Rendering the whole world blank: Precarity, totalising fear and digital scrolling

This talk, based on the fourth chapter of my thesis, explores the connection between structurally induced precarity and the material practice of digital scrolling. It argues in favour of an expanded definition of precarity and explores the affective texture of precarity, contending that it results in a state of what I call totalising fear (fear which relates, at once, to discrete objects as well as the world itself). In that context, this article advances the claim that scrolling can be understood as an affective attachment (of the kind outlined by Lauren Berlant), developed in response to totalising fear, and which enables the subject to suspend time and to escape from conscious experience of precarity. In establishing this conclusion, the article also explores how the form of scrolling engenders an absorbing, passive and essentially ‘blank’ experience of the world, and how the attainment of this state is an expression of a constrained, precarious mode of agency.

Image credit: Philosophy seminar 15 March.jpg