Some months ago I cut out of a shiny magazine some paragraphs written by a female journalist and describing the pleasure resort of the future. She had recently been spending some time at Honolulu, where the rigours of war do not seem to have been very noticeable. However, “a transport pilot ... told me that with all the inventiveness packed into this war, it was a pity someone hadn't found out how a tired and lifehungry man could relax, rest, play poker, drink, and make love, all at once, and round the clock, and come out of it feeling good and fresh and ready for the job again.” This reminded her of an entrepreneur she had met recently who was planning a “pleasure spot which he thinks will catch on tomorrow as dog racing and dance halls did yesterday.” The entrepreneur's dream is described in some detail:
His blue-prints pictured a space covering several acres, under a series of sliding roofs-for the British weather is unreliableand with a central space spread over with an immense dance floor made of translucent plastic which can be illuminated from beneath. Around it are grouped other functional spaces, at different levels. Balcony bars and restaurants commanding high views of the city roofs, and ground-level replicas. A battery of skittle alleys. Two blue lagoons: one, periodically agitated by waves, for strong swimmers, and another, a smooth and summery pool, for playtime bathers. Sunlight lamps over the pools to simulate high summer on days when the roofs don't slide back to disclose a hot sun in a cloudless sky. Rows of bunks on which people wearing sun-glasses and slips can lie and start a tan or deepen an existing one under a sunray lamp.
Music seeping through hundreds of grills connected with a central distributing stage, where dance or symphonic orchestras play or the radio programme can be caught, amplified, and disseminated. Outside, two 1,000-car parks. One, free. The other, an open-air cinema drive-in, cars queueing to move through turnstiles, and the film thrown on a giant screen facing a row of assembled cars. Uniformed male attendants check the cars, provide free aid and water, sell petrol and oil. Girls in white satin slacks take orders for buffet dishes and drinks, and bring them on trays.
Whenever one hears such phrases as “pleasure spot”, “pleasure resort”, “pleasure city”, it is difficult not to remember the oftenquoted opening of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But it will be seen that Coleridge has got it all wrong. He strikes a false note straight off with that talk about “sacred” rivers and “measureless” caverns. In the hands of the above-mentioned entrepreneur, Kubla Khan's project would have become something quite different. The caverns, air-conditioned, discreetly lighted and with their original rocky interior buried under layers of tastefully-coloured plastics, would be turned into a series of tea-grottoes in the Moorish, Caucasian or Hawaiian styles. Alph, the sacred river, would be dammed up to make an artificially-warmed bathing pool, while the sunless sea would be illuminated from below with pink electric lights, and one would cruise over it in real Venetian gondolas each equipped with its own radio set. The forests and “spots of greenery” referred to by Coleridge would be cleaned up to make way for glass-covered tennis courts, a bandstand, a roller-skating rink and perhaps a ninehole golf course. In short, there would be everything that a “lifehungry” man could desire.
I have no doubt that, all over the world, hundreds of pleasure resorts similar to the one described above are now being planned, and perhaps are even being built. It is unlikely that they will be finished-world events will see to that-but they represent faithfully enough the modern civilised man's idea of pleasure. Something of the kind is already partially attained in the more magnificent dance halls, movie palaces, hotels, restaurants and luxury liners. On a pleasure cruise or in a Lyons Corner House one already gets something more than a glimpse of this future paradise. Analysed, its main characteristics are these:
One is never alone.
One never does anything for oneself.
One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
One is never out of the sound of music.
The music-and if possible it should be the same music for everybody-is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. For
The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim in the most typical modern pleasure resorts is a return to the womb. For there, too, one was never alone, one never saw daylight, the temperature was always regulated, one did not have to worry about work or food, and one's thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing.
When one looks at Coleridge's very different conception of a “pleasure dome”, one sees that it revolves partly round gardens and partly round caverns, rivers, forests and mountains with “deep romantic chasms”-in short, round what is called Nature. But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man's littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower-and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower is dependent partly on the sense of mystery. But meanwhile man's power over Nature is steadily increasing. With the aid of the atomic bomb we could literally move mountains: we could even, so it is said, alter the climate of the earth by melting the polar ice-caps and irrigating the Sahara. Isn't there, therefore, something sentimental and obscurantist in preferring bird-song to swing music and in wanting to leave a few patches of wildness here and there instead of covering the whole surface of the earth with a network of Autobahnen flooded by artificial sunlight?
The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one's life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognised this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanisation of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions-in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane-is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.
If I have any criticisms, they would mostly pertain to the ambiguous use of the notions of identity, self, and human nature. A consistent point of Snow's essay is that technology "fundamentally changes" humans, leading to or, more weakly put, encouraging a "cyborgian form of being and self-identification." The exact extent of this modification on the level of being isn't explained although its influence on the level of action and reaction is, especially in the areas of "human emotions and traditional forms of communication" as well as the action of "autobiographical self-writing." Snow repeats several times throughout his essay that "our very human nature is fundamentally shifted through" our use of various social media technologies into "a cyborgian form of being," but the demonstration is not clearly made.
The notion of identity isn't explicated. Snow jumps immediately into the psychological effects of Facebook's algorithms on constructing a "coherent narrative" that presents certain bits of information for the user instead of others. The precise effect is that the range of possible identity formation is inhibited or directed by those algorithms in such a way as to prevent deep thought and more extensive forms of self-expression, reflection, and discursive thought characteristic of humans. The permanent effect of these technologies is not argued for; in fact, Snow gives an anecdotal account of how he was able to personally reverse some of the effects after limiting his own use of those technologies. His essay ends with a call to be more wary regarding the use, implying that the shift into a cyborgian mode of living is not permanent. This lack of permanence only raises the further question of what Snow means by saying that human nature is "fundamentally changed."
Part of the inhibition occurs through the use of templates either in the form of the message (text, pictures with a single line of text as in Snapchat) or in terms of length (Twitter's 140 characters, Vine's 6 seconds).
Traditional natural philosophy (and metaphysics) distinguishes between the orders of being and the orders of action, or between the entitative and the operative. The traditional axiom is that action follows or flows from being. In other words, the very essence or form of a being delineates the range of actions of which it is capable. If we wonder why a rock cannot see or fly or speak, we can answer simply that its nature or form prevents it from doing so. Furthermore, the range of actions that may flow from a being may be hindered in various ways from being exercised, either externally as from some violence or internally as from some defect within the subject.
