<nettime> Wolfgang Schirmacher: Cloning Humans With Media

["Wolfgang Schirmacher" <W.Schirmacher@worldnet.att.net>]

January 2000

Thanks to everybody who participated in the discussion of my talk “Media
Aesthetics in Europe” and proved that THINK MEDIA is a program which,
properly understood, will never be outdated.  There is always a need for
questioning, for considering different angles and for pushing for bold
ideas. In my view, thinking is not merely philosophizing and certainly not
theoreticizing, but a creative as well as critical approach to life
utilizing many languages.  I’ve especially enjoyed Monique’s remarks about
the philosophical super-women - some of them I’ve already invited to work
with us, others are being seriously considered for Saas-Fee where Donna
Haraway and Avital Ronell are going to teach this summer. And I am more in
agreement with Sean than he may like: The ZWISCHEN (in-between) is crucial
to my phenomenological truth.  That is to say: The poles are abstract and
there are no senders and receivers since the event (timing) is the temporary
activity (Wirklichkeit).  Therefore, instantaneous and unmediated
communication is not pre-discursive or post-discursive - that’s just a
biased way to describe one of our most common experiences.  Also, it has
nothing to do with all the other dualisms (such as subjective-objective),
and DIFFFERENCE is - as Heidegger noted - the way identity validates itself.
Sean (and Umberto Eco) totally underestimate the spell of metaphysical
language and try to “fix” in language structures what is basically a
question of living. “Get a life before you get a theory”, I used to tell my
students in New York, but what I really feel as a philosopher is “never ever
get a theory at all” - not even a weak one a la Vattimo.  So my theoretical
texts are just arbitrary reports from a life lived!


Anyway, let me post another of my (unpublished) lectures concerning media
which I delivered in Paris, nearly two years ago, at a conference organized
by the University of Paris in June of 1998.  This historical moment can be
pinpointed as easily as my first! The disenchantment with Lady Di and the
embarrassment people felt about their emotional reaction a year later,
should be noted but will not change my analysis. Still, it is draft and
criticism is welcome.

Wolfgang Schirmacher (European Graduate School www.egs.edu)


CLONING HUMANS WITH MEDIA


1. The Postmodern Condition: Cloning-in-the-world

This time humanity really did it.  In more ways than one can imagine, Being
became cloning in the postmodern world.  But the meaning of cloning has
little to do with the scientific-technological act.  Dolly, the sheep from
Scotland, radically changed what it means to be a human being, and in this
respect is a personality of world historical impact.  The public reaction to
Dolly was widespread fear. Calling it blasphemy and a fall from grace or a
stupid contribution to overpopulation, are judgments based on basic
perceptions about human life and our final destiny.  Therefore, Dolly became
a case study for the postmodern condition: we happily jumped to conclusions,
and "anything goes" was not a concept but the only strategy we all had in
common.  To be sure, "anything goes" is not advice you give other people but
is the analysis of our own theory and practice, firmly rooted in personal
convictions.  Such pluralism can only be misunderstood in terms of
relativism or skepticism because sometimes a person will fight to the end
for the chosen language game.  The crucial move is choice –  serious and
playful alike – and, therefore, universal acceptance is out of  reach: only
numbers, approval rates, high ratings prove to be realistic.  Most people
chose to reject the idea of cloning, and laws against cloning humans were
hastily discussed in the US and in Europe.

Like the passengers of the TITANIC, nobody noticed that Dolly was merely the
tip of the iceberg.   The more imminent challenge to humanity as we know it
came from a life technique which has taken over the public and also our
private life.  This most successful technique to shape human life has many
names but just one core: It is called information technology, communication,
media or internet, and its core activity is cloning humans.  Cultural
critics from Postman to Virilio have attacked the media as an invitation to
be irresponsible, and much has been written about the role model function of
media stars.  A few philosophers took issue with our emphasis on information
as the new commodity stressing the difference between information based on
facts or fiction, and messages which actually mean something to somebody.
It was observed that even the internet,  the new frontier of communication,
has a bias towards a status quo, the given condition of the world: its most
prominent feature is e-mail, a hybrid of oral and written communication
which has done little to change the writers.  Yet critics and defenders
alike gave credit to the mass media for being a possible tool for the
betterment of humanity and a medium of global change.   For McLuhan and his
followers hardware is the real news!   But since the death of Lady Di
McLuhan has had to eat his own words: the global village showed itself as an
ethical world beyond the petty distinction between hardware and software.
The Soul was revealed for a long day of mourning and billions of people
celebrated a cloning-of-the-world media was able to achieve.

