ABSTRACT
There is but one future we are all assured of, if you discount the certainty of taxes. But death is strangely absent from contemporary discourses of the digital media, even those that focus on artificial life. Immortality of the soul rages as a discursive formation, but death has been banished. However, banishment is not destruction. Death returns in a variety of guises, the repressed that will not fade away. Central to these discourses of the repression of death is the variety of responses that can be configured around the question, What comes after the natural? In the languages of digital aesthetics, nature’s successors rarely appear unambiguously as personal extinction, but in a series of metaphorical and futurological constructions in each of which death is reconfigured as a kind of conceptual landscape. Such altering landscapes through which these answers meander I will refer to as postnatures. I would normally avoid the prefix ‘post’: I can find little evidence for a radical break with the genocidal, exploitative, oppressive and bureaucratic recent past. I cannot believe that the triumphant western imperium is about to crumble because of an epistemological event, sociologically explicable as the slow dissemination of a mathematical puzzle about the status of truth theorems. Indeed, the same puzzle, as stated in Gödel’s Entscheidungs-problem and Turing’s response to it, is fundamental to the invention, design and functioning of the computer (Nagel and Newman 1959; Hodges 1993). Not even the changing terms of truthstatements can disguise the debts owed by the electronic architectures of knowledge to Morse telegraphy, the institutional library, the imperial bureaucracies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a vast legacy of visual, auditory and verbal regimes and protocols from the recent and the more distant past.
