Media in crisis: contemporaneity and the metanarrative machine

http://aric.edugraf.ufsc.br/congrio/html/anais/anais.htm

Benjamin Luiz Franklin Ms-IPT
Carlos Augusto Remor Dr-UFSC
Tarcisio Vanzin Dr-UFSC
Gregório J. V. Rados Phd - Loughborough University

Tradução: Mylene Queiroz.

Abstract:


This paper has two objectives. The first is to attempt to situate a scenario, which clarifies a media crisis, in which digital convergence presents a threatening paradigmatic exchange for the current entertainment and communication business models. The second objective is to suggest that this crisis is not the result of a technological change, but results from a logical change in forms of subjectification within modernity. Our attempt to outline this crisis is based on the understanding of the machine concept in contemporary society, in which the transition among machinic logic set the limits of a change over what psychoanalysis defines as a “non-sexual relationship”. We conclude this work with a criticism of the idea of digital convergence, privileging the concept of simulacrum. This concepts points to a broader movement of epistemic convergence, a new metanarrative, abstained from sense production in favor of the code fascination regime, as pure versatility.
Key words: media, digital convergence, forms of subjectification

Introduction:

The term digital convergence has been broadly used to describe the migration or integration process of existing technologies to a digital mold compatible with internet protocols and patterns. In his book, Digital Being (1996), Negroponte defines “digital convergence” as a conversion of atoms into bits. He draws attention to a contradiction in the creation of the business model constructed by the 20th Century communication and entertainment industry, in which information is much more important than the media that supports it. This industry model was erected based on the material sales of its immaterial products. Consequently, it is suffering from the breakdown of its monopoly - in the distribution or consumption of its merchandises and services, specifically because they have been attaching information to the media that supports it.

It is important to remember that the phonographic industry, represented by RIAA, (Recording Industry Association of America) claimed an annual loss of more than 10% of CD sales, blaming the peer-to-peer internet file sharing – which has tripled in users every year (OBERHOLZER & STRUMPF, 2006). VOIP (voice over internet protocol), enables phone calls via internet and has become a tendency in the telecommunication industry[1]. Concerning audiovisual production, YouTube has produced more audiovisual hours in a period of six months than what the three most important American entertainment networks had produced altogether in a period of 50 years (WESCH, 2009).
This paper intends to discuss these “tendencies” toward digital convergence. Foregoing an attempt to understand the technological changes that threaten traditional media and communication sectors, we will attempt to understand what forces are operating these changes so that they occur as a set of “tendencies”. The force which precedes technology and which we wish to draw attention to is related to Negroponte’s definition, pointing to a modern existence of an atomist world: the idea of equivalence between an indivisible entity that can be represented as another indivisible unity. Atoms and bits could be converged, submitted to an equation, and hence orchestrated in a way, which creates a complete set of equivalences, as an ideal language, as if there weren’t any loss in this movement.
The machine concept in modernity can serve as an attempt to understand the initiative - of conquering an ideal language - that, however, presents the following paradox: if on the one hand there seems to be a reduction of the great narratives, on the other hand it seems that a new form of unity is appearing. The machine concept can be illuminating in the investigation of what we could call – and we will see in what conditions we may do so – the new imaginary meta-narrative in the contemporary, which finds in the digital convergence one of its greatest emblematic movements.


