Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology

Spirits in the Material World

Spirits in the Material World The Challenge of Technology

Gil Germain

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly-owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Germain, Gilbert G., 1954– Spirits in the material world : the challenge of technology / Gil Germain. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3368-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-3370-5 (electronic) 1. Reality. 2. Realism. 3. Materialism. 4. Technology. I. Title. BD331.G475 2009 128—dc22 2009027477 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In memory of my father, Gilles Germain, a lover of learning

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No more contact with the ground: all that sinks into it has become alien and incomprehensible to us. Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover, to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depth of things, but with their very surface. E. M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

Contents

Introduction

xi

Chapter One

As Real as it Gets: Derrida

1

Chapter Two

Reality Show: Baudrillard

27

Chapter Three

Reality Shows: Paul Virilio

71

Chapter Four

The Fate of the Real: Lyotard

109

Chapter Five

Getting Real(er)

153

Conclusion

201

Bibliography

207

Index

213

vii

Acknowledgments

Tom Darby and Fred Dallmayr remain the well of insight and inspiration from which I continue to draw. I thank them. I thank as well the University of Prince Edward Island, and especially the faculty and staff of the Political Studies Department, for providing a work environment that allowed me to pursue this study over the past several years. Matthew McAdam, my editor at Lexington Books, deserves considerable praise for his services. So does Scott McBride for his efforts in creating the image that graces the cover of this book. Lastly, I extend my gratitude to Sheri and Emma, my lovely wife and daughter, for their steadfast support and companionship.

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Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure? Don DeLillo, Underworld

DeLillo’s query touches on a deep and abiding concern: What is real and how can reality be discerned? The suggestion is that if a determination could be made regarding which of the two realms is primary, the virtual world or the world proper, we will have taken an important step toward fixing the nature of what is really real. Whatever else reality may be, the argument goes, it cannot be an epiphenomenon of a more essential order of being. In contrast, whatever is circumscribed by a more encompassing order, and therefore limited with respect to the whole, is derivative and (if not unreal) at the very least less than truly real. But this provisional response still leaves unanswered how it may be possible to determine which order of being is most foundational. It is arguable that any determination regarding “what” is real must consider “how” reality is apprehended: Ontological concerns are inseparable from epistemological considerations. This means any attempt to answer the question, “What is real?,” must invoke the experience of what at least passes for reality, since reality is necessarily a phenomenon, a putative “object” of experience. So the question regarding what is real ultimately is a question about which categories of experience are more foundational than others, and which perhaps is the most foundational of all. Is, for instance, the experience of the phenomenal world, the world of objects and events directly revealed through the senses, more or less foundational than the suprasensible or intelligible realm? Is the realm of mediated perception associated with cyberspace derivative of the world as directly perceived through the senses? xi

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May it be that the limits of sensory and intellectual perception preclude us from discerning altogether what is truly real, or even from resolving gradations in a scale of realness? These and other related questions admit of no easy resolution and speak to the ambiguities that attend a central component of the human condition. Questioning the reality of appearances is hardly new. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a cultural or intellectual predilection that has not been informed, in some manner, by doubt regarding the authenticity of the sensible world. In the Western philosophical tradition, Plato set the template for numerous subsequent claims, arguing, variously, that the real world lies above or beyond the tangible realm of appearances.1 Whatever their differences, these metaphysical arguments uphold the view that the sensible world is framed within a more comprehensive reality and for this reason is less real than it appears to be. Modern scientific realism likewise shares with the metaphysical perspective the view that the everyday world of appearances occludes a higher truth.2 While scientific realism is premised on the assumption that the obfuscated “real world” is an immanent reality, not a transcendent one, it shares with the metaphysical world view a fundamental distrust of “mere” appearances. The uncertainty regarding the status of the sensible world rests on an apparent disjunction between what seems to be and what is, between appearance and reality. This incongruity may be extreme, as with the Kantian distinction between the for-itself and the in-itself, where unconstrued reality forever remains outside the realm of human experience. Or the tension between appearance and reality may take a more muted form, where the realm of appearances is seen as a portal to a higher reality that can be traversed through the application a disciplined method of inquiry, scientific or otherwise. This difference aside, the question as to whether or not reality is ultimately knowable is less significant than the metaphysical assumption that what is real is located beyond the realm of appearances. Challenging this metaphysical bias is crucial because as long as the “real world” is perceived as residing beyond the phenomenal world, the realm of appearances will continue to be assigned a secondary or derivative status, perpetuating the neglect of a key factor in the debate over the status of the phenomenal world. What is overlooked with this bias is that in questioning the veracity of the realm of appearances, one necessarily presupposes the experience of the realm under interrogation. If not reality simpliciter, then at least the appearance of reality is something necessarily attributed to the realm of appearances prior to any attempt at determining its status. It is impossible, in other words, to question the veracity of the phenomenal world without first presuming the givenness, or reality, of what at least appears to be real. This is not an inconsequential

Introduction

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observation. For by acknowledging the indubitability of the appearing world, we realize that any attempt to doubt the veracity of this world must take as self-evident the very thing it brings into question. So it is that in positing the primacy of a metaphysical reality one presumes the givenness of a reality beyond or against which something more real is said to exist, and in relation to which this higher order of being establishes its specific character. Hannah Arendt is correct in asserting that it “has always been the very appearingness of this world that suggested to . . . the human mind the notion that something must exist that is not appearance.”3 Whether or not the phenomenal world is actually real is not of ultimate concern here. Is, in truth, the spatiotemporal realm derivative of a higher reality?4 Or is the worldly realm all there is, a self-subsisting entity likened by some to a giant quantum computer that computes itself?5 Answers to such questions are inherently inconclusive. What is less uncertain is that only from within the perceptual context of everyday reality can such questions be posed and provisionally answered. To this extent at least, the experience of the sensible world is foundational: It constitutes our entry point into alternative realities. It follows that in looking beyond metaphysical assumptions about reality we must entertain the possibility that reality is disclosed through experience, not in spite of it. The consequences of this shift in understanding are significant. Most obvious, it results in the identification of the realm of appearances and reality: The appearing world is real, or as real as real can be. But more than this, the identification of appearance and reality means that the experience of the sensible world also is “real.” Perceptual experience can be thought of as real to the extent that we disabuse ourselves of the notion that such experience constitutes a mere mental representation of an exterior reality conjured by the mechanisms of sense perception. Here, the experience of the phenomenal world is not seen as a construal of a reality external to the perceptual act. On the contrary, perceptual experience is taken to be more than the sum of neurophysiological processes that assemble an ideational facsimile of an exogenous reality. A phenomenological approach to the so-called “reality problematic”6 counterposes a metaphysical account of the relationship between phenomena and reality with one that forefronts the preconceptual experience of being-in-the-world. The mechanics of sensory perception, through which the subjective experience of phenomena is construed and reality is revealed, are seen as operating within a larger context where the perceiver is met by something which is initially unconstrued. This initial encounter with worldly being takes the form of an invitation or summonsing. The world elicits an engagement with the perceiver, and the perceiver responds to this call by setting into motion the means at its disposal for

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allowing the world in. Phenomenology tells us that reality emerges from this open-ended dialogue between perceiver and perceived. So while reality can be thought of as a construct, it is a construct grounded in a primal encounter with the presence of a totality, with the Being of which it is a part. Only when reality is seen as eluding easy description as either “idea” or “thing,” do we realize to what extent humans are implicated in the fabric of worldly being. For it is precisely because no distinct line separates the observer from the observed that the realm of appearances cannot be isolated from the reality these appearances purportedly represent. As part of the totality of Being, there is no outside, no external or privileged vantage point, that would permit us the luxury of equating reality with what “really” is. The “problem of reality,” then, dissolves with the realization that we inhabit a participatory universe where observer and observer, mind and matter, are aspects of a singular order of being.7 The conceit of this study is that the participatory nature of humanity’s placement within reality matters. It is not without meaning and consequence that we are consanguineous with worldly reality—a reality not of our own making—and related to it as a coin’s face is related to its obverse. Articulating this nexus and its significance are primary objectives of the analysis that follows. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that the central focus of this study is an exploration of the ways technology abrogates the participatory principle to the detriment of what makes us human. To the extent humankind seems perennially predisposed toward questioning the status of the world of appearances, disregard for the participatory principle might be taken as a constituent of the human condition and thus beyond remediation. It may very well be that humanity is not constitutionally adapted to reside in the real world. Still, the consequences of the impulse to transcend the limits imposed upon us beings of spatiotemporal reality are of a different order today than previously, and it is this difference that is the subject of this investigation. Historically, for instance, doubts regarding the authenticity of the mundane world existed alongside a belief in an otherworldly reality that both transcended and anchored the sensible realm, and to which we owed our ultimate allegiance. Life on Earth was likened to living in a shadow-world, from which only partial liberation could be gained, and even then only as a result of considerable intellectual or spiritual exertion. Today, our discomfiture with the mundane world, whether as cause or effect, exists alongside a belief in the power of technology to reconstitute the world in a manner that renders it amenable to human control. Unlike our forbears, who sought transcendence through acts of intellectual or spiritual discipline, we moderns seek a literal liberation from the shackles of the Earth. Seeking freedom of this sort is understandable given the particular nature of the metaphysical bias

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underpinning the techno-scientific enterprise. It stands to reason that a system of production grounded in the notion of the “detached observer” would recapitulate this bias in its reconstructive efforts. Technology does indeed rearrange the world so that we do not have to experience it.8 The disarticulation of humanity and earthly reality takes two separable yet interrelated forms today. First, and perhaps most obvious, our liberation is gained by escaping the strictures imposed on us by virtue of our condition as embodied beings. This has been accomplished with our devising a means of re-presenting the immanent world in a manner that bypasses the self-imposed limits of that world. Like immanent angels, we ply a virtual reality without incurring the costs associated with movement within geophysical space. Second, our freedom is won through the heightened efficiency with which we engage in actual social, political, and economic practices. Here the powers unleashed by digital and other technological refinements are employed to help reorganize the world itself, affecting how we conduct business and live out our political, social, and biological lives. The increased efficiency with which we pursue our interests signals a reduction in the tension between our desires and our capacity to have them satisfied. As we enter into ever more systemic union with the realm of human artifice we progressively are shielded from the obdurate materiality of unreconstructed reality and from the resistance it offers to the commanding will. To the extent we become one with the technological system, we cease to function as this-worldly beings, as creatures subject to the vicissitudes of the worldly matrix from which we emerged. The term spiritization9 is used to capture the sense in which technological progress invariably leads to a condition of immanent otherworldliness. The spiritization of humanity denotes our progressive release from the claims of the body and things bodily, from the demands placed upon us as creatures of spatiotemporal reality. That is to say, increasingly, it is not “given being,” or any arrangement said to be grounded in “nature” or a comparable “order of things,” that provides the context (and therefore sets the boundaries) within which human action plays itself out. Less and less do we have to endure the ignominy of fate in the form of those restrictions that constrain us as creatures of space and time. We are no longer bound by our bodies: not politically or socially, as determined by ascriptive familial and class ties; not spatially, as hidebound dwellers of geophysical space; and not biologically, as bearers of a fixed genetic inheritance. On the contrary, we are spirit-beings to the extent we have transcended such “natural” impositions and therefore are free to impress our will upon the world.10 In the conceptual lexicon of Aristotle, we could say that the spiritization of humanity is the process by which the “accidental qualities” of humanity play a diminishing role in determining the conditions of life.

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If humanity appears destined not to be at home in the sensible world, then what separates the technological from the pretechnological era is the manner in which this existential unease is now instantiated. The ideal of finding release from the weight of the world no longer takes symbolic form: Rather, today the transcendent impulse is real. Technology makes actual the release of humanity from the strictures of space and time. Technology thus can be said to possess a negative gravitational force. Technology’s natural propensity, as it were, is to negate the imposition of worldly or real constraints placed upon us as creaturely beings. This acknowledgment leads to an important series of questions: Are we fitted to be spirits in a material world? Is humanity best served by jettisoning the accidental qualities that attend us as human beings? If so, how are we served by spiritization? And if spiritization is less than salutary, then for what reasons, and can anything be done to offset this advance? With regard to this latter question, it needs be asked if there is a countervailing force to technology: Is there a positive gravitational force that works to keep in check technology’s disincarnating impulse? A preliminary response to this question might suggest that reality itself is the ultimate check, that our technological efforts to surmount “the real” are continually humbled by reality’s tendency to resist such efforts. In defense of this view, reference often is made to instances where reality “bites back,” and to what this says more broadly about the tension between the rhetoric of technology and its actual accomplishments.11 Recognition of the limits of technology does not, however, disprove the general claim made here regarding the negative gravitational powers of technology. This study examines technology’s spiritual tug: It does not ignore the fact that this pull is met with a measure of resistance. So, in the final analysis, it is the tendency toward spiritization that preoccupies this study, along with the apparent imbalance of forces that facilitate this drift. A substantial portion of this text is devoted to a reading of four contemporary theorists who have devoted considerable attention to the reality problematic and its disincarnating propensities, namely, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Paul Virilio.12 Loosely, if somewhat erroneously categorized as postmodern thinkers, their reports on the status of reality are representative of several leading ways the reality problematic can be addressed. One approach is epistemological in its focus on how reality is received and conceived. If it can be shown, for example, that a perceiver is never simply “there” in the sensible or real world, that the experience of reality is always already mediated, then the rationale for distinguishing “real” from “virtually real” experiences dissolves. Derrida is a leading exponent of such a view, with its assertion that reality is a construct, or text. Another approach is sociological in character.

Introduction

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The questioning here focuses on how contemporary technologies are reshaping societal practices and the impact these practices are having on those who participate in them. Under this second heading are found arguments claiming the “real world” to be redundant to the extent that representations or simulations of reality are more commanding than reality itself, both in terms of their appeal and their utility. A desubstantialized reality—or what passes for reality—is home to an equally ethereal humanity, which merely plays at the game of life. Baudrillard is a leading defender of the view that reality has been occluded by its representations, resulting in its nominal demise. A less radical variation of the sociological approach is the notion that modern technology has led to the bifurcation of reality. In this instance the real world is said not to have disappeared as much as been set against an alternative reality which vies for supremacy. Virilio aligns himself with this “multiple realities” view. Yet another approach to the questioning of reality adopts an ontological orientation. Adherents of this approach look to cosmological justifications for assessing the fate of the real. They consider the possibility that the impetus behind the technology-driven eclipse of worldly being is rooted in the nature of things, rather than in sociological processes, and that humans are being carried along by this more encompassing dynamic towards both a state of self-transcendence and transcendence over the material conditions of the Earth. Lyotard addresses what ostensibly is the most radical interpretation of the reality problematic. In part, my reliance on these four figures and their respective commentaries is to assist in adumbrating a typology of common responses to the reality problematic and the related question of spiritization. This typology codes popular reactions to the relationship between technology and an understanding of reality. First, there is the response that dismisses entirely any relationship between the two, on the grounds that reality is always an image or perception of reality and thus at bottom a conceptual interpretation. This type of response circumvents the reality problematic by arguing it amounts to so much tilting at windmills, as manifested in the assertion “nothing is really real,” and its corollary, “reality never existed.” In contrast to the first, another commonly held view adheres to a belief in manifold realities, refusing to accede to the demise of the real while acknowledging the creation through technology of alternative realities. If the first type of response is nihilistic in contending that nothing is really real because everything is derivative, then the multiple realities orientation is nihilistic for the opposing reason that everything is real. From this vantage point the online and offline worlds are equally actual, only differently so, and technology is seen as productive of new ways of being-in-the-world. A third type of response shares with the second a belief that technology and an understanding of what constitutes reality are correlated.

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Only in this instance technology is assigned a leading role in the present day confusion over the meaning of reality. Those who advance this view see technology as contributing to the ambiguity that attends the meaning of reality. The assumption is that something approximating the real world exists, but that it has been obscured by a second-order reality created by technology. Finally, the populist version of the ontological approach to the reality problematic claims that what passes today for reality (both human reality and otherwise) is but a way station on the road to its transcendence, and that through technological advance we are facilitating the transition to a new order of being. Futurists and their ideological kin see technology as salvific, and eagerly embrace the coming of an era when the scaffolding of the real world has withered away. These popular reactions to the reality problematic reflect the values of the cynic, the relativist, the romantic, and the idealist, respectively. One refuses to believe, another believes indiscriminately. One censures technology for obscuring reality, another looks to technology to deliver us from reality. As useful as this typology may be to grasp the general contours of the debate, it does not speak in itself to the central concern of this study, which is to examine technology’s spiritual impulse in the context of humanity’s grounding in worldly being. Exploring the tension between these positive and negative gravitational forces remains the primary focus. So despite the diversity of approaches to the reality problematic examined in these pages, the interpretive thrust of this work is singular in exposing the extent to which much of the current philosophical debate on this issue is indebted to phenomenology. Phenomenological insights, as will become evident, are sometimes embraced and often rejected, but they are never ignored. Acknowledging this helps illustrate the futility of critically questioning technology’s spiritual leanings outside the context of a claim that identifies the human condition with embodiment, or worldliness. Abandon the kinds of arguments phenomenology makes regarding the participatory nature of the universe and one of the last remaining bulwarks against the flight from the real dissolves. The politics of the reality problematic are, if anything, more questionable than the theoretical conundrum that undergirds it. Certainly most of the key figures examined in this study are less than sanguine about the prospects for any large-scale organized resistance to the status quo. None of them, for instance, offer how it may be politically possible to counter the drift toward spiritization. Their silence on this issue underscores the fact that politics is seen as enfolded within the logic of technology, which functions as an independent variable. This study is sympathetic with the view that technology constitutes our fate, and therefore that the success of any resistance to the spiritual impulse of technology can be measured only in relative terms. Then

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again, resistance may prove to be entirely unfeasible, in which case bearing witness to the spiritization of humankind would remain the only political act in the age of technology. Whatever position one is inclined to adopt, there is at present a need for continued serious debate about what constitutes reality, how technology alters our relationship to this reality, and to what extent if any our stature as human beings is compromised by our technological milieu. Several themes and tensions run throughout this study, some explicitly addressed and others more implied. One of them pertains to the now infamous “end of history” thesis, originally formulated by G.W.F. Hegel and later popularized and refined by the likes of Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama.13 It would not be altogether wrong to conclude that the exploration in these pages of the spiritization of humanity is a gloss on post-historical existence. Indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of spiritization outside the context of a technologically advanced liberal democratic society of the sort described by end of history theorists. Spiritization is linked with post historicism as is liberalism because both issue from a common source, technology, and technology, in turn, has as its primary impetus the overcoming of “what must be,” as expressed in terms such as nature or fate. Technology works against nature or fate insofar as it restructures the real in a way that renders reality amenable to human control. To live technologically is to live a life free from historical necessity, from the natural constraints that once informed our lives as material and social beings. Liberalism, for one, is a product of technological thinking in that it was born out of the rational attempt to reconstruct the “natural” political order—where the few dominate the many—according to principles that would maximize self-consciously sought after ends, such as security and popular self-rule.14 By enshrining the desire for equal recognition as the premiere political virtue, liberalism freed the self from the political and social strictures that characterize hierarchical societies. Spiritization, in this context, can be interpreted as an extension of the same liberatory principle underlying liberalism. To live at the end of history is not merely to live unencumbered by the social and political ties that once made claims on is, but more generally to be free from the strictures of all things bodily. Another theme coincident with this study is Max Weber’s “disenchantment thesis.” Weber argues that what marks the unfolding of history is the progressive disenchantment of the world, by which he meant the continued rationalization of reality. A world that once appeared as enchanted or alive has been robbed over time of its animating spirit. Reason, in its scientific guise, is the force responsible for the disenchanting of reality. While Weber acknowledges the gains won by science’s deconstruction of the mythological world view, he also highlights the losses. The powers of control over nature (human and nonhuman) wrested by modern science and technology he says are

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accompanied invariably by a loss of meaning. The more such powers grow, the less it seems we know to what end or ends these powers of control ought to be employed. Nihilism, then, is for Weber the inevitable consequence of the rationalization process. Arguing as I will here that spiritization is a necessary consequence of technology’s unfolding, this study shares with Weber concerns over the implications of this development for the question of meaning. Martin Heidegger is a name that must be invoked when the issue of technology and nihilism is raised. As with Weber, Heidegger attributes the loss of meaning that so acutely characterizes our age to the powers of intellectualizing or theorizing. It is the understanding that access to reality is gained best by adopting an attitude of repose, of detached observation, that marks the onset of the nihilistic spirit for Heidegger. This stance of theoretical remove from reality—this cognitive disengagement which pits the thinking self against an objective reality—underlies all philosophic, scientific, and technological endeavors and unites them as effects of a single cause. Interpreted in a Heideggerian context, technology’s disembodying propensities are fully in accord with nihilism. The drive to master material reality, to be rid of the limitations imposed on us as creaturely beings, is a symptom of nihilism no less than is the talk of “values” in the realm of morality. Reality no longer makes a claim on us and for this very reason loses its meaning, the loss of which only serves to reinforce the technological ethos and its nihilist essence. The final theme that finds a voice in the text is less explicit than the others. It has to do with the perennial tension between nature and history. The question as to whether humans are ultimately historical or natural beings has been a fixture of political thought since its inception over twenty-five hundred years ago. To ask, as I do, whether human beings are suited to a spiritized life is to ask by other means whether the forces of history, as manifested in technological advancement, enhance our nature or are an impediment to its full expression. The response to this question given here will do nothing to relieve the tension that animates it. Human beings are indeed suspended between nature and history, which is why technology, taken as our fate, both speaks to our nature and desecrates our nature. In terms of organization, this investigation is comprised of five substantive chapters and a brief conclusion. A full chapter is devoted to each of the four principles of this study, while the last chapter is given over to an extended review and critique of the arguments presented in previous sections of the text. This critique attempts to synthesize the various discourses on the reality problematic by highlighting the extent to which they can be read through the interpretive lens of spiritization. Also assessed in the last chapter is the politics associated with the reality problematic, especially the “politics of resistance,” a key component of several of the arguments under review.

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Given this short introduction to a theme of considerable depth and breadth, let me conclude by observing that the primary aim of this study is to promote and provoke further discussion of an issue that merits serious addressing. It attempts to frame, or reframe, a debate that will facilitate an ongoing dialogue capable of producing more comprehensive insights into the human condition. This dialogue is necessary because, in its absence, the tension between the spiritual pull of technology and any effective counterpull will only continue to slacken and we may find ourselves less able than presently to mount an effective critique of one of the major challenges of our time.

ENDNOTES 1. This assertion, of course, holds only if one disagrees with the contention that Plato’s metaphysical teaching is a salutary myth propagated by political necessity, as Leo Strauss argues, for example. 2. Modern scientific realism is aligned with classical physics. One of the chief claims of classical physics is that a “thing” or “particle” exists independent of its observation, and thus prior to perception. Not so according to the nonclassical, or quantum, description of reality. Here method and object are taken to be inseparable. The classical ideal of an “objective description” of reality founders with the realization that the act of perception is constitutive of the object of perception. Determinism is replaced with uncertainty when the perceiver is accorded an active role in the construction of reality. As a result, contemporary physics, or at least its nonclassical variant, reinforces the participatory paradigm that emerges from a phenomenological understanding of reality. It may be countered that with non–classical physics the participatory paradigm applies only to the realm of reality’s constitutive elements, not to directly observable phenomena. It should be noted, however, that an emerging scientific perspective called biocentrism attempts to build on the insights gained by quantum physics by situating consciousness at the center of the everyday experience of reality. Cellular biologist, Robert Lanza, expresses this sentiment well in claiming that “space and time fall into the province of biology—of animal sense perception—not of physics.” Lanza’s variant of biocentrism is extreme and likely cannot hold up to scientific scrutiny. But there is a more troublesome concern. Biocentrism, in any form, is intended an antidote to a scientific world view that excludes consciousness in its attempt to explicate the nature of things. As welcome as it may be to reintroduce the observer’s role in an analysis of the observable world, biocentrism is no sounder a world view than the one it seeks to replace when it situates consciousness at the center of the constitution of reality. Reality, whatever ultimately it may be, is certainly not “life-created,” as Lanza contends. All that one can say with certainty is that because consciousness is a phenomenon coexistent with the observable world, there exists some affinity between conscious beings such as ourselves and the world

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around us. Although reality seems to be attuned to conscious existence, and vice versa, it would be presumptuous to reduce one to the other, as biocentrists like Lanza appear to do. (See Robert Lanza, “A New Theory of the Universe,” The American Scholar, Spring 2007, 18–33.) 3. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Volume One, Thinking (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), 23. 4. In defending the mundane world as real I am not arguing that the real world is the most real of all. I am not discounting the possibility that the mundane realm is an epiphenomenon of a higher order of being, or the work of some supernatural power. All I am asserting is that we need to realize that any truth claim regarding the ultimate status of “this world” is grounded in a typically unexamined assumption of the reality of this world. 5. The quantum mechanical engineer, Seth Lloyd, is a leading proponent of the view that the universe is composed of bits of information incorporated by the constituent elements of the natural order, whose interaction “processes” information by altering those bits. The universe is thus a huge, self-referential, computing device. See Lloyd’s Programming the Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 6. As the expression implies, the “reality problematic” pertains to the general set of assumptions, concepts, and debates on the contemporary status of reality, including my own as set forth in these pages. Spiritization is one aspect, albeit an important aspect, of the broader question concerning what is real. 7. One of the earliest and best scientific defenses of the participatory paradigm is contained in John D. Wheeler and Frank J. Tippler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press), 1983. 8. The phraseology here is borrowed from Max Frisch, and taken from the novel Homo Faber (Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Book), 1994. 9. The verb “spiritize” and its cognates are invoked regularly in this study to denote the disincarnating power of technology. Matters of style aside, spiritize is preferred over “spiritualize” because spiritize carries with it fewer overtly religious overtones. As employed here, to spiritize means simply to imbue with spirit, or a nonphysical essence. On occasion, I revert to using the term “spiritual” to describe technology’s propensity toward disembodiment. However, I do so reluctantly and only when stylistic concerns override other considerations. While technology is hardly disassociated from religion and the religious impulse (and a point touched on in subsequent chapters), I wish to make clear that the primary focus of this study is on the nexus between technology and disembodiment. 10. It should be formally noted that the title of this study is best interpreted when not taken too literally. No one could rightly assume that unconstructed reality, of which human beings are a part, can be adequately described as merely material. The spirit/ material dichotomy is employed here chiefly for heuristic purposes. It seeks to capture, in evocative rhetoric, the general sense in which contemporary technological trends are further eroding our status as embodied beings. 11. One of the more recent arguments showing how “reality is always gaining on us,” despite technological advances, is contained in Edward Tenner’s Why Things

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Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Vintage), 1997. 12. Readers might wonder why Michel Foucault is left off the list of those whose thoughts are examined here. While Foucault is attentive to the historical contingencies that help produce the body/subject, as revealed through changing power configurations within various social institutions, his general avoidance of matters pertaining to the body-world nexus makes his work less suitable for inclusion this study than that of the other theorists surveyed in this study. 13. There are several other significant contributors to the end of history debate, one of which I would like to single out for special attention. Tom Darby’s The Feast: Meditations on Politics and Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) remains one of the finest expositions of the end of history thesis and is mandatory reading for anyone wishing to grasp the full import of Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 14. Some might take issue with this reading, citing that Fukuyama sees the thymotic impulse that undergirds human nature as manifesting itself not only in the desire of some persons to dominate others, but also in the desire for equal recognition. Liberalism thus can be seen as having a basis in nature, in human nature. Even if this claim is defensible, the record shows that history has not favored liberalism as the preferred regime choice. Liberalism is a latecomer on the historical scene and clearly the product of a protracted political struggle. The fact that liberalism takes work to establish itself should convince us that if liberalism is not anti-nature, its basis in nature is relatively weak and therefore vulnerable to countervailing forces. See Fukuyama’s discussion regarding the distinction between megalothymia and isothymia in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 181–191.

Chapter 1

As Real as it Gets: Derrida

If there had been no computer, deconstruction could never have happened. 1 —Jacques Derrida

At one time or another we have been reminded of the disjunction between the somatic experience of being there in the tangible world and the informationally generated experience of being there. We know, although it is often difficult to articulate, the difference between a real and a virtual experience or encounter. We are able, in short, to distinguish between a representation of the world and the world itself. The gap separating real from virtual experiences perhaps can be best understood analogically. Let us imagine there is a traveler-to-be, whom we will call Alice, whose plan it is to visit for the first time the land of her forebears. Suppose that upon securing an airline ticket, Alice spent the few months prior to her departure doing all those kinds of things anxious travelers do in anticipation of a voyage. For simplicity’s sake, let us focus on those various activities that fall under the general heading of acquiring information on one’s chosen destination. Let us say that as a result of her absorption of prodigious amounts of information from numerous sources, Alice came to believe she “knew” the place she intended to visit. After endless hours of gazing at photographs, watching films, poring over written material, and viewing websites she had imaginatively conjured a world she believed replicated both in detail and in spirit the actual locale she was soon to visit in person. Now assume further that Alice’s mental image is an exact duplicate of the original. Suppose her imaginative capacity is such that when informed by representations of reality Alice was able to ideationally recreate the real with utmost 1

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fidelity. The question that now arises is: Will Alice’s actual arrival at the land of her ancestors add anything to her preexisting sense of the place, and, if so, what exactly? Common sense tells us that our traveler in all likelihood will experience some sort of dislocation upon her arrival. In other words, her bodily insertion into a region she had known previously only as an idea will doubtless add something to her sense of the place and, consequently, alter her relationship to it. For now we could say this added “something” is, for lack of a better expression, a sense of the real, the awakening of which might find expression in an utterance of the sort: “So this is what this place is like!” The suggestion put forward here is that even in a situation where an informationally generated experience of place faithfully corresponds to its real world referent, the experience is necessarily reductive.

THE EXPERIENTIAL DIVIDE: MERLEAU-PONTY AND DERRIDA The focus of the ensuing analysis centers on what might be called the problem of accessing the real world, or reality, with “reality” referring to the sensible realm of appearing things, natural or otherwise. This accessing is problematic because the question that concerns us here is not an empirical one whose objective is to uncover the physiological mechanisms through which human beings come to experience their external environment. Rather, the approach is epistemological in that it issues from critical reflection on how the sensible world is perceived or experienced as real. As such, the question concerning our access to reality is potentially contentious and open to divergent readings. Derrida and Merleau-Ponty present us with two such readings, and it is to these we now turn. The gap separating Merleau-Ponty and Derrida over how access to the world is gained—a gap which arguably accounts for the difference between a modern and a postmodern reading of the reality problematic—can be illustrated by referring once more to the scenario confronting our fictive traveler. But before doing so it bears repeating that defending reality in part presupposes there is a qualitative difference between technologically mediated and directly embodied types of experience. This difference is supported by the even more basic assumption that mediated experiences, by virtue of their relative remove from reality, are phenomenologically less substantive and therefore less real than their real world counterparts. However, this line of reasoning falters if the distinction between mediated and unmediated types of experience is revealed to be illusory. One way to

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undermine this dichotomy is to refute the notion of unmediated experience. If, for instance, it can be shown that no experience, not even embodied experience, is simple in the sense that it denotes some kind of primordial or direct contact with the world, then it no longer would make meaningful sense to speak of a qualitative difference between an experience of a representation of the real (i.e., of the virtually real) and an experience of the real itself. For in the latter case, no less than in the former, experience would reveal itself to be an ideational construct rather than an immediate appropriation of reality. In other words, the experience of reality would be shown to be a “text” in the literal sense of being a production, something constructed or contrived through the interweaving (the Latin textus means “to weave”) of various elements. If the expression “direct experience” proves to be an oxymoron, then our access to the world is necessarily always “after reality.” We are never, in our experience of reality, in the presence of reality itself. In the context of the scenario previously outlined, this means that whatever Alice’s arrival statement (i.e., “So this is what”. . .) was meant to convey, it cannot properly be construed as an announcement of release from the alleged cave-world of mediated experience. Granted, the transition from the imaginary to the real may be sufficiently striking from a phenomenological point of view to provoke the kind of quasi-epiphanic response uttered by Alice, but this apercu should not be interpreted as indicating entry into a qualitatively distinct order of experience. On the contrary, according to this reading, the world Alice experiences upon her arrival is still a text and as such is as much a construct as the world she had imaginatively projected prior to her excursion. The only thing that changed in the transition is the content of the text itself. I have suggested above that Merleau-Ponty and Derrida are encamped on opposing sides of an experiential divide. This claim seems both sensible and somewhat peculiar. It is sound because their differing responses to the question regarding our access to the world underscore a pivotal tension between modern and postmodern modes of theorizing. At one pole we find Merleau-Ponty arguing from a modernist or metaphysical vantage point (or so Derrida would claim) in his assertion that access to the world is gained extra-perceptually through the ontological attunement of body and world. On the other hand, Derrida’s contrasting claim that contact with the world is best interpreted as a kind of textual reading reflects the typically postmodern absorption with language and the sign. Yet this selection of opponents is odd to the extent that Derrida’s critique of phenomenology is directed almost exclusively at Edmund Husserl’s “pure” or “transcendental” phenomenology, at the expense of Merleau-Ponty’s own unique articulation of phenomenological thought. Despite this neglect there are good reasons why it is preferable that Merleau-Ponty, rather than Husserl, be played off against Derrida. It

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is not only more desirable to do so but feasible as well, given that the gist of Derrida’s critique of Husserl is equally applicable to Merleau-Ponty. Considerable effort has been expended lately trying to interpret MerleauPonty as a postmodern avant la lettre.2 Although such exercises often are highly illuminating, the temptation to over-interpret in the act of reading backwards is an ever present danger to which many fall prey. The Merleau-Ponty being presented here is one who cannot be read as an incipient postmodern, certainly not when Derrida serves as a representative figure of poststructural or postmodern thought. This is most clearly in evidence with respect to their opposing views on the notion of embodied experience. In greatly condensed form their respective arguments can be stated thusly. For Merleau-Ponty the world is what we see: To experience the world is to perceive it.3 Importantly, he asserts that this perceived world—the visible world of sensible things—is “older” than the invisible world of thought and language. It is older, Merleau-Ponty explains, because the invisible world “has its truth only on condition that it be supported on the canonical structures of the sensible world.”4 Even without fully elaborating the meaning of this claim, it is apparent that Merleau-Ponty believes language is situated within an extralinguistic context. The human capacity for speech he argues is grounded in and issues from the silence of a perceived world. This is to say that things speak for themselves or that human beings have the capacity to speak for things because they can read and give voice to the unspoken language of things. In Albert Borgmann’s apposite phrase, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the “eloquence of things.”5 Derrida flatly rejects any such sentiment. It is evident from even the most cursory reading of his work that nothing is more inimical to Derrida’s thought than the contention that language rests on some kind of mute experience of the world. That language is a derivative capacity, as Merleau-Ponty implies, which supplements a more basic prelinguistic experience of the world is an utterly untenable proposition, according to Derrida. The argument is unsupportable because it falls prey to what Derrida asserts has befallen virtually every attempt at philosophical thought in Western history—the illusion of immediacy, or the “metaphysics of presence.” Derrida uses this expression to refer to the flawed philosophical assumption that access to the immediately present is possible. It is for him the search for apodictic meaning—for absolute certainty and necessary truth—that sustains the illusion of immediacy in the mistaken belief that whatever presents itself immediately to the beholder must be undeniably certain. From a Derridean perspective, Merleau-Ponty succumbs to this metaphysical temptation in his belief that through perception we find ourselves directly immersed in the world’s being, or in the presence of sensible things themselves. Derrida would argue there is no better indication of Merleau-Ponty’s alliance with

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metaphysics than the claim made in The Primacy of Perception that “the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us.”6 Terms such as “presence” and “moment” for Derrida are red flag markers that ought to alert us to Merleau-Ponty’s true purpose in analyzing perceptual experience. In his phenomenologizing he seeks what many before him have sought, a means of extricating the subject from the flux of experience, of anchoring the subject’s feet on some sort of solid ground. In the final analysis, then, Merleau-Ponty (despite his realism) is no less a metaphysician to Derrida than the likes of Plato, for along with Plato he presupposes the possibility of gaining direct access to the real. That Merleau-Ponty argues the real is accessed somatically, while Plato noetically, does not alter the fact that for both the real is not only directly accessible but accessible through some sort of perceptual (i.e., visual) act. Merleau-Ponty would strenuously object to the charge of metaphysical backsliding. If there is one thing his commentators agree upon it is that he assiduously sought (especially in his later writings) to think beyond the oppositional tensions of metaphysical thought. This leads us to the question regarding Merleau-Ponty’s status as a postmetaphysical thinker. The battle line in this debate appears to be drawn between those who, like Derrida, argue that Merleau-Ponty remains entangled in the trappings of metaphysics because his theory of perception remains beholden to the metaphysics of presence, and those who interpret his efforts to bridge the ontological divide separating the cogito from the cogitatum as indicating his intent to think outside the dualisms undergirding metaphysical thought. One way to resolve the interpretive wrangle over the classification of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological teaching is to suggest that he should be read as a postmetaphysical thinker whose thought otherwise resists accommodation into the postmodern fold. It is in his elaboration of a “philosophy of the flesh” that we find a mature articulation of a thought which is both antioppositional in character and yet, to the extent that it simultaneously upholds the veracity of the experience of openness to the world, lies on the far side of the postmodern divide. It is the indubitability of this encounter that MerleauPonty refuses to relinquish and which comes under attack in the postmodern quest to root out and deconstruct all forms of foundational thought.

CONNECTIVE TISSUE As argued above, the tension between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida can be framed in the context of the question: Is the somatic experience of “being there” qualitatively distinct from mediated forms of experiencing the world? I

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have noted that Merleau-Ponty would answer this question in the affirmative. The somatic experience of the world is for him originary in that the experience rests on a tacit affirmation of the presence of things. The “first truth” for human beings “installed in the multitude of things,” Merleau-Ponty asserts, is “that ‘something’ is there.”7 It is this certitude of the “there is” of sensible things—of the perceptual presence of the world—that constitutes what he calls our “perceptual faith.”8 What Merleau-Ponty means by the expression “perceptual faith” can be understood fully only by coming to terms with his broader critique of perception. The driving force behind his articulation of perceptual experience is an antipathy towards the notion that perception is a kind of mental inspection of the world, a view which assumes the perceiver to be a perceiving mind (ego percipio) distinct from the “outside” world it surveys. Merleau-Ponty could not countenance such a dualism and set out to undermine this antinomy by showing that the very conceptualization of the subject/object (or perceiver/ perceived) dichotomy is inconceivable without a prior preconceptual attunement of perceiver and perceived. There can be no attunement or bond between the perceiver and the perceived for Merleau-Ponty unless they comprise the same stuff. He coins the notoriously enigmatic appellation “flesh” to describe this ‘substance’ which subtends and facilitates the intercourse between perceiver and perceived. The noun substance is intentionally placed within ironic quotation marks to denote, along with Merleau-Ponty, that flesh should not be interpreted in the conventional sense as denoting something akin to “matter.” Neither should it be confused with the contrary notion of mind or spirit.9 How, then, is it possible to convey that which is neither a thing nor an idea but is “midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea”?10 Merleau-Ponty chooses to render intelligible the present absence of the world’s flesh by likening it to an intertwining, a reversing, or in his preferred terminology, a chiasm. The best way to grasp more fully the sense in which he uses these terms is to amplify on a favorite theme of his—the act of touching. In the course of going about our daily business we literally are in constant contact with the sensible things of this world. We are forever touching things, whether they be external objects, our own bodies, or other persons. It could be said that we are always “in touch” with our worldly environment. Merleau-Ponty observes with regard to this state of affairs a commonplace that is nonetheless rich in implication. He notes, simply enough, that to touch necessarily implies being touched. For example, if I pause and reflect on exactly what it is I experience when I pat my dog on the back, I realize that touching this bit of the world necessarily involves being touched by it—that is to say, being touched back— even though I am in this instance the one who initiated the tactile encounter.

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This is where the notion of reversibility or chiasm enters the picture. For in patting my dog, my contact with the world cannot be properly construed in either exclusively active or reactive terms. To conceive it solely in terms of the former is to think of touching merely as an active placing of part of my being (my hand, in this case) upon part of another (i.e., my dog’s back). However, for Merleau-Ponty the touch in actuality is as much a suffering or a receiving as it is an initiating contact. On the other side of the initiating contact my hand undergoes touching of the other in the sense that it has inscribed upon it the contours of the other. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, reversibility means that “every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken.” The hold, he adds, “is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.”11 By this Merleau-Ponty means that the reciprocity between touching and being touched exists only because there is a shared “element of Being,” (i.e., flesh) between that which touches and that which is touched.12 As previously observed, this element of Being is not an idea because it is a “concrete emblem of a general manner of being,”13 a particular style of material being. Yet neither is flesh a spatiotemporal individual or thing because it is not being per se, but the manner in which being comports itself. Because flesh is a general manner of Being, every type of sensorial interaction with the world for Merleau-Ponty is chiasmatically charged. Therefore, just as touching and being touched relate to each other as obverse relates to reverse, so does the act of seeing imply its reverse, being seen. Obviously Merleau-Ponty is not to be taken literally when he says it is possible to sense being looked at by things.14 Rather, he is implying that insofar as I can say that in touching something the touched thing lends me its textures and contours, and therefore in a sense touches me, so too I can say I see an object to the extent the object cooperates with my vision by lending my eye its visible surface. This characterization of vision is not as fanciful as it might otherwise seem if we keep in mind that for Merleau-Ponty, perceiving, like touching, is an embodied act occurring within the world’s flesh. In his effort to overturn the Cartesian understanding of vision as an internal mental representation of an external object, Merleau-Ponty reminds his readers of the basic attunement between the seer and the seen that belies their common home in the world’s flesh. The look, he says, “envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of preestablished harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style . . . so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command.”15 Like a pair of ballroom dancers whose coordinated movements are so expertly and effortlessly executed that one cannot distinguish the person who leads from the one who follows,

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the relation between the seer and the seen is “magical” in its exquisite complementarity.16 It is this perceptual intertwining of my being with that of the world—this “crossing of the avenues”—that enables Merleau-Ponty to say not only that I am both in myself and in the other, but also that I am ultimately of the world.17 It is our participation in the world’s flesh that permits him further to speak of “our living bond with nature,”18 a bond whose indubitability is underscored by our faith in the world that opens up to experience. Importantly, this faith in the givenness of the world we encounter, precisely because it is something whose presence we presuppose, has for Merleau-Ponty “the force of what is inaugural and present in person, according to a view that for [the perceiver] is ultimate and could not conceivably be more perfect or closer.”19 The directness of the perceptual encounter with the world that MerleauPonty refers to here is not to be conflated with identity or “coincidence.” The perceiving body does not in any sense merge with that which it establishes a perceptual relationship. While deconstructing the notion of the transcendental subject, Merleau-Ponty holds on to the common sense distinction between the perceiver and the perceived world. Presence, he says, is the presence of the world’s flesh to my flesh, which is why we always perceive at a distance. Accordingly, to be of the world, or to participate in and have a kinship with the world, does not mean for Merleau-Ponty to be identical to the world.20 It is this element of noncoincidence between the being of the perceiver and that of the perceived which Merleau-Ponty speaks of interchangeably as divergence, separation, or dehiscence (écart). Of these terms, dehiscence captures better than the others the meaning Merleau-Ponty wishes to convey in his analysis of the nonidentity of Being, for dehiscence refers to the act or instance of splitting along a natural line, as, for example, an earthquake results in the earth’s crust splitting along a fault line. When speaking of “splitting” the temptation always exists to attribute to this act the quality of pure negativity or nothingness. Merleau-Ponty has good reasons for dissuading his readers from assuming that dehiscence infers a void of this sort. For it if did, if the being of the perceiver and the perceived were separated by a void, then the metaphysical divide between the subject (as a perceiving body) and the object (as the perceived world) would reassert itself. In order to avoid this trap, Merleau-Ponty proposes that dehiscence be thought of as an opening within Being or as difference within the identity of Being. Because this divergence simultaneously distinguishes and conjoins the two elements of Being—namely, the perceiver and the perceived—Merleau-Ponty identifies it with flesh, with the connective tissue that constitutes the medium of exchange between these elements.

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Since for Merleau-Ponty there is no more immediate form of experience than our perception of appearing things, this “wild” or “brute” experience is said to constitute an “archetype of the originating encounter” that is imitated and renewed in our encounter with more derivatives types of experience.21 Our attention now will turn briefly to one such secondary form of experience, the linguistic experience and conceptual realm it opens up, and its relationship with what Merleau-Ponty claims is our inaugural encounter with the world. As noted, Merleau-Ponty argues it is through the perceptual life of the body that access to the world is first gained. To perceive the world is to be open to the world in a primary or originating sense.22 This puts language in a decidedly ancillary position with respect to perception. The irony in placing language within the silence of Being does not escape Merleau-Ponty. He is well aware that he is conveying the primacy of the extra-linguistic through linguistic means.23 Whether or not the attempt to speak into existence the primacy of the unsaid is futile depends ultimately on one’s view of language. Merleau-Ponty, for one, contends that such an exercise is not in vain should language prove to be more than a self-enclosed, self-referential system of significations. This of course is the central issue over which Merleau-Ponty and Derrida disagree. It has been stated that for Merleau-Ponty language is not indifferent to the silence of the world but indeed is open to it in a fundamental way.24 Although he acknowledges that much if not most of what we say or think is performed within the parameters of sedimented or ready-made language, Merleau-Ponty does not conclude from this that the linguistic world is a closed universe. The capacity to speak always retains for him an extra-referential dimension. Thus he censures semiotics or “semantic” philosophies, as he prefers to call them, on the grounds that they “close up language as if it spoke only of itself.” In contrast, language for Merleau-Ponty “lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave.”25 Because language for Merleau-Ponty opens upon and speaks of the world, meaning is necessarily delimited by the world and its emergent sense. To illustrate how language “speaks” the world, consider for a moment the following scenario: Suppose, while preparing a cup of coffee one sunny morning, I suddenly notice that my next door neighbor’s garage is on fire. I respond by immediately running out the door toward the garage and shouting: “The sky is blue!” One would assume that should a passerby chance upon this event he would think it a bit strange, to say the least. For while my speech is not disassociated from some aspect of the perceived world (the sky is blue, after all), it is disassociated from the world’s meaning as revealed through the scene’s general configuration or gestalt. The world that morning had “spoke” to me,

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and I, by exclaiming the blueness of the sky, failed to capture with my words its emergent sense. Merleau-Ponty would assert that the universally accepted absurdity of this hypothetical response of mine reinforces (albeit negatively) the claim that language ultimately is of the world. For all his emphasis on the silent ground of language, Merleau-Ponty does not mean to denigrate the power of speech and of language in general. How could he? As Merleau-Ponty rightly observes, from the moment we speak of our experience we are perforce immersed in the reflective world of language and thought.26 However, what Merleau-Ponty wishes to impress upon us is that if human beings are of the world in the manner he claims, then it is highly improbable that our capacity to speak does not bear the same chiasmatic relationship with the world that subtends other nonverbal forms of human communication. To think otherwise is to look upon language as a selfreferential (albeit endlessly productive) system of signifiers whose proper end is the equally closed act of human communication. Merleau-Ponty never discredits the utility of this (in his mind) somewhat prosaic conception of what it means to be a language-speaking being, just as he generally supports the functional advances made possible by progress in the modern sciences. His concern, however, is that as our language and thought become increasingly operationalized, we risk losing sight of what lies beyond the world that language has built and of what ultimately sustains this second-order cosmos. Merleau-Ponty therefore admonishes his readers to remain sensitive to the more originary mode of speech often found in literary, poetic, and philosophic sources. It is a less egocentric and more receptive mode of speech, one which “possesses the signification less than it is possessed by it” and “lets [the world] speak and be spoken with me.”27

THE ORIGINARY DISCONNECT From a Derridean perspective, the Achilles’ heel of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological phenomenology is the presupposition that by perceiving the world the perceiver is in the midst of an originary encounter with being, through which some aspect of the world presents itself immediately to the perceiver. Talk of an originary encounter, of openness, of presence, all point to a fully operational metaphysics in Derrida’s estimation. The problem with such theorizing is that it betrays the difficulty of actual lived existence. As John Caputo might say, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologizing tries to make things look simpler than they really are.28 This, of course, is a disputable charge. Merleau-Ponty justifiably has been touted as a philosopher of ambiguity

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who, far from intending to reduce perceptual experience to a few propositional truths, merely adumbrated the contours of an encounter he took to be magical at its core. Be that as it may, a deconstructionist would respond by saying that Merleau-Ponty’s struggle to remain true to life’s difficulty ultimately fails because he is unable to extricate himself from the metaphysical need for moorings. Derrida would say the shadings and nuances of the perceptual superstructure rest, paradoxically, on rather unequivocal grounds. The putative philosopher of ambiguity reveals in the end he does not really have the stomach for the flux. Merleau-Ponty prematurely aborts the journey instead of following the trail of reversals, intertwinings, and divergences right through to the dizzying “original encounter.” If presence for Merleau-Ponty is our first truth, then the second is that our ability to recognize that which is present and to give voice to this recognition springs from the “inner power” or “internal arrangement” of the appearing things themselves. Whether the constituent beings of our world actually possess this inner power or whether it is conferred upon the object by the perceiver is not a matter of ultimate concern for Merleau-Ponty. All that interests him is the fact that these appearances “behave as though they had an internal principle of unity,” and that this behavior is responsible for our capacity to both recognize and speak for things.29 This means that for Merleau-Ponty something “is” to the extent it manifests the behavior of the unitary thing it appears to be. Presence as openness toward the preexistent unitariness of existing things contravenes several major precepts of Derridean deconstructionism, the primary being that presence is a constituted effect or text. Derrida’s often cited claim, “il n’ya pas d’hors la texte,” suggests there is no experience whose content and apparent immediacy exempts it from being a product of antecedent actions. To assert there is nothing outside the text is to say that every experienced thing is produced through a “movement of interpretation.”30 Derrida is very clear on this point. He plainly states that the term “text” implies for him “all the structures called ‘real,’ ‘economic’, ‘historical’, ‘socio-institutional’, in short: all possible referents. . . . every referent, all reality has the structure of the differential trace.”31 The referent that concerns us here is the perceived mundane realm, or reality as commonly understood. As confirmed above, for Derrida the real is no less a text than the printed page before you in that both share the structure of the differential trace. Because the function of the differential trace in Derrida’s account of language already has been subjected to intensive analysis and because it does not directly touch upon present concerns, it need not unduly occupy our attention. Nonetheless, a brief overview of its crucial role in Derrida’s conceptualization of language will serve as a prolegomenon for further analysis of the real as text.

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When Derrida says that language has the structure of the differential trace, he is saying in effect that meaning is not immediately present in the linguistic sign. In arguing this position, Derrida takes Ferdinand de Saussure’s lead in reproving the view that signs refer directly to things lying outside the sphere of language, either to extra-linguistic categories of pure meaning or to things within the empirical world. By claiming that language operates independently of the sign/nonsign polarity, Saussure was implying that the notion of linguistic meaning is more complex or mediated than previously assumed. To understand his reasoning, we first have to realize that if signifiers refer not to extra-linguistic referents but to concepts which are themselves internal to the semiological sign, then meaning is generated within the system of signs that constitutes a language (la langue).32 This complicates matters because it undermines the traditional view which assumes the meaning of a word is rather neatly contained in the referential relationship between sign and nonsign. The operative assumption of the traditional view is that words (signs) are positive terms insofar as they point to specific and identifiable referents, be they transcendental or empirical. Saussure counters with the claim that meaning—or the identity of a sign—is determined not positively but relationally, through difference. That is to say, once the meaning of the word is seen as tied to a conceptual referent (the signified), which itself is embedded within the system of signs, then it no longer makes sense to assume this meaning is isolable, that it is solely the preserve of the signifier/signified relationship. Quite the opposite, according to Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, signs have meaning only in contrast with other elements within the system, a contrast that often takes the form of a binary opposition. Hence meaning for Saussure is far from simple. It is neither identical with nor present to itself, which is to say that in the final analysis to know what a word means always entails knowing more than what that word signifies in isolation from other signs. Although the principle of difference is thoroughly implicated in his understanding of language, Saussure nonetheless believed that the identity of signs is fixed. It is fixed because even though meaning is differentially determined, when taken together these determinations constitute a static, synchronic structure of differences. It is because relational differences between signs congeal into an ahistorical system of differences that language for Saussure has the properties of a language-state (état de langue), and that meaning is stabilized. Derrida throws a bomb into the edifice of language which structuralists like Saussure had erected. Ironically, however, this bomb was constructed by refashioning some of the very matériel used in the original creation of the linguistic structure. Specifically, Derrida takes the Saussurean notion of

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semiological difference and applies it not merely, as Saussure himself did, to the relationship between signs but to the sign itself, or to the relationship between signifier and signified. As we know, from a Saussurean perspective the principle of semiological difference ensures that the sign “cold,” to take an example, has no linguistic value apart from its relations with other signs, such as “hot.” Yet because for Saussure the cold/hot distinction is part of the set of codes which comprise our language system, the concept that is referred to by the signifier “cold” is fixed and unproblematic. Derrida takes issue with this latter claim. The signifier/signified relationship is not a stable one in his view. To believe otherwise is to make simple and certain what in actuality Derrida believes to be complex and indeterminate. The signifier/signified relationship is not stable for Derrida because the very distinction upon which this relationship rests is illusory. Signifiers and signifieds cannot be neatly separated from each other as Saussure would have it because the signified (meaning) for Derrida is necessarily embedded in the linguistic text. In short, meaning never transcends language. If, to continue with our previous illustration, I were pressed to give the meaning of (or to define) the signifier “cold,” my likely response would be to say that cold means having a low temperature, or something to that effect. The obvious point to be made here is that whatever I deem the signifier to denote, the articulated signified is (unremarkably) a word-meaning, a meaning which itself takes the form of a signifier. To persons familiar with the English language, my simple definition would be sufficiently complete to convey an intelligible meaning. However, it is important to note that the definition is complete only in the sense that others know, or think they know, what certain key signifiers (i.e., “low,” “temperature”) within the signified themselves mean. On the other hand, for the uninitiated (or perhaps for the just plain obtuse), my initial attempt to articulate the signified would be incomplete. In truth, however, the attempt to articulate fully the signified is forever incomplete, since one cannot conceive of an articulation of meaning—no matter how far down along the line of articulations—that itself does not contain signifiers which refer to other signifieds. It is for this reason that Derrida maintains we never hit the bedrock of meaning. It is impossible to nail down meaning or to be in the presence of conceptual truth. It is impossible because signifiers and signifieds are constantly interchanging positions. Meaning, therefore, never simply “is.” It is never present at any given time or at any given place. Rather, it is dispersed along the chain of signifiers and hence is always elusive, always deferred. The nuanced “différance” is the term coined by Derrida to articulate precisely the “play of differences” between signifiers, or the “differentiating origin” of this play that keeps meaning (or the concept) from ever being fully present in any

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given sign.33 As such, différance is closely aligned with the Derridean term “trace.” For if meaning is elusive in the sense that it always refers beyond its current articulation to another concept—and therefore is neither fully absent nor fully present, but both absent and present simultaneously—then meaning never has more than a ghostly presence, which in the final analysis for Derrida is no presence at all. The term “trace” is meant to denote this spectrelike quality of the sign, and therefore of meaning as well. Like a footprint in the sand, the sign is the registering of an absence. And just as a footprint always portends other prints, indeed, a trail of prints, so too does the sign-trace never appear in the singular but always points beyond itself to another sign-trace, ad infinitum. To argue as Derrida does that there is nothing outside the text is to say that all reality has the structure of the differential trace. Returning to the query that instigated the present investigation, this means that our access to the world— to the appearing world of sensible things—is for Derrida as much shaped by différance as is our entry into meaning through language. We read the world therefore as we do a text, which is to say our access to reality is textured. The Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence reinforces the ethos of a disenchanted age—where reality is perceived as alien to the human realm, as mere generic or extended matter—to the extent that it forswears the possibility of any kind of direct access to things, and hence of any sympathetic connection with what lies beyond the human. We are never in the presence of the world as our phenomenological friends would have us believe because for Derrida the means by which we gain access to this mute realm is no less direct, no less affected by the differential trace, than is our pursuit of meaning through language. So the real world of perceived things, too, appear to us always already worked over by différance, as products of the work of différance. This is what Merleau-Ponty fails to consider, which explains why in Derrida’s estimation his phenomenology is a form of metaphysics. For the “originating encounter” with being which Merleau-Ponty claims subtends more derivative types of experience is shown by Derrida to be just another attempt to ground the flux of experience within the stillness of presence. He responds by arguing that this primary encounter—this “living present” which is so central to the phenomenological enterprise—is an effect of a prior production and therefore not an originating or “brute” encounter after all. Because Derrida takes his general bearings from Husserl regarding the key issue of perception, it is necessary to briefly review the relevant highlights of his mentor’s phenomenological teaching. The first and most basic observation to make in this regard is that for Husserl “lived experience” (Erlebnis) is generated through the work of consciousness, and that one of the central

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features of conscious existence is the experience of time or temporal duration. Consciousness, in short, is necessarily time-consciousness. The purported “transcendent” objects of perceptual experience are for Husserl temporal entities to the extent that we perceive them as enduring. The tree I see ahead of me, for example, exists not only as a spatially configured mass but as an object with a temporal arc as well, since the object literally “takes time” to be. A substantial portion of Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise was devoted to questioning how consciousness of the objects of experience is imbued with a temporal dimension. His response can be encapsulated thus. When, Husserl asserts, consciousness intends or is directed towards its object, it always is directed towards more than the primal impression it receives from that object. That is to say, consciousness always reaches out beyond the “source-point”34 which marks the moment when the initial sensory impression of the intended object is perceptually registered. If such were not the case, if consciousness were limited to the mere recording of a succession of discrete primal impressions, the continuity of consciousness required to perceive objects as temporally extended time would be absent. Time and consciousness as we know it would cease to exist under these circumstances. In order to account for the phenomenologically real experience of temporality, Husserl posits the existence of three distinct vectors or directions in which a given act-phase of consciousness arrays itself. Apart from the original consciousness of the primal impression (the source-point), there exists for Husserl a retrospective intentional mode, known as “retention,” and a prospective mode he labels “protention.” Together, these two vectors of consciousness work to blend discrete source-points into a flux of originary impressions, or reality as it is commonly perceived. By retention Husserl means an originary experience of the past. This consciousness of the past is not to be confused with what he calls “ordinary” or “secondary” memory, with memory as a re-presentation of a past object. Rather, retention is a kind of micro-memory that is originary in the sense that it is a present consciousness of “what has just been,” or an awareness in the present of the immediate past.35 Retention, therefore, is the work of consciousness which modifies the sensory source-point by prolonging or preserving it, by creating a sensory “trail” which temporally fills out the primal impression in a retrograde direction. On the other hand, protention is essentially the power of retention operating in reverse. With protention the sensory trail extends into the immediate future. Here intentional consciousness exhibits an “openness” to further experience.36 It elicits from a sensory source-point an immediate anticipation of a further perceptual experience. Protention, then, is the force which continually primes consciousness for the experience of continued consciousness.