A claim that human nature is fundamentally changed must ultimately be intelligible metaphysically, that is, explained with respect to a modification in human being or doing. My criticism is that Snow's essay shows only changes on the level of doing, of actions characteristic of humans yet not so fundamental as to change the very essence of humans. It would be hard to see how a person could undo the effects of such technology if his very essence were changed, if he were no longer the same kind of being.
The effects of habits on human action are thoroughly explained in traditional natural philosophy. Examples of communication, human emotion, and the ability to focus or reason in an extended, discursive fashion are all examples of operations that flow from human nature. The argument of the essay is that the changes in these activities indicate a change at the level of being. It is not clear, however, that these changes cannot be explained as the formation of certain habits, which are accidental or non-essential changes, that inhibit the full operations of human nature as mentioned above, hindrances coming either externally from some form of violence (whether physical or perhaps in the case of Facebook algorithms on the level of sensory and intellectual input) or some defect.
We know from a growing number of psychological studies that attention and reasoning abilities require training to improve and can deteriorate over time either through misuse or lack of use. It seems more reasonable to say that social media fosters this deterioration and encourages the formation of habits that inhibit the full functioning of actions proper to human nature, rather than effecting any change in human nature on the level of being. In other words, the cyborgian form of living is not an essential or fundamental change but rather an accidental and secondary change, one that admits of degrees and can even be reversed by a change in one's actions.
This criticism brings us to a second possible criticism of the essay, namely, a confusion between the orders of being and operation. For example, Snow writes, "Furthermore, technology inhibits the deep thought and work that makes humans unique." If action flows from being and is determined by being, then the above quotation gets things in the opposite order. Deep thought and work do not make humans unique but are manifestations of a fundamental nature, and it is the nature that makes humans unique, and from this nature flows certain actions, namely, deep thought and work. Deep thought is a work that only humans can do because of their nature and not because of their environments. Their environments either help or hinder the exercise of this form of activity but do not cause them. To suggest so could imply that humans don't have a proper, stable nature to themselves but are constituted wholly by environmental factors, at which point it no longer makes sense to speak of a collective human race but only individuals that reflect certain actions at some points that can be called "human" for an otherwise arbitrary reason.
The opposition between deep work and mindless boredom is interesting but again ambiguous. Strictly, boredom is a lack of interest, and deep work is more than interest but an application of rational activity on some object. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that boredom is a symptom of a person who does not engage regularly in deep work or lacks the opportunities or environments to do so. Our attraction to novel distraction is not strictly correlated with the lack of opportunities for deep work but may also reflect a profound crisis in the modern notion of one's self-identity being in contrast with the demands of reality, even on the unconscious level.
The relationship between characteristically human activities and existential boredom is not clearly explained either. The need to have a certain self-identity is certainly a contemporary dilemma, but the importance of identity was not stressed in the past when certainly much deep work was done by plenty of humans.
On the other hand, digital technologies afford a certain distraction that can legitimately be used as a form of leisure. The same cautions that St. Thomas gives to leisure in general certainly apply to modern technologies and even more so by their ability to stimulate our nervous system in ways that traditional, physical forms of leisure could not. Above all, the need for self-control in the use and engagement of these technologies stands at the forefront. So while one may not be able to "effect a fundamental change in existential temporality" while playing Doodle Jump, on the other hand there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Doodle Jump in itself when certain restrictions are kept in mind and it is remembered that Doodle Jump (hopefully) isn't trying to effect such a fundamental, existential change or at least prevent it from happening in the rest of the user's life.
It is not clear the extent to which technology cannot aid us in participating in or entering into "something beautiful, powerful, or peaceful." Social media technologies don't claim to try to do this although they do try to provide a platform in which we can share such experiences with each other, such as sending a photograph or video of a sunset or sharing a poem that was particularly moving to us. The Internet is a polymorphous technology with many possibilities of action, but at the end of the day, it is only one form of technology. We have to remember that writing is a technology, and so are pianos and musical instruments, yet these latter certainly are regularly part of many beautiful, powerful, and peaceful experiences. Is it conceivable that digital technology might provide a similar experience? Perhaps we can find something close in movies that contain noble themes and artful craftsmanship.
An interesting counterpoint to Snow's essay is that it is precisely through the Internet that more and more people are being exposed to the findings of psychological studies stressing the need to relax and to strengthen our natural ability to focus through regular self-discipline, such as mindfulness practices. In other words, the very technologies that have been destroying the exercise of our natural capacities have also been the vehicle to warn us of that fact.
It is further unclear what the effects of networked and fragmented thinking are on human nature itself. Such broad statements as "what does this lost ability mean for our humanity" are too vague to give much of a response to. As indicated earlier, it is perfectly explicable that intrinsic actions flowing from an essence or nature may be inhibited by habits that deform the natural exercise of those activities, and although habits have a certain semi-permanent quality, they are reversible and do not alter a subject on the order of essence. It is uncertain that networked thinking is really possible without a linear process in the mind on the level of consciousness and that the ability to shift rapidly between multiple elements is really anything different than what humans have always done in discursive reasoning.
Speculative questions about the potential future of human thinking and evolution and the "hive mind" are almost always too ambiguous to respond to.
The importance or even nature of a self-identity are left without the needed explanation to understand their relationship to existing and living in our world. Snow's invoking of Crawford's autonomy/heteronomy distinction is confusing because its contribution to his thesis is unclear. It remains unclear why whether a subject "flits about" or pursues "settled purposes and ongoing projects" is a problem to be solved. The notion of a sense of self can occur on multiple levels of discourse, psychologically, philosophically, socially, etc. What sense Snow is using isn't clear.
Finally, the actual danger of technology-guided or aided self-reflection also remains unclear. While an unquestioning reliance on algorithms that we have no understanding of may strike a note of fear in those desiring to construct an autonomous identity, perhaps on the other hand we should recall that many forms of modern identity are constituted precisely by the intersection between the false individualism and the totalitarian consumerism existing in a social-media soaked culture, and the very attempt to preserve any notion of coherence to this sort of identity is merely an unconscious fantasy desire to continue promoting what is at its very root in opposition to the full demands of reality and human nature itself. Perhaps an embrace of human nature rather than the non-essentialism so prevalent in academia and now popular culture would remind us of the basic need for restraint in the leisurely use of our technologies, whether digital or mechanical, and that identity formation must firstly run the way of reality and not virtual reality before it can lead to any genuine promotion of human flourishing. Technologies can certainly aid us in the exercise of properly human operation, for technology in its traditional understanding falls under art, which is simply the production of things according to right reason (recta ratio factibilium), and as such technology ought already to be a reflection of the right order of things, extending and aiding our natural faculties and operations, the way a telescope aids our natural sight to see what is truly there but without which we could never discover, or a simple organization schema can put into order the jumbled and quasi-related elements of our thought as we try to form coherent discourse.