The concept of machine


The concept of machine that we seek may be articulated with the concept of repetition. The path that we are proposing to cross is committed with Deleuze’s view that essentially a repetition of the same does not exist; and that repetition always points out the existence of a difference – meaning that thought can problematize the ideal representation of identity (DELEUZE, 1998). Initially this opinion may appear contradictory, since it seems that repetition is everywhere and that it seems to encompass an order. From this point of view, knowledge would consist in discovering this chain of repetition.
We do not intend to force a disassociation between the possibility of repetition and the possibility of representation. Our first task is to understand the process that enables the effects of repetition, or as Deleuze and Guattari explain, thought implies making it so that universals are explained (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1992). Given an unrepeatable universe, how can we obtain an illusion of the repetition of the Same[2] the semblance so that we can apply a function of identity where A=A? According to Lacan, the identity affirmation type A=A occurs only in the semantic field, in the verb to be coupling (REMOR, 2007) – wherein we could make use of logical couplings, or mechanisms of interference through which we can relate entities of a domain. Lacan affirms that A is not equal to A. In other words, in his aphorism, there is no sexual relation, the identity or the verb to be coupling is imaginary; there isn’t an independent form of a subject that announces this identity. Lacan’s and Deleuze’s opinions converge at this point – there are no essentialisms, in a critical posture in relation to Platonism and Structuralism[3].
Lacan articulates the main concept of psychoanalysis using three registries of human reality: real, imaginary, and symbolic. These three “registries” cannot be disassociated, and they allow Lacan to locate concepts in a way, which provokes new forms of articulations and new approaches to Freudian inquiries. In summary, we can comprehend the registry of the real as a failure of representation modes, pointing to a repetition of that which “wavers”. Rather, it is the return of a failure, of the impossible, or the repetition of a difference; a revisit of the nonsense that becomes traumatic due to its resistance to forms of nomination. The real would be that which always returns to the same place. However, the same place is a failure in the proposition of sense. We can think that there is no repetition of the Same in the Real, being that there isn’t any possibility of repetition in the Real - to the degree that there is no coupling of the to be verb at all, or is there a law that organizes it (FREIE, 1997).
For Lacan, the repetition of the Same, as identity, by the means proposed in the logical coupling of the to be verb, occurs only in a semantic sense. The symbolic registry would be this language-ordering dimension, which precedes the speaker and subjects him to an adjustment, allowing language to speak through the living being. It is the symbolic order that would acquire the body, once the body is subjected to this structure. The subjectivity process would be linked, according to Lacan, to the process of culture entrance by the use of language and its symbolic structure. In summary, it is linked to the effort to make the speaker subordinate to a preexisting logical field (LACAN, 1993).
Nevertheless, the repetition of the Same would also privilege the registry of the imaginary. If an ordainment of pure difference occurs in the structure of the symbolic, the identity of these elements with sense and signification occurs in the imaginary. The imaginary has a Narcissist dimension, in which the speaker gives a unitary meaning to his/her form – a similarity, a duality, and autonomy (REMOR, 2007).
For the purpose of this work, repetition is associated to the machine concept as an operation of identity and sense, rather as an imaginary sexual relationship given by the logical coupling of the to be verb, as a return to a unitary and similar Same, excluding the Real registry – even if also in an imaginary way. It is important to highlight that Lacan describes the real as also being what “doesn't cease not to inscribe itself.”
If the concept of the Real, as a registry situated away from meaning, sense, and identity, does not tolerate the repetition of the Same, neither does it tolerate the concept of Machine that we are seeking here due to fact that it’s related with identity. Lacan resorts to a dream to highlight the exclusion of the Real in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1976). A father dreamed that his child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully, 'Father, don't you see that I am burning?' Soon he wakes up. After, at the wake, there is the boy’s funeral and the crepitating flames burning the coffin. Lacan’s interpretation emphasizes the awakening; not in the reality perceived by the exterior noises, but in the reality of the message: 'Father, don't you see that I am burning?'
For Lacan, given the emergence of senselessness in the son’s death, the father attends a message that points out his responsibility in the Imaginary registry. The father wakes from a traumatic encounter with the nonsense in the dream, to assume a sense in the vigil, even if it is the one censured by the son. In other words, he wakes up from the real nonsense in order to remain asleep in reality, though it is a place of significance and grammar, but outside of the traumatic castration of the senseless (LACAN, 1993). .
Given the traumatic repetition of the radical difference in real, we escape to language reality and its forms of contention and paradigmatization of repetition in reality. In other words, we escape toward, and not from reality. The repetition of the same occurs in reality and encounters in the scripture a privileged form of ordainment to the degree that it has an effect upon interiority.
