Digital Subject UK: A Workshop at the University of Dundee (1 April 2015)

• How enabling or disabling are concepts such as ‘the network’, ‘feedback’ and ‘information’ for contemporary forms of life?
• Is the Internet one or many things?
• Is the advent of the ‘Information Age’ something to be welcomed or feared?
• What role can philosophy play in thinking about information and communication technologies and forms of subjectivity emerging in relation to them?

These questions and other related ones were tackled in this intensive one-day workshop at the University of Dundee. The workshop took place Wednesday April 1st 2015, 10 am – 6 pm, Room 2S15 in the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee. More info >

Dominic Smith (University of Dundee): ‘Does the Digital Subject Sleep?’  [MP3]

Ashley Woodward (University of Dundee): ‘Is the Digital Subject the Übermensch?’ [MP3]

Alan Bell (University of Dundee): ‘Paranoia, fictions and realities; technological change and the record’ [MP3]

Joris Vlieghe (University of Edinburgh): ‘How learning to read and write shapes humanity: A technosomatic perspective on digitization’ [MP3]

Erika Fulop (University of Hamburg): ‘Weave Your Own Web: Authorial Self-representation on the Internet’ [MP3]

Arnauld Regnauld (University of Paris VIII): ‘Aura is Interface: Translation and Subjectivity in the Digital Era’ [MP3]

Claire Larsonneur (University of Paris VIII): ‘Interface me? Living 3.0’ [MP3]

Pierre Cassou Noguès (University of Paris VIII): ‘Body as Money’ [MP3]

Galit Wellner (Ben Gurion University): ‘Codes of Subjectivity’ [MP3]

Tim Barker (University of Glasgow): ‘On Being Con-Temporary: What Technical Media Studies Might Offer to Theories of Contemporaneity’ [MP3]
 

The Dark Matter of Heidegger's “Black Notebooks”

Publication of Martin Heidegger's Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) caused a tempest which now appears to be one of the biggest dramas in academic world these days. The chain reaction of comments is gaining power with each conference, book, essay, and blog post dedicated to this issue. Now The New Yorker contributes — again (see older articles here and here) — to the “Heidegger-the-nazi” saga with Joshua Rothman's “Is Heidegger Contaminated By Nazism?”, and I must admit after reading at least a dozen of other recent articles on this very issue, that it is one of the most readable insights.  
The so-called “Heidegger controversy” is a highly complicated, sensitive, and — for the majority of Heideggerians and the continental kind in general — painful matter. In fact, the matter is so dark and delicate, that big words and bold statements seem to be impossible to avoid. Alas, the commanding boldness of the title of Rothman's article. Even the question mark at the end of the title leaves no chances for redemption because of this biologically suggestive term “contamination” — a graphic trope which obviously works very well for the press. The trope has been borrowed from Peter Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, also the editor of Schwarze Hefte and the author of a book called Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy. In the latter, Trawny occasionally addresses Heidegger's philosophy in terms of it being possibly “contaminated” by Nazism. However, at the end of his article, Rothman is cautious enough to remark, that “As to the question of ‘contamination,’ Trawny said he regretted, somewhat, the choice of that metaphor. It may have been ‘too strong.’” I would add that in this uneasy and tense silence which often befalls us when we are publically challenged by the terms such as “Holocaust,” “Nazi,” “jew,” or “gas chamber,” every subsequent utterance, no matter how thoroughly premeditated, will always tend to sound a bit “too strong.” Within this field of tension, within this apparent unthinkability of the matter, utterances often become inevitably amplified to the level of dictum, or verdict.  
Speaking of verdicts, some authors (e.g., Emmanuel Faye et al.) would be happy to turn the whole Heideggerian philosophy into an ideological Chernobyl — a zone contaminated by radioactive waste of Nazism. Such attempts are often based on the assumption that Heidegger's early writings, including Being and Time as well as some of the most important seminars of the twenties, allegedly had a bias toward subliminal ideological reasoning, as if Nazi ideology — retroactively — was a condition of possibility in Heidegger's philosophy even before he became a member of NSDP in 1932. By the same token, it would be equally unfair to assume that such bias was evident in Heidegger's work even after this infamous biographical turn — all in all, until the publishing of Schwarze Hefte in 2014, we had no direct hermeneutical evidence of this sort.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that Rothman's article is devoid of conveniently polarized verdicts, I must disagree with his dictum regarding the “math-like quality” of philosophy as such. Rothman puts forth the proposition that philosophy is “not just a vocabulary, but a system. A failure in one part of the system can suggest a failure everywhere.” Such an apparently commonsensical reasoning might seem irrefutable until this “everywhere” is brought into question. In other words, what is “everywhere”? Does it pertain to both philosophy and biographical life?   
The fact that Heidegger wanted Schwarze Hefte to be published at all instead of simply getting rid of them, tells us that he was surely aware of these questions. In Rothman's article we find a passage about the position of Peter Trawny himself, who “saw a way out for Heidegger in one of the philosopher’s own concepts, ‘errancy’—the idea that human beings are not calculators, but conjecturers, and that being wrong is, therefore, an irreducible part of being a person. (In ‘The Essence of Truth,’ Heidegger wrote that ‘the errancy through which human beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the [existence] into which historical human beings are admitted.’)”  
In philosophy, dictum veritas is never axiomatic in the mathematical sense. It is not that the principles of logic do not apply or do not matter, but the mere possibility of having the whole philosophical “system” grounded on a certain set of self-evident axioms turns philosophy into a positivist scientific project. The fact that today we consider Plato and Aristotle, Decartes and Locke, and even Spinoza and Leibnitz still worthy of a serious philosophical enquiry is one of the quick ways to argue against such a synonymity between philosophy and mathematics. Despite all the incongruencies, contradictions, and plain errancy of certain arguments and propositions, philosophical “systems” survive because somehow they happen to be more than the sums of their parts.  
If the question of Schwarze Hefte is to be answered, then the answer should not entail the amputation of a whole chapter in philosophy, because amputation of a limb — even if it is a saluting hand of a Nazi — brings us only to a phantom limb syndrome. 