Lady Di, the princess of the people, did in her death for media what Dolly,
the Scottish lamb, did with her birth for biogenetics.  Both life techniques
which made us human-only-human are foremost cloning techniques.  What the
public rejected in the case of Dolly was emphatically embraced in the case
of Diana.  The postmodern condition easily allowed for this split in
perception and would explain it as the irony of two contradicting language
games which both happen to be true.  But aren't we sick and tired by now of
this playful attitude, so easy to perform?   The postmodern dandy has become
a bore who may still be right in his criticism but is such a pain to be
with.  A media-generated perceptual change may bring back ethics and it
confronts us with a postmodern decision after we stopped enjoying the
postmodern condition.  This decision has the distinct flavor of an ethical
judgment always concerned with a good life we will never know but live on
our best days.   Ethical worlds which let us live at home are by necessity
imperceptible, and their awareness needs concealing.  By cloning with media
the many ways in which a human being exists, we are also protecting the
virtuality of humanity, our principally undefined status, the not-yet as
well as the never.



2. The Postmodern Decision: Cloning Humans

"Just gaming", was Lyotard's ambiguous answer referring to the double
meaning of "just": to take life lightly and at the same time insist on
justice for the working of language games.   In this respect, the postmodern
decision is about becoming a player rather than a spectator in the activity
of cloning humans in order to allow for a good life.  When the global media
merged Lady Di and Mother Theresa after death, an ultimate clone was born:
Mother Di.   In this clone everybody found him- or herself reborn,  an
anthropological twist Schopenhauer once anticipated.   At the core of
Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion  is a strange recognition which may
happen anytime and against our will: The sudden insight in front of a
suffering person "This is you" (tat tvam asi) not only breaks down the
protective barrier of my being an individual but is an ethical judgment
about the condition of life.  According to Schopenhauer, in suffering, not
in happiness, are all living creatures one being, and all the others in a
very strict sense our clones.   The postmodern decision as judgment  does
not identify or conceptualize the acts of cloning since it continues to
favor difference and to resist integration and truth.   The lessons we
learned from Levinas, Lyotard, Derrida or Bataille are still valid.
Interruption, hesitation, postponement, violence: as postmodern preparations
for a different way of acting, these have not yet lost their touch.  The
folding, unfolding and refolding  - as Deleuze described our
Being-for-the-world  - will not recapture identity or Being or time as means
to make our lifeworld  more accessible and an easier place.  Therefore,
Mother Di does not function as an icon and is not a lifestyle commercial
which allows instant identification.  Instead,  Mother Di follows the
complexities of truth which Heidegger determined as aletheia, a timeless
interplay of revealing and concealing.

Like Dolly, Mother Di reveals the perceptual implications of our ethics and
gives humanity a different name: homo generator.  Determined by a
self-generating activity, we have to reformulate what it means to be human:
mortality as well as natality are called into question again.  With openness
as our existential taste and co-evolutionary power as our design, homo
generator favors eternal revisions and safeguards the freedom of creation.
What we clone is exactly this attitude of open generating and never a mere
copy of anything (we leave that to primitive machines).  Therefore, a
biological copy of Mozart will never re-create the composer, and the media
clone Mother Di has as many faces as people who feel themselves cloned by
it.  It is worth noting that Lady Di and Mother Theresa formed their
identities mainly through hardship and not by their successes.   In the case
of Mother Theresa, a certain contender for sainthood, it was the suffering
of others which made her famous.  In dedicating her life to the untouchables
on the far side of the world and helping to ease an existence often worse
than death,  Mother Theresa served as a powerful reminder of our mortality.
Lady Di was an ordinary person, a kindergarden teacher sentenced by birth to
become a princess one day, who learned to wear her scars in public, and
proudly.  Hunted to death by paparazzis with whom she had a symbiotic
relationship, Lady Di emerged as the bulimic princess scarred by a bad
marriage and became the queen of the media confession scene.  Without
intending so, Lady Di impersonated the true postmodern heroine by blurring
the borderlines between high and low, serious and playful, fact and fiction.
A point in favor: Clint Eastwood was her most beloved actor.  Like Madonna,
the notorious champion of media natality, Lady Di regenerated herself
through and within media, using them skillfully.  In the ultimate clone
Mother Di, people experienced the fusion of mortality and natality as a
celebration of self-generated wholeness.  Fact and meaning together became
our responsibility alone, a postmodern decision on an everyday level.
Traditional hierarchies such as the British Royals or the Catholic Church
were pushed aside by the global event of postmodern cloning which cancelled
any other claim to these personalities.

But we don't need to turn to Mother Di in order to appreciate how media
clones humanity on a daily basis.  Talkshows and chat rooms provide a media
group therapy which lets even the weirdest people feel like everyone else:
This is you – under different circumstances.  Soap operas, sitcoms and
cartoons have lost their distance to real life, and the members of fictional
humanity become our Virtual Family.    The characters of "Melrose