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The everyday perceptual experience of worldly objects is thus far from simple, according to Husserl. What is perceived in the present “moment” is not a direct registering of the presence of the thing before consciousness, as if consciousness were capable of intuiting the whole of the object in a nondurational instant or now-point. Husserl argues this is the fantasy of “natural consciousness,” which “believes it grasps in a single glance, in a simple intuitive act, the objective thing itself.” It is a misguided interpretation, he concludes, because “only a small part of what we here presume to intuit is actually intuited.”37 So in Husserl’s estimation it is phenomenologically naïve to assume the perceptual object is ever fully present to consciousness. This is not to say that he denies completely the function of intuition (Anschauung) in the perceptual act, but it does means intuition or presence plays a clearly defined and limited role in perceptual experience. Husserl maintains that intuition is limited to the source-point of intentional consciousness, or to the primal impression alone. It is this intuited impression which then is worked over by the retentional and protentional modes of consciousness, resulting in the impression acquiring its characteristic durational texture. Without this all important modification of the primal impression, the perceptual object would not hold together over time: It would not endure. Were it not for the work of consciousness, for example, the discrete aural sensations emanating from my radio would be incapable of concatenating sufficiently to create a recognizable melody (a temporal event), and the trees I encountered in my walk through the woods would have presented themselves as streams of disconnected visual profiles. Derrida respects greatly Husserl’s pioneering studies in phenomenology. Indeed, if we heed the advice of commentators such as Caputo, we ought to interpret Derrida’s questioning of Husserl not so much as a critique of phenomenology but as an emendation which elicits from his teachings an even deeper understanding of the density of lived experience.38 Setting aside the more problematic issue regarding Derrida’s assessment of the Husserlian project, we will focus instead on the surface debate between the two over the issue of perceptual experience. Not surprisingly, Derrida’s critique of Husserlian phenomenology hinges on that postmodern bugaboo–presence. For our purposes, we will restrict our attention to Derrida’s critical analysis of Husserl’s account of perceptual experience as contained primarily in Speech and Phenomena. However, before we begin it should be noted that, comparatively speaking, Derrida is far more partial to Husserl’s rendering of perceptual experience than he is to MerleauPonty’s. The reason is that of the two, Merleau-Ponty’s account is perceived by Derrida as more embedded within the ethic of presence. It has been stated that

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perceptual experience for Merleau-Ponty is an opening upon the world whose condition of possibility is some form of contact with worldly being, one which presupposes the sharing of a common element of Being (i.e., flesh) between the perceiver and the perceived. This experience was said to be originary or primary because it speaks of the presence of the world’s flesh to the perceiver’s flesh. It was suggested as well that the emphasis Merleau-Ponty places on perceptual presence can be explained by his overarching desire to find a means of bridging the ontological gap separating the cogito from the cogitatum. Husserl we know did not possess a similar (post-metaphysical) desire, and the consequence of this disinterest is clearly revealed in his portrayal of the ego as a transcendental consciousness, or “pure subjectivity.” This Cartesian ideation later was to come under fire by the likes of Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and others, including Derrida himself. Derrida’s admiration of Husserlian phenomenology does not therefore extend to its description of the status of consciousness. Yet he is in general agreement with Husserl’s claim regarding the active role consciousness plays in constituting perceptual experience, for this understanding underscores Derrida’s own reading of perception as a constructed text. This being said, the concordance remains a loose one because Derrida cannot abide by the specifics of Husserl’s reading of the constitutive role played by consciousness. More precisely, he cannot accept Husserl’s assertion that the experience of the living present is constructed through a series of modifications of an antecedent intuition by working over sensations which themselves are directly impressed upon consciousness. From a Derridean perspective, Husserl’s disclosure of the phenomenological complexities within the putatively simple act of perception is robbed of its full glory by his inability to root out all vestiges of presence therein. Of course, there is a good deal of irony in this assessment of Husserl. For, as we know, his investigations were driven in large part by the desire to dispel precisely the “natural” viewpoint which assumes that what is perceived is intuited, or simply “present,” to consciousness. Still, it is Derrida’s contention that the Husserlian project fails to hit the phenomenological target which it rightfully set up for itself. It fails, in short, to grasp just how textual is perceptual experience. If one were forced to cull from Derrida’s writings a single statement that best encapsulates his take on perceptual experience, a prime contender would be the following: “Sense, being temporal in nature . . . is never simply present, it is always already engaged in the ‘movement’ of the trace, that is, in the order of ‘signification’.”39 Here Derrida tells us that just as meaning is not immediately present (in the sign), so is our perceptual experience of the world forever deferred, or always worked over by the differential trace. The first step in unravelling the rather compact claim linking sense

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to signification is to note Derrida concurs with Husserl’s observation that sense experience is an inherently temporal phenomenon. Moreover, since we necessarily sense “in time,” the experience of the world for both theorists is indissociable from the structures of time-consciousness. Derrida deviates from the Husserlian course only in his account of the specific forces at play in time-consciousness. We have observed that for Husserl the temporal object receives its density, its experiential fullness, through the continual interweaving of retentional and protentional forces within the transcendental ego. Derrida counters that the experience of the temporal object is constructed not by a transverse intentionality but, as stated above, by the movement of the differential trace. The question now arises: How does the differential trace and signification structure perceptual experience? The first step in answering this question is to realize that if sense is never simply present, as Derrida claims, this does not mean the perceived world is not in any way present to the perceiver. He tells us in Speech and Phenomena that “[t]he presence-of-the-present is derived from repetition and not the reverse.”40 Here Derrida advances his own position by attacking Husserl’s notion that the presence of lived experience is constructed by temporally modifying primary intuitions.41 We have seen that for Husserl consciousness works over the antecedent “given” or intuition by extending it both forward and backward in time. This renders the work of consciousness—the dilation of the sensory nowpoint—dependent on an initial intuition. Derrida asserts in contrast that repetition comes first. The lived present is not built up by a continuous extending backwards and forwards of directly intuited now-points. Rather, for Derrida there is repetition all the way down. In other words, there is no point at which repetition hits ground zero, where it repeats some “thing,” some stable, selfidentical, punctum of pure presence. For Derrida it is the other way around in that the “thing” experienced in the living present is derived or created through the act of repetition. This reversal means that what is primordial is not an intuited substance but a pure act. The act of repeating has no preexisting object upon which to act but instead produces the object through repetition. It is for this reason that Derrida asserts that repetition (or the play of différance) is “always older than presence.”42 Derrida thus pushes to its limits Husserl’s initial claim asserting just how much the experience of the lived present is derived from the work of consciousness, or, conversely, just how little of this experience is actually given to consciousness. His intention is to free what he says is the “incomparable depth” of Husserl’s analysis from the “closure of the metaphysics of presence” which haunts it.43 As observed, Derrida accomplishes this by arguing that nothing

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(literally, no “thing”) is given to consciousness ready-to-perceive. Perceptual objects therefore are constituted, but, importantly, not in the Husserlian sense which posits consciousness working over a prior originary impression. Derrida challenges the notion that the supplemental work of consciousness is extrinsic to the core source-point of the perceived object, that it kicks in only “after” consciousness passively registers a sensory impression. He disposes of this lingering residue of metaphysics by arguing that supplementation is intrinsic to the perceived object. It is there right from the start to the extent that it is through supplementation qua repetition that the perceptual object in the first place is rendered present to consciousness as an object. So contrary to Husserl, Derrida insists no part of perceptual experience is immune to or can escape from the textualizing work performed by repetition. Because repetition is always already producing its perceptual effects, nothing is ever simply given to consciousness. The idea that repetition or différance is always already at play lies at the center of Derrida’s deconstruction of the “presence” of the present and of Husserl’s (not to mention Merleau-Ponty’s) theory of perception, as well, which grounds itself on this metaphysical shibboleth. Derrida, we have seen, chastises Husserl’s formulation not so much for its wrongheadedness but for its theoretical tentativeness. Husserl we know sees the work of consciousness as modifying the sensory source-point in such a way as to generate an experience of the perceptual object as enduring in the actual present. Perception for him is nothing more than “the self-giving of the actual present.”44 The emphasis here is placed on the unity and the perceived immediacy of lived experience, on the perceptual fabric that consciousness constructs out of the warp and weft of its intentional machinations. This despite the fact that Husserl himself took great pains to deflate the naturalistic pretension which systematically underestimates the active role played by consciousness in the production of perceived reality. Derrida interprets this stress on the perceived immediacy of the present as simply the reappearance of the abiding metaphysical need for apodicity, a need that demands for its satisfaction some form of direct contact with the world. He liberates Husserlian phenomenology from its servitude to presence by showing that perceptual presence is a constituted effect of the work of consciousness, of repetition. For Derrida, Husserl erred when he differentiated “primary” memory or projection (i.e., retention, protention) from “ordinary” remembrance or anticipation. This dichotomy postulates a meaningful difference between the presentation of the just past/just ahead and the re-presentation of the more distant past/distant future. It is a distinction that maintains the singularity of the present, but only at the considerable cost of shielding it from the effects of repetition.

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Derrida is unwilling to pay such a price. He refuses to accept that a discrepancy in the length of the temporal interlude between the “now” and the “just now,” on the one hand, and the “now” and the “past,” on the other, is sufficient grounds for establishing a qualitative distinction between the presence of the present and the re-presentation (memory) of this presence. In so doing Derrida contends that difference—difference with a substantive bite (i.e., différance)—invades the living present at the most primordial level. The experience of the living present for him is at its core infused with nonpresence and otherness, with precisely what is not given to consciousness but with what consciousness adds to an originary deficiency in order that it may appear in the first place. This supplementary work of consciousness is the work of différance, which Derrida says necessarily “stands in for presence due to its primordial self-deficiency.”45 To argue with Derrida that our perception of world is structured like a differential trace is to say that because access to the perceived world is gained through the work of time-consciousness, our relationship to reality is never immediate, never direct, never unmediated.46 Stated in positive terms, it means that the world as it presents itself is necessarily always deferred. It is never simply present before us in the sense that the perceived is never taken in by consciousness ready-to-be-perceived. The reverse actually holds. Perceived being is right from the start supplemented being. Moreover, because for Derrida it is originally supplemented, perceived being cannot be looked upon as a supplemented “something”: It cannot rightly be conceived as an ex post facto reworking of (intuited) being, as Husserl believed. To the contrary, Derrida puts forth the radical claim that perceived being is nothing more than an effect of supplementation or repetition, and therefore never “is,” pure and simple. This is why Derrida likens perceptual reality to a trace, for a trace also never simply is but instead denotes the presence of an absence, the remnants of something which is not. Like a footprint in the sand, a trace is a sign or a stand-in pointing to something which itself is not there. To argue, then, that a perceived object is structured like a trace is to suggest that what we take to be the object’s identity is actually a kind of “special effect”47 produced by the differential trace. What appears to consciousness to “be” in the immediate present is for Derrida a constituted effect produced by the supplementary (specifically, the differential) work of consciousness. There is consequently more going on in perception than meets the natural, even the Husserlian, perceiving eye. The image of perception articulated by Derrida is unreal, it may be said, in that perceptual experience is an effect produced by an antecedent cause (i.e., différance) which itself is removed from the experiential relationship between perceiver and perceived. This follows because différance

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is an originary force—the “differentiating origin of differences,” Derrida says—that itself is driven by nothing.48 Différance, this cause without a cause, ensures perception is structured by a force which eludes delimitation by the perceived world. We see that for Derrida the world we experience is unreal to the extent the perceived world is an effect of a differentiated consciousness which is not bound by the world it perceives. Différance thus can be likened to a tear in perceptual experience that effectively denies the possibility of presence. It is a rupture, which, from a phenomenological perspective, denies the very possibility of perception.

DECONSTRUCTION AND THE COMPUTER The question as to “whom gets perception right,” phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty or poststructuralists like Derrida, has been hotly contested and very likely will continue to be for some time. On one side of the debate there are interpreters who, as noted, argue that Derrida’s critique of (Husserlian) phenomenology is not to be read as a disavowal of perceptual experience per se but as an attempt to provide a more accurate account of that experience.49 On the other side there are those who assert that Derrida’s critical rereading of phenomenology produces a diminished rendering of perceptual experience. Although these latter critiques vary considerably in nuance and detail, they generally concur (most evident with respect to defenses of the Merleau-Pontyean strain of phenomenology) as to the primary weakness of Derrida’s theory of perception. It pertains to the claim mentioned above that différance, the generative nothingness that makes language and perception possible, is for Derrida an ungrounded and hence transcendental force. The gist of the critique is that Derridean perception constitutes a form of idealism in that it is disconnected from the world and its emergent sense.50 My aim in providing an overview of the tension between a phenomenological and a postmodern reading of perception is to show how the latter reinforces the ethos of spiritization that is allied with the essence of technology. It is not by accident that Derrida links deconstruction with the piece of technology called a computer.51 The computer, after all, is a machine that builds “worlds” through the nothingness that differentiates a “0” from a “1.” Like perception itself, computing is a nothingness that produces something, or at least the appearance of something. And that is the main point. Derrida we know believes perceptual experience is deceptive in that what we take to be present before us is really just an appearance of presence generated by différance. It could be said that the “lived present” is to différance what watching a film is to the movement of the film strip through a projector. In both cases the former

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is an effect that is produced by the latter, an effect that necessarily obscures the origins of its own production. But if presence is an effect, if we are never “really there” in the sense that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty contend we are when we perceive the world around us, then the grounds for distinguishing the real world from representations or simulations of reality dissolve. They dissolve because everything, it turns out, is a representation of sorts produced by the perceiving mind. On this account there is no fundamental difference between, for instance, flying a Cessna in a flight simulation program and an actual Cessna. From a Derridean perspective, the experience of flying a “real” Cessna no longer is distinguishable from its virtual twin, at least not on the grounds that the latter is merely a representation of an otherwise immediate experience. For when presence is shown to be an effect produced by the repeating or re-presenting of signs—in other words, when presence itself is revealed to be a simulation generated by the play of difference—then one of the primary criteria for differentiating the real from the virtually real is lost. My intention here is not to determine whether Derrida’s critique of phenomenology issues in an improved or richer reading of perceptual experience, but simply to assess Derrida’s emendations within the broader context of this study. It is therefore less the truth content of Derrida’s deconstruction of “natural perception” that is of interest than its alignment with the ethos of technology. Derrida makes it clear that while we may be “in” the world, we are not of it. If a computer can rightly be called a spirit-machine, being founded on a productive nothingness, then we are its creaturely counterpart: spirit-beings. As spirit-beings, the world “beyond” is necessarily a construct, the real world no less than its virtual counterpart. Since, we have seen, Derrida believes no perceptual object is ever present to the perceiver, it makes no sense to continue to assume that technologically mediated experiences are less than real on the grounds that they are mere iterations or representations of an original experience. It follows that the only way a distinction between the two texts—between the virtually real and the really real worlds—can be sustained from within the Derridean paradigm is by focusing on differences in the content of the texts themselves. In other words, what differentiates the real from the virtual are differences in the kinds of sensory entities that différance supplements and generates. The real world function of flying an aircraft is an illustration of a type of experience generated by the play of différance acting upon sensory impressions emanating from the mundane world, be they natural (i.e., the enveloping atmosphere) or otherwise (i.e., the aircraft itself). In contrast, virtual flight can be classified as a distinct type of experience only to the extent that here the differential trace works over sense impressions issuing from a simulatory

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world. The point to be made is that for Derrida the distinction between the real (natural) and the virtual (simulated) is irrelevant because, to repeat, the criterion used to secure this distinction is grounded in a discredited metaphysics—the metaphysics of presence. Rather than pursue the unattainable “pure” experience, as had Husserl and Merleau-Ponty before him, Derrida settles for the less ambitious but more feasible goal of uncovering the constitutive work that produces experience in the first place. Attuned to the prevailing Zeitgeist, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence is hardly revolutionary.52 His claim that all is trace, repetition, and representation—in short, that reality is a production, or text—only allays the anxieties of those who interpret our technological foray into virtuality as a flight from reality. After all, why fret over spiritization when it is revealed that we are spirit-beings and that we have been flying all along?

ENDNOTES 1. The German theorist, Friedrich Kittler, heard this remark uttered (“after some questioning,” he observes) by Derrida at a lecture he gave in Seigen, Germany. The Derrida quotation is taken from the article, “Spooky Electricity: Laurence Rickels Talks with Friedrich Kittler,” in Artforum International (December, 1992), 66–70. 2. See G. B. Madison’s “Between Phenomenology and (Post) Structuralism: Re-Reading Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, eds. Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 117–128; esp. 122. In the same volume, see also M. C. Dillon’s “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism,” 129–138. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25. 7. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 160. 8. Ibid., 28–49. 9. Ibid., 139, 146. 10. Ibid., 139 11. Ibid., 266. 12. Ibid., 139. 13. Ibid., 147 (emphasis mine). 14. Ibid., 139. 15. Ibid., 133. 16. Ibid., 146.

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17. Ibid., 160. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. Ibid., 158. 20. Ibid., 127. 21. Ibid., 158. 22. Ibid., 37. 23. Ibid., 102. 24. Ibid., 179. 25. Ibid., 126. 26. Ibid., 126, 145 n. 5. 27. Ibid., 118. 28. See John D. Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). Caputo argues that metaphysical constructions by definition betray life’s original difficulty and that “radical hermeneutics” attempts precisely to restore life to its original hardship. 29. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 162. 30. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1988), 137. 31. Derrida, Limited, Inc., 148. 32. Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist account of language is detailed in his Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Belly and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). 33. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 11. 34. Edmund Husserl, “The Lectures of Internal Time Consciousness from the Year 1905,” trans. James S. Churchill, in Husserl: Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 280. 35. Ibid., 281. 36. See John B. Brough’s “The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,” 273. 37. Edmund Husserl, “Psychological Studies for Elementary Logic,” 131. 38. See Chapter 5, “Repetition and the Emancipation of Signs: Derrida on Husserl,” 120–152. 39. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 85. 40. Ibid., 52. 41. Ibid., 51. 42. Ibid., 68. 43. Ibid., 84, n. 9. 44. Husserl, “The Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness,” 283. 45. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 88.

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46. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 29. 47. Derrida, Margins, 17. 48. Derrida, Margins, 11. 49. See note #37. As stated, John Caputo seems to me to be the most eloquent and forceful exponent of such a view. In his Radical Hermeneutics he basically concurs with the Derridean position that the absolute transcendence of the world—created, as it were, by the productive nothingness called différance—means signs can refer only to other signs. Restoring the original difficulty to life therefore entails for Caputo acknowledging the infra-referentiality of both language and perception. 50. See M. C. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism,” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, eds. Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 129–138. 51. See the chapter’s opening quotation. 52. Compare Derrida’s reading of perception to that of theoretical physicist, David Deutsch. Deutsch discredits the notion that there is any “direct” experience of the world through the senses. He concludes by stating explicitly the implications of such a view in a way that Derrida does not, but similar to the manner I have interpreted Derrida here. For Deutsch, our putatively direct experience of the world is a virtual experience of reality: Reality is virtual reality. It follows that for Deutsch all facets of “real world” experience are virtual as well. As he says: “All reasoning, all thinking, and all external experience are forms of virtual reality.” See David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 120–121.

Chapter 2

Reality Show: Baudrillard

We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonise, reorder, find jouissance in, and, finally, if and when we decide, it is the reality which, since it is our destiny, we may meet, confront, and destroy. —Julian Barnes, England, England

Derrida deconstructs reality by undermining the identification of reality with that which is “present” to the perceiver. He shows, on the contrary, that reality is an artifact produced by the constitutive work of consciousness. Baudrillard shares with Derrida the opinion that reality, commonly understood, is not what it appears to be. But whereas Derrida might call reality “unreal” to underscore its status as a construct projected by consciousness, for Baudrillard reality is unreal because it has been reconstituted by technology. In other words, technology for Baudrillard replaces the function of consciousness in the constitution of reality. Reality has been remade through technology into a “show” of itself: It is always already a technological representation of itself. It is because the practice of technology (versus the operation of consciousness) constitutes, or reconstitutes, the world that Baudrillard concludes the dissolution of reality affects “quotidian reality in its entirety.”1 Baudrillard’s characteristically unsystematic treatment of the reality problematic can be made to cohere by distinguishing between three variations of the meaning of the term “reality.” The first of these meanings aligns reality with “the objective world,” or object world. As suggested by the descriptor “object,” the object world—designated here as Reality—stands or is thrown against the self and therefore is “other” than the self. In its radical otherness, Reality symbolizes what cannot be captured or controlled in either thought or 27

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deed. It points to the ineffable quality that attends the realm of appearances, to the realization that despite our ceaseless efforts, the appearing world forever withholds disclosing its essence. Reality in the second or more prosaic sense of the term refers simply to the worldly context, or natural order, within which human beings structure their lives. Here, the otherness of reality is tempered to the extent that the real world of space and time is perceived as amenable to control for the purpose of satisfying both basic needs and those desires that contribute to the realization of the good life, however that may be defined. The word “control” is used intentionally here to highlight the fact that reality is often seen as indeterminate with regard to human purposes. The unreconstructed material order simultaneously complies with and resists human efforts at manipulation. This ambivalence is manifested in the very meaning of the term control, since to work or roll against (L. contra—against + L. rotulus—roll) something is to acknowledge the resisting force of the thing being controlled. The act of controlling is therefore a reciprocal exercise insofar as having power over a thing is simultaneously to be aware of a countervailing action, or an opposing force. In pretechnological or magical societies the force that offsets the controlling instinct is primarily spiritual. Perceiving the material world as enchanted or inspirited means that any attempt to wrest power from this world requires appeasing the spirit world that animates the visible realm. This requirement in turn limits the extent to which control over the material realm can be secured. This limitation persists as long as reality is perceived as an essentially autonomous order with a distinct life force against which humans strive to secure some advantage. It holds, although less noticeably, even in the case of transitional societies, where the disenchanting power of science has partially eroded faith in the supernatural underpinnings of the natural order. If Reality represents the world as pure otherness, and reality the world as subject to control, then “reality,” the third variant, denotes the world mastered. Unlike “control,” the verb “master” (L. magister—chief, head, director) is devoid of connotations of otherness. To master is to dominate, to be in utter authority with regards to the thing mastered. That which is mastered offers no resistance to the commanding will and thus is fully absorbed into the economy of the act of mastery. “Reality,” then, designates a re-created order or second nature, where all vestiges of reality’s defining quality—its relative autonomy—have been erased through technological means. Yet for all this there remains a constant. What remains real in “reality” is the appearance or semblance of reality, which its framing by quotation marks is meant to signify. “Reality,” in short, is a remaking of the world in a way that conceals its remaking: It is a Derridean trace, only a trace produced by technology.

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The difference between Derrida and Baudrillard over what produces the trace called “reality” is not insignificant in terms of its implications. For instance, if reality is seen as an artifact produced by consciousness, then “reality” is as real as it gets. There never has been nor ever will be a realm outside “reality” that one can speak of meaningfully and employ as a critical reference point. If, to the contrary, “reality” is an artifact of technological origin, then, being a product of contingency, “reality” can be assessed in relation to standards that lie beyond the realm of the technological. In contrast to Reality, “reality” describes a world that is intellectually transparent and thoroughly a product of human artifice. This “reality” is what Baudrillard means, broadly speaking, by simulation or simulated reality. Whereas a simulated reality stands diametrically opposed to Reality, consideration also must be given to how “reality” differs from its more prosaic twin. This difference can be exemplified with reference to what distinguishes a real adventure from its simulated counterpart. Both an actual and a virtual adventure can be defined in general terms as a purposive undertaking marked by uncertainty. Adventures are struggles against an adversarial environment. Whether, for example, one flies an actual aircraft or simulates flying an aircraft, in both instances the pursuit of some objective entails a degree of risk. In both types of experience the risk to the adventurer usually involves a certain level of physical or emotional stress, if not injury. This much is obvious in the case of real adventures, but it holds for virtual adventures as well. The verisimilitude of certain flight simulators, for instance, is such that its operators exhibit the same physiological responses to the stresses of virtual flight as do actual navigators, even to the point of suffering heart attacks. So while a simulated adventure may incorporate many of the elements of a real adventure, such as hardship and unpredictability, if these types of experience are to remain distinguishable, the overlap must not be complete. In the final analysis, what distinguishes a virtual from a real experience is that the former, unlike the latter, remains a programmed experience and, as an experience engendered by artifice, remains bound by parameters self-consciously set by its programmer. A simulated reality is therefore a “willed” reality and as such assumes the status of a game. And like all games, it can be exited, in marked contrast to its “real world” alternative. Against this backdrop, one may ask along with Baudrillard: What has become of reality? What stands against us in an age where the very fabric of our everyday existence has been thoroughly reshaped by the efficiencies afforded by modern technology? Some persons may respond that much remains in terms of resistance, and indeed it is true that even in the technologically privileged West, the goal of mastery is far from realized and that the existing powers of control are hardly accessible to all persons. Still, if

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mastery is not fully realized in fact, past technological successes lead to an expectation of ever expanding levels of control for ever greater numbers of persons. The measure of progress remains tied to the presumption that reality will continue to yield to human control, with the tantalizing goal of mastery as its endpoint. Technology is therefore responsible for the demise of reality both in spirit and (increasingly) in fact. For Baudrillard, what passes for reality is unreal because it has been supplanted by an image or a reproduction of the real. We live in what he calls the “simulacrum” of the real, in an age of simulation where reality is always already a reproduction of itself. It is an age, he believes, where artifice lies at the very heart of reality.2 Baudrillard’s ruminations on the demise of reality (or what amounts to the same thing, reality’s objectivity) are in keeping with the general claim regarding the impact on the nonhuman natural realm of a disenchanting science. His assertion that reality has become redundant vindicates the telos of the disenchantment process. For the goal of disenchanting science always has been to reconstitute the given natural order, or reality, so as to effectively destroy its alterity. Its operating assumption always has been that a “good” reality is a moribund reality, an intellectually transparent and consequently an infinitely malleable order of things. Underlying this assumption is the more basic premise that reality is unredeemed or fundamentally flawed, and that disenchanting science is the means by which reality is made good. Reality is expiated through its remaking—its negation. The logic of disenchantment therefore leads to the ironic conclusion that only by leaving reality behind can its promise be realized. This is the thematic context within which I wish to approach a reading of Baudrillard. To be fully appreciated, his thoughts on the reality problematic must be situated within a larger intellectual framework because, like Weber and Kojève before him, Baudrillard’s philosophical musings constitute an elaboration on what it means to live in the age of technology, and in the posthistorical context within which this age unfolds. Doing so lends to Baudrillard’s thoughts on the reality problematic a much needed sense of balance and perspective. It helps us realize, for one, just to what extent he, like Kojève, is best understood as a jokester of sorts. But unlike Kojève, who stayed true to his intellectual conviction and realized, after delivering the lectures that later became the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, that nothing more needed to be said, Baudrillard never fully quit the halls of academe. Both the content and style of his mature writings reflect the reveries of a “satisfied” man, alternately bemused and chagrined by the unfolding of the new world.3 The jokester in Baudrillard is sustained by the awareness that play, and not work, is the defining characteristic of post-historical existence. Kojève’s “playtime” began after his serious scholarly work was complete, when in 1945 he took a post at the French Ministry of Economic Affairs and helped

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create many of postwar Europe’s leading institutions.4 Baudrillard, on the other hand, having never left the academic fold, evolved into the consummate intellectual wag who forsook the labor of reasoned argument for gnomic pronouncements from the technological front line. This posturing necessitates reading Baudrillard circumspectly. As with any trenchant interpretation of the end of history thesis, consideration must be given to what extent Baudrillard’s thoughts on the reality problematic constitute a “serious joke.”5 What is meant by a serious joke is by no means certain. On the one hand, a serious joke can refer to a fiction that nonetheless is serious because it edifies—a so-called noble lie. On the other hand, a serious joke can denote a reality whose “truth” is perceived to be “a joke” insofar as it violates some assumed norm or standard of rectitude. In the former instance, the end of history thesis would be interpreted as an untruth based upon a truth, whose understanding provides insight into an existing situation or predicament. The conclusion here would be that history has not and cannot end, even in principle, and that in neglecting the reasons why it cannot end we increasingly act as if history has ended. In contrast, in the latter instance history would be regarded as effectively over, an outcome viewed with extreme apprehension in part because no escape is seen as pending. It is impossible to know with confidence which, if either, way of interpreting the artfulness of Baudrillard’s writings would yield the greatest insight. Perhaps no single interpretation is necessary or required. Still, what is certain is that Baudrillard’s claims regarding reality’s demise cannot be taken at their face value. Perhaps all that can be said is that, like history, reality for Baudrillard is not (yet) dead. A potential problem remains with the application of this approach to Baudrillard, for his “poetics of pessimism”6 are seen by some to be entirely a joke. Although popular with the lay population—as witnessed by the up-scale packaging his most recent works have received—Baudrillard largely remains an object of suspicion, if not derision, within academic circles. The reasons are obvious. Clearly not a systematic or even an original thinker, his ruminations are hypertrophic, repetitive, and generally unsupported by empirical evidence. The overall sense one gets from Baudrillard’s writings (especially his later writings, which will concern us here) is that they exhibit the triumph of style over substance, or image over reality. Clearly the joke is not lost on Baudrillard that his commentary on the demise of reality replicates precisely the same tendency toward excessive artifice that he finds lying at the heart of the phenomenon he purports to be dissecting. The question to be entertained at this juncture is: Is Baudrillard’s “joke” a serious joke? Does he have anything of substance to say about the state of reality in a technologically advanced society such as ours? I will argue he does and that underlying the overblown rhetoric lies the contours of a coherent

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response to the reality problematic that warrants careful consideration. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the fragments of this response and reconstitute them in a way that illustrates Baudrillard’s abiding interest with the concerns of this study. I will do so operating on the premise that Baudrillard is best read ironically. That is to say, just as Baudrillard’s thoughts on the reality problematic are informed, at one end, by the idea called Reality, so they are equally informed by an opposing idea—“reality” or simulation. In short, I will approach Baudrillard’s exposition of “reality” as a serious joke, as depicting a not-yet-fully-realized tendency toward the dissolution of what is commonly understood as reality.

THE PROBLEM WITH REALITY The best way to begin to make coherent sense of Baudrillard’s thoughts on the reality problematic is first to ask what for him is the central problem with the present organization of the world, as realized by modern technology. What is the underlying logic behind the reconstitution of reality and what organizational principle is responsible for this condition? Baudrillard’s answer to this question is relatively straightforward, despite the diversity of descriptors he employs to signify it. The problem with “reality” is that it has been organized by a principle run amok—the “performance principle.” This principle, Baudrillard says, has been “unleashed,” suggesting that the problem may lie less with the principle itself than with the fact that it presently escapes limitation. This reading is reinforced by other expressions he uses to describe the same phenomenon, such as “the war against otherness,” “identity mania,” and “the death drive.” Together, they describe an extreme or pathological condition whereby the world is reorganized in a way that closes the gap between command and response, or between desire and its satisfaction. A regulative ideal, Reality is anathema to the efficiency or performance principle, since it associates what is real with what is impervious to control or mastery. Reality does not work: It is by definition dysfunctional, at least with respect to human purposes. As noted, because we inhabit a world over which we have a measure of control, what differentiates a technological from a pretechnological society is largely a matter of the extent of acquired control. Baudrillard likely would concur that for almost all of history humanity has resided between Reality and “reality.” However, he also believes—or wishes us to believe he believes—the cumulative impact of interrelated technological developments has precipitated a phase change of sorts, resulting in a qualitatively new way of perceiving, organizing, and interacting with the world.

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It is with respect to the performance principle that this change has occurred. Its unleashing has systematized the world and maximized its efficiency. To create a “system” involves combining or recombining particular elements in such a way as to make a functional whole. This process is both rational and technological in that the self-conscious ordering of parts is undertaken with the view to better manage the outcomes the system seeks to effect. Unlike Reality, a well-designed system works: It performs efficiently in that it responds effectively to the task for which it was designed and implemented. It does so because every element within a system, from the parts themselves to their interactions with each other and to the whole (not to mention the systematic coordination of systems), is a product of artifice and therefore under the guiding control of its creators. In a world fashioned in accordance with the performance principle, everything is operationalized, which is to say everything is calculated and nothing is left to chance. The problem with “reality” is that it is stripped of all remaining vestiges of otherness. To say that reality is systematized is to say that all aspects of contemporary life have been reshaped by system imperatives. This reshaping is so pervasive and endemic that it goes largely unnoticed. Nonetheless, its imprint is everywhere, in commercial, political, educational, and communications practices, to name a few. All of these practices are being conceived and reordered essentially as “delivery systems,” as coordinated sets of operations whose end is the efficient dispensing of a service or product. So, for example, in the business world we see the emergence of “supply-chain management,” a logistics based coordination system that seeks to synchronize the flow of goods, services, information, and finances throughout the entire supply chain, beginning with the supply of raw materials and ending with the consumer. The complexity of this task is enormous, given the globalized modern economy to which supply chain management systems both respond and contribute in their operation. The scale of its complexity aside, supply chain management systems do what all systems in every application do, namely, increase the efficiency with which a product is delivered. The question as to why systemizing reality is a problem remains unanswered. What exactly is pathological about efficiency? In principle, nothing, if we mean by these terms increasing the effectiveness of our control over the order of things. Preserved in this understanding is respect for the relative autonomy of this order, and therefore respect for the limits of achievable efficiency. The problem, for Baudrillard, is that this understanding no longer prevails. The operative assumption of a systems approach to reordering reality is that only by eradicating all sources of system interference or “noise” can the war against the intransigent other be successfully waged and efficiency fully maximized. Systems, to be effective, must operationalize every element within

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the system—bring every element under rational scrutiny and control—and excise from the system those elements incapable of being operationalized. It is by maximizing their “transparency,” a favored term of Baudrillard’s, that systems and the reality they configure produce pathological consequences. As noted, the problem with “reality” originates with an inherent flaw of its organizing principle, as manifested in the system ideal of maximizing efficiency. The performance principle seeks to tighten systems by eliminating from them those elements that are redundant or otherwise fail to contribute directly to the performance of the task at hand. For Baudrillard, this technological imperative results in a general condition where discontinuities give way to contiguities, where the spaces separating the perceiver and the perceived, desire and satisfaction, and humans and their technologies, dissolve and produce in their wake the closed circuitry of an integrated system. It is this condition which prompts him to conclude that problems today arise “not in an excess of alienation, but in a disappearance of alienation in favor of a maximum transparency between subjects.”7 All the societal pathologies Baudrillard addresses in his various writings can be seen as emerging from two general sorts of outcome generated by the implementation of the performance principle. One outcome relates to pathologies produced in reaction to systematized order. These may be called backlash pathologies, or pathologies of the avenging Other. All remaining pathologies arise less in reaction to a systematized reality than flow directly from such a reality. This second category of pathology issues from what might be called the performance effect, to signify their connection to the “successes” generated by the efficient performance of systems. There are three subcategories of pathology associated with the performance effect. First, there are those aberrations resulting from the sheer productivity of a systemized “reality.” There is another subclass of pathology related less to the volume of production than to the impact efficient production has on the substance of what is produced. The third subcategory of pathology is rooted in efficiencies gained in the interface between humans and their technologies, and their impact on human agency. It should be noted that both major categories of pathology are effects of the same cause, namely, systems of maximized efficiency. What distinguishes them is the nature of the effect. For backlash pathologies, the effect is the implosion of systems, and for pathologies that issue from the performance effect, a panoply of consequences all of which contravene aspects of the economy of reality. We could conclude, then, that the performance principle is inherently problematic since it produces systems either given to collapse, or, if such a fate is avoided, given to pathologies associated with heightened levels of efficiency. Simply put, for Baudrillard, systems either don’t work, or work too well.

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Regarding backlash pathologies, Baudrillard holds that the total transparency sought after in the creation of systems provokes a counteraction, where, he says, systems begin to “secrete their own internal virulence, their own malignant reversibility.”8 Reminiscent of the Frankfurt School theorists Horkheimer and Adorno’s conceptualization of “the revenge of nature,”9 Baudrillard argues that the transformation of objects into interactive subjects upsets a “metaphysical subject/object balance,”10 which in turn initiates a counteraction that rights this imbalance by reasserting the aggrieved party— the object. So it is, for example, that when our bodies are overly protected from potentially harmful bacteria through hyperintegration—which occurs either by eradicating from the body alien microbiological life forms or through the body’s overly restrictive circulation with other bodies11—defenses atrophy and the body succumbs to internally generated or immunodeficiency-related diseases, such as cancer and AIDS. These illnesses are not of the conventional sort for Baudrillard in that they do not represent an external threat to an otherwise homeostatic biological entity. Quite the opposite, he holds that the primary scourges besetting humanity today should be seen as responses to a technologically induced imbalance within the human body. As Baudrillard puts it, illnesses like cancer and AIDS are “generated by the very success of prophylaxis and medicine.”12 These diseases are provoked by too much physiological ease, as happens when modern medicine oversteps its responsibility to quell microbial adversity. Baudrillard is far from alone in realizing that without an “enemy” to attack, the body’s defenses effectively turn upon itself, wreaking havoc on its host in the process. Instilled with what amounts to a Nietzschean will-to-power, the body’s immune system would rather consume itself than lie idle for want of microbial adversaries. Illnesses such as cancer and AIDS therefore are interpreted by Baudrillard as a microbiological manifestation of the avenging Other. Ironically, the logic of the avenging Other dictates that the more vehemently we pursue the ideal of microbiological transparency the more vulnerable the body is to breakdown and catastrophe. It is a view which, despite its somewhat overblown presentation by Baudrillard, seems to be born out by events such as the recent appearance in the West of antibioticresistant strains of communicable disease. In parallel fashion, Baudrillard notes that the closed circuitry of modern communications networks renders these networks highly susceptible to the avenging Other known as the computer virus, which metastasizes throughout the digital body in much the same way that cancer cells proliferate within its corporeal counterpart.13 For Baudrillard the message in both instances is the same: “Total prophylaxis is lethal.”14 Or, as he says in The Illusion of the End, “maximum interconnectedness brings maximum vulnerability

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of all networks.”15 A system, biological or otherwise, is thus never more predisposed to collapse than when it is shielded from environmental noise. Paradoxically, absolute efficiency leads to dysfunction and death. When viewed from the internal vantage point of the system, these metaphysical redresses necessarily pose themselves as threats to the well-being of the system. Typically their presence is interpreted as a sign of impending catastrophe, of some sort of generalized breakdown or system failure. Baudrillard assesses things differently. Such extreme phenomena in his view should be looked upon more disinterestedly and equitably. He submits that the “secret disorder” of these phenomena—or what amounts to “evil” in a disenchanted world—plays in fact “a prophylactic role by opposing its chaos to any escalation of order and transparency to their extremes.”16 Internally generated forms of virulence therefore are for Baudrillard both a symptom of and a countermeasure to a form of pathology specific to “reality.” Baudrillard also contends that the maximizing of means-related instrumentalities tends towards overheated or hypertrophic production, one of the subtypes associated with the performance effect, the second major category of pathology. So we see, for instance, that the more efficient the process of transmitting information becomes the more information there is generated for circulation. Or, likewise, the more successful the struggle against disease the greater the impetus to identify and conquer all remaining conditions deemed to lie outside the biomedical norm of well-being. The problem with “reality” therefore is defined in part by a continued escalation of its productive powers and by the corresponding expansion of the effects of these growing powers. Baudrillard applies the pejorative term “excrescential”17 to this society to convey what he perceives to be the excessive nature of its productive effects. He traces this hypertrophism in particular (but not exclusively) to the recent magnification of the power and reach of communications media, a phenomenon he claims has upset the previously established balance between cause and effect by enabling singular causes to produce prodigious effects. Here Baudrillard suggests, along the lines previously developed by proponents of chaos theory, that the relationship between reality and mediated representations of reality bears a striking resemblance to the chaotic, nonlinear relationship between cause and effect within the natural world. Simply put, Baudrillard believes that along with chaotic natural systems, the effects generated by the modern media are extremely sensitive to the slightest changes in an initial set of conditions. The media appear to be capable of initiating their own “butterfly effect,” where, as suggested by the metaphor, an event as innocuous as the beating of a butterfly’s wings can be sufficient to precipitate a shift in the Earth’s atmospheric conditions far removed from the triggering event.18 In the context that interests us here, this

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means that the generative power and complexity of the modern media—an outcome of their growing efficiency—is such that even the slightest real world “anomaly” (i.e., the contentious behavior of a celebrity) is sufficient to prompt a veritable torrent of images, information, and commentary with unforeseen repercussions in realms far removed from the originating source. Indeed, the production of these representations often acquires the critical mass required for them to transmogrify into a self-contained virtual universe, whose “laws” of development bear no relationship with those of the real world and whose pervasiveness is ultimately responsible for the disappearance of reality.19 Associated with problems related to over-production is the acceleration of processes. Making systems more efficient by excising from them all extraneous elements enhances their performance in part by encouraging the rapid execution of an assigned task. In the digital worlds of computer networking and the mass media, the technical goal of transmitting information and images efficiently has been perfectly realized in temporal terms: Information and images circulate instantaneously for all practical purposes. For Baudrillard the “prodigious uselessness” of signification we witness today is only compounded by the dizzying speeds at which these signs are relayed.20 Technological efficiency not only results in pathologies of excess, it also tends to homogenize the utility of produced things. To the extent that efficiency pertains to the one best way—the technically most expedient way—of performing a task, there invariably arises over time a growing convergence in the functionality of produced things in a technologically advanced society. As consumers, we have come to expect that most brands of a particular item of similar cost are roughly comparable in terms of their utility. This expectation is especially reinforced in the context of a globalized economy, where efficiency demands the standardization of materials, production, and so forth. The problem with this particular consequence of the performance principle is that it is bad for business: Capitalism thrives on competition, and competition in turn relies on the selling of distinction and difference. If what we consume is similar, in terms of use-value, then it stands to reason that other means must be found to differentiate consumables. There are at least two types of response to this challenge. One, emphasis can be switched from the functionality of goods to their design, from substance to style. Two, and related to the first, a premium can be put on selling the “image” of a product, rather than the product itself. Another outcome of the performance effect is therefore the birth of modern marketing, where “branding” or “name recognition” becomes the sine qua non of economic success. Baudrillard, we shall see, is especially sensitive to the consequences of this outcome as they pertain to the reality problematic.

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The last set of pathologies associated with the performance effect relates to the impact that gains in the efficiency of our machines have on the way we interact with them. Baudrillard’s concern in this regard is with the consequences for human agency of the implementation of “smart” technologies. Specifically, he fears the ubiquity of these technologies is resulting in the disappearance of the subject (i.e., the technology’s user) into the logic of the machine. In the real world, the inefficiency of our attempts to control the environment had the effect of making us aware of ourselves as subjects acting against the “other,” whether this “other” is the natural world or the world of human artifice. No such resistance exists in a world reshaped in accordance with the performance principle, which is why Baudrillard believes the subject, along with the object, are dissolving into the integrated circuitry of the system. It could be said, in conclusion, that Baudrillard’s understanding of the origin of the pathologies of the “real” world insinuates that these pathologies stem from a contravention of the underlying organizational principle of reality. If the performance principle subtends “reality,” then we could say the redundancy principle undergirds reality. This latter principle describes an arrangement of both the human and the nonhuman natural orders that ensures within them a place for redundancy or untapped reserves. So it is, for instance, that most of the genetic programming material encoded in a genome is never utilized in the ontogenesis of a species, including the human species. This redundancy in the economy of animate being—so-called “junk DNA”—is replicated according to Baudrillard within the social sphere in the mass of idle floating signifiers that comprises language, the existence of which preserves meaning by preventing “human beings from expressing everything and the world from signifying everything.”21 For most of human history various sorts of limitations, technological or otherwise, prevented the realization of systemized control of (or mastery over) the human and nonhuman environments. The redundancy principle could not be transgressed because inefficiency was unavoidable. Recent technological development now has made the contravention of the principle not only possible, but routine. Its violation is one of the hallmarks of our post-real age, and is responsible for its excesses and pathologies.

THE GENEALOGY OF VALUE As a preamble to a more thorough exploration of Baudrillard’s contribution to the reality problematic, it is helpful to review his genealogy of a disappearing reality and situate this genealogy within its larger intellectual context. The intellectual influences on Baudrillard’s thought are many and varied,

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including Marxism, semiology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis. These influences account for the considerable evolution in his ideas since the 1960s. However, despite the vagaries of Baudrillard’s intellectual odyssey, his aim has remained steadfast—to critically examine consumer society. During his Marxist period and beyond, he has never abandoned his interest in exploring the relationship between persons and the commodities they consume as participating members of an advanced capitalist economy. Baudrillard began to make his intellectual mark when, during the 1960s, he questioned the Marxist reading that placed the mode of production at the core of a social order. He argued in contrast that consumption, not production, was central to the workings of contemporary society, and proceeded to provide an account of the emergence of consumer society, and its impact on commodities and consumers alike. One of the first conclusions he drew from this new approach was that consumers consume objects as signs. Simply put, Baudrillard believed it is not commodities per se we desire as much as the image commodities signify—their “sign value.” With this shift, Baudrillard veered away from Marxist concerns related to political economy and turned toward an analysis of “the political economy of the sign.”22 Borrowing from Roland Barthes and semiotics, Baudrillard came to realize that our desire to consume the sign value of objects is fundamentally a desire to establish difference and distinction. If consumers purchase items for the images they signify, they do so primarily to distinguish themselves in some manner from other consumers. So, for example, consumers today desire a particular brand of motor vehicle for the recognition this brand confers upon them as persons with status, or taste, or environmental sensitivity, and so on. In presenting this argument, Baudrillard was attacking the Marxist notion of primary needs, the notion that “by nature” persons have certain essential needs which corresponding objects are capable of satisfying. Baudrillard argues that there are no such primary needs (nor indeed, secondary or false needs), and that any residual belief in them is an artifact of political economy. The same is true for the Marxist notion of “use value.” Use value is not a fundamental or natural quality of products whose “truth” is obscured when capitalism, through its exchange relations, imposes a new regime for determining value. For Baudrillard, the utility of a product no longer inheres in the product itself but in its sign, which is to say that usefulness has become an image and therefore sits alongside other images, such as quality, durability, or sexual allure. In the 1970s Baudrillard began to cast doubt on his semiology-inspired critique of Marxism. He came to believe his demythologizing of needs and use-value was misdirected, and instead should be replaced by a more radical demythologizing of signification itself. Taking his cues from Derrida,

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Baudrillard realized that the hidden, and questionable, assumption behind semiological analysis was its naïve faith in the correspondence between the sign and what it stands for—its referent. Just as Derrida argued that meaning is an effect of the exchange of signs (thus disengaging meaning from the referent), so Baudrillard asserted that the “reality” of commodities is an effect produced by the exchange of commodity-signs. For Baudrillard, the “structural” or “sign value” stage of the commodity represents a quantum leap forward in the genealogy of value because this is the point at which value parts company with reality and enters the realm of “reality,” simulation, or the hyperreal. To better understand the rationale behind Baudrillard’s claim that value has lost its traditional reference to reality, we first must recount what he perceives to be a fundamental shift in the primary challenge facing late capitalist economies—the shift that precipitates the advent of hyperrealism. Baudrillard concedes there was a time when the most pressing obstacles to continued economic prosperity were taken to be related to matters of production. In the early stages of capitalism energies were directed primarily towards overcoming technical problems associated either with the introduction of new and more advanced products, or with increasing the efficient manufacturing of existing ones. It was assumed the way to economic growth lay primarily in the production of commodities both more attractive and cheaper than one’s competitors. At this stage of development the value of a commodity was determined largely by its use and exchange value. While Baudrillard does not deny outright these aspects of a commodity’s value, he does refute the primacy of use and exchange value in a modern capitalist economy where production takes a second seat to consumption. Now that the key to economic prosperity resides less in the efficient production of a superior commodity than in the manufacturing of a desire for a given product, values like utility and exchange persist chiefly in the form of sign values, or simulated values. Baudrillard insists that the shift in focus from production to consumption has radically restructured our relationship to reality. In capitalism’s productive phase, when use and exchange value were the chief determinants of a commodity’s worth, a commodity’s value tended to inhere in its actual substance, as manifested by its functional capacities and its worth relative to other such commodities. As capitalism advanced in its ability to efficiently mass produce consumer goods, and as competition amongst producers grew more fierce, a new organizing principle of society emerged. This new organizing principle was premised on the rule of the sign, prompting Baudrillard to conclude that “the era of the signified and of function is over.”23 In marking our entry into the age of the signifier, Baudrillard is not denying the persistence of production, any more than Kojève denied the continuance of time in

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the post-historical era. To continue with the analogy, we could say that just as the end of history was realized with the solving of the political problem of inequality, so the end of the era of the signified was realized with the solving of the problem of productivity. The overcoming of technical obstacles to mass production rendered the objects of mass production valueless, at least according to traditional criteria such as cost and accessibility. In the era of ubiquitous consumer goods, a new system emerged to help maintain distinctions among goods and between persons who consumed these goods. If the mere possession of objects no longer was a mark of distinction, possessing the right kind of objects (as conveyed by their signs) could satisfy the same end. It could be said, then, that gains in economic efficiency have rendered substance redundant. Or again: Technology renders the real redundant. The substance of the objects in our possession mattered in an age when such objects were few and in the possession of a few. These objects were valued for their utility or beauty because of their scarcity. Now that challenges related to supply largely have been solved, what matters is not the substantive reality of goods but their image (as self-consciously crafted by manufacturers and advertisers) and their alignment with consumers’ desired or existing selfimage. In this new context, the substance of products invariably becomes less inviting than the “realer than real” images that represent these products and supply them with meaning. From the 1980s onward Baudrillard explored the multiform consequences of our entry into the age of the sign, an age where commodities acquire value through their identification with images of themselves—with their simulacra. In the age of simulated value, the value (and ultimately the meaning) of things is severed from its concrete referent: Value becomes a floating signifier. This development is not unexpected since Baudrillard suggests consumers are thoroughly bored by the substantive content of the world anyway. Value as a result is forced to divorce itself from the increasingly empty content of a disenchanted world. It survives by sundering the bounds of reference and by simulating, or playing at, reference to the real. Complicating matters is the fact that for Baudrillard the referents which values now simulate comprise many things other than consumer goods. They include, as well, natural objects, actions, and even the representation of things, or signs.24 As a result, the structural stage of the law of value forecloses the possibility of speaking meaningfully about the value of substantive reality in all its varied manifestations. Value simply speaks itself: It is self-engendering. In a later work entitled The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard adds a fourth stage to his typology of value, which radicalizes the divorce of image from reality. Significantly, this new “fractal” or “viral” stage, as he calls it, does

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not displace or supplant entirely those that preceded it but merely appends itself to the list. Here Baudrillard clarifies a point only partially articulated in his earlier treatments of the question of value—that value over time has accreted various “formal distinctions” or “aspects,” such as a natural aspect, a commodity aspect, a structural aspect, and now a fractal aspect.25 To refer to a metaphor Baudrillard himself frequently employs, we could say that the genealogy of value shares with that of DNA a profound conservatism. For just as new genetic mutations within the human genome never displace already established ones, so too is the introduction of new aspects of value never achieved at the expense of already existing values.26 As a consequence, commodities, ideas, and actions still retain associations with preexisting types of value for Baudrillard. His claim, then, is not that these aspects of value have been discarded but merely that over time they have been reincorporated into a new societal organizing principle which elevates a different value. In its structural variant, simulated value is likened by Baudrillard to value in “orbit” in order to denote its detachment from its referent. Just as satellites hover above the referent “Earth,” so do simulations their referents. Yet their detachment from their respective referents is not total. To the extent that satellites revolve around the Earth and simulations remain simulations of “real world” referents, they retain a formal connection with their hosts. In contrast, simulated value in its fractal configuration is de-orbitized: It is value completely severed from its referent, and thus free to blast off haphazardly into the deep reaches of significatory space, unfettered by any operational principle whatsoever. Echoing Derrida’s linking of meaning with the play of signifiers, Baudrillard maintains that value now is generated through a “general commutation of [referentless] signs.”27 At this juncture the “law” of value for Baudrillard yields to a veritable epidemic of value. Value enters a hypertrophic or viral stage, when, like a cancer cell, it loses the capacity for self-regulation and begins to metastasize.28 Here Baudrillard seems to be describing the tendency, in “postmodern” technoculture, for signs to commute indiscriminately with other signs in a veritable orgy of signification. In this new significatory space, or firmament of signs, signs are free to commute unbounded by strictures of any sort. For value in its fractal aspect, nothing stands apart from anything else (and everything can be parlayed into something else) because what once restricted the free commutation of value and meaning has been effectively transcended. For Baudrillard, it becomes increasingly meaningless to speak of business, politics, popular culture, literature, higher learning, or science as distinct disciplines when the images representing them so overwhelm their referents that they break the bonds of representation entirely, thus becoming free to commingle indiscriminately with other emancipated signs. So it is today that no one raises an eyebrow today when an icon associated

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with quality sportswear is used to promote an airline, or when a dimestore novelist launches a new perfume line. The public’s general acceptance of the radical convertibility of value only underscores its hold on contemporary society, and Baudrillard’s assessment of our age as, if not quite unreal, then at least surreal in its fantastic and incongruous commingling of signs. Baudrillard’s account of the evolution of value in capitalist society stresses its progressive abstraction or spiritization. Whereas the value of produced goods used to be tied to “real world” considerations such as utility and exchange, goods now are mere ciphers for their appended signs, signs which acquire meaning through their commutation with other equally disembodied, or referentless, signs. In having “drawn away” (L. ab, away + trahere, draw) from the specific and the concrete, Western society stands radically opposed to the kind of social order described by French sociologist Marcel Mauss in The Gift.29 Baudrillard gained from Mauss’s sociological study of primitive societies an appreciation of a system of exchange completely antithetical to that of modern capitalism. He came to see in this system of “symbolic exchange,” founded on the act of gift exchange, an economy of objects that escaped the abstraction haunting our contemporary society. These objects, Baudrillard opined, are substantive or real in terms of their being particular offerings, insofar as a gift-giver gives this gift and not another. They are real also by virtue of their ties with social obligation, since to receive a gift is to be obliged to the giver of the gift. It is their rootedness in the concrete that lends the quality of objectness to the gifts within a system of symbolic exchange. These gifts “stand against” both those who give and receive them precisely because their meaning is not infinitely malleable, but fixed by the exigencies of a social system that has yet to fall under the sway of the economy of the sign. Through his analysis of consumer culture Baudrillard discerns a movement toward the increasing abstractness of lived existence. We have moved ever further from the practice of symbolic exchange, where the gift (as the object of exchange) truly stands as an object, as something which is unique, inexchangeable, and rooted in a particular set of social dynamics. It is this loss of objecthood, of the capacity for something to be an object, that Baudrillard appears to lament in his critique of consumer society.

HYPERREALITY If, by Baudrillard’s own admission, earlier forms of value persist in an advanced stage of the age of simulation—the fractal or viral stage—they do so in an altered and, ultimately, diminished manner. His point is that while

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earlier configurations of value are never entirely lost, their diminishment reveals a fundamental shift in perception as to what is real. The evolution in our understanding of what constitutes the value of a commodity, an evolution inextricably linked to advancements in technology, is evidence for Baudrillard that we simply have lost interest in the world as object. Of course, this is not to say that today all avenues of intercourse with reality are mediated through technology and technology’s artifacts, only that a preponderance of them are. His overriding claim is that the texture of contemporary life is removed from reality and what reality symbolizes. We live, Baudrillard believes, in a world largely of our own making, a world produced by disenchanting science and technology. For Baudrillard, this “world” of artifice is hyperreal. In Simulacra and Simulations, he succinctly describes what he means by the term. Hyperreality, he says, is a “reality” generated “by models of a real without origin or reality.”30 Since these models of reality without reality are what Baudrillard means by simulacra, we can conclude that hyperreality is a simulated reality. A simulated reality, in turn, is not simply a re-creation of reality that pretends at being real, in the manner that someone may pretend to exhibit the symptoms of a cold. Hyperreality is not a “fake” reality, but an image (broadly defined) of reality that functions in a manner felicitous with the real—nothing less than a “real fake.” For Baudrillard, it is the realness of this fake called hyperreality that is most captivating because, being a product of technology, this realness is subject to manipulation and augmentation. So compelling is this “realer than real” reality that its status as a simulation of the real falls from view. Hyperreality is thus not an image of reality but its own pure simulacrum: Hyperreality is reality, or, as Baudrillard says conversely, “reality itself today . . . is hyperrealist.”31 For Baudrillard, hyperreality is as real as it gets. It holds that this “reality” is unreal to the extent hyperreality is a product of a modeling process which itself is “without reality.” But what exactly does it mean to proclaim that reality today is modeled upon an unreal template? Part of the answer to this question was touched upon earlier in our discussion of the four stages of value. To recall, in the latter stages of value, meaning is detached from substantive reality and, in this condition of disassociation, becomes volatile and subject to radical mutation. In turn, emerging configurations of meaning are introjected into “reality,” reshaping it in the process. Hyperreality, then, can be seen as reflecting the constitutive work done by referentless signs and their commingling. In the final analysis, what distinguishes the real from the hyperreal is that with the former, images, signs, and value remain representations of the world, whereas with hyperreality, they are the world.

