Narcissification, ideology, ethics, poetry? Flânerie amid big data's Homo digitalis.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s In the Swarm (2017. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) foretells of a near-future in which ‘the mounting narcissification of perception is making the gaze, the other, disappear’ (24). Asking the rhetorical question, ‘If poets are in the business of cultivating “voice” then, logically enough, to which ends?’ this paper intends to argue that poetry can be an ethical cry seeking a fraternity of others in a ‘post-truth’ era, which Han imagines to belong to the newly emerging Homo digitalis (11). Finally, this paper speculates that the creative producer must turn, politically, to face ourselves within our others, as distanced and as near as a mirror’s reflection. Making-sacred in the marketplace-real, by these means can we hope to shelter together, a fraternity gathered against what Han characterises as a fast-approaching shitstorm (2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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