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?
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