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There are numerous examples of the ways in which “reality” today is being generated from templates with no direct link to substantive reality. Previously mentioned “supply chain management” systems illustrate perfectly a scenario where the generation of a virtual model of “system coordination” precedes and informs the establishment of “real world” supply chains. Another example of the phenomenon Baudrillard refers to as the “precession of simulacra”32 is the Boeing 777 passenger jet. The 777 was the first fully operational aircraft to go into production without first having existed as an actual prototype. Rather, the entire aircraft, from the engines to the overhead baggage compartments, was modeled and tested solely on a computer screen. What this development says of contemporary simulation technologies is unambiguous: Computer systems have reached such a level of sophistication that engineers can confidently substitute a simulation of reality for reality itself. Once again, technology renders reality redundant. Central to Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality is the claim that the control which simulation affords is achieved through the employment of feedback mechanisms of various sorts. Simulation within the economic realm, for instance, is manifest in the now routine practice whereby the production of an actual commodity postdates its (virtual) testing in the marketplace. Commodities are not only produced but literally conceived in the crucible called “consumer feedback.” This prompts Baudrillard to comment that only in the age of simulation are commodities “conceived according to their very reproducibility.”33 Of course, it is not just commodities (at least not as traditionally understood) that are conceived this way. The symbolic realm, the realm of ideas and rhetoric, is itself given the same treatment, as any political consultant is well aware. However, perhaps it is with recorded music that our familiarity with hyperreality is most keenly observed. Modern recording techniques have long since enabled singers and musicians to achieve in a recording format what is impossible to replicate on stage, without the aid of prerecorded material or other mechanisms of aural enhancement. These techniques not only expand the existing aural palette, they allow for the creation of entirely new soundscapes. With the exception of “live to tape” recordings, it can be said that the vast majority of productions today are not recordings of music. These productions, in other words, do not represent a “real” referent, such as the music generated by a band playing in real time. Rather, these recordings are the music in the sense that the music does not exist apart from, or does not precede, the recording. The introduction of modern recording techniques has transformed our perception of musical reality because it has altered fundamentally what we take “real” music to be. It used to be that the primary musical challenge was to find a means of faithfully reproducing at home the

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music you first heard live in a concert hall. Accordingly, the veracity of the recording was measured against the standard of a live performance. Now, in the age of the hyperreal, the challenge is precisely the reverse: To find a means of faithfully reproducing in an arena what you first heard at home. The measure of a “real” performance is its conformity to an artifact. And so, in hyperreality, “reality” is measured against an image of reality. Baudrillard’s often equivocal reception of hyperrealiy is belied by his frequent descriptions of the pathologies associated with this condition. The existence of these pathologies, in turn, presupposes a deviation from a norm, a violation of some sort of natural economy or order of things. This order may very well embody the secret rules of life, to which Baurillard enigmatically refers in Impossible Exchange.34 Whether sheer perversity or willful obfuscation lies behind Baudrillard’s refusal to articulate this “set of rules” is not for us to know. It is a moot point, anyway, since Baudrillard has been shedding light on this purportedly hidden order for some time now. As suggested in these pages, the order Baudrillard alludes to is a world whose reality is grounded in its conformity to the redundancy principle. This principle, to repeat, is what prevents the world from devolving into a system: It is the name given to that which resists assimilation into a system. In contravening the redundancy principle, hyperreality also can be seen as violating a phenomenological description of embodied experience. The hyperreal transgresses both articulations because each points to the same general description of reality as contingent. Reality can be regarded as contingent to the extent that, from a strictly logical or rational point of view, not all the elements which comprise it are strictly necessary. As noted, from a purely rational perspective, anything perceived as not contributing (in any readily discernible way) to the fulfillment of some function is regarded as mere “noise.” The hyperreal reconstitution of reality excises these perceived redundancies as part of the overall strategy of maximizing transparency and performance, and in the process breaches the redundancy principle. In contrast, a phenomenological description of embodied experience advances the contingency of reality by acknowledging the role played by the unproductive nothingness called “space” in the perceptual act. Baudrillard appears partial to such a reading of the real. His frequent references, for instance, to the “scene” and the “spectacle,” and to the centrality of “aesthetic distance” (or “space”) in the perceptual act, resonate with Merleau-Ponty’s observations that perception is an embodied experience.35 This affinity explains both Baudrillard and Merleau-Ponty’s willingness to assert that with embodied perception the perceived exhibits only an elusive presence. That is to say, the perspective character of embodied perception ensures the perceived always hides as much as it reveals. Merleau-Ponty expressed

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the point eloquently in his assertion that seeing is always seeing from a distance, and that it is this distance which lends the visible its capacity to resist being “all actual under the look.”36 It is precisely the spatial component of embodied perception that hyperreality abjures. Baudrillard argues that hyperreality is typified by a qualitative transformation in the nature and role of the image in society. He contends that this transformation has reshaped the entire visual aesthetic, and employs the rubric “obscene” to describe this altered condition. In The Transparency of Evil, televisual imagery is labeled obscene because it is said to lie at “a special kind of distance” from the human body which the body cannot bridge.37 Baudrillard’s statement evokes Merleau-Ponty’s observation that one can possess the visible only if one in turn is possessed by it.38 The argument is that with unmediated vision, the space between perceiver and perceived is the distance separating two “objects” with a singular realm of being, i.e., the real or phenomenal world. The distance between the seer and the seen is bridgeable because both poles of the perceptual experience partake of the same world. In contrast, the space between the perceiver and a televisual image is unbridgeable because the perceiver and the perceived exist in different orders of being, the real and the virtually real. The implication is that, in truth, there is no space—no phenomenological space at least—between me and the images on my computer monitor, but rather a radical proximity which alters fundamentally the perceptual experience. In conclusion, we could say that the unmediated perception of reality is always incomplete in a way that the perception of mediated imagery is not. This incompleteness is a consequence of the space separating the perceiver and the perceived, a space which accounts for why the perceived necessarily resists complete exposure. The incompleteness of unmediated perception also accounts for the reason why the real world seduces (L. se, away + ducere, lead) the eye with the impossible promise of total exposure. In contrast, it is the nonspace separating the perceiver from electronic imagery—the “unbridgeable distance”—that secures such imagery’s total exposure before the eye. Like pornography, virtual imagery is imagery that lies too close and reveals too much to the eye. And like pornography, what virtual imagery lacks in charm, it makes up for in its power to capture and fascinate.39 Baudrillard’s views regarding sound reproduction in the age of hyperreality both extend and reinforce what appear to be his phenomenological sympathies. Just as with vision, he suggests that the “real” experiencing of music requires space for its fulfillment. As embodied beings, we necessarily hear from a distance. It is this space between the hearer and the heard which permits sound to resound, to literally fill the air and to acquire the characteristic traits of musicality. Baudrillard intimates that the technologically driven

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desire to perfectly reproduce sound is misguided because it treats space as a primary cause of aural distortion, and hence wrongly concludes that sound can be perfectly reconstituted only by eliminating this source of atmospheric “noise.” This oversight links the perfecting of sound reproduction to aesthetics of immediacy or transparency. It is an aesthetic that identifies purported “good sound” with the realer than real pleasures of aural exactitude, an aesthetic that accounts in part for the ascendancy of digital technology over the now largely defunct analog systems of music reproduction. Baudrillard’s critique of the quest for aural purity hinges on the contention that this ideal betrays the phenomenological link between hearing and distance. He asserts that only by first denying the space separating the hearer from the heard can one set up “a simulation of a total environment” where the technologically modulated “experience” of listening to music takes precedence over the music itself.40 Under these circumstances the listening “subject” for Baudrillard becomes a mere adjunct to the technology of sound reproduction and the musical experience is reduced to an evaluation of the performance of reproduction rather than an appreciation of what is reproduced.

DISAPPEARANCE AND DEATH It has been observed that because alienation is anathema in hyperreality, a premium is placed on closing the gap separating the self and the other. Bridging the gap that estranges the subject from the machine requires either humanizing our technologies or technologizing humanity. Baudrillard points out that the hyperreal social order is fully committed to both endeavors, which necessarily unfold concurrently. It is suggested that these parallel developments are present in the paradigmatic case of advancing automotive technology and its impact on the experience of driving. The most spectacular advances in car performance have originated of late from the implementation of computer technologies. With the aid of onboard computers, cars now are able to monitor and adjust their own operating systems as well as keep their operators informed of the proceedings. These aptly named “smart” cars are paragons of functionality precisely because they communicate. On the one hand, they forever are “speaking” to themselves by replying to perturbations detected either within the operating system itself or between the system and its immediate environment. At the same time these automobiles speak to their drivers in the form of informational readouts on their ongoing operational status, demanding replies from their operators only on those occasions when perturbations within the system cannot be self-corrected.

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Baudrillard brings to our attention that the proper functioning of a system demands complicity between the machine and its human operator. Each pole in the dyad “man-machine” must learn to mimic the functional behavior of the other to realize the logic of driving.41 So it is that when a technology is programmed to operate as an integrated system, the technology demands that each of its constituent elements—including its human operator—perform his or her appointed duties so as to maintain the integrity of the feedback loops that secure the system’s stability. Baudrillard notes that under these circumstances the car driver (to take just one example) ceases to view his car as an extension of his or her power. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the subject disappears into the logic of driving. Just how extensively the subject can be subsumed within the logic of performance is well illustrated by the relatively recent development of “fly-by-wire” aircraft. The computer-controlled flight systems these aircraft employ have inadvertently complicated the interaction between pilot and aircraft, sometimes with deadly consequences. While computer systems of this sort relieve pilots of much of the tedium involved in routine flying, there are times when under extreme aerodynamic circumstances a kind of tug-of-war develops between the human pilot and his cybernetic double over which party is ultimately in control of the aircraft. During these extraordinary moments the computer system does not merely dictate to the pilot the preferred maneuvers, but monitors the pilot’s responses to its commands, often overriding these responses should they fall outside the parameters of acceptable flying behavior as defined by the computer. Baudrillard argues that the drive to reduce everything into a series of integrated circuits is equally apparent in recent developments within the sociopolitical sphere. The ubiquity of practices such as poll-taking and content analysis previewing, where the public is endlessly solicited to divulge its opinions on every conceivable aspect of public life, is viewed by Baudrillard as just another manifestation of the universal impulse to systematize. The ostensible dialogue these practices claim to establish between patrons and their clientele in truth functions primarily as a means of closing the gap between desire and satisfaction. The probing of public opinion, plainly put, demotes politicians to mere functionaries whose job it is to give the public what they deem the public wants, much as producers (with the help of advertisers) market products and services they already have determined their consumers desire.42 Importantly, because a simulated social environment is defined in terms of its capacity to satisfy desire, the ends of desire are of less concern to the public than either the nature of the response or the efficiency with which the system responds to an expressed desire. For this reason the functionality of the system overrides any ends it may purportedly uphold. Process overtakes content.

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There are at least four general consequences that flow from the advent of hyperreality, or the age of simulation, according to Baudrillard. The first is the already mentioned disappearance of the subject. The subject disappears in simulation because a simulated reality dissolves the very precondition for subjectivity, namely, the scene of the real or the aesthetic distance which sets the subject apart from the real. Baudrillard’s assertion that the subject disappears in a simulated reality is closely attuned with the Hegelian premise linking self-consciousness with desire. It was Hegel who argued most convincingly that to be a conscious subject necessarily entails an awareness of a gap (negation) between the self and the nonself. Consciousness is a state of desire insofar as desire denotes the feeling of incompleteness that consciousness experiences in its isolation from the world.43 As noted, Baudrillard maintains that by simulating reality we have closed precisely the tension which constitutes the locus of desire and, by extension, of self-consciousness (or subjectivity) as well. Because the desire to satisfy desire—to put an end to alienation or otherness—is satisfied in hyperreality, the age of simulation marks the death of the subject for Baudrillard. Thus to the extent we continue to speak of the “subject” in simulated reality, it is only as a component in the integrated systems of technologies. In the final analysis, Baudrillard’s grim portrayal of the world as an interrelated set of processes without either subjects or desires is not significantly different in tone from the one both Nietzsche and Weber forewarned their readers was fast approaching a century ago, a world inhabited by passive nihilists whose primary goal in life is to avoid the suffering that attends unrealized desire.44 The eclipse of the subject is reflected in what Baudrillard sees as another consequence of simulation—the death of pleasure.45 The meaning of pleasure, as theorized by Baudrillard, is aligned with the notion of seduction in that pleasure is won only through labor, as a result of a process that necessarily defers immediate gratification. As argued earlier, the rationale behind this association is that seduction presupposes a distance or a space through which one can be drawn, a distance which the integrated systems of a simulated reality cannot countenance. The affiliation between seduction and distance is evident as well in the conventional association of a seductive force with a power of attraction that is somehow ill-defined and obscure, and hence mysterious—for it is distance that obscures. In other words, it is because something lies afar—and therefore is less than transparent—that it has the capacity to beckon the perceiver forward with the promise of total transparency. Pleasure, accordingly, is the reward of partial discovery, of venturing out into the scene and exploring its contents. Although the scene for Baudrillard excites and seduces, that which replaces the scene in hyperreality—the obscene—merely fascinates.46

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Unlike the act of being seduced, which implies a purposeful drawing out of the subject into the world, to be fascinated suggests the adoption of a passive and dispassionate stance before the given. To be fascinated is to be held in rapt attention by the object of attention, to be transfixed as a viewer is locked in a dead-ahead stare at an image on a computer monitor. The hyperreal fascinates because there is no scene into which the perceiver can be drawn. The absolute proximity of the hyperreal “other” forces the observer into the detached repose of a voyeur, a spirit-being, who has nothing at stake in what is surveyed. When this sense of detachment is coupled with the extensive powers of control that a simulated reality offers, the inhabitants of hyperreality find themselves in the curious position of being simultaneously both in and out of their immediate environment. They are a part of their reconstituted world to the extent it responds to their commands, but they also are removed from this world because the hyperreal is incapable of drawing them into its fold, of seducing them. The pleasures of seduction thus are traded in for an ersatz substitute, namely, the dizzying sensation of radical release that overcomes those who cease to care about what they control. “Manipulation without purpose” is said to be the hallmark of an age when pleasure is a stranger.47 “Cold seduction” is the name Baudrillard gives to the flimsy allure of hyperreality.48 Rather than gaining its hold over us by withdrawing or obscuring, hyperreality attracts by adopting the opposing strategy of producing a surfeit of realism and an equally overwhelming extension of power over this realer than real world. It is for Baudrillard both the obscene character of the hyperreal and the expansion of our powers of control over it that ultimately proves irresistible, and eventually overshadows any residual interest in the real. Cold seduction is thus seduction in the form of infinite play, or play for its own sake. It is the kind of seduction which prevails in an environment so thoroughly textured by technology that the concern over whether or not we are living in the real world is rendered moot. When the line distinguishing the real from its reproductions has dissolved, as Baudrillard claims it has, every foray into the world is necessarily a move within the construct of hyperreality and every act a play in the game of simulation. Here Baudrillard seems to be saying, albeit somewhat resignedly, that if we are in fact captives of the models of perfection our technologies have built, then we at least can alleviate the boredom of our captivity by amusing ourselves with the digressions open to us through our technical toys. More pointedly, he suggests that if as captives of hyperreality we no longer are in a position to engage ourselves with the world in a substantive or purposeful manner, there still remains an opportunity to play at or simulate such an engagement. Just as an audiophile, for instance, is drawn into the endless game of trying to capture “real” music

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through innovations in sound technology, a political activist likewise is drawn into the impossible quest of ending “real” human suffering by recourse to political technologies, such as human rights charters. The audiophile and the activist have been seduced not by the reality of their respective interests, but by their simulations. Audiophiles may claim to love “live” or “real” music, but what their actions belie is a love of sound chasing after its own perfection. Activists, too, may assert their love of peoples and their struggles, but what their actions reveal is a love of an ideal seeking its impossible realization. What the audiophile and the activist share, and what we all share as residents of hyperreality, is the conceit that our simulated universe is somehow real. Baudrillard claims that with the collapse of the tensions that once set humans radically apart from the natural order, from their own creations, and from each other, the inhabitants of hyperreality have discovered that satisfaction can be found only in playing with the possibilities of control already afforded us by our technologies, because that is all there is left to do.49 The pervasiveness of the spirit of play in contemporary society can best be explained by returning briefly to our analysis of a previously cited instance of simulation, the technology of sound reproduction. Doing so will enable us as well to articulate the connection linking play with the third general consequence of simulation. We noted that the hyperreal quest for perfect sound is just one attempt amongst many to narrow the gap separating the self from the other. In this case the goal is to close the distance between the hearer and the heard. We are frequently informed that one of the aims of recording and playback technologies is to bring the experience of a “real” music into the home environment, making listening to reproduced sound indistinguishable from listening to the real thing. The intended objective therefore is the goal of all simulation, to reproduce reality with such a degree of fidelity that the copy is rendered indistinguishable from the original. The sought after ideal of simulation is nothing less than a “real copy.” However respectable such an objective may be, it leads to a rather unintended result of killing the very thing one wishes to faithfully duplicate. The disappearance of the real, then, is the third of the invariable consequences of simulation. In the case of music reproduction, the real dissolves when the perfecting of reproduced sound yields a sound so perfect it “disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect.”50 What Baudrillard means by such a remark becomes clearer when we realize that technologies situated on the near side of the aforementioned divide operate primarily as means to the attainment of exogenous ends. Within these parameters a stereo system functions primarily as an instrument of sound reproduction that provides its user with a listening experience of greater versatility than would be otherwise possible without such an instrument. Here the listener remains

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cognizant of the fact that recorded music is an aural artifact that may bear little or no affinity with the sonic nuances of a live performance. The deficiencies of simulated sound are nonetheless compensated for by other factors. Most obviously, simulated sound offers the listener benefits associated with hyperrealism, such as enhancements in tonal clarity and dynamic range. That the list of enhancements does not end here is immaterial. The point to be drawn from the above is that nothing Baudrillard says about technology precludes the possibility that technology can function as an instrumental means for the pursuit of exogenous ends. A stereo system can be used to enrich the musical experience. There is nothing about a technology that dictates to its operator that the power it unleashes must be treated as an end in itself. Yet Baudrillard asserts we nonetheless have come to relate to our technologies precisely as ends in themselves: We have been seduced by our technical creations. As a consequence of the ongoing desire to make our technologies more powerful and responsive instruments, we have crossed a line past which their instrumentality disappears into the materiality of the technologies themselves. With respect to the present illustration, the threshold in question is transgressed when, in the desire to bring the musical experience into our personal spaces, we devise an apparatus of such instrumental perfection that the apparatus occludes that which it originally intended to reproduce. At this point music ends, Baudrillard opines. It ends not for a lack of music proper, but because music ceases to exist outside its simulated effect. As noted previously, we need look no further for a sign of music’s demise than to the public’s demand that “live” musical performances sound like their recordings. When the criterion for evaluating a live musical event is reduced to its fidelity to a recording—a recording which itself has no basis in the real—reality truly has become redundant. Its fate is sealed when the public begins to demand that recordings possess the hyperreal brilliance they erroneously impute to the sound of “real” music. This same dynamic infuses the entirety of the contemporary social order. So it is that, as citizens, we demand of politics today that it realize the impossible ideal of liberalism, the freedom and equality of all persons. So it is as well that, as consumers, we demand from business what can be supplied only with the implementation of the impossible ideal of total efficiency within the supply chain. In these and other aspects of contemporary life, we expect “reality” to conform to unreal expectations, to expectations that issue from the technological imperative known as the performance principle. We demand that the world surrender to what Baudrillard ironically calls the “reality principle,” to a sanitized version of the real which has had extricated from it everything that impedes the realization of the performance principle.

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It was observed earlier in this chapter that for Baudrillard reality disappears with the implementation of the performance principle. In its stead stands a simulated reality where both subject and object are drawn together in the closed circuitry of cybernetic systems. This prompted Baudrillard to conclude that the erasure of the “other” has rendered reality “residual” and “insignificant.”51 The “other” qua human subject, for instance, has dissolved with the advent of the modern democratic state and its recognition of universal human rights. Even the invisible wall separating humans from their technological creations has been breached through the securing of communication loops between human and machine. These and other comparable developments are said to underscore a cultural imperative that has as its end the extinguishing of all otherness from the realm of human experience. This pathological antipathy toward otherness, this “identity mania” or “death drive,” as Baudrillard likes to call it, constitutes for him the decadent core of our hyperreal age.52 Baudrillard contends that the implosion of tensions precipitated by the war against otherness has liberated humanity from those constraints—natural, human, and technical—that historically have contributed to the definition of the human experience. Freedom from these restraints therefore is interpreted by Baudrillard as nothing less than freedom from history itself, the fourth consequence of our entry into the hyperreal. Humanity, he observes with characteristic equanimity, has at some point simply “dropped out of history.”53 It goes without saying that if humanity for Baudrillard has dropped out of history, then history in a sense has ended. Yet despite the fact that he resorts on occasion to describing the contemporary condition in explicitly post-historical terms,54 Baudrillard generally avoids following this route and opts instead for a more tempered, but no less radical, assessment of the situation. Thus we see frequent references to the “disappearance” of history, or to history simply having been left behind.55 A large part of the reason for his uncharacteristic disavowal of the rhetoric of “endings” is Baudrillard’s wish to distinguish his thoughts on humanity’s remove from history from the pronouncements of “end of history” theorists, such as Kojève and Fukuyama.56 Unlike them, Baudrillard deigns to adopt the role of the “useless prophet”57 of post-history. He refuses to do so because the notion of endings tends to solicit the kinds of passionate response (i.e., jubilation, remorse, or denial) that simply do not resonate with our own culture’s relative indifference to the passing of history. Endings tend toward the tragic and Baudrillard is convinced that our departure from history has been received as anything but calamitous. On the contrary, he argues that humanity simply has dropped out of its “relationship” with history, as an individual might take leave of a stale love affair, dispassionately and with no regrets. History and the real, therefore, have not ended as much as simply ceased to matter.

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As alluded to earlier, our indifference to reality, and thus to history as well, can be traced to the fact that for Baudrillard the real gains its meaning by standing against the subject as “other.” If we adopt the Hegelian premise that consciousness implies desire or difference, then eradicating the differential tension between both humans and the non–human phenomenal world, and within the human order itself, undermines the status of reality and humanity as objects of consciousness. Baudrillard believes this is precisely what has been achieved with our liberation from history: By realizing the once utopian dream of laying to rest the threat of the unknown and recalcitrant other, the putative “object” has quietly disappeared into its own manipulability. At a more prosaic level, the disappearance of history is revealed in the switch from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, the much touted information economy. The old mode of production—the mode associated with real things, such as commodities and labor power—has lost much of its efficacy in the contemporary social order.58 For Baudrillard, the “pathos of growth” that characterized the age of industrialization is no longer with us. Gone are the days when it was assumed that the future would usher in wave upon wave of more abundant and technologically advanced commodities. One has to look back only to the 1950s and 1960s to recall a time when faith in material progress was firmly embedded in popular consciousness. Then, the reigning image of the future was one of unadulterated functionality. Cities (the future and the city were always inseparable) in the decades ahead were going to be veritable paragons of efficiency, we told ourselves. Naïve as it now appears, the popular imagination projected a future in which all things would function with ever increasing efficiency. The zero-sum principle would be held in abeyance: There was going to be more pay for less work, greater productivity and more leisure time, and increasing consumption without negative environmental repercussions. Shadows, death, and decay were in the process of being erased, leaving in their wake the antiseptic sheen of utopian functionalism. The arrival today of yesterday’s future shows just how trusting was our faith in the perfectibility of the social order through technology. We now realize, Baudrillard reminds us, that the orgy of material production and consumption is in fact behind us.59 The upbeat futurism of earlier times has been replaced by the sober realization that indefinite material progress is an unattainable, even an undesirable, goal. This realization, however, did not lead to resignation but to a new challenge, namely, how to reconfigure desire—or the productionconsumption cycle—in a manner suited to the temper of our postindustrial times. The response to this challenge, Baudrillard continues, is well known to us who live in the new age: Simulate the orgy. Carry on consuming in such a way that bypasses the negative repercussions of actual consumption.

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This challenge has been met by our developing an appetite for consuming the representations of things over things themselves. We have become gourmands of the sign and consequently have acquired as well an equal thirst for the means by which we gain access to this sign culture—the media. Becoming rapacious consumers of the sign requires first that reality be aestheticized, or turned into a show of itself. As Baudrillard puts it: “What we are witnessing . . . is the semiurgy of everything by means of advertising, the media, or images. No matter how marginal or banal, or even obscene it may be, everything is subject to estheticization, culturalization, museumification. Everything is said, everything is exposed, everything acquires the force, or the manner, of a sign.”60 It is clear from the above that an aestheticized world for Baudrillard is an over-represented world. It is a world made obscene by the pathological desire to exhibit everything, to simulate every facet of the real as information, image, or sign. Through the refractive and disseminating powers of the media and communications technologies the real for Baudrillard is irradiated into countless consumable reproductions of itself, into innumerable circulating images, narratives, ideals, fantasies, and informational messages. It is our embrace of the reality principle, as manifested in our pathological desire to exhibit everything, that marks both the end of history and its perpetuation. The disappearance of reality (and again, by extension, history as well) does not mean that the real vanishes without a trace. We have seen that for Baudrillard the trace is all that is left of the real today: Reality exists only as an image of itself in the age of simulation. In fact, Baudrillard suggests it is precisely because “reality” and “history” have ceased to matter that we find ourselves filling the void created by their disappearance with representations of what has been left behind. It is by means of these productions that what is now the myth of reality and of history is perpetuated. Thus history and its “real” constituents (i.e., alienation, desire, conquest, etc.) live on, albeit only virtually, in the hyperreal venues of movie theaters and theme parks, TV screens and computer monitors, and the advertisement pages of magazines. Our reliving through simulation the tensions and passions we no longer have the need to act out in the real world Baudrillard takes to be a mark of exhaustion.61 Embracing the strategy Nietzsche adopted in his critique of Western morality, Baudrillard appears to be saying that we have entered hyperreality out of weakness, not strength. It is because the weight of the world and its earthly limitations have proven too burdensome to continue to endure that we have exchanged reality for its hyperreal twin. Thus at every opportunity the functionalism of a simulated reality, with its emphasis on performance and the maximization of means, is substituted for the tensions

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and ambiguities that attend human intercourse with the real. The vicissitudes of real wars have been cashiered for the entertainment value of their simulations on movie and TV screens. The vagaries of open political discourse have largely disappeared with the employ of political image consultants and script writers, whose true allegiance lies less with their candidates than with overnight polls. The uncertainties and challenges of embodied dialogue likewise have yielded to the cybernetic ideal of transparent communication, as revealed in our collective embrace of the “interactive” experience between humans and computers, and with each other through modern communications networks. In these and numerous other instances, Baudrillard detects the consequences of what might be called reality fatigue, or disenchantment with the real.

THE BAUDRILLARD TWINS I argued in the previous chapter that for Derrida the distinction between reality and its simulations is unsupportable because the criterion used to secure this tension rested on an untenable metaphysics of presence. Since for Derrida we are never simply in the presence of reality, maintaining a categorical distinction between it and the virtually real was no longer defensible. I then suggested that Derrida’s deconstruction of presence accords with the ethos of spiritization for the rather straightforward reason that it is premised on a radical break between the world of appearances and the perceiver of the appearing world. Like angels, perceivers for Derrida are not of the world they perceive. Postmodernism describes in part an emerging state of mind typified by a loss of confidence in the unifying assumptions that previously underpinned modernist theorizing. Chief amongst these assumptions is the dichotomy which pits the natural against the artificial, the original against the simulated, or the real against the virtual. Derrida can be placed within the ranks of postmodernists to the extent he destabilizes this central canon of modernist thought. However, I have argued that Derrida’s accomplishment also can be seen as fulfilling the modernist dream of transcending reality. To a greater extent than Derrida, Baudrillard is explicitly identified with the postmodern world view. His writings of the last two decades, especially, have solidified his reputation as an avatar of postmodern cool.62 Although the studied prose of Baudrillard’s reading of the age of simulation may account in part for his elevated reception in some circles, others submit that his arguments are more apocryphal than apodictic, and thus are unworthy of serious attention. It is certainly true that Baudrillard is far from being a systematic or rigorous thinker. Whether this putative shortcoming is a cover for intellectual

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laxity or a self-conscious rhetorical style of no damaging consequence should be left for individual readers to decide. However, as I have attempted to show in the preceding pages, Baudrillard’s analysis of contemporary society is far from incoherent. With Weber, I have argued that disenchanting science and technology operate on the principle that all things can be mastered through calculation and that, within this context, Baudrillard ruminations on hyperreality can be seen as a report on the successes of the disenchantment project. This leaves us to ponder the greater question concerning the relationship between disenchantment and hyperreality, on the one side, and postmodernity, on the other. Are these terms interchangeable as well? Is Baudrillard’s account of postmodernity reducible to what already has been said concerning disenchantment? And if not, in what sense does Baudrillard’s discourse on postmodernity add to our understanding of the contemporary social order? In order to answer these questions we must investigate what the prophet of postmodernity himself means by this term. To this end, it should be observed at the outset that Baudrillard’s explicit references to postmodernity are scattered and relatively infrequent. However, one such mention occurs in his Cool Memories, where he refers to postmodernity as “the end of final evaluations and the movement of transcendence, which are replaced by “teleonomic” evaluation, in terms of retroaction.” In postmodernity, he concludes, “Everything is always retroactive, including—and, indeed, particularly including—information. The rest is left to the acceleration of values by technology (sex, body, freedom, knowledge).”63 Here we have a relatively concise account of the postmodern condition. Baudrillard tells us that postmodernity is marked by the collapse of what amounts to a world view, a collapse one can only assume is bound to antecedent changes in the material or technological conditions of the social order within which the rupture has occurred. What founders is the reign of final causes. Postmodernity therefore denotes an age when the value of an event or a thing is no longer determined by reference either to some abiding criterion or to criteria that exceed or transcend the actuality of the event or thing in question. On the contrary, Baudrillard employs the term “teleonomic” to convey the fact that rather than being generated by fixed or final causes, value today is mutable and self-generated. Baudrillard’s reference to information and its alliance with retroactivity and self-generation underscores the immanent character of postmodernity. By definition information is about something: It necessarily refers back to some aspect of an already existing person, event, or thing. The immanent character of information also is reinforced by its divorce from normative concerns and its subsequent embrace of descriptive analysis, especially of a factual kind.

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Thus to live in the age of simulation is to be bombarded with images and descriptive analyses of aspects of an already constituted world to the detriment of other types of reasoning, such as critical or imaginative. This information onslaught tends to produce a mentality more keen on keeping tabs on the immanent flow of events than on attempting to understand the actual content of these happenings. Extending one of Marshall McLuhan’s pithy insights into the dynamics of the media, we could say that the informationalizing of society tends to cultivate a “make happen” rather than a “make aware” sensibility.64 So it is, to cite just one example, that contemporary media commentary on the entertainment industry tends to trumpet such means-related matters as how a film’s technical effects were produced, how much money a film cost to produce and advertise, and how well a film fared at the box office, over other considerations related to the actual content of a given production. The freeing of values in postmodernity from any norm or end beyond the realm of values itself Baudrillard later intensifies in his depiction of the fractal stage of value production. So if postmodernity initially signified for him the detachment of values from anchors such as “reality” or “the transcendent,” then postmodernity reaches full bloom with the promiscuous commutation of signs in the fractal or viral stage of value. Baudrillard likens this particular logic of value production to that of fashion. As he puts it in The Transparency of Evil: “Fashion is an irreducible phenomenon because it partakes of a crazy, viral, mediationless form of communication which operates so fast for the sole reason that it never passes via the mediation of meaning.”65 The French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky concurs. Postmodernity for him is synonymous with the rule of fashion, with “the advent of a society restructured from top to bottom by the attractive and the ephemeral—by the very logic of fashion.”66 To the extent postmodernity is identified with the circularity or immanence of the system, there is no significant difference between what Baudrillard terms postmodernity and what I have said regarding a disenchanted world and its dependence on systematized thinking. Yet one nagging difficulty remains. It seems as if Baudrillard himself is not altogether certain as to what the disenchantment process has produced. This ambivalence could support the conclusion that there are in a way two Baudrillards. On the one hand, there is the Baudrillard who sees the modern project as essentially unfinished business, and on the other, there is his postmodern twin who takes the modern project to be a fait accompli. There is in addition a distinct posturing that corresponds with each of the Baudrillards: We see both the engaged critic of modernity and the dispassionate (if not somewhat bemused) voyeur of the postmodern condition. It is this equivocation regarding the status of our disenchanted world that lends credence to the view that Baudrillard ought to be read ironically. To argue as Baudrillard often does that our world is hyperreal and thus utterly removed

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from reality is to overstate the case. The world is not simply postmodern as Baudrillard at times seems to suggest, for reasons I will discuss shortly. Yet it is equally misleading to maintain that for Baudrillard the disenchanting of the world has not produced a qualitative change in our relationship with reality but merely further extended already existing powers of control. That is to say, it is misleading to assume we live in a hypermodern age. Has reality disappeared, or is it disappearing? Are we living “after” modernity, or merely in a late stage of modernity? One solution to this quandary is to align the modern project with the conquering of reality, and postmodernity with the consequences of having achieved this mastery. Postmodernity then denotes a condition where the real no longer stands against the self as object, but instead is cybernetized, or brought into the “circuit of subjection.”67 There is ample evidence to support the view that Baudrillard believes Western civilization has entered a post-real phase. It is nearly impossible to avoid the conclusion that his commentaries on the contemporary scene amount to an extended gloss on the eclipse of reality and the repercussions of this loss. Still, appearances can deceive. While it is true that Baudrillard professes the demise of reality, it is by no means certain that this pronouncement is intended to be taken at face value. Not surprisingly the guru of hyperreality is himself given to hype and hyperbole. Thus he may state definitively at one point that reality has disappeared, only to claim shortly thereafter in the continuous present tense that the real in the age of simulation is ceasing to be an object as it becomes progressively enfolded within the circuitry of subjection. In statements of the latter sort we sense that for Baudrillard the threshold separating the hypermodern from the postmodern, while being approached, has yet to be traversed. And insofar as the modernist ideal of a de-differentiated subject-object continuum remains precisely that, an ideal, we find ourselves still residing on the near side of the hypermodern/postmodern divide. Support for the claim that a disenchanted world straddles the hypermodern/postmodern divide is reflected in the ambivalence with which Baudrillard responds to the repercussions of disenchantment. On the one side, we are exposed to the postmodern panache of a text like America and, to a lesser extent, Forget Foucault. Here Baudrillard’s reaction to the world that disenchantment begets can be described as sanguine and varies in mood from stoic acceptance to celebratory embrace. Believing the hyperrealization of the real to be effectively complete, he appears to have reconciled himself with life after the disappearance of the real, or with the postmodern condition as he defines it. For example, in Forget Foucault Baudrillard says of the hyperreal world that what it lacks in terms of stability and reassurance it makes up for in its sheer unpredictability. A certain giddiness, he adds, attends the experience of living in a world “ruled by reversibility and indetermination.”68 In America

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his enthusiasm for the postmodern experience is positively unbridled. It is in this work that Baudrillard states outright what up till then had been merely implied in his earlier analyses of hyperreality, namely, that the age of simulation has a special affinity for the American (as typified by the Californian) lifestyle. Commenting on this way of life, he says: “In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: “What are you doing after the orgy?” What do you do when everything is available—sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it is becoming the whole world’s problem.”69 Americans have hit on the only viable solution to the problem posed by postmodernity, according to Baudrillard. They instinctively realize that in a world where everything is available and hence where desire is suppressed, a way must be found to keep the flames of desire alive. The uniquely American solution to this particularly American problem is simple enough: Desire more. As Anne Norton has observed, American popular culture remains vibrant by being what it always has been, a culture of insatiable desire. Baudrillard doubtless would agree with her assessment that American culture is propelled by “the desire for more things, more knowledge, more sensation, more speech, more forms of the self, more time, more power, more rights, more justice.”70 This unquenchable desire for more desire explains the peculiarly American penchant for production. For it is through the production of things—of images, goods, services, etc.—and what they signify, along with the consumption of these productions and their significations, that Americans construct their everevolving identities. Americans are natural dream-realizers because their very identities issue from their productions. Were the real for them connected with the unrealizable “idea” they would cease to exist, for they would have lost their only means of self-constitution. Americans as a result cannot afford to lament the unreality of the idea and the ideal: Rather, they are compelled to realize it. The American genius is the faith (which Europeans regard as childlike) they possess in their ability to realize their dreams, fantasies, and ideals. This faith is acted on either virtually, via the image, or concretely, through the everexpanding production of goods and services. For Baudrillard it is the zeal with which Americans give their ideas the form of reality that lends them a special charm and undeniable appeal. Baudrillard is well aware that Europeans frequently respond to the bourgeois core of American popular culture by denigrating Americans for their deficiencies at conceptualization.71 But the postmodern Baudrillard comes to America’s defense by charging that Europeans wrongly assume by leveling this critique that “everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized.”72 He turns the tables on his fellow

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countrymen by asserting that this assumption merely underscores a European bias toward transcendence and the rule of the idea. What Europeans seem incapable of understanding, Baudrillard proffers, is that Americans simply adhere to an opposing and equally ungrounded bias, one that maintains contrarily that nothing exists—not even an idea—until it has been actualized. Baudrillard’s postmodern persona therefore detects virtue in what otherwise might be considered a vice. Under this particular dispensation he believes America’s only “crime” to have been the exteriorization of the chaos, the uncertainties, and the excesses which lie within us all. Be that as it may, there is another side to Baudrillard which is not as accepting of the objectification of the “madness” within.73 Indeed, this is the side that argues we exacerbate our propensity to flee from the real by exteriorizing this flight, by making the flight “real” through its simulation. This is the Baudrillard I have spoken about at length in this chapter. This is the other half of his dual persona—his hypermodern twin. I have aligned this aspect of his dual persona with hypermodernism because it is clear that by critiquing hyperreality the value of the critique is implicitly assumed, the relevancy of which would cease to exist were the world in actuality to have stepped over the postmodern divide. As noted, if the modern project for Baudrillard signifies the systematic rooting out of difference, then in a hypermodern world the assault against difference is marked by its severe aggravation. The implication is that despite the severity of the campaign and its frequent victories, the battle against the real is ongoing and therefore still open to counterattack. It is in his hypermodern mode, then, that we find Baudrillard assuming the role of the gadfly. While acknowledging what appears to be the implacable advance of hyperreality, Baudrillard nonetheless resists capitulating to this force. He is able to offer resistance (albeit only conceptually) because entry into the realm of simulation transgresses what he perceives to be both an inviolable aspect of human experience and a central tenet of reality’s economy. The core aspect of human experience that preoccupies Baudrillard is the already cited notion of embodiment. According to this understanding, part of what it means to be human is to be situated, as a corporeal being, within a theater of operation (i.e., the phenomenal world) whose constitution ensures its accessibility through the human body. Following Merleau-Ponty’s lead, Baudrillard maintains that the human body acts as a bridge between itself and the world. Through its sensory deployments the body extends itself into the world, thereby spanning the distance separating itself from its worldly environs. The notion of embodiment colors Baudrillard’s entire analysis of perception. As mentioned, because his theory of perception rests on the phenomenological insight that perceiving is necessarily perceiving from a distance, the presence of this aesthetic distance ensures that the perceived exhibits only an

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elusive presence. Nothing as a result is ever completely revealed in embodied perception. Baudrillard contends that this entire paradigm of the sensory is radically altered with the advent of technologies of simulation, and that this change threatens to disrupt the very foundations of the human experience. He argues that as our worldly environment becomes ever more technologically textured our sensory gaze is directed not toward the real but toward representations of the real. Increasingly, the voices we hear are representations of embodied sensory experience carried to us from afar through a variety of technological apparatuses. More than ever, the sights we set our eyes upon are digitized images on television screens and video terminals. Taking his cues from McLuhan, Baudrillard refers to this new form of sensory perception as “tactile” to underscore the absolute proximity—the “epidermal contiguity”74—this mode of perception establishes between the eye and the televisual image, or the ear and the aural image. The “tele-images” that comprise our new media landscape are for Baudrillard of a different order from the objects of embodied perception. They lie, to repeat, at a “special kind of distance” from the body which the body cannot bridge. The collapsing of the aesthetic distance between the perceiver and the perceived leads to the creation of a new disembodied perceptual dimension. It is a mode of perception which the critical, hypermodern Baudrillard reviles as “no longer quite human.” 75 It is a mode of perception which compels him to conclude that “we are living today in non-sense.”76 The other transgression that our entry into hyperreality effects is more ontological than phenomenological. It too pertains to a closing of distances, only this time not in relation to the sensory relationship between perceiver and perceived but to the relationship between elements within technologically reconstructed systems. To recall, Baudrillard regards the push to operationalize every aspect of the real—be it the human body and its biological processes, the act of communication, the consumption of goods, etc.—with a high degree of suspicion. For the task of operationalizing requires that reality be ruthlessly reconstituted in a way that eliminates those elements of reality that either impede or do not directly contribute to the performance of some function. Baudrillard is critical of the general tendency toward maximizing performativity because high performance systems are most susceptible to catastrophic collapse. The principle of the avenging Other will see to it that a price is paid for having too thoroughly removed redundancies from within a system. Baudrillard’s critique of hyperreality is therefore more ontological than moral. He consistently eschews moral condemnation of diseases like AIDS and cancer, or practices like cloning and blood doping, providing an explanation of them that is essentially tragic. In a limited and self-serving sense, Baudrillard believes the perceived good of maximized efficiency is lamentable because it

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is not in our best long-term interests. By not heeding “the secret rules of life,” the benefits accrued to us through the maximizing of performance will be offset in the long run by system-generated catastrophes. But in a deeper sense, Baudrillard assails our hyperreal age for its neglect of the wisdom of the given order of things, whose rules order the constitution of things. Recently, Baudrillard has readdressed a theme that has informed his examination of consumer culture and its aftermath since the 1960s, the previously mentioned notion of symbolic exchange. In Impossible Exchange, Baudrillard argues that the uncertainty of the world, of reality, stems from the fact that it has no equivalent, that “it cannot be exchanged for anything.”77 Unlike the act of gift giving, which demands some kind of reciprocity, the real world is given to us without demand for repayment. Although one may feel obliged to repay the “gift” that is the world, repayment is impossible since reality is not something for which there exists an equivalent that could serve as repayment. The problem with reality, Baudrillard concludes, is that it cannot be verified as real, and it cannot be verified as real because it has no exchange value. Baudrillard here seems to be suggesting that we come to know the value of a thing, and by extension the reality of a thing, through our capacity to exchange it for something of equivalent value. In short, the reality of a thing, its identity, is determined relationally. There can be no certainty regarding the existence of reality, so the argument goes, because it does not exist in relation to anything beyond it that could function as its equivalent. This uncertainty, Baudrillard continues, points to the Nothing contained within the Something that is reality. It points to the “anti-real,” to the symbolic debt we accrued as a result of being given a gift (i.e., reality) for which there is no repayment. A case could be made that heeding the secret rules of life would entail acknowledging impossible exchange. Doing so would permit living in the tension produced by our relationship with an ambiguous reality. However, this is an orientation we have forsworn. We have chosen instead to divest reality of the “anti-real,”78 and hyperreality is proof of this oversight. Simulation, in the final analysis, is for Baudrillard an attempt to quit a symbolic debt that can never be repaid. Through simulation we are attempting to prove the reality of reality by creating an image of the real that can function as its equivalent. The irony is that by attempting the impossible, by trying to validate reality through our remaking of reality, we are only further obscuring what we wish to reveal. Baudrillard finds in impossible exchange the answer to his questioning of reality. It is an answer that says there can never be certainty with respect to the question: Is reality real? To provide a defense of the reality of reality is to impress meaning upon reality, and meaning is something reality forever withholds, a fact which we neglect to our detriment. The question that now

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has to be asked is: Is Baudrillard’s account of the uncertainty of reality defensible? Whereas it may be on its own terms, what remains open to debate are the grounds for determining whether or not the reality of reality can be established. Baudrillard’s criterion for such a determination is based on the concept of exchange. It does not stand alone. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of embodied experience provides a way to save reality, yet not at the expense of capitulating to the forces responsible for the creation of our increasingly simulated universe. Merleau-Ponty saves reality by avoiding the trap that equates certainty with meaning. He agrees that the meaning of reality, strictly speaking, is undecidable. For him the veracity of reality is not something we intellectually know as much as something we tacitly acknowledge through our bodily intercourse with the world. The reality of reality is verified through our perceptual faith in its existence, a faith without which we could not perform higher order functions, such as thinking. In other words, we behave as if the world was real, and recognition of our faith in reality is sufficient to purchase a claim to its truth. I have attempted to show how aspects of Baudrillard’s critique of hyperreality appear to be informed by phenomenological insights. Notwithstanding this affinity, he breaks with phenomenology on the important point regarding the grounds for determining the reality of reality. His stand against hyperreality, as tentative as it is, therefore is won at the cost of the truth of reality. I have argued, and will continue to argue in the following pages, that this cost is too high and, ultimately, unnecessary.

ENDNOTES 1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983), 147–148. 2. Ibid., 151. 3. The concept of the “satisfied man” has its origins in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man,” the self-satisfied being whose primary ambition is self-preservation. The concept receives further treatment in Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, where Kojève sees the dispassionate man of post-history taking one of two forms. One follows either the “American way” and becomes “an animal again,” or, like the modern day Japanese, one remains human by adopting a value system completely devoid “of all ‘human’ content in the ‘historical’ sense.” Kojève’s cryptic analysis of “the disappearance of Man” is contained in an extended footnote to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). See note 6, 158–162.

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4. The most thorough biographical study of Alexandre Kojève is Dominque Auffret’s yet to be translated Alexandre Kojève: La Philosophie, l’Etat, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: LGF), 2002. 5. See “The End of History: Kojève’s Serious Joke,” in Kritika & Kontext, volume 2/98, 8–19. 6. Sean Cubitt coined the expression “poetics of pessimism” in his Simulation and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications), 2001. 7. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 81. 8. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993), 65. 9. Ibid., 66. 10. Ibid., 67. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Ibid., 64. 13. Ibid., 65. 14. Ibid., 64. 15. Baudrillard, Illusion, 46. 16. Baudrillard, Transparency, pp. 63, 65. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. See Benjamin Wooley’s Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 88–94. 19. Baudrillard, Illusion, 104–105. 20. Baudrillard, Transparency, 32. 21. Baudrillard, Illusion, 102. 22. See Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, (St. Louis: Telos Press), 1981. 23. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 248. 24. Ibid., 5–6. 25. Ibid., 5. 26. Robert Pollack, Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 84–85. 27. Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. B. Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), 7. 28. Baudrillard, Transparency, 5–6. 29. See Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: WW Norton), 2000. 30. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 31. Baudrillard, Simulations, 147. 32. As Baudrillard says, in Simulations, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory.” As noted, the Boe-

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ing 777 is the first full-production passenger aircraft engineered and tested in the substanceless realm called virtual reality. Using CAD (or “computer assisted design”) software, Boeing implemented a program called CAITA (or “computer-aided, threedimensional, interactive application”) to design the 777. The technical advantages to virtually crafting a complex machine of this order are numerous. The most obvious is that without having to build actual models of jet components prior to their production, time and cost savings on the order of 40% are realized. In addition, the fact that the aircraft and its parts exist only as electronic information prior to their actual production means the virtual creation of the aircraft can be dispersed over many sites. Modern aircraft design is a truly global, collaborative enterprise. The information cited above was gleaned from Karen Kaplan’s “Welcome to CyberAir: Computer and Communications Tools are Revolutionizing the Way Planes are Built,” Los Angeles Times, Monday, February 10, 1997. 33. Baudrillard, Seduction, 56. See also Baudrillard’s Simulations, 171. 34. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 38. 35. Baudrillard, Seduction, 30. 36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Claude Lefort, ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 191. 37. Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil, 55. 38. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 146. 39. Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 132. 40. Baudrillard, Simulations, 30. 41. Baudrillard, “Ecstasy,” 127. 42. Baudrillard, Simulations, 162. I might add that the practice of establishing feedback loops between producers and consumers in every conceivable venue of social interaction contributes substantially to the “it’s over before it begins” sensibility that seems so prevalent today. One of the consequences of getting what you want is the kind of generalized boredom that has overtaken the contemporary social order. 43. See “The True Nature of Self-Certainty,” (Section B, Part 4) in G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1967), 217–220. 44. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, trans. Nicole Dufresne (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1987), 75. 45. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 77. 46. Baudrillard, “Ecstasy,” 132. 47. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 77. 48. Frequent references to “cool” or “cold” seduction are found in Baudrillard’s Seduction. 49. Baudrillard, Simulations, 157–159. It is interesting to compare Max Weber’s account of the “sport” ethic with Baudrillard’s accounting of life in contemporary culture. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber famously notes that “victorious capitalism” no longer needs to justify itself in accordance with any religious or ethical norms, the result being that the pursuit of wealth has taken on “the character of sport.” Baudrillard appears to extend this insight into the whole of culture. In our

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post-historical, post-real world, every pursuit—from politics to art—is approached in the spirit of a game the object of which is to win. See Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 182. 50. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 5. The popular singer/songwriter Ry Cooder likewise is concerned with the technology-driven tendency for recorded music to disappear into its own special effect. Praising “nice old tubes mikes” for their ability to capture the harmonic ambience of the space within which music is produced, Cooder is quick to point out that this “good sound” is “not quite like live sound.” It differs from the original or live sound in that it gives you a “certain heated up, heightened sense of reality,” a somewhat realer than real sound which Cooder says listeners can nonetheless relate to “because it’s like they’re there” before the music. He contrasts this atmospheric “good sound” against the sound of recorded hiphop, which effectively disappears into its own special effect when the space surrounding the sound is removed. In Cooder’s words, hip-hop “is some kind of weird thing that only exists coming out of a speaker cone. It’s not really there.” Hip-hop, in short, is an aural experience marked by a kind of depthlessness. It is not, strictly speaking, a means of musical conveyance in that one does not hear through its sound. Quite the opposite, rap music Cooder tells us exists only as the sound emanating from the speaker. It should be noted, in fairness to the genre of popular music Cooder speaks of here, that hip-hop is hardly alone in exhibiting a kind of aural depthlessness. Anyone at all familiar with the panoply of contemporary musical genres will attest to the fact that the sonic signature of hip-hop is pervasive. (All the Ry Cooder quotations cited above are taken from Neil McCormack’s article “The likes of which you’ll never hear again,” originally printed in The Daily Telegraph but taken here from the September 11, 1999, edition of the Canadian daily, National Post.) 51. Baudrillard, Illusion, 78. 52. Ibid., 109; and Baudrillard, Transparency, 114, respectively. 53. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 68, 69. 54. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1990), 37. 55. Baudrillard, Illusion, 5. 56. See Alexandre Kojève’s seminal Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. See also Tom Darby’s The Feast: Meditations on Politics and Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 57. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 69. 58. Daniel Bell is perhaps one of the first persons to articulate and popularize the coming of a new “post-industrial” socioeconomic order. In such an order, he observes, reality “is not ‘out there’, where man stands ‘alone and afraid in a world [he] never made’. Reality is now itself problematic and to be remade.” See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalis (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1976), 149. 59. Baudrillard, Transparency, 3–13.

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60. Ibid., 16. 61. Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 150. 62. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, eds., Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Guilford Press, 1991), 111–112. 63. Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 171. 64. Eric McLuhan, Essential McLuhan (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995), p. 174. 65. Baudrillard, Transparency, 70. 66. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5. It needs be said that although Lipovetsky agrees with Baudrillard on the general mindlessness of the logic of fashion, the former is more sanguine than the later over the productive effects of the rule of fashion. As Lipovetsky says: “Fashion is accompanied by ambiguous effects. Our job is to reduce its ambiguous effects. Our job is to reduce its “obscurantist” dimension and enhance its “enlightenment” dimension—not by seeking simply to eradicate the glitter of seduction, but by putting its liberating potential at the service of the greatest number.” (Ibid., 11) 67. Baudrillard, Illusion, 80. 68. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 77. 69. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 199 ), 30. 70. Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 173. 71. Baudrillard, America, 84. 72. Ibid., 84. 73. Ibid., 86. 74. Baudrillard, Transparency, 55. 75. Ibid., 55. 76. Baudrillard, Simulations, 80. 77. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso Press, 2001), 3. 78. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 12.

Chapter 3

Reality Shows: Paul Virilio

[We declare] that movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies. —Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910

Paul Virilio shares with Baudrillard certain intellectual affinities, yet in many important respects their conclusions as to the contemporary state of reality differ considerably. As with Baudrillard, Virilio’s intellectual interests have led to an examination of the reality problematic. Both men agree that reality is imperiled and that technology is a key factor in its undoing. Both are pessimistic with regards to the future prospects for reality, due in part to their partiality toward technological determinism. As well, both men articulate this pessimism in highly idiosyncratic language that eschews the formality of traditional academic discourse. These similarities notwithstanding, there is much that distinguishes the positions held by Virilio and Baudrillard regarding the reality problematic. Much of this difference can be accounted for by differences in their personal histories and academic training, a review of which merits brief consideration. Born just three years after Baudrillard, in 1932, Virilio shares with his fellow compatriote the same social and political life experiences. Yet the impact of these experiences on them varied considerably. Baudrillard, as noted, was drawn intellectually to mass consumerism, a phenomenon he witnessed emerging during the post-War economic boom. Virilio, on the other hand, was more duly affected by World War II, often referring to himself as a “war baby.”1 So moved was he by memories of the War and later by his observations of military installations in Normandy that, beginning in the 1950s, Virilio spent ten years researching bunker architecture and extrapolating from his investigations a theory of war as a military “space.”2 71

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During the 1960s, Virilio’s burgeoning career continued to follow a highly unorthodox path. He trained as a painter and an artist in stained glass, studied architecture and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and joined an architectural group that became renowned for promoting (both in theory and in practice) the aesthetic of the “oblique.”3 Virilio’s career as an academic solidified only in the late 1960s when he won a post at an architectural school in Paris, despite the fact he never formally qualified as an architect at any time during this thirty-year tenure at the school. When a student at the Sorbonne, Virilio managed to audit Merleau-Ponty’s lectures shortly before the phenomenologist’s death in 1961. Virilio acknowledges that the impact of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures made him “a follower of Gestaltheorie,”4 which is clearly evident in his writings up to the present day. The linkages to Merleau-Ponty that only can be inferred from a reading Baudrillard, and even then only with limited success, are readily apparent in Virilio’s oeuvre. Indeed, as I will attempt to show, Virilio’s analysis of the reality problematic is deeply indebted to Gestalt psychology and MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of perception. Another factor distinguishing Virilio from Baudrillard pertains to religion. Whereas Baudrillard is unmusical in religious matters, Virilio became a Christian and a self-proclaimed Catholic militant at the age of eighteen. His religious conviction remains deep and abiding, and directly impresses itself on his philosophical and political views. Virilio’s faith has acted chiefly as a bulwark against the forces of modernity. His religious conviction, for instance, prevented him from ever adopting a Marxist political stance, despite his sympathies with the ultra-leftist Italian Autonomist movement in the 1970s. This faith-based antipathy toward totalism is extended to technology as well. In fact, Virilio believes that technology’s very success may one day provoke a loosening of its grip: “The ironic outcome of techno-scientific development,” he tells us, is a “renewed need for the idea of God.”5 In this regard Virilio can be likened to Jacques Ellul, in that he stands in the tradition of Christian dissent against the totalitarianism of technology. It is Virilio’s sympathy toward phenomenology, together with his religious faith, that enables him to hold on to what Baudrillard cannot—a conviction in the reality of reality. Virilio’s thoughts proceed, in his words, “from the antagonism between the real and the virtually real.”6 Although he expresses concern over the long term fate of reality, he is secure in his belief that the real world presently coexists in an uneasy relationship with the virtually real world. This rapprochement Baudrillard cannot accept. He disparagingly calls the “principle of reality” Virilio refuses to relinquish a “moral principle,” adding that, unlike Virilio, he is averse to making “judgments.”7

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Notwithstanding the fairness of Baudrillard’s comment, it is evident that he and Virilio are divided on the issue regarding the state of reality in contemporary society. If, as Virilio believes, reality and virtuality are mutually antagonistic, the source of this antagonism needs to be clarified. What is it about the constitution of these two realties that sets them apart? More basic still, what exactly does Virilio mean by “reality” and “virtual reality”? Answering these questions in full will occupy a major portion of this chapter. Yet, it is possible to capture the essence of the distinction between the real and the virtually real in a single word—speed. Reality, for Virilio, is the realm of the subluminal and virtuality the realm of luminality. Upon this distinction everything rests.