The machine has the effects of scripture in the sense of its achievement (to transfer to reality), like dreams – which Freud denominated as the realization of a desire. The machine applies a semantization of the world and hides the interiority of this structure in reality. However, the machine as a discourse does not need a defender as a text. This is due to the fact that it defends itself within its discursive logic, inside its mechanisms of imaginary sexual relationships. The machine operates in a structure as the scripture does, but it can operate readings. In other words, it can operate movements of meaning in its own interiority, since it changes the positions of its nodes and creates metonymic displacement without the presence of a subject, which is needed in scripture. The machine defends itself.
Modernity and Machine
In the ancient times, Greeks revealed their Gods through the holy word, and mathematics would seek ideal aesthetic relationships and establish a demand for conviction and for the rhetoric that occurred in the polis public sphere (VERNANT, 2003). In modern times, with the advent of the Christian neo-platonic forms, the truth became related to a unique and imponderable god – whose description merely distanced it in its Metaphysical Horror (KOLAKOWSKI, 1998). This new divine attribution made a new ambition possible, which placed truth as an attribution of men – since god could not be described but could guarantee in a transcendental and ineffable way that the secret codes of nature could be deciphered by reason. Milner (1996) explains that it was due to this new possibility that a new manner of describing the world could arise, anchored in the mathematization of the real and the creation of the subject of science (Descartes) - an impersonal subject without qualities who is able to describe the world through mathematical characters.
The Differential Engine proposed in the 17th Century by Newton and Leibniz supposes the existence of a world that obeys a transcendent law, a meta-language that can be described in mathematical terms – with the existence of a superior being that offers the guarantee of upholding such a law: a proletarian god (CABAS, 1997). This structural centrality, as well as the systemic functionality of the machine in modern times, logically responds to Foucault’s indications to what he called a disciplinary society. This disciplinary society results from the institutionalization and rationalization of disciplinary mechanisms in regulating social practices, which arose between the 18th and the 20th Centuries. Its emblematic control device was panopticon (FOUCAULT, 1997).
Panopticon is an architectural form that consists of a central tower, which is conscious of the actions within surrounding peripheral cells. These cells do not have a full view of the central tower or of the other cells in the system. The purpose is to “induce in the prisoners a conscious and permanent state of visibility which ensures the authoritarian function of power” (id., p.166). A disciplinary society inquires well-established control towers, which are able to support a symbolic cohesion to the power system – whether they are systems of controlling the production of material goods, as in industry, or the production of symbolic goods, as in the school and family. Telephonic, radio, and television industries are emblematic both in their technological patterns and in their business models – they are great panopticons. They are systems that need control centers and govern themselves in monopolies, creating discursive units and unifying and integrating views of the world. They are like giant differential engines that support themselves based on a consistent truth in an indeterminate subject.
Systematic thought, as a modality of modern scripture, which clearly establishes cause and effect relationships within a same circle, has reaffirmed its platonic heritage of primacy of idea over form, wherein there the spirit is prioritized over flesh. Rather, the good ideal form is projected as a creator and disciplinary project. If in the old machine the idea of technical reproduction was subordinated to the singularity of the real, as a return of the senselessness of the condition of difference (and thus its artesian aspect), in the modern machine its reproducibility is entire, given that its origin is preserved in the scriptural sphere, since the difference of forms in relation to its original project can be seen as inferior to its ideal project. The non-disciplined form through functionality of the spirit can be discarded and substituted without harming the universal functionality of the system. (LÉVY, 1998).
The continuous movement of this operation is the production of universals, which are infinitely integrated to a classificatory scheme of the spirit, in the constant separation and privilege between representation and its degraded forms in the flesh. The modern metaphysical sickle once more has separated the machine from its support. The distinction between Hardware and Software made by Turing in the 20th Century was an emblematic stroke of modernity – the creation of a machine that could emulate other machines once it could be fed with a project other appropriate scripture: the Software[4]. The Hardware, the universal reader of modern-day scriptures, complies with their role of minimizing the roar of real machines toward a utopia of systemic forms totally managed by reason.
Turing’s accomplishment concerning the statute of the Machine implies an understanding of Leibniz’s formulas, in the sense of the production of a radical alphabet within binary logic, where everything can be created from an absolute disjunction between presence and absence, zero and one (DELEUZE, 1991). If in the base of the binary alphabet there is a radical ontological separation, we can derive a series of combinational differences, which preserve the binary identities’ content. With the modern machine, we have created a dual ideal of nature. Rather, we have transformed nature into words in the machine. However, with Turing’s mechanization of Leibniz’s theology we have inaugurated the differential engine, the proto-machine of virtuality; wherein the separation between reader and scripture is finally abolished and an objectified reader in universal bases is created.