Hacking Times

It's about the time, and the way we feel about it. 

One of those interesting ways to reflect on how "time" is embodied in technologies, is imagining what would it mean to experience this embodiment. The very moment we encounter a word "time" as an utterance, text, or thought, it opens up a whole totality of meanings and possibilities: it can be the date on a wall calendar (which is found — more often than not — on the screen), a clock (which is found — more often than not — on the screen), an old postcard (which is f. . .), etc. It must have — and it most often does — some particular meaning, one of the countless others, even if it's just a romantic generalization "oh, time... ."

What are we counting when we are "counting time"? That is a good question. What does this imaginary "tick" refers to? It's not a mechanical click of a clock. It's barely a sound anymore. The vibrations are not detectable, because it's a signal in a circuitry. It has no commanding physical presence, unlike the relics of an era which has just passed away: an old mechanical watch, ticking, banging and squeaking hours out 24/7, a bell tower in the middle of a town, a wrist watch. The sceptre * of time is confidently delegated to an electric signal in a "digital world."

* Peculiarly enough, sceptre a misspell-away from spectre. The latter could serve as an interesting substitute in another discussion, maybe I'll return to it in another post about ghosts.

Now let's see what would happen (within the strict confines of the imaginary experiment, of course) if the time (i.e., the official, scientific Time) in a particular social context would be changed without people being aware of it. Even if it's a relatively slight change. Imagine, that you wake up one morning and every media confirms a bad feeling that it is... yesterday. Let's say, yesterday was Friday. You expect to wake up into a lazy Sunday morning, but instead of that you're awaken by an alarm clock. It's 7:30 pm. You can't believe your eyes, check the date on the iPhone. "It cannot be!", — you get up out of bed to debunk this glitch, but TV, Internet, even the old electronic alarm clock seem conspired against you: it's Friday, again. You finally loose your sense of righteousness, when you realize that you're rushing to work, like everyone else, like you normally would, on a Friday morning. Soon you find out that everyone around share the same feeling of a "glitch." Even the pictures you really took yesterday, have proper dates assigned to them — it seems that time (again, the official, scientific, mediated time as a universal numerical representation, the "symbolic" time), together with the whole digital time grid, suddenly has taken a 24 hour step back. Nonetheless, you don't protest it too much, because there is no evidence to prove your point. You just have a feeling about it. Or maybe you protest and get hysterical — it doesn't matter. What matters here, is that our imaginary time shift occurs on top of, or in the background of... something. This background already has many names (and counting): reality, the Real, materiality, subjectivity, the World, nature, the physical. That "something" is always being referred to and coordinated with. There is this peculiar link between the universal time and "something."