SPEED, LIGHT, AND THE ATTACK ON REALITY Virilio argues that for most of human history the potentially deleterious effects of speed were of greater concern than its enabling powers. He asserts that “until the nineteenth century, society was founded on the brake.”8 Holders of military, economic, and political power held fast to the belief that only by decelerating the transmission of persons, goods, and services could positions of power be secured. Such was the thinking in what might be called the age of the speed-bump. For Virilio the impetus behind the creation of so many battlements, gates, and bureaucratic checks was to slow various forms of intercourse to better control their movement. If in general terms speed is inimical to the forces of control, this is especially true in the context of technologically underdeveloped societies. It was not by accident, then, that speed came to be regarded as a possible asset rather than an irredeemable liability only with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution. For the emerging technologies proved that the forces of celerity and control need not work at cross purposes. Once it was shown that speed does not have to be sacrificed on the altar of control, speed’s conversion from an impediment to a facilitator of power was all but complete: Virilio’s “dromocratic revolution” had arrived. Power now was seen to be invested in acceleration, and society was reorganized in accordance with “logic of the race.”9 Still, it took until the beginning of the twentieth century for speed to acquire the kind of iconic power that theorists like Virilio argue remains unchallenged to this day. Speed arguably made its debut as a symbol of humankind’s spiritual potential in the dawning years of the twentieth century, with the publishing in Le Figaro of the “First Futurist Manifesto.” In this paean to modern technology and the technological lifeworld, F. T. Marinetti not only endorsed the phenomenon called speed but sanctified it by employing one of the surest

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ways of securing the acceptance of the new: He aestheticized speed. “The world’s magnificence,” Marinetti proclaimed, “has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed.”10 Futurism’s enchantment with speed was always more than a mere infatuation with the quickening pace of life advanced by le technique, to borrow Ellul’s phrase. While the “fast and fragmented” quality of modern life held a certain surface attraction for the Futurists, their devotion to speed was rooted in the belief that the forces of acceleration enabled human consciousness to transcend the quotidian (or embodied) experience of space and time, and intuit reality through the lens of an infinite awareness. In the glowing words of Gino Severini, speed “has given us a new conception of space and time, and consequently of life itself.”11 “Simultaneity” was the name the Futurists gave to this revolutionary sensibility. It was the linchpin of a world view informed more by a kind of spiritual intuition than by direct sensory perception, because it claimed to deliver something mere perception could not—a conception of the essence of things. Thus, from the beginning, the fetishizing of speed was linked to the so-called “erotics of transcendence.” Speed, so the Futurists assumed, possesses the power to deliver us from the dead weight of the world’s materiality and from the limits of perception that attend our condition as embodied beings. To this extent the ethos of speed was idealist or essentialist. More precisely, the ethic in question was an immanent form of essentialism—a “physical transcendentalism”12—since the essence the Futurists sought was intrinsic, not extrinsic, to things: “We seek the internal essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialized in motion they become idealized.”13 There is perhaps no statement of Futurism’s enmity toward the world’s gross materiality as guileless as the above. The Futurists evidently preferred to perceive the real as pure motion because it led to a desired consequence, the spiritizing or dematerializing of reality. Statements to the contrary notwithstanding, their idealizing the real through the exaltation of speed appears motivated as much by a disdain of corpuscular matter than by an intrinsic love of pure movement. Their frequent associations linking speed to purity and hygiene,14 their depredations against the organic morphology of natural objects (i.e., the human body, the natural landscape, etc.),15 and the denigration of women, all point to an underlying ethos that is profoundly scornful of the realm of appearances. At the dawn of a new century the affinity between speed and the erotics of transcendence remains secure. In fact, a case can be made that if the history of speed over the past century proves anything it is that the effort to extricate ourselves from the “original sin” of embodiment has intensified dramatically, producing in its wake the ethereal speed-world called virtual reality. If Virilio

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rightly can be titled a theorist of speed it is because he is acutely aware that our attraction to speed today speaks to something much deeper than the mere impulse to self-preservation or to increased efficiency. Speed, he acknowledges, is symptomatic of a radical disaffection with reality as we know it, and our relationship to it. Speed is a response to the perceived incompleteness of man, the full implications of which will be discussed in the pages ahead. Virilio notes that because speed is not a “thing” but a relation among appearing things, it cannot be studied in abstracto. For this reason the study of speed necessarily must be grounded in an examination of the realm of worldly appearances. In this realm, what I have termed reality and what Virilio prefers to call “real space” or the “space-world,”16 relations among phenomena are necessarily constrained by a number of invariant geophysical laws. The most basic of these restrictions dictates that an object in real space can exist either in the here-and-now or in the there-and-later, but not in the here-and-there-and-now. It is axiomatic that an object in the space-world cannot exist at two different sites simultaneously. As a result, an object can be said to exist “here” and “there” only if some temporal lapse unfolds between the “here” and the “there” under consideration. Common sense tells us moving objects in real space necessarily “take time” to move. Time, therefore, is nothing other than “the form of matter in motion.”17 Moreover, the fact that in the context of the space-world speed pertains to objects with mass means that, in its worldly register, speed always falls short of its ultimate upward threshold—the speed of light, or “time-light,” as Virilio sometimes refers to it. The space-world turns out to be speed’s nemesis in that it withholds from speed the promise of its perfection. But if, according to this reading, reality acts as a barrier to the absolute speed that is the speed of light, then reality also is a barrier to instantaneity. That is to say, when time is conceived in terms of matter in motion, and the speeds associated with such movement are necessarily subluminal, time “flows” or is durational. Here time and space are homologous in that both exhibit the quality of extension. This is why Virilio frequently likens our experiences as worldly beings to journeys, for like journeys they appear to take us from one point in space and time to another. Journeys move us, as it were, in a way which makes us conscious of movement as movement. Virilio argues that when the space-world paradigm was ascendant, both time and space were conceived without reference being made to that cosmological constant known as the speed of light. This is understandable because the effects of light’s speed on time and space make themselves known only between widely separated frames of reference, such as may pertain, for example, between Earth and a spaceship traveling at some great velocity toward a distant star. In contrast, within a local frame of reference the effects of light’s

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speed are so negligible as to be nonexistent. Thus for all practical purposes, the Newtonian paradigm suffices for the inhabitants of the space-world: Here time and space are absolutes. It need hardly be repeated that Newton’s oversight was to project what is true for us on Earth (i.e., the absolutes “time” and “space”) into a universal truth. It took a genius of the stature of Albert Einstein to conceive the universe from beyond the bounds of Earth and to expose the relativity of both time and space from that vantage point. But as effective as Einstein was in overturning the Newtonian paradigm, the theoretical nature of his insights proved insufficient to de-center the space-world. In the final analysis, our intellectual awareness of the relativity of time and space was incapable of destabilizing a perceptual truth which suggested the contrary. Virilio intimates that only with the invention of the computer was the idea of the relativity of time and space given concrete form and made part of the perceptual fabric of everyday experience. If phenomena were required to be “real” or materially voluminous in order to appear, the issue regarding both time and space’s relationship to light and light’s speed would not impress itself upon us with such force. In the spaceworld, where appearing things are corporeal and voluminous, phenomena exist by virtue of their being illuminated or bathed in light. The same pertains to time, since time, to recall, is for Virilio nothing other than illuminated matter in motion. It is because light subtends both time and space in the space-world that they are largely shielded from thematization. The upshot of Virilio’s analysis is that time and space, and hence reality itself, remained sheltered from any kind of radical questioning for only as long as their relation to light remained fundamentally unaltered. Virilio asserts that the computer and communications technologies have effectively aligned the preexisting linkages between time, space, and light. They have done so by showing that phenomena do not have to be real in order to appear. In the virtually real computer-generated realm called cyberspace, the space-world is replaced by a light-world populated with virtual or dematerialized light-objects. Virilio contends that we misinterpret this virtual universe if we think of it merely as “the real” in a different key, as a world of the same order as the real world, only immaterial. Virilio’s intellectual mission is to inform his readers that by divorcing the realm of appearances from the space-world, an entirely new reality has emerged and along with it a new understanding of what constitutes reality, one which very well may supplant the notion of the real that has prevailed since premodern times. For Virilio, the gestalt switch that is redefining what counts as real has been effected by the transformation of the functions of speed and time within the virtual realm. We have seen regarding the space-world that its materiality acts as a brake on speed and time, lending to both the quality

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of extension. However, this shared characteristic is eradicated in a virtual universe populated by dematerialized light-objects. Virilio argues that cyberspace represents speed’s apotheosis precisely because this alternative reality is fundamentally a world of light, as opposed to a world of illuminated space. A dromosphere without equal, the virtual world proves to be the ultimate speed-friendly environment. It is the immateriality of appearing things in cyberspace that enables phenomena to move from one “place” to another at light-speed, which on an earthly scale means in no time at all, or at least no discernible time. Virilio concludes that insofar as cyberspace is a light-speed world, it is an instantaneous world or a world without time. It was Einstein who introduced the notion that the measurement of space and time varies in accordance with the relative motion between the observer and the observed. Transposed into Virilian terminology, this means that reality is ultimately a function of speed. But when reality is perceived as dependent on speed there emerges the possibility of multiple realities based on variances in the relative motion between the perceiver and the perceived. As noted, in the space-world, where the viewer and the viewed exist within the same ontological plane, velocities are negligible in comparison to the ultimate speed limit—the speed of light. It is the corporeality of this shared habitat that lends to space its extension and to time both its local character and its durational quality. Light, in this context, is an immaterial force that illuminates the “substance” of both time and space. However, when light no longer merely illuminates reality but constitutes it, as in cyberspace, there is a radical alteration in the relative motion between the observer and the observed, and thus an equally radical change in the nature of the real itself. As Virilio says in Open Sky: “To tamper with light, with the illumination of the world, is . . . to attack reality.”18 Such tampering attacks reality by effectively opening a new reality alongside the reality of real space. As a prologue to a more detailed account of Virilio’s exegesis on the fate of the real, it is instructive to revisit briefly Baudrillard’s parallel analysis. We have seen that for Baudrillard the entire visual aesthetic of hyperreality is coterminous with the emergence of the obscene. The mania for transparency and total illumination the term is meant to convey radically alters the perceptual realm by presenting the perceiver with televisual imagery that is said to lie at an unbridgeable distance from the body. We observed as well that Baudrillard’s argument recalls Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on natural perception. It was Merleau-Ponty who argued that the distance between the spectator and the spectacle is bridgeable with natural perception because the two poles of the perceptual experience partake of and occupy the same world, what Virilio terms the space-world. Given this understanding, we see that the “unbridgeable distance” Baudrillard speaks

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of as existing between the perceiver and the mediated image is less a true distance (which implies a common world) than a kind of schism separating two incommensurate realities—the real and the virtually real. Virilio is in basic agreement with Baudrillard on this point. In The Vision Machine, for instance, Virilio cites approvingly Merleau-Ponty’s claim that with unmediated or natural vision everything one sees is “marked on the map of the ‘I can’.”19 Such a claim underscores what has been said above regarding the linkage between natural perception and real space. The operative assumption is that as a mobile perceiver one has the power to traverse the distance separating oneself from the perceived “other.” This assumption in turn presupposes the even more basic conviction that both spectator and spectacle inhabit the same ontological space. “Distance technologies” undercut the sensibility that takes reality to be the common ontological space within which the perceiver and the perceived are embedded. By permitting us to perceive in “real time” that which is not present in the hic et nunc, these technologies effectively bypass the phenomenological constraints that until recently were controlling in the commonly received opinion of what constitutes reality. Virilio asserts that with the advent of cyberspace, what used to hold as reality simpliciter has metamorphosed into two realities, or, what amounts to the same thing for him, two “perspectives” on reality. The creation of a technologically mediated space has brought with it a new reality. The implication here is that for Virilio what counts as “real” is determined by the nature of perceptual experience established between the viewer and the viewed. In the case of unmediated or embodied perception, reality emerges through the lens of an “audio-visual” perspective.20 This nomenclature is employed to indicate that the space-world is a reality where we see and hear at a distance. Importantly, Virilio notes that the perceiving body’s capacity to see and hear across distances in real space is not matched by a comparable ability to touch at a remove. In the real world touching necessarily presupposes the subject’s “being there” with the object in the sense of being contiguous with the object of touch. It is meaningless here to speak of touching across a distance, as we can with seeing and hearing. Because the sensation of touch manifests most directly the overlapping of perceiver and perceived in the world’s flesh, Virilio reserves for it a special role in what could be called his negative account of reality. Above all, it reads, reality is the space where touching at a distance is an impossibility. Moreover, because Virilio associates touching with doing or acting, reality is the space where acting at a distance is likewise an impossibility. Cyberspace is that alter-reality where what otherwise is impossible prevails. In this virtual space a new perspective opens up concerning what counts

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as real, according to Virilio. Before reality had “gone stereo,” it was assumed that part of what it means to live in the real world is to live in a space-time continuum where movement through space is necessarily correlated with movement across time. However, with the emergence of cyberspace the reigning common sense understanding of what constitutes the real is relativized. The space-time continuum is revealed as constitutive of a reality, not reality per se. Because the “space” in cyberspace is virtual, not real, movement through this space is unhindered by the restrictions that inhere in actual objects moving through real space. So it is that, with reality’s doppelganger, the movement and interaction of virtual objects is procured without the penalty of time being exacted. One can by making things happen over “there” from a location over “here” without having to expend time getting from here to there. In Virilio’s preferred expression, cyberspace is a reality that permits one to “act over distance.”21 The distanceless space of cyberspace transforms the nature of audiovisual perception as well. When Virilio says that living in the space-world allows one only to see and hear (but not act) at a distance, it is implied that the distance across which one perceives is terrestrial space. Accordingly, the expanse of space across which one perceives is constrained by those real world conditions affecting the quality of the perceptual experience, such as the acuteness of the perceiver’s sensory faculties, variances within the medium of perception, and the status of the perceptual object, such as its mass, shape, texture, color, and so forth. These constraints are lifted in virtual reality because the distances traversed in cyberspace are light-distances, not space-distances. It is because light takes time to travel distances of a terrestrial scale that these distances, as terrestrial spaces, disappear in cyberspace. As Virilio notes in Ground Zero, when subjected to the “nihilism” of luminal speed, “the World retracts, it is foreclosed, out of time in the strictest sense.”22 Thus it makes no sense in this parallel world to continue using language appropriate for describing real world perceptual experience: One cannot meaningfully speak of seeing and hearing “at a distance.” All one can say of the objects of perception in virtual reality is that they are objects in the extensionless moment, in ironically titled “real time.”23 To review, Virilio argues that the objects of perception in the space-world share with their observers the property of extension. In other words, real objects possess both mass and its temporal correlative—durée. To this extent reality can be said to possess the quality of openness. It is this openness which prevents reality (again, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty) from being “all actual under the look,” and which in turn accounts for the fact that real world perceiving takes time. Such is not the case with cyberspace.24 Here it is a given

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that the objects of perception are not part of the perceiver’s phenomenal reality, the world of real space. Virtual objects are not real, and they are not real in two related senses. First, as light-objects, virtual objects possess no mass: They are not in the strict sense “things.” Second, these massless objects are timeless in that they do not exist “in” time as much as in the instantaneity of light. All of which prompts Virilio to conclude that cyberspace is typified by the collapse, contraction, or disappearance of space and time. Ironically, the same technological forces that once were responsible for the expansion of horizons are now instrumental in closing them. Quoting H. G. Wells, Virilio says that after “three hundred years of diastole” came a “swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist.”25 We have noted that Virilio and Baudrillard disagree over the issue of the fate of reality today. Baudrillard, taken at face value, argues that reality has effectively disappeared behind its own reality effect, or simulation. There no longer remains for him any access to the real, only to simulations of reality. Virilio objects to such a view: “I don’t believe in simulationism. . . . As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. . . . We are entering a world where there won’t be one but two realities.”26 By arguing that reality has bifurcated, Virilio is claiming that reality is being supplemented today by an alternative reality, a reality that substitutes for reality proper, rather than simulates it.27 Virtuality is thus a duplicate reality, a parallel or separate reality. From Virilio’s perspective, Baudrillard overstates the case when he asserts that reality has dissolved into an aestheticized reproduction of itself. For Virilio, reality has not disappeared down the rabbit hole of simulation, but splintered in response to the pressures of new technologies, producing a virtual reality alongside the preexisting space-world. According to this reading, the virtual experience of flying is not to be taken as a likeness of real flying that supersedes the real thing, thus obliterating the difference between the two experiences. Virilio more cautiously argues that to date virtuality remains a mere alternative to a more originary experience. If, as Nietzsche once observed, the notion of “chance” has meaning only in an otherwise purposive universe, so too one could argue that notions such as the “virtual” or the “hyperreal” hold meaning only in a world where the real has not been totally extirpated.28 Because for Baudrillard the whole of reality has been aestheticized, reality itself cannot serve as a reference point from which to mount a critique of what has replaced it—hyperreality. Accordingly, he was forced to look elsewhere for a point of reference. In contrast, Virilio’s refusal to accede to the demise of reality permits him to critically analyze the surrogate reality called virtuality from a “real world” perspective. He gains his critical bearings from an appreciation of the space-world, as informed by

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his sympathy toward phenomenology. This sympathy allows Virilio to conclude that living in real space entails being bodily present within the more encompassing body of the world, and experiencing time as “present time.” The distinction between “present time” and “real time” is of central importance to Virilio and therefore merits further consideration. It has been argued that from a real space perspective, time is perceived as being locally or spatially bound.29 It follows that living in the space-world means for Virilio to experience distance as having not only a spatial dimension but also a temporal one, as revealed when one speaks colloquially of a town being “two hours away,” for example. In addition, because in the space-world distance is time and time distance, widely separated populations perceive each other not only as far removed in geographic terms but also as distant in a temporal sense, making the distant “other” appear to exist in another time as much as in another place. All of this is to say that in the space-world time is experienced subjectively through one’s body and its relationship to the surrounding world. Virilio states as much when he says “there is no true presence in the World . . . other than through the intermediary of the egocentration of a living present; in other words, through the existence of one’s own body living in the here and now.”30 This “living present,” because it is founded in the interchange or overlap of body and world, has a certain volume and depth which ensures that time is experienced as duration. In virtual reality, on the other hand, time is not lived through the body so much as perceived as a function of light or light’s speed. Virilio coins the neologism “time-light”31 to express the conjoining of time and light where time is conceived not as duration but as instantaneity, or, more exactly, as a procession of instants. He calls this time “chronoscopic” in an effort to distinguish the depth and extension of present (or “chronological”) time from the “light interval” which exposes light-objects in cyberspace. Virilio’s point here is that the world which emerges from our screens appears to us as light, as electromagnetic energy, and comes to us at light-speed. In this postNewtonian light-world, light has become the new cosmological constant, the common wellspring from which space and time are projected.32 “Real time” for Virilio is understood as time “lit up” by light’s speed. It is the “no time” that permits one to vicariously experience an event beyond one’s direct sensory field at the same time the event is occurring.33 When issues pertaining to one’s placement within the world are moot, as they are in virtual reality, what matters most is not being there in “space” but being there in “time.” What is paramount in virtuality is witnessing an event, or acquiring information about an event, as it happens: “Here is no longer, all is now.” 34 Viewers of television news know only too well the centrality of real time in contemporary culture. The rush to provide “live” coverage of events, to be

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“first” with the news, is the driving force behind television news production. Temporal immediacy is such a premium that television news is being relegated to a secondary position behind the Internet as the preferred source for information delivery. In an era where time dominates space, “what happens” is subordinate to “as it happens,” to the experience of real time telepresence. Ironically, our cultural fixation with “real time” masks the collapse of time as duration. Real time, Virilio points out, “effaces all duration, exclusively promoting . . . the directness of the immediacy of ZERO TIME.”35 Real time does not flow, but is counted off as a procession of discrete “nows,” of “zero times,” the totality of which yields “no time.” For Virilio, the premium placed on real time and the “absolute present” is a symptom of resignation over the real world of appearances. Real time is born from despair because it signals a rejection of the time order that accompanies the world of appearances. From Virilio’s perspective, real time negates the “analog” experience of natural time and embraces instead the “digital” experience of time as a succession of discrete now-moments. The flow of the ephemeral has ceded to the procession of isolated “nows.” Virilio compares the triumph of real time over durée to “the resurgence of a classicism that already laid claim to the eternal present of art.”36 In this same vein, we could conclude that real time Egyptianizes temporality: Real time de-realizes time by making us prisoners of the specious “moment.” Virilio delights in underscoring the paradoxical nature of the phenomenon known as real time. On the one hand, he acknowledges that the sense of immediacy generated by the real time experience is responsible for the speeding-up of everyday existence. Thanks to modern technology, we do not live just “our” (i.e., local) time, but everyone’s (i.e., universal) time, and the effect can be dizzying. On the other hand, this virtual experience of immediacy is likened to a form of inertia, in that it extracts us from the flow of time. Real time, then, begets both speed and its antithesis, stillness. For all of this, however, what real time cannot capture is “the poetics of the ephemeral,”37 the transitoriness of lived experienced in the realm of appearances. Virilio charges that the entire technological imperative to digitize appearing reality is an assault against the poetics of the ephemeral. Recalling Baudrillard’s analysis of the same, Virilio cites as an example of this assault the incapacity of modern digital technology to capture the ephemeral in music, that quality which makes music live and breathe. Appearances are being spirited away, he says, “behind the artifice of the manipulation of signs and signals of . . . digital technology.”38 Musicians themselves have long criticized the trend toward the monumentalizing of recorded sound. In Art and Fear, Virilio relays Bob Dylan’s lament that “All you hear these days [in recordings] is just electricity! You can’t hear the singer breathing anymore behind this electronic wall.”39 Other

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singer-songwriters are equally sympathetic to the loss of the poetics of the ephemeral. As with Dylan, their criticism pertains to the absence of air and movement in recorded sound. Whether they lay blame for this absence on tightly constructed recording studios or on digital recording techniques, the end product is said to lack the aural ambience of living, breathing music.40 To capture the aura of live sound in a recording would require the re-presenting of the harmonics of “real” sound. This would entail capturing the “space” or “air” that mediates sound and through which the listener hears sound. To the extent such a recording would supply the listener with the experience of listening to sound “at a distance,” it necessarily would reject the sonics of transparency or the obscene, to paraphrase Baudrillard. In sum, we could say that capturing real sound involve rejecting the spurious linking of authentic sound with immediate sound. Drawing inspiration from his interest in art, Virilio sees the premium placed on immediacy today reflected in the decline of representative or figurative art. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western art attempted to save appearances by re-presenting appearances in a manner that shed meaning upon them. In this early dispensation, according to Virilio, art never aspired to the transparent capturing of some truth and therefore never fell victim to the fraudulent allure of immediacy. The situation has since changed and we are confronted today not with the art of representation but of presentation. Not just art proper, says Virilio, but all media aspire today to offer “the very presence of the event.”41 He explains that what was once the agenda of the artistic avant-garde is now the modus operandi of our entire mediated environment. The move “towards the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, between the idea and the onlooker,”42 which Mark Rothko once claimed as his personal ambition as an artist, has now been universalized and operationalized by the media and contemporary communications technologies. They aim to open a window onto the world, and thus to present reality. Representing reality is anathema to media and related technologies, because representation is hostile to today’s most valued commodities—proximity and immediacy. Virilio’s analysis of these “simulators of proximity” (i.e., television, the Internet, cell phones, etc.) is grounded in a critique of presence. His critique is not to be confused with Derrida’s repudiation of the metaphysics of presence. Operating outside linguistic parameters and instead within the optics of space, Virilio’s critique of presence reveals the influence of phenomenology on this thinking. Along with Merleau-Ponty, Virilio realizes that we never are simply present before the given or space-world. Perceptual experience involves equally an active insertion of the body into the world and the possession of the body by the world. It is through this entanglement of body and

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world that we come to experience reality, an experience that necessarily takes time. As a result, the perceiving self is never simply “present” before the world and the perception of reality never “immediate.” A culture that sanctifies the “simulators of proximity” and what they purport to deliver overlooks this elemental phenomenological fact. It is not reality proper, but only its substitute, that can be delivered in real time. So far we have examined Virilio’s assessment of virtuality primarily from the perspective of time. From the vantage point of time in its natural aspect, the “real time” of virtual reality reveals itself to be no time at all. There is no time in virtual reality because, to repeat, the collapsing of the temporal “space” between subject and object prohibits the becoming of things. However, virtual reality also can be assessed from the interconnected perspective of light. As previously mentioned, to tamper with light is to tamper with reality, and for Virilio the age of electronic telepresence is premised on a most radical tampering with nature’s light, the form of light that directly illuminates the Earth. We are exchanging, he says, nature’s light (or “light-matter”) and therefore nature’s time (or “Earth time”) for the “time-light” of cyberspace, for that form of light which transmits information in no time at all. In Open Sky, Virilio likens the perceptual experience of virtual reality to “lunar reality,” as experienced and recounted by the Apollo astronauts who walked the Moon’s surface decades ago. Citing Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s description of light on the lunar surface as “weird,” he goes on to tells us that Aldrin attributed its alienness to the fact that, unlike conditions on Earth, solar light remains unrefracted by an atmosphere before it hits the Moon’s surface. Aldrin says the harshness of the moon’s unrefracted light was especially evident when he moved his hand from the shadow to the light, a process he described as akin to “crossing the barrier to another dimension.”43 It is an observation that clearly strikes a chord with Virilio, for it shows the centrality of Earth’s atmosphere in creating that form of light which allows us “to count time, thanks to the transitive nature of days, hours and minutes.”44 Reading the transcripts of the Apollo lunar excursions, one is struck by the frequent references the astronauts make to the quality of sunlight on the Moon’s surface and its effects on their perception of the alien landscape. The absence of a refractive atmosphere rendered the Sun a “super-bright spotlight,” in the words of Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, whose intensity in turn wreaked havoc with Conrad’s and other lunar visitors’ visual ability to read accurately their surroundings. It appears all the lunar astronauts had difficulty estimating sizes, distances, and gradients on the Moon’s surface. Evidently, the ease and speed with which their bodies adapted to the new set of demands made on them by their one-sixth gravity environment was not matched by the adaptive powers of vision.

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Just how profoundly “light” and “reality” are correlated is revealed by a not atypical visual miscue made by Alan Bean on the Apollo 12 flight. Requested to rendezvous with a nearby Surveyor craft already on the lunar surface, Bean was convinced at first of the impossibility of the mission. From a man for whom visual acuity is paramount, the ten-degree slope on which Surveyor sat some five hundred feet in the distance appeared to be a precarious forty-degree incline. Confessing his dismay at the prohibitive drop, Bean later recounted his frustration with the situation: “How are we going to get down there? How come they [NASA] screwed up so badly (on the slope estimate)? And I think I was fooled because, on Earth, if something is sunny on one side and very dark on the other, it has to be a tremendous slope. We weren’t getting (scattered) light like you do on Earth. So when light finally did strike, it was real.”45 The anecdotes recalled by both Aldrin and Bean contain a valuable insight. They tell us our visual capacity to accurately assess the body’s environs and the body’s orientation within these environs is not a generic, placeindependent capacity but context specific. They tell us indirectly as well that when human vision is alienated from its original context, as was the case on the airless Moon, a different perception of reality emerges, which for Virilio is synonymous with the emergence of a new reality itself. Although he refrains from using this expression, we could say that Aldrin and the other lunar astronauts were immersed in a “digitized” or “binary” reality to the extent that it was a world without penumbras. The transition from shadow to light was perceived as unearthly in its abruptness, with no “in between” separating the presence and absence of reflected solar light. It is in this sense that Virilio suggests objects on the Moon’s surface are not illuminated by the Sun as much as “exposed” by the Sun’s glare. They either are “real” and “there” in the Sun’s light, or they are not. While objects on Earth appear to endure as they sweep from darkness to light and back again, on the lunar surface the same objects commute instantaneously between unlit and lit states. It is the instantaneity of the changeover that lends a digital or binary quality to light’s effects, which gives objects the appearance of leaping, quantumlike, from one dimension to another. Lunar reality can be likened to a three-dimensional analogue of cyberspace. The Sun’s light in that world is for all intents and purposes the same “time-light” that exposes light-objects in virtual reality. Virilio concludes from this that the lunar astronauts “were thus the first to glimpse the general accident that awaits us tomorrow, down here, in this already-here tomorrow of the perpetual present of real time technologies.”46 We are, in other words, all astronauts to the extent we live within the glow of the monitor’s unrefracted light. Like the lunar astronauts, the objects of our experience

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increasingly pop in and out of view, in a trice. The fractured quality that attends our perceptual experience of placeless cyberspace is accompanied by a perception of time that is equally discontinuous, the previously cited chronoscopic time. The consequence of both transformations is that like immanent astronauts, or spirit-beings, we less inhabit a place in the hereand-now than occupy a site in the perpetual present. We have seen how Virilio uses the real space paradigm as a standard against which to assess how the technologies of ubiquity have created a new sensibility regarding what counts as real. Persons take their bearings within real space by reading their position relative to their nominally stable terrestrial context. To this extent we could say that from the perspective of the space-world, the world is the measure of all things. For Virilio the introduction of popularly (and ironically) labeled “distance technologies” has radically undermined this framework by subordinating the importance of distance (material extension) under that of time. If our ability to orient ourselves in “reality” is a matter of determining our coordinates in the three-dimensional space-world, the topography of virtual reality in contrast offers few spatial cues to embodied beings such as ourselves. This is intuitively understood when we realize the futility of demanding to know our location in cyberspace in the terms of reference appropriate to real space. We have seen that for Virilio the demise of real space brings with it the demise of present or local time. To recall, time is local in real space for the simple reason that two persons separated by some measurable distance cannot physically share the same space in present time. We noted as well that the purported “laws” of virtual reality allow for precisely this possibility. It follows that what separates communicants in cyberspace is not a geographical but a temporal distance, or the span of time required to electronically transmit information between two or more nodes in a communications web. However, because digital information travels at the speed of an electrical current, the transmission of information in cyberspace is essentially instantaneous, effectively erasing the temporal distance separating the communicants. Unlike physical reality, whose material extension ensures all distance communications transpire over time, the light-world of cyberspace holds no such restrictions. On the contrary, in cyberspace everything is immediately at hand: The “instantaneity of ubiquity” prevails.47 It is necessary, at this juncture, to throw a wrinkle into the preceding overview of Virilio’s depiction of the antagonism between the actual and the virtually real. I have argued thus far that both Virilio’s description and evaluation of virtual reality issue from a prior understanding of what constitutes reality, and that his understanding of reality is informed by phenomenology. We also recall that it was Virilio’s intellectually informed faith in reality which Baudrillard dismissively referred to as his “moral” principle. The problem

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with Baudrillard’s rebuke is that it depicts Virilio as adhering steadfastly to an unhistorical truth called “reality,” when in actuality he takes reality (or real space) to be an invention. Reality qua real space, according to Virilio, came into being with the Quattrocentro invention of linear perspective. He does not mince words in this regard. Reality, he says, “is the outcome of a predetermined epoch, science, or technique. Reality must be reinvented, always. To me, it is not the simulation of reality that makes the difference, it is the replacement of a predetermined reality by another predetermined reality.”48 The invention of linear perspective during the Italian Renaissance has been the subject of considerable analysis and informed opinion generally agrees that the advent of perspective marks the emergence of a system of representation depicting reality as a homogeneous space governed by geometric rules. Perspective, in short, was the Renaissance’s response to the problem of representing space. As such the invention of linear perspective supported a deterministic world-picture that took reality to be stable and unchanging, and thus subject to mastery by universal mathematical principles. This conception of space, as originally framed by Renaissance artists, quickly became entrenched as the reigning reality paradigm—the “real space” paradigm. Its dominance was assured given that the invention of real space facilitated the birth of modern science and technology. This invention, then, constitutes modernity’s “predetermined” reality, a reality which until recently has prevailed as the only reality. It appears from the above analysis that Virilio is disputing the notion reality exists in any naturalistic sense of the term. He appears to suggest that the given world always has to be received by the perceiver, and that the act of receiving is always filtered through an interpretive lens, a technology, or both. In short, reality exists relative to some form of mediation. But if reality is simply “the outcome of a predetermined epoch, science, or technique,” then on what grounds can Virilio rightly criticize any particular form reality may take in a given epoch? How can he defend reality against the onslaught of virtuality when he says there is nothing definitively real about reality? We have to ask ourselves whether Virilio’s defense of the real space paradigm is simply a matter of aesthetic preference or personal taste. We have to determine whether or not a Virilian critique of reality is possible. There is a way, it turns out, to resolve the apparent contradiction that lies at the center of Virilio’s tale of two realities. First, it should be noted that Virilio is not being disingenuous when he asserts that reality is an invention that keeps on being reinvented. We are fated to invent realities for the rather straightforward reason that we are barred from accessing reality-in-itself. Yet it is a mistake to conclude from this premise that these invented realities are entirely contingent and therefore bear no relationship to the given world. Just as it is

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erroneous to interpret the paradigmatic nature of scientific understanding as indicating a radical disjunction between understanding and its object, so it is misguided to interpret Virilio’s claim that reality is an invention as supporting a view which takes these inventions to be randomly determined worldpictures. There is, in other words, a middle position between the relativistic view that reality is purely a social construct devoid of any inherent connection to the world, and the view that our perception of reality is unproblematic and thus a window onto the world as it really is. This middle position holds that while no single interpretation of reality is definitive, not all interpretations are equal in terms of their fidelity to what they purport to convey. It follows that if invented realities are neither wholly true nor wholly false, there exists the possibility that successive shifts in interpretation exhibit some kind of directionality. In the case of modern science, this means that while neither the Newtonian nor the Einsteinian paradigms supply a true picture of the world, the shift from the former to the latter is progressive insofar as the Einsteinian world-picture accounts for anomalies within the Newtonian world-picture in a way the Newtonian paradigm itself cannot. The transition from real space to virtual space (or cyberspace) likewise is viewed by Virilio as directional. While neither of these two realities are true representations of the given world, the move from the real to the virtually real is not a random movement, a movement without meaning. On the contrary, the history of reality for him is rational in the Hegelian sense of having an intelligible structure. The only problem is that the history of reality is retrogressive. In Ground Zero, Virilio offers his readers a concise overview of this “negative” history, saying that from “the perspectiva . . . of the Quattrocentro to the Utopia of Saint Thomas More . . . and with the Cartesian tabula rasa . . . the technoscientific imagination has structured itself for some six hundred years around the concept of disappearance—of the inexorable enactment of a stripping down of the World, of the substance of the living world.”49 Here Virilio lets it be known that his apology for the space-world against the intrusions of a parallel reality is itself relative. It is relative because his apology does not pit a true or appearing reality against a false or disappearing one. Rather, for Virilio, the “hatred of matter”50 around which modern science and technology are organized was present from the start. Indeed, the attack against appearances was exemplified by the highly rationalized conceptualization of reality as mathematized space that emerged during the Renaissance. This means that the reality Virilio defends already is a stripped down or abstracted reality, a reality whose substance is disappearing. The difference between the two realities thus appears to be more of degree than of kind. If Virilio defends reality against virtuality, then he does so knowing he is defending a world already tainted by the techno scientific imagination.

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The antagonism between the two realities from which Virilio claims his thought proceeds can be properly assessed only when viewed in the context of what unites them. Doing so, we realize that Virilio is resisting not just the digital age and its associated technologies but, more broadly, the telos of the entire modern scientific and technological enterprise—the disincarnating or spiritizing of reality. But this realization raises another important question: Can there be a future for “real reality” when technology works inexorably toward the transcendence of space and time? In a word, no. Virilio admits that the antagonism between the real and the virtually real marks what is effectively a transitional phase in the development of science and technology. We presently are caught in the midst of a paradigm shift, affected by technology, where the perspective of real space is in the process of surrendering to the perspective of real time. It would be mistaken, then, to assume that when Virilio speaks of reality having gone “stereo” he is describing a permanent alteration of the landscape of the real. It is not so much that reality has split into two equally viable realities, but that a new reality has emerged alongside the old and is in the process of superseding the old. Virilio concedes that reality and virtual reality “will shortly constitute one single reality.”51 Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that for Virilio the “two realities” distinction is more analytical than real. This much can be surmised because although Virilio outwardly suggests this new hybrid reality is not yet upon us, he writes from the vantage point of it having already arrived. He is quick to admit, for instance, that enumerating the negative consequences of this new reality lie at the core of his writing. And what precisely will this new hybrid reality look like, should it in fact currently exist? Virilio is short on specifics, in part because we are in the incipient stage of the virtualization of political, economic, and social life. However, living at the cusp of a new era does put him in a position to adumbrate the contours of such a world. Before discussing the shape of this new world, it bears repeating that for Virilio the virtualizing of reality has yielded a new form of perspective called cyberspace. We noted that this new perspective enables us to accomplish what could not be done from within the audio-visual perspective of real space, that is, to act at a distance, or to make contact at a distance. We have seen as well that this newfound ability to act across distances has rendered both space and time irrelevant. More accurately, what has been rendered inconsequential is space and time as conceived from the register of the real space perspective, or geophysical space and durational time. These attributes of real space are being replaced by the corresponding attributes of cyberspace: Informational or virtual space, on the one hand, and real time, on the other. If for Virilio the space and time of cyberspace rightfully can be called “unreal,” it is only because they are less rooted in the materiality of the world relative to the reality which preceded it.

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THE TYRANNY OF REAL TIME Globalization is the term often reserved to describe the age of virtual interconnectedness. In a globalized or networked world, all forms of societal practice are in the process of being universalized and homogenized through the comprehensive exchange of information. Globalization, so the mantra goes, is giving rise to a new world whose defining characteristic is its oneness. Virilio does not dispute the novelty of globalization, but he does question what exactly is meant by the suggestion that we live in “one world.” First, the term “world” carries with it connotations associated with the increasingly marginalized space-world. The world, in a substantive sense, is precisely what is being effaced by science and technology, and so for Virilio any suggestion that globalization is reducing the world to a single geophysical space would be misleading. Second, we have to ask ourselves in what sense a globalized world is “one.” Is it united primarily in terms of a convergence in economic and political practices, the outcome of history’s end? Is the world one in terms of the spread of the spirit (if not practice) of technology? While the possible responses to this question are many, Virilio’s own response is singular and unambiguous: The world is one because time has been globalized. So adamant is Virilio about the centrality of time to reality’s return to “mono” that he is on record as saying there “is no such thing as globalization” and that the term is “a fake.”52 His displeasure with the term (which he nonetheless frequently employs) is directed toward common associations summoned by its usage, such as technology transfer, cultural homogenization, and the like. While Virilio does not deny that many of these outcomes are tied to globalization, he sees them as epiphenomena of an underlying shift in perspective. Virtualization is the preferred term Virilio uses to describe this new perspective and, we have seen, acting at a distance (or tele-contact) is its defining characteristic. As noted, tele-contact itself is possible only because the means have been devised to transmit information across distances without exacting the penalty of time. Terrestrial spaces have collapsed because the time needed to traverse real space has been reduced to zero, which has been realized by virtualizing reality (that is, by digitizing information about reality) and commandeering the speed of light for the purpose of transmitting information about reality. So if for Virilio the world can be said to be one, it is in the specific sense that the world has been globalized by the instantaneity of time, as effected by the harnessing of the speed of light. He adds that “the speed of light does not transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!”53 Accordingly, we who live at light-speed live under a “one-time-system,” under a “real time” regime that engulfs the planet. Whatever happens in the future

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therefore will happen in global or universal time, the consequences of which Virilio believes will affect severely every aspect of societal life. Virilio’s mission is to highlight the negative repercussions of the temporal dislocation brought on by virtualization. He observes that until the emergence of virtual reality, history unfolded locally with respect to both space and time. “If history is so rich,” Virilio comments, “it is because it was local, it was thanks to spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time.”54 In contrast, time in the virtual age is literally dislocated, or freed from its previous grounding in localized space. And so instead of a plurality of times corresponding to a plurality of spaces, the virtual transcendence of geophysical space results in the emergence of a single global time zone, where being there in time takes precedence over being there in space. It is important at this juncture to consider the nature of Virilio’s assessment of the negative repercussions of virtualization. His critique of virtuality is presented on two levels of analysis, one internal to the society under consideration, and one external to it. With respect to the former, Virilio speaks of the subjective experience of temporal dislocation associated with globalization, the “fundamental loss of orientation” that will negatively affect both individuals and their social institutions. Virtualization merits serious attention, he argues, in part because it is reordering our perception of what constitutes reality. Yet Virilio tends to overlook the fact that the logic of his analysis of the reality problematic suggests this disorientation is a byproduct of living in a transitional era where an emerging reality paradigm has not yet fully displaced the preexisting one. By his own account there is nothing intrinsically disorienting about a world ordered in accordance with global time, any more than there is anything inherently disorienting about a world founded on local time. This is not to conclude that Virilio cannot and should not address the issue of disorientation, only that in doing so one should be mindful of the specific historical context which accounts for the condition being examined. There is another, broader sense in which Virilio impugns virtualization. This critique has less to do with understanding the disorienting consequences of virtualization then with assessing virtuality in relation to the goal of modern science and technology. It has been said that Virilio regards technoscientific forces as responsible for the spiritizing of reality. When seen from the vantage point of these forces, globalization signifies more than a reality regime change and its attendant disturbances: It manifests in full the “hatred of matter” that subtends the modern techno-scientific project. Virilio’s commentary on virtual reality is best understood in the context of the development of modern science and technology. It is best understood this way because situating his analysis within this framework offers a more

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inclusive explanation of the phenomenon under investigation. From this angle, Virilio can be interpreted as acknowledging the loss of orientation associated with the changeover in realities without limiting his critique of virtuality to analyzing the negative side effects of this transition. More to the point, adopting such a critical perspective permits the censuring of virtuality not merely for its disorienting effects but also for its remove from worldly materiality. In light of the above analysis, we turn to an examination of what Virilio takes to be some of the specific consequences of living in the shadow of planetary time, and the reasons why he assumes we ought to be concerned with these consequences. In answer to the first part of the question, a case could be made that Virilio’s various charges against globalization stem from his understanding that ours is a world which eschews the previously cited poetics of the ephemeral. Virilio’s allegiance to the quality of ephemerality is tied to his respect for phenomenology, or the appearingness of being. To repeat, according to this reading, things exist to the extent they come into being, persist in being, and pass out of being. It is the very transitoriness of appearances that lends them their realness. Moreover, it is the ephemerality of appearing things that elicits from us the same response Virilio asserts a true work of art is capable of evoking, that is, “the extreme veneration of receptiveness.” It is the receptive attitude, which Virilio equates with the “extreme vigilance of the living body that sees, hears, intuits, breathes, and changes,” that falls victim to the allure of “‘real time’ dramaturgy.”55 The distinction between ephemerality and real time is crucial to an understanding of Virilio’s treatment of the reality problematic. At bottom, his defense of reality rests on this distinction. What draws Virilio to the ephemeral is that he sees the real world as ephemeral. Reality “lasts a day” in the sense that its progressive unfolding in time is marked by contingency, by unrepeatability. In Ground Zero, Virilio suggests the ephemerality of the appearing world is something to which we ought to attune ourselves in an effort to live a real life. Living a real life entails “being there,” being bodily present before the unfolding of the appearing world. Virilio likens such an existential stance to the performance of a dance. “Don’t do it like machines,” Virilio tells us through the mouthpiece of the ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev, “do it the way you would do it in real life when you do everything for the first and last time, for if, in real life, time never ends, nothing is repeated either, nothing is exactly banal for us, every moment that arrives is a new moment—the ordinary course of life is the extraordinary, the permanent feature of existence is astonishment.”56 It is this openness and receptivity toward to the extraordinariness of the everyday course of life that Virilio defends against “the tyranny of real time.” In a real time regime, the extraordinariness of quotidian existence is cashiered for the cheap exhilaration that attends the virtual experiencing of the live

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event. The powers of reflection that are cultivated with attentiveness to the ephemerality of reality likewise are exchanged for the “reflex action” of the denizens of cyberspace. Virilio’s charge here is that the “presentism” that afflicts the wired generation incapacitates the powers of reflection. If thinking is a form of slowing down, then it holds that a world which operates at the speed of light is ill-disposed toward the cultivation of thought. For Virilio, the tyranny of real time is directly linked with the unthinkingness it encourages. This tyranny, he tells us, is “not very different from classical tyranny, because it tends to destroy the reflection of the citizen in favor of a reflex action.”57 The political component of Virilio’s reproval of virtual reality cannot be overstated. While virtualization may be criticized on a more purely philosophical level for being untrue to the ephemerality of worldly reality, it is the consequences of this disconnection that bear the brunt of Virilio’s attack. The culture of unthinkingness that the real time era fosters is politically charged for him because it promotes the subjugation of persons to existing mechanisms of power, be they political, economic, or social. True action, in contrast to mere reaction, requires the input of thought. To act freely demands that we reflect, either singly or collectively, on possible options for action, as well as on the possible outcomes of various lines of action, and evaluate them according to our perceived needs. Time, the primary requirement for informed action, is in short supply in an accelerated culture which puts a premium on speed and immediacy, and its devaluation undercuts the all-important deliberative element of democratic societies. Insight into the consequences of virtualization is best acquired by examining the issue of virtual democracy, to which Virilio has spoken extensively. The primary question facing democracies in a dromocratic age is the same one facing all other forms of societal practice: Can democratic politics be reconfigured so it conforms to the demands of real time and yet still retain its integrity? In Virilio’s words, the most pressing political question of our time is whether we will “be able to achieve a democracy of real time, LIVE time, a democracy of immediacy and ubiquity.”58 Virilio believes we can but fears the final product will resemble a democracy in name only. It has been observed that one reason for his skepticism is that true democratic debate takes time, with no assurance that the time expended in deliberation will yield the desired political end. Virilio’s concern is that the ephemera of true democratic engagement—such as the electoral process, party politics, inter-party wrangling, ideological combat, and so forth—will be bypassed with the implementation of mechanisms that more expediently translate public opinion into public policy. He sees the introduction of practices associated with what is commonly referred to as plebiscitarian or direct democracy as indicating the abdication of politics in response to the demand to give the citizenry what it wants. In an age where the

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public is attuned to the ideology of presentism, to the ethos of interactivity and immediacy, the cut and thrust of democratic politics appears distant, elitist, and ineffectual. The residents of virtual reality demand to be “in touch” with their environs, and in the political arena this translates into support for those practices that facilitate direct democratic rule, such as referendums, public opinion polling, focus group analysis, and voter recall. The erosion of the representative element in politics, and the concomitant reducing of politics to the presenting of public opinion for the purposes of acting upon it, is for Virilio a particular manifestation of the general trend toward the shedding of appearances behind the artifice of technology. In the case above, we are seeing the political appearances (or ephemera) associated with deliberative democracy disappear behind a facade of political technologies whose end is the efficient translation of public opinion into political action. There is another sense in which Virilio is critical of the virtualization of politics. The precedence of real time in a virtual world means that geopolitics, or the space-based politics of old, has given way to a “universal chronopolitics,”59 or the politics of real time. In an age of ubiquitous and instant media communication, both within the state and amongst states, extreme pressures are placed on political actors to make rapid decisions and, when required, to synchronize decision-making and strategizing with equal rapidity. Virilio argues that both the globalization and the acceleration of politics have produced increasingly complex systems of governance which, by virtue of their complexity, are less amenable to human understanding and control. While spin-doctoring and media manipulation are employed with the hope of gaining at least a semblance of control over this precarious state of affairs, Virilio remains convinced that chrono-politics is more highly predisposed to catastrophe than geopolitics. For Virilio, every aspect of virtualized social practice is being reconfigured by the dual pressures of presentism and instantaneity. What Bob Dylan was quoted earlier as saying of music is applicable to every type of social practice: It’s all just electricity. That is to say, we live in a spectral realm of near infinite speed that has forsaken the “space,” both temporal and material, that permits embodied beings such as ourselves to attend to those things that make us fully human. Somewhat surprisingly, given his dark view of societal evolution, Virilio remains somewhat optimistic about the future. Not surprisingly, given his description of the pathologies associated with the virtualizing of reality, the solution to the problem of spiritization is regaining contact with the world’s materiality. Virilio suggests such a return may be possible because virtualization marks not just the crossing of a threshold, but a collision of sorts. With virtual reality we have hit, he says, an “insurmountable barrier,” the barrier of real time. Virilio concedes that the centuries old

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dromocratic revolution is over, and that it has ended because there is nothing beyond the light-speed whose power we command. There is, in short, no more accelerating to do in a world that already has hit the universal speed limit. Virilio calls our crashing into the time barrier the “general accident.” Importantly, it is not a fatal accident, but one that “will force us to slow down, to regress, or to back up.”60 While he goes on to say it is premature to know exactly what form this reaction will take, he is convinced “we will have to compensate for the loss of the world proper and the loss of the body proper, since by that time, the situation will have become intolerable for everyone.”61 Politically, Virilio suggests the solution may lie in reclaiming the city as a space for communal life.62 This proposed solution, short on details as it is, points to what Virilio envisions as the general shape of the remedy for the dislocations effected by virtuality. This remedy requires opening spaces that facilitate more corporeally direct forms of engagement between persons and among groups. Virilio’s optimism in the face of his own diagnosis of present trends may be regarded as either naïve or reaffirming, but regardless of how it is received, his idealism speaks to his faith in the self-corrective power of politics. It is important at this point to ask ourselves whether Virilio’s guarded optimism is well-founded. Is it sound to assume we will realize the losses ascribed to virtualization outnumber its benefits, and that this realization will be sufficient to initiate a return to the space-world? Are we at “the end of an era” from which some form of regression is our only exit, or have we merely taken the next step in the ongoing quest to master reality? There are reasons to assume that Virilio’s optimism is indeed misplaced. Among them are recent developmental trends in the realm in human-computer interfacing, and it is to one particular aspect of this trend that we now turn.

THE ULTIMATE INTERFACE? The Tangible Media Group (TMG) is a subdivision of the MIT’s renowned Media Laboratory. As a branch of the Media Lab, the Group shares with its parent research facility the goal of advancing the capabilities of distance technologies. What differentiates the Group from other research units at the Lab is its mandate to improve “human-computer interaction” (HCI) by foregrounding the haptic, or tactile, dimension of human communication. In the words of the Group, its research goal is to “rejoin the richness of the physical world in HCI.”63 To this extent the TMG philosophy is congruent with one observer’s claim that computers need more “Africa”64 in them if we wish to relate to cyberspace in a more multimodal and, hence, a more fully human manner.

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Researchers with the Group are frank with regards to the experiential dilemma motivating their work. “We live,” they say, “between two realms: our physical environment and cyberspace. Despite our dual citizenship, the absence of seamless couplings between these parallel existences leaves a great divide between the worlds of bits and atoms. At the present, we are torn between these parallel but disjoint spaces.”65 As they see it, the problem is not that reality has gone stereo but that these two spaces remain disjointed. Their objective, accordingly, is to array these spaces so as to maximize the capacity for their mutual interaction. The Group argues the great divide separating the real from the virtually real issues from the manner in which humans commonly interact with computers today. “Graphical User Interface” (GUI) is the code given to the dominant form of human-computer interaction at present. Through this mode of interrelation the virtual world reveals itself to humans as photons of light, or “painted bits,” to use the accepted vernacular. What concerns the TMG is that these light-bits emanate from rectangular screens set in box-based hardware which are largely isolated from the ordinary physical environment of everyday interaction. The suggestion is that we live in a world where reality’s text is all too abruptly punctuated with scattered portholes to cyberspace, with all-too-distinct “terminals.” The TMG wants to remedy this perceived shortcoming by establishing an open border between two worlds that until now have been only crudely interconnected through the GUI format. The Group believes that clearing the obstacles to free trade is best realized when the physical world itself is transformed into an interface. Upon this transformation, human-computer interactions will take on the “real world” qualities that mark human-world interactions: They will be tangible, discreet, and ubiquitous. The plan to replace painted bits with “tangible bits” is nothing less than an attempt to graft virtuality onto the skin of reality. It is an effort to immanentize the virtual, to bring bits down to earth and fuse them with the atoms of this world. The Group’s work is ultimately redemptive in that it seeks to make the world whole again by interweaving the realms of bits and atoms. It follows from this reading that the transgression perpetrated by humans has nothing to do with the destruction of the geosphere, as Virilio suggested. From the Group’s perspective, Virilio’s concern over the fate of the real is misplaced since he upholds the autonomy of the real beyond the point such a view can be legitimately sustained. This is why the engineers of tomorrow see the problem as having to do less with humanity’s remove from reality than with humanity’s alienation from the virtually real. Their vision of the world has contained within it the important concession that we already are

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once removed from reality. It is because the geosphere is “history,” so to speak, that they work to circumvent a doubling of our remove from what is now a recreated reality. In conclusion, these engineers of tomorrow’s technological landscape maintain that we live neither fully in reality nor in virtuality: Rather, we are alienated from both the world of atoms and the world of bits. Because a return to the former is perceived to be either undesirable or impractical, the only avenue that remains open is to forge deeper connections with the forces that permit the transcending of the limits of the space-world. Thus the “problem with computers” may soon be no more. An Africanized world of virtuality is on the horizon. It is a world where reality will be augmented by having graspable physical objects as the preferred interface between humans and information. If the MIT researchers get their way, the graphical user interface, with its “icons” and look-point-shoot delivery system, will be replaced with “phicons” (or physical icons) and a touch-move-shoot system.66 We will quite literally feel our way around an infosphere that envelops us in the way our largely unaugmented physical world surrounds us today. In an augmented reality, touching and being in touch will be synonymous. The question to be asked at this point is not whether the augmenting of reality will be realized as currently envisioned, but what the desire to augment reality signifies and whether this desire aligns itself with Virilio’s concerns regarding the eclipse of the geosphere. The answer to the first question already has been alluded to. The impulse to augment reality seems to arise from a need to make the infosphere less abstract, more tangible, and more ubiquitous: In a word, more real. Of course, what is left unsaid about the drive to make the virtual realm more real is its inseparability from the opposing impulse to further informationalize reality. The goal of this grand synthesis would be the seamless blending of matter and information, of the real and the virtual. Again, whether or not this vision of a seamless blending of the physical and the virtual is fully realized is immaterial. The point here is that the techno-scientific imagination is captured by the idea of such a union. It aims to advance humanity’s exodus from reality by integrating the world of atoms with the world of bits. There is no reason to assume the techno-scientific imagination will abandon this dream, given its success in realizing this end and Virilio’s contention that the desire to be released from the strictures of worldly reality is the dream of technoscience. Likewise, there is no reason to believe the public will reject attempts to provide it with more seamless means of access to the virtual realm, given the public’s habituation to technology’s role in providing ever growing levels of comfort and ease.

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WAR AND FAITH Virtualization is war by other means. It seeks to accomplish what war seeks to accomplish—the eradication of an enemy. In the case of virtualization, the warring impulse seeks to resolve the problem posed by the “mortification of the flesh,” by the hatred of matter that underlies and informs modern science and technology. Virilio is aware that war can be seen to serve a cleansing function, as witnessed in the coining of a euphemism such as “ethnic cleansing.” The connection between war and purification was highlighted early in the twentieth century with the Futurist motto: “War is the world’s only hygiene.”67 This slogan encapsulated the belief that the destructive power of war helps realize a constructive end, namely, sanitizing the world. War, thus understood, is an antidote to the world’s dirt, or, more crudely, its shit. War is anti-shit in the same way that kitsch is anti-shit within the realm of politics or art: It wants nothing to do, in the words of Milan Kundera, with what is deemed “unacceptable in human existence.”68 The only difference between the two is that kitsch simply denies the unacceptable, while war aims to annihilate what offends. With war proper, the destructive powers of battle are directed toward whichever peoples or forces are deemed unacceptable. With war as virtualization, the object of destruction is the materiality of earthly existence. Here the cleansing operation is ridding the world of its substantive being, replacing the muck of obdurate matter with the sheen of malleable bits. Virilio is not sympathetic toward the end of history thesis. While he agrees that a limit of sorts has been reached in our era, this limit is not history’s end, as interpreted by the likes of Kojève and Fukuyama, but “the end of a regime of historical temporality.”69 In other words, history, as inscribed in local time, has disappeared with the appearance of the new time regime known as real time. Although Virilio goes on to say that Fukuyama’s thesis is “entirely wrong,” it is difficult not to interpret the war against the world’s materiality in the context of the end of history. For if peace is a dividend of history’s completion, then the cleansing impulse, as advanced by modern technology, must be redirected toward a target that endures in a globalized world. The post–Cold War retrofitting of hi-tech military enterprises to meet the demands of the gaming industry and other virtual reality-related businesses speaks to the inner connection between technology and war, on the one hand, and militarism and virtualism, on the other. Virilio always has regarded war as first and foremost a matter of perception. The logistics of perception in the battlefield of necessity has as its end the gaining of some sort of visual overview of the theater of operation. Whether, as in the past, such an overview was gained from a natural vantage

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point, like a hilltop, or, as today, from satellite imagery, the logic of war always has advantaged the side better able to perceive the battlefield.70 In this way, war has aligned itself with visual abstraction, with perceiving from afar and with the technologies of vision that furthered this end—so-called “vision machines.” From this context, the technologies of virtual reality, which permit us to “see from beneath, from inside, from behind . . . as if we were God,”71 merelyrais of the logistics of perception that undergird warfare to a general organizing principle of society. If the history of warfare and the evolution of military technology can be seen as contributing to the abstracting of humanity from worldly reality, it is for Virilio just one aspect of a multifaceted process. In the realms of philosophy and art, the abstracting process was furthered by the casting into doubt the efficacy of the senses. From Leon Batttista Alberti, to Leonardo da Vinci, to Rene Descartes and Jakob Böhme, Virilio detects the “mystical ego of inner change” abetting the “techno-scientific ego . . . in a single desire to annihilate sensory life.”72 Virtual reality is the fruition of the war against sensory life. Importantly, Virilio interprets this slipping from the bonds of the earth as an attempted escape from humanity’s “congenital incompleteness.”73 The significance of such an assertion becomes apparent when interpreted in the context of his previously mentioned faith. As a devout Christian, Virilio upholds a belief in the fallen condition of humankind. Humans are incomplete in their separation from God, the remedy for which in this life is faith in God. The idea that humans are inherently incomplete, that we suffer from a fundamental lack, has a long history in Western philosophical thought, extending from Plato’s analysis of eros, to Hegel’s discussion of the struggle for mutual recognition, to Lacan’s theorizing on our exit from the idea of the Real. What binds these and other related readings is the notion that a preexisting lack in our constitution as human beings initiates a compensatory force that seeks to fill the void. So it is that the striving for power—be it political, economic, social, or personal—is seen as a mere epiphenomenon of an underlying restlessness brought on by our condition as incomplete beings. The animus Virilio displays toward the virtualization of reality seems to issue from his conviction that it signifies a false and unrealizable hope. We cannot redeem ourselves by derealizing reality, by reconstructing reality in a way that enables us to act as if we were spirit-beings, or gods. It is the vanity of such a project which stirs Virilio’s indignation at least as much as the specific negative repercussions of our flight from reality. The virtualizing of reality is a vain effort because Virilio believes Truth cannot be found by following the path of science. Nor is Truth delivered in the world which science begets through technology. Virilio draws from Einstein’s observations regarding the relativity of time and space the

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conclusion that they constitute “forms of intuition,” and as such are “as much a part of consciousness as concepts like form, colour, size, and so on.”74 We inhabit, in other words, a participatory universe that precludes our gaining “objective” knowledge of its constitution. Modern science was forged in the belief that the mind of God could be fathomed by examining God’s natural creation: Knowing nature was a path to knowing God and his Truth. The identification of scientific understanding with Truth has long since been abandoned. As Max Weber announced almost a century ago: “[Science] is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets . . . nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and prophets about the meaning of the universe.”75 Virilio concurs with this assessment, and yet he realizes that the popular imagination remains largely incapable of drawing this crucial distinction. It is by conferring onto science and technology powers they do not possess—by regarding them as vehicles to the obtaining of Truth—that they have acquired the kind of iconic power which excuses them from critical judgment. The disappearance of reality is grounded in this oversight. As a corrective measure, Virilio attempts to demythologize the powers of science and technology by revealing that, against appearances, their embrace of the virtual is not founded on some sort of pure and noble drive seeking to establish a new cyber-Jerusalem, but upon a revulsion towards the reality these forces strive to transcend. Like Nietzsche and Weber before him, Virilio shows up the irrationality at play at the heart of scientific rationalism. But unlike them, he sees this irrationalism, or hatred of matter, as issuing from a misunderstanding of the truth of human incompleteness. Interpreted in this manner, Virilio’s reading of the reality problematic parallels the critique of radical twentieth century ideologies proffered by conservative thinkers such as Eric Voegelin and Norman Cohn.76 The millenarian fantasy, which these thinkers have expounded upon at some length, is premised on the misguided understanding of utopianism. Throughout the ages, various religions and philosophical teachings have presented images of ideal order, against which the disorder of the immanent world is contrasted. The Christian image of perfection is the Kingdom of God and, as defended by the Church, entry into this Kingdom can be had only at the end of time, that is, only after the thousand year reign of a returned Christ. The Church’s teaching regarding the Kingdom proved to be especially vulnerable to misreading, intentional or otherwise, since it requires the faithful bide their time on Earth in anticipation of Christ’s assured but unspecified return. These authors have argued that living in this state of constant anxiety often proves too difficult to sustain, resulting in the triggering over the centuries of numerous attempts to “immanentize the eschaton,” to realize Heaven on Earth. The rise of fascism and nazism in the twentieth centuries represents particularly virulent forms of this millenarian heresy.

