At least the Europeans, with their deep pre-textual vision of peace as a condition of the home, not the frontier, understand the nature of the revolution promised by digital life “winning out in all spheres” against the civilization of the word. Western life, especially in still-dominant America, is headed for an “image crash.”
But what if the disordering cycle of disruption, disunity, and diaspora is inherent, as it so often seems on closer inspection, to the civilization of the word itself? What if, no matter how transformative the image, the crash is something to which the West is somehow deeply geared? Surely it ought to bring us up short that we have so freely adopted emoji from the Japanese, who have sunken according to the latest surveys into a shocking degree of de-sexualization, paralytic anti-sociability, and full-blown communicative arrest.
Yet shouldn’t it just as surely give us pause that all the stultifying uniformity imposed by the overthrow of the written and spoken word has yet to tame us or draw us together in surrender to sovereign sameness? We have yet to determine how to fight with each other for fun and sport in purely visual media. But when we do, is there any doubt that our belligerence and contrariness will blaze on undimmed?
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