturation, which is creative growth, requires time.

It is imperative that we carve out some spaces beyond the hyper-bright instant. This instant is insomniac, amnesiac; it locks us into a reactive time, which is always full (of outrage and pseudo-novelty). There is no continuous time in which shadows can grow, only a time that is simultaneously seamless (without gaps: there is always “new” content streaming in) and discontinuous (each new compulsion makes us forget what preceded it). The result is a mechanical and unacknowledged repetition. Is it still possible for us to cultivate shadows?