Jan
20th
Fri
20th
My own example is the stash of older computers I have kept in my university office. I have a least four or five and mostly use only one, the latest model. I remain attached to older machines that have been replaced so fast that I could neither learn everything from them, exhaust them as it were, or just trash them as I was advised to do. I have kept them with all their separate memories and data, out of a sense of nostalgic attachment. Today’s technology offers the spectacle of an elephants’ graveyard, of interest only for inhabitants of the third and fourth worlds or quasi-Luddites like me. Machines that are discarded but functional are figures of a stubborn non-death; they are muter than ghosts, those who do not know that they are dead, or vampires, who derive strength and powers from being dead. Obsolete machines are still alive in a sense, but are cold and dusty because left unused. This is why obsolescence takes us beyond the venerable category of the uncanny—its awkward survival is at best funny, or ironical. Devoid of melancholia, it points to the moment when both mourning and death are impossible.
— Jean-Michel Rabaté, “The Death of Freud: What Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence?”