Contemporary Machines


The maturation of capitalism as explained by Bauman (2001) has not changed its logic of abstraction. On the contrary, it pointed out ever more efficient forms of abstraction. If in modernity the ontological cut was given by opposite pairs, with the exultation of this logic other cuts were made, new categories were created, and new ruptures have resulted in a new hyper-disciplinarity. It has occurred such that those opposites quit opposing each other, since they have become interchangeable and codified. Senseless, but permutable in the Leibnizian sense; without a center but virtual while exchanging a radical alphabet into its genetic difference, Deleuze named this new society ordainment the society of control (DELEUZE, 1996)
There are interconnected modules within the society of control, and without a central mechanism, they replace the panopticon. The idea of a system that challenges the notion of interiority and exteriority melts the edges and avoids a direct confrontation with power, which becomes diffuse and ambiguous (COSTA, 2006). Control is permanently exercised, without confinement, under an open sky, through evaluation mechanisms and permanent training, in a continuous and modulated time.
Handcraft objects have been deterritorialized in disciplinary society, In other words, they have had their consistency withdrawn from the real, while a repetition of the same, in order to have a logical consistency in the symbolic and in the imaginary, in terms of system – there is where the possibility of repetition of the same arises. On other hand, in a control society, the deterritorialization went beyond desrealizing even more, creating virtual machines. Whatever was considered a gear in disciplinary society became a scripture in control society or, Software. It contained a universal reader in the computer and furthermore its virtualization: cyberspace[5].
Different than the systems produced within the disciplinary society, in control society the machines have established among themselves a non-deterministic relationship. Without a regulatory center for the totality of these interactions, its boundaries remain little defined. The continuous virtualization of the machine has promoted its radical dissolution in computational logic from its conception in ancient times as craftsmanship until the time of its technical reproducibility, via the Industrial Revolution.
The dissipation of the machine in the virtualization of the computer itself, in the myriads of cyberspace, is part of the Platonic-Christian logic reading of separation of the spirit from the flesh, of the horror towards the sexual. Nowadays it has encountered its greatest victory: a machine that gives up the meaning that used to define it in return for a complete reversibility in a precession of models; hyper-reality (BAUDRILLIARD, 1976). Hyper-reality does not need to prove anything related to truth and sense, as occurs with the real, however without the curse of failure, toward an attempt to neutralize the effects of a Lacanian reality as a faulty encounter.
If for Lacan, real excludes sense, for Baudrillard the hyper-real empowers it within its transparency. Senselessness appears according to the potency for multi-senses offered by the modern machine. In a Lacanian perspective, the real would be then, according to Baudrillard, erased, in a symbolic machine, which is not concerned with sense, but with the empowerment of virtualizations. While modern machines affirm the real by reserving it a place for senselessness, this made a return to the Same possible as a logical failure, an entropy, a death drive, the side effects, etc. The contemporary machine, by involving the hyper-real, erases, using Baudrillard’s term, the real while assuming a place of similarity without sense, in the operation of reversibility and fascination of the virtual code (Idem, 1973).
If the decline of paternal function[6], i.e., the loss of a metanarrative, which is a feature of the contemporary, dissolved the panoptic model of power, it did so to obtain more efficient exchange mechanisms and to create more flexible and adaptive models for merchandise, commerce, and control flows. The virtualizations of all flesh, the transformation of bodies into codes, the erasing of traces of the real, go in the direction of a unique dream of control: the desire for modernity.
However, we may consider that if on the one hand modernity has discarded the great narratives, on other hand, in its current statute it demands a meta-machine, or a metanarrative machine, or further more, a machinic metanarrative as an effort to operate a universality of its own premises. As said by Guattari (1992), it requires a universality of significance, even if the cost of this movement is the deterioration of sense, fragmented in multiple forms of significance production, all under the fascination of the code.
Hardt and Negri (2000), draw attention to the fact that the paradigmatic form of the exercise of power of our days is no longer submission to a central agency, but volunteered, wishful, unconscious adhesion to a communication net of acentric-virtualized codes. If within the model described by the panopticon we have an imperialist situation, in the society of control we have the Empire – that is certainly not imperialist, because it does not want to sustain a tradition, does not intend to civilize savages, or generate a vanguard revolutionary movement. The Empire does not offer a universalizing narrative, but a universal means of communication through a deterritorialized, acentric, and amoral machine. Globalization is not the universalization of a language or of a life style, but the universalization of a virtual machine of biopolitic control – so we can use the terms examined by Deleuze with Foucault in order to designate forms of political and disciplinary control over life and its reproduction.
The machine that came from ancient times with a singular statute - since it could not be technically reproduced - was abstracted in the beginning of modernity within the disciplinary society by the creation of the scientific subject and differential tools. At the beginning of the 20th Century, there was the division between Hardware and Software, with the creation of a universal code reader: the computer. At the beginning of the 21st Century, within the society of control, the machine was almost completely virtualized, as the universal code reader was equally deterritorialized. The machine also needed to respond to a fragmented scientific subject, who is abstained from sense in the name of a complete transparency of information, seduced in its radical alphabet statute and complete in its binary ideal sexual typicality.


