Dominic Pettman
Bio
| Dominic Pettman is Associate Professor of Culture & Media, Eugene College and New School for Social Research. He has previously taught in Melbourne, Geneva, and Amsterdam. His books include After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion, Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (with Justin Clemens), and Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age. His forthcoming book is titled Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines. |
Abstract
On Social Lubrication: Between the Digital and the Chthonic
One of the more striking maxims framing this conference on contemporary labor practices is that "Social participation is the oil of the digital economy." My paper taps this metaphor in order to explore the ways in which debates surrounding "peak oil" set the cultural tone for our lives and interactions to a degree that even Hubbert and Co. could not foresee. Working - as we do - not only within a market economy, but a libidinal one, means that the very notion of the social (and by extension, participation) are inflected through the often subliminal erotics of transactions. I therefore trace some of the pulsions of this concept through Lyotard to more recent theorists such as Alan Stoekl and Bernard Stiegler, specifically in order to understand the relationship between economy, energy, and ecology. What happens to digital labor, in other words, when oil runs out - both literally and metaphorically?