(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Is it really so that we are like the fish – that we always swim underwater and thus do not know what is outside? The magazine Agora is out with a new issue with the theme «Technology, media and aesthetics», and points out that technology today is – like language – so ubiquitous that we do not notice its impact, constructions and dangers. "Journal of Metaphysical Speculation", which is Agora's subtitle, this time serves the views of a bunch of philosophers who in a row believe they look into the depths of what is fermenting and smoldering beneath the surface of our technological world and our associated self-perception: Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Stiegler, Michel Foucault – all influenced by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
A weakness of much of the topic is that there will probably be a lot of general theoretical talk and use of concepts. I studied these technology themes in the 1980 and -90's, and am left with the impression that one year after 25 has not so much decisive news to say. Is it because much has now been learned along the way from us technology users? For is it really so different that one has the Internet and Facebook today, that social media and new technology are more ubiquitous?
First out is William Ernst, who in an interview is said to be most fond of the "cold look"; in looking at the technological devices we have around us, free of meaning, that is, free of meaning. He explains that sampling of sound on 44 000 Hz, twice as much as our hearing can perceive, is necessary in order not to lose sound quality. And then? His studies in media archeology unlike engineering studies, is more concerned with deconstruction, by "cognitive sparks", by what is inside old radios, and by more profound technological implications. Well, pointing out that with Apple we got designed "flat" computers, much like how Chevrolet took over the more repairable simple T-Ford, means we can't see what's under the hood. And so – is it really that dangerous? That we can't easily look inside? Here Heidegger is implied in such a context – that when something breaks, we should be able to understand how it is put together. But this was in the mechanical era. Don't know if it helps to throw out concepts like post-digital, ubiquitious computing, deconstruction or copying Marshall McLuhan. Ernst has been criticized for "passionate listening," and I can hardly agree. Philosophy? In borderland.
The next man out in Agora is the mention of Friedrich Kittler, again a guy with a cold look. He is dystopian in his war and media criticism – man ends up as machine subjects, according to Kittler. In books like Gramophone, movie,Typewriter (1986) it appears that the media determines our situation. Yes, as McLuhan previously suggested with his phrase "the medium is the message" and "massage". Kittler's thesis that "there is no software", that the machine's interface is irrelevant, is interesting considering how we are embedded in technology today. But I remember when I met Kittler at a seminar in Trondheim in the 90 century, where I helped him find an ATM – then the philosopher had to suddenly run up to his hotel room because he had something to program in assembler, ie the machine's internal language! Did the overview go a little like Ernst's lost in the mechanical details?
Nevertheless. Much insight is found among the many conceptual texts in Agora. For example, the use of archives, or what Ernst calls "anarchive" (non-archive) to escape certain meanings. Yes, as long as we have with us Foucault's deep insights into how reality is structured and his examples of establishing linguistic discourses, or institutions that monitored prisons or the clinic. Or how to establish identity as human as such. A patient archive, national archive or cultural archive has a deeper function than just a database search.
The same could be said by the philosopher Jacques Rancière when he was recently on a Norwegian visit (Astrup Fearnley Museum): Distribution of our conditions of possibility (dispotiver) is aesthetic, that is, they are created and changed, so that political practice follows established, imagined or selected opportunities for human behavior. This aesthetic foundation is established before politics – and also before technology.
As Jacob Lund mentions in his review of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, our new conception of time is now concurrency - a vast infinite "now" in the many channels and interactive of the media community on-demand offers of experiences and information. But again, what is the danger of this? Well, the point is that we lose the ability to take on stories. Here, both the perception of the future and the past – and long horizons of time – are weakened.
All of these philosophers grand old master Martin Heidegger is reprinted in this Agora edition, with his important essay The question of the technique (1953) – about how man makes himself free in his oblivion, his blindness to the essential human being. As I once read, according to Heidegger, we end up with cynical control of the surroundings as a kind of stock ready to be used, a rat race of an instrumentalization in which man as a free subject is swallowed by the whole and becomes an object himself, an object among resources. It all ends up pointless in a huge apparatus that is only about a will-to-will.
That we ourselves have already become "goods" in an enormous consumer apparatus, Bernhard Stiegler adds an explanation: We actually evolved via the techniques, eventually called the technology – via the prostheses we rose above the animal. For we have always been incomplete and deficient beings. This vulnerability of ours is aided by technical prostheses and procedures, such as speech, writing and images. Our existence is "therefore fundamentally constituted and conditioned by technology."
We are also vulnerable enough to need circuits, media, environments ("mi-lieu" means in-between) or forums to understand ourselves. Such forums are called in this journal agora, ie square. But Agora itself has so far not used available technology to create such squares – if not four printed numbers a year is a form of squares outside of the network's ubiquitous media.
The technological is part of us, and has always already been there. At the same time, we should know that television "programs" our brain time – and, as Agora states, people now find it opportune to sell "Disposable brain time" or consumption patterns. And Facebook, like our time panopticon (from Foucault's surveillance analysis), maps and adjusts your brain time based on your patterns of interest or consumption. Facebook can even determine your mood by regulating the number of positive or negative through affective techniques news feeds for a moment.
As Foucault put it, our freedom is a struggle between being restrained and restraining oneself – through "the life techniques of the self," a care for the self. Or as Stiegler points out – the conflicts revolve around how mobile you are. Or? truls@nytid.no
