Louis Althusser, fotografiado en 1973 durante una de sus clases en la Escuela Normal Superior de París. / PATRICK GUIS / KIPA / CORBIS. Retreived from http://elpais.com/diario/2011/06/16/cultura/1308175201_850215.html

Chapter I: The unworkable interface

Alexander Galloway - The interface effect

"... the four regimes of signification:

(1) Ideological: an aesthetic of coherence, a politics of coherence;

(2) Ethical: an aesthetic of incoherence, a politics of coherence;

(3 ) Poetic: an aesthetic of coherence, a politics of incoherence;

(4) Truth: an aesthetic of incoherence, a politics of incoherence.

[...] Thus an additional claim is helpful, [...] if anything can be said about the changing uses of these regimes in the age of ludic economies it would be that we are witnessing today a general shift in primacy from the first to the second, that is to say, from the "ideological" regime to the "ethical" regime. […] ideology is in recession today, at least in terms of its classical effectivity; there is a decline in ideological efficiency. Ideology, which was traditionally defined as an "imaginary relationship to real conditions" (Althusser), has in some senses succeeded too well and, as it were, put itself out of a job. Instead, we have simulation, which must be understood as something like an "imaginary relationship to ideological conditions." In short, ideology gets modeled in software. So in the very perfection of the ideological regime, in the form of its pure digital simulation, comes the death of the ideological regime, and simulation is "crowned winner" as the absolute horizon of the ideological world. The computer is the ultimate ethical machine. It has no actual relation with ideology in any proper sense of the term, only a virtual relation."

Galloway, A. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.