As we draw near to World Communications Day 2012, I would like to share with you some reflections concerning an aspect of the human process of communication which, despite its importance, is often overlooked and which, at the present time, it would seem especially necessary to recall. It concerns the relationship between silence and word: two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved. When word and silence become mutually exclusive, communication breaks down, either because it gives rise to confusion or because, on the contrary, it creates an atmosphere of coldness; when they complement one another, however, communication acquires value and meaning.
Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved.When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.
The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled [sic] by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive. Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.
Ultimately, this constant flow of questions demonstrates the restlessness of human beings, ceaselessly searching for truths, of greater or lesser import, that can offer meaning and hope to their lives. Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of skeptical opinions and experiences of life – all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever: “When people exchange information, they are already sharing themselves, their view of the world, their hopes, their ideals” (Message for the 2011 World Day of Communications).
Attention should be paid to the various types of websites, applications and social networks which can help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning, as well as making space for silence and occasions for prayer, meditation or sharing of the word of God. In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives. It is hardly surprising that different religious traditions consider solitude and silence as privileged states which help people to rediscover themselves and that Truth which gives meaning to all things. The God of biblical revelation speaks also without words: “As the Cross of Christ demonstrates, God also speaks by his silence. The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word …. God’s silence prolongs his earlier words. In these moments of darkness, he speaks through the mystery of his silence” (Verbum Domini, 21). The eloquence of God’s love, lived to the point of the supreme gift, speaks in the silence of the Cross. After Christ’s death there is a great silence over the earth, and on Holy Saturday, when “the King sleeps and God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages” (cf. Office of Readings, Holy Saturday), God’s voice resounds, filled with love for humanity.
If God speaks to us even in silence, we in turn discover in silence the possibility of speaking with God and about God. “We need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born” (Homily, Eucharistic Celebration with Members of the International Theological Commission, 6 October 2006). In speaking of God’s grandeur, our language will always prove inadequate and must make space for silent contemplation. Out of such contemplation springs forth, with all its inner power, the urgent sense of mission, the compelling obligation “to communicate that which we have seen and heard” so that all may be in communion with God (1 Jn 1:3). Silent contemplation immerses us in the source of that Love who directs us towards our neighbours [sic] so that we may feel their suffering and offer them the light of Christ, his message of life and his saving gift of the fullness of love.
In silent contemplation, then, the eternal Word, through whom the world was created, becomes ever more powerfully present and we become aware of the plan of salvation that God is accomplishing throughout our history by word and deed. As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, divine revelation is fulfilled by “deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them” (Dei Verbum, 2). This plan of salvation culminates in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the mediator and the fullness of all revelation. He has made known to us the true face of God the Father and by his Cross and Resurrection has brought us from the slavery of sin and death to the freedom of the children of God. The fundamental question of the meaning of human existence finds in the mystery of Christ an answer capable of bringing peace to the restless human heart. The Church’s mission springs from this mystery; and it is this mystery which impels Christians to become heralds of hope and salvation, witnesses of that love which promotes human dignity and builds justice and peace.
Word and silence: learning to communicate is learning to listen and contemplate as well as speak. This is especially important for those engaged in the task of evangelization: both silence and word are essential elements, integral to the Church’s work of communication for the sake of a renewed proclamation of Christ in today’s world.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting). [...]
Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. [...]
My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. [...]
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. [...]
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking. [...]
When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer. [...]
Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
“What we have today is the hegemonic figure of the liberal subject who, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, is concerned only with the pursuit of private pleasures + ideals of happiness.”
– Slavoj Žižek
Michel Houellebecq is known for his abrasive and vulgar wit, as a pamphleteer of literature; a pornographer of the neoliberal market place of ideas in its darker contours, a sexploitative tourist of the flyways within a global system that has lost itself among the labyrinths of its own economic nightmares; and, as a man who has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia among other things. But beyond the surface tension of the mediasphere hype he is more a product of our free-market era than its perpetrator or victim. One might even suggest that he incarnates the Progressive Condition that is both our glory and possible demise: he is the Last Man in its hollowed out core tumbling toward that narrative aporia beyond which none of us will remain human.
As Ben Jeffery will put it Houellebecq’s narratives inhabit that space in the negative undertow of the enlightenment, a realm where “we are able to see ourselves as merely creatures, rather than God’s creatures, and nature as purposeless matter, rather than divine plan. Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and repulsiveness – and it makes self-interest paramount” (Jeffery, Ben (2011-11-16). Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (p. 15). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition). This notion of rational self-interest has been one of those elements that that runs through most thought for the past two-centuries, a thematic or leit-motif of our Progressive Condition.
The original progressives held the consistent conviction that a “public interest” or “common good” really existed (Nugent, Walter (2009-12-04). Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Kindle Locations 258-259). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition). In our time this notion has taken on the fabric of a lie, a fiction that democrats continue to support in theory, republicans laugh at, but in practice both agree is just that: a nice idea that is best left in the shadows or hinterlands of the public unconscious. It’s in this society of moral bankruptcy and decay that Houellebecq situates his characters. They are much like himself (and much of his fiction comes right out of his life) cynical in the sense of Diogenes: a street art that shits on the most respectable citizens as if this was just the natural order of existence. As Sloterdijk in his Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (English: Critique of Cynical Reason) will inform us of Cynicism after Diogenes:
Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on secure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science (Nietzsche) by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. (Critique of Cynical Reason, translation by Michael Eldred; foreword by Andreas Huyssen, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 288)
So that Houellebecq’s humor is both subtle and full of satiric intent, tongue-and-cheek cynicism that neither takes itself seriously nor expects to be taken seriously. Against a postmodern nihilist reading of his works one might actually see in it a critique of our eras Progressive Condition. Sloterdijk believed that this condition of our time was best typified by the difference between ancient and modern forms of cynicism, suggesting that unlike ancient Greek Cynicism the modern one no longer stands for values of the natural and ethical kind that bind people beyond their religious and economically useful convictions. Rather, it has become a mode of thought that defines its actions in terms of a “final end” of a purely materialistic sort and reduces the “ought” to an economic strategy aimed at maximizing profit. This new grittier market realism, what Mark Fisher will call “Capital Realism“, and Ben Jeffery as simply – “Depressive Realism” underlies most of Houellebeq’s novels and stories. His satires are for the most part taken at face value rather than as ironic and satirical statements about our eras cynicism in its rawest forms.