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Although the connection between Virilio’s reading of the reality problematic and millenarianism can be overdrawn, it is important not to underestimate the religious foundation of Virilio’s thought and its role in understanding his response to virtualization. As he says, most candidly: “The great debate is between transcendent God and God-machine. We should be able to talk about this, but we can’t. It’s not politically correct. I can talk about it with Christians, but not with anyone else.”77 Here Virilio expresses his concern that technological development invariably leads to the creation of a machine from which a “god” emerges, to a world of artifice imbued with powers otherwise associated with a deity. This deus ex machina challenges what it means to be human since it bestows upon us powers once reserved for God or the gods and impels us to make judgments of godlike proportions. Also challenged is the notion of a transcendent deity, since the impulse to believe in such an otherworldly power abates as the powers of humankind take on supernatural dimensions. Virilio’s trepidation regarding the replacement of a transcendent God with the God machine reflects upon his understanding of the proper relationship between the physical and metaphysical realms. As he sees it, they are interrelated but ultimately distinct: “The sensible and the supra-sensible are not mutually exclusive, but they do not merge either.”78 The God-machine is thus an abrogation of the dualism that underlies Virilio’s thinking, as informed by his Christian sensibility. The attempt, with virtuality, to immanentize the supra-sensible, to embody the bodiless, and in the process to bestow upon humankind the powers of the invisible, is for Virilio to tread where humans have no right to tread. The intensity with which Virilio resists the advances of technology can be understood only in the context of his religious beliefs. Virtualization for him is indeed heretical in its radical rejection of created nature, and like earlier efforts to bring Heaven down to Earth, he believes that the attempt to lead a life of God-like powers will lead to disaster. Virilio reveres the real world that is created nature for the simple reason that this world is God’s creation, and that God’s presence resides within it. He admits as much in his claim that what drew him to Christianity is “Incarnation, not Resurrection.”79 If, then, Virilio is a self-admitted materialist, it is only because matter for him is sanctified by God’s presence. His valorization of the human body, as the epicenter of materiality, likewise must be understood in the context of the body’s perceived holiness. It is the sanctity of the body which Virilio defends against its spiritizing by technologies of proximity and its colonization by microtechnologies. It is the sanctity of the body which accounts as well for his sympathetic stance toward phenomenology. It makes little sense to claim as some commentators have that Virilio’s thought has been compromised by his religious beliefs.80 On the contrary, his

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spiritual faith is constitutive of his stance toward technology and virtualization. It is as indefensible to suggest Virilio’s thinking has been contaminated by religious precepts as to suggest the same of Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on law, or to impugn the integrity of Marx’s notion of dialectical materialism on the grounds that he was an atheist. It is simply impossible to disentangle Virilio the critic from Virilio the believer, and any attempt to isolate his thought from its religious context would severely misrepresent it. It is for this reason that his treatment of the reality problematic must be seen in the context of his religiously informed skepticism toward human self-transcendence through technology. What he resists is not technology proper, but the propensity for us to confer upon technology a salvific function. Virilio, in other words, resists the mythologizing of technology, and he does so because it is precisely by idealizing technology that we come to unthinkingly embrace it. Virilio makes it clear there is a difference between demythologizing technology and rejecting it altogether. No Luddite, neither is he a technophile: “I am definitely not against progress,” he says, but adds that “it would be unforgivable to allow ourselves to be deceived by the kind of utopia which insinuates that technology will ultimately bring about happiness and a greater sense of humanity.”81 While Virilio is not being disingenuous in asserting his support of progress and technology, one could only imagine the kind of world we would inhabit if his critical sensibilities informed the development of technology. Clearly, in such a scenario, the advance of technology would be confined within the parameters imposed upon us as corporeal beings dwelling in a corporeal world. This tempering of progress, in turn, would presuppose the reinvigoration of politics in that decisions regarding what is appropriate and inappropriate development would have to be formulated and acted upon. The problem with this response is twofold. First, by Virilio’s own account modern science and technology are devoted precisely to escaping the limitations placed upon us as corporeal beings: Abstraction from the real is their very raison d’etre. Second, the political will needed to offset science and technology’s “natural” course of development is largely absent. The very need to demythologize modern technoscience speaks to politics’ failure to critically assess the ends which technoscience ought to serve and to implement them. Politics, in other words, has been colonized by technoscience. In an attempt to resolve apparent inconsistencies in Virilio’s solution to the problem of technology, we first have to examine his aforementioned assertion concerning progress. How can Virilio claim not to be against technology and progress when he so adamantly rejects what he takes to be their proper end—disincarnation? One possible response is to suggest his critique extends only to modern science and technology, thus opening up the possibility of accepting other forms of intellectualizing and interacting with the world. It

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stretches credulity to believe that Virilio is resolutely anti-modern, however. It is more likely he overstates his antipathy toward modern science and technology as a way to provide a more incisive critique of their effects. I say this because Virilio must realize that, at some basic level, the cause already has been lost. Short of the improbability of returning to a technological Stone Age, or adopting a non-Western world view more amenable to the ethos of embodiment, he knows we moderns are fated to live in a condition of relative disembodiment. This much is obvious if or no other reason than the fact, as previously discussed, that the reality Virilio defends against a looming virtual reality is already an abstracted reality. What is at stake, then, is not a choice between two qualitatively distinct realities, between a Real and an Unreal reality, but choosing whether or not to resist the increasing de-realization of reality. Virilio, the “war baby,” frequently describes his function as a critic in the language of resistance: “The thing about collaborators is that you don’t know you are one, whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. To be in the resistance, you choose to be in it.” He goes to say, with explicit reference to World War II, that “the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, the official Militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.”82 There is no better insight into Virilio’s self-understanding as an intellectual than the admission he is a resistance fighter. In fact, war and resistance serve as perfect metaphors for describing Virilio’s account of the reality problematic. As he sees it, a centuries-old war has been waged to eradicate to reality, over which time the forces loyal to reality have steadily lost ground to those which seek its extermination. Successive generations have collaborated with the war effort, seeking its advantages while inured to its progression. At present, we find ourselves in what appears to be the final stages of the defeat of reality, with the lay public, distracted by the apparent blessings of progress, blindly supporting the prevailing side. Amongst the supportive masses, however, a few latter-day gadflies make their presence known by trying to awaken the public, through speech, to their plight as subjects of a new regime of dubious merit. Their ultimate wish is to translate word into deed by resisting the occupying forces of virtuality and reclaiming reality. This show of resistance would constitute for them the ultimate political act in the age of virtual reality. Virilio sees himself as mounting precisely this kind of resistance campaign. He has engaged himself in a kind of holy war against what appears to be the overwhelming forces of desacralization. If, he believes, the substance or materiality of the world is sacred, then it is his duty to resist those forces which attempt to profane the holy. Since modern science and technology are for him the profane forces of our time, they must be the target of resistance.

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Virilio, a thinker of faith, resists spiritization because, as previously noted, for him Christianity’s greatest teaching is Incarnation, or the presence of spirit in the world. In transcending the limits of the space-world, spiritization renounces Incarnation: In becoming spirit-beings, we enter the God-machine and further fall from the embrace of our Creator. For Virilio, the stakes involved in such an enterprise could not be higher. ENDNOTES Note: *indicates that the work is only available in electronic form. 1. Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17. 2. Redhead, Paul Virilio, 18. 3. Ibid., 25–26. 4. This unreferenced quotation is taken from Steve Redhead’s Paul Virilio, 21. 5. This unreferenced quotation is cited from Steve Redhead’s Paul Virilio, 13. 6. Ibid., 123. 7. See Star Culture, ed. M. Sanders and J. Hack (London: Phaidon, 2000), 139. 8. Paul Virilio, Pure War, 2nd edition, trans. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e) 1997), 44. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. R. Brain, R.W. Flint, et al. (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 21. 11. Gino Severini, “The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism—Futurist Manifesto 1913,” in Futurist Manifestos, 125. 12. Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Painting and Sculpture (extracts) 1914,” in Futurist Manifestos, 180. 13. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “Futurist Photodynamism 1911,” in Futurist Manifestos, 44. 14. References to purity and hygiene abound in Futurist manifestos, and are too numerous to catalog here. It will suffice for our purposes to refer to one such reference in F. T. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism.” It reads: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.” (Futurist Manifestos, 22) 15. Both the representation of nudes and landscapes in the classical tradition were regarded as formulaic and tired genres to be totally jettisoned in favor of the dynamism of Futurist art. Again, references in support of such a view are manifold in Futurist literature. The “Manifesto of Futurist Painters, 1910” presents perhaps the most cogent and concise statement on the Futurists’ relationship to the art of the Academy. (See Futurist Manifestos, 24–27.) 16. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), 134.

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17. Ibid., 120. 18. Ibid., 139. 19. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 7. For Merleau-Ponty, the same is true of consciousness in general, which has as its template the act of vision. Consciousness, he says, “is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can.’” See Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1962), 137. 20. See Paul Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” in Ctheory: Theory, Technology and Culture, eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Vol. 18, no. 3, August 1995. Elsewhere Virilio refers to the means through which reality is perceived as a “real-space perspective.” See Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 151. 21. See Paul Virilio, “The Third Interval: A Critical Transition,” in Rethinking Technologies, ed. V. A. Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University Press, 1993), 3–12. 22. Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002), 16. 23. Because the telecommunications revolution abolishes the “tyranny of distance,” rendering our location in geographic space of no consequence to our acting selves, our location in time looms all important. Not having to be there in a physicalistic or spatial sense in order to “be there” virtually, we desire being there temporally—being there as it happens, in “real time.” As Virilio observes in Open Sky: “The real-time interface . . . replaces the interval that once constituted and organized the history and geography of human societies, winding up in a true culture of the paradox in which everything arrives not only without needing physically to move from one place to another but, more particularly, without having to leave” (19). 24. In apparent agreement with Virilio, Baudrillard argues “real time” does not exist, at least not within the confines of real space. He says the relative (because finite) speed of light ensures all things exist “only in a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an inescapable distance from each other.” Baudrillard substantiates his claim by referring to the impossibility of knowing whether or not the star a person spots in the night sky exists “right now,” in the precise moment the person sees it. The argument here is that because the being of the star is identical with its appearance, we cannot speak meaningfully of being outside appearance, or outside the time of its appearance which is the present moment. He concludes from this that the distances between the perceiver and the perceived ensure they are neither “truly present to each other” nor “‘real’ for each other.” If the logic of his argument is accepted, Baudrillard would have to draw from it a conclusion he apparently does not. He would have to concede that real time is as impossible in virtual reality as it is in the real world, since the speed with which information is electronically transmitted in cyberspace and emitted in the form of pixellated light is no less finite than the rate at which light is propagated through real space. In both instances perception is mediated by a time interval. Of course, in a technical sense Baudrillard’s observations are correct. We are never temporally present with what it is we perceive (real or virtual) because there is always a temporal or distance between the object and our

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perception of it. This is especially evident when we turn our gaze upward toward the stars, where the time frame of the viewer and the viewed are widely removed from one other. However, it is one thing to point to the consequences for time perception of the finiteness of light’s speed within a cosmic context, and quite another to do so within a more localized reference frame. Clearly, while the effects of light’s finite speed are felt uniformly throughout the cosmos, both between widely separated reference frames and within more localized ones, the meaningfulness of its effects in the latter case must be questioned. It has to be called into question because within a planetary scale of the order that exists on Earth, time-light (or the time light takes to travel from one place to another) is durationless for all experiential purposes: It is a phenomenological nullity. Baudrillard’s analysis is thus conveniently incomplete. When it is to his advantage to depict the real as a material illusion, he trumpets the empirical fact that things exist in an “unutterable disorder of time-scales.” However, what Baudrillard conveniently fails to add is that even within the reference frame that most of us live our lives, this disorder of time-scales plays itself out. By neglecting to incorporate the importance of context into his analysis of light, time, and relativity, he effectively reifies the notion of the time interval. See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996), 52. 25. Virilio, Ground Zero, 16. 26. See “Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio.”* 27. Contra Baudrillard, Virilio explains in “Cyberwar, God and Television”*: “We are entering a world where there won’t be one but two realities. . . . This is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality into two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation.” In another published interview, Virilio adds, “reality never vanishes. It constantly changes. Reality is the outcome of a predetermined epoch, science, or technique. Reality must be reinvented, always. To me, it is not the simulation of reality that makes the difference, it is the replacement of a predetermined reality by another predetermined reality.” See “The Silence of the Lambs: Paul Virilio in Conversation,” with Carlos Oliveira, in Ctheory, vol. 19, no. 1–2, 1996. The interview is also available electronically under the same title. 28. In Nietzsche’s words: “Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Three, section 109, “Let us Beware.” The quotation above is from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 168. 29. The most concise and illuminating accounts of Virilio’s thoughts on time and the real space perspective are found in the interviews, “Global Algorithm 1.7: The Silence of the Lambs: Paul Virilio in Conversation,” and “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” See also Virilio, The Art of the Motor, 106–107; and Virilio, “The Third Interval,” 3–12. 30. Virilio, Open Sky, 38. 31. References to “time-light” can be found on pages 5, 6, 14, 27, 28, 123, 125, 135, and 141 of Virilio’s Open Sky.

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32. Ibid., 13. 33. Ibid., 10, 13. 34. Virilio, Ground Zero, p. 51 (author’s emphasis). 35. Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Continuum, 2003), 72. 36. Ibid., 47. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. Ibid., 48. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. See footnote # 50 in Chapter Two. 41. Ibid., 40. 42. Quoted from Virilio’s Art and Fear, 37. 43. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 138. 44. Ibid., 138 (author’s emphasis). 45. This particular reflection of Alan Bean on his lunar experience was retrieved from “Apollo Lunar Surface Journal,”* ed. Eric M. Jones. 46. Virilio, Open Sky, 139 (author’s emphasis). 47. Paul Virilio, Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 18. Broaching the same subject in The Vision Machine, Virilio says the following: “Today, the strategic value of speed’s ‘no-place’ has definitely outstripped the value of place. With the instantaneous ubiquity of teletopology, the immediate face-to-face of all refractory surfaces, the bringing into visual contact of all localities, the long wandering of the gaze is at an end.” (31) 48. “Silence of the Lambs,” Ctheory.net, Virilio interview. 49. Virilio, Ground Zero, 12–13. 50. Ibid., 12. 51. “Silence of the Lambs,” Ctheory.net, Virilio interview. 52. Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!,” Ctheory.net. 53. “Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space,” with John Armitage, Ctheory.net, 2000. 54. Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!,” Ctheory.net 55. Virilio, Ground Zero, 50. 56. Ibid., 51. 57. Paul Virilio, The Politics of the Very Worst, ed. J. Der Derian (New York: Semiotext(e), 1999), 87. 58. Ibid., 17 (author’s emphasis). 59. Paul Virilio, Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2000), 109. 60. Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, 51–52. 61. Ibid., 48. 62. Ibid., 52. 63. See Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ulmer, “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms,”* MIT Media Lab: Tangible Media Group, 1997.

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64. The full passage, from which this comment is taken, reads: “Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can’t use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her.” From “Interview with Brian Eno,” Wired Magazine, May, 1995. 65. The Tangible Media Groups’ website masthead substantiates this view. It reads: “We live between two worlds: our physical environment and digital space. The Tangible Media Group at the MIT Lab focuses on the seamless couplings between physicality and virtuality.” 66. One of the more dramatic illustrations of advancement in haptic technology is CNN’s “Magic Wall,” a large multipoint interactive touch-screen invented by Jefferson Han, founder of Perceptive Pixel. 67. Futurist Manifestos, 22. 68. Milan Kundera speaks extensively on this theme in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.) 69. Virilio, Pure War, 185. 70. Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, 26. 71. Virilio, “Cyberwar, God and Television.” 72. Virilio, Ground Zero, 8. 73. Ibid., 38. 74. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 22. 75. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 152. 76. See Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millenium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. See also Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1987. 77. Virilio, Pure War, 182. 78. Virilio, Ground Zero, 9. 79. Virilio, “Cyberwar, God and Television.” 80. See Redhead’s Paul Virilio, 161. 81. Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, 79. 82. Virilio, Pure War, 183.

Chapter 4

The Fate of the Real: Lyotard

Nature is a nanometer-scale factory, and we are trying to mimic what nature is doing. —Anatoli Melechko

The depth of Virilio’s anxiety over the de-realization of reality, which need hardly be overstated, pales in comparison to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concern for the fate of humanity. Lyotard, indeed, can lay claim to being the all-time reality worrywart. Yet it is not reality per se that is the object of his concern, for reality, in Lyotard’s estimation, is synonymous with the cosmos, and the cosmos will endure long after our dying Sun renders the Earth uninhabitable. Rather, his anxiety is directed toward the fate of humankind within the context of a dynamic and developing universe. Since Lyotard perceives reality as fluid and not fixed, human reality, a subset of reality proper, is itself fluid. Our humanity, like the present state of our planet, is not therefore a given for all time. There is, as a result, no guarantee that the qualities and conditions we presently associate with being human will persist indefinitely into the future. More than this, Lyotard seriously entertains the idea that the unfolding cosmological order is actually hostile to humanity, and that if we are to survive, it may be in a form we now think of as inhuman. Lyotard’s response to the potential dehumanization of humanity is, characteristically, equivocal, and will be a topic of discussion later in the chapter. His ambivalence notwithstanding, Lyotard shares with Virilio a concern over the fate of humankind. As with Virilio, this anxiety results from his fear that technology possess an inner dynamic which is evolving in a manner that compromises what it means to be human. But Lyotard’s assessment of the situation is even bleaker than Virilio’s because he situates the logic of technological 109

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development within a more encompassing order of cosmological development. Resisting technological development for Lyotard is therefore more than merely opposing the technoscientific drive toward dehumanization, as if this were not a sufficient challenge: It involves resisting the dynamic order of the cosmos, of which technoscience is just an expression particular to humanity as its present stage of development. Given the scope of the challenge, the politics of resistance Lyotard champions borders on the near futile. It should be noted, at the outset, that Lyotard is not primarily known for his interest in questions specifically pertaining the fate of reality, human or not. Perhaps fittingly, it was only toward the end of his life, with the publication in 1991 of The Inhuman, that he was drawn explicitly to issues related to the “end” of humanity, in the double sense of the term. For most of his academic career, Lyotard advanced a critique of the universal categories of reason and the subject (through which the world is rationally represented), a critique which emerged from his engagement with many of the dominant intellectual trends of the mid- to late twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism. As with many of his generation, the Second World War politicized Lyotard’s thought, turning him away from the speculative philosophical pursuits of his youth and toward more engaged forms of intellectualizing. Early in his teaching career, in French-occupied East Algeria, Lyotard joined the revolutionary organization Socialisme ou Barbarie (and later, Pouvoir Ouvrier) and devoted the next fifteen years of his life to the cause of socialist revolution. Then, typical of many of his ilk, he abruptly quit all formal associations with the political left (while remaining staunchly anti-capitalist, it should be added), and returned to the study of philosophy. Almost all of his publications appeared after his break with Marxism in 1966, and those works for which he has gained the widest recognition, since the publication of The Postmodern Condition in 1979. The overriding theme in Lyotard’s writings over the decades is that reality consists of singular events that cannot, without injustice, be rationally harmonized so as to create ideational representations of a more encompassing totality. Reality, in short, exceeds rational representation. It is Lyotard’s disavowal of the modernist conceit regarding reason’s capacity to generate these totalizing theories, or “master discourses,” that identifies him with postmodernism and the associated notion of difference. With the bulk of critical commentary on Lyotard continuing to concern itself with an analysis of concepts such as the figural, the differend, or the event, the perception of him as a theorist of the incommensurable is repeatedly reinforced.1 While this emphasis is not misplaced, I intend to argue that his interest in dissension cannot be properly understood without giving full consideration to what he calls “the

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metaphysics of development,” and its implications for the reality problematic In turn, understanding Lyotard’s account of the metaphysics of development requires coming to terms with the twofold loss of the real that constitutes a major part of this developmental process. Taken together, these notions lead him to conclude, more boldly than either Baudrillard or Virilio, that reality as we presently know it is being left behind. Although Lyotard equivocates with regard to the ultimate success of this venture, he cannot disregard what he takes to be the cosmic forces driving humans off the planet.

WITHDRAWAL OF THE REAL: THE TWO WAVES We have seen that reality is problematic for Derrida because it does not exist independent of the productive work of consciousness. Likewise, Baudrillard questions reality with his claim that reality does not exist independent of its simulations. Virilio stands alone in asserting the continued existence of an external reality, only to question its viability in the virtual age. Lyotard broaches the subject from an angle substantially different than either Derrida, Baudrillard, or Virilio. At the risk of over generalizing, it could be said that whereas Derrida’s approach to the reality problematic is primarily epistemological, and Baudrillard and Virilio’s sociological, Lyotard’s analysis has a particularly ontological cast. For him, the fate of reality issues from nothing less than the order of things. It has been suggested that Lyotard sees humanity as being propelled by a cosmological impulse whose end is humanity’s transcendence. If his assessment proves correct, then what presently counts as constituting a “real” human being will one day be eclipsed by a new reality. Although the specifics of this new reality are impossible to predict with accuracy, the arc of technological development points in the general direction toward which humanity is heading. Lyotard is in basic agreement with Virilio that modern science and technology are making us progressively less dependent on the conditions of the Earth, or on “reality,” broadly defined. Accordingly, whatever the future holds, it appears humanity is fated to progressively disassociate itself from the substance of the world, from both its own bodily substance and the substance of the Earth itself. Along with Virilio, Lyotard understands that the disincarnating process unleashed by the technological advances of the twentieth century originated with the birth of modernity, in realms not directly associated with either science or technology. Virilio, as noted, traced the de-realization process back to the invention of linear perspective, to a new form of aesthetic perception devised by Renaissance artists. Lyotard also traces the process of de-realization back

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to the emergence of a new form of perception, only in this case to a change in perception regarding mind, nature, and their interrelation. The first wave of de-realization occurs with the emergence of a new world view. Despite his stated aversion to conceiving notions like modernity in periodizing terms, Lyotard claims that what typifies the modern era is both a “shattering of belief” and the related “discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality.”2 He identifies the modern world view with Nietzschean nihilism, which in turn he sees as a modulation of the earlier Kantian notion of the sublime. Lyotard also links the modernist sentiment with the later Heideggerian notion of the retreat, or default, of Being.3 In order to better understand Lyotard’s twinning of modernity with a form of irreality, let us first briefly consider one of the parallel notions to which he refers—Heidegger’s conception of the retreat of Being. In Nietzsche, Heidegger maintains that the “essential unfolding of nihilism is the default of Being as such.”4 By this he means that the movement of history traces a progressive withdrawal of Being and, concomitantly, a growing preoccupation with things (beings) and their mastery. Heidegger argues that this progression has culminated in an age of planetary technology, where the withdrawal of Being manifests itself in our collective effort to master both the human and nonhuman orders. As a consequence, it is the West’s fate that Being qua beingness, to the extent that it can appear at all, appears to us only as an absence. And so for Heidegger the essence of what is closest to us, and therefore most meaningful, is destined not to appear “in the midst of the throng of beings [things],” but as no-thing, as nothingness.5 We can conclude by saying that for Heidegger meaning qua Being is no longer experienced as present “in” the phenomenal world. Rather, if and when it appears, it appears in the form of an abstraction, a concept, a nothingness. Generalizing Heidegger’s commentary on the withdrawal of Being, it could be said that certain types of ideas are suprasensible in that they do not find a “home” in the sensory world. They are the kinds of ideas not presentable in the sensible or real world. While these ideas are real insofar as they are conceivable, their conception necessarily remains abstracted or removed from phenomenal reality. To conclude, certain ideas are conceivable yet not directly presentable. Along with Kant, Lyotard refers to the sentiment evoked by the experience of an unpresentable idea as “sublime.” Such an conception, he says, is one “which no presentation is possible,” such as the idea of the infinitely great or powerful.6 The experience of the sublime therefore can be said to rest on a disjunction between nature and mind, or, in the Kantian terminology Lyotard frequently employs, between the imagination (the faculty of presentation) and understanding (the faculty of concepts).7 Kant introduced the notion of the sublime to point to the limitations of the faculty of presentation. As he says in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the sublime

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is the “capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense.”8 This observation prompts Lyotard to add, in support of the above, that with the experience of the sublime the mind “feels only itself,” and reaches in the process its final destination—freedom.9 When Lyotard argues in Kantian fashion that with the experience of the sublime the mind is free, he is saying something quite specific. The mind is free, or, more accurately, free from nature, in the sense that “nature stops addressing itself to us in [the] language of forms.”10 Under the “aesthetic of the Beautiful,” the mind was tethered to reality qua nature to the extent that the contents of perception were delimited or given form by the understanding, a faculty which at this juncture pervades the imagination. With the aesthetic of the Beautiful the imagination necessarily presents sensory data as preformed or preconceptualized, and consequently as inherently meaningful. This prompts Lyotard to remark that under the reign of this particular aesthetic, nature addressed itself to us in so many “visual or sound ‘landscapes’.”11 The upshot of Kant and Lyotard’s analysis of the premodern sensibility is that there was a time when no idea was not imaginatively presentable and, conversely, no perceptual reality not also immediately intelligible. The advent of modernity and the accompanying aesthetic of the sublime is marked by the decline of the form-giving capacity of the imagination. This severing of the link that once bound mind (the conceivable) to nature (the presentable) signals the freeing of mind from nature, or, equally, the withdrawal of nature from mind. This leads Lyotard to conclude that “modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real.”12 Reality has withdrawn in the sense that we can no longer procure from nature, or our perceptual experiences, instances or objects which correspond to our conceptualizations. Thus nature in modernity is rendered mute: It no longer speaks to us in a way that might instantiate our understanding. Reality becomes problematic in the modern era because nature no longer speaks to us directly in the language of forms. More simply, to be a modern for Lyotard is to perceive the world as devoid of inherent meaning. It is this disjunction between mind and nature that Weber intended to convey with his description of the modern world as disenchanted. In contrast to magical societies and the magical world view, where reality presents itself as embodying spiritual powers whose machinations are decipherable if not controllable, the withdrawal of spirit from the world today means that reality presents itself as empty of signification—as mere meaningless “matter.” Alienation from reality is thus the defining characteristic of the modern age. Indeed, for Lyotard, the shattering of belief in the reality of reality is of such lasting impact that what follows modernity (i.e., postmodernity) is necessarily situated within the conceptual space opened up by a vacated real-

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ity. It is important to note at this point that Lyotard believes neither modernism nor postmodernism addresses the problem of the withdrawal of reality in a way that would seek its retrieval. Like Heidegger, he invokes the notion of fate in his portrayal of humanity’s alienation from reality in modernity. And like Heidegger he argues that anything other than a full embrace of our alienated condition, which for Lyotard entails embracing reality’s silence, or otherness, is a less than authentic response to the spirit of our age. Against this backdrop, Lyotard distinguishes between two general kinds of response to the modern retreat of reality, which denote two equally general aesthetic sensibilities—the modern and the postmodern. It bears repeating at this juncture that both types of response seek a common goal, that is, to somehow convey that which cannot simply be made present, the ineffable sublime. Lyotard notes that it is in the nature of aesthetic expression within the visual arts that any attempt to present materially the ineffable invariably needs recourse to allusion to complete its task.13 It is because the sublime is precisely that which forever exceeds presentation that it only can be intimated in an artwork, or presented “negatively,” as he prefers to say.14 The distinction between these types of response is slight but nonetheless significant, in Lyotard’s opinion. The line separating them is fine because it is grounded more on the motivating psychology prompting these responses than in their actual outcomes. As observed, both types of response seek to allude to the sublime. One form of allusive presentation, the modern aesthetic, Lyotard deems to be “nostalgic” or “melancholic” because the attempt to present the unpresentable is performed out of a sense of regret for the lost unity of mind and nature. The romanticism inherent in this mode of presentation tends to produce texts or artworks whose form exhibits a “recognizable consistency” that imparts “solace” and “pleasure” to their viewers.15 Lyotard refuses to endorse the modernist mode of presentation because of its disingenuousness, for the modern aesthetic acknowledges the lost unity of mind and nature only to blunt and ultimately deny the shock of this recognition. The postmodern aesthetic follows a more single-minded and austere path. Eschewing romanticism, the preferable postmodern response locates the sublime not “at a great distance, as a lost origin or end,” but in the very materiality of an artwork.16 It is thus not the “idea” of the sublime that the postmodern aesthetic is concerned with, but with the search for new ways to present the sublime in the work itself. Accordingly, the task of postmodern art for Lyotard is to capture the presence of the “immanent sublime,”17 not for the purpose of enjoying its presentation, but as a way of conveying a stronger sense of the unpresentable.

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So far our consideration of the reality problematic has been limited to Lyotard’s thoughts on what constitutes modernity as a world view, and the various reactions to this state of affairs within the plastic arts. We have seen that he valorizes those kinds of aesthetic statements which boldly underscore the disjunction between mind and nature, a cleavage he claims defines who we are as moderns. Ironically, then, to be a true modern for Lyotard requires the adoption of a postmodern stance. Only by showing up the otherness of reality can one be true to reality. In contrast, all attempts to paper over the discrepancy between mind and reality signal a betrayal of our fate as moderns. It is Lyotard’s general repudiation of attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, to close the gap separating mind and reality, that leads him to reject all forms of universal conceptualizing, as they may pertain to matters relating to the arts, philosophy, justice, or politics. We have seen that, for Lyotard, the modern world view is typified by a loss of faith in the idea of reality. Reality is problematic because we no longer live in a time where reality reveals itself as inherently meaningful: We live, to repeat, in an age of the withdrawal of the real. But the issue is more complex than this, for Lyotard detects a second wave of withdrawal occurring within the first. He argues that within the parameters of the modern world view, where the idea of reality has lost its currency, reality proper is in the process of withdrawing. Nowhere does Lyotard better express what is at stake in this second wave of withdrawal than in the article, “Can Thought go on without a Body?”, published in a collection of essays entitled The Inhuman. Presented as a transcription of an address given at a graduate seminar, we find Lyotard challenging his audience to consider the consequences for philosophy of humankind’s ultimate fate, that being the eventual annihilation of our planetary home with the Sun’s “heat death.” He suggests that the threat of this very real demise, some four billion years off, ought to make us reconsider the standard philosophical commitment to the disembodied pursuit of the “life of the mind.” For the life of the mind issues from consciousness of our mortality, and solar death, he says, will precipitate “the death of death as the life of the mind.”18 Given the prospect of the eventual death of the possibility of death, and hence the death of thinking as well, Lyotard asserts that philosophical thought at present carries with it a certain futility, amounting to no more than a momentary “smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos.”19 Lyotard’s claim that the prospect of solar death has repercussions for philosophical thinking today appears sufficiently bizarre that the question of interpretation immediately is raised. How is one to read a seemingly fantastic claim asserting that a future event, unimaginably distant in time, ought to give us pause for consideration? First, Lyotard’s warning regarding the end

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of humanity and of thinking billions of years from now can be read as satire. His true intention, perhaps, is to show that humanity has an almost infinite amount of time remaining on the planet, and that the tension between things and thought comprises for practical purposes a permanent feature of life which, if we cannot embrace, then at least we need not seek to resolve posthaste. Indirectly, then, Lyotard’s warning could be interpreted as a critique of the absurd urgency with which humanity is working to save the life of the mind from a doomed planet.20 Alternately, Lyotard’s claim can be approached as a serious joke, of the sort previously linked to Baudrillard’s reading of the reality problematic. The comical aspect of Lyotard’s assertion is the preposterous notion that we should permit our present-day thinking to be swayed by the prospect of humanity’s demise in the unimaginably distant future. If we are to take seriously the claim that we ought to let events of this sort influence our thinking about thinking, then why not import into the discussion the mother of all heat deaths, the heat death of the universe? Why not conclude that thinking is doomed even if we are fortunate enough to outlive the death of the planet? After all, what does an few extra billion (or trillion, for that matter) years of thinking amount to in the face of the eventual decay of all matter some 10100 years from now, when all that remains will be a diffuse sea of radiation and subatomic particles? Clearly, if Lyotard’s argument is to hold any meaning, it must be approached in the spirit of a serious joke. It must be assumed, in other words, that he incorporates the idea of solar death into his reflections about the life of the mind to accent a deeper point. The deeper point in question is simply the ultimate absurdity of human existence, a datum of self-consciousness he believes still remains largely unthought. Lyotard chides that, for all their skepticism, professional thinkers are believers in one important way. Unlike their avant-garde (or postmodern) counterparts in the arts, he tells us, they still believe at some fundamental level in the “complicity of things and thought,” in reality as a meaningful order. And having been “seduced and deceived” by a faith in reality, they continue to wrongly subscribe to the underlying purposefulness of all things.21 Thus the surface skepticism that pervades the contemporary intellectual scene rests for Lyotard on a more primal faith in the congruence of mind and worldly things. Of the two, the latter interpretation is the more fitting because it better captures Lyotard’s intention in discussing the mind-body conundrum. The satirical interpretation focuses almost exclusively on the time gap separating the present from the death of the Sun, asserting that “the end” is sufficiently distant that it ought not unduly affect present concerns related to thinking. This reading downplays Lyotard’s primary concern, which is the incongruence between mind and matter. More importantly, this reading overlooks the fact that this incongruence is not a condition waiting to befall humankind at

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some prescribed future date, but constitutes the order of things as it relates to self-conscious human existence. Solar death highlights the discrepancy between mind and matter as an abiding ontological condition. One of Lyotard’s primary objectives in writing The Inhuman is to underscore that modernity signals the end of reality conceived as a meaningful order. It is for this reason, he contends, in what amounts to a recapitulation of Weber’s notion of disenchantment, that the sensible world is perceived as ultimately indifferent to our interests and concerns.22 It is for this same reason that we realize our well-being as a species is inconsequential in relation to the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. Indeed, a central part of what it means to be a modern is to realize that humanity is not exempt in any fundamental sense from the larger order of things, whose operation we now acknowledge is not incompatible with the accidental and the unpredictable. This awareness extends to our understanding of the origin of human species itself, which evolutionary theory has informed us is not the product of some preordained natural design, but the outcome of a matrix of forces, some of which are contingent and some not.23 In this context, maintaining an awareness of the inevitability of solar death serves to highlight the divorce of matter from mind: It reinforces the ultimate indifference of the material “hardware”—that is, both the human body and planet Earth—toward the “software” in its midst. We have seen that Lyotard’s abiding interest in the visual arts is fueled by his belief that art has a special capacity to bring us face to face with the indifference of matter, and with its attendant indeterminacy or contingency. The sublime is but another name for matter as indeterminate being.24 To be attuned to the sublime is to be cognizant of the experiential truth that the world presents to us, in its sheer incalculable beingness, before we lend it conceptual form. This is why Lyotard says the sublime (qua matter) simply “happens.” The sublime experience is a happening that dwells in the space between thing and meaning, between being and sensibility. Lyotard concludes from this that postmodern art, to the extent it refuses to lend meaning to itself and simply is, in the here and now, does not re-present nature but instead “creates a world apart” by presenting the ontological rift between mind and matter.25 Paradoxically, then, the withdrawal of reality that Lyotard associates with modernity sets up the possibility for a greater awareness of the sheer givenness of things. Without this disjunction between mind and matter, the radical otherness of matter could not be a datum of consciousness. Be this as it may, Lyotard is confronted with a challenge of enormous proportions. The challenge pertains to the fact that the entire thrust of societal evolution works against our capacity as human beings to remain open to the unharmonizable otherness of things—to the sublime. As we have seen, the remaking of reality through technology is directed toward precisely the

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opposite end, toward homogenizing what is heterogeneous, or naturalizing what is alien. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the cocooning of humanity in a world of its own making makes it increasingly unlikely that we will encounter anything in the world around us “that is not manmade and hence is not . . . [ourselves] in a different guise.”26 What makes matters worse, in reconciling ourselves with the world we are not, as Lyotard sees it, simply acting on what we have deemed to be our interests as a species. Our technological advance is anything but the expression of human free will. Quite the contrary, Lyotard sees our progress as a species as being guided by a more encompassing cosmological imperative over which we are largely powerless. In holding such a view, Lyotard follows a long line of theorists—including Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Jacques Ellul, and Niklas Luhmann—for whom societal development can be best explained from a systems theory perspective. Setting aside for the moment Lyotard’s own somewhat ambivalent reception of this approach, it is clear that he is fascinated with the modern scientific account of the phenomenon of biological life and its applicability to human beings and their social arrangements. Systems theory takes all living organisms to be entities immersed in, and in dialogue with, ambient environments. Everything from singled-celled protozoa to the orderings of multi-million celled organisms (i.e., human societies) operates in conformity with a set of functional variables that enable them to thrive within their respective locales.27 Given this commonality between living things, or, more interestingly, between a thinking humanity and the rest of animate nature, what differentiates human beings from lower forms of biological life is the complexity of their mechanisms for reading, storing, and responding to environmental information.28 It follows that human beings differ meaningfully from lower life forms, such as plants, for instance, only to the extent humans have at their disposal a more diverse array of means for responding to the demands placed upon them by their environment, a capacity that derives in turn from a more differentiated capacity to process and store information. Thus from the systems theory perspective, humans are richer, more complex, “processing units” than other forms of terrestrial life. The factors that contribute to making human beings the most complex processing machines on the planet are numerous and need not unduly concern us here. However, it is important to recognize the impact of what for Lyotard is a particularly auspicious contributing factor to human complexity. While he is far from alone in placing special significance on language and its central role in defining what it means to be human, language is especially significant for Lyotard because the systems theory perspective he adopts is grounded in the understanding that organic life is essentially a dialogic phenomenon. Living beings are taken to be uniquely “alive” in that they are in

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constant communication both with themselves (as compound entities) and their external environments. As such, all life forms employ “language” (i.e., genetic, biochemical, etc.) as a means of sending and receiving messages that contribute to both their growth and maintenance. Therefore, unlike inanimate objects, whose muteness consigns them to merely suffering the effects of external forces (as, for example, a stone can be said to suffer the effects of erosion), living things possess the extraordinary power not only to respond to environmental inputs but to initiate action as well. It is for this reason that living beings, in contradistinction to other types of entities, have been defined variously as self-generating, endogenetic, or self-steering. Given his systems theory bias, Lyotard takes human language to be a highly differentiated “symbolic” medium that extends our means of absorbing information about the world. In this sense, language is just another type of feedback mechanism whose end is increasing the complexity of the dialogue between self and other, or between system and environment. But unlike other dialogic media, language has the unique property of enabling its users to reflect on the way they process the information they gather. This “recursive” capacity of language, Lyotard says, is especially crucial in supplying the human species with a range of moves (vis-à-vis its environment) unmatched in less complex organisms.29

COMPLEXIFICATION AND THE INHUMAN The notion of complexity and its progression across time, a process Lyotard calls “complexification,” is central to his systems theory account of human development. In the introduction to The Inhuman, Lyotard explains the connection between complexification and development in the following manner: “[Development] obeys a simple principle; between two elements . . . whose relation is given at the start, it is always possible to introduce a third term which will assure a better regulation. . . . [T]he ‘richer’—i.e., itself mediated—the mediating term, the more numerous the possible modifications, the suppler the regulation.”30 Applying this understanding of development to a biological context, we can say that an organism develops, or complexifies, as it acquires a suppler and more varied array of mechanisms for selfregulation. This process is by definition negentropic since it counters the forces of entropy, which see to it that disorder increases within a closed system over time. Thus despite the “running down” of the universe in toto, there exists within the cosmos pockets of negentropic activity called organic life. Paradoxically, nature transgresses its own “natural” tendency towards increasing disorder when it comes to the phenomenon of life.

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Lyotard maintains that life on our planet is as firmly within the grip of negentropic forces as the universe as a whole is under the sway of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is the destiny of life on Earth to complexify by developing ever extending capacities for self-regulation and self-preservation. As stated, from the systems theory perspective, human beings have acquired a uniquely differentiated and adaptable set of mechanisms for self-regulation. We are arguably the most developed species on the planet. However, to speak of the state of human development in the past tense is not to suggest that human development has run its course. Life is development. In fact, the claim can be made that complexification, as it relates to the human species, has accelerated with the latest transformation of the social system, a transformation Lyotard equates with postmodernism. It need hardly be stated that postmodernism is a highly contentious term. It not only means many things to many of its proponents, its meaning often is equivocal even within the conceptual framework of a single theorist. Lyotard’s use of the term appears to suffer from this same sort of equivocation. In part the confusion arises from nuances of terminology: Concepts such as “postmodernity,” “postmodern,” and “postmodernism” need not refer to the same phenomenon. Some commentators have attempted to sort out this interpretive jumble by arguing that postmodernity, for one, refers to the time period after modernity in which the political, social, and economic systems engendered by Enlightenment reason have atrophied and been replaced by new societal configurations. Within this context, postmodernism then denotes the set of cultural and aesthetic styles that are congruent with the new societal ordering called postmodernity.31 Unfortunately, the confusion surrounding Lyotard’s understanding of the concept cannot be so neatly resolved. Looking at just one variant, “the postmodern,” we see he has employed it in reference to aesthetics (i.e., as depicting “the unpresentable in presentation itself”32), to changes in cultural horizons or world views (i.e., as occurs when grand narratives lose their credibility33), and to technological development (i.e., as manifested in complexification34). Given the confusion that arises from the multiplicity of meanings attending this and other related terms, I will refer to “the postmodern” or “postmodernism” in its aesthetic guise simply as postmodernism. Lyotard’s use of the term postmodernism as it pertains to technology and complexification I will relabel systemic postmodernism. Within the terms of this conceptual reconfiguration, complexification is aligned with systemic postmodernism.35 The primary carriers of the complexification process today are for Lyotard the interrelated enterprises of science and technology, or techno science. In his words: “technological-scientific development is . . . the present-day form of a process of negentropy or

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complexification that has been underway since the earth began its existence.”36 Recently, this technology-driven complexification process has been closely associated with the computer and computer-related innovations. Lyotard sees these technological advancements as augmenting, through the creation of more complex memory and retrieval systems, the preexisting powers of language to enrich mechanisms for self-regulation.37 Like all previous technologies, the postmodern variants extend a system’s capacity for self-management by increasing the store of information available to its participants. This cybernetic a priori is reinforced daily with the promulgation of statements equating the vast collections of digitized information now available to us with an increased ability to solve, both individually and collectively, the problems confronting contemporary society. Lyotard adds that while the introduction of digital technologies has vastly expanded our capacities in this regard, they perform a function in principle no different than numerous less advanced techniques, such as the invention of the written word. This being said, he goes on to claim that digital technologies differ in kind from their predecessors in one important respect: They make the programming and control of information “less dependent on the conditions of life on earth.”38 We now are in a position to discern the irresolvable tension that both haunts and animates Lyotard’s stance on the reality problematic. On the one hand, he claims we live in an irreal age where the rift between mind and reality calls for a new sensibility that is attuned to the sublime, to the here-and-now of the world as “matter” and “event.” Yet he also maintains that this same age (like every age before it) is driven by cosmic or “metaphysical”39 forces of development which are propelling us inexorably beyond the spatiotemporal limitations of earthly existence, beyond the here-and-now. This is why Lyotard can claim that if the loss of the transcendent in modernity left us only with space and time, then in postmodernity “we no longer even have space and time.”40 To better understand the interconnection between complexification and the withdrawal of the real (or the eclipse of the spatiotemporal world), it is necessary to return briefly to an analysis of systems theory. The systems theory proponent Jacques Monod once said the following regarding one of the building blocks of more complex forms of organic life: “It is not Hegelian at all, but thoroughly Cartesian: the cell is indeed a machine.”41 Unpacking the meaning of this statement requires that we first state the obvious: A cell is a self-contained entity, or monad, possessing a genetic code (i.e., DNA) that holds instructions for making both itself and precise copies of itself. A cell therefore can be seen as a “technology” in the specific sense that it is a mechanism of production. To be more precise, we would have to add that because the cell is a mechanism which produces itself, or reproduces, it is

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properly speaking an autogenetic machine. We could go even farther and call the cell a “Cartesian” production unit because its capacity for self-generation and self-replication is entirely immanent. The cell needs no “outside,” so to speak. Monod observes this is born out by the fact that the translation procedure within the cell is necessarily unilinear and irreversible: Genetic information is always conveyed from DNA (the “inside”) to the protein (the “outside”), and never the reverse.42 The significance of Monod’s observation is that Lyotard believes the evolution of the human social system is moving invariably toward the same kind of monadic or Cartesian state that defines the life process at the cellular level. The assertion is that as the social system progresses or complexifies, it too will have progressively less need for an “outside.” Development ensures the system’s maintenance becomes increasingly less dependent on any conditions beyond the system itself. Taken to its logical conclusion, the process of complexification will necessarily transfigure the social system in such a way as to render it virtually independent of all extra-systemic forces. It will produce a monad, a self-contained system, of such complexity that it will no longer require for its continuance the site from which it sprang. For Lyotard, this “techno-science monad” is literally a world, or reality, apart. What exactly are the conditions beyond the system which the monad one day will no longer have need? Precisely the conditions of space and time, the constitutive features of the “real world,” or earthly reality. Although we have not reached, and perhaps never will reach, the degree zero of total self-containment, Lyotard makes it clear that “simulating the conditions of life and thought” in such a way as to make thinking possible beyond our earthly context is the largely unspoken goal of current technical and scientific research.43 It is impossible not to be struck by the congruence between Lyotard’s thoughts on the second wave of reality’s withdrawal, on the one hand, and the linking of technological development with the attempt to prepare humans for life beyond the bounds of the Earth as recounted by both Baudrillard and Virilio, on the other. One could cite Biosphere II, of which Baudrillard has spoken considerably, as a perfect instantiation of Lyotard’s theoretical claim that complexification is preparing humanity for a monadic existence. Likewise, Virilio’s diatribe against virtualization is animated by his concern that we are fast divorcing ourselves from any substantive connection to a reality outside our virtual confines. The contention that the ultimate end of techno science is to sustain “thinking” beyond the body, understood both in terms of the human body and the body of the Earth, follows from what Lyotard sees as a fundamental rift between mind and things. As noted, for Lyotard the phenomenal world is at best indifferent to the fate of thinking. We delude ourselves if we believe nature is somehow “on our side” and thus seeing to it that an evolving reality remains hospitable

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to thinking as it is presently configured. Lyotard argues our actions betray our rhetoric when it comes to the question concerning humanity’s placement within the cosmological order. Talk of nature and our need to respect her ways should not detract us from recognizing the work being done to prepare us for life beyond nature. This work, the work of technoscience, is complexification in action, and we humans are its bearers. Therefore, as previously observed, we humans are not using technoscience to further what we take to be the interests of the species as much as being used by technoscience to better realize complexification’s agenda. More to the point, this means for Lyotard that the complexification process is working to ensure the creation of the conditions for the possibility of thinking outside the context of the human. How could it be otherwise when one is convinced, as is Lyotard, that it is not we humans but the techno-science monad that needs “‘our’ wonderful brains”?44 Humanity’s fate is to take leave of the very conditions which gave it birth. Lyotard is fully aware that by moving toward this end the human race is losing any natural connection it had to the substance of the world. As he states somewhat cryptically, the “biocultural” specificities of “graphic” humanity are invariably dissolving to accommodate the extended complexity of a “telegraphic” humanity.45 The telegraphic reconfiguration of our minds and bodies is being pursued to ensure the survival of the complexification process (in our corner of the universe) beyond the terrestrial conditions from which they originally emerged. For Lyotard, the cosmological plan for humanity is nothing less than to “manufacture hardware [a ‘body’] capable of ‘nurturing’ software at least as complex . . . as the present-day human brain, but in nonterrestrial conditions.”46 At this point it is important that we clarify matters related to the interpretation of a key Lyotardian term, namely, development. Earlier we identified development with complexification. An organism or species was said to develop to the extent it establishes more complex and subtle means of communicating with its environment. Although this identification is not inaccurate, it is potentially confusing since Lyotard attaches another more specific meaning to the term. In its more restricted sense, development refers to advanced capitalism, and its constant demands for expansion and improvements to the system’s productive efficiency. Because development shares with technology the same ends of increased efficacy and efficiency, capitalism and technology are mutually dependent. Capitalism relies on technological innovation for the purpose of securing greater competitive advantage, while technology requires capital to fund innovation. We arrive now at the crux of the problem relating to Lyotard’s treatment of the reality problematic. In The Inhuman, Lyotard identifies two sources of the growing inhumanity of humanity. One source is development, in the specific form of advanced capitalism, and the other is found in the areas of

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technological research commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL). Although Lyotard makes a point of distinguishing these threats to our humanity, from a broader perspective they can be seen as aspects of a single underlying phenomenon. The phenomenon in question is development, understood this time in terms of the “metaphysics of development,” the expression Lyotard reserves to describe the process of complexification. If biological life is to be understood in relation to complexification, as Lyotard contends, and if complexification reveals itself today in scientific and technological progress, then it follows that all aspects of such progress must be seen as contributing to the realization of the cosmos’s plan for life in our corner of the universe. Viewed from the context of complexification, the achievements of advanced capitalism are not of a different order from those within the fields of AI and AL. Innovations in both domains constitute progress toward more complex forms of order, a “good” from the vantage point of complexification. We have seen, however, that what is proper for complexification is not necessarily proper for humankind. In fact, the apparent antagonism between the ends of complexification and humanity constitute a classic case of a differend. For Lyotard, there is no tertium quid allowing for the reconciliation of the opposing needs of development and humanity. Humans emerged from the forces of development and now it appears we are in the process of being sacrificed on the altar of these same forces. We took the momentary alignment of developmental forces with “the human” as indicating an abiding affinity between the two, resulting in the mistaken belief in the complicity of thinking and matter. But now, Lyotard suggests, we must come to terms with the troubling fact that the needs of development are overrunning those of humanity. We must realize that humanity is being subjected to the inhuman demands of development. The inhuman demands foisted upon us by the metaphysics of development take two forms, according to Lyotard. For one, as already mentioned, we are being subjected to inhuman demands through the forces of advanced capitalism, or by development proper. Lyotard sees the performance principle that lies at the heart of capitalism as alien to what is truly human. Development’s single-minded pursuit of increased operational efficiency and its compulsive goal-directedness he finds antithetical to the human, especially to human thinking, which cannot be defined solely in terms of purposiveness and functionality. Echoing Virilio, Lyotard argues as well that development’s reliance on increased efficiency tends to accelerate societal processes, which creates an environment hostile to the promotion of reflective thought. His reaction to cultural acceleration is uncharacteristically blunt: “I do not like haste. What it hurries, and crushes, is what . . . I find that I have always tried, under diverse headings—work, figural, heterogeneity, dissensus, event, thing—to reserve: the unharmonizable.”47

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Whereas Lyotard sometimes speaks of development as a complex of external forces imposing the inhuman upon humanity, he suggests as well that the inhuman is occupying humanity from within. Humanity, in this latter sense, is being “inhabited” by a colonizing force capable of altering our very understanding of what it means to be human. Here the inhuman reveals itself in the idea that it may be “proper” to humankind to sustain itself in bodiless form, so as to ensure humankind’s perpetuation beyond earthly conditions. That is to say, the inhuman appears when we take complexification’s goal as our own, and move toward realizing this end through our continued efforts to blur the boundary between human and machine. Lyotard fully engages himself in the question concerning the propriety of our inhabitation by the inhuman. Importantly, addressing this question requires a prior understanding of what it means to be human. This understanding, in turn, presupposes a set of criteria which when met is seen to satisfy the basic demands for inclusion under the rubric “human.” But this requirement puts Lyotard in a difficult position. It places him in a bind because, as a modern, the meaning of what we are as a species is not a given: Humanity has no essence. As a result, what it means to be human only can be determined relative to the evaluative standard chosen to define the human. It follows that if we are to ask whether humans are being colonized by the inhuman, we must have at our disposal an evaluative standard by which to judge the relative inhumanity of humanity. The standard Lyotard deploys in his questioning is humanism. So when he asks whether we are in the process of becoming inhuman, this term is to be understood only in relation to a humanistic conception of what it means to be human. We could ask at this point why Lyotard evaluates the consequences of complexification against the humanist ideal and not another, since he argues there are no grounds for defending the truth of one ideal over another. For no other reason, it seems, than the fact that the humanist paradigm has dominated modern western discourse and that through it we have secured our self-understanding as human. What Lyotard means by humanism is what most scholars accept by the term, namely, the view that persons are capable of self-realization through the use of unaided reason. In a more philosophical sense, humanism denotes a belief in the “subject” as a universal category, a so-called transcendental self that acts as an organizing center of knowledge. A humanist reading of humanness therefore accentuates both the autonomy of the self and self-realization though reason. It is a reading whose truth is taken to be self-evident, since we have been acculturated over the centuries to view ourselves as independent rational agents acting on the world in ways that maximize our interests.