It is possible to shatter this link not by questioning if the real events are "real", but by wandering are the real events still relevant? We're not just counting something when we mean "time," we're counting on something, which does that instead of us. There are no everyday observations of nature to rely on, these observations are carried out by groups of specialists and scientists, which count on scientific methods. For someone who is far from this particular scientific area, universal time is something given as a trusted knowledge. And like every knowledge, it — in its digital form — is, technically, "hackable." It can be altered, even if it is a highly difficult and complex venture. At least, within a certain scale. Here I caught myself thinking about The Truman Show, only in my version Truman was living in the real world with... the wrong time. Say, he would normally read that kind of newspaper every morning:

1853, 19th century. And it's ok. Until the day when poor chap discovers that it is actually 2013 that he's living in: same world, different dates. If my imaginary scenario were a Hollywood movie, it would end with the protagonist returning to normality and accepting the right time, right sexual partner, right thinking, etc. But it is not a Hollywood movie, it's my line of thought, and I'm ending with a promise to return and take care of further developments.

Media archeology of enjoyment

It's the end of the 1960s and it is surprising to see how some of the media conventions (many of which are now widely accepted as contemporary) "survived" the techno-evolution for nearly half a century. All basic elements of the interface are still there today, unharmed, only massively pimped-up by high-tech cosmetics: the screen, the drawing pad, e-pen, graphic interface with Cartesian system of graphical representations. It's what's seen in the screen what has changed the most.

   

The Genesys system, developed by Dr. Ron Baecker in MIT's Lincoln Laboratory from 1967-69, was one of the world's first interactive systems for real-time animation. Genesys utilizes an interactive animation that exploits the potentialities of direct graphical interaction. Because every last picture in the animation sequence drives algorithms to generate the next one (so-called "dynamic display"), the process is referred to as "picture-driven animation".

It would be hard to imagine a contemporary media user enjoying the interaction with the same graphic interface and experiencing the same joyful immersion, as that young illustrator in the movie did. Realization that you can control the imagery in such a new way must have triggered the feeling that suddenly, a completely new space for explorations opened up right in front of you.

From the times of Ch.Babbage, explorations in the fields of automated computing and cybernetics were carried out mostly by professionals, *

[* In contemporary techno-cultural lingo, the analogue for "professional" is "geek." It is interesting to notice, that the connotations of "geek" over the period from 60s until the "noughtees," followed a peculiar dynamics: from negative (sociopathic, asexual, "smart-ass", "programmer") to positive (social, sexual, successful, "CEO"). ]

at least until the 1990s, when "realistic" graphic interface became popular — i.e., became a norm. The representations in the computer screen became "real enough" to be enjoyed by everyone, not just programmers.

As we know, this realistic turn was met with explosion of enjoyment, in direct proportion to global computer sales. A radical change in the world-wide economy of enjoyment, and a general facelift to the interfaces: keyboard, drawing pad and e-pen, monitor. They remained intact, without any changes on a fundamental level. Obviously, there must have been reasons for that, and the "enjoyment" factor is not to be missed here. The screen — and not the "margins" around the screen: monitor, input/output devices — received the most of attention. The joy of watching, seeing, looking, gazing, peering, staring, glancing, glaring, peeping. It would be only natural to say, that the "picture-driven animation" was, indeed, also an "enjoyment-driven animation" (and "progress").

There was no reason to change the concept of the rectangular computer screen as a "window" metaphor, or to change the concept of a drawing pad as a metaphor of "paper," or the concept of an e-pen as a "pen." The factors of familiarity, convenience, and cognitive accessibility can still guarantee their dominance.