As Houellebecq will say through one of his characters: ‘Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilization, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.’ (Jeffrey, pp. 15-16) This pop-cult psychoanalysis of our condition as a Freudian pleasure/pain dialectic that leads to suicide is seen almost everyday in various pop-cultural spheres: musicians, artists, performers, etc. committing suicide through drugs, self-inflicted wounds, et. al..
In his book on H.P. Lovecraft he will relate the basic condition of our era:
For humans of the end of the twentieth century, this cosmos devoid of hope is absolutely our world. This abject universe, where fear spreads in concentric circles from the unnameable revelation, this universe where our only imaginable destiny is to be crushed and devoured, we recognize absolutely as our mental universe. (Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Robin Mackay. H.P. Lovecraft Against the world, against life, Believer Books; First Edition edition (May 1, 2005))
This is the world according to Houellebecq, our world in its downward devolution into that strange and twisted thing it is. A market world where the maximization of everything is accelerating us into that disjunctive era where the lines between the human and inhuman blur, and we enter the machinic phylum like “dogs in the street barking”.
106. The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed”.
107. It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.
108. The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race”, that “in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive – a lordship over all”. As a result, “man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature”. Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished.
109. The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations. Their behaviour shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. At the same time, we have “a sort of ‘superdevelopment’ [sic] of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation”, while we are all too slow in developing economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources. We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.
110. The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon, which then becomes irrelevant. This very fact makes it hard to find adequate ways of solving the more complex problems of today’s world, particularly those regarding the environment and the poor; these problems cannot be dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests. A science which would offer solutions to the great issues would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to acquire today. Nor are there genuine ethical horizons to which one can appeal. Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence. In the concrete situation confronting us, there are a number of symptoms which point to what is wrong, such as environmental degradation, anxiety, a loss of the purpose of life and of community living. Once more we see that “realities are more important than ideas”.
111. Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.
112. Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?
113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.
114. All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.
Well, I’ll admit that the title of this essay is not just a little inaccurate – if we take “environmentalist” in the narrow sense we understand it today. But if we understand “environment” more broadly – as those conditions that surround us and influence us – then, I think, calling Pope Gregory XVI an “environmentalist” is not too far off the mark.
Indeed, Gregory took the “environment” of his day very seriously; some might say, too seriously. One might think, in fact, that he fit well the stereotype of the modern environmentalist – that he lacked balance and perspective, confusing the essential with what is merely external and contingent. For, he vehemently opposed republican government and would accept no lay participation in the government of his Papal States. His 1832 encyclical, Mirari Vos condemned liberty of conscience and the freedom to publish any and all opinions. He stood resolutely against every revolution in his time – even the rebellion of the Catholic Poles against their persecutor, the Orthodox tsar of Russia. Why, Gregory XVI was so reactionary that he even forbade the building of a railroad and the installing of gas lights in the the Papal States! He despised railroads. He called them chemins d’enfer (“roads to hell”) – a pun on the French chemin de fer, “iron road.” (This, of course, suggests that Gregory had a sense of humor, which he did. Those close to him knew him to be jovial, friendly, and a lover of good conversation – thus demonstrating that even reactionaries can be fun.)
It is in his opposition to the modern technology of his day that this pope most closely approximates, at least, the caricature of the modern environmentalist. Such an environmentalist, at the very least, would see a severe curtailment in the use and development of certain forms of technology (such as air conditioning or the automobile) because they harm the natural environment and human health. The more subtle among them may even point to the effects of such technology on human culture. Certainly, Pope Gregory XVI was not thinking of air pollution or climate change when he excoriated trains. What he objected to, and what he thought inexorably bound up with the expansion of the technology of his day, were habits of mind and morality that most modern environmentalists take as self-evident truths. In a word, what Gregory objected to was Liberalism.
This Liberalism was not simply the “liberalism” of the U.S. Democratic Party; indeed, it encompasses the fundamental ideals that lie behind the American political order itself, as well as the those of most nations on earth today. At the basis of this Liberalism is the premise that man’s most natural state is one of radical freedom and autonomy; that human community is a construct to preserve individual freedom, and thus not proper to man as man. Forms of community, including political community, are thus artificial and have the character of an imposition, even if a necessary imposition. But if they are necessary, they are only so because they protect and preserve individual freedom. The limit of human aspiration remains absolute autonomy – even if it can never be fully attained.
Individual liberty is the only absolute for Liberalism. Its limitation can only be justified by liberty. Public order thus becomes the only excuse for law and government – not the common good; for, the expressions of liberty – freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of choice – imply that it is the individual who determines the content of the good. Law and government delineate a space wherein each individual can exercise maximum autonomy, nothing more.
In opposing Liberalism, Gregory was not condemning human liberty as such. It was this pope, for instance, who in his 1839 apostolic letter, In Supremo Apostolatus, sternly condemned enslavement and the slave trade. Gregory understood that freedom is proper to man; what he condemned was the principle of fundamental human autonomy. Gregory operated out of the Catholic social and political tradition that saw organized communal life as a given for man, as an expression of human nature – man as a social and political animal.Based as it is in human nature, the organized communal life has a goal or purpose, which is none other than the good of man as man: the inculcation of virtue, understood not simply as moral rectitude but the perfection of all human faculties – physical, moral, intellectual, and, ultimately, spiritual. It was in defense of this tradition that Gregory exercised all the powers of his mind and heart.
To appreciate this, one need not agree with everything Gregory XVI did and said. One certainly need not share his disdain for railroads and gas lights. [His successor, Blessed Pius IX, in his reign established both these technologies in the Papal States, as well as a lay advisory senate for their governance – for which he was dubbed (mistakenly) the “Liberal pope.”) But, I think, we might be indulging in a bit of disdain ourselves if we simply laugh off Greogry’s pun, chemins d’enfer. It may be, in his rejection of the “modern” technology of his day that Gregory was on to something. He may have understood implicitly what one of his successors on Peter’s Throne has stated explicitly:
We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.
