Modes of resilience. Literature and Technology

Abstract

At this stage of the 21st century, no one can doubt the revolution that the development of information and communication technologies has caused in all areas of life. The digitalization implemented in recent decades is the most important instrument for the expansion and democratization of knowledge. However, the dark side began to emerge some time ago. We speak of the “information regime” in which we live as a form of domination in which algorithms and artificial intelligence play a decisive role in political, social, economic, cultural and identity processes. Byung Chul Han in Infocracy describes them: “digital information technology makes communication a means of surveillance” even though people feel free. The arguments show the different ways of permeating society, fragmenting it while undermining the democratic system. In this context, it is worth updating Walter Benjamin's proposal when he assigns to the historian the task of appropriating a memory as it flashes in an instant of danger. As art has the capacity to make the abstract concrete by putting singular faces and lives, I try to analyze the ways in which literature gives ethical, political and aesthetic answers to almost cyclical crises. On this occasion I choose texts by Michel Nieva, who cultivates the genre of science fiction with a markedly political character. His novels build a plot where the science fiction genre, the literary tradition -Argentine and elsewhere- and certain historical characters intersect. Video games, global warming, epidemics and viruses, national history, certain books operate as productive matrices.