From Technology to Machinism

Brent Wood

Methodologies for the Study of Western
History and Culture
Trent University
bwood@trentu.ca

 

Conley, Verena Andermatt, ed., on behalf of Miami Theory Collective. Rethinking Technologies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

 

Rethinking Technologies is a collection of twelve essays inspired (at least nominally so) by Miami University’s 1990 colloquium “Questioning Technologies.” The volume is dedicated in memoriam to Felix Guattari, whose writings on technology and ecology the editors single out as specifically inspirational for much of the work it contains. Guattari’s thought is represented by his essay “Machine Heterogenesis,” perhaps the most difficult in the volume, in which he seeks to go beyond Heidegger by showing how machines manifest not Being but “multitudes of ontological components” (26). We humans, according to Guattari, participate in this “ontological reconversion” merely by accepting what it is that the machines offer us.

 

The majority of the essays in the volume relate directly or indirectly to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”; some refer also to other of his works. Ingrid Scheibler’s “Heidegger and the Rhetoric of Submission” focuses almost exclusively on a defense of Heidegger’s work against criticism it has endured from Jurgen Habermas. Heidegger’s major contribution to the discourse of technology was to ask that we think of technology not in terms of applied science but instead in terms of a representational “enframing” that prevents us from encountering the Being of beings; editor Conley suggests that “it may be possible to rethink technologies in terms other than enframing” (xi). Conley sees the collection of essays that make up Rethinking Technologies as an attempt to go both “through” and “beyond” Heidegger, a move required primarily by two late twentieth-century developments: global ecological crisis and the “transformation of subjectivities” (xiii) brought about by the proliferation of communication technologies.

 

The essays are nominally organized into four groups: “Questioning Technologies,” “Technology and the Environment,” “Technology and the Arts,” and “Technology and Cyberspace.” These groupings, intended as “markers for the reader” (x) are largely specious. Francoise Gaillard’s essay “Technical Performance: Postmodernism, Angst or Agony of Modernism” seeks the roots of the apparent political anemia of the arts under late capitalism, all but ignoring technology in the process. Three other essays, Scott Durham’s “The Technology of Death and Its Limits: The Problem of the Simulation Model,” Alberto Moreiras’s “The Leap and the Lapse: Hacking a Private Site in Cyberspace,” and Avital Ronell’s “Our Narcotic Modernity,” look to literature for advice on the problems posed by the clash of the human and the technological, yet only Durham’s is grouped under the banner of “Arts.” The only case in which there is a productive dialogue between the grouping and the interior of the essay is that of Teresa Brennan’s “Age of Paranoia.” Brennan’s essay traces a metaphorical connection between the urge, in the infant, for control of the mother’s breast and modernity’s overstress of the visual and tendency to commodify (and, implicitly, degrade) the earth as a source of life.

 

Presented with such a motley collection of ideas, one can proceed in either of two ways: take only what is useful to one’s own field of study and dismiss the rest, or labour to make connections between the pieces that (hopefully) result in further insight, which may be still more heterogeneous with regard to the original collection. There is also the possibility that the latter approach may result in nothing but a headache and a subsequent recoiling to the safety of a good novel. At the risk of sounding disrespectfully flip, I suggest that this state of affairs may have been the founding moment of the three “appeals to literature” described above. It ought to go without saying that there is nothing dishonourable about such a move, in which art ceases to be mere illustration for theory and begins also to motivate and to define it.

 

In terms of the hard-core theory exemplified by contributors Guattari and Virilio, the three “appeals to literature” may appear marginal. I prefer to see them as the epitome of the “interplay” which Conley feels we ought to find within Rethinking Technologies. I take the bold step of forming my own provisional groupings for the purposes of “making sense” of the heterogeneity of the collection. I would wish to imply all the standard logocentric disclaimers applicable to the previous statement were I not, in highlighting these three essays, making words the sort-of-center of my critique. Perhaps I might venture to call it a “blind spot” as opposed to a “sort-of-center” in order to point out the absence of “words” as an explicit subject of discourse in the volume, for it appears that they are always lurking just over the authors’ and editors’ shoulders.

