Information-Power: Teletechnology and the Ethics of Human–Animal Difference
Samrat Sengupta
in Banerji D., Paranjape M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. Springer, New Delhi.
Abstract
Jacques Derrida in the book Echographies of Television invites us to train ourselves into the mechanics of televisuality. In case of reading a written text, we attempt often to be close to the originary intention of the text, thereby unconsciously trying to repeat the original. This kind of unconscious technicity, however, is much more foregrounded in the televisual where the spectator unknowingly remains haunted by the hidden modes of its construction. This paper through a reading of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler tries to show how and why this technicity has to be recognized and how it is unavoidable in the case of a televisualized object-image. The presentness is much more rooted in the televisual reproduction, though with the awareness that this must have been framed. I propose here that there is certain spectrality at the heart of the televisual that corresponds closely to the spectrality of the world order after the end of history and end of ideology epoch. The spectrality is insinuated to the perpetual presentness in terms of temporal and spatial omnipresence of an Empire around the globe which is all pervasive. In this context, the paper would talk about the enframing of man and notions of humanity—the human subject in terms of a new paradigm of power supplementing Foucault’s notion of biopower, which I would call information-power, which radically reorients the knowledge/power paradigm. It would also focus on a literary rethinking of the human–animal difference insinuated by the changing paradigm of power.