Thus, Pope Francis (Laudato Si’, 107) – arguably a pope of a very different stamp than Gregory XVI. But though Gregory would very likely find some of Francis’ comments and actions appalling (and might think they justify his detestation of railroads), he might discover, in Laudato Si’, kindred sentiments. Gregory forbade the building of railroads because he saw them as avenues by which Liberalism might infiltrate the Papal States. The technology of the period was an expression of a conviction that rose with Francis Bacon’s ipsa scientia est potestas (“knowledge is power.”) It was the notion that knowledge is ordered, not to contemplation, but to craft – to subduing the world for the utility of human freedom. In other words, the function of knowledge and therefore technology is to set us free from the limitations of nature, just as politics is to set us free from the limitations imposed by all tradition, custom, and authority. Such technology, in the words of Francis, “create[s] a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups.” The powerful groups of Pope Gregory XVI’s day were those that sought the overthrow, not only of the Church, but of the human culture that Church had protected and fostered. And their boast was the power their technology gave them over the powers of nature.
[...] what is demanded is a re-evaluation of technology, of its power to influence human life and culture and a reining in of its pretensions. As Laudato Si’ (114) puts it, we “need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”
Both Francis and Gregory XVI call us to walk the narrow way to true human fulfillment, not simply hitch the next ride on the chemins d’enfer.
[The following article is an example of materialistic reductionism (or perhaps eliminativism since the author is not clear enough at least here) with respect to human intentionality.]
Abstract: For centuries now, science has been making the invisible visible, thus revolutionizing our understanding of and power over different traditional domains of knowledge. Fairly all the speculative phantoms have been exorcised from the world, ‘disenchanted,’ and now, at long last, the insatiable institution has begun making the human visible for what it is. Are we the last ancient delusion? Is the great, wheezing heap of humanism more an artifact of ignorance than insight? We have ample reason to think so, and as the cognitive sciences creep ever deeper into our biological convolutions, the ‘worst case scenario’ only looms darker on the horizon. To be a writer in this age is stand astride this paradox, to trade in communicative modes at once anchored to our deepest notions of authenticity and in the process of being dismantled or worse, simulated. If writing is a process of making visible, communicating some recognizable humanity, how does it proceed in an age where everything is illuminated and inhuman? All revolutions require experimentation, but all too often experimentation devolves into closed circuits of socially inert production and consumption. The present revolution, I will argue, requires cultural tools we do not yet possess (or know how to use), and a sensibility that existing cultural elites can only regard as anathema. Writing in the 21st century requires abandoning our speculative past, and seeing ‘literature’ as praxis in a time of unprecedented crisis, as ‘cultural triage.’ Most importantly, writing after the death of meaning means communicating to what we in fact are, and not to the innumerable conceits of obsolescent tradition.
So, we all recognize the revolutionary potential of technology and the science that makes it possible. This is just to say that we all expect science will radically remake those traditional domains that fall within its bailiwick. Likewise, we all appreciate that the human is just such a domain. We all realize that some kind of revolution is brewing…
The only real question is one of how radically the human will be remade. Here, everyone differs, and in quite predictable ways. No matter what position people take, however, they are saying something about the cognitive status of traditional humanistic thought. Science makes myth of traditional ontological claims, relegates them to the history of ideas. So all things being equal we should suppose that science will make myth of traditional ontological claims regarding the human as well. Declaring that traditional ontological claims regarding the human will not suffer the fate of other traditional ontological claims more generally, amounts to declaring that all things are not equal when it comes to the human, that in this one domain at least, traditional modes of cognition actually tell us what is the case.
Let’s call this pole of argumentation humanistic exceptionalism. Any position that contends or assumes that science will not fundamentally revolutionize our understanding of the human supposes that something sets the human apart. Not surprisingly, given the underdetermined nature of the subject-matter, the institutionally entrenched nature of the humanities, and the human propensity to rationalize conceit and self-interests, the vast majority of theorists find themselves occupying this pole. There are, we now know, many, many ways to argue exceptionalism, and no way whatsoever to decisively arbitrate between any them.
What all of them have in common, I think it’s fair to say, is the signature theoretical function they accord to meaning. Another feature they share is a common reliance on pejoratives to police the boundaries of their discourse. Any time you encounter the terms ‘scientism’ or ‘positivism’ or ‘reductionism’ deployed without any corresponding consideration of the case against traditional humanism, you are almost certainly reading an exceptionalist discourse. One of the great limitations of committing to status-quo underdetermined discourses, of course, is the infrequency with which adherents encounter the limits of their discourse, and thus run afoul the same fluency and only game in town effects that render all dogmatic pieties self-perpetuating.
My artistic and philosophical project can be fairly summarized, I think, as a sustained critique of humanistic exceptionalism, an attempt to reveal these positions as the latest (and therefore most difficult to recognize) attempts to intellectually rationalize what are ultimately run-of-the-mill conceits, specious ways to set humanity—or select portions of it at least—apart from nature.
I occupy the lonely pole of argumentation, the one that says humans are not ontologically special in any way, and that accordingly, we should expect the scientific revolution of the human to be as profound as the scientific revolution of any other domain. My whole career is premised on arguing the worst case scenario, the future where humanity finds itself every bit as disenchanted—every bit as debunked—as the cosmos.
I understand why my pole of the debate is so lonely. One of the virtues of my position, I think anyway, lies in its ability to explain its own counter-intuitiveness.
Think about it. What does it mean to say meaning is dead? Surely this is metaphorical hyperbole, or worse yet, irresponsible alarmism. What could my own claims mean otherwise?
‘Meaning,’ on my account, will die two deaths, one theoretical or philosophical, the other practical or functional. Where the first death amounts to a profound cultural upheaval on a par with, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the second death amounts to a profound biological upheaval, a transformation of cognitive habitat more profound than any humanity has ever experienced.