 

Ronell focuses her essay around a meta-fictional passage linking Flaubert’s Madame Bovary with America’s contemporary “war on drugs.” Ronell equates the writer with the addict, and literature with drugs. She begins with a reference to the presence of drugs in Heidegger’s Gestell (enframing) and Dasein (Being). Addiction, in Ronell’s reading of Heidegger, is a response to a vital urge, but in the end an inauthentic one: “addicted, Dasein goes nowhere fast” (60). Ronell provisionally accepts Heidegger’s assimilation of addiction under technology–“a certain type of ‘being-on-drugs'” (62)–in order to deconstruct it. Derrida’s supplement pokes its head into the picture as an explanation of the literature-drugs analogy; each is an attempt to compensate for an absence that seems to have always been there. Ronell argues that the two share a common and parallel history contemporaneous with modernity. Moreover, literature itself has always worked to tell us about the very strictures of law with which both it and its intimate, drugs, have had an ambiguous love-hate relationship: “Flaubert’s book went to court: it was denounced as a poison” (64).

 

It is through the figure of Emma Bovary that Ronell demonstrates her thesis: that the “structure of addiction” is “metaphysically at the basis of our culture” (64).

 

As I read the documents I realized that [Emma] was the body on which these urges started showing almost naturally, prior to the time the technological prosthesis became available on the streets. . . . She declared a war on the real, this unknown horror, she put out a call for a drug culture. She worked out of her own abysses, hunting down the imaginary phallic supplement. (68-69)

 

Ronell’s open-ended essay allows one to conclude that it is not contradictory to see literature and drugs both in terms of Heidegger’s enframing and in terms of Derrida’s supplement–if one sees modernity itself as in some sense a product of the enframing. The word, in cybernetic terms, as commandis in an ambiguous position in its literary function, part of a control system that is nonetheless Other to the Law.

 

From modern literary control system we move to Scott Durham’s postmodern simulation model. Durham’s essay is inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, one of the original harbingers of cyberpunk. Durham contrasts Siegfried Giedion’s illustration of the hog slaughterhouse as a paradigmatic encounter between technology and organic life with Ballard’s use of crash-test dummies to alter that very opposition. Giedion’s vision is a modern one that is fated to “untimeliness”: it can only appear in a retrospective in which the organic appears as an “irreducible living presence” precisely at the moment of its death in the mechanized slaughterhouse of a technologized modernity. Ballard’s is a postmodern one in which Baudrillard’s reversal of the dependence of simulation on actuality is presaged. By implication, Durham’s use of Ballard to replace Giedion also means a bracketing of Heidegger.

 

In Ballard’s novel the power of the word as an effective cog in a technological apparatus reaches new heights when viewed as an analog of the simulation model. That the model is of human death prevents us from appealing to mortality to highlight human “life” as unique from technological “life.” Our deaths are now just as much a product of social engineering as our day-to-day routines. Durham argues that Baudrillard’s hyperbole–“a certain phantasy of postmodernity as a totally operational system”–is most important not for its own truth or falsehood, but rather for “the effects of truth it exerts on those who entertain it” (161). Crash‘s protagonist, as a believer, dreams “of a fatal collision with Elizabeth Taylor that would launch him into a permanent afterlife on the far side of the screen” (163). Durham recalls J. L. Austin as he characterizes the ensuing accident as a “misfire”: Ballard’s hero’s planned “accident” is interrupted by a “real” accident in which he crashes (ironically) into a busload of tourists. In Durham’s eyes, the attempted enactment of Baudrillard’s hyperreality results merely in the displacement of the real/simulation opposition it might have sought to resolve. For Durham this implies that in postmodernity the “real” is lived not merely as “that which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction” but also as that which “withdraws absolutely from reproduction” (166). This echo of Heidegger is analogously ironic.

