IMPLOSIVE SOCIETIES: SCREENS, MATTER, AND LATERAL AGENCY

Abstract

Abstract. What we have been facing over the past decades may be described not in the worn-out terms of yet another ‘turn’ but rather as a fundamental change of vector: from outward-directed expansion to inward-directed compression — or, more precisely, to productive differentiation. This shift represents a dialectical reversal within expansionist dynamics themselves, encompassing both human experiences and material milieus and tending to merge them into a new kind of concretion with distinct characteristics.
Among these characteristics are the intensified presence of screen-like surfaces that predominantly surround us; the laterality of experiences, which are increasingly susceptible to distributed or dispersed forms of presence as opposed to aggressivity-laden frontal (re)actions; and a form of meaningfulness that resists accommodation within symbolic structures. Taken together, these tendencies mark a broader transformation in material-social dynamics — one that paradoxically accelerates the imaginative realm, now situated beyond the long-standing divide between inner and outer worlds. Such an imaginatively accelerated society may be described as implosive — a term I use in a sense close to that found in the programmatic work of Marshall McLuhan. In this context, implosion is understood as a productive process of technological and perceptual differentiation, involving the composition and decomposition of matter and resulting in the blurring of established boundaries between the given, the meaningful, and the perceptible. In this article, I examine the origins, underlying conditions, and political as well as social-theoretical implications of the emergent implosive societal.