The Post-Digital Pensive Image: Reclamation of Subjectivity within Communicative Capitalism

This paper/project theorizes an epistemological rupture between the scopic regimes of Cartesian Perspectivalism and the “Post-Digital” and how these influence conceptions of reality, identity, and subjectivity. Through an analysis of the progression of perspectivalism from the 15th century to the digital image, the photograph is theorized as operating concomitantly with realism and positivism, and through digital mediation, as having been commodified and weaponized by capitalism for the purposes of subjugating its subject. This subjugation is theorized as producing a pervasive dysphoria, as the simulacrum of reality engendered by digital visuality causes the semiology of reality to dissolve. The “post-digital,” then, serves as a negation of this subjugation through a reflexive and hyper-mediated visuality that employs surrealist strategies to ground the spectator in their own subjectivity. The photographic component is an inquiry into how I, as a digital subject, utilize aesthetic strategies in order to ground my own subjectivity within this paradigm.