Configurations of the Global in the Postdigital Era through ‘Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen’

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This study explores how postdigital technology impacts on the global, and how it results in the modification not only of the configuration and representation of the global, but also of cultural and linguistic practices, which can now be considered postglobal in nature. In the novel ‘Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen’ (2016), by Senthuran Varatharajah, digital media and its relationship with language are inseparable from the issue of globalization. Here, the term “globalization” has a dual meaning, owing to the inherent ambivalence between the materiality and immateriality of the Postdigital. Firstly, the Internet has become an intermediary of cultural connections, while simultaneously reincorporating, remediating and feeding off the physical and cultural space. As such, it plays its role in the figuration of interconnections, which are in turn linked to global coordinates. Secondly, the immateriality of the space itself and the evanescence of its spatial distances and pathways point towards a reconceptualization, or the suspension of global coordinates in a geopolitical sense. Put another way, they point towards the Postglobal.