Paradigm and Spasm

Reflecting upon Negroponte's writing [7] in regards to the conversion from the material to the informational society, paradigmatic schisms become evident when considering material and information based systems of exchange. For the past two hundred years, Western society has been dominated by materialist capitalism that built it since the Industrial Revolution. The initial response of corporate culture is to apply the materialist principles of mid-20th Century industrial consumerism to the realm of electronic realms of intellectual capital. Wall Street has shown that the infoculture operates on substantially different principles that the previous industrial society, as investments and returns from the tech sector are frequently not measured in terms of actual holdings and performance, but on speculation and expectations based on common shareholder consensus. Like mice placed in a jar of oxygenated fluid, capital's shift to non-material symbolic systems of exchange locks it in a series of spasms as it learns to stop breathing air and begins to breathe bits.

The shift to the ephemeral has likewise caused similar shudders in the art world. . Galleries that once hesitated at the prospect of displaying digital prints, which have been problematic under materialist discourses of collecting and archival, enter logistic spasm when confronted with net.art Such genres do not fall into antecedent paradigms of material commodity, and present issues not only of Warholian/Fordist mass-production, but also of Benjamin's thought regarding the potential of the object as being infinitely reproducible[8]. Therefore, returning to Benjamin, what is then commodified is the 'aura' of the object[9], and not the data itself. The experience of image, or verisimilitude (implication of truth) of the artwork becomes the symbol of exchange. So what is for sale, or at contention, is not the object itself, but the representational practice that governs it, creating a marked shift from that of traditional materialist discourse.