Machinic Highs and Pathic Patchworks of Addicted Systems
Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey · Bristol University Press eBooks · 2024
Adopting, as its starting point for the engagement with more-than-human aesthetics, a discussion of the concept of the machinic ‘high’ to be found in the work of Félix Guattari, this chapter proposes an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ engagement with networked digital technologies. It considers the affective texture of human–computer interaction from a point of view that stresses the compulsive, even addictive dimension of media engagement but insists in particular on the complex ‘machinic’ configuration of technological systems. The concept of the ‘pathic’, derived from existential psychiatry, rewired in the work of Félix Guattari in the service of an environmental thinking that emphasizes the delicate nature of processes of morphogenesis, becomes a key operator in the chapter for exploring the productive ambiguities of data-driven forms of subjectivity.