ABSTRACT

In this chapter and in Part II as a whole, we build upon Part I’s analysis of technological enframement to explore how the abstract perception of technology’s apparent autonomy is, in late capitalism, deeply imbricated within the material commodity form. The fantastical properties Marx saw in commodities, Benjamin developed in explorations of both the ‘phantasmagoria’ of midnineteenth-century Paris and the ‘lucid dreaming’ of the newly emergent cinema. These fantastical properties are now increasingly aligned with the physical world as the commodification of our social environment merges ever more seamlessly with its media representation. In this context, digital matters relates to the crucial role digitality plays in promoting a new form of Georg Lukács’s (1968 [1922]) concept of reification. New commodity forms assume an increasingly informatic appearance that is simultaneously material and immaterial: at once both static elements in our physical environment and in motion or flux (e.g. the spread of franchised stores and logos). We thus build upon Kittler’s identification of the city as an information processor to show that a crucial dimension of the digital is its ability to change whole environments into areas ripe for informationalization so that key Marxist notions such as the reversal of relations between people and objects, commodity fetishism, etc. breach ever new thresholds.