Unworlded After-Picture: The New State of Being in the Virtual Cosmos
Mary Claire Brunelli
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 4
Abstract
In 1938, Heidegger christened his era “the age of the world picture,” evoking the human capacity to represent a meaningful existence through authentic social engagement and care for shared surroundings. There have been various “world pictures” throughout history, each a response to popular media produced by the latest technology. From papyrus to print, alphabetic writing has long supported literature as the dominant medium. Now, the development of digital, virtual, and network technology is dethroning this tradition and reshaping the world picture established through text. Brian Rotman notes that habituation to new technologies is restructuring the brain’s cognitive architecture, resulting in unpredicted consequences on thought, activity, and selfhood. The private, self-contained, alphabetic “I” is splintering into the porous, pluralistic, public agent that Rotman calls para-self. Accessible and available at all times, adept at navigating the invisible pathways of global cyberspace, simultaneously “present” at numerous “sites,” crisscrossed by networks of other selves and simulacra of itself through an ongoing stream of spontaneous information, this para-self does indeed present a picture of the world that corresponds to the technology used to build it, digitization. The question is, to what extent can this digital imaginary sustain the “world picture” heralded by Heidegger as a participatory and conscientious unity of Being-in-the-world?
Keywords: World Picture, Unworlding, Dasein, Subiectum, Para-self, Cognition, Subjectivity, Digitization, Network Media, Virtual Technology, Martin Heidegger, Brian Rotman
Mary Claire Brunelli (mbrunelli@gradcenter.cuny.edu) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York, USA. She received her BA from Williams College in English and French, and her MA in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She works on American, English, and French literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, with primary interest in aesthetic theory and body culture studies. Her current research concerns the influence of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and pragmatism in literary representations of the Modernist body.