Convergence and simulacrum


According to the demands of the society of control, the universality of an acentric system of communication does not imply narrative convergence. On the contrary, the contemporary machine does not intend to semantically arrange civilization, but produce entirely new discursive forms, as if it could add more blocks to a heterodox construction. The fundamental point is that for as heterodox the available blocks could be in the creation of narrative structure, they will have a common protocol that enables communication among the objects to go beyond functionalism – their ambience, as Baudrillard (1973) had said.
The digital convergence that we are facing in our days is not exactly “convergent”, as it cannot generate a homogeneous field. On the contrary, it tends to execute more and more diverse forms of machine production. Virtualization does not simply dematerialize, as shown by Levy (1997), but it produces hybrid forms, since hybridism requires a common scenario or a code exchange system.
This convergence points to “a decline of the paternal function” the acentrism of machines, a senseless, non-semantic federative model of communication, and an amoral-connectionist discourse made of networks of networks. Following this path, it becomes evident that the internet nowadays is a paradigmatic example of this new power mold in the Empire described by Hardt and Negri (2001).
The Internet is emblematic because it responds to an acentric model, with open and frankly dissident boundaries to a control-centralized model. It is also emblematic because its architecture virtualized communication systems. It is convenient to remember here Sun’s (an internet paradigmatic enterprise) motto: the computer is the network. We should also remember that the internet arose in a federative society, a society of dissidents with disdain for the royal, metaphysical authority predominant in modern Europe.
However, the Empire does not belong to its homeland. Just as capitalism was born in Europe and became universalized, the Empire was born in America and was universalized in an incomparable way, an acentric way, wherein it is not possible to conclusively recognize its actors. Modernity, with its horror for flesh, has deterritorialized machines, work, and the body. Once the machine was deterritorialized through the internet, now modernity bears its teeth to the form, which created it: it is the moment of the deterritorialization of the internet itself.
The communication structure created by the telephone, radio, and television systems, as well as their business models, belongs to an anterior phase of modernity: the solid phase, as Bauman named it. The Empire, nevertheless, launches its tentacles upon these domains. The tendency towards the predominance of an acentric technological and business model for these segments of the communication industry does not result from a technological innovation, but from a tendency of the forms of control and reproduction of intrinsic power to this society.
The Convergence of the information, technology, and communication (ITC) systems, is not convergent. Rather, it will not create a unitary model of control. First, it overlaps contemporary control forms to modern models of biopolitical control. The entertainment sector crises, as in music and soon in the movie industry, point out fissures in their modes of contemporaneity.
We can take the phonograph industry crises as example, which needs central mechanisms to control flows: large recording labels, distributors, mass media mechanisms, beyond the governmental legal apparatus of copyright protection. It is weighty mechanism, which centralizes regulated processes and flows.
What is happening in the phonographic industry is not a surmounting of the modern production model and artwork deterritorialization, but the radicalization, virtualization, and transformation of them all: musicians, music, timbre, instruments, desire, distribution, solitary consumption, celebration rituals, etc.. These elements are moving to a symbolic mediation plan, in an acentric control machine such as peer-to-peer technology, wherein it is not easy to determine who is the consumer, distributor, or manufacturer.
The telecommunication sector, in its right, with the virtualization of the communication network, is feeling the effects of its own deterritorialization. VOIP technology, by using an acentric model of control based on internet protocols (IP), radically alter control flows within the telecommunication company business model. It is important to draw attention to the fact that VOIP technology, which enables voice and video transmission via internet, does not necessarily utilize a central server to control calls, as happens with the telephone operators.
The technology used by companies such as Skype, for example, inhabits peer-to-peer telephony connections over IP. In other words, it directly connects two users without the intervention of a control center. The central control existing in Skype assures cohesion of user ids and access to other services, as well as integration with traditional telephone systems. From this example, a long projection is not necessary to presume that the peer-to-peer technology of voice transmission will find a open space to propagate, and will become a common service of the internet, just like web or e-mail.
Even if telephone operators detain control of the broadband system, which currently permits the effective use of VOIP technology, or even if they block the use of VOIP technology over their networks[7], access can be made by alternative broadband connections, such as wireless technology, which promotes communication over radio waves and microwaves. We can take Wimax as an example of a technology capable of connecting devices, broadly diffused in metropolitan and rural areas (a range of 50km). This technology is an alternative to the telecommunication monopoly domain and a possibility for creating alternative networks that will offer acentric means of communication.
The possibility of voice and video communication by using peer-to-peer technology subverts the centralized model of communication developed in the 20th Century, threatening the telecommunication business model. The telecommunication company monopoly will not resist to the paradigm switch offered by deterritorialization of the communication networks. The fall of the monopoly does not mean, however, a victory for democracy in the media distribution systems, or an achievement of oppressed classes in a territory of new opportunities. The model change is merely readjusting the field for the dispute for power, tending to further distance outsiders from insiders. To be included in a deterritorialized world means to participate in a social network of contacts of subjective resonances, echoes of desire, and communication mediated by virtual machines of control.
Conclusion
The machine, as a scripture that defends itself, can be understood as one of the ways to face the non-sexual relationship, as defined by psychoanalysis. It has its statute modified in contemporary society toward the simulacrum logic, which abstain a plan for meta-narrative explanation in the field of sense of the world in order to be diluted as a virtual acentric machine in a global operation plan of multi, reversible, and exchangeable models.
Digital convergence is far beyond a technological unification. It has a statute of a new metanarrative, based on the seduction of code and it tends to create a nonsensical operational field of total exchange among the numerous fields of subjectification and subordination of the bodies. The idea of digital convergence hides a much larger movement that is linked to the continuous autonomy of scripture over the real.
The destitution of the sense of the modern machine in favor of the reversibility of contemporary code, as pure difference, leads us to the production of an ideal symbolic registry, or maybe an ideal of the symbolic, according to the Lacanian definition. While globalization of a significant, brought about by the banalization of the imaginary reproduced in the horizon of nonsense, amplifies diverse forms of contemporary discomfort.
Ancient media was not able to deal with the new forms of subjectification and production of desires, considering the new contemporary forms of facing non-sexual relationships, implying a revitalization of capitalism. Capitalism encounters in the emergence of the real its principle mode of operation, bloom, and dedifferentiation.