If the first stage (mode? level?) of enjoyment in the 50s-70s was "the joy of recognition," then the second stage — the one which still lasts (more or less) — could ne named "the joy of immersion." It is hard to ignore, that both of them suggest a progression to "the joy of acting." The joy of acting after the new media have been recognized, and after they have been embedded in our being, in our Dasein. Acting under the influence of the new media with Heideggerian "you are what you do" in mind.


If there is a direction to the movement of enjoyment, then it is the ideology of representational realism which determins it. The "joy of acting" must be tied with the realism of robotic action. That is a good topic, which requires a separate, more elaborate discussion, and I'll put this aside for now.


Returning to my initial surprise, what is actually surprising to see (or, rather, to witness again, to remember), it is how enjoyable the early "computer graphic systems" were at their time. Computer-generated visualizations were highly abstract and symbolic (those dotted lines even bare some semblance with aboriginal art), reduced to still recognizable minimum, bound to the aesthetics of visual economy. And in the aesthetical totality, the imagery has a certain raw quality, in the sense of raw imagery of the  cinema avantgarde in 1900-30s...

Between Possibility and Necessity: Get Online with God

Photo: Geiste Kincinaityte (2012)

In the 1960-ies Lynn White Jr. has made a major contribution to the history of technology by introducing a new concept of Middle Ages as a highly technologized era. Among many points he made in his thorough research (here I'm referring to: Lynn White Jr., "Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages", Viator 2 (1971)), was one regarding the role of technological achievements within the context of Christianity. Medieval Church (mostly Western European, as opposed to the Orthodox East) was quick to embrace and institutionalize various technological inventions. For example, right after the mechanical clock was introduced, the metaphor of a perfect "heavenly mechanics" was born. The precision of a mechanical device was representing the precision of a divine logos. Every church—since then campanellas became equipped with clocks—became an institutionalized representative of a mechanized divine time. Every technological improvement not only contributed to the expansion of a power network, but also sustained and strengthened the bonds between technological and religious practices. White puts it this way:

About 1450 European intellectuals began to become aware of technological progress not as a project (. . . this came in the late thirteenth century) but as an historic and happy fact, when Giovanno Tortelli, a humanist at the papal court, composed an essay listing, and rejoicing over, new inventions unknown to the ancients. . . . It was axiomatic that man was serving God by serving himself in the technological mastery of nature. Because medieval men believed this, they devoted themselves in great numbers and with enthusiasm to the process of invention. (White, 199)

Considering the further historical trajectories of Western thought and praxis, this insight obviously resonates with contemporary post-religious discourse. It is the servitude to the (Western) "values of democracy" which is now spontaniously associated with the techno-scientific progress (e.g., the idea of democratically positive transparency of hi-tech-savy societies vs the fundamentalist opacity of "developing" societies; think Egypt revolution and Arab Spring events).
What deserves our critical attention here is the "self-explanatory" and seamless reversal of this modified Medieval equation—i.e. the false logic of the notion that every technological achievement is an inevitably valuable contribution to the democratization. The problem here is the actual lack of the etchical dimension in technology proper for this equasion to be possible in the first place. The "self-explanatory" presence of an ethical (and thus democratically correct) justification in contemporary post-industrial technology can be paralleled with the "self-explanatory" presence of a Holy Ghost manifesting itself in the technology of Middle Ages.
The distortion becomes apparent when the two sides of the equation are attributed to the categories of necessity (of technology) and the possibility (of God or the secular Good). In both cases of the justification of technological servitude, possibility is allowed to function as a (mode of) necessity.

To be continued

Heidegger and Television

It is still a bit surprising that Heidegger, a major figure in philosophy of technology, didn't leave any systematic reflections on radio and television, even though he was obviously familiar with both of these technologies from the pre-WW2 era. The fact that mid-20 century media remained outside Heidegger's theoretical scope might indicate the presence of "modernist fundamentalism" (and it is the same modernism, which found a threatening dimension in the technologies of post-Industrial revolution). It's quite peculiar that at the end of his life he became interested in television after all... but only as a medium for broadcasting soccer games.