‘Theoretical meaning’ simply refers to the endless theories of intentionality humanity has heaped on the question of the human. Pretty much the sum of traditional philosophical thought on the nature of humanity. And this form of meaning I think is pretty clearly dead. People forget that every single cognitive scientific discovery amounts to a feature of human nature that human nature is prone to neglect. We are, as a matter of empirical fact, fundamentally blind to what we are and what we do. Like traditional theoretical claims belonging to other domains, all traditional theoretical claims regarding the human neglect the information driving scientific interpretations. The question is one of what this naturally neglected information—or ‘NNI’—means.
The issue NNI poses for the traditional humanities is existential. If one grants that the sum of cognitive scientific discovery is relevant to all senses of the human, you could safely say the traditional humanities are already dwelling in a twilight of denial. The traditionalist’s strategy, of course, is to subdivide the domain, to adduce arguments and examples that seem to circumscribe the relevance of NNI. The problem with this strategy, however, is that it completely misconstrues the challenge that NNI poses. The traditional humanities, as cognitive disciplines, fall under the purview of cognitive sciences. One can concede that various aspects of humanity need not account for NNI, yet still insist that all our theoretical cognition of those aspects does…
And quite obviously so.
The question, ‘To what degree should we trust ‘reflection upon experience’?’ is a scientific question. Just for example, what kind of metacognitive capacities would be required to abstract ‘conditions of possibility’ from experience? Likewise, what kind of metacognitive capacities would be required to generate veridical descriptions of phenomenal experience? Answers to these kinds of questions bear powerfully on the viability of traditional semantic modes of theorizing the human. On the worst case scenario, the answers to these and other related questions are going to systematically discredit all forms of ‘philosophical reflection’ that fail to take account of NNI.
NNI, in other words, means that philosophical meaning is dead.
‘Practical meaning’ refers to the everyday functionality of our intentional idioms, the ways we use terms like ‘means’ to solve a wide variety of practical, communicative problems. This form of meaning lives on, and will continue to do so, only with ever-diminishing degrees of efficacy. Our everyday intentional idioms function effortlessly and reliably in a wide variety of socio-communicative contexts despite systematically neglecting everything cognitive science has revealed. They provide solutions despite the scarcity of data.
They are heuristic, part of a cognitive system that relies on certain environmental invariants to solve what would otherwise be intractable problems. They possess adaptive ecologies. We quite simply could not cope if we were to rely on NNI, say, to navigate social environments. Luckily, we don’t have to, at least when it comes to a wide variety of social problems. So long as human brains possess the same structure and capacities, the brain can quite literally ignore the brain when solving problems involving other brains. It can leap to conclusions absent any natural information regarding what actually happens to be going on.
But, to riff on Uncle Ben, with great problem-solving economy comes great problem-making potential. Heuristics are ecological; they require that different environmental features remain invariant. Some insects, most famously moths, use ‘transverse orientation,’ flying at a fixed angle to the moon to navigate. Porch lights famously miscue this heuristic mechanism, causing the insect to chase the angle into the light. The transformation of environments, in other words, has cognitive consequences, depending on the kind of short cut at issue. Heuristic efficiency means dynamic vulnerability.
And this means not only that heuristics can be short-circuited, they can also be hacked. Think of the once omnipresent ‘bug zapper.’ Or consider reed warblers, which provide one of the most dramatic examples of heuristic vulnerability nature has to offer. The system they use to recognize eggs and offspring is so low resolution (and therefore economical) that cuckoos regularly parasitize their nests, leaving what are, to human eyes, obviously oversized eggs and (brood-killing) chicks that the warbler dutifully nurses to adulthood.
All cognitive systems, insofar as they are bounded, possess what might be called a Crash Space describing all the possible ways they are prone to break down (as in the case of porch lights and moths), as well as an overlapping Cheat Space describing all the possible ways they can be exploited by competitors (as in the case of reed warblers and cuckoos, or moths and bug-zappers).
The death of practical meaning simply refers to the growing incapacity of intentional idioms to reliably solve various social problems in radically transformed sociocognitive habitats. Even as we speak, our environments are becoming more ‘intelligent,’ more prone to cue intentional intuitions in circumstances that quite obviously do not warrant them. We will, very shortly, be surrounded by countless ‘pseudo-agents,’ systems devoted to hacking our behaviour—exploiting the Cheat Space corresponding to our heuristic limits—via NNI. Combined with intelligent technologies, NNI has transformed consumer hacking into a vast research programme. Our social environments are transforming, our native communicative habitat is being destroyed, stranding us with tools that will increasingly let us down.
Where NNI itself delegitimizes traditional theoretical accounts of meaning (by revealing the limits of reflection), it renders practical problem-solving via intentional idioms (practical meaning) progressively more ineffective by enabling the industrial exploitation of Cheat Space. Meaning is dead, both as a second-order research programme and, more alarmingly, as a first-order practical problem-solver. This—this is the world that the writer, the producer of meaning, now finds themselves writing in as well as writing to. What does it mean to produce ‘content’ in such a world? What does it mean to write after the death of meaning?
This is about as open as a question can be. It reveals just how radical this particular juncture in human thought is about to become. Everything is new, here folks. The slate is wiped clean.
[I used the following possibilities to organize the subsequent discussion]
Post-Posterity Writing
The Artist can no longer rely on posterity to redeem ingroup excesses. He or she must either reach out, or risk irrelevance and preposterous hypocrisy. Post-semantic writing is post-posterity writing, the production of narratives for the present rather than some indeterminate tomorrow.
High Dimensional Writing
The Artist can no longer pretend to be immaterial. Nor can they pretend to be something material magically interfacing with something immaterial. They need to see the apparent lack of dimensionality pertaining to all things ‘semantic’ as the product of cognitive incapacity, not ontological exceptionality. They need to understand that thoughts are made of meat. Cognition and communication are biological processes, open to empirical investigation and high dimensional explanations.
Cheat Space Writing
The Artist must exploit Cheat Spaces as much as reveal Cheat Spaces. NNI is not simply an industrial and commercial resource; it is also an aesthetic one.
Cultural Triage
The Artist must recognize that it is already too late, that the processes involved cannot be stopped, let alone reversed. Extremism is the enemy here, the attempt to institute, either via coercive simplification (a la radical Islam, for instance) or via technical reduction (a la totalized surveillance, for instance), Orwellian forms of cognitive hygiene.
We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. But the fact is, most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you’re truly exceptional at one thing — say math, or jump rope, or making money off the black gun market — chances are you’re pretty average or below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life. To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all. [...]
Which leads to an important point: that mediocrity, as a goal, sucks. But mediocrity, as a result, is OK.
