ABSTRACT
In The Transparent Society,3 Gianni Vattimo offers an assessment of the chang-
ing modes of production and reception of artworks in light of a new (digital)
technology, suggesting that contemporary cultural production relies no longer
simply on shock but on an effect of sustained disorientation – almost a sus-
pension of shock:
Indeed, Vattimo re-evaluates the similar notions of Stoss and Schock devel-
oped by Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin respectively, each deploying
the term to account for changes in aesthetic experience occasioned by techno-
logical change. He does so in light of the current shift in technological ‘base’
effective event/work now being one that endlessly differs/defers cognitive
assimilation, marking a shift that I will here characterize in similarly psycho-
logical terms as trauma5 (the mind struggling to comprehend a lack). The
term latency6 is used within psychology to describe the lack of incorporation7
that attends trauma – that it is founded on an insistent yet inassimilable event
– which I will here consider in terms of the affects engendered by/in a digital
medium.
