The Technologisation of the Social by Paul O'Connor Marius Ion Benţa

Author:Paul O'Connor, Marius Ion Benţa [Paul O'Connor, Marius Ion Benţa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367511661
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 58589381
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Placing nothing

The injunction to be alive to is to take up space in the world (Relph, 2000) would seem to foreclose the possibility of explaining the experience and territoriality of nothing. And yet, nothing peeks out at us. The German photographer Oliver Bomberg produces hyper-realistic scale models of very familiar modern spaces such as the underpass on a motorway in what he calls non-locations, places so familiar they could be anywhere and nowhere. Archetypal urban situations which you will recognise but not be able to place. Like Bomberg, the photographer Thomas Demand also constructs scenes from everyday life and photographs them, reducing the ‘real’ to its generic and nostalgic form. We immediately recognise and identify with these places even though we cannot place them. They are recognisable but also institutional in their blankness. Sterile images of our vacuous places of modernity. These two photographers echo Marc Augé’s concept of supermodern places (2015), our collective experience of spending more time in places that we transit through, places that are neither here nor there, not with our kinspeople, rather in a new form of solitude. In a more extreme strain of this condition, Edward Relph’s studies of Disney theme parks (2007) reveal the destruction of the local and regional landscape that very often initiated the tourism, replaced by conventional tourist architecture and synthetic landscapes and pseudo-places, demonstrating in a material way how negation is strategically produced by modernity. Reflecting on these shared experiences makes it evident that nothing is now everywhere.

This form of experienced nothing has only existed for a few centuries, and many of our contemporary social practices generate versions of nothing wherever they go. Nothing has come to dominate our everyday human activity. It is no surprise why this is the case; only abstract sciences can consider a metaphysics of nothing because it is ‘a limit case’, a special case. If we look closely at voids, elisions, vacuums, nothings, we tend to eventually see something there. There is only ever nothing from a distance.

Mathematics, particularly the mathematics of mathematicians, is often presumed natural and given. And yet it has a rich social life, especially the remarkable transformation in our understanding of nothing. This radical departure, coinciding with the Enlightenment and birth of the technological age, has seen this new form of zero perform on us in ways that radically alter social life, in which we have created entire categories of being that rely on a radical mythical definition of nothing made immanent.

There is no empirical, sensory support for the notion that ‘There is nothing’. Instead, the emergence of nothing comes from the abstract world of Enlightenment philosophy. Following the contours of the opening passage in the Book of Genesis, such metaphysics starts with René Descartes who starts with nothing in the world, and then admits things as he logically establishes them. Controversially Descartes clears out everything from his world and then restores only what he can prove to exist. In contrast, St Augustine, always in his project of conservation, calls

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