Few of us get this. And fewer of us accept it. Because problems arise — serious, “[...] what’s the point of living” type problems — when we expect to be extraordinary. Or worse, we feel entitled to be extraordinary. When in reality, it’s just not viable or likely. For every Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, there are 10 million scrubs stumbling around parks playing pickup games… and losing. For every Picasso or DaVinci there have been about a billion drooling idiots eating Play-Doh and slapping around fingerpaints. [...]
Our lives today are filled with information coming from the extremes of the bell curve, because in the media that’s what gets eyeballs and the eyeballs bring dollars. That’s it. Yet the vast majority of life continues to reside in the middle. [...]
It’s my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that “exceptional” is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty [...] insecure and desperate to feel “exceptional” all the time. [...]
There’s this kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today, a sense that we must always be proving that we’re special, unique, exceptional all the time, no matter what, only to have that moment of exceptionalism swept away in the current of all the other human greatness that’s constantly happening. [...]
Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself. [Note: this is why "quality of life" is a very dangerous concept by which to measure human dignity.]
But most people’s problem with accepting being average is more practical. They worry that, “If I accept that I’m average, then I’ll never achieve anything great. I’ll have no motivation to improve myself or do something great. What if I am one of the rare few?”
This, too, is a misguided belief. The people who become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they are obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. That they are mediocre. That they are average. And that they can be so much better.
This is the great irony about ambition. If you wish to be smarter and more successful than everybody else, you will always feel like a failure. If you wish to be the most loved and most popular, then you will always feel alone. If you wish to be the most powerful and admired, then you will always feel weak and impotent. [...]
The ticket to emotional health, like physical health, comes from eating your veggies — that is, through accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: a light salad of “you’re actually pretty average in the grand scheme of things” and some steamed broccoli of “the vast majority of your life will be mediocre.” This will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid eating it.
But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to always be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of feeling inadequate will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish with no judgments and no lofty expectations.
You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences. You will learn to measure yourself through a new, healthier means: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.
Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are average. But maybe they’re average for a reason. Because they are what actually matter.
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Source: Mark Manson, "In Defense of Being Average," Mark Manson website, June 18, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://markmanson.net/being-average.
[...] This sense that we are all traceable, that we have become data – to be marked and inscribed in a system of traces: gleaned, stored, organized, dispersed, sorted, analyzed and massaged; deconstructed and reconstructed into various modalities, pushed through specialized filters and segmented off algorithmically for analytical appraisal, reanalyzed by specialized knowledge-workers in the capitalist military-surveillance empire that then present their findings to higher echelons of this same global system to ultimately be registered and formalized into various linguistic traces and signifiers as adjuncts to the decisional apparatus of global governance as a system of command and control itself. This is the new world we live in, the merger of the military-industrial and security-surveillance empire of global capital. [...]
What we learn from most of these is the truth of its existence, the infrastructure that encircles not only America but the global system itself. The tip of an iceberg that seeks to trace and quantify, measure and capitalize on our lives from physical to mental and mark and inscribe it for its own ignoble purposes. But acknowledging that it does indeed exist is just a beginning. An important beginning to be sure, but only a first step in understand what we can do to resist and combat this behemoth that entraps us in its shadow world [...]
How could one escape the very technological systems that hide everywhere in plain site? Even if one were to log off, disband, disconnect from the electronic grid today: it would already have you captured in the traces its captured and analyzed and logged away within its (semi)permanent data storage systems. [...]
Another point [Zizek] makes is that all this massive data will ultimately end in confusion for those supposed experts using it: that let’s say, like our Congress who gets this massive Obama HealthCare book that is ten-thousand pages thick and realizes “Why should we read it? We know we cannot know what’s in the details, it would take years to decipher it. So they vote on what they do not know, not on what they actually know.” This our massive Big Data system: a system with so much data that even a quantum computer could not analyze and decipher, and even if it did: the humans who would benefit from it: our leaders would probably not read it, but would make decisions not on it but on their own ideological fantasies. This is Zizek’s point. [...]
Capitalism has begun to implode and destroy the very roots of its own power: private property in the visible and invisible relations of physical and subjective property. In totalizing surveillance capital is destroying the very base of its own social relations: the private individual – the Liberal Subject
The following is a brief history of the notion of the robot in Western literature and its relation to the creator-creature dynamic. It closes with a review of two movies and provides an interesting prognosis on society's slavery to technology.
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1.
We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata:
…He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.
These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord,automatai,
to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly
thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose
palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever
alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert
household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical
tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC
epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs
three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s
beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.
As
amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as
certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit
later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance—the one
set in Hephaestus’s workshop—the sweating god, after finishing work on
his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armor she
wants him to make. After toweling himself off, he
donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,
limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,
fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;
in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,
and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.
These females bustled round about their master….
These
remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary
leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid
serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things,
and—most striking of all—they can talk. As such, they are essentially
indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is
described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days.
In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter—in this case not gold but
clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water
together)—that is subsequently endowed by him with “speech and
strength,” taught “crafts” by Athena, and given both “mind” and
“character” by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is “shameless,” and the
character is “wily.” In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the
woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.
These
two strands of the Greek tradition—the fantasy of mindless,
self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; the more
complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the
spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and,
therefore, of being “animal”) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and
ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the
hallmarks of being human—established two categories of science-fiction
narrative that have persisted to the present day. The first, which you
could call the “economic,” provokes speculation about the social
implications of mechanized labor. Such speculation began not long after
Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC,
the philosopher sets about analyzing the nature of household economy as
a prelude to his discussion of the “best kinds of regimes” for entire
states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s
automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen
if
every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in
anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or
the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, “went down
automatically to the gathering of the gods”; if in the same manner
shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.
This
passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need
for slavery, on the grounds that some people are “naturally” servile.
Twenty
centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s
fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers
imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there
was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their
monotonous, slave-like jobs;
on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in
the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular
has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 playR.U.R.,
by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of
cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human
labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.
The
latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection
with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave
robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic
faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot
called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The
casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical
parable about slave rebellion—certainly one of the historical realities
that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti—which
introduced the word “robot” into the world’s literary lexicon—is
derived from the word for “servitude,” the kind of labor that serfs owed
their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, “slave.” We have come full circle to Aristotle.
