#stephen curtis

[draculasdaughter]

(...) The availability of any potential identity digitisation will inevitably be restricted by the socioeconomic and financial considerations that prevent universal access to current technology. Pace Donna Haraway, for whom ‘exchange in the [cyborg] world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well’, the reality of technological production means that such markets will control the digital world much as they do now (2000: 79). In short, the servers will always require servants.

Stephen Curtis, “You have been saved: digital memory and salvation” in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging Gothic from the nineteenth century to the present, Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds.), 2015.

[draculasdaughter]

The ability of programming such as UNICODE to convert alphabetic languages to their purest forms of presence and absence through binary code make the familiar unfamiliar; the heimlich unheimlich. Our inevitable value judgements about language are not shared by computers, which make no distinction between shopping lists and Shakespeare. As Kittler puts it, ‘inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice’ (1999: 1). The physical act of writing changes too, as we are further removed from the formation of the letters and words themselves.

Stephen Curtis, “You have been saved: digital memory and salvation” in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging Gothic from the nineteenth century to the present, Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds.), 2015.

[draculasdaughter]

Jean Baudrillard describes the process of saving as a ‘shift from tactile to digital’ (cit. Landow, 1997: 22), a spectralisation that defies physical ontologies. We must put faith in the computer, give up our work to the invisible, and be prepared to conjure forth a ghostly revenant to interrogate and save again. Each time we save, we renounce our claim to the file, and, as Derrida states, ‘A phantom’s return is, each time, another, different return, on a different stage, in new conditions’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 22). (...) Our relationship with the digital document is an uncanny one, since it is always a phantom.

Stephen Curtis, “You have been saved: digital memory and salvation” in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging Gothic from the nineteenth century to the present, Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds.), 2015.