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For Lyotard, there are two basic ways to entertain questions concerning the inhuman, one based on a humanist perspective and the other on what might be called a “post-humanist” perspective. From a humanist perspective, complexification is a threat to the integrity of humanity and technoscience the dominant dehumanizing force. Humanists see complexification as threatening because it challenges human autonomy. It does so in several ways. First, complexification challenges human autonomy by robbing from our bodies their autonomy. Biotechnological interventions of various sorts work to undermine the status of the body as “self-ruled,” a development which both ethicists and the lay public know all too well raises new questions regarding the meaning of the human. Second, and related to the first, complexification is a threat to the autonomy of humans in that recent advances in the fields of cybernetics, computer technology, and bioengineering foreshadow the creation of artificial forms of life and thinking, the existence of which would cast into doubt the humanist conceit linking thinking exclusively with the human. Finally, complexification threatens the autonomy of humans because it portrays humanity as an intermediary between its prehuman forbears and its posthuman progeny. Humanists are torn by the “progress” of development. On the one hand, they are drawn to the idea of development because development appears to be working toward securing the long-term survival of the species. Humanists, on the other hand, are wary of development because development, in the words of one critic, “simply wants to continue expanding indefinitely, and whatever restricts that internal dynamic merely registers as a problem to be overcome by the achievement of ever greater levels of operational efficiency.”48 Humanists fear that development is targeting the operational inefficiencies of humanity as a “problem” to be overcome. They fear that should development succeed in its quest to have thinking survive solar death, it may not be human thinking that wins the day. Humanists respond to this threat by asking whether it is possible to perpetuate what makes us essentially human in an alternate form. Lyotard distills their concern in the question: “Can thought go on without a body?” But, of course, because Lyotard realizes the humanist perspective is simply a perspective on reality, not reality itself, he puts into play the question of the inhuman by asking us to consider it from a posthumanist perspective as well. Turning the tables, he asks us to evaluate the impact of technoscientific progress upon humanity from the vantage point of complexification. When viewed from this angle, the central question becomes not whether thought can outlive the body, but whether thought should outlive the body. Perhaps it should not. Perhaps the operational inefficiencies of thinking are problems in need of fixing, and development is working toward overcoming the source of the problem (i.e., the human body), whose

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transcendence would spell the end of thinking as we know it. It may very well be that what is “proper” to humankind is for humankind to be inhabited by the inhuman, even to the point of the eclipse of the human.49 For Lyotard, there is no ambiguity regarding the complexification process itself. The debate is not over whether complexification is producing a technoscience monad, whose end is to make thinking independent of the conditions of the Earth. Rather, the discussion is over the significance of this process for humanity. In the final analysis, Lyotard asks us a fairly simple question: Is the inhabiting of the human by the inhuman a cause for concern? Are advances in the mimicking of life (and ultimately human life), as represented most acutely by progress in the realms of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, a worrisome development or not? Should achievements in these domains cause us to fear for our humanity, perhaps provoking resistance to their further progression, or should they be seen as advancing developmental forces and therefore be embraced in the name of the greater cosmological cause, even if doing so demands we sacrifice our humanity in the process? Lyotard’s stance on the significance for humanity of abandoning the reality that constitutes us as terrestrial beings is complex and warrants serious attention. Along with Michel Foucault and other thinkers aligned with poststructural thought, Lyotard always has sought to deconstruct the humanist ideal of the transcendental subject. The subject for him is not primary or foundational, an independent epistemological category, but rather an effect produced and reproduced by ever-evolving sociocultural forces. It is only through an indifference to difference, to what is other than human, that the myth of the subject has been perpetuated, according to Lyotard. Hence his attentiveness to the category of experiences which brings us face to face with the unassimilable, including the experience of the sublime. As an antihumanist, Lyotard’s sympathies would seem to lie with those who regard it “proper” that the human be inhabited by the inhuman. It seems only fitting that the theorist of difference would embrace the “other” of the human, the inhuman. Not to do so would involve repressing otherness and partaking in the “terror” of exclusion, leading ultimately to a diminished understanding of the human. Lyotard’s anti-humanist bias is clearly revealed in his commentary, in The Postmodern Condition, on the future of education in postmodern society.50 There he argued the partial replacement of teachers by computers can be rightly criticized only if it is assumed that education is in the service of some an exogenous end, such as human emancipation or wisdom. Indeed, from the vantage point of these metanarratives of legitimation, the recent trend toward the technologizing (or informationalizing) of learning will be seen as yet another indication that contemporary society is afflicted by an endemic

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“loss of meaning.” Lyotard rebuts such a claim, however, on the grounds that because we live in an age where the world does not reveal itself as inherently meaningful, we cannot rightly criticize the educational system for lacking what is unavailable to it, namely, some overarching order of meaning that could serve as its ground. Instead, he insists we must accept the historical truth that knowledge in postmodernity no longer possesses a narrative form, and consequently that learning of necessity will align itself with those methods and interests that contribute to optimizing the performance of the societal system as a whole. If, as it appears, Lyotard’s sympathies lie with the anti-humanist view, then it would seem intellectually dishonest of him to resist complexification. Yet he does, and with considerable passion, as will be discussed. How, then, can this apparent contradiction be accounted for? How can an anti-essentialist modern defend humanity against the inhumanity of development? One possible solution is to argue that Lyotard’s never intended to defend “the human,” understood as a transcendental category, in his call to resist development. Perhaps his aim is not to preserve the inviolable quality called humanness, but merely to resist the forces challenging our current understanding of the human. The problem with this solution is that it does not account for Lyotard’s seeming obsession with the humanist wish to perpetuate thinking beyond the body. It remains unexplained why he engages himself with the humanist contention that thinking is worth preserving, not merely for the short term, but in perpetuity. A more fruitful way to resolve the contradiction is to suggest that Lyotard is an “anti-inhumanist,” rather than an anti-humanist.51 The argument here is that Lyotard can be read as defending the human against the inhuman, but only if we mean by the term a new form of humanism, a type of humanism informed by the postmodern sensibility. Postmodern humanism is worth defending because, unlike humanism proper, it is a form of humanism that remains open to the unassimilable other. It is the form of humanism aligned with thinking in the truest sense of the word, which Lyotard contends is defined by an awareness that reality always exceeds reason’s powers of conceptualization. It is this postmodern variant of humanism that is eroded by the advances of techno-science, which work toward closing the human within itself, destroying along the way the possibility of remaining open to what lies beyond the human. This reading informs us that “thinking,” in the context of the techno-science monad, is unlikely to be “human” thinking because it would not meet the central requirement of true thought, openness to difference. As a result, the forces conspiring to save human thinking from the consequences of solar death must be resisted. While Lyotard is sensitive to the seeming indifference of matter toward mind and its long-term consequences for humanity, he is equally sensitive to

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the fact that it is precisely the otherness of matter that allows for the possibility of thinking. His focus on reality’s indifference to the end of human survival serves as a counterbalance to the traditional humanist faith in the naturalness of humanity. Nature, to repeat, is not on our side. Yet Lyotard simultaneously refuses to concede that because nature is not on our side nature is necessarily against us. The otherness of the world cannot possibly be anti-human if only for the reason that its otherness is a condition for the possibility of thinking. The tragic element in Lyotard’s understanding of the reality problematic is that the condition that allows for the possibility of thinking is the same condition that likely will spell thinking’s demise. Lyotard examines the ambivalence of the relationship between mind (or thinking) and matter (or reality) in The Inhuman in order to better understand what development portends for humanity. In “Can Thought go on without a Body?,” humanity’s future is debated in the form of a dialogue between the anonymous interlocutors, “He” and “She.” Both voices explore the issue with the understanding that the forces of development are preparing humanity for survival beyond the conditions of the Earth, and that little can be done to alter this process. The question for both is not whether there will be an exodus, but what will do the exiting. In further agreement, they both argue that should something resembling “the human” vacate the planet at some future date, it will do so only if we are able to devise a way of duplicating, by artificial means, something resembling a human body. Representing traditional sex-based biases, “He” focuses on the general question of embodiment as it relates to thinking, and “She” on more specific aspects of embodiment and their contribution to thinking, such as suffering, gender, and desire. The irony here is that humanity, as we know it, will survive solar death only if a means is found of replicating ourselves in the form we presently are configured. Both interlocutors therefore reject the popular assumption, within scientific circles at least, that human thinking is a scaled up version of computational thinking, and that humanity can be saved by downloading consciousness onto a computer chip.

VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE? Lyotard is keenly aware that we have entered a new phase in our social system’s unremitting self-transfiguration. Information and communications technologies, along with technologies of simulation, already have distanced us from the conditions of earthly reality. It is readily apparent that one casualty resulting from the introduction of these technologies is the bodily experience of being present in the here-and-now, the world of space and time. As Lyotard says: “The question raised by the new technologies . . . is

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that of the here-and-now. What does ‘here’ mean on the phone, on television, at the receiver of an electronic telescope? And the ‘now.’ Does not the ‘tele’-element necessarily destroy presence, the ‘here-and-now’ of the forms and their ‘carnal’ reception? What is a place, a moment, not anchored in the immediate passion of what happens? Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen with it? Can anything happen to it?”52 That Lyotard expresses concern over matters relating to presence is telling. It is revealing because the purported destruction of presence these new technologies advance need not necessarily be considered problematic. Certainly for Derrida such a concern is irrelevant since presence itself is a myth, the destruction of which changes nothing. Lyotard evidently sees things differently. Although the replacing of presence with “telepresence” may be an advance from the perspective of complexification, and therefore part of our great cosmological fate, it represents a threat to our status as embodied beings with the capacity for thought. Lyotard is wary of the disembodying effects of the new technologies and their long-term impact on thinking because he subscribes to a basically phenomenological understanding of the mind and its relationship with the world. Both he and “He” see as reductive the “calculating machine” image of the mind, as popularized by mathematicians cum philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred Whitehead, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann. For Lyotard, the mind “doesn’t think in a binary mode. It doesn’t work with units of information (bits).”53 Citing the pioneering work of phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard counters the calculating machine model of the mind by suggesting that thinking operates or “moves” without the aid of preestablished criteria telling it how or where to move. And to the extent thinking is not restricted in advance by a preset program or code, it cannot for Lyotard be duplicated by the modern computer which functions precisely in these terms. What the computer cannot duplicate, according to Lyotard, and what accounts for its inability to truly think is that a computer is not present before the world in the way a human being is present. We have seen that for Merleau-Ponty the phenomenal world is always already there before the eye actively searches out and perceives an object. This preexisting visual field or horizon functions as a kind of nonthematized perceptual backdrop against which the eye searches for and perceives specific phenomena. Lyotard adopts this same line of reasoning when he argues that thinking “becomes aware of a ‘horizon,’ aims at a . . . sort of non-conceptual monogram that provides it with intuitive configurations and opens up ‘in front of it’ a field of orientation and expectation, a ‘frame.’”54 It is precisely because thinking proceeds

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from within this orienting frame that its movement is not predicated on the existence of preestablished guidelines or criteria. Added insight into what Lyotard sees as the fundamental difference between human thinking and the calculative operations of a computer can be gained by examining what was arguably the twentieth century’s greatest contest between man and machine—the chess matches between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue. The first match, held in 1996, pitted the reigning world chess champion against a second generation IBM computer specifically designed to compete at the game of chess. Its calculating power was formidable. With a total of 256 parallel processors at work, Deep Blue was capable of calculating between 50 and 100 billion moves within the three minute time period allotted to each player, per move. In addition, to improve Deep Blue’s chances of beginning a game on a strong footing, the design team collected a database providing the operating system with a vast assortment of opening moves taken from grandmaster games played over the past 100 years. A comparable feature provided Deep Blue with billions of endgame scenarios as well. History records that the human prevailed over the machine. After losing the first game, Kasparov went on to win the six game contest by a relatively comfortable margin of four games to two. However, the match proved to be anything but a pushover for Kasparov, especially at the outset. In fact, Kasparov’s initial engagement with Deep Blue was so intellectually captivating that he was moved to say of the encounter: “I had played a lot of computers but had never experienced anything like this. I could feel—I could smell—a new kind of intelligence across the table.”55 Yet it is also true that as the match progressed, Kasparov’s competitive edge over Deep Blue widened to the point where the last two games could hardly be considered a contest. Clearly, the human mind was capable of consistently outperforming the computer in the long run. Both Kasparov’s and the design team’s explanation of this fact are consistent with Lyotard’s phenomenologically informed conviction that human thinking is more than mere rule-guided calculation. They were acutely aware that Deep Blue did not duplicate the subtlety of human ratiocination as much as reach the same end by other means. Of course, as a computing system, even an extremely powerful one, Deep Blue was capable of performing just one function—calculation. And it was solely by increasing its powers (i.e., memory, speed, processing capacity) as a calculating engine that the designers of Deep Blue hoped to create a machine that could outperform an opponent at a given task and, by extension, to “out think” the opponent as well. However, the match clearly revealed that thinking and calculating are not interchangeable operations. If we compare the computational power of man and machine in isolation we see there was absolutely no contest between the

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two parties: For every single hypothetical move a highly skilled human player can make, Deep Blue could perform millions of searches. The competitive human mind therefore must have at its disposal an effective means of compensating for this spectacular disadvantage in sheer computational power. What the mind possesses, and what the computer could not mimic, is the power to think selectively. The puny (in computational terms) human mind was able to outwit Deep Blue only by commanding certain capacities that significantly reduced its dependence on brute calculative power. What precisely are these capacities? Certainly not memory, for Deep Blue had at its command billions of moves made by chess masters (including Kasparov himself) in previous real game contexts. Neither can it be said that humans are capable of computing more flawlessly than computers, for, as one IBM research scientist noted: “Deep Blue . . . will never make an obvious tactical error with short-term consequences.”56 Furthermore, to assume that Kasparov prevailed over the computer because unlike his opponent he was able to strategize with passion or intensity is also problematic, because the emotional component of the game cuts both ways: Confidence and the desire to win can be offset by the negative effect that losing one’s emotional balance may have on the strategizing process. The human advantage over the machine must lie elsewhere. One such place is in an extremely complex evaluation system that provides humans with the powers of intuition, judgment, and pattern recognition. Kasparov himself asserted that certain intangibles, like human creativity and imagination, also play a crucial role in the superiority of human over machine. One need not explore the details of what constitutes this advantage to conclude that human thinking is uniquely open-ended. Thinking is not constrained by the logical dictates of a preexisting program or set of algorithms. Unlike digital computers which “think” in accordance with an internal set of explicit instructions laid down in advance by an external agent (i.e., a programmer), brain functioning is an embodied phenomenon that cannot be divorced from a whole host of interconnected biophysical processes that, together, are consanguineous with the realm of appearances. As a result, thinking is “open” to the world in a way a computer never can be. It is this openness that lends to thinking its singular capacity to respond in unprogrammed ways to an evolving environment. The participatory character of thinking is revealed in Kasparov’s claim that his initial success over Deep Blue could be explained in large part by how he interacted with the machine. Approaching the computer as he would another human being, he relates how he was able to imaginatively enter into the “psychology” of his opponent and assess its style of play, including its relative strengths and weaknesses. Kasparov soon realized that Deep Blue thrived

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against his aggressive style and was in fact able to outperform him in a game of head-on clashes. So he did what the computer could not. Reflecting on his opponent’s overarching style of play, it became apparent to him that the computer faltered when it did not have a concrete goal to calculate toward.57 This realization is hardly surprising if it is remembered that a computer’s reasoning powers are strictly purposive in nature. In other words, because computers are means-generating and not ends-positing machines, their capacity to compute can be put to work only if they are presented with clearly defined problems to solve or goals to realize. Given this limitation, outsmarting a computer as powerful as Deep Blue could be achieved only by adopting a negative strategy where the paramount concern was to avoid giving the computer what it needed to function properly, namely, intelligible objectives. This meant Kasparov had to adapt his style of play so as to eschew the approach experience taught him had provided the computer with these kinds of tactical goals. By avoiding direct clashes with Deep Blue and hence denying the computer clearly defined aims, Kasparov rendered the machine useless, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. Like the wasted potential of a well-trained marathoner who has lost his way on the racecourse, Deep Blue’s impressive computing power was disengaged for want of clearly defined ends to work toward. In conclusion, we could say that computational processing is distinct from human thinking because the computer is not embedded within a framework that enables it to make decisions without relying on preestablished rules for guidance. In the case that interests us here, this means Deep Blue was incapable of determining, through an evaluation of its own performance vis-à-vis its opponent’s, what new extra-programmatic or meta-strategies had to be implemented in order to prevail. This incapacity can be traced in the final analysis to the fact that the computer exists apart from the world it surveys. Unable to establish a true dialogue with the world, as can human thinking, computational reckoning delivers only a series of programmatic reactions to its surroundings. Even if designers develop digital computers capable of making sophisticated meta-judgments concerning relative intangibles like “style of play,” these second-order powers of judgment necessarily will be constrained by the operational parameters of the computer’s program, and thus will not be able to match the openness of the human capacity for judgment. Lyotard says as much when he argues, this time in the guise of “She,” that computing is distinct from thinking because thinking alone is premised on “suffering,” on a fundamental openness toward the world that permits the human mind to receive, or bear, the given.58 And so, while experts argue that further advances in the speed and sophistication with which computers process information eventually will yield a truly artificial intelligence, Lyotard

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counters that such a goal can be realized only if a way is found to recreate a form of intelligence capable of suffering. Kasparov’s unsuccessful rematch with a new and improved Deep Blue in 1998 does not render the above analysis any less cogent. Clearly, what the loss shows is that the computer’s relative deficiencies with regard to its ability to enter into a true dialogue with the world can be compensated for through sheer computational strength. But this advantage it has over its human competitor in no way alters the fact that the intelligence of such a machine issues from its essentially autistic nature, not from its openness to reality. The question remains as to whether the goal of creating a suffering intelligence is technically realizable and what form such an intelligence would take if it were. With respect to the first part of the question, Lyotard is unwilling to rule out the possibility that technoscience may one day artificially replicate human thinking. However, as alluded to above, he unequivocally asserts that if something approximating human thinking is to persist after solar extinction—as the complexification process suggests it should—then the computer as presently configured cannot be its vehicle. It cannot because the form of intelligence associated with the computer is a caricature of human thinking, the perfection of which would bequeath to the future only a “poor binarized ghost” of our present selves.59 The proclamation that we would be reduced to mere shadows of ourselves should we live on as some form of binary intelligence must be understood in more than mere metaphorical terms. For Lyotard contends, again through the voice of “She,” that machines neither can think nor suffer because they do not have bodies. The veracity of the assertion that the computer cannot mimic human intelligence because it is a ghost- or spiritlike apparatus may appear somewhat contentious at first glance. After all, a computer is an extended object or “body” situated in the world that is capable of performing certain calculative functions, just as a human being. On at least one level of analysis, a claim can be made that computer intelligence is no less disembodied than its human double. Yet from the phenomenological perspective Lyotard apparently upholds, the affiliation postulated above between human and computer cannot be sustained. For even though a computer is in the world in the rather prosaic sense of the term, as a piece of furniture may be said to be “in” a room, the computer is not (as Merleau-Ponty would say) in the world in the more precise sense of being part of the world’s flesh. Although not overtly stated by Lyotard, this distinction appears to be crucial to his argument. For unlike a computer, a human being is more than a mere “thing” capable of responding in subtle and complex ways to the information it absorbs from the world surrounding it. Lyotard’s pronouncements regarding the connection between thinking, on the one side, and suffering and embodiment, on the other, underscore his partiality

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towards the phenomenological notion that what makes human beings human is their being comprised of the same ontological stuff as the world in which they are placed. Lyotard seems to suggest it is our participation in the world’s being which accounts for our ability to suffer the world, even if, as is purportedly the case in modernity, we suffer the world intellectually as a lack. If embodiment is a precondition for our capacity to receive the world, then it accounts as well for our status as gendered beings and desiring beings. “She” reminds us that the “irremediable differend of gender”60 is central to what it means to be human, and that “sexual difference is a paradigm of the incompleteness of not just bodies, but of minds too.”61 The incompleteness that is desire, sexual and otherwise, also is constitutive of our humanness, and, along with gender, would have to be literally incorporated into a machine if such an artifact were to be a true “thinkingmachine.” All of these constituents of our humanity (i.e., embodiment, suffering, gender, and desire) contribute to our inhabiting a “world” or “human situation,” as opposed to a “universe” or “physical system.”62 Unlike a computer, whose operative raw material is a potentially infinite set of meaningless discrete facts, human beings cogitate within a continuous field of experience that is always already meaningful, as informed by our condition as embodied and incomplete beings. Artificial intelligence researchers and their proponents prefer to overlook the fundamental discrepancy between world and universe because the digital character of the modern computer they seek to perfect demands the worldly domain be treated as a physical system comprised of a mass of discrete elements. Only by doing so can the computer’s environment be represented in an abstract language whose symbolic form is amenable to digital manipulation through prescribed syntactical rules. Lyotard’s partiality toward the phenomenological critique of artificial intelligence complements his general assessment of our postmodern condition. To review, his reading of postmodernism forefronts heterogeneity by arguing that with the collapse of the real and the advent of the aesthetic of the sublime, there exists no overarching rule or set of rules capable of mediating between differences or differends. Lyotard concludes that thinking is not guided in advance by rules for determining data, but instead develops such rules after the fact based on the results of experience. It is because thinking is an experiential act, versus a mere cognitive operation, that thinking for him is indissociable from issues related to gender and desire. To assert that thinking is a performative act is to say thinking is more a kind of doing, or coping, than simply calculating from predetermined precepts. Such a view is congruent with Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the process of thematizing a perceptual object (i.e., the figure) is embedded in

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and dependent on a more primordial faith in the perceived totality of the visual field (i.e., the ground). For Merleau-Ponty, seeing too is a kind of coping. It is a visual coping, a mode of bodily involvement with the world, and therefore the antithesis of the “thinking with the eyes” model of perception sustained by Cartesian dualism. It follows that because computers do not have bodies, they are incapable of interacting with the world, which in turn means that computers are confined to functioning at a “knowing what” (versus a “knowing that”) level of cogitation. Lyotard’s antipathy toward binary-based intelligence is rooted precisely in its rule-dependency, in the fact that what a computer knows it knows only as a consequence of prior programming. The computer is strictly a “knowing what” machine utterly incapable of knowing that its environment exists and hence of operating in ways that eschew reliance on preset parameters and ends. For Lyotard, it is the impossibility of digitally simulating what might be called the contextual (or “knowing that”) component of human cognition that constitutes the ultimate barrier to achieving a truly artificial human intelligence. All the processing power in the world proves insufficient in the end to compensate for the computer’s somatic deficit, for it is the human body that allows us to respond to the world not as a concatenation of isolated elements but as a continuous field of experience whose totality can be anticipated and grasped without recourse to preestablished rules. This is another way of saying the body confers meaning upon its environs: It creates a world out of sets of data. To return to our discussion of the game of chess, we could argue it is because master players like Kasparov have exceptionally fine-tuned perceptual skills that they can assess in a glance their overall positional strength on the board. The embodied eye in this case is primed to respond to the visual rhythm of the placement of chess pieces. This perceptual “body-set,” in the words of Hubert Dreyfus, is not “a rule in the mind” which can be formulated apart from the activity in question.63 Rather, it is a context-dependent somatic skill that enables the adept to bypass an extensive formal analysis of the scenario in their assessment of (and response to) it. Existential phenomenology appeals to artificial intelligence critics such as Dreyfus and Lyotard because it underscores the nonreproducible somatic component of intelligence, from which derives our capacity to recognize the organization of elements in a field of experience—a so-called “pattern recognition” or “gestalt”—without first having to delimit the elements of that experience. Importantly, this capacity is considered the linchpin of human intelligence because the figure/ground (or the knowing what/knowing that) structure of embodied sensory perception is believed to inform the presumed “higher” rational functions. Even putatively “pure” intellectual pursuits such as logic and mathematics are somatically grounded, for what counts

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as significant in these more esoteric intellectual exercises necessarily arises from what Dreyfus calls “an underdetermined anticipation of the whole.”64 Lyotard argues in parallel fashion that thinking is an embodied activity because, along with sensory perception, intellectual perception possesses an analogical relationship with its objects of thought. Thinking cannot help but proceed in any way other than analogically since, as in the case of vision, thinking proceeds without a complete description of its object. In Lyotard’s words, “the eye . . . is indeed always in search of a recognition, as the mind is of a complete description of an object it is trying to think of: without, however, a viewer ever being able to say he recognizes an object perfectly since the field of presentation is absolutely unique every time, and since when vision actually sees, it can’t ever forget that there’s always more to be seen once the object is ‘identified.’”65 For Lyotard, both sensory perception and thinking are analogical because in performing these activities we proceed “as if” we possess a complete description of an object whose density is nonetheless perceived as inexhaustible. Thus our understanding of the world is always tentative and ambiguous. Perceptual certainties always are susceptible to destabilization as we further explore sensory and noetic landscapes. Borrowing from MerleauPonty, we can conclude that because nothing is “all actual under the look,” every object of perception (sensible or symbolic) bears only a likeness to what it appears to be at any given moment. Embodied perception reveals itself to be constitutionally dispossessed of the capacity for certitude. Lyotard nonetheless concedes that human thinking is haunted by the ideal of certitude, doubtless precipitated by the embodied mind’s ability to intuit the whole. As a consequence, thinking is said to be situated between “the logical demand for complete description,” on the one hand, and the “inexhaustibility of the perceivable,” on the other.66 It is precisely this discrepancy which Lyotard argues the digital computer is incapable of capturing since the perceptual horizons that contextualize human thinking cannot be digitally encrypted. For truly analogical or human thinking to occur a thinking machine would have to relate to its environs in the way human beings do: It would have to partake of the world’s flesh. Or as Lyotard puts it, genuinely human thought would have to be “in its data just as the eye is in the visual field.”67 In short, a truly thinking computer would have to possess a body.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES For all its strengths, Lyotard’s critique of artificial intelligence research is less than comprehensive due to its neglect of controversies within the scientific community over how to produce a genuine thinking machine. Research in the

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field is divided into two broad camps, each reflective of a distinct philosophical view regarding how to best create an artificial intelligence. For the sake of discussion, we will refer to these as Top-Down and Bottom-Up schools of Artificial Intelligence. Top-Downers (TDers), such as research scientists Hans Moravec and Douglas Lenat, are distinguished by their philosophical commitment to both the separability of mind and matter, and the priority of mind over matter. They contend human consciousness possesses a deep logical structure, a formal mathematical structure, that just so happens in the case of the human species to be instantiated in a carbon-based life form. Implied in this understanding is the notion that the formal character of consciousness disassociates consciousness from any necessary affiliation with a particular material base. The relative autonomy of consciousness therefore ensures its transferability, at least in principle. Once this breach between consciousness and embodiment has been secured, the only obstacle preventing human consciousness from residing in a disembodied host like a silicon computer chip is the determination of a method for encoding the logical structure of the mind and transcribing it onto a new material substrate. The theoretical feasibility of this procedure is unquestioned by TDers. Their goal, they say, is simply to find the technical means to download consciousness onto a computer chip. In their rejection of the mind-body connection, TDers stand irrevocably opposed to phenomenological claims regarding the embodied character of human thinking. The philosophical battle lines between the likes of Moravec and Lenat, on the one hand, and Lyotard and Dreyfus, on the other, could not be more clearly drawn. However, Lyotard’s position with regards to the other main grouping of researchers, the so-called Bottom-Uppers (BUers), is less determinate and consequently of more interest to us here. As the rubric implies, members of the Bottom-Up school challenge the Top-Down philosophy claiming human cognition to be basically a logical, rule-bound phenomenon whose ontological indifference toward the human body facilitates its transference to any number of different material platforms. BUers hold the contrary view that human consciousness and cognition are more a product of nervous systems than of logical systems, and therefore more closely related to the sensory and motor functions of the body than to the formal structure of presumed independent mental processes.68 This emphasis on the somatic component of human cognition explains why BUers sometimes prefer to describe their objective as the creation of artificial life, rather than artificial intelligence. Even though BUers, in the final analysis, are as firmly committed as their nemeses to fabricating an artificial intelligence, they maintain this ultimate goal can be reached only if researchers first acknowledge the fundamental role the living, mobile body plays in human cognition.

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BUers assert that awareness of this fundamental constituent of consciousness underscores the fact that consciousness is in truth an epiphenomenon of a more basic mode of being-in-the-world exclusive to humans. The claim is that human consciousness has emerged in response to the particularities of our embodied condition—that is, in response to the subtleties of human perception, to the development of complex motor skills, etc.—and not the other way around. Humans, in short, think through our bodies, not in spite of them. The research agenda of the prominent BUer Rodney Brooks illustrates well the body-mind connection. Brooks’s research has led to the creation of various robots over the years, the most famous being “Cog,” a rather ungainly humanoid robot with eight 32-bit microprocessors for a brain. What distinguishes Cog’s intelligence from an information processing form of artificial intelligence is that Cog does not possess a mind in the sense usually applied in AI circles. Cog, in other words, has no central processing unit from which issues a guiding (or top-down) set of operating instructions. Cog’s “brain” instead consists of an arrangement of loosely coordinated digital reflexes scattered among its eight processors. Its brain is thus comprised of a conglomeration of distributed systems, along with a control system designed to be activated only when conflicts appear between these distributed processing units. Importantly, this means that Cog operates without any a priori programmed knowledge of the world. It possesses no internal model of the world, no preexisting formalized copy of reality to help guide its behavior. On the contrary, whatever intelligence it may be said to possess it has acquired through interaction with its physical environs. Cog’s rudimentary intelligence is therefore learned. What it knows it gleans from direct experience of a complex environment, from the bottom up. The Bottom-Up philosophy is commonly referred to as “connectionism”69for the stress it places on creating the conditions that facilitate the building of electronic connections between a grouping of relatively simple, decentered microprocessors. Connectionists claim such arrangements reflect the actual physiological organization of the human brain and that attempts to create an artificial intelligence which are not patterned after the neural networks constitutive of the human brain are doomed to failure. Drawing support from neurobiological research, they conclude that these networks are not preset or hardwired but rather are drawn and redrawn in response to stimuli received from an organism’s sensory interaction with its environment. To the extent that intelligence is said to emerge from fluid subsymbolic or sublogical processes, rather than issue fully formed from the mental substance that is the brain, connectionists avoid the determinist trap which treats intelligence as a complex set of prescribed rules that dictate an organism’s behavior.

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When Brooks makes the connectionist claim that the world its own best model, he is effectively rejecting the view that takes intelligence to be a “mental representation” or “picture” of reality. Indeed, “intelligence without representation” has become a kind of mantra for Brooks’s approach to the artificial intelligence challenge. In adopting this understanding he aligns himself with theorists like Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, and Lyotard, who likewise embrace the connection between thinking and embodied experience. The emphasis BUers place on the somatic component of human consciousness is reinforced by the findings of many disciplines outside its own. Perhaps the most compelling evidence supporting the BUers’ claims comes from the paleoanthropological community, whose members generally concur that human consciousness is an “emergent” phenomenon that has evolved alongside changes in human physiology, changes which themselves were provoked by challenges associated with evolving climatic and geophysical conditions. Simplifying greatly, the argument here is that while the contemporary human brain can be seen as a product of millions of years of natural selection, it is misleading to conclude from this that the evolutionary process had as a priority the production of bigger and better brains. Such thinking reinforces the Western philosophical prejudice regarding the split between form and matter, and the ontological priority of mind over matter. Scientific evidence suggests, to the contrary, that the evolutionary history of the human brain is secondary (albeit closely linked) to the history of what eventually emerged as the human body. The crucial difference between humans and our closest relatives, the family of great apes, therefore is said to lie in such developments as bipedalism (which consequently facilitated the capacity for speech) and the opposable thumb. It was evolutionary developments pertaining to locomotion and manual dexterity that served as the primary impetus for the restructuring of the brain and, by extension, for the eventual emergence of fully developed human consciousness. This accounts for the fondness with which paleoanthropologists note that had the cataclysmic series of events which triggered bipedalism in our ancestors some five million years ago not occurred, such as the semi-desertification of East Africa, human consciousness as we know it would not have emerged.70 Doubtless this message is well received by AL researchers and their adherents. One would hasten to add that this account of the emergence of the human species and human consciousness is equally appealing to Lyotard, for contemporary research into the origins of the species has uncovered the interconnected development of form and matter, of mind and body. Unlike their information processing counterparts, then, AL researchers implicitly accept the Lyotardian premise that while thinking may be capable of persisting beyond the human body, it cannot meaningfully exist without a body.

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Whether or not the kind of mechanical robots BUers such as Brooks are presently constructing qualifies as a primitive instance of embodied intelligence is a matter of professional opinion to decide, and ultimately not an issue that concerns us here. Whereas some commentators say that Cog’s nonlocalized brand of experiential intelligence indicates that it does, we can just as easily imagine someone like Dreyfus arguing that Cog’s continued reliance on digital technologies secures the ontological gap separating human from machine. On the other hand, for TDers who are not averse to the digital aspect of artificial intelligence research, the contention that the kind of learned behaviors exhibited by Brooks’s creations can be “scaled up” to produce an intelligence of human complexity is pure fantasy. Regardless of these differences of opinion, what is important about the development of emergent intelligence is that there currently exist research projects committed to the principle that artificial intelligence is unrealizable outside the parameters of embodiment. While technological limitations at present preclude, and perhaps will preclude indefinitely, the possibility of recreating the complex neural and nervous systems that constitute human embodiment, current research within the AL community seems to have realized that replicating truly human intelligence requires precisely the replication of this variant of embodied being.

THE REMAINDER I have spoken at some length of Lyotard’s affiliation with phenomenology, especially with regards to the centrality of embodiment to thinking. At the same time I have refrained from drawing too explicit a link between Lyotard and the likes of Merleau-Ponty, preferring more elliptical ways to show up any connection between their respective readings of mind-body interdependency. This reticence is well-founded. The problem with trying to make a phenomenologist out of Lyotard is that he rejects phenomenology’s attempt to speak about that which cannot be spoken. Merleau-Ponty, to be sure, explicates the preconditions for explication: He speaks of the silence which subtends and allows for speech. He does so in the service of dethroning the Cartesian or humanist understanding that identifies thinking with the transcendental subject. While Merleau-Ponty’s wish to get past the humanist illusion of the res cogitans is something Lyotard applauds, he cannot countenance the phenomenologist’s efforts to rationally defend a post-humanist position. Compelled to explain why the self is not autonomous, Merleau-Ponty attempted to bring the whole of reality under the ambit of reason, showing in the process his incapacity to resist fully the totalizing pretensions of humanism.

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Lyotard’s rejection of phenomenology’s response to humanism leaves him in a curious predicament, for it forces him to rely on aspects of a teaching he cannot otherwise accept. As shown, Lyotard’s “anti-inhumanism” draws him to arguments that take human thinking to be more than mere information processing, which explains his partiality toward Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological discourse, whose explicit aim was to discount the very model of thinking which later came to be associated with computer intelligence. But while Lyotard avails himself of many of the insights contained in this discourse to further his purposes, he cannot subscribe to the teaching—the larger, grounding narrative—because doing so would trap him in a world view that lays claim to truth. However, by resisting the totalizing ambitions of phenomenology, Lyotard falls into what appears to be another trap. One of the virtues of the phenomenological outlook is that, by depicting the mind-matter distinction in terms of a tear within the fabric of being, mind is seen as neither identical with matter, nor radically opposed to it. It follows that while mind is not simply reducible to the body, neither can it function outside the context of the body. Thought most definitely cannot go on without the body, in MerleauPonty’s estimation, because, as different aspects of the same mode of being, mind cannot be disassociated from its material form—the human body. Unwilling to concede that mind and matter are held together within a more encompassing order of being, Lyotard is forced to conclude that mind and matter have their own separate and conflicting agendas. On the one hand, there is the humanist urge to preserve thinking from the dehumanizing effects of technoscience. On the other, there is the push to complexify in the name of development, which requires further enhancements of technoscience’s dehumanizing effects. On the surface, there appears to be only two rather simple outcomes of this showdown between mind and matter: Either mind wins the contest, or matter prevails. If the latter prevails, then mind is lost and humanity will become a mere footnote in the history of development. If mind wins out, then mind gets a reprieve through its remaking in a form conducive to human thinking. Of these two possible outcomes, Lyotard suggests strongly that matter is more likely to win the day. To accommodate the human, technoscience would have to concede too much of its power and compromise too radically its commitment to efficiency. Yet, for all his apparent pessimism, Lyotard does not concede all is lost. First, as previously noted, he is unwillingly to rule out entirely the possibility that a technical means may be found to perpetuate human thinking beyond the confines the human body. Second, he holds out hope that development may be thwarted through the politics of resistance. Why Lyotard should be sufficiently sanguine about development to even consider an outcome that is partial toward humanity warrants explanation. After all, if development is what he claims it to be, can there really be any

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discussion regarding the fate of humanity? Is not resistance to development futile by definition? Conversely, does not talk about resisting development, or otherwise altering the course of development so as to give it a human face, imply that development is not what Lyotard claims it to be? If resistance proves not to be futile, must not development be reconsidered? It seems incongruous that Lyotard takes seriously both the discourse on development and the discourse on resistance to development. One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to argue that Lyotard embraces both discourses because, not being in a position to decide definitively which discourse is “true,” he does what he can to engage the issue by putting into play the contending aspects of the debate. His antipathy towards rationalism and its totalizing pretensions lies behind his reluctance to commit fully to either the inhuman or the human, to development or resistance to development. Lyotard knows full well, for instance, that an idea like complexification constitutes a scientific reading of the order of things, and as such constitutes a reading of the world. In The Postmodern Condition he argued that reality cannot be fully captured by any single genre of discourse, by either scientific or narrative knowledge, a fact that scientific knowledge overlooks in presenting itself as the only legitimate form of knowledge. It is the dominance of the discourse of science that Lyotard sought to expose as illegitimate and, consequently, to disrupt. Seen through the optics of The Postmodern Condition, complexification represents an interpretation of the order of things, which means a partial or incomplete reading of the order of things. If Lyotard’s views regarding the state of knowledge in postmodernity are applied to an analysis of development, we see that as a reading of techno-scientific progress, the discourse on development can be neither definitive nor incontestable. Still, insofar as it represents arguably the dominant discourse on reality today, development has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It turns out that we are slaves of the cult of efficiency, not because the cosmos has preordained this outcome (since it is impossible to know definitively the will of the cosmos), but because we have convinced ourselves that such is our fate. The implications of Lyotard’s understanding of the state of knowledge in postmodernity on his analysis of development need to be fully drawn. On the one hand, complexification can be assessed on its own terms as a scientific concept purporting to represent the “progress” of reality. Whether or not it is a true description of the order of things is a task for science to determine according to the rules for determining truth as laid out in the methodology appropriate to this form of knowledge. There is every reason to believe that Lyotard takes the theory of complexification to be an accurate representation of the forces responsible for human progress, even though, as a scientific claim, it remains falsifiable. His contention is not that complexification is contestable

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as a scientific theory, but that even if it were a true description of reality, complexification remains an incomplete description of the whole of reality. A representation of reality can be understood as both true and incomplete only if one agrees, with Lyotard, that there exist different types of knowledge, each with its own distinct set of rules for determining what counts as knowledge. Working from this premise, Lyotard can think together the truth of development and the truth of resistance to development, the latter being grounded in an alternative, narrative reading of the meaning of reality. This thinking together of the twin truths of development and resistance is the primary objective of Lyotard’s The Inhuman. On the one hand, he takes seriously the scientific claim that organic life evolves by complexifying and concludes that technoscience ought to be regarded as an extension of the developmental process. Seen from this perspective, technological innovation is no less a “natural” flowering of the metaphysics of development than the consequences of earlier developmental milestones, such as bipedalism or the acquisition of speech. In addition, because the end toward which development strives is no less natural than the means of its procurement, the sacrifice of one of nature’s more exalted creations on the altar of complexification could only be regarded as a noble loss. Against this scientific account of development Lyotard juxtaposes a narrative reading of what constitutes the human, a reading informed by the philosophical insights of phenomenology. This alternative reading of our humanity rebuts the scientific premise that increases in complexity and efficiency necessarily indicate developmental progress. He points to the fact, as judged by technoscience, it is precisely the limitations of the human body and thinking that account for the immeasurable gulf between human thinking and its binary counterpart. To conclude, it bears repeating that in defending our “wonderful brains” against the march of development, Lyotard is not claiming that the development thesis is untrue, only that there is more than one truth with regards to humanity and humanity’s place in the order of things, a fact often overlooked in an age monopolized by scientific discourse. In counterposing these two perspectives on reality, Lyotard is able to concede that development is both natural and inhuman. But, importantly, by focusing on the inhumanity of development, he shifts attention toward an understanding of the human that escapes delimitation by scientific discourse. Perceived solely through the lens of scientific understanding, we are reduced to mere natural creatures subjected to the forces of nature, of which complexification is one. Yet we have seen that for Lyotard human reality is not fully captured by scientific discourse. We are more than mere natural beings if we realize there are other legitimate means of understanding the human.

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If it were the case that humans were simply natural beings given over entirely to those physical processes through which the drive toward increased order is instantiated, then we indeed would be powerless to resist our negentropic fate. However, the fact that we can reflect on our condition and resist this condition as a consequence of our reflection, means for Lyotard that our thoughts and actions transcend the merely natural in that they are not simply programmed by nature.71 In order to explore further Lyotard’s thoughts on resisting development, it is necessary to briefly address at this juncture the question of politics in reference to the complexification thesis. Politics in the context of development is problematic for the straightforward reason that if development forecloses any opposition to its own forward momentum, then human action ultimately serves to reinforce the interests of the evolving social system. Indeed, from within the parameters of the techno-scientific world view, politics can be “nothing other than a program of decisions to encourage development . . . a program of administrative decision making, of managing the system.”72 Lyotard goes on to argue that the form of political organization best suited to managing the system is, not surprisingly, liberal democratic rule.73 The reason liberalism has prevailed over rival forms of governance is because over time it has proven to be the most complex, and hence the most efficient, processor of information. As he puts it: “By leaving the programs of control open to debate and by providing free access to decision-making roles, they [liberal democracies] maximized the amount of human energy available to the system.”74 Development, in other words, favors the regime type that is best able to further development’s own agenda. Here Lyotard’s reasoning aligns with the end of history contention that liberalism is destined to prevail over rival regime types because it more efficiently responds to the demands of social management. Lyotard also asserts that democratic liberalism’s advantage over other regime types lies in its capacity for self-correction. A veritable political monad, the liberal democratic state can facilitate the developmental process without recourse to any ideological input beyond its own political parameters. On this account, the notion of emancipation from the system, long a mainstay of the radical political tradition, no longer represents for Lyotard an “ideal alternative that can be opposed to [political] reality.”75 To the contrary, the politics of self-management sees to it that the system itself articulates and actualizes the ideal of emancipation. Lyotard hypothesizes that even obstacles to the realization of internally generated political ends may be set up by the system as means of developing new and more complex strategies for development. From the context of development, then, emancipation cannot be considered a truly “human” possibility. It cannot since the moves the system generates to extend its range of coping strategies, and therefore its

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own freedom from contingency, are congruent with the ends of complexification, which as previously noted Lyotard does not believe are necessarily supportive of the ideals best suited for human flourishing. Indeed, he states unequivocally in Political Writings that the process of development “ends up in contradiction with the human plan of emancipation.”76 So where does this leave Lyotard and the question of politics? At best, in a very precarious position. To the extent he is bound to the theory of development as a probable account of the workings of the natural order, of which humanity is a part, he is forced to concede that politics (conceived as free or unconditioned action) is largely moribund.77 The admission that politics today is constrained by the ethos of efficiency compels him to give up on the “politics of redemption,” the leftist belief that alienation from the inhumanity of the system can be reversed through revolutionary action. Yet, he refuses to relinquish entirely the “nostalgic notion” that it may be possible at least to resist the system in a way that does not merely reinforce the system but actually furthers the goal of human emancipation.78 This hope is deemed nostalgic because it is grounded in what Lyotard takes to be besieged belief that humanity and human action can be addressed in terms other than those dictated by the prevailing paradigm of development. Despite this guarded optimism, Lyotard’s discussions concerning the potential for resistance seem to evoke an unmistakable sense of loss born from the belief that the system is ultimately destined to prevail. Searching for an exit the existence of which he seems not entirely convinced, he asks: “Which man, or human, or which element in the human is it that thinks of resisting the grip of development? Is there some instance within us that demands to be emancipated from the necessity of this supposed emancipation [of the system]?”79 He answers, somewhat tentatively, in the affirmative that there is indeed a “remainder” within us that can serve as the basis for an authentic resistance. This remainder, or surplus, Lyotard calls a “slow and uncertain resource,”80 that aspect of the human which is the “other” of the spirit of acceleration that permeates development.81 It is the element within us which is neither programmable nor completely led by nature. This element eludes encryption, he says, because it is neither a thing nor a datum capable of being encoded and entered into a memory bank. Rather, Lyotard likens this ineffable something to a “native lack,”82 which he associates especially with the state of childhood. As he says, the child, or the child within us, is “eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay into humanity . . . is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to be more human.”83 Here Lyotard articulates what amounts to the differend within the human, that extra-natural “other” within us which, precisely because it is other, is

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able to bear witness to the inhumanity of the system. Thus, for Lyotard, the only form of authentic resistance to the inhuman system is one which, by recollecting that not everything is programmable, records and therefore sustains an awareness of the inhumanity of a system that is working precisely toward the opposite end. The only kind of resistance he believes remains open to us is therefore a kind of vigilance or rearguard action whose goal is a remembering of what is either fast disappearing or no longer. If, he seems to say, the system cannot be resisted as a political, economic, technological, or sociocultural totality, then at least we have the capacity in our thinking, our art, and our literature to record its inhumanity with the hope of keeping alive what development cannot touch. It is ironic that the defender of les petit narratifs finds himself an actor in the greatest story ever told, the story of development. This cosmic drama reveals that human existence and human thinking are byproducts of the forces of complexification, whose continued evolution likely will spell the demise of the human as we know it. Whether humanity perishes altogether, survives in some diminished form, or is transfigured in a manner that retains its integrity, is inconsequential to the forces of development. What is of import is only that the complexity associated with “the human” is extended beyond current levels. With the potential disposability of the human comes the potential disposability of reality. There is nothing, in the story of development, that identifies reality exclusively with the embodied experience of space and time. Reality is instead a wholly relative term. What is real is defined in relation to the perceiver, which in the context of humanity means that our understanding of what constitutes reality is necessarily conditioned by our evolving technological milieu. We have seen that alongside the story of development Lyotard presents another reading which, by focusing on the human condition, appears quaint in relation to the grandeur and austerity of the discourse on development. This philosophical narrative informs us that what constitutes “the human” eludes the scientific imagination in two basic ways. One, it asserts that our humanity is intimately tied up with the condition of embodiment, a condition technoscience seems unable or unwilling to accommodate. Accordingly, it is understood that by distancing ourselves from the reality of space and time, we are altering not just the conditions under which we live, but the conditions which constitute us as human. Reality, in this instance, is not a relative concept, but constitutive of our being human. Two, this alternative narrative tells us there is an element within the human spirit that eludes containment by developmental forces, an element which must be called upon if we are to resist the inhumanity of the system. And for Lyotard resist we must, if we put any value in being human. This resistance is political not in traditional sense that it works toward overthrowing the status quo, since the goal of overthrowing

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the system runs counter to the end of development and hence is ruled out as a viable option. Rather, the resistance Lyotard speaks of is political in that it calls attention to the inhumanity of the system, and registers its effects. He admits that politics has been reduced to the conscience of the system when he asks: “[W]hat else remains as ‘politics’ except resistance to this inhuman?”84 The claim that politics today has as its end nothing but resisting the inhumanity of the system underscores the depth of his conviction that development poses a threat to the sanctity of the human. This threat appears on multiple levels. For Lyotard, it comes in part in the form of globalization, with the efficiencies that accrue from the planetary embrace of both liberalism and capitalism. The threat also appears in technological advances that further blur the line separating human from machine. Finally, Lyotard suggests the inhuman is making an appearance in the innermost recesses of human consciousness. There is, he says, an “infinitely secret” inhumanity to which “the soul is hostage.”85 This claim is reminiscent of what Dreyfus in another context posed as the real danger towards humans in the digital age. As he puts it: “If the computer paradigm becomes so strong that people begin to think of themselves as digital devices on the model of work in artificial intelligence, then, since . . . machines cannot be like human beings, human beings may become progressively like machines.”86 Lyotard’s deepest concern likewise is that the system is engendering a forgetting of what escapes it. Humans are not spirit-beings, or spirits with bodies, yet “progress” habituates us into assuming otherwise. Lyotard is not unduly troubled by overt attempts to quash the perversity that dwells within the human spirit, saying that such efforts would only aggravate it, thereby fanning the fires of discontent.87 He is far more worried, however, that the irrepressible human spirit may simply lie dormant, stilled by the rush of progress, in which case the system will have the last say. His writings on the reality problematic can be read as an effort to awaken us to such a possibility and to avert such a fate.

ENDNOTES Note: *indicates that the work is only available in electronic form. 1. See, for example, Bill Reading’s Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, (London: Routledge, 1991); Andrew Benjamin, ed., Judging Lyotard, (London: Routledge,1992); Richard Rorty’s article, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” in Essay on Heidegger and others, (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991); and Stephen K. White’s Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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2. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 77. 3. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 113. 4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), Volume IV, 238. 5. Ibid., 249. Heidegger’s most penetrating analysis of technology and the age of planetary domination is contained in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977). 6. Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Sublime,” in Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, #26 (V, 327). This quotation has been extracted from Ernst Cassirer’s Kant’s Life and Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 329. 7. Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 136. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Section 25 (V, 321 f.) (Ak. V, 250). This quotation is taken from Ernst Cassirer’s Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 328. 9. Lyotard, Inhuman, 137. 10. Ibid., 137. 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Lyotard,“What is Postmodernism?” 79. 13. Ibid., 80. 14. Lyotard, Inhuman, 126. 15. Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?” 81. 16. Lyotard, Inhuman, 126. Lyotard’s most eloquent summation of the distinction between the nostalgic modernism and the novelty seeking postmodern aesthetic is found in the above-cited appendix to The Postmodern Condition, entitled “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” 17. Ibid., 128; See also The Inhuman, 151. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 10. Irony aside, Lyotard miscalculates just how momentary our stay on the planet will be. Although the Sun’s heat death lies approximately four to six billion years ahead, the steady consumption of hydrogen at the Sun’s core is precipitating a slow but steady increase in solar radiation that, according to scientific opinion, will likely lead to the end of life on the surface on the planet a scant one billion years from now. 20. See Martin S. Olivier’s unpublished article, “Personal Privacy and Lyotard’s Inhuman.”* 21. Lyotard, Inhuman, 10–11. 22. See Gilbert G. Germain’s A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections of Politics and Technology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), especially Chapter 2.

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23. Lyotard, Inhuman, 11. 24. Ibid., 94. 25. Ibid., 97. 26. Ibid., 97. 27. Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between Past and Present (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 277. 28. Some of the more prominent studies of systems theory or cybernetics include: R.W. Ashy, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1956); A. Burks, ed., Essays on Cellular Automata (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964); R. Laing, “Machines as Organisms: An Exploration of the Relevance of Recent Results,” in Biosystems 11 (1979), 201–215; L.L. Langley, Homeostasis (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1965); Edgar Morin, “Complexity,” The International Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 26, no. 4 (1976), 55–58; J. von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966); Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Avon, 1950) and Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 29. The literature on complexity is extensive, with most of it being generated by the scientific community itself. A few of the more illuminating texts include: John L. Casti, Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), especially 269–274; John L. Casti and A. Karlqvist, eds., Complexity, Language and Life (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1986); and D. Stein, ed., Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity (Redwood City, CA: AddisonWesley, 1989). 30. See Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 12; and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Paul Geiman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 122. 31. Lyotard, Inhuman, 6. 32. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993), 130–132. 33. Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?” 81. 34. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 37. 35. Lyotard, Inhuman, 5. 36. Ibid., 5. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Lyotard, Political Writings, 15–20, 122. 39. Lyotard, Inhuman, 62. 40. Ibid., 6–7. 41. Ibid., 116. 42. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 110–111. 43. Ibid., 111.

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44. Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 12. 45. Ibid., 34; See also Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 15, 90 n. 55. 46. Lyotard, Inhuman, 199. 47. Ibid., 53. 48. Ibid., 14. 49. Ibid., 4. 50. Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), 33. 51. Lyotard, Inhuman, 2. 52. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 47–53. 53. Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman, 25–26. 54. Lyotard, Inhuman, 118. 55. Ibid., 15. 56. Ibid., 15. 57. This quotation is taken from Gary Kasparov’s magazine article, “The Day that I Sensed a New Kind of Intelligence,” in Time Magazine, March 25, 1996, 55. 58. This quotation is taken from Robert Wright’s article, “Can Machines Think?” in Time Magazine, March 25, 1996, 50–54. 59. Kasparov, “A New Kind of Intelligence,” Time, March, 25, 1996, 55. 60. Lyotard, Inhuman, 18. 61. Ibid., 17. 62. Ibid., 22. 63. Ibid., 20. 64. Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972), 213. 65. Ibid., 248. 66. Ibid., 255. 67. Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 17. 68. Ibid., 17. 69. Ibid.,17. 70. N. Katherine Hayles, “Narratives of Artificial Life,” in Future Natural: Nature, science, culture, eds. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 161. Much of the ensuing analysis on emergent intelligence is gleaned from Hayles “Narratives of Artificial Life.” 71. Good introductory texts to the theme of connectionism include William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen’s Connectionism and the Mind: Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution (New York: Blackwell), 2001; and Steven Davis’s Connectionism: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press), 1992. 72. Stephen Jay Gould is one of the most popular and vociferous critics of the “cerebral primacy” theory of human evolution, which links the relatively recent evolutionary advance to modern man with a rapid and unprecedented growth in brain size. Gould maintains that despite the fact that fossilized records disproved the theory over eighty years ago, the myth of brain-led human evolution continues to circulate in modern media circles and thrive in the popular imagination. See Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since

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Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1977), Chapter 26, “Posture Maketh the Man.” See also Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), Chapter 11, “Our Greatest Evolutionary Step.” 73. Lyotard, Inhuman, 3. 74. Lyotard, Political Writings, 101. 75. It is difficult not to interpret Lyotard’s thoughts on the victory of liberal democratic state as yet another wrinkle in the “end of history” thesis initially outlined by Alexandre Kojève in his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The rationale for its supremacy may differ from the accounts of a Kojève or a Fukuyama, but the result is the same. 76. Lyotard, Political Writings, 122–123. 77. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 113. 78. Lyotard, Political Writings, 152. As Lyotard says, we see the signs of the contestation between the system’s needs and human emancipation in “the disastrous effects of the developed civilizations, effects that motivate the ecology movement, incessant curricular reforms, ethics commissions, the crackdown on drug trafficking.” (Ibid.) 79. Ibid., 151. The full passage reads: “I confess that in my darker moments, I imagine that what we still call emancipation, what the decision makers call development, as the effect of a process of emancipation (called negative entropy in dynamics) that has affected and still affects the small region of the cosmos formed by our sun and its miniscule planet, Earth.” 80. When commenting that politics today pertains “only” to the business of managing the system, Lyotard adds in parenthesis: “I say ‘only’ because I have a revolutionary past and hence a certain nostalgia.” (Political Writings, 101) Clearly, in light of this admission, Lyotard regards the act of resisting the system as essentially futile. Which is not to say, of course, that the ultimate futility of the act means it cannot carry with it a measure of nobility. 81. Lyotard, Political Writings, 152. 82. Ibid., 152. 83. Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 3. 84. Ibid., 3. 85. Ibid., 4. 86. Ibid., 7. 87. Ibid., 2.

Chapter 5

Getting Real(er)

If no one asks me, I know what it is. —St. Augustine

The quotation above is Augustine’s much repeated response to the question: What is time? The paradox of time, which the Bishop’s reply reveals, is that time is an experiential reality that eludes capture in thought and speech. We live time, know it in an intuitive sense, but nonetheless are unable to explicate fully this tacit understanding. It is for this reason that most definitions of time seem inadequate to the lived experience of time. They take the appearance of tautologies, citing time to be either some kind of measurable period in which events unfold, or the subjective experience of events passing from the future through to the past. In deference to Kant and Lyotard, the experience of time may be called sublime to the extent its perceptual reality escapes intelligibility. Augustine’s response to the question of time acknowledges as much in drawing attention to the disjunction between the experience and the idea of time. Like time, the phenomenal world is something we experience as real and yet are unable to conceptualize in a way that reconciles the idea of reality with its experiential veracity. Reality is an experiential truth whose concept is inadequate to its object in the double sense that the concept appears both indeterminate and insubstantial relative to what it purports to describe. Reality, it turns out, is more problematic as an idea than as an experience. This explains why we may doubt the existence of reality, or otherwise reconsider the meaning of reality, but refrain from acting as if the world were unreal. Conceptions of reality are problematic because, as abstracted pictures of the real, we can reflect on them and rationally interrogate their integrity. In contrast, the lived experience of reality is immune from challenge because the experience by 153

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definition is not an object of thought. One simply cannot, for instance, abstract the practice of walking from the reality of taking a walk, as one can detach the idea of walking from its practice. It follows that the “truth” of reality cannot be proven propositionally, but only confirmed through its living. The difference between reality as idea and experience finds a parallel in the Heideggerian distinction between “present-at-hand” and “ready-at-hand,” or between being as presented to consciousness and being as revealed through use.1 The lived experience of reality is reality understood as ready-at-hand: It denotes the prereflective experience of the world whose givenness is accepted on faith. It is this perceptual faith in the givenness of things that tends to be overlooked in relation to supposedly weightier questions concerning the truth or meaning of things. To argue there are in effect two realities, the reality upon which we reflect and a prereflective reality, is important because it permits us to bracket the question of reality’s meaning from the question of reality itself. It acknowledges that the experience of reality subtends its intellectualization and that discourses questioning “the reality of reality” presume the prior existence of the object under examination. In doubting, denying, or reimagining reality, we always end up affirming the existence of the very thing we question. Suppose, then, there is no escaping reality for the reason cited above. Suppose as well that the experience of being in the world is foundational because, as creatures who inhabit the Earth, we are also creatures of the Earth and thus share with the world the properties of spatial and temporal extension. Hannah Arendt’s contention that earthly reality is the “very quintessence of the human condition” sums up nicely the view that situates embodiment at the center of our humanness.2 The problem, of course, is that the condition that marks us as fundamentally human is also imperiling. Since the dawn of recorded history, human beings have been keenly aware of the mixed blessing that is earthly existence. Whatever pleasures there are to be found in the world are tempered by the forces of strife and anxiety that permeate this world. The vagaries and deprivations of nonhuman nature, along with the travails spurred by antisocial impulses, conspire to make the world a less than obliging habitat. We respond to this predicament by devising ways of narrowing the gap separating our desire to be rid of these insecurities from their satisfaction. In doing so, we move toward making a home (a domos) out of the world. Our initial efforts at domesticating reality were realized with the adoption of a world view that took reality to be inspirited, a view which facilitated the development of a particular set of practices that sought to effect change in the world. Magic was the name given to the technical arts in the age of enchantment. We moderns, on the other hand, have relied on technology to achieve the same end. While both magic and technology seek to domesticate the world, how they do so affects dramatically the outcomes of the respective processes. In

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dealing with what is taken to be an animate world, magic aims to placate the spirits, assuming that by appeasing them a particular practice or ritual likely will achieve the desired effect. Rarely is blame attached to the practice itself when the magical arts fail to realize the anticipated results. Rather, through skillful reinterpretation, the practitioner may claim the failure to be a success, or, alternately, he may blame himself for misreading the wishes and intentions of the spirits, a forgivable offense given the limits of human perception in relation to the powers of the gods. Magic, in the end, domesticates reality not through its practices as much as through a reading of those practices. The limited success of magic in closing the gap between desire and satisfaction is compensated for by interpreting its performance in the context of a living reality, where visions of a triumphant human will have no place. Domesticating worldly being through technology proves to be a completely different enterprise with entirely different results. As with magical practices, technological practices reflect an interpretation of reality, only with technology the world is perceived as bereft of any animating principle that may serve as a bulwark against a controlling human will. From a Heideggerian perspective, a disenchanted reality is a world where what appears before us is taken as “standing reserve” (Bestand), a resource whose energy humankind can extract, transform, and store for future use.3 This reorientation in perception changes everything, for only by seeing the world as a venue for human advantage could the means be sanctioned to develop new tools for engaging such a world, namely, modern science and technology. Unlike magic, whose success must be measured in the context of a world view that assumes nature possesses an independent mind, the success of technology is measured solely on its own terms. That is to say, in the absence of considerations external to it, the measure of success of a technical operation lies within the operation itself, in the efficiency with which it performs the intended task. Efficiency is a term employed more frequently than it is properly understood. The adjective “efficient” is derived from the same Latin root word (ex, out + facere, to do) as “effect” or “effective,” meaning to accomplish or work out. To be efficient means to be able to produce an effect, and to the extent efficiency pertains to the ability to make things happen it is associated with power. However, this literal definition proves wanting because it omits a crucial element in the contemporary understanding of the term. Efficiency connotes not simply the power to produce an effect, but to do so in a manner not wasteful of time, effort, or expense. There is a world of difference between possessing the mere power to precipitate a desired effect and having the capacity to do so economically. The end of efficiency, then, is to determine the optimum means of achieving a desired end. Not satisfied with a mere capacity for accomplishment,

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efficiency seeks to rationalize this capacity by restructuring it in accordance with rational or scientific principles. This task requires the employment of what Max Weber calls “formal rationality,” an instrumental kind of reasoning that limits itself to the end of maximizing means.4 Instrumental reasoning realizes its goal by first assessing the performance of a prescribed task relative to the amount of energy expended for its realization, as manifested in such things as time, effort, or cost. Then, based on this assessment, calculative reasoning is applied to determine ways to reduce the work-to-energy ratio. Having recourse to insights gleaned from the science of physics will help better explain the relational aspect of the concept of efficiency. Efficiency is defined in physics as the amount of work done by a system divided by the heat or energy put into the system. This ratio of work to energy is such that no system can convert absolutely all the energy available to it into work. No system, in other words, can be perfectly efficient. In converting energy into work, or potential into kinetic energy, some energy is always lost to the system’s environment in the form of heat. This loss is in keeping with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that although no overall energy is lost in converting energy to work, the amount of energy available to do work—that is, the amount of organized energy—decreases over time. Entropy is the name given to the process whereby the quality of energy becomes progressively and irreversibly degraded over time. The law of entropy governing the natural order sees to it that no system can attain total efficiency. Whether the system in question is the human body or an entire ecosystem, no process can fully utilize all the energy or information it has at its disposal. But to acknowledge that perfect efficiency remains an unattainable ideal is not to say progress cannot be made toward narrowing the gap between what the energy committed to a task potentially can accomplish and what this energy actually produces in the way of results. In fact, the history of technological development can be regarded as a protracted effort to economize productive capacities by attuning the potential and the actual, the ideal and the real. We have seen that because technology is efficiency-driven, it invariably favors systems and systematization, since systems are a product of the rational ordering of parts for the purpose of increasing efficiency. Yet because by definition no system can be perfectly ordered, or one hundred percent efficient, there always is work to be done to heighten the efficiency levels of systems. Just how thoroughly enmeshed we are in the technological ethos is revealed by how problems related to the relative inefficiency of systems are confronted. Like any other means-ends challenge, the technological mind sees the problem of inefficient systems as requiring the application of a rational solution—an efficiency management system. Everyone in the administrative sector of a modern economy is aware that management systems are

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constantly being devised to measure existing efficiency levels within a given system for the purpose of further improving system performance. And, as with any technology, considerable effort is expended improving the efficiency with which these efficiency management systems perform their task, since improvements to the system’s performance are dependent on a precise assessment of existing levels of efficiency. The powers over the given world that have accrued as a result of our collective commitment to the performance principle are impressive. Long past is the time when Hesiod could say of his fellow man that they “never rest from labor and sorrows by day, and from perishing by night.”5 In fact, it can be argued that so thoroughly have we transformed the world in an effort to make it our own that reality effectively ceases to exist. We have crossed a threshold where, instead of making a home of the world, we have created a technological matrix of such complexity that it constitutes a world apart—a System of systems. This is the abiding concern of the techno-skeptics surveyed in this study. With the exception of Derrida, whose idiosyncratic reading of the reality problematic sets him apart, the others are united in casting a wary eye upon the encasing of humanity within a world of its own making. This process is viewed with trepidation because it closes an horizon deemed essential to the human condition. It is, ironically, an openness toward what transcends the merely human that sustains the human. To speak of the closing of horizons is to invoke the name of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an earlier century, employed similar imagery to portray the death of God and its aftermath: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?”6 Nietzsche’s madman alludes here to the role played by reason and modern science in eroding faith in a reference point which for millennia had oriented the moral and intellectual traditions of Western civilization. Humanity’s self-understanding, he realized, would undergo a tremendous transformation with the death of metaphysics. Gone are the days when we could look to the heavens for comfort and guidance in our dealings with earthly concerns. He warned that from now on the struggle for answers will be fought down here, on Earth, through the worldly actions of political, scientific, and cultural leaders. Over a century later we have witnessed the results of such struggles. However, in an unexpected twist, the powers unleashed as a consequence of our embrace of earthly reality have now turned upon reality itself. Having relinquished what lies above, we seem intent on abandoning what lies below. The moral and spiritual disorientation Nietzsche warned would befall humanity in the wake of God’s death is compounded today by a disorientation of another order in the wake of reality’s demise.