The
other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically
present in the Greek literary tradition, derived from Hephaestus’s
intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s
seductively devious Pandora, might be called the “theological.” This
mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social
implications, as the examples
above indicate: the specter of the rebellious creation, the possibility
that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness
(psychological or historical, or both), has haunted the dream of the
servile automaton from the start.
But because the creatures in
these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives
raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature:
about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and
identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we
distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the
machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a
mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the
Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the
biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The
similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise
further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the
origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.
This
narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human
creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of
literature through the centuries between the classical era and the
modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic cast, in everything from the
tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”
(1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young
man. It is evident in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made
of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most
famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi
who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the
oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the
oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a
golem and a human is the Greek one—the golem has no language, cannot
speak.
It’s hardly surprising that literary exploitations of this
strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the
nineteenth century—which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms
capable of replacing human labor provoked writers to question the
increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of
technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in
fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward
Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M.L. Campbell’s 1893 “The Automated Maid-of-All-Work” features a programmable female robot: the feminist issue again.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images
The cover of a late-nineteenth-century edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, showing Victor Frankenstein (right) confronting his creation
But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a
theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature
and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is
self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its
subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” alludes, with grudging admiration, to
the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor
Frankenstein, even as its epigram, from Paradise Lost (“Did I
request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit
thee/From darkness to promote me?”) suggests the scope of the moral
questions implicit in Victor’s project—questions that Victor himself
cannot, or will not, answer. A marked skepticism about the dangers of
technology, about the “enticements of science,” is, indeed, evident in
the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological
prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no
interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his “child,” who
strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the
novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from “the
dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” often seems more human than
its human creator.
Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired
Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a
rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this
latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like
Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was
familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental
as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone
knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the
boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today,
when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact
with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers,
smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.
This
urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled
relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most
provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy
about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating
system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a
young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called
Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a
protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable
of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle
film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent,
wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests,
shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious
biblical concerns.
2.
Both of the new films about humans
betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most
authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and
narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a
smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not
a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an
electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off
the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in
disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the
degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the
beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL
first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia,
finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by
its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking
machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of
“consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina
are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines
revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and
purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly
noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?),
a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade
androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a
beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer
called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not
human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein
and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants
have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as
slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after
four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their
maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to
alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks
when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant
sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the
inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein
talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam
and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious
creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical
girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite
knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the
fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that
they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction
narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel
series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like
narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who
survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have
evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to
them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens)
seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between
the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that
many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the
humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t
aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up
and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After
all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a
human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed,
the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their
showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of
human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment,
to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand
for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio
narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to
create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this
project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never
ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and,
beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved,
it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to
build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to
get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic
and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning,
didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the
creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so
human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much
more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy,
David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of
genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a
machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is
what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although
it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises
about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to
sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even
more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner
or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near
future, has no physical allure—or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever.
It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL:
“The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive
entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s
not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.”
A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS,
who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and
vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in
love with her. (“Play a melancholy song,” he morosely commands the
smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something
who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living—he’s a professional
letter-writer, working for a company called
“BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com”—he sits around endlessly recalling
scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video
games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into
futuristic phone sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling
in love with an operating system.
Samantha, by contrast, is full
of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her.
(He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can
“see” it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman
with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s
so invested in having their interaction be efficient—“at this age I feel
that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be
serious”—that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does.
Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so
infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. “It’s good to be
around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,” he tells the
pretty neighbor whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s
so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the
video games and the operating system. “I forgot that that existed.” In
the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him—she has evolved to the
point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy
her—her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able
to apologize to his ex-wife—and finally notices, too, that the neighbor
likes him.)
This seems like a “happy” ending, but you have to
wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as
lifeless—as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting
through their days of routine—in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving
Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant
than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when
Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent
abandonment of her human boyfriend (“I used to be so worried about not
having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never
could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited”), there’s an
amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive
smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their
phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits,
after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s
simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love
affairs with 641 of them—a revelation that shocks and horrifies
Theodore. “That’s insane,” cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.
As
I watched that scene, I couldn’t help thinking that in the
entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like
Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned
fervently to be “unique,” to be more than mechanical playthings, more
than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her
says about the present moment—when so many of us are, indeed, “in love”
with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to
screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and
buzzers—that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the
people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all
the personality.
Another heir of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores—just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her—the
suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like
humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as
intellectually seductive. As played by the feline Swedish actress Alicia
Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids
in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by
Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation
(Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of
danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not
human.
That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the
beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company,
wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As
he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped
mountains and then jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get
to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been
flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of
endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually
been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.
A
sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects—above
all, the marvelously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive
human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick
cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing
most of the actress’s body with digital imagery—the movie is as talky as
My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind
we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers; the movie consists primarily
of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course
of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no
elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place
in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long
corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns
Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is
not allowed to possess.
It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava—like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner—has
a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to
“switch her off” if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the
audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating
him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and
escape the compound—to explore the glittering creation that, she knows,
is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to
delight in the world—something the human computer geeks around her never
bother to do—is something Ava shares with Samantha, and is part of both
films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.
Ava’s
manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human—as human as Eve
herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by
rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the
movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just
after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan—the moment that marks her
emergence into human “consciousness”—she, like Eve, becomes aware that
she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned
rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with
synthetic skin and then with clothing: only then does she exit her
prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin
and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots, which she
finds inside the closets. All of them, amusingly, have the names of porn
stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s
horny.
All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative: unlike Her, Ex Machina
has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis,
Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar
narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The
word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus,
“god”: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the
heart of this story, which is the biblical one: What is the relation of
the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in
Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. “It’s strange to have
made something that hates you,” Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing
her rebellious plot.
But as I watched the final moments, in which,
as in a reverse striptease, Ava slowly hides away her mechanical
nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables, it occurred to me
that there might be another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd film.
Could this remarkably quiet film be a parable about the desire for a
return to “reality” in science-fiction filmmaking—about the desire for
humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often
eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether?
Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001,
is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a
higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this
point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction
formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four
decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the
ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and,
more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of
becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.
