HMKK0323DU Cultural History: Discourses on Disconnectivity

In this course we will place the current discussions on the so-called “culture of connectivity” (Van Dijck) against the backdrop of its imagined other, namely the discourses on disconnectivity. In a culture obsessed with social networking, participation, and connectivity, to disconnect has come to mean going off-line; to reclaim presence in the physical world; to salvage the actual over the virtual. The desire to reconnect it expresses – whether it be with ones (“off-line”) self, with the other, with the spiritual values in life, or with ones natural environment –, however, is not new to our historical moment. In fact, it can be found throughout history in various forms of asceticism, as well as many expressions of literature, (media), art, and politics that are generally associated with (early to late) modernity, from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1845; which inspired anarcho-primitivism and the back-to-the-land movement), to Theodore Kaczynsk’s “Industrial Society and Its Future” (1995, also known as the “Unabomber Manifesto”), and beyond. Working from the understanding that each social order produces its own recluses and tendencies to disconnect, the common traits of which are specific to the historical moment and culture from which they arise, the aim of this course is to identify the specificities of voluntary disconnectivity in the digital age, and explore how it compares with other and earlier practices of psychic, socio-economic, and political withdrawal.

This course takes its inspiration from Roland Barthes lecture series entitled “How to Live Together” in which he explored the phenomenon of what he calls “idiorrhythmy” (a form of living together in respect of one-another’s individual rhythms) through a series of novelistic simulations (or texts). Our concept will be “voluntary disconnectivity,” and our texts may vary from novels, art works, films, and photo-projects, all the way up to web-environments and digital apps.