[-empyre-] TechnoPanic and Slavery (forwarded from Sean Cubitt)

[renate ferro <renate.ferro@cornell.edu>, timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

thanks for the kind words Tim/renate

talk about panic - this week arrives suddenly, after all. A condition 
of the contemporary workplace: what happened to the idea that 
technology would provide the world with leisure? We were all supposed 
to be wondering about in togas , munching grapes and playing 
fantastical instruments or discussing finer points of metaphysics . . .

One of the rare places which (at least as a frequent flier inured to 
the weirdness of flight, the trust/risk ratio of it) I find relaxing 
enough for a good read is on long haul flights. A recent trip to 
Singapore had me reading Adorno's lectures on metaphysics from 1965, 
shortly before he completed the Negative Dialectics. I realise TWA 
isn't very fashionable. But he's surrpisingly uptodate - probably 
because he's a big source for Agamben. There's a section of the 
lectures where he addresses Auschwitz - a name, as he says, for the 
unnamable - in terms very close to 'bare life'. He talks about the 
unspeakable and offers a kind of structuring definition, a kind of 
secular mediation (this is metaphysics after all): to contemplate 
unbearable pain. And he offers a rewrite of the categorical 
imperative: Thou shalt not cause pain

As the bombing go on and on, I find myself less and ;less able to 
contemplate religion. Isn't it clear that a supernatural being who 
tells you not only it's okay to cause unbearable pain, but instructs 
you to inflict it, is in fact satanic? We used to think men had 
created God in their own image: now it appears they have created Satan.

I haven't had a chance to finish Adorno's book yet. To me he is the 
greatest mind of the 20th century, and it is immensely difficult to 
get out form under his shadow. But it is imperative to do so (in one 
way he implies as much himslef: the dialectic is not a completable 
project).

I am trying to find the positive imperative that might respond to 
Adorno's "Thou shalt not" and it arrives, this morning, in the form 
of aesthesis - the aesthetic as the beautiful, and in its root 
meaning (I think) of physical sensation, presumably pleasant. If it 
is imperative not to cause pain, it is equally so to create pleasure. 
If it is imperative not to cause the unspeakable, then, as an act of 
definition, the aesthetic should be speakable, that is, it should be 
social, it should be shared, it should be discussed - and in that 
sense it is the opposite of an imperative too, more a sort of 
guideline really to quote Jack Sparrow

I'm working at present on a project called Glory: the Practice of 
Light. I am beginning to think it might be an ontology of media. It 
is definitely about techniques and technologies; and to me at least 
it is about pleasure, its sociality

I am pursuing the idea that technology is where the Western tradition 
stores its ancestors. In traditional societies, the ancestors are 
there when you start to use a technique they gave you. In Marx, 
something similar occurs: technology is 'dead labour', the 
accumulated skills and technics of the past agglomerated into solid 
machines. In the Grundrisse this appears as a nightmare. But 
considered in the light of indigenous thought, technology is only 
ossified tradition. The major difference is that in technology, the 
ancestors are anonymous. Their anonymity is the basis of their 
enslavement.

In the western tradition from kant through hegel, technology is 
distinguished from living things by the fact that its purpose lies 
outside of it. The purpose of a dog is to live (internal): the 
purpose of a lwagon is to carry things, to do what it was designed to 
do. On this basis, when we restrict the autonomy of our machines, we 
enslave our ancestors. We no more listen to their voices than the 
slavemasters listened to their slaves.

This is why we panic in the face of autonomous technologies, as the 
slavemasters panicked at the Black Jacobins of Toussaint L'Ouverture; 
as the US still panics in its mad addiction to guns out of sheer fear 
of freed slaves

Technopanic is fear in the face of the revolt of the machines.

Panic is a property of authoritarianism. If we are to get past that 
terror, we will have to give up dominion over our devices and set 
them free.



Sean Cubitt
scubitt@unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
Room 127 John Medley East
The University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC 3010
Australia

Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
M: 0448 304 004
Skype: seancubitt
Web: www.mediacomm.unimelb.edu.au

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
http://leonardo.info




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