 

Alberto Moreiras takes Durham and Ronell one step further, gathering together Heidegger and Derrida, the word and the letter, analogy and cybernetics, and extrapolating them into the world of virtual reality through Jorge Luis Borges’s story “El Aleph.” The “Aleph” in Borges’s tale is a mysterious site of revelation which Moreiras uses as an analog of cyberspace. It is “one of the points in space containing all points” and also “the site of encounter where ‘modern man’ meets robotic control of reality” (195). In this scheme, the Aleph is “a radical place of disjunction, where language breaks down” (195). Since the Aleph can never be expressed but merely indicated, and since it contains every point and therefore must contain itself, it is the place where the “ground of analogy breaks in excess” (196). Moreiras likens this crisis of analogy to what occurs when virtual reality, as the evolutionary end-product of a “calculative-representational enframing of the world” (194) –an utterly enveloping representation–throws representation itself into question. Once again we are presented with the “real” as “withdrawing excess.” The place where this withdrawal is experienced is the “private site” of the essay’s title.

 

An Aleph is also, Moreiras notes, “the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language” (198). We must then, by analogy, deal with cyberspace in terms of the the Derridean concept of writing as both excess and lack. As one attempts to “hack” one’s way into cyberspace, encountering only the concurrent withdrawal of the real, one finds oneself, as Moreiras puts it, “engag[ing] cyberware as a writing machine” (198). Here Moreiras’s own sloppiness with cyberlingo comes back to haunt him. In the proliferation of “cybertech,” “cyberexperience,” “cyberexcess” and “cyberware” in addition to “cyberspace,” “cybernetic” and “cyborg,” a consistent meaning for the object of his analogy is lost. His traditional recourse to kybernetes (“pilot or governor of a ship”) as the root of “cybernetics” does not help; the “control” function is alluded to once and never again, giving way to discussion of the “lapse” and the “leap” of writing.

 

The role played by control in critiques of technology, and especially of “cybertech,” cannot be overstated. N. Katherine Hayles’s excellent essay “The Seductions of Cyberspace” appeals to the “cybernetic literature” of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs and Vernon Vinge, but in the end its principal source of motivation is another kind of science fiction: Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Wiener, in fact, occupies a place in Rethinking Technologies not so very far from Heidegger’s. One is tempted to see the two thinkers as fraternal twins: complementary interpretations of an original union between humanity and technology. Hayles highlights the “fetishistic drive for control” that is at the base of cybernetics and, though it is not as often admitted, at the base of cyberspace. This latter is evident in a reading of Gibson, the originator of the term “cyberspace.” Hayles quotes from Autodesk’s John Walker, who, inspired by Gibson, defines a cyberspace system as “a three-dimensional domain in which cybernetic feedback and communication occur” (176). Hayles makes the implicit connection between the drive for control over the physical world and the desire to escape the results of this drive by occupying virtual space.

 

Here we must examine the multiple meanings of the word “virtual,” which are the source both of the term’s appeal and of its contradictory implications. In English, “virtual” has two connotations: one optical and one mechanical. A virtual world is one that exists, from the user’s perspective, on the other side of the mirror: the illusory “place” which Ballard’s hero seeks. At the same time, it is thought of as “virtual” reality; that is, the illusion is so strong that we can behave as if it were “reality.” The French virtuel, however, often translated simply as “virtual,” offers yet another angle. The “virtual” in this case is contrasted with the “actual”: virtuality is potentiality. The gathering together of these meanings in a single term guarantees that it will be slippery and not admitting of a univocal conclusion when put into question. As Hayles notes, it is fallacy to believe that by entering a virtual “space” we will be able to escape the problems that will continue to plague our physical surroundings. Nevertheless, she is unable to resist the temptation to interpret cyberspace as “opening up new vistas for exploration” (188), even while she warns us of the power of the cybernetic system over human behaviour. This, it seems to me, is the most important “seduction” of cyberspace. Hayles suggests we (dominant Westerners) take the opening up of cyberspace as an opportunity to “extend lessons learned from postcolonialism” (188). We ought at the same time to bear in mind the lesson Ronell learns from literature: “drugs, as it turns out, are not so much about seeking an exterior, transcendental dimension . . . as they are about exploring fractal interiorities” (62). If “cyberware” constitutes, as Moreiras suggests, “a writing machine,” or even if, as it seems to me, it puts the Derridean distinction between writing and speech into question, then it is vital that the option of silence be left open for us, and not dismissed as a technophobic desire to return to a pre-technological world.

