A totalizing and globalizing view, a vision like the one Marshall McLuhan developed, is hard to criticize: once you acknowledge his assumptions, you have to go with him all the way. For a critical philosopher there is of course the attractive possibility to question the methodological and epistemological presuppositions of such a totalconcept. He could also excavate the historicalphilosophical categories, used in this theorie and argument that these are uncritically applied. Without substantial difficulties one could criticize both McLuhans and De Kerckhove's view as ultimately hegelian: the paradigmatic triads De Kerckhove uses in his book Brainframes is just one example: the alphabetic brainframe is denied, negated by the videobrainframe. Finally the VR or cyberbrainframe integrates the former into a wider and more integrated orientation. A parallel can be found in the texts of Walter Ong, when he speaks about a second orality. This hegelian strain of thought seems to culminate at the end of the book Brainframes, when De Kerckhove speaks about psychotechnological identities. In an affirmative sense he states, that the names of the European programs like ESPRIT, BRITE, FAST, ERASMUS, MEDIA, BRAIN, SPRINT en EUREKA give expression to a cognitive revolution, in which the and this is the hegelian keyterm collective Mind or Spirit becomes manifest and objectivizes itself in a final stage als its telematic allencompassing expression. This conclusion is affirmed by De Kerckhove's efforts to integrate oppositions. For example in comparing analogue and digital, that is, neural networks and expertsystems, De Kerckhove makes a point of not excluding one and preferring the other: he accepts both.

Without a doubt, an interesting implication of this hegelian view is the hypothesis that Internet could be a new form of communal interaction, a telematic expression of McLuhans global village with all ethical and political consequences. However, the problem of this or any hegelian view is its totalitarian impact: nothing seems to escape the necessity of these developments. And sometimes, while reading De Kerckhove's texts or listening to his lecture, an eary, now and then even suffocating feeling creaps up on me. Something like an allergic reaction, comparable to the ones I got in earlier days, when dogmatic marxists or feminists tried to convince me of their eternal truth.

I could elaborate on this critique, but I won't. Simply because this sterile critique ignores something more important. After reading McLuhans book for the first time about 20 years ago I primarely experienced its creative impuls for thought, an esthetic and experimental impuls, that is far more important than the academic quibbling about methodological presuppositions and pragmatic implications. De Kerckhove's Brainframes gave me the same thrill, especially because, in an empirical sense, it explores the wasteland of open spaces in traditional theory of culture, that was caused by the explosion, after McLuhan had thrown his intellectual handgrenade in the cultural debat on the role of the new media. Up till that moment this debat was dominated by neomarxist theorie. After my affirmative reception of De Kerckhove's ideas a few crucial questions forced themselves upon me: Because of the limited time I have to restrict myself. In order to clear the grounds for an inspiring dialogue I therefor will elaborate only a threefold question: can transparancy of the material body in telepresence be the foundation of an different ethical attitude? Or in other words: can Internet transform the pathos that is: pain and joy or suffering and passion the elimination of which has always been the goal of ethics and politics?

1. natural body
In Brainframes De Kerckhove comes to the conclusion, that nature of man has never existed. I agree completely. As McLuhan pointed out, from the beginning on, the body has been mediated by tools and technological/theoretical frameworkes. Concerning the theoretical framework Foucault analysed this in his thesis on the disciplined body in relation to the paradigm of the human sciences. Lately telematic media have overdetermined these earlier mediations. The works of Hegel and Marx as well as the philosophies of Baudrillard and Virilio bare witness of this fundamental fact. In short, Nature, or natural essence is as much a function of mediation, as God is a function of rituals. Nowadays looking for the natural, sound body is an exploration a healthfoodstore or a sport studio. But undeniably there's a material substrat: if I close my eyes and run straigh ahead I will experience this in a catastrophical way. De Kerckhove characterizes this substrat as "my personal portion of organic substance", that is: as the physical Self. Let me elaborate on this materiality in order to prepare my question on the ethical impact of telepresence. What is the ultimate proof of my existence? My consiousness in relation to others, that is my subjectivity? Or my senses: sight, sense of hearing, taste, smell? Or is it the interactive experience of space, of depth? A simpel intellectual experiment will show, that the latter is probably the most adequate option. The physical proof of my existence is furnished by gravity, that is by pressure and by material resistance. This is registered by the tactile senses. Beside the longdistance receptors eyes, ears, nose we employ our skin, muscles and joints the direct receptors through the feeling of warmth and the sense of touch, through kinesthetic and tactile sensations. This subsides our awareness of the environment and of other persons. Space is experienced as interactivity. Space is not an empty room, we can cross and leave, but it is an immediate presence of something other than me. Space is primarily contact. This means that contact with the world and with our fellowmen is anchored in physical tactility. Blind, deaf, deprived of sense of smell and taste, the tactile sense remains the ultimate proof of our existence. Only through resistance and in collision, in material interactivity we experience contact. So the cartesian thesis of the selfcontained cogito and the epistemological dualism between mind and matter or consciousnous and body is in need of a correction: not cogito ergo sum, but: collido or better: collidit ergo sum. In Dutch: het botst, dus ik ben. As De Kerckhove points out in Brainframes: looking at television means thinking with our bodies, registering reality in a mimetical sense with our muscular subconsciousness or by means of submuscular reactions. This body is, as he concludes at the end of the book, "the only physical point of reference", tactile and allencompassing, not just a perspective among others, but our "angle of being". Contactility can be pleasant or painful. Perhaps our existence is collective and communal, because of inner pressure: as suffering or as passion. Anyway, it is a empirical fact that individuals are locked together by this pathos: they are linked togethert in suffering and in passion. That's probably why an ethical attitude and social behavior is anchored in both affects.

2. telepresence

Do those contactual effects of materiality enter cyberspace? And if not, does the body as telepresence, accompagnied by simulation of pressure and resistance a kind of telerobotic armwrestling across the Atlantic does the body as telepresence perhaps evoke a new social experience? Can we make a comparison with an earlier revolution? After the introduction of the alphabet a collective memory, laid down in books, we were released from the necessity of actively remembering and reproducing orally the past. As a result western man's consciousness could develop other capacities, for instance esthetic experiences. What potential human capacities will be triggered, once distance that is: the crossing of spacetime has been eliminated and contact is carried to its ultimate limits? And what is the ethical impact of this new sensibility? Is it only enjoyment and pleasure or will the counterpart: pain and suffering be introduced in cyberspace? Will the cyberexperience compensate the inescapable suffering, by which the materiality of the body at least in its decay and in the existential perspective of its forthcoming death or will it transform the whole idea of life and death, as for instance is propagated by artists as Stelarc? Do we, as Stelarc forsees, externalize our consciousness, download it as it were in another medium than the body?

I'd like to end my comments with an afterthought: Somewhere in the lower of my brain, far beyond the neocortex and the limbic system, just beneath my brain stem a nasty, pseudomarxist tuned voice is nagging: and what about three quater of world's population that is not on line, are we tying them down or stringing them up again by means of a telematic imperialism, legitimated by ecological necessities? And in the distancer this dying voice murmurs: and what will happen if someday, someone pulls out the plug?

    This is comparable with your critique on the model of western civilisation of Robert Arnold Russell in Brainframes. You characterize it as "lineair, causal, chronological, categroical and hierachic order" that is typical for the alphabetical order and the dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain.

    The exposition of Greenaway in Boymans proved that even the physical self is a function of tools and images we created through human cultural history.

    Or is this paranoia as outdated as the collective fear of the old day, when we were terrified that a lunatic would push the nucleair button?