The individual in the Age of the Digital Spectacle: target, raw material and critical potential

Abstract

This essay seeks to sketch a historical constellation in which the contradictions of individuality are continually redefined both by economic changes and by new sociotechnical devices that reconfigure the sensorium, cognition and desires. The argument runs through the text that individuality depends on critical reflection, on the production of intellectual experiences, and that the understanding of the contradictions in question depends as much on a look at the whole, at capitalism and its mutations as at the devices, institutions and technologies in which the relations between knowledge and power take concrete forms in places close to individuals. The text ends by emphasizing the relevance of art for the development of a subjectivity used to critical thinking