ICT (Immaginario, Capitalismo e Tecnologia)

Abstract

ICT (Imaginary, Capitalism, and Technology). The paper defends the use of the concept of social imaginary as a tool of analysis of contemporary capitalism, using a philosophical approach. Firstly, I claim that such a concept is more useful than the traditional concept of ideology, because the idea of unmasking or undressing an ideology produces a structural impasse (§ 1.1), and because “social imaginary” grasps the features of a society populated by digital images in a better way. In doing this, I insist that if the logic of ideology is textual and referential, the logic of social imaginary is imaginal and non-referential (§ 1.2). Secondly, I focus on the imaginary horizon of digital contemporary capitalism: I present the “immaterial” nature of post-Fordist capitalism (§ 2.1), I describe the “cerebral” work of information machines that animate it (§ 2.2), and I thematize the informatization of the imaginary, arguing that the age of technological reproducibility of the relationship engages us to imagine a world at the center of which we have not things, but interrelations or interactions (§ 2.3).