Practical Consciousness

We have learned that consciousness is always mediated, first by time, then by culture, then by culture-in-time: history. Then we learned that media have always determined our historical situation, and that this situation consists in all-encompassing practical world-views called “imaginaries.” Media reproduce these imaginaries as images impressed upon the body and mind, and it is the task of critical consciousness to come to relational, contradictory, historical, reflexive, and practical awareness of this situation. Finally, we come to practical consciousness. We ask: what is to be done?

If the cultural environment is always a series of images, then the foremost task of contemporary historical consciousness is to engage in and with these images. Indeed, every major critic has gone “into the world of technical images,” to appropriate Villem Flusser. The history is quite neat and tidy:

• Kant knew that the critique of reason was needed before there could be a critique of practice or judgment.
• Hegel knew he had to critique Spirit against the abstract idealism of Fichte and Schelling.
• Marx knew that the critique of religion was the precondition for the critique of political economy.
• Nietzsche knew that the critique of Schopenhauer’s abusive-historical Kantianism was needed before he could use history as genealogy.
• Benjamin knew he had to critique film and mechanical reproduction.
• Adorno knew had to critique radio.
• Foucault knew he had to critique Marxism when the Soviet Union became unbearable.
• Deleuze and Guattari knew they had to critique psychoanalysis when it failed to deliver results.
• Fanon knew he had to criticize Sartre’s abstract existentialism.
• McLuhan knew he had to critique media as inert.

Every major critical theorist begins not with critiquing anything, but with the practical criticism, as IA Richards put it, of judging the works and ideas in circulation about them. Sometimes, this was the critique of a media form, as in Benjamin and Adorno. Sometimes, it was the critique of a concept-in-use, as in Kant and Hegel. Other times, it was the critique of an academic and social practice, as in Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze. Whatever the case, the images doing technical work in the social imaginary were, for each theorist, a point of departure. The knowledge that such theory had to be such a point of departure was above all a practical consciousness.

What, then, is our practical object? What do we take to be at the forefront of historical consciousness? What requires the greatest historicizing, and where must be most closely apply the close, aesthetic work of time-conscious analysis?

Today, there can be no more pressing object for contemporary criticism than the internet. Indeed, if culture is an environment of images authenticating subjects, and if contemporary culture is indelibly mediated by the internet, then the technical image of most concern to us to day remains the internet. As a cultural object, the internet is nothing other than the image of images, the space within which cultural life is not only reproduced as a series of photographic images, but as profiled images of human beings, associational images of social movements and, most recently, historical images of training data for large language models.

Beyond the loneliness of Sherry Turkle, beyond the surveillance of Shoshanna Zuboff, beyond the endless racial criticism of Wendy Chun, Ruha Benjamin, Saidya Hartman, and Safiya Noble. Beyond the techno-optimistic Silicon Valley ideology and its contemporaneous AI-adjacent flavors. Beyond Manuell Castells’ and Clay Shirkey’s hope for the universalization of networked, “free software.” Beyond the blogosphere and Papacharissi’s affective politics. Beyond dana boyd and Nancy Baym’s “digital public spheres.” Beyond Kate Crawford and Karen Hao’s trite “logics of digital capitalism.” Beyond Bratton’s “stack” and Marwick’s personal branding. Beyond platform capitalism, cognitive capitalism, too late capitalism, hyperpolitics, hyperconnectivity, and hyperreality. Beyond all such cliches about what the internet has been and might be, beyond every tired formulation that leaves untroubled the scholar’s relation to the web. Beyond every smarmy formulation about how this new theory will definitely be the one to knock our socks off, we must say:

We go into the image of images. We study the perceptionis imaginarium, perception’s imaginary. We live as both profiles and avatars, visions and instantiations. We make our lives our study, and we deny the internet is anything but part of real life. We deny that theories about the internet should be anywhere but formed in, on, and by the real experience of its use. We are the image makers, and we imagine tomorrow: We take the forefront of historical consciousness as our way of life. We search in that life for the motors of the future, and we know imaginary practice to be its solvent. Thus we say: death to all past imaginaries—let perception itself rule, and let consciousness make its own history, exactly as it pleases. Autonomy, or death!

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