 

Silence is in fact the theme of Scheibler’s defense of Heidegger. Scheibler seeks to rescue “silence” from the connotation of submission or resignation, especially in light of Heidegger’s acquiescence to National Socialism. Making reference to several of Heidegger’s works, she reinterprets silence as meditation, a way of being and thinking that frees us from the objectification of the world (and ourselves) that is the result of representational thinking. Meditative thinking, writes Scheibler, “is the way in which human beings are involved directly and immediately in Being” (126). She quotes from John Anderson, who suggests that “meditative thinking begins with an awareness of the field . . . an awareness of the horizon rather than of the objects of ordinary understanding” (127). This type of silence is not submissive to authority but rather outside of authority; it is outside word and outside writing. It is interesting that while “putting on cyberspace” appears to be an opening up of the horizon, it is only accomplished by a shrinking-in of our awareness. It is an inverse relation of the sublime that we feel here: to comprehend the function of “cyberspace systems” within our own minds is an impossible task. The Aleph, the point in space that contains all points, it turns out, is within us, and it expels our contemplation with all the force of a magnetic field. The contemplation of the function of the word within results in a flurry of exteriorized words in ecstasy and defense.

 

In the end, it appears that only Felix Guattari himself is capable of what Conley advocates as the mission of Rethinking Technologies: to go through and beyond Heidegger. Guattari begins by invoking both Heidegger and Wiener; he proposes that both these perspectives be avoided in an attempt to “discern the thresholds of ontological intensity that will allow us to grasp ‘machinism'” (13). Machinism is Guattari’s “object of fascination,” not technology as it is defined by Heidegger, by Wiener, by Derrida, or by Baudrillard. Guattari raises the all-important question of machinic autopoiesis, but insists that this not be thought of in terms of “vital autonomy according to an animal model,” but rather in terms of “enunciative consistency” (14). Neither are machines to be related to their material manifestations. For Guattari the machine is a complex apparatus of enunciation that does not obey the structure of the Signifier. Echoing Austin once again, he asserts that machinic autopoiesis is characterized not by signification but by “effects, products . . . [and] particular services” (14). Echoing Wiener, Guattari suggests that this autopoiesis is demonstrated through a seeking of disequilibrium. Following Francisco Varela, Guattari notes that one function of autopoietic machines is to reproduce themselves; breaking with Varela, he suggests that autopoiesis ought to be thought of as a kind of life “specific to a mecanosphere that superimposes itself on the biosphere” (17). In this vision, machines exist co-extensively with their biological components.

 

The machinic in Guattari’s essay seems to occupy a position similar to that occupied by schizoanalysis in his other work. Here he is able to trace machinic orderings through dimensions of asignifying semiotics (related to cybernetics but also surpassing it), technological, biological and even human components. The machine is a figure of heterogenesis which challenges our habit of thinking in terms of ontological homogeneity. This is the underlying thrust of Guattari’s analysis of machines. It is even a seduction to call these heterogeneric orderings “machines”; this verbal component, following the intuition that Guattari is seeking to access the heterogeneity of which he writes, is itself part of a functioning machine whose access to our thought is through the word “machine” itself. Guattari’s article does not tell us anything about technology. Its function is to instruct our thought about its own structures by forcing it to strain against them. As an enunciation Guattari’s work is neither writing nor speech, but a sinister attempt to reorient the belongingness of our own enunciations to a system of control.

 

I have focused only on half the essays that comprise Rethinking Technologies not through a prior process of choosing but merely because they fell this way as I attempted to “make sense” of the heterogeneity which with they presented me. In this respect I am guilty of attempting to unify difference through recourse to the essential unit of control–the word. Mea culpa. This is my own cross to bear. Other contributors include, in addition to the aforementioned Brennan, Virilio, and Gaillard, Patrick Clancy (“Telefigures and Cyberspace”), editor Conley herself (“Eco-Subjects”), and Jean-Luc Nancy (“War, Law, Sovereignty–Techne“). In utterly pragmatic terms, I recommend the book as useful reading for Graduate students as well as senior undergraduates preparing for Graduate school. It is also useful for any philosopher or cultural theorist pursuing questions posed by the clash between technological proliferation and either ecology or shifts in our conception of subjectivity.