Chapter 21 - The Digital’s Amodal Affect

Summary

Via digital and networked media, a volatility of process infuses the world. My argument here is threefold. First, signal (from sunshine to speech to wifi) and code (from the so-called “nature’s code” to alphabets to modern data) have always involved a technical carriage of transformational capacity. At its heart, this involves an attunement – for better or worse – to amodal capacities for affecting and being affected. Second, as the transformational capacity of digital and networked media increases, this pushes the more towards living, thinking, and feeling with the amodal. Third, this opens up a potential infinity of shifting, and more obviously transient modalities. To put this differently, modality needs to be thought as both continuity and novelty at once, in what I will later in this chapter call an a(modal) shimmering.