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THE PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGY To this point I have presented a largely sympathetic reading of the main players reviewed in these pages, focusing on their respective contributions to a self-defined problem. The time now has come to ask ourselves whether the problem they address exists at all. Although I have stressed that several of the readings of the reality problematic must be read ironically, I nonetheless have presented reasons why we ought not dismiss their admittedly dire assessments of our technological society and its future. Is this defense well taken? Are their more convincing arguments suggesting their pessimism is misguided and that modern technoscience is not as problematic as they claim it to be? A brief survey of the main counterarguments to technological pessimism will set the stage for further analysis. The charge of technological determinism is often raised in connection with the dystopianism of thinkers like Virilio and Lyotard, not to mention Heidegger, Ellul, and others who share their intellectual sympathies. The criticism is that those who demonize technology often wrongly attribute to it, as one commentator notes, “a specific, coherent, and all-determining significance.”7 They are thought guilty of reifying technology, which explains in part their penchant for referring to technology in the singular. Conflating the idea of technology with technology proper, the argument continues, these dystopians are able to impute to technological development an exclusive goal, such as the enslavement or dehumanization of humankind. Along with this error, critics assert that technological determinists fall prey to reductionist thinking. Reductionism is said to err on two fronts. One, it assumes the relative autonomy of various aspects of a social order, and for this reason assumes as well that they can be excised neatly from the whole and examined in isolation. Two, reductionist thinking errs in singling out a particular aspect of the social order, such as technology or the economy, and claiming it to be the efficient cause of the whole of that order. In response to the reductionist’s presuppositions and assertions, the critics argue that because no aspect of the whole stands in isolation from other aspects, technology, like every other component of society, functions as both cause and effect. As stated, dystopians maintain that technology is the efficient cause of societal development. There is no countervailing force in their view to the technological imperative of efficiency. All aspects of the social order are informed and reordered in accordance with the dictates of technology, which themselves are immune to overriding influences by any kind of extraneous input, be it political, economic, or cultural. Although not a dystopian himself, the contemporary critical theorist Jürgen Habermas takes seriously the determinists’ concerns in his analysis of “the mediatization of the lifeworld.”8

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His critique of technology asserts that the rationality associated with technology has overpowered the domain of communicative action, the “lifeworld.” This latter realm, the realm of politics, broadly defined, is being corrupted and distorted by the “system,” which has as its goal not mutual understanding but control in accordance with rational rules and procedures. Habermas shares with the dystopians a concern that, if not technology per se, then at least the spirit of technology, has colonized the social order as a whole to its detriment. But what he and most critics of the determinist position cannot countenance is the assumption that no force exists within society capable of altering the course of what is purported to be “autonomous” technological development. Habermas sees the lifeworld, and the rationality which informs it, as a distinct mechanism of coordinating societal action: It therefore stands against the system and its rationality. Both mechanisms serve as means to satisfy different sets of societal interests, and so both for him have their place within a well-functioning social order. For Habermas, the problem with technology has nothing to do with technology itself, with either its purposiveness or its focus on efficiency, but with its domination as a mechanism of societal coordination. Accordingly, the solution to the problem of technology for him lies in reinvigorating the lifeworld and the integrity of communicative action. All critics of the dystopian philosophy of technology share with Habermas the view that there are competing logics at play within the social order which see to it that the domination of technology is less than total. Technology, they say, is not sufficiently monolithic to warrant either deification or demonization, but instead has the power both to restrict and extend human freedom. In monumentalizing technology and seeing it primarily as a negative force, the critics charge the dystopians with falling prey to one or more common fallacies. The first of these may be called the “design fallacy,” or the view that a technology invariably functions in the manner it was originally intended to function. Those who succumb to this fallacy see technology as an instrument that advances the power of those who own and implement it. Since technologies are regarded primarily as tools designed to extend control over the domain to which they are applied, their imposition necessarily leads to a loss of freedom on behalf of those at the receiving end of these instrumental forces. Dystopians, for instance, would regard technologies such as communications networks or the Internet as classic illustrations of “system” forces in that they are rationally structured and managed, and are distributed on a market that rewards efficiency. The freedoms and powers these technologies confer upon their users are more apparent than real, they assert, since their realization is framed by the rational demands of these specific technologies, as well of those of the larger technological system within which they are embedded. The critics, on the other hand, counter it is misleading to assume that just because these technologies

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are designed to maximize efficiency and extend the power of their managers, they must remain mere instruments of the system. They argue that the communicative practices facilitated by these technologies need not produce outcomes which reinforce system needs. Some observers cite the Minitel incident of the 1980s, where the French government’s introduction of an information distribution system was effectively sabotaged by the public to serve its own ends, as proving a more general claim that all technologies have the potential to be implemented in ways that can subvert the interests of the system.9 Critics also allege dystopians as falling victim to the “appeal-to-tradition fallacy.” The guiding assumption of this fallacy is that older technologies, by virtue of their relative primitiveness, function more directly as extensions of the human body and therefore are more attuned to the essence of our humanity. This nostalgic embrace of primitiveness leads dystopians to interpret every technological advance as another step toward an increasingly mediated and ultimately dehumanized existence. Looking, for instance, at the evolution of inscription technologies—extending from the first etching tools to word processing systems—dystopians see only a progression from more to less embodied forms of writing. Where words and symbols once were committed to a surface with the aid of a steady hand and a focused mind, they are now abstract “objects” of manipulation to be arranged and rearranged in accordance with the whims of the moment. Heidegger perfectly captures this sentiment in his analysis of the typewriter, the word processing system of his era: “Mechanized writing,” he tells us, “deprives the hand of dignity in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a mere means for the traffic of communication.”10 Heidegger’s fear, and the fear of dystopians in general, is that a change in the medium of linguistic expression affects not only the form of language, but more importantly the content of what is expressed. Hardly neutral, they see technology as actively transforming what it acts upon, conforming it to the technological demands of efficiency and standardization. While many critics of dystopianism concede that technology is not neutral, they take issue with the view that technological progress is necessarily dehumanizing. Admitting different technologies impose different forms on the material they act upon, and that some these forms indeed may be more mediated or mechanical than others, they conclude that never is the form so alien to human purposes that it precludes being used as a means of true intellectual or creative expression. To argue otherwise would be to claim, for example, that because a keyboard is a mechanized hand, those who use it are capable only of expressing mechanized thoughts. This absurd conclusion, the critics argue, underscores the fact that while technology imposes a form on what is expressed, this imposition does not necessarily extend to its content.

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Finally, dystopians are accused of exaggerating the uniformity with which technology advances. In part as a consequence of their reifying technology, dystopians see the evolution of technology as a lock-step process composed of successive phases of instrumental sophistication. So it is, for instance, that we see ourselves living today in the Computer or Digital Age, as distinct from the Mechanical Age which preceded it. Critics dispel what may be called the “coherency fallacy” by pointing out that in any given period there is considerable diversity in types of technology. Hi-tech never displaces lo-tech entirely. Antiquaries such as bicycles, typewriters, vinyl LPs, pencils, and handpowered reel lawnmowers, still have a place in a world otherwise given over to the latest technological innovations. While dystopians tend to dismiss the persistence of antiquarian technologies as unimportant in relation to the overarching pattern of development, the critics see it as providing more evidence that technology is hardly the hegemon some claim it is. If, they say, we reflect on the manner we actually live our lives and the tools we rely on to facilitate our actions, we will see that our technological milieu is multilayered. That we lead technologically disjointed lives proves that technology does not hold sway over the human, at least not in the totalistic sense the dystopians would have us believe. We use technologies to satisfy our needs and desires, the nature of which (while conditioned by the technologies at our disposal) is not wholly determined by the technological milieu. If it were otherwise, they ask, how could one explain the enduring appeal of the lowly pencil in a virtual world, or the persistence of analog technologies in a digital age? If the arguments against technological pessimism mentioned above hold any merit, then the problem with technology stems more from a misreading of technology than from technology itself. The critics of the dystopian vision, while cognizant of technology’s dark side, refuse to see its powers of coercion and self-perpetuation as anything more than propensities. Technology for them remains subvertible because it does not constitute a closed system. It follows that we do not, strictly speaking, live in a technological society because technology’s final end (i.e., efficiency) is not the only determinant of societal evolution. As powerful a force as technology may be, they assert, it remains one force among others and therefore subject to challenge. If there is a problem with technology, the critics of determinism say, it is a consequence of the failure of politics. Following Habermas, they assume that the excesses of technology result from underdeveloped communicative capacities and a corresponding weakened capacity for communities to dictate the ends to which technologies ought to be employed. Much of what has been said in the preceding pages about the fate of reality is predicated on the determinist assumption that humanity is being ineluctably driven by technological development from the real world of space and time.

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The expressed concerns about reality’s demise and its dehumanizing consequences would lose their force if it could be shown that nothing in the logic of technology dictates such an end and that our technological “fate” remains, as always, squarely in our hands. Before we can decide which of the two sides of the debate presents the stronger argument, we must review the dystopian position’s likely response to the charge that it seriously misreads the essence of technology. As noted, the critics of dystopianism argue that technological pessimists wrongly attribute to technology a single and all-determining purpose. They do so because they conflate the idea of technology with its exercise, thereby granting the essence of technology (i.e., efficiency) an inflated significance in the workings of society. By adopting this high-altitude intellectual posture, they invariably neglect the real world of technology, with its inconsistencies, paradoxes, and cleavages. This oversight accounts for the dramatic flair of much contemporary theorizing about technology, especially continental philosophizing, with its sweeping generalizations and dire pronouncements on the end of man, nature, or reality. Unfortunately, these critics charge, the grandiosity of their claims is matched by an equally formidable misreading of the nature of technology. Those who subscribe to the determinist position simply reject the allegation they misread technology by viewing it as some kind of a singular social reality in accordance with which individual decisions are made and actions are undertaken. On the contrary, the determinists charge that their detractors, by eschewing a more expansive theoretical perspective, are misinterpreting technology by failing to appreciate fully its impact on society and the self. There are two main variants of the determinist position which correspond to differing interpretations as to how technology attains the status of a separate and determinative force. The ontological version of technological determinism has Heidegger as its leading proponent, while the sociological strain is taken up most forcefully by Ellul. A brief review of these respective types of determinist thought will aid in understanding how those who forewarn of reality’s demise can deflect criticisms that their assessments are based on simplistic accounts of technology and therefore hold no merit. Heidegger maintains that we lose sight of the true import of technology if we follow the strategy of the critics of determinism and read technology simply as a concatenation of specific instrumentalities. Doing so blinds us to the key question concerning what makes technology possible in the first place. Heidegger’s response to the question concerning technology takes him to the essence of technology, which he equates with enframing (das Ge-stell), or a particular manner in which Being reveals itself. Through enframing Being reveals itself as the previously mentioned “standing reserve”: Here Being calls

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to be appropriated by the human will to do the will’s bidding. Enframing, then, is for Heidegger the condition of possibility for technology. Without this particular world view, there simply would be no technology as we know it. This reading of technology, however, would not in itself make a determinist out of Heidegger if it were not for the fact that he does not regard enframing as an understanding over which humans have control. Ironically, given its association with human willing, enframing is not a self-willed understanding of Being but “a sending” (ein Geschick) from Being. Because the understanding of Being which subtends technology is not, strictly speaking, “our” understanding but an understanding that has been bequeathed to us by Being itself, we remain powerless to understand Being in any way other than technologically.11 This is why Heidegger insists that technology is humanity’s fate, and that in light of this determination the only viable response to technology is a kind of mindful acceptance in advance of a new dispensation of Being. Ellul shares with Heidegger the view that the essence of technology is not something technological. That is to say, to get to the core of technology we must refrain from thinking about technology as “ware,” either hard or soft. While Ellul abstains from attributing to technology the lofty underpinnings present in Heidegger’s account, he nonetheless agrees that to understand technology we must look to its essence. For Ellul, the essence of technology is best understood in sociological terms. One gets closest to the true import of technology, in other words, when one sees it not as an aggregate of instrumentalities but as a system with its own specific reality and particular characteristics. For Ellul, the technological system evolved with the rationalizing of technical know-how (techné), and with the subsequent radicalizing of this process, resulting in an “extreme development of means.”12 So radical is the development of means today that Ellul contends technology has become an end in itself disguised as means. Technology, in short, is autonomous. Liberated from the religious, cultural, or moral constraints that once limited and directed the productive arts, technology’s “calculus of efficiency” has become the animating principle of the whole of society. From humble beginnings, the technical arts have assumed the status of society’s central organizing force. This means, in sociological terms at least, that there are no viable alternatives to the performance principle. The technological ethos for Ellul does not exist in tension with other ordering principles and therefore cannot be contained by a competing societal force. Politics, the well-spring of hope for those critical of the determinist position, Ellul regards as already tainted by the ethos of efficiency and thus incapable of guiding technology in the way Habermas and others assume it can. In taking technology to be a “preexistent and more or less determinative” sociological reality, Ellul is not denying the existence of human freedom.13

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Determinists of his persuasion do not assume the spirit of technology dictates every thought and action, only that individual freedoms cannot be isolated from the sociological context in which they occur. Since, for Ellul, the contemporary sociological context is essentially technological, the general pattern of societal development necessarily conforms to the dictates of efficiency. Again, this does not mean that every individual or even every collective decision accords with the general pattern. How to retain a measure of freedom within a technological society is a matter of no small importance to a determinist like Ellul, since he regards technology as a less than salutary sociological force. Because freedom for him is socially conditioned, the surest way to lose whatever residual freedom we may have and to actively advance the technological spirit is to deny the determinisms that press upon us. As Ellul says: “If man were to say: ‘These are not necessities; I am free because of technique or despite technique,’ this would prove that he is totally determined.”14 So, just as the path to wisdom opens with the realization of one’s ignorance, freedom can be gained for Ellul only by first acknowledging the forces of necessity, which today entails recognizing the centrality of technology and its determinations. We are now in a position to assess how the determinists likely would respond to the fallacies their critics claim undermine their position. In rebutting the design fallacy, a determinist predisposed to a Heideggerian reading of technology would argue that the end to which a particular technology may be applied in no way alters the essential character of the relationship between the instrument and its employer. It does not make any difference whether Minitel, for example, is used for the purposes government originally intended or for ends congruent with the communication needs of civil society. In both instances what remains constant is that persons regard and use the technology as a resource to facilitate the satisfaction of certain needs and demands. Sociological determinists like Ellul would concur that the particular ends to which a technology is applied amounts to a difference without a distinction. The essential character of technology, the premium placed on efficiency, is unaffected by considerations pertaining to use. With respect to the appeal-to-tradition fallacy, Heidegger would take issue with the view that technology is neutral, and the allied presumption that form and content exist largely independent of each other. The critics of determinism like to point out that new technologies, no less older technologies, are basically means of conveying the intent of those who use them. So it is that a typewriter employed by a gifted wordsmith is an instrument of considerable accomplishment, while in the hands of a hack, an instrument of less dubious distinction.15 Determinists like Heidegger and Ellul would not deny that a technology like the typewriter is capable of facilitating the composition of great works, only

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that the character of their greatness is modified by the form of their inscription. To take an example, we could look at modern technologies like cell phones or emailing services and conclude, as the critics would like, that they are simply novel means of advancing age-old communicative practices. We could add that these new technologies are only as effective as their employers in that what gets communicated is dependent on the ideas, interests, and communication skills of the dialoguing participants. While doubtless true that cell phone conversations and email exchanges run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime, only the most obtuse would deny that these technologies have not changed the general character of communication in contemporary society, rendering it more fragmentary, spontaneous, and ubiquitous. More importantly, this shift in the parameters of communication invariably affects the content of what is communicated. For instance, modern communication devices and the communicative practices they cultivate discourage the development of extended thought patterns, a loss which in turn inhibits the formation of the kinds of ideas that demand prolonged and focused attention.16 Heidegger’s critique of technology is often labeled nostalgic, a not altogether unwarranted charge. But the essential point of both his and Ellul’s response to the appeal-to-tradition fallacy is that their critics misread their skepticism toward emerging technologies as indicating a predisposition against novelty, when in fact it reveals merely a rejection of the presumed neutrality of technology and hence a heightened awareness of the unavoidable costs of technological advancement. As observed, both Heidegger and Ellul understand there is no escaping the ethos of technology, and for this reason no escaping technological “progress” either. So their respective critiques of technology cannot be read as anti-progress for they do not equate the questioning of progress with a facile rejection of technological advancement. Their animus toward progress is directed less toward the material signs of progress than toward what our unquestioning embrace of technological advancement reveals about the totality of the technological order. In the final analysis, it is not novelty per se that concerns them as much as the implications of our incapacity to question the new. Determinists, lastly, would respond to the coherency fallacy by rejecting it out of hand as a largely irrelevant critique. The uneven advancement of technology, they would say, in no way undercuts the claim that technology constitutes our fate. That a person, for instance, may use a pencil to jot down a note while composing a thought on a keyboard is interesting only insofar as it proves that different sorts of practical challenges demand technological solutions of varying complexity. It is simply wrong to assume that in order to constitute our fate, technology must be uniform in its applications. Determinists such as Heidegger and Ellul would argue that their critics mistake the

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forest for the trees by focusing on the issue raised in the coherency fallacy. To assert that the coexistence of technologies of differing levels of sophistication indicates technology’s less than complete hold over humanity is akin to saying the copresence of humans and microbes on Earth disproves the theory of evolution. All it does reveal is the complexity of the technological environment to which we are bound.

THE QUESTION OF ALIENATION The debate between the determinists and their critics over “who gets technology right” and whether the “problem with technology” is in truth a problem comes down to a matter of perspective: How you interpret and evaluate technology depends on your vantage point. We have observed that the determinists assess the technological landscape from a high-altitude position, whereas their opponents do so from a ground-level position. As a result, the determinists accuse their opponents of not seeing the “big picture” while the critics charge the determinists with not seeing the “true picture.” The unresolvable tension between the competing visions of technology finds a parallel in the standoff between those who see the ideological debate between the political left and right as real and substantive, and those who do not. The ideological gap between liberal and conservative political forces is perceived as a veritable chasm for those whose vocation or avocation is intimately tied to the affairs of contemporary political life. The same gap is viewed by others as a trifling distinction when judged from a critical standpoint that sees each side as a variation on the theme of classical liberalism. As with the debate over technology, those on either side of the theoretical divide heap scorn on their opponents’ political acumen. The big picture theorists are called politically irresponsible by their opponents for not acceding to the orthodoxy that the left-right split matters, while they label their critics credulous for not realizing that the progressive and conservative factions within liberal democracies share far more then they wish to admit in terms of fundamental political goals. This study constitutes a high-altitude reading of technology and its impact on questions concerning the nature of reality, human and otherwise. Consequently, it is susceptible to the kinds of criticism that can be leveled at all big picture studies. It is certainly true, for instance, that most of the theorists investigated in these pages appear to position themselves within the determinist camp, which imparts to their commentary on technology and the reality problematic an air of necessity. The pessimism associated with the determinist position is seen by its detractors as misleading and unwarranted, as more a projection generated by the intellectual equivalent of farsightedness

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than a reasoned conclusion based on hard-headed observational analysis. The evidence supporting the claim that technology is imperiling reality is inconclusive, the critics argue. For every indication that the advancement of technology is distancing humanity from the reality of given being, they point to a counter-indication showing resistance to this distancing and a dialectical return to that which was previously transcended. If we accept the conclusion that the preceding discourse on reality is an artifact of perspectivism, then we are left at an impasse of the sort that confronted Callicles and Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias. It is impossible, in this circumstance, to determine whether or not such a discourse captures the tenor of our times. All that can be said is that, given one’s philosophical predisposition, one is either inclined or disinclined to accept the rhetoric of the reality problematic. Certainly, for most of the players in the debate, the determinist/anti-determinist polarity amounts to a differend. There is very little love lost between those who are partial to the insights of theorists like Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard, and those who are not. Yet I suggest that what the theorists examined in these pages have to say about the status of the real in contemporary society is not anywhere as radical as their detractors assume, and that there is sufficient common ground between these two positions to have each shed light on the other. Take, for instance, the argument put forth by Andrew Feenberg, a prominent critic of the determinist position. He employs a modified version of Habermas’s system/lifeworld distinction to counter the dystopian claim that the dictates of technical rationality have infused the entire social order, leaving no room for the play of counter strategies. Technology, he tells us, has two faces, not one, as his opponents would have us believe. It has both system associations, linking it with imperative of control, and lifeworld associations, aligning it with meaning and, ultimately, resistance to the imperative of control. So, for instance, a technology like the telephone is not just a technical instrument, but also a “richly signified artifact” whose meaning contributes to the redesigning of the technology and the system of which it is a part.17 It is the mutual penetration of technology’s two faces that permits Feenberg to conclude “the dystopians did not anticipate that once inside the machine, human beings would gain new powers they would use to change the system that dominates them.”18 Feenberg’s rebuff of the dystopians is curious because it concedes the central claim of the dystopian position, namely, technology’s domination of humanity. That we may modify the technologies at our disposal to suit our liking does not detract from the determinists’ assertion that humanity is entangled in the web of technology. In fact, by altering the system in ways that better reflect social needs and desires, the hold of technology over humanity is reinforced by advancing technology’s capacity to close the gap separating desire and its satisfaction. Feenberg undermines his own critique

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by misguidedly assuming that dystopians see technology only as a system of control over humanity, when in truth they are more likely to regard technology as a system of control enabling humanity to realize its needs and desires. As with as any other system of power, technology possesses a dual nature: It both limits and extends, constrains and liberates. This latter modality of technology’s power is especially salient, since humanity likely would not accept the yoke of technology if it were experienced merely as an imposition. If technology were viewed simply as an alien force imposing the inhuman upon the human, it would be impossible to imagine humanity being content with merely modifying the system. On the contrary, that most persons are content with adjusting the system proves the system is not perceived as working at cross-purposes with the lifeworld. Determinists concur that societal evolution involves the humanizing of technology. What differentiates the dystopians from their critics therefore is not the issue of whether humanity has a measure of control over technology, but the consequences for humanity of the humanizing of technology. To review, Feenberg and his supporters assert the determinists have a one-dimensional view of technology, and that by seeing it only as a system of control they are drawn to the misleading and pessimistic conclusion that technology’s domination of humanity is total. If they were to realize that technology’s systemic propensities are capable of being moderated, then the dystopian myth of an “autonomous technology” would be dispelled and humanity would regain a pride of place in the technological scheme of things. The “machine controls man” bugaboo, the critics assert, vanishes when system and lifeworld forces are shown to be reciprocally related and coevolving. But the humanizing of the technological system is small comfort to the determinists. The integration of human and machine, and machine and world, is in fact precisely what they fear most. What is deemed by some as indicating the continued vitality of “the human” within the system is viewed by others as proving the opposite, as pointing to the loss of the conditions which sustain the human.19 Theorists like Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard, we have seen, fall into the latter camp. Their pessimism is fueled by the sense that our technologically mediated lives are defined increasingly by a lack of alienation between self and other, and between society and the natural order. The question of alienation even touches upon Derrida’s singular treatment of the reality problematic. It was argued earlier that Derrida’s deconstruction of reality can be seen as part of his more general attack on the metaphysics of presence. In the realm of language, this attack was aimed at dispelling the logocentric illusion that because the meaning of language originates in the structure of reality, we can gain direct access to the world. Derrida sought to expose the gap between word and meaning, and meaning and reality. Lan-

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guage’s removal from reality is mirrored in the mute world of visual perception, where as perceivers we are cut off from the objects of perception. Like language, perception does not passively register reality but produces it, which prevents the perceiver from ever simply “being there” in the real world. For Derrida, reality is essentially and irrevocably problematic since we are constitutionally alienated from the world we perceive and of which we speak. The concept of alienation is the linchpin in Baudrillard’s treatment of the reality problematic as well. Baudrillard, we noted, contends that the value of a thing is determined by its exchange value. Value, he says, is not intrinsic to things but is conferred upon them according to a calculus of comparable value, and it is because particular things exist in a world of relatable objects that such calculations can be made. Importantly, for Baudrillard, this system of equivalences does not extend to the world itself, or to reality proper. Unlike things within the world, reality cannot be validated because there being nothing outside reality by which to compare it, reality has no exchange value. Hence Baudrillard’s likening reality to a gift from nowhere for which repayment is impossible. Rebelling against the otherness of reality, we simulate reality in a vain attempt to confer worth upon that which eludes the attribution of value. Alienation plays no less a central role in Virilio’s understanding of the question concerning reality. Drawing from Christian teaching, human beings are said to suffer from a “congenital incompleteness” that seeks restitution.20 Human desire is rooted in a striving for redemption from our condition as incomplete beings, from our self-alienation. As a Christian, Virilio is amply aware that this erotic striving for wholeness takes many forms, and that each can serve a useful purpose as long as none function as a substitute for redemption through God, the only path to true wholeness. He is equally aware how easily desire leads humanity astray with its false hopes. To the litany of nostrums that have beset humanity Virilio adds the ideology of presentism. Presentism, to recall, is the term he reserves for the ethos of interactivity and immediacy—the ethos of virtualism—that has pervaded every aspect of contemporary social life. Virilio’s main claim regarding presentism, and the reason for his rejecting it, is that the ideology is grounded not in the positive embrace of a particular good, such as immediacy or clarity, but in a more profound and largely unacknowledged revulsion toward matter. In linking technology with the mortification of the flesh, Virilio depicts the derealizing of reality as a rejection of God’s created universe. Within such a conceptual framework, embracing virtualization is akin to rejecting God. Through spiritization, not only do we not redeem ourselves, we actually fall further from God’s grace. The function of alienation in Lyotard’s understanding of the reality problematic is no less pronounced than with the other major theorists examined

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in this study. Lyotard, it was said, defends a postmodern brand of humanism against the forces of development. Unlike its classical counterpart, the humanist stance he aligns with “the human” remains open to the unassimilable “other” and thus rejects rationalist attempts to harmonize self and other. Lyotard believes the primary challenge confronting us today is to preserve the human in the face of the evolutionary course of development, whose inhuman end is to extinguish the other by enfolding humanity within a world of its own making. He therefore calls on us to resist development’s push to collapse the tension between the human and the cosmic by “naturalizing” man. The importance of alienation to the reality problematic is highlighted when we realize the pivotal role it plays in determining counterstrategies to the prevailing ethos. Simply put, if technology is responsible for our suffering too little alienation, then a corrective to this condition must involve regaining an appreciation of our remove from things. This is precisely the challenge that Derrida, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard set for themselves: To restore the gap between self and other. Derrida, as noted, accomplishes this feat by attacking the metaphysics of presence, as it relates to both language and visual perception. Baudrillard highlights the otherness of reality by underscoring its singularity, which makes it ill-suited for incorporation into any system of equivalences. For Virilio, only by gaining an understanding of the true source of human incompleteness, our alienation from God, will we be able to accept the created universe and forestall our escape into virtuality. Lyotard, finally, asserts that only by reacquainting ourselves with that part of us that is alien to nature, or at least alien to nature as understood by science, can we preserve “the human” against the forces of development. The articulation of these counterstrategies is significant because one would not expect to see them given the theoretical leanings of their authors. We observed previously that critics blame the determinist penchant for seeing technology as a totalitarian force on their one-dimensional understanding of technology. Save Derrida, for whom the attribution has no relevance, the remaining theorists examined in this study rightly can be said to favor the determinist view that technology represents a monopolistic power whose end is, broadly speaking, anti-human. This much can be surmised because none of them believe humanity can offset the problems triggered by technological development by cooperating with the forces of technology. None, in other words, subscribe to the view advanced by Feenberg and like-minded theorists that, as part of the lifeworld, technology is amenable to interests beyond those associated with efficiency and control. Instead, they tend to regard technology as an autonomous force whose independence insulates it from considerations other than its own. Before the technological juggernaut there can be only two responses: acquiescence or resistance.

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Should the determinism to which Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard ascribe be totalistic, there would be no choice but for them to accede to the process of spiritization, or disincarnation. For Baudrillard, this would mean accommodating ourselves to whatever societal changes emerge from further refinements of the performance principle, including a deepening engagement with the world of simulation. For Virilio, spiritization would see technological progress dragging humanity further along the path toward virtuality, sacrificing the remaining vestiges of materiality for the greater good of presentism. Lastly, as a strict determinist, Lyotard would identify our fate wholly with complexification, leaving humanity no recourse but to submit to its natural end—self-transcendence. Clearly, the sympathies of Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard lie with the determinist vision that technology is more than an aggregate of instrumentalities and that, as a sociological phenomenon, technology possesses its own set of characteristics and internal dynamic. All agree with the determinist position that technology is the independent variable of societal development. But despite this agreement, none are willing to concede that technology’s hold on humanity is total, and therefore that resistance to technology and the world it begets is pointless. Each, we have seen, presents a counterstrategy to the reality problematic, illustrating the extent to which they reject the claim that reality’s demise constitutes a fate to which we must submit. Admittedly, these counterstrategies are often half-articulated and pitched in a manner that leads to doubts regarding their efficacy, but that is to be expected given their convictions about the nature of technology and its function in contemporary society. Seeing technology as a largely autonomous system of control whose alien logic infuses the entire social order, any attempt to oppose the system must originate from a point outside the system and its associated ethos. These counterstrategies, in other words, must be grounded in an ethic that rejects, as ultimate ends, the pragmatic values of efficiency and control that undergird a technological society. By rejecting the precepts of modernity, one would expect these counterstrategies to be received as rather fanciful attempts to undermine the general thrust of technological development. Indeed, the kinds of response to the reality problematic we see emerging from the likes of Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard do possess a fantastic quality to them, all calling, in their own way, for a sea change in our perception of what constitutes reality. The counterstrategies embedded in these responses to the reality problematic are not likely to satisfy the demands of a technological culture for a “rational” solution. These counterstrategies are not rational in the modern sense of the term because they do not articulate a method for solving the problem at hand, assuming such a problem exists. In truth, they hardly can be called strategies, since the term implies the construction of a plan or method

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for the purpose of realizing an end. What these countermeasures offer is less a plan of action than a prescription for what must prevail before any kind of redress can be made. The prescription in question amounts to a request for attentiveness. Despite their differences, the responses to the reality problematic offered by Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard call on us to be attentive to reality, or at least mindful of a reading of the real that runs counter to the prevailing one. Reality is not what we take it to be, they tell us. Baudrillard, as observed, wishes us to be heedful of the singularity of the real. It is reality’s singularity that gives it a “terrifying objectivity,” from which we have sought refuge.21 Virilio, too, wants us to be mindful of the obdurate materiality of the universe, and to embrace the mystery of this reality and its Creator. Lastly, Lyotard asks us to be mindful of the reality of our humanness, especially that part which escapes the purview of modern scientific discourse, if we wish to preserve our humanity against the forces of development. While these calls to attentiveness may appear flimsy to those who take the problem of technology to be a fundamentally political challenge, they remain the only kind of response open to those who see technology’s essence as residing not in its instrumental function but in its capacity to produce ways of being in the world. It was stated earlier that the critics of determinism like to think that problems with technology occur when technologies are highjacked by their system functions. Technologies are purportedly misused when employed primarily to extend powers of control, and redeemed when pressed into service to further ends associated with the lifeworld. The belief that the problem of technology can be solved by deploying technology toward “proper” ends only reinforces the myth of the neutrality of technology, say the determinists. This view rests on the erroneous assumption that attitudes and understandings towards things such as reality, community, or the human person remain largely unaffected by developments in the means by which we come to know them. Unconcerned with the impact technology has on the production of perception, and hence on the production of subjectivity as well, they focus on the extent to which particular technologies fulfill their capacity to realize ends associated with the needs of the lifeworld. Technologies are deemed to be well-guided if they realize this capacity and poorly guided if they do not. For those who presume the neutrality of technology, the idea that technology possesses the power to transform our understanding of reality, a transformation which in turn affects the course of technological development, is barely considered and largely ignored. Those on the other side of the debate see the interrelation between technology and perceptions of reality all too clearly. Their concern, as raised in the writings of Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard, is not directed toward the misuse of technology, however that may be defined, but at how technology both alters and is altered by perceptions of reality. More

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to the point, their concern is that as technological society advances and we become more fully immersed in a world of artifice over which we have control, we lose the capacity to appreciate that which resists the spiritual force that is the commanding will. In this context, “reality” comes to represent the forces of resistance. What is real is the alien “other” that evades capture by the calculating mind and the productive arts. Reality, thus understood, is the symbol for what frustrates the technological will: It is the source of all inefficiencies, the ground of all challenges. It follows that the progress of technology is measured by a diminishing of the real in the double sense that over time there will be fewer and less imposing challenges to the technological will, and a continued reduction in our collective tolerance for the remaining obstacles in its path. We see this dynamic played out today in the domain of personal safety (to name but one), where every advance in technological design and every new regulatory guideline is accompanied by a further reduction in the public’s capacity to accept risk. Just as we become more risk averse as the world becomes safer, so too we become increasingly aware and less tolerant of what resists the forces of control as these forces strengthen and multiply. As stated, technology produces not only things but also ways of being in the world. In fact the two are interrelated. What is produced by technology and how we look at the world are reciprocally conditioned aspects of an evolving social order. Since modern technology is aligned with enframing, or the perception of Being as a resource, as technology acts on this perception the world progressively loses its character as an object. Technology and reality are therefore inversely related: The more technology realizes the end of mastery, the less the world that technology acts upon exists independent of it. Coupled with this dynamic is the previously mentioned tendency toward selfintensification. Success in overcoming obstacles to technological mastery only emboldens the will to further successes. But technology’s triumph over the real also produces a backlash of sorts, a yearning for what increasingly is no longer. Ironically, but not unexpectedly, the demise of reality is revealed in part by a heightened awareness of reality and a longing for its retrieval. Like “history” and “God” before it, reality makes an appearance as an object of thought only after the lived experience of reality is called into question. And, just as Hegel realized that to speak coherently of history means that history in some sense must be over, so too we can say that the contemporary fascination with reality reveals its moribund character. Certainly, Baudrillard would agree with such an assessment. In paying homage to reality through simulation we mask our rejection of the radical objectivity of reality. For Virilio, our fixation with reality is manifest in an embrace of a “real time” regime, which also conceals a rejection of the lived experience of space and time. Lyotard sees signs of an obsession with reality in the efforts by the AI

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community to replicate the reality of thinking. It is been argued that he takes such efforts as indicating not an affirmation of reality but the promotion of a limited world view that misguidedly equates reality, and especially human reality, with the vision of reality that emerges from scientific discourse.

BETWEEN ALIENATION AND RECONCILIATION Reality is an idea whose time has come. A special veneration is reserved for what is thought to remain untouched by the transforming power of human ingenuity. The search for a specious authenticity has never been so acute or far-ranging. Native culture, wilderness travel, roots music, and non-Western religions are a few of the ciphers that stand in for experiences and ways of life stripped of the alienating sophistication associated with a technological lifestyle. Of course, this grasping for realness tells us more about ourselves than that to which we aspire, since the pursuit of these experiences is hardly untainted by the mentality many regard as adulterated. It speaks to a conflicted relationship with technology and the world as it is given to us. We want to live a “real life” within the technological order but fail to appreciate the inner contradictions presented by this option. Like the person who coordinates an environmental protest through messaging on a Blackberry, we are blind toward the depth of our entanglement in the technological world view.22 In truth, we know, or ought to know, that the real world is not something we either have the power to master fully or the luxury to neglect utterly. The key issue is not whether we ought to abandon reality or preserve it, erase otherness or embrace it, but to strike a balance between the forces that see otherness as a threat to human well-being and those that see its demise as the ultimate peril. Both technological determinists and their detractors agree, in principle, that the problem of technology can be resolved by seeking such an equilibrium. Where they disagree, and disagree profoundly, is over how to effect this end. The critics of determinism believe the balance can be achieved by accentuating the lifeworld component of the social order, which tends otherwise to be overruled by technology’s system imperatives. Politics, broadly defined, can correct the imbalance of forces at work in contemporary society. Determinists, on the other hand, contend that employing such a tactic only feeds into the confusion that already surrounds technology. To adopt the instrumentalist view of technology, they argue, is to overlook the essence of technology and thus to underestimate technology’s hold over us. It leads to the perception that technology, if managed well, has the power to facilitate truly human ends. Community, responsible government, learning, all the components of the good life, can flourish in a technological society if the

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tools of production are utilized properly. Or so the theory goes. The determinists debunk this idealist understanding of technology by arguing that technology itself admits of no balance. They take the hardline view that technology is single-minded in its pursuit of efficiency, and that the demise of reality is a consequence of the relentless drive to maximize means. Consequently, any corrective to technology must come from a source outside technology and the technological world view. We have seen, with Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard, the kinds of responses to the problem of technology that emerge from adopting this position. Each offers an account of the incompleteness of the technological world view and attempts to defend the concept of reality from an extra-technological vantage point. If the solution to the problem of technology advanced by the critics of determinism can be criticized for being philosophically naïve, then their opponents’ response can be slighted for its practical ineffectiveness. For different reasons, neither of the solutions from the opposing camps is wholly satisfactory. There may very well not be a solution to the problem at hand that is both philosophically sound and efficacious, but in the interest of pursuing this perhaps impossible goal, final consideration must be given to the theoretical stance upheld by those who have addressed the reality problematic. Much has been made of the fact that the preferred response to the reality problematic has been to stress the uncanniness of what otherwise is perceived as prosaic. The common refrain is that the real world is not what we assume it is, and our relationship to this world is not what it appears to be. Regaining a sense of the mystery of the mundane world, of the fantastic quality that attends given being, is seen as an antidote to the reigning view that takes this being as mere fodder for human design. This objective is laudable in its general outline. However, by accentuating excessively the foreignness of the real, by emphasizing what distinguishes humanity from reality, the responses to the reality problematic offered by the principals of this study run the risk of overcorrection. They too strictly identify the real with what is other than human, and the human with what is other than real. The propensity to overcorrect is most evident with Derrida, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, who go to considerable lengths to show that reality is either inaccessible, radically alien to codes of human behavior, or a threat to our very existence as a species. Even Virilio, who is less culpable in this regard, shows up the uncanniness of reality in underscoring its supernatural origins. The difficulty with placing too heavy an emphasis on the otherness of reality is that it saves reality only by abstracting reality from the realm of the human. The reality we are called upon to acknowledge is something that eludes rational description or representation. But does it in fact? Does not Baudrillard, in speaking of the terrifying objectivity of reality, actually negate

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the very objectivity of which he speaks by virtue of having named it? Does reality retain its otherness after we come to know and speak of its otherness? Do we not go a long way toward ridding reality of its alterity, toward making it our own, by conceptualizing it comparatively as other than human? Likewise, by naming that remainder within us capable of resisting development, has not Lyotard assimilated that “alien” spirit into the bosom of the human? Has not even Derrida, by using speech to inform us of the limits of speech (and perception) in capturing reality, disproved his own assertion that language is inadequate to that which it speaks? Has he not shown that speech and perception relate to reality, albeit perversely, by not relating to them in the facile manner depicted by logocentrism? Finally, and most importantly, do not all the above attempts to conceptually resolve the reality problematic merely confirm the impossibility of jumping over the shadow of technology? That it is impossible to avoid intellectualizing reality, even when the goal is to identify the real with what eludes the grasp of the calculating mind, only underscores the futility of overplaying the antagonism between ourselves and the world bequeathed to us. The majority of the principals of this study realize as much. Although the most visible elements of their respective analyses are associated with recovering the spirit of alienation, with the exception of Derrida, all of them temper this teaching by alluding to ways humans are embedded in the real world. A main objective of this study has been to highlight this countercurrent by foregrounding the phenomenological components of their responses to the reality problematic. Baudrillard, we saw, attacked the aesthetics of the obscene, so closely identified with televisual imagery, on the grounds that it contravened the laws of natural perception, where nothing is “all actual under the look.” Virilio’s prioritizing a body-centered form of perspectivism anchored in geophysical space and durational time, over virtualism and the ideology of presentism, borrows explicitly and extensively from the canon of existential phenomenology. Lastly, as noted, Lyotard pays tribute to phenomenology in critiquing the presumption, within AI circles, that thinking can be disassociated from the body. To understand reality as that which is both proximal and distant, near at hand and yet curiously alien, is key to regaining an appreciation of the primal world that subtends our efforts to understand and act upon it. Emphasizing either of its aspects to the relative exclusion of the other obfuscates the complexity of the real and humanity’s place within it. The otherness mania which afflicts much contemporary thought (as witnessed in these pages) feeds off the desire to reintroduce tension into a world where tensions are constantly dissolving. It is perfectly predictable, given technology’s animus toward otherness, that the value of otherness or difference increases as its supply diminishes. As concrete differences evaporate between peoples, places, and

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ways of life through the homogenizing effects of technology, interest in what lies at the margins of such developmental forces intensifies. What is deemed “real” is seen as residing in the interstices of technological culture, in what has yet to be incorporated into such a culture or what is incapable of being so absorbed. There are problems with too narrowly identifying the real with what lies outside technology’s grasp. One, there is very little that actually lies beyond the “event horizon” of modern technology, and what is likely to remain beyond capture cannot by definition be an object of discursive analysis. Identifying reality in this way often leads to vain and unproductive searches for the holy grail of authenticity, or to vague and poetic references to a higher reality that lies beyond the reality of the everyday. Two, and more importantly, any attempt to account for reality in a way that runs counter to the prevailing understanding remains, by virtue of its dialectical association with the superseded viewpoint, related to its antecedent. There simply is no escaping the fact that alternative realities remain bound to the reality they transcend. This is well illustrated in Lyotard’s assertion, for instance, that the core of our humanity is centered on a “native lack” with the power to resist the forces of development. Stripped to its essentials, his claim says nothing more than that humans have the power to resist the forces of science and technology, and that “reality” is sufficiently capacious to accommodate both development and its negation. Because every attempt to reconceive reality in terms contrary to the status quo is contaminated by the spirit of what it seeks to escape, because there can be no perception of reality from a vantage point devoid of any association with technology, a provisional solution to the reality problematic must abandon the dream of adopting an alternate strategy. The solution therefore requires that we relinquish the notion that what is truly real is necessarily other than the reality of everyday experience. After all, it is the perceived otherness of this reality, the sense that the world stands opposed to humanity in the way mere matter stands opposed to mind, that is largely responsible for the birth of science, technology and, ultimately, our integration into the technological system. If, ensconced in the circuitry of a technological order we suffer today from a lack of alienation, it is because we no longer feel a kinship between ourselves and worldly reality. Hannah Arendt rightly observed, in this regard, that modernity is an age marked by doubt as revealed by a retreat from the reality of anything given or external to humanity. It is this skepticism toward the veracity of the appearing world that led to the presumption that “one can know only what he has made himself,” and thus to the birth of technology through the conjoining of making (techné) and knowing (logos).23 Rather than wonder at what is, as it appears to our unaided senses, we moderns act upon reality in order to uncover

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what is. Whereas reality was once as close to us as our own senses, reality now is deemed to lie beneath the surface of appearances, remaining hidden from view unless exposed by the objectifying gaze of science. It is the conviction that reality is something to be uncovered through action that is the driving force behind all scientific and technological development. While this conviction cannot be abandoned, as the determinists rightly argue, it can be supplemented by a newfound appreciation of the appearing world which lies closest to us and which precedes all attempts to uncover its meaning or remake it. Regaining a sense of wonder at this primal world is a tall order in a society that intuitively associates knowing with acting. The whole thrust of such a society is to activate knowledge, to translate what we know into “actionplans” for the purposes of “problem-solving.” We live in an age more attuned to the operative rhetoric of the technocrat than to the language that gives voice to our implication in worldly being. Nonetheless, what is required is a regeneration of a sense of wonder at that which is, and a renewed appreciation of our embeddedness in the being of what is. In premodern times, during the age of enchantment, humans shared with the world an animated spirit. We were at one with the world in the sense that all was perceived as alive. The advent of modernity is coterminous with the breaking of the spell that sustained this perception, from which there can be no simple recovery. A recovery of sorts is possible, however, if it unfolds from within space opened up by modernity. The challenge is to find a way to articulate the human-world connection from within the parameters of modern philosophical discourse. This challenge, I argue, is the one Merleau-Ponty set for himself in his effort to think through the human-world connection. Whether or not his efforts were entirely successful remains a matter of debate and is not a primary concern here. What is important is the attempt to think past the reigning paradigm which posits the thinking subject (res cogitans) as other than the world it confronts (res extensa). It was noted that Merleau-Ponty did so initially by taking issue with the transcendental consciousness of the modern philosophical tradition, claiming consciousness instead to be incarnate or embodied. Later, in an effort to further distance himself from the legacy of Cartesian dualism, he abandoned entirely the notion of embodied consciousness, replacing it with the perceiving body, whose reflexivity enables it to share with the world the capacity to see and be seen, to touch and be touched. An awareness of this “magical relation,” as Merleau-Ponty calls it, where the body and world intersect, serves to undercut the view that the real world lies “out there” beyond the self. On the contrary, self and world, although distinguishable, are said to be part of the same realm of being to the extent they partake of the same ontological stuff, the same “flesh.” In the absence of this link, he tells us, there would be no resonance between self and world,

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no “secret visibility,” and thus no profane or “manifest visibility” as well.24 Merleau-Ponty’s Contention is that our very capacity to make sense of the world—to attribute meaning to it, to gain knowledge from it, to abstract from it—is inconceivable were it not for a prior attunement between ourselves and given being. Likewise, all that flows out of our understanding of reality, our technology and the realm of artifice it erects, is sustained ultimately by the primal world that precedes these developments. Despite his effort to overcome the dualism that haunts modern philosophical thought and to advance a participatory epistemology, Merleau-Ponty is fully aware that the overlap between self and world is not total. Our articulations of the world, for one, always fall short of capturing perfectly the perceptual faith that sustains the world we perceive and speak about. Language therefore manages simultaneously to be both adequate and inadequate to what it describes: It alludes to reality’s emergent sense but does not fully capture it.25 Likewise, with vision, the world we perceive is never complete, never fully adequate to all that is, due to the embodied nature of perception and the limits placed upon it by its perspectival character. It was argued in Chapter One that Derrida’s hostility toward phenomenology was directed at its ruling premise that we are simply “present” in the real world. The goal of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence was not to deny the being of the real world per se, but to counter the belief that our relation to reality is simple. I have argued that the distance separating deconstruction and phenomenology (in its Merleau-Pontyean guise, at least) is less than it first might appear when we realize that, for the latter, our interactions with the phenomenal world also are never simple, or without ambiguity and slippage. This being said, phenomenology clearly departs from deconstruction with its insistence that, despite the slippage between self and world, our perception of the world remains informed by the world in a way that highlights the common ground linking perceiver and perceived. Merleau-Ponty’s account of reality has the advantage of showing the world to be beyond capture, either intellectually or sensibly, yet absolutely critical in facilitating whatever capacities we have to make provisional sense of ourselves, other persons, and the world around us. Thus conceived, the earthly reality from which we have sprung is at once sufficiently close to us as to prompt its neglect, yet equally distant as to spur efforts to make it fully our own. We moderns have chosen to respond to the impossible challenge of reconciling ourselves with reality through science and technology. That the goal of total mastery over reality always will remain elusive has not prevented us from creating a second-order reality over which we already have impressive control and will continue to achieve greater levels of control. The fact that nature seeks revenge for our wresting power over it, or that we

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risk jeopardizing our humanity in an effort to augment it, has not discouraged us from the pursuit of further adventures in remaking reality. What is worrisome about this development is that it tends to be self-perpetuating. As revealed in the concerns expressed in this study, quantitative advancements in the sophistication and range of technological deployments have produced a qualitative change in our sociological milieu which makes it increasingly easy to overlook the extent to which we, as embodied beings, are implicated in the real world of space and time. This neglect, in turn, clears the way for further movement down the path toward a disembodied future. The end-of-reality scenarios presented by Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard merit our attention because they constitute progress reports on technology from a vantage point that takes technology seriously. They elaborate on Max Frisch’s observation that technology “is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”26 In so doing, these depictions confirm the assertion that the essence of technology is not something technological. If Heidegger is correct in taking technology’s essence to be the revealing of worldly being as standing reserve, then it follows that technological practices should evolve in a direction that renders being increasingly amenable to human ordering and control. It is important to underscore the fact that in the process of negating the otherness of being, technology extricates the agent of negation from the hold of this being. The essence of technology therefore points to the emergence of a god-man, a spiritized being whose function it is to dwell in a self-created universe. Whether or not the principals of this study accurately capture the nuances of humanity’s departure from reality is a moot point. What does matter is their general claim that humanity has embarked upon a journey beyond the conditions of the Earth. Of equal importance is their insistence that we take this journeying seriously, that we refrain from supposing that the drift toward derealization is necessarily self-correcting. We delude ourselves, for instance, if we assume that human nature—as manifest in such things as common sense or sheer contrariness—suffices to ward off the kind of supernal future described in these pages. Human nature is sufficiently pliant to have us adapt to many scenarios we presently might find inhuman or otherwise unacceptable, especially when change proceeds incrementally and on time scales that span generations. But the situation is likely more dire still when we realize how problematic is the notion of “nature” (human or otherwise) in an era where faith in essences has been largely corrupted. To the extent that being modern means valuing history over nature (since history is made and nature merely suffered), our self-conception as a dynamic species only serves to support the progressive forces of development. If we take upon ourselves the challenge of checking technology’s spiritual impulse, this resistance must be grounded in an understanding of the inex-

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tricable connection we humans have with a world not of our making—with the “real world.” Without an appreciation of this world and our participatory relationship with it, it is unlikely we will grasp the context within which we deploy our technological powers, a context that would allow us to see more clearly the folly of embarking on a program whose end is the wholesale exchange of the given for the humanly constructed. To simply rebel against technological development out of some inchoate suspicion of progress will lead only to the self-defeating posturing that plagues the anti-globalization lobby, for example, and will yield no practical effect. How, then, to gain an appreciation of the real world remains the primary objective. The first step in addressing this concern may be taken by examining the effects of the forces of spiritization. The bulk of this study has been devoted to detailing the impact of these forces. The picture that emerges from the reports on the reality problematic is complex, but subtending the complexities lies a unifying theme: The decoupling of appearance and reality. As cited in the Introduction, throughout the ages the claim has been made that appearances deceive, that what appears to be is not consonant with what truly is. What distinguishes the modern age from its predecessor is that the appearance/reality duality now plays itself out within the immanent realm: Simulacra of the real are counterposed against the given, spatiotemporal world. The relocation of this tension is not without consequences. To claim that the appearing world is “merely” an appearance requires a defense since, prima facie, the appearing world appears to be more than a mere appearance. The same cannot be said of representations of the real. Because we assume representations of worldly reality to be appearances, to be products of artifice, there is no pressing need to provide a justification of the gap separating these appearances from reality: It is simply a given. The easy acceptance of the appearance/reality distinction introduces a new dynamic to modernity, for when the artifice of appearances is taken for granted, the standard by which appearances can be judged as “mere” appearances evaporates. In the premodern era, appearances remained tethered to reality, albeit perversely, since the realm of appearances was legitimated as an epiphenomenon of a more foundational order of being. Today, selfawareness of the artificiality of the representational realm leads ironically to its acceptance as “real,” as constituting a reality in its own right. The legitimation of the realm of appearances makes it easier than ever to conflate what seems to be with what is. The kind of questioning articulated by Don DeLillo in the Introduction’s opening quotation reflects this ambivalence and confusion. The repercussions of the representational realm’s attainment of quasiindependent status are generally overlooked in most current debates on

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technology and its effects. Usually the focus of analysis is on normative concerns as they relate to social, political, and economic practices. Controversies arise over the extent to which virtual communities depart from “real” communities, and the import of this deviation. The democratic potential of communications systems such as the Internet is another topic of significant speculation. Questions are posed regarding technology’s role in the homogenization of practices and ways of life, and on global inequality. As important as these sorts of queries are, they overlook the fact that no matter how technology may be deployed, and regardless of its practical consequences, the essence of technology has a singular impact on what it transforms. By focusing exclusively on the pragmatics of technology, sight is lost of this more far-reaching and fateful impact. The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan once noted, and in this case the message of the medium called “technology” is the spiritizing of humankind. In the long run this propensity toward disembodiment will more profoundly affect humankind than the fallout from analyses of the use and abuse of technology. In its function as a disincarnating or abstracting power, technology suffuses contemporary practices, institutions, and rhetoric with a certain thinness, onedimensionality, or cartoonlike quality. Its effects are manifested in the realm of language with the proliferation of “plastic words.” Uwe Poerksen’s expression refers to the bureacratization or professionalization of language via the import of technical and scientific terms. “Connotative stereotypes”—terms such as process, information, development, and communication—have infiltrated the vernacular to its detriment by draining language of its specificity and nuance. Plasticized words take on the appearance of significance but do not designate anything specific: They assume the form of meaning but not its substance.27 The underlying trend signified by the emergence of plastic words extends beyond the language domain. Language, after all, is not simply a “mode of communication,” a neutral means of conveying information about things. The presumed neutrality of language, so firmly entrenched in the plastic word phenomenon, reveals precisely the aligning of language with the ethos of technology. A plasticized vernacular, with its ghostly “agents” and “processes” and “developments,” perfectly exteriorizes the objectifying or instrumental form of thinking allied with the techno-scientific outlook. Heidegger rightly would interpret the rise of plastic words as a symptom of the tightening grip of metaphysical thinking, of nihilism, and a complement to the wider project of manipulation designated by the term “enframing.” To the extent language informs and reflects social practices, the whole of the contemporary social order is imbued with the qualities associated with plastic words. The “tyranny” of the language regime Poerksen speaks to is

