On Floating: Romanticism in the Digital World

by Alexander Pschera, Erik Butler

In the digital realm, we float like fish. We have the sensation of being everywhere and nowhere -- or everything and nothing -- at once. We are between "no longer" and "not yet." Digital floating is addictive because it liberates us from space, time, and responsibility. But floating is at once a liberation and an endangerment: liberation from history, facts, obligations, but endangerment through the loss of identity and through a sense of contingency. In On Floating, Alexander Pschera proposes Romantic irony as guide for navigating digital space.

Pschera explains that digital floating means constantly fluctuating between self-affirmation and self-negation. Irony, according to the Romantic philosopher and poet Friedrich Schlegel, involves perpetual alternation between poetry and critique, creation and destruction. Understanding our digital world as ironic, we need not reject digital reality completely or express uncritical enthusiasm for it.

Pschera takes us to Korean supermarkets with no "real" products, only giant plasma screens and barcodes to be scanned. He considers the antieroticism of ebooks, the loss of narrative and history, and the "aquatic petting zoo" that is Facebook. Self-aware floating, he tells us, is the proper mode of existence for the digital world, allowing us to live both in the real world and in the digital world and giving rise to a form of expanded reality by which the confused and disoriented self regains its bearings.

88 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 2018