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Authors
Benjamin Luiz Franklin belfra@gmail.com
Consultant in Computational Intelligence. Master in Systems Engineering at IPT-SP, Expert in Psychoanalysis (Estácio de Sá University) and PhD. student at Engineering and Knowledge Management – UFSC.

Carlos Augusto Remor remor@matrix.com.br
PhD in Production Engineering by UFSC (2002). Is Professor and Head of Psychology of UFSC; Psychoanalyst, Founder (1984) and President of Maiêutica Florianópolis - Psychoanalytic Institution.
Tarcisio Vanzin tvanzin@yahoo.com.brPhD in Production Engineering from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), 2005. Permanent Professor of the Program of Post-Graduation in Engineering and Management of Knowledge (PGEGC) - UFSC, Department of Engineering of Knowledge.Associate Professor of the Program of Post-Graduation in Architecture and Urbanism - PósArq UFSC
Gregório J. V. Rados grego@egc.ufsc.br
Phd - Manufacturing Engineering - Loughborough University (1991). He is currently associate professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

[1] VOIP use has grown exponentially, with projections indicating that in 2009 more than 90% of international calls will be using this technology, constituting a real threat to communication sectors in their current business model (SLABY, 2005)
[2] We will use the word same with initial capital to designate the identity repetition.
[3]Deleuze and Gatarri, incisively criticize psychoanalysis’ universal structures, the Oedipus complex as in DELEUZE and GUATTARI’s work Anti-Oedipus or the Lacanian registries to think upon human experience (Idem, 1995). We don’t have space in this article to detail their theoretical differences. We are instead interested in what speaks about their positions on identity construction and similarities; specifically, in Lacan, of how the symbolic order is constructed or, in Deleuze and Guatarri, of how difference is impoverished and crystallized in a similarity.
[4]Turing’s machine is a theoretical device, known as universal machine. It was conceived years before the modern digital computer (the reference was published in 1936) by the British Mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954). Precisely, it is an abstract computer model, limited to the logical features of its operation (memory, states, and transitions) and not to its physical implementation. Cf. pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Máquina_de_Turing.

[5] This term was created by Willian Gibson in his romance called Neuromancer. It is about a consensual hallucination. However, denoting what Baudrillard defines as “the liberation of the signs of this ingenuity” (BAUDRILLARD, 1976:16).

[6] This term referrers to the psychoanalytical form of thinking about great narratives, which structured the imaginary in modernity. According to Roudinesco (2003), the paternal function is restored in a Logos divisor, which can arrange possible exchange forms in society. The contemporary movement would be the decline of this function in favor of a movement of pure difference. This movement would place the familiar model based on the patriarch into check, beyond the form of governance and production consecrated in the image of the “God father” that guides western civilization and its forms of representation.


[7] Net neutrality is discussed in another article (Franklin et al., 2006)