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a specific instantiation of the same tyrannical impulse Heidegger and the principals of this study have addressed, as manifested in the overwhelming authority of techno-scientific thinking. It has been argued that the ethos of technology takes the real world to be an object of mastery. It has been argued as well that the problem with technology has little to do with humanity’s estrangement from the world because the human condition is such that we have never been fully at home in the world. Rather, problems arise when we take our existential unease as indicating a tear in the fabric of being, when we assume that because we are not in “categorical agreement with being”28 we are other than the being with which we are ill at ease. Technology’s impetus toward desubstantiation both drives and is driven by this radical alienation, by a loss of faith in the participatory character of worldly reality. The relentless pursuit of efficiency which undergirds modern technology is premised on this breach of faith, resulting in a denial of the very substance of the appearing world. The emerging simulacrum of the real is this loss made manifest and a testament to our desire for a “clean” representation of the world granted to humankind. How the spiritizing impulse reconfigures politics in the age of technology is a topic of considerable interest today. Although a thorough response to this question is beyond the scope of this investigation, technology’s impact on politics can be adumbrated with reference to three key concepts: deterritorialization, essentialism, and voluntarism. With respect to the first, it is axiomatic that sovereign power traditionally has been aligned with a defined territorial base. Implicit in the notion of governance is governance over a given territory. The linkage between politics and geophysical space is immune to considerations regarding regime type. Regardless of the form of governance, sovereign power is necessarily delimited by territorial boundaries. Modern nation-states are likewise constrained, but recent developments have disrupted the association between sovereign power and territory. For a host of reasons, the “space” within which politics unfolds today has assumed a new form. It is argued that the privileged political terrain is no longer geophysical but informational space, a virtual space opened up through the media of communication. This “terrain” has become the new site of political contestation. The claim here is that gaining and wielding real, or existential, political power is dependent upon the manipulation of the symbols of power within the media sphere.29 Admittedly, the manipulation of symbols for political purposes is hardly a new invention. What is novel is not the alignment between power and image per se, but the nature of the relationship between the two. With the new politics, image management is no longer an adjunct to the wielding of power, a tool used to secure and extend a preexisting power base, but is constitutive of such power: The image of power precedes the reality of

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power. Baudrillard, needless to say, is an exceptionally vocal exponent of the view that politics today is moribund, but he is hardly alone in highlighting the radical consequences for politics of our entry into the information age. One of the ironies of modern liberalism is that it embodies in its organization and practices a disembodied conception of the human person. Equality makes the many into one. Better yet, the idea of equality unites the many into one. The making of “we the people” is therefore an act of the political imagination and will. Liberalism is indeed an expression of “confidence in the power of mind,” as Lionel Trilling once noted.30 The idea of equality that undergirds liberalism is premised on the antecedent idea of the transcendental subject, the notion that the self exists prior to and independent of experience, and therefore is indifferent to the purposes and ends of life that experience bestows. It is because the self is understood as being conceivable apart from these constitutive ends that it becomes a vehicle or bearer of rights. The priority of the right over the good, liberalism’s founding political principle, demands an understanding of the self as “unencumbered,” or unburdened, by the very reality of being a self.31 To distinguish so cleanly one’s purportedly “true” being from one’s existence as a living being is to reject entirely the participatory ethic in its application to sphere of social and political life. Voluntarism is coupled with the conception of the self which subtends liberalism. To the extent the self exists prior to and independent of experience, there can be no real world context, no form of communal association, capable of acting on the self in a way that would constrain or modify the essence of the self. On the contrary, the self is a worldly being only to the limited extent that it authors its own engagements. Choice, or volitional action, is therefore the only means open to the unencumbered self to enter the world. The sovereign self of necessity wills its actions, its associations, its values. The voluntarism that defines the liberal conception of self is recapitulated in contemporary social practices such as are found, most notably, in the creation of virtual communities.32 A defining characteristic of online communities is that their members willfully chose to associate on the basis of shared interests and aspirations. Persons enter these communities of their own accord, whether the communities are organized along ascriptive (i.e., race, gender, age, etc.) or affiliative (i.e., ideological orientation, professional association, etc.) lines. While ease of access to virtual communities adds to their allure, their primary appeal lies in their capacity to satisfy the need for fellowship while preserving the autonomy of the participants. It is because members of virtual communities relate to each other not as persons, but as bundles of interests abstracted from the fullness of the persons attached to them, that they can enter the networks of unbinding associations that constitute online communities. In the final analysis, it is the thinness of the members’ identities that

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ensures a corresponding thinness in their associations toward each other, enabling them to exercise a form of social responsibility that does not excessively impinge on their autonomy. To be sure, the attenuation of the concepts of personal identity and political obligation originated with the advent of liberalism, not the invention of network and virtual technologies, but the proliferation of mediated communities likely will only further detract from our already diminished capacity to appreciate and participate in dutiful forms of community, or to make the sacrifices needed to realize them. In the final analysis, the telos of technological development outlined in these pages complements the end towards which modern democratic societies have been advancing since their inception, and illustrates to what extent both liberal democracy and technology fit within the same overall developmental pattern. As the French political theorist Pierre Manent rightly insists, democratic societies are driven ultimately by a spiritual impulse, by the desire to have all bonds originate out of the act of human willing. While modern democracies eschew religion as an ordering principle of political action, they nonetheless are “politically and morally spiritualist” in their reliance on the principle of voluntarism. So it is that we moderns reject the presumption that “the body could create bonds by itself, that there could be ties rooted essentially in the ‘flesh.’” Manent suggests that, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, modern liberalism in an important respect is more otherworldly than its premodern antecedent: “We increasingly behave,” he says, “and we increasingly interpret our behavior, as if we were angels who just happen to have bodies.”33 Harvey Mansfield touches on this same theme in his analysis of the centrality of thumos to a proper understanding of politics.34 Modern political science presupposes wrongly, in his view, that human beings are essentially selves with interests. This understanding presents a simplified picture of what it means to be human for it neglects thumos, that part within us that “reminds us that we are animals with bodies.” Following Plato, Mansfield identifies thumos with the body, since the spiritedness denoted by the term expresses itself physiologically. Whereas self-interested actors tend to be maximize sought after ends through cool calculation, the righteous indignation associated with thumos is passionate and not always self-serving. For Mansfield it this seemingly lowly capacity to take umbrage at some perceived transgression that makes humans complicated beings, and ultimately soulful. Like Manent, Mansfield tries to restore dignity to both politics and its study by deepening our appreciation of the complexity of the human actor. In both cases, they target the neglect of the body and the claims it makes on us as responsible for the current malaise. The same otherworldly impulse behind liberalism underlies technology and constitutes its driving force. Those who hold an instrumentalist view of technology—the critics of determinism—overlook this essential point: They

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differentiate the body of technology from the mind of politics, and therefore refuse to concede that technology might reasonably be perceived as having a mind of its own. Instrumentalists deny that technology may possess its own animating principle, just as modern liberals dismiss out of hand that the order of the flesh may serve as a viable counterpoint to the order of the mind. Baudrillard, Virilio, and Lyotard recognize the folly of the view that technology is merely an ensemble of instrumental forces, even if a very powerful one. Rather, technology is rightly regarded by them as not only spiritizing, but spiritual, which is why today it is accorded the same reverence once reserved for religion proper. And like a latter-day religion, we impart to technology the task of delivering humanity from the sins of the flesh.35 If technology is taken seriously, along the lines suggested in this study, then the spiritual core of technology and its spiritizing impulse must be acknowledged. Disregarding technology’s essence leads to an underestimation of the primary challenge posed by technology and helps to foreclose the possibility of any effective countermeasure. On the other hand, we have seen how a simple acceptance of technology’s essence can lead to resignation, as best exemplified in Heidegger’s lament that only a god can save us. The objective of a constructive critique of technology’s drive toward derealization is to establish a middle ground between naïveté and despair. As argued here, the difference mania that infuses postmodern thinking, and accounts for the disconsolate tone of much of its politics, is premised erroneously on the belief that the normalizing forces of technology can be corrected only by upholding that which resists homogenization. There is a Manichean cast to such depictions, one which pits the omnivorous forces of technology against the unassimilable “other.” This dualism, I have said, reflects our civilizational response to the impossible challenge of reconciling ourselves with reality through technology. The challenge is absurd because it issues from a neglect of the underlying unity that binds self and world. That this unity may not be simple, that being and meaning do not perfectly cohere, is not evidence of a fundamental rift between the two. Yet it is the positing of a rift between a disenchanted reality and our spirited selves that undergirds our attempts to save ourselves (and meaning), via technology, from an alien universe. This same rift also is responsible for the yearning, so manifest in postmodern teaching, for what cannot be assimilated into the world of meaning and making, in response to what is perceived to be overwhelming success of the technological project to humanize reality. Returning to Manent, we find in his questioning the “ethical irrationality” of modernity (as first articulated by Weber) a parallel to the line of reasoning employed here for related purposes. Manent agrees with Weber’s contention, itself traceable to James Mill, that “if one proceeds from pure

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experience, one arrives at polytheism.”36 That is to say, meaning today does not cohere but manifests itself as a clash of values or value spheres, which is why something may be true but not holy or good, or sacred but not beautiful. Manent does not deny the obvious, but he takes issue with Weber’s interpreting this incongruence as evidence of a “war” between wholly distinct and conflicting value spheres. He questions why it must be inferred from the premise that meaning is equivocal the conclusion that it is fractured and therefore irrational. Why, indeed? Likewise, why must one take the dislocation between self and world—between meaning and being, or being-in-itself and being-for-itself—as evidence of a full-blown rupture so as to elicit the attempt, through technology, to negate this divide by concretizing our presumed angelic essence? The answer to the above question is that there is no compelling reason to conclude our tenuous relationship with reality reveals anything other than the subtlety of this connection. Ambiguity, discontinuity, and incongruity do not indicate a fundamental and necessary breach between the beholder and the beheld. As implied by Augustine’s commentary on time, we are no less temporal beings for not knowing definitively the meaning of time. Similarly, we are no less creatures of space and time, of spatiotemporal reality, for our capacity to transcend both imaginatively and practically our creaturely nature. The contemporary tragedy is that our remove from the immediacy of unreconstructed reality has sanctioned its wholesale abrogation.

IN PRAISE OF MATERIALISM Interpreting the slippage between being and meaning as indicating their fundamental incongruence informs us about the nature of the assumptions guiding our actions, not their validity. What it tells us is not insignificant if we conclude along with Heidegger that technology constitutes our fate, and that the essence of technology is driving humanity toward a post-human future. But even should we concur with this reading of technology, we are doing nothing more than agreeing that the world by default appears as a resource, or acknowledging we have been habituated to see the obdurate givenness of reality as something to be effaced through technology. That such a world view effectively conceals its status as a world view marks its effectiveness as a paradigm. Yet to recognize the hegemonic nature of technology is to accede to its predominance, not to acquiesce to its complete and unrelenting grip. At least partial release from our technological fate is gained through the very act of explicating the condition in which we find ourselves, which itself implies gaining an understanding of alternative ways of interpreting our placement in the order of things.

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I have argued that the tendency in modernity (a tendency intensified with postmodernism) to posit a rift between meaning and being, or spirit and matter, aligns with the technological project to have spirit prevail over matter, and ultimately to relegate reality to the dustbin of history. Technology always has sought to overcome the unyielding materiality of the “real world.” It has succeeded in doing so by reproducing or reconstituting the real in a manner conformable to the dictates of the human will. By actualizing this end ever more fully we have been pressed to consider questions that previously had no need to be entertained. For example, is virtual reality an oxymoron or is it simply an alternate reality? Does it make any sense to speak of reality today when the reality of our workaday lives is so thoroughly textured with artifacts whose existence are themselves generated from a modeling of reality? These are not idle kinds of questions. They speak both to the promise of technology’s power to recreate the given world and to our profound unease with this power and its capacity to remake the given so thoroughly as to render it moot. I have argued here, through a cluster of readings, that we would be remiss not to take seriously the consequences of technology’s escapist proclivity. Giving due consideration to the question concerning technology involves knowing how to respond to the phenomenon in a manner respectful of what is at stake. If the ultimate goal is to seek a better balance between spirit and matter, then redress can be gained only by emphasizing the centrality of what is being obscured or otherwise overlooked. The first step toward such a realization is taken when we consider to what extent our everyday actions betray an allegiance to the view that the material order is tangential to our true being, and therefore warrants being subjected to the commands of the controlling mind. In response to this consideration, we need to rekindle the sense in which we are essentially embodied creatures, both within the immediate confines of our own skin but also within the more expansive framework of the world proper. There are two fundamental ways to possess knowledge of ourselves as beings with bodies. There is an objective or third-person form of knowledge and a more intimate knowledge of the body gained simply by virtue of our condition as embodied creatures. The former type of understanding—the previously mentioned “knowing-that”—is inherently contestable, because here the body is apprehended conceptually. Not so with the latter type of understanding, or knowing as “knowing-how.”37 Called, variously, body-ego, body-sense, position-sense, or proprioception, this preconceptual form of awareness permits us to feel our bodies as belonging to us, and us to them: It is what accounts for the intuition that our bodies are real. This body-sense is real because we have observed the consequences of its impairment. Persons

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whose proprioceptive powers have been compromised experience a profound sense of disassociation between who and what they are.38 They report feelings of disembodiment, a kind of somatic dislocation that renders their bodies alien to their sentient selves. True Cartesians, proprioceptively impaired persons are selves without bodies (i.e., Manent’s “angels”), not sentient embodied beings. While their predicament can be ameliorated by relying on other perceptual faculties at their disposal, no measure of success in coping with the consequences of their debility can erase totally the feeling that their bodies are foreign to themselves, and thus unreal. “Proprioception impairment” could very well be the defining disability of a technologically advanced civilization. We are becoming wraithlike as we further integrate our phenomenal selves into systems of scientific management and unleash our wills through technologies of command. The pathologies that arise as a consequence of the increasing irrelevance of our bodies to our daily lives, as well as those excesses associated with the challenge of reclaiming the body, are indications of a fundamental imbalance between the spiritual and the somatic as dictated by the logic of technology. To be sure, the tension between spirit and body is a component of the human condition, not the special preserve of homo faber. Historically, attempts to identify the proper relation between the two poles of human experience unfolded in response to questions regarding the good life, as reflected in ethical and prudential interests. Despite the perennial nature of such concerns, today they are addressed within the context of a technological culture, and this repositioning alters fundamentally the nature of the analysis. Questions about what it means to lead a good life, or what it takes to create a well-ordered state, seem rather quaint in an age where basic assumptions about what constitutes a human person or a polity are being challenged in the wake of continued technological advance. These reevaluations reflect a displacement of the classical tension between spirit and body. The struggle that once was centered in the human soul is now unfolding within the world itself. Increasingly, the decisive question no longer pertains to what comprises a well-ordered soul but to our status as spirit-beings: Are we, to repeat, selves who just happen to have bodies or embodied beings with soul? If the former, are we obliged, by virtue of our status as spirit-beings, to continue to work toward shedding the strictures placed upon us as spatial and temporal beings by further developing our powers of mastery? Does the classical path to virtue—that is, the informing of the passions—require too great a respect for the body and its intelligence (i.e., thumos) to appeal to beings increasingly denatured by their technological milieu? In short, are we losing an ability to appreciate not the body of muscle and bone, which can be easily augmented, repaired, or compensated for, but the body as a register of drives and instincts, which is less amenable to disciplinary forces?

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There is a parallel, not to be overdrawn, between the argument presented here regarding the need to balance mind and spirit, and Eric Voegelin’s analysis of the metaxy, or the “in between.”39 Taking his cues from Plato, the human condition for Voegelin is informed by an erotic tension between two existential pulls, one up toward the Beyond (epikiena) and one down toward the depths of material being (apeiron). In agreement with Plato, he believes that our nature is bettered when the spiritual component of reality is fully engaged, but he also realizes with Plato that in doing so respect must be paid to the metaxic structure of the psyche. For Voegelin, to be aware that in our spiritual striving we are not merely spiritual beings is the great lesson to be learned from Plato’s teachings, and its neglect in modernity is the source of the deformation of contemporary or gnostic politics, as reflected in ideological and utopian thought. There is a broad alignment between Voegelin’s claim that we suffer today from a kind of psychic imbalance and the cautionary tale explicated in this study regarding spiritization. Modernity is characterized by an intellectual bravado that has seen science evolve into scientism, with its belief that “self-salvation” constitutes humanity’s proper end.40 In rejecting the participatory nature of our relationship with the world, modernity tacitly sanctions the view that the structure of reality is transparent to human ratiocination and thus an object of mastery. The claim to know or possess the potential to know the nature of things, in a definitive sense, is the gnostic delusion Voegelin sought to dispel. He did so by showing that the experience of reality is not explicable in historical terms. History in itself is not an eidos and has no meaning, Voegelin points out.41 It is not an idea or thing which permits us to extract from it the essence of humanity and life’s purpose. This is not to say that history is meaningless, but that order in history for Voegelin can be understood only through its illumination by symbols of order that transcend history. Voegelin’s circumspection toward overintellectualizing is well-founded. It is indeed erroneous to assume humans possess Godlike powers of ratiocination, powers that could be attained only if we were not participants in the reality we seek to comprehend. Voegelin also is correct in pointing out the tragic consequences of modern gnosticism. The political upheavals of the last century can be seen as resulting from a perversion of the spiritual desire for perfection. The millenarian ideal has been employed as a template for many of radical political experiments that rocked the twentieth century. Yet one need not agree with Voegelin’s views on eschatological or political matters to see a parallel between his concerns over bringing Heaven down to Earth and the desire to perfect earthly reality by technological means. Both projects rest on a misguided assumption that the material order is “merely” material, that it represents in an unambiguous manner the idea or substantive form of reality.

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An ambivalence towards the modern project of mastery underlies our neglecting the centrality of earthliness to the human condition. On the one hand, the age of technology is defined by an emphatic rejection of human embodiment. The real world is taken to be an object-world fated to be brought within the ambit of technological control by the human subject. Differences are obliterated and reality is homogenized in the process. The binary computer is the greatest “leveling machine” yet devised and for this reason has come to epitomize the promise of technology to make equal the unequal. We venerate its prodigious digitizing powers and even more so its power as a systematized or networked machine. We stand in awe as well of the computer’s human creators, a special subset of technological innovators, and expect ever more dramatic realizations of its power to represent reality in a form amenable to human control. Unease toward the creaturely aspect of human existence is nothing new, and reflects a more general uncertainty regarding the proper relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of our being. But, as argued here, the nature of this indeterminateness has changed because of an alteration in the preferred means of responding to the human predicament. Whereas overcoming self-alienation once provoked a call for self-control, through either the sublimation or repression of the passions, today we seek wholeness by both disciplining the body, as a medicalized object, and indulging the body, as a soulless object. Spirits haunting a planet, the imbalance associated with our disassociated condition encourages such disparate responses to the challenge posed by our dual nature. If technology constitutes our fate, and technology is inclined toward disincarnation, then clearly there can be no relinquishing technology’s spiritual impulse. Whether this admission also eliminates the hope of securing a better balance between the spiritual and material poles of earthly existence is a matter still to be considered. Our collective commitment to modern science and technology may mean we are irreparably wedded to its spiritual impulse, but left open is how to respond to this otherworldly impetus. As long as we humans do not slip entirely the bonds of our own materiality, we can begin to redress the imbalance of forces associated with spiritization by recognizing the centrality of embodiment to the human condition. Such recognition demands not just an attunement to the mind-body nexus, but also an awareness of the connection between self and world. The awareness called body-sense needs to be recapitulated more broadly by cultivating a world-sense or, better yet, a sense of place. While speaking of the need to gain an appreciation of the phenomenal world is not entirely misplaced, to do so is to risk succumbing to the abstracting power of the mind and to the very force that feeds spiritization. Edward Casey rightly observes that the term “place,” as the “phenomenal particularization of

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‘being-in-the world,’” better captures the density and the concreteness associated with worldly existence.42 Casey’s definitive study, Getting Back Into Place, explores in detail the full implications of “being-in-place,” which cannot be adequately summarized here.43 Suffice it to say that his analysis illustrates the vital role place plays in human experience. As he says in this regard: “Place comes first: before Space and Time . . . and before Mind and Body. Yet the priority of place is neither logical nor metaphysical. It is descriptive and phenomenological. It is felt: felt bodily first of all.”44 In accordance with this reading, placeness is an alertness to the overlap between body and world. It is the sensibility that subtends the intuition that the world is real, a sensibility which finds its analog in proprioception, the capacity which accounts for our perceiving our bodies as real. It is important to note that while our condition as embodied beings is premised on the overlapping of body and world, the mutual introjection of body and world is not usually thematized. We are not normally required to think about the body-world connection for the same reason we do not have to think about our bodies in order to use them. That is to say, it is precisely because the world is taken to be real and not an alien “thing” that the connection between body and world is overlooked. The second-order reality generated by the spiritual impulse of technology no longer affords us the luxury of ignoring our condition as embodied beings. Questions concerning the nature of reality are being thrust upon us. It may very well be, as Virilio suggests, that the Earth itself is becoming a phantom limb, more imaginary than real as increasingly we take our bearings from the reconstituted spaces opened up by our digital technologies and the accompanying ideology of presentism. It stands to reason that as we progressively take on the mantle of angels, earthly reality falls from view and begins to acquire the status of myth. Living, as we are, in an age where the long-term repercussions for humanity of technological development are readily discerned, we are obliged to determine to what extent reality makes a claim on us. We are compelled to do so for the same reason proprioceptively impaired persons are forced to consider their own predicament–because our condition of relative disembodiment leaves us no other choice. I have suggested that this reconsideration can yield potentially salutary results. Put in a position that necessitates the foregrounding of the previously unthought or partially conceived, we can begin to comprehend what was once taken for granted and engage this understanding in ways that might prove beneficial in a new context. I would argue that developing or deepening an appreciation of embodiment constitutes the vital first step toward achieving this end. It is a way of responding to the growing breach between body and world that helps restore the body-world connection, even, we have seen, in the midst of those forces that seek its dissolution.

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If a critique of the disembodying effects of technology is to have any chance of yielding a practical effect, then it must respect the ambivalence many share toward the phenomenon in question. In doing so, however, we acknowledge the existence of that toward which we display contradictory sentiments. It follows that a response to the disembodying effects of technology that respects its ambivalent reception must also pay homage to the object of critique. This requires, at the very least, the realization that advancing an “embodiment narrative” entails the promotion of a corrective measure to technology, and as such remains bound to the problem it seeks to ameliorate. The goal therefore is not to combat the forces of derealization by promoting an anti-technology teaching, but more prudently to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the partiality of the technological world view. What is sought, in other words, is a coming to terms with the full import of technology. Ironically, this entails objectifying technology by making the world view that sustains technology itself an object of critical reflection. The hope is that by revealing technology to be a way of being-in-the-world, at least partial release from its totalizing grip can be realized. By turning the technological spirit against itself, we seek disengagement from the forces of disengagement. Heidegger argued as much in his identifying modernity with the “age of the world picture,” where reality, or the essence of what is, is conflated with its theoretical representation as generated by modern science.45 Science, we have seen, is for Heidegger an epistemological framework propagated by technology that engenders a specific way of revealing Being. “World picture” is the expression he employs to denote a revealing of Being which takes reality to be a systematic matrix capable of being framed within the limits of human understanding. The problem with technology, on Heidegger’s account, is that we moderns have become so enamored with the project of ordering reality that we have lost sight of the fact that technology is merely one way of revealing Being. As stated in The Question Concerning Technology: “Man stands so decisively in attendance by the challenging-forth on Enframing, that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim.”46 Implicit in this critique is the assumption that loosening technology’s hold on us requires acknowledging its partiality as a world view. Technology responds to and amplifies the spiritual or angelic aspect of our being. In objectifying reality, technology draws humanity upwards and away from the immediacy of being present in the world. The reverse is true for pretechnological society. Given to a body-centric orientation toward the world, premoderns engaged the world more directly through human presencing, which opened the self to what lies beyond the self.47 Heidegger is fond of citing the pre-Socratic Greeks as exemplars of a people who adopted a more receptive posture toward the world, one that enabled them to respond to the opportunities

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and demands the world placed upon them. The knowledge gleaned from such an attunement with worldly reality is characterized by a kind of ontological humility that simply cannot be found within a technological milieu. By objectifying reality, technology necessarily sets humanity apart from that which is objectified. The subject-object distinction upon which technology is premised is “made real” through its reconstructive labor. No longer merely a philosophical issue of the sort Descartes entertained, our refashioned world is the very instantiation of this distinction. Increasingly we encounter the world from the outside, positioning and repositioning ourselves in relation to the objects of manipulation as if we were invisible to them. While there can be no wholesale return to a more embodied form of relating to reality, Heidegger is correct to argue that something can be gained simply by acknowledging the extent to which our lives are being played out in the context of the world picture. This study shares his hope that such an acknowledgment might help ease the stranglehold of techno science and its objectifying gaze. The embodiment narrative profiled in these pages issues from a call to come to terms with the forces that seek our further remove from unreconstructed reality. It acknowledges that disembodiment constitutes the default position of a technological society, that technological progress invariably leads towards a systematic disconnection from worldly materiality. No work is required to do so, since this end is aligned with the end of efficiency. As if by nature, increases in the functionality of the technological system expedite the further aestheticization of culture, where markers of difference are repositioned within the symbolic realm—the realm of image and fashion—rather than within the more substantive domain of form and function. By comparison, effort is required in the age of technology to acknowledge the centrality of embodiment to the human condition. As spirit-beings we live essentially theoretical lives. Because reality is perceived as making no claim on us, we feel free to make claims on it, to picture the world as we see fit and use this image as a template for rearranging the given. Seeing technology for what it is—namely, a specific mode of revealing Being—brings with it an appreciation of an alternate, nontechnological way in which being can be revealed. Cultivating such an appreciation may not dislodge technology as the dominant paradigm, but it can help demote technology by altering our attitude toward it. When no longer conceived as a path to the truth, to what really is, but simply as a particular way “what is” reveals itself, technology is shorn of its quasi-religious aura: The poetic is rendered prosaic. In light of the concerns of this study, this demotion helps disabuse us of the conventional belief that liberation from the strictures of our worldly condition constitutes an unalloyed good. On the contrary, Earth alienation (as Arendt would put it) leads ultimately to Earth nihilism: Our detachment from

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the conditions of the Earth, which technology presupposes, renders reality meaningless. An objectified reality possesses no authority over us, no capacity to elicit our commitment, but rather is seen as mere meaningless stuff to which meaning is imputed. Combating Earth nihilism by consciously attempting to re-enchant the world is self-defeating because it amounts to just another attempt to foist meaning on an otherwise meaningless reality. The path proposed here is more subtle and avoids the trap of self-contradiction. It proposes regaining an appreciation of human embodiment because only by abstracting from this condition is the technological will able to restructure reality in a manner that transcends it. Awareness seeks its complement in action. Even though an alteration in perspective may elicit changed behavior, it need be asked more directly which forms of practice correspond to an awareness of our condition as embodied beings? The short answer to this question are practices that might be described as “grounding.” By grounding practices is meant practices informed by knowhow, which as mentioned is a way of knowing more closely aligned with a kind of coping than with theorizing. Hubert Dreyfus notes that the meanings attached to such practices are necessarily implicit. They are meaningful, in other words, precisely because they are not explicitly thematized as meaningful. It is in this sense that Dreyfus agrees with Heidegger’s claim that technology’s grip upon us is not so total as to preclude our cultivating the saving power of little things,48 those practices where one relates to others and the world simply, and often ritualistically. Albert Borgmann touches on this same theme in his analysis of “focal practices,”49 practices that shun mediated ways of relating to persons and things in favor of activities that remain more attuned to what lies beyond the self. This study concurs with their general assessment.50 ENDNOTES Note: *indicates that the work is only available in electronic form. 1. See Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), especially Part I, chapter 3, sections 15–16. 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 2. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 33–35. 4. Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality,’” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, eds. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,

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1949), 34. Here Weber makes a distinction between a subjectively rational action, on the one hand, and a rationally correct action, on the other. With the latter, one acts in an objectively correct fashion, or in manner in accord with scientific knowledge. 5. Hesiod, “Works and Days,” in Works and Days, Theogony and the Shield of Heracles, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, lines 172–173. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Three, section 125, “The madman.” The quotation cited here is taken from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181. 7. Arthur M. Melzer, “The Problem with ‘The Problem with Technology,’” in Globalization, Technology, and Philosophy, eds. David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 136. 8. The most explicit formulation of the mediatization phenomenon is contained in Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 323–325. 9. See Andrew Feenberg’s discussion in Alternative Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 144–166. 10. Martin Heidegger, “On the Hand,” cited in Michael Heim’s Electric Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 11. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 24. 12. Jacques Ellul, Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work, ed. William H. Vanderburg, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1981), 50. 13. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), xxviii. 14. Ellul, The Technological Society, xxxiii. 15. Don Ihde, “What Globalization Do We Want?” 82. 16. The reductio ad absurdum of this trend is the social networking system known as “Twitter,” which facilitates text-based posts of no more than 140 characters. 17. Andrew Feenberg, “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 103. 18. Ibid., 104. 19. Herbert Dreyfus captures this sentiment well when he says: “the real danger in technology is not that it might completely destroy is, but that it might not. We might find a technological fix for every technological problem until we finally achieve the total domination of the planet . . . finally health and happiness for all.” See his article, “Knowledge and Human Values: A Genealogy of Nihilism,” in Teachers College Record, Spring, 1981. 20. See my previous discussion of “congenital incompleteness” in Chapter 3. 21. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996), 37. 22. Allan Bloom makes a similar observation in The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). He adds: “Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing.” (172) 23. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2.

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24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Essential Writings of MerleauPonty, ed. Alden Fisher (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), 257. 25. M.C. Dillon, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism,” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas W. Busch and Shawn Gallagher (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 136. 26. Max Frisch, Homo Faber, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 178. 27. See Uwe Poerksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, trans. Jutta Mason and David Cayley (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), especially chapter 1. 28. This expression is Kundera’s. See The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 29. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 122. 30. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 1953), preface, xi. 31. See Michael J. Sandel’s “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” reprinted in Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New York: Routledge), 2006. 32. Darin Barney, “Communication versus Obligation,” 33–34. 33. Pierre Manent, “The Return of Political Philosophy,” in First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, no. 103 (May, 2000), 15–22. 34. See Harvey Mansfield’s 2007 Jefferson Lecture, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science.”* 35. A close examination of the interconnections between technology and religion is found in David F. Noble’s The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). 36. This quote from Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” is cited in Pierre Manent’s “The Return of Political Philosophy.” 37. Feenberg, “Looking Forward, Looking Backward,” 104. The knowing-that/ knowing-how distinction is drawn from Hurbert L. Dreyfus’s “Knowledge and Human Values: A Genealogy of Nihilism.” 38. Antonio Damasio broaches this subject in his ruminations on anosognosia, a disorder that renders its victims unaware of conditions such as blindness, paralysis, or aphasia. He accounts for this perplexing condition by asserting that anosognosics “offer us a view of a mind deprived of the possibility of sensing current body state, especially as it concerns background feeling. I suggest that these patients’ self, unable to plot current body signals on the ground reference of the body, is no longer integral.” [author’s emphasis] See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1994), 154–155. Chapters 4, 7, and 10 of Descartes’ Error are especially relevant to the question concerning the body-mind nexus. 39. The most cogent exposition of the metaxy is found in Eric Voegelin’s “Reason: The Classical Experience,” in Anamnesis trans. Gerhardt Niemeyer (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 89–115. 40. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 174.

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41. Ibid., 120. 42. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), preface, xv. 43. A useful shortcut to gaining a sense of what is meant by placeness is to contrast the conception against one that defines reality in spatial terms. To think of reality spatially is a profoundly abstract and objectifying exercise. It is to excise from the phenomenologically rich experience of “being there” the qualities that distinguish a particular locale as unique or interchangeable. Describing reality in spatial terms therefore presupposes a drawing away from the world as perceived by the embodied eye and a repositioning outside the world, as if looking in. It is not surprisingly that from this Archimedean standpoint the world manifests itself primarily as object-filled space, as extended matter positioned within an extended void. Parallel to the view that takes a painting to be a flat space (i.e., the blank canvas) filled with colored bits and shapes, the world can be intellectually conceived as bits of extended matter housed in homogenized, three-dimensional space. There is a decided advantage in formulating reality as a space-world. The advantage lies in the ease with which the space-world can be translated into the symbolic language of mathematics and converted into the currency of transmissible information. Yet what is gained in terms of the convertibility of data about the world is offset with regards to the content of what is converted. The price paid for perceiving the world primarily in terms of spaces rather than places is a diminishment in the understanding and experience of what constitutes “being there.” When spaces are regarded as commensurate with places, everything, even reality itself, comes to be seen in terms of a picture that contributes to the conflation of the experience of “living out” or “living through,” with the spiritual or otherworldly experience of “looking in.” Spaces, properly understood, are surrogates for places not to be confused with the places for which they stand in. Spaces are places once removed from reality, mere “sites” whose amenability to mathematization and ultimately manipulation, is not matched by their ability to engage the human sensorium in the commanding way that places can. This is why we surf, browse, or visit virtual spaces—like websites or television channels—but refrain from inhabiting them. Despite their considerable surface allure, virtual spaces lack gravitas, the weight of material presence without which they cannot sustain our long-term engagement. 44. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 313. 45. See Martin Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, 116–154. 46. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27. 47. The change in sensibility wrought by technology can be highlighted with the aid of a simple illustration. Human survival, it need hardly be said, always has been dependent in part on the skillful observation and interpretation of weather patterns. However, the expression of this universal need is historically conditioned. Our ancient forbears gained insight into weather-related concerns by lending their bodies to the world. Reading the weather involved deploying the body’s sensory receptors in an effort to register nature’s signals. The somatic participation required of such an interpretive act lies in stark contrast to modern-day meteorological hermeneuts. We moderns learn about the weather not through any direct engagement with the world, but by looking

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down upon the world as represented through an array of images of the world. While our focus remains on such phenomena as wind patterns, cloud formations, and temperature shifts, we analyze these developments from a vantage point detached from the immediate experiencing of them. Like immanent angels, interposed between us and the sky stands a clusters of instruments which create a picture of reality, the truth of which is graspable precisely because it has been rendered an object of analysis. 48. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 33. 49. There is a parallel between my critique of spiritization and Albert Borgmann’s analysis of hyperreality. I agree with the general contours of Borgmann’s claim that the abstractness of hyperreality can be offset by recapturing the sense in which reality remains “eloquent” or “focal.” There are, in the interstices of our postmodern or hyperreal experience, both things and practices that Borgmann believes retain a capacity to speak to us in a way that deeply satisfies a basic human need for meaning and continuity. Importantly, technology per se is not anathema to focal reality. If eloquent things and practices are “natural,” they are not in a straightforward sense. A horse Borgmann counts as a focal thing and a pick-up game of baseball a focal practice, both of which bear the imprint of human ingenuity. Human presence destroys the eloquence of reality only when it overwhelms the capacity of reality to speak for itself. There is a world of difference between a simple sport, simply played, and the same sport as a hyperreal spectacle. The former remains an activity with its own rhythms and demands, while the latter a commodified event driven by technological and economic imperatives. Borgmann addresses the notion of focal reality in Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Especially relevant is Chapter Five, “Postmodern Realism.” 50. My sympathies with the correctives to the reality problematic adumbrated by Dreyfus and Borgmann extend only to their call to resuscitate nonobjectifying practices. Dreyfus, however, argues that encouraging and protecting such practice is insufficient in itself to create a shared moral space of serious alternatives to the technological paradigm. Following Heidegger, he contends the required gestalt switch in our understanding of reality, the so-called “new god,” would appear only when now marginal nontechnological practices become the new norm. It is difficult to find fault with his conclusion as a simple piece of reasoning. But Dreyfus’s reasoning (and Heidegger’s before him) falters when he claims to have found evidence of an incipient gestalt switch in the cultural developments associated with the Woodstock generation of the 1960s. To assert the counter-cultural 1960s give us a “hint” of what a new nontechnological paradigm might look like is assailable on many levels. The only comment I will make here regarding this assessment is that it belies the very seriousness of the age of technology that critics like Dreyfus claim is overlooked. If technology has the commanding hold over humanity that Dreyfus says it does, then the 1960s should be seen less as a glimpse of what a release from such a hold might look like than a vain and reactionary struggle against the dominant technological ethos. See Herbert Dreyfus’s “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 289–136.

Conclusion

In the Introduction I said one of the thematic underpinnings of this study was the end of history thesis. Technology and the end of history are of a piece, I argued, because history is the theater of desire and technology is an effective means of satisfying human longing for material abundance and control over the physical environment. Although technology has not yet satisfied completely material desiring, nor is it likely to into the future, it is inconceivable that a nontechnological way of acting on the world could better satisfy the human desire for freedom from physical threat and material want. To this extent, technology cannot be surpassed: It constitutes the endpoint in the development of the productive arts, just as liberalism may be said to denote the endpoint of political evolution. Integral to the end of history thesis is the claim, most forcefully enunciated by Kojève, that what makes humans distinctively human is not their nature but their history. As natural beings, we are no different than any other biological entity on the planet in that we are composed of the same material stuff and subjected to the same natural laws. For Kojève, then, man can be said to have a biological nature but not a “human nature.” But, as Kojève was well aware, if we humans have no fixed soul, no unchanging essence that defines us as human, then by satisfying human desire at the end of history the condition that makes human beings distinctly human is overcome. And so it is that in humanizing reality via technology we escape our humanity by transcending the limits imposed upon us as worldly beings. The claim linking technology with post humanism is potentially problematic. For if humanity disappears at the end of history, then against what exactly can a critique of technology be mounted and its impact on humanity assessed? Does not an analysis of the sort contained in this study presuppose 201

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the notion of a human nature, a notion that has no place in a reading of technology that discounts its instrumental function and instead takes technology to be the larger context within which “the human” plays itself out? More to the point, could it not be said that a critique of technology’s spiritual propensity rests on certain assumptions regarding what is proper for humankind, an impossible ideal in a post historical age? It is axiomatic that there cannot be a defense of humanity from within the parameters of an argument that claims our age to be post-human. And so we can conclude that if Kojève is correct and humans are essentially historical beings, then the species will further spiritize in symbiotic union with its technological creations, as it should. Clearly, the critical thrust of the argument contained in these pages suggests that such a presupposition is false. No explicit endorsements of the truth content of the end of history thesis have been offered. What I have argued is that the proclamation regarding history’s completion ought to be given due consideration because, like a serious joke, it need not be true to be instructive. The heuristic value of the end of history thesis is a function of the uncompromising rigor of its reasoning, especially as adumbrated by Kojève. To repeat, he argues convincingly that if humans are essentially historical beings, then history’s objective has been realized in principle and increasingly in fact, and the species homo sapiens ceases to exist as distinctly human. The question as to whether or not humans are essentially historical beings is pivotal in analyzing the postmodern response to the reality problematic. It could be argued, in fact, that the entire debate unfolds from within the shadow of Kojève’s thoughts on post historicism. With Lyotard, for instance, we see a juxtaposing of two incommensurable types of narrative. On the one hand, Lyotard plays the historicist card by asserting that humanity is a project propelled by forces larger than itself, the outcome of which is a post human future. On the other, he advances the seemingly antiquarian notion of an inviolable humanness capable of resisting the forces of progress. Virilio as well seems pulled between a historical reading that interprets the drive toward virtualism as a sociological phenomenon of near unstoppable force, and a premodern view that situates humanity within the bounds of a created order. Baudrillard, too, appears to vacillate between a giddy embrace of the vertiginous possibilities of our post-real world and a more somber stance exhorting us to accept the ineffableness of the real. The fact that these respective analyses take seriously the historicity of technological development yet resist yielding wholly to its force indicates ultimately a rejection of the Kojèvean position, or at least a nonironic reading of it: Humans and human society are not for them essentially historical. However, to say humans are not essentially historical beings is not to assert its antithesis, either. In the final analysis, the fundamental question is not

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whether humans are essentially either historical or natural beings, but to what extent we are both. For the principals of this study, nature clearly constitutes the quieter of the two narrative voices. Their technological pessimism grows out of the conviction that, on balance, the forces of history hold sway over those of nature. Yet it is not at all certain that the quieter voice must necessarily be the weaker of the two. In conceding that the voice of nature is subdued relative to that of history we acknowledge the overriding technological character of our social order and its disembodying thrust. Yet by refusing to abandon the notion of nature while affirming technology’s supremacy we recognize as well that technology speaks to an important aspect of human nature, to that component which seeks disengagement from, and mastery over, self and other. Technology constitutes our fate, then, because it aligns with our nature. But human nature, as argued here, is less a delimitable “thing” than a condition marked by an interplay of forces within the soul or psyche. The erotic striving toward transcendence, whose ultimate end is the cessation of desire and ultimately the attainment of wholeness, is countered by a downward pull toward immanence, where desire is constantly reborn and thus the desire to end desire continually frustrated. So if technology can be said to constitute our fate because it speaks to our nature, it is a fate fraught with contradiction since technology also possesses the capacity to violate this same nature. Of course, this contradiction tends to be overlooked in our age because by defining ourselves primarily as historical beings, the notion of human nature is either dismissed entirely or interpreted in a way that resolves the variance between nature and history. Still, technology’s problematic association with humanness remains because what makes humans human exists in permanent tension with technology. It is the abiding quality of the tension between our humanness and technology’s spiritual inclinations that makes the voice of nature if not more compelling than that of history, then at least its equal. If our attachment to technology at bottom is tenuous and conflicted, as is becoming more evident, it is because technology emerges from and speaks to our indeterminate nature. It is a nature, to repeat, that seeks self-transcendence and domination over the human and nonhuman worlds while remaining bound to forces not of its creation which subvert its supernal ambitions. When the postmodern discourses on the reality problematic are examined from within this theoretical framework, we see that their provisional responses to the problematic acknowledge the significance of a neglected component of human and worldly reality. That is to say, their questioning the disembodying effects of modern technology issues from a defense of what it means to be fully human. The subtext of their commentaries suggests that acceding to the all-too-human impulse to transcend self and world is tantamount to losing both. So if it is true that by taking technology seriously, they

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are forced to critique it from a position outside the ethos of technology, their critiques are informed by an understanding of what constitutes the real, and therefore informed as well by an understanding of what it means to be human. This reading is significant for it points to what I believe is the only prudent and self-consistent response to the technology-induced spiritization of humanity. On one side, it shows the pitfalls associated with mindless antitechnologism by illustrating the extent to which technology responds to a central component of the human condition. On the other, it suggests we ought to use restraint in exercising the power of technology if we wish to avoid jeopardizing the very thing whose advance is sought. Taken together, this teaching calls for measured circumspection regarding technological advance. It does not reject outright technology and its spiritual thrust but calls on us to respond to technological development mindful of our indebtedness to the world of space and time. It invokes the primacy of the art of living and not of escape. To participate in a way of life whose end one rejects as an uncontested absolute is to adopt a contradictory stance. In our present age, such a stance calls on us to be atheists of technology.1 Like Christians living in pagan Rome, modern day disbelievers of the “new god” accommodate themselves to the general contours of a society whose reigning ethos they reject. The “new faithful” embrace the participatory ethic against which spiritization stands. The contest between the ethos of technology and the participatory ethic is reflective of a tension within philosophical thought that extends back to the pre-Socratic era and the birth of natural philosophy. The Parmenidean view regarding the singularity of being was counterposed by the Democritean perspective that took reality to be a complex of irreducible parts. Contesting views as to whether reality is of a piece or a configuration of pieces have persisted ever since. Modern science, in its classical dispensation, aligned itself with the Democritean or atomist view of reality and the mechanistic conception of nature that subtended this perspective. However, even during the height of its classical phase, modern science could not completely disavow itself of the pretensions of holism. The notion, for instance, that space is actually a plenum comprised of a rarified substance called “ether” was a ruling paradigm for leading scientists of the nineteenth century, such as James Clerk Maxwell, and was disposed of only with the advent of Albert Einstein and his formulation of the special theory of relativity in 1905. Even then, Einstein’s rebuff of the ether concept had less to do with dispelling the notion that physical reality is ultimately a manifestation of continuous fields of electromagnetic energy (versus material points in motion), than with Maxwell’s assumption that these fields could be explained mechanistically.2 Indeed, scientific research into the twenty first century appears to have redeemed the Parmenidean view that space, far from being empty, is imbued with a pervasive nonmechanistic cosmological

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medium, an immense sea of background energy. Seen in the context of the energy field that permeates space, the material universe has been likened to a small “wavelike excitation,” a mere ripple, on a vast sea of energy.3 The mechanistic perspective adopted by classical modern science is supported by the view that takes reality to be discontinuous: Reality is seen as emerging from the interplay between discrete bits of matter swirling in the void. The implication of such a world view for the reality problematic is unambiguous: Humans are detached observers of a world beyond the boundaries of their skin. There is a parallel, in other words, between a view which takes the elemental particles that comprise the material order as fundamentally distinct, and one that positions the human subject as essentially distinct or outside the world within which it is situated. In contrast, the structure of reality implied by contemporary physics corroborates the phenomenological contention that reality, at bottom, is all of a piece and that the nature of reality is misread should its constituent parts be seen as fundamentally discontinuous. Recognition that humanity is consanguineous with reality, with a nature not of our making but in relation to which we nonetheless derive our own specific nature, is a corrective to the prevailing world view that sustains spiritization. We are not spirits in the material world but worldly beings with the spiritual or imaginative capacity to question the world in its appearingness. The problem lies with the assumption that our ability to question the appearing world indicates that humanity is obliged to escape altogether the realm of appearances, and to reside in a realm built on the insights gleaned from this privileged position. Such an escape is illusory. Although we can withdraw from present appearances, we cannot escape from appearances altogether.4 We cannot, in other words, get beyond “mere” appearances and see reality for what it “really is.” Reality, by definition, is an appearing reality for the simple reason that we are constitutionally incapable of inhabiting the position required to come to an objective understanding of the world within which we live. Yet we persist in assuming otherwise. And in so doing we further engage the art of escape.

ENDNOTES 1. The idea that one ought adopt an atheistic stance toward technology is taken up by Paul Virilio: “It is necessary to be an atheist of technology! . . . My fetish image is that of the battle of Jacob and the angel. Jacob is a believer, he meets the angel of God, but to remain a free man, he is obliged to battle. This is the great figure. It is necessary to obey—but also to resist.” See “Is the Author Dead: An Interview with Paul Virilio,” in The Virilio Reader, James der Derian, ed. (New York: Blackwell, 1998), 20.

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2. An excellent analysis of the ether concept and twentieth century physics is contained in Ludwik Kostro’s Einstein and the Ether (New York: Aperion), 2000. 3. The expression is David Bohm’s. See The Essential David Bohm, Lee Nichol, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 98. 4. Hannah Arendt speaks insightfully of the interconnection between being and appearingness in Chapter I of The Life of the Mind: Volume One/Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg), 1978.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by an “n” and a second number refer to a note on the indicated page. For example, 105n24 indicates the reference is to note 24 on page 105. Adorno, Theodor. See Baudrillard, Jean AIDS. See Baudrillard, Jean Aldrin, Buzz, 84, 85 Aquinas, Thomas, 102 Arendt, Hannah, xii, xxiin3, 118, 154, 177, 194 Aristotle, xv Artificial Intelligence, 124, 127, 135; Bottom-Up School, 137–41; TopDown School, 137–38, 141 Artificial Life, 124, 127 Barnes, Julian, 27 Barthes, Roland, 39 Baudrillard, Jean, xvi, 77, 80, 83, 111, 116, 202; Adorno, Theodor, 35; AIDS, 35; alienation, 169; American way of life, 60, 62; Biosphere II, 122; capitalism, 40, 43; chaos theory, 36; commodities and value, 40–42; contra Derrida, 29; Horkheimer, Max, 35; hypermodernity, 60; hyperreality, 40, 43–48, 50–52, 54, 56, 61; identity mania, 54; impossible exchange,

64, 65; as jokester, 30–32; Kojève, 30, 40; Marx/Marxism, 39; media, 56; Merleau-Ponty, 62, 63, 65; performance effect, pathologies of, 35–38; performance principle, 32–34, 63; politics, 184; posthistoricism, 30, 41, 54–55; reality problematic, 30, 32, 175, 176; reality, typology, 27, 28, 32, 33; secret rules of life, 64; simulation, 29, 30, 48, 56–57, 60; spiritization, 43, 171; and Virilio, 71, 73, 105n24, 106n27 Bean, Alan, 85 Bell, Daniel, 68n58 Bloom, Alan, 197n22 body-ego. See proprioception body-sense. See proprioception body-world connection, 192 Böhme, Jakob, 99 Borgmann, Albert, 4, 195, 199n49 Brooks, Rodney, 139–40, 141 capitalism, 37, 40, 123 Caputo, John, 10, 16, 24n28

213

214

Index

Casey, Edward, 191–92 chaos theory, 36 CNN, 108n66 Cohn, Norman, 100 computers, problem with, 97 connectionism. See Artificial Intelligence; Artificial Life Conrad, Pete, 84 Cooder, Ry, 68n50

entropy, law of, 156

Damasio, Antonio, 197n38 Darby, Tom, xxiiin13 DeLillo, Don, xi, 181 democracy. See liberalism Derrida, Jacques, xvi, 57; and Baudrillard, 29, 39–40, 42; and the computer, 21; différance, 11, 13–14, 18, 19, 20–22, 25; and Husserl, 16–18; language, 11–14; and Merleau-Ponty, 4–5, 10, 14, 21; metaphysics of presence, 4, 11, 14; perception, 19–21; phenomenology, critique of, 3; reality problematic, 168–69, 175; and Virilio, 83 Descartes, René, 99, 194 Deutsch, David, 25n53 différance. See Derrida, Jacques disenchantment, xvi, 30, 60, 113, 117, 155, 186 DNA, 42 Dreyfus, Hubert, 136, 148, 195, 199n50 dromocratic revolution. See Virilio, Paul Durkheim, Emile, 118 Dylan, Bob, 82–83, 94

globalization, 90, 92, 94 Gould, Stephen Jay, 151n71 Graphical User Interface (GUI), 96

Earth alienation, 194 Earth nihilism, 194–95 efficiency. See technology Einstein, Albert, 76, 88, 204 Ellul, Jacques, 72, 74, 118, 162, 163–65; politics, 163; and Virilio, 72 enchantment. See magic end of history. See posthistoricism Eno, Brian, 108n64

fascism, 100 Feenberg, Andrew, 167–68, 170 the flesh, philosophy of, 5–8 Foucault, Michel, xxiiin12, 127 Frisch, Max, xxiin8, 180 Fukuyama, Francis, xix, 54, 98 futurism, 55, 74, 98

Habermas, Jürgen, 158–59, 161, 163, 167 Hegel, G. W. F., xix, 55, 88, 99, 173 Heidegger, Martin, xx, 17, 112, 114, 160, 164–65, 180, 182, 186, 187; enframing, 162–63, 173, 193; perceptual faith, 154; saving power of technology, 195; standing reserve, 155, 162; world picture, 193 Hesiod, 157 historicism, 202–3 Horkheimer, Max. See Baudrillard, Jean human-computer interface (HCI), 96. See also Tangible Media Group human nature, 180, 201–3; and technology, 203 Husserl, Edmund, 3, 14–20, 22, 23, 130; and Derrida, 16–20 hypermodernism, 60 Internet, 82 Italian Renaissance (Quattrocentro), 87, 88 junk DNA, 38 Kant, Immanuel, xii, 112, 113, 153 Kasparov, Garry, 131–33, 134, 136 Kittler, Friedrich, 23n1

Index

Kojève, Alexandre, xix, 65n3, 202; and Baudrillard, 30, 54; and Lyotard, 152n74; and Weber, 30 Kundera, Milan, 98 Lacan, Jacques, 99 last man. See Kojève, Alexandre Lenant, Douglas, 138 liberalism, xix, xxiii, 53, 54, 145, 166, 184, 201 linear perspective, 87, 111 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 59 Lyotard, Jean-Jacques: alienation, 169; anti-humanism, 127–28; anti-inhumanism, 128, 141; and Baudrillard, 122; complexification, 119–29, 143, 144, 147; development, 110–11, 119, 121, 124, 126, 128, 142–47; formative years, 110; globalization, 148; heat/ solar death, 115–17, 149n19; and Heidegger, 114; humanism, 125–26; The Inhuman, 129, 135, 144; inhumanism, 123–29, 146–48; and Kant, 112–13; Marxism, 110; modern aesthetic, 113, 114; modernity, 112, 113–14, 115, 121; phenomenology, 135, 141–42, 144, 176; politics of resistance, 142, 145–48; postmodern aesthetic, 114; postmodern humanism, 128; postmodernity, 113–14, 120, 121, 143; spiritization, 148, 171; the sublime, 112, 114, 117; systemic posmodernism, 120–21; systems theory, 118–19; technoscience, 123, 126, 128, 142, 143, 144; and Virilio, 111, 124; visual arts, 117 magic, 154–55, 176 Manent, Pierre, 185, 186–87, 189 Mansfield, Harvey, 185 Marinetti, F. T., 73 Marx/Marxism, 39, 72, 102, 110

215

Mauss, Marcel, 43 Maxwell, James Clerk, 204 McLuhan, Marshall, 59, 63, 182 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2–11, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 46–47, 62, 65, 72, 77–78, 79, 130, 134, 135–36, 137, 141–42, 178–79; brute/wild experience, 9; and Derrida, 5; the flesh, philosophy of, 6–8, 137; language/speech, 4, 9–10; metaphysics of presence, 4; perceptual faith, 6, 154 Mill, John Stuart, 186 millenarianism, 100–101, 190 MIT. See Tangible Media Group Monod, Jacques. See systems theory Moravec, Hans, 138 music. See phenomenology nazism, 100 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 50, 56, 80, 100, 106n28, 157 nihilism, xx, 79, 112 von Neumann, John, 130 Newton, Sir Issac, 88 Noble, David, 197n35 Norton, Anne, 61 Parsons, Talcott, 118 participatory universe, xiv perceptual faith, 6 phenomenology, xiv, 46, 47; and Baudrillard, 62–63, 65; and Derrida, 4, 5, 10, 14, 21; and Lyotard, 135, 141–42, 144; music, 45–46, 47–48, 51–53, 68n50, 83; and Virilio, 80, 81, 83, 101. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice placeness. See Casey, Edward plastic words. See Poerksen, Uwe Plato, xii, xxin1, 5, 99, 167, 185, 190 Poerksen, Uwe, 182, 183 politics of resistance. See Lyotard, Jean-Jacques

216

Index

position-sense. See proprioception posthistoricism, xix, 54, 201–2; and Baudrillard, 54, 202; and Lyotard, 202; and Virilio, 98, 202 posthumanism, 201, 202 postmodernism, 57–62 pre-Socratics, 193, 204 proprioception, 188–89, 192 radical hermeneutics, 24n28 reality, xi–xx, 3, 46, 172–73 reality problematic: and Baudrillard, 30, 32; counterstrategies, 171–72; defined, xxiin6; and Lyotard, 111, 123; politics of, xviii, 203, 205; and postmodernism, xvii, xviii; solutions to, 175, 176; solutions to, critique of, 175–77, 181; and Virilio, 91 redundancy principle, 38, 46 revenge of nature, 35. See also Baudrillard, Jean Rothko, Mark, 83 Russell, Bertrand, 130 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 12–13 Scheler, Max, 17 scientific realism, xii Second Law of Thermodynamics, 120, 156 semiotics, 39 Severini, Gino, 74 spirit-beings, 22, 148, 180, 189, 191, 205 spiritization, xv, xvi, xx, xxiiin6, 43, 101, 104, 148, 171, 181, 182, 191; defined, xv; liberalism, xix; and Manent, 185; politics, 183–84, 185; posthistoricism, xix St. Augustine, 153, 187 Strauss, Leo, xxin1 systems theory, 118, 121–22 Tangible Media Group (TMG), 95–96

technology: and alienation, 168–69; determinism/dystopian, 158–68, 174, 185; disembodiment, xv, xvi, 191, 193, 194, 203; efficiency, 33, 37, 53, 126, 143, 157, 161, 162, 170, 183; efficiency, defined, 155–56; fallacies of, 159–61, 164–65; humanizing of, 168; versus magic, 154–55; and posthumanism, 201; problem of, 158–66, 174–75; reification of, 158; smart technologies, 38, 48; and spiritization, 183, 193, 204; spiritual nature of, 186 techno-skeptics, 158 Tenner, Edward, xxiin11 thumos. See Mansfield, Harvey Tippler, Frank J., xxiin7 Trilling, Lionel, 184 utopianism, 100 da Vinci, Leonardo, 99 Virilio, Paul: and alienation, 169; and Baudrillard, 80, 86, 105n24, 106n27; Christian faith, 72, 99, 101, 169; chronoscopic time, 81; cyberspace (virtuality), 76–81, 84, 85, 86, 88–89, 90–91, 94, 98; demythologizing technology, 102; and Derrida, 83; dromocratic revolution (speed), 73, 93, 94–95; and Dylan, 82, 94; and Ellul, 72; formative years, 71–72; and Fukuyama, 98; geosphere, 96–97; globalization, 90, 92, 94; history, 88, 91; and Lyotard, 109; and Merleau-Ponty, 72, 77, 78, 79; politics, 93–94, 95, 102, 103; posthistoricism, 98; presentism, 83–84, 93, 94, 169, 176, 192; reality, 73, 77–78, 87, 106n27; reality problematic, 175, 176; real time, 79, 81–82, 90; simulation, 80; space-world, 75–78, 83, 86, 95; spiritization, 91, 94, 104, 169, 171;

Index

time-light (light speed), 75, 90; two realities, 89; virtual reality, xv, 84; war, 98–99, 103; and Weber, 100 Voegelin, Eric, 100, 190 voluntarism, 184, 185 war. See Virilio, Paul Weber, Max, xix, 50, 67, 100, 113, 117, 156, 186–87; and Kojève, 30. See also disenchantment

Wells, H. G., 80 Wheeler, John, D., xxiin7 Whitehead, Alfred, 130 Wiener, Norbert, 130 world-sense. See Casey, Edward World War II, 71, 102

217