The Next Level: Rollbacks and Erasures in Three Acts

Abstract

The Next Level:Rollbacks and Erasures in Three Acts Avital Ronell ACT ONE—Medial Contestation Gripped by invasive aspects of multifactorial collapse, we are bound to ask about the nature of technological impingements and their political resolve. Part of the job description involves keeping pace with the cognitive shakeups provoked by technical mutations and their existential counterparts—critical rounds that can wear one down and kill one's creative engines, particularly if one is inclined to think that one has covered the material, more or less. Yet, a thinking grrl's duty consists in tirelessly checking the premises of updated windows and opaque techno-clusters, whose status often clocks in as obsolesced on arrival. Still, we grind on. The speculative task force pulls overtime, becoming especially pertinent as reproductive rights and technologically dependent protections, including those of the fairly straightforward American voting machine, come under regressive attack. Historically, the fascistic tendency is to split off from the technological gridwork on which a totalitarian impulse fixates and primes its killing sprees. Mythologizing nationalisms routinely dispense with the platforms that are counted on to propagate a syntax of aberrant claims. Each viable technological innovation, whether of nano dimension or oversized by virtual expansion, deserves stubborn assessment based on urgent protocols of investigation. With every turn (and turnoff), technology, [End Page 403] since it became a question and bully concept, calls for a theoretical size up. When Nietzsche lamented the loss of our prime spectator, he foreshadowed the way Gd's removal would be supplanted with the reproving gaze of the digital media, its capacity for merciless hounding from a nearly theologically-based hideout in the cyber-kingdom. Had I sufficiently wide expanses at my disposal I would analyze a host of substitutive topoi and entanglements—cutting from Benjamin's phantom swarms to state-of-the-art experimental sites in Austin, TX—that involve wet-labs, mixed medical reality, electronic sniffers, biopolitical installations, ghost guns, the Gatso speed camera, and so on, without downplaying the increasing importance of regenerative farming and enhanced pharming (starting with fractal split-offs ascribable to the pharmakon).1 In terms of a critical history of inoculation I might want to close in on the cable, linking Dr. Jenner and Kant, that relates phantasms of freedom to body phobias, anti-vax rhetoric and transcendental incorporation—or examine the way billionaires get their rockets off when Mother Earth crumbles into an immunocompromised pose. Narrowing the scope for the purpose of the reflections proposed by Nicola Behrmann and Antje Pfannkuchen, I revert instead to the Urphänomen of my own technological investigations, seeking a way to address unobtrusive networks in cell phone cultures that give rise to inerasable images in the quest for social justice. Arguably, the propensity for democratic outbreak is programmed into telephony and the way it handles the invisible. Nonetheless, the telephone complicates the testability of a democratic-leaning statement to the degree that it boasts a disturbingly large repertoire of stances—and also linked to dial M for murder, issuing archaic death sentences from a despotic command post and a series of random caprices attached to an indifferent Gestell and problematic demos. Assuming an ambiguous site, it has fine-tuned conditions for freeing up contact and creating new mobilities, but was also held hostage to an 'evil twin,' maintaining limits and the ever shortening leash of surveillance techniques and instruments of torture. Ask any teenager, or any other species of detainee. Still, the cell phone repeatedly beats back its own demonry of haters at many junctures of decisive action. In times of a nationally [End Page 404] triggered Aggressionstrieb, it is responsible for shooting at white supremacies; in league with other resident technologies, it develops unbearable footage and chisels at the phobic imposition of contact taboos, whether legislated or unconsciously enacted: It is perhaps not a mere aleatory fact that Alexander Graham Bell was an anti-racist activist, agitating for voice and vote. ________ The cell phone not only serves as a licensed weapon of choice for a multitude of disconnected Daseins, a way to push back on power and call out the perversion of justice. It has also folded into an 'addictionary' of compulsive behaviors—the...