From conceptual thinking to magical thinking. Notions about the statute of theoretical practice in the culture_ram

Abstract

This article is about the effects of the change in the dominant scopic regime on the development of theoretical practice. He talks about the emergence of the digital apparatus and the RAM_culture. In this culture, all information is produced through digital simulations distributed as time-images along the link-frame. Here, the coded imagination of the cybernetic program prevails over the critical practice of the scientific theory. Such an operative modality requires a particular model of intellection that rejects modern conceptual thinking – sciences model –, replacing it with magical thinking. This last one totalizes the appearances of the circulating in network, rejecting all reflexive turn that threatens against the accelerated temporality of the virtual reality. In this way, we are facing a process of precariousness of theoretical practice that has its causes in the very materiality of the digital apparatus. As a result of this new cybernetic modality of matter, the imaginary imposes itself on the conceptual, reinforcing the positions of the dominant ideology that rules the visible. The hegemony of the imaginary within the RAM_culture implies that magical thought relegates conceptual thinking, undermining the status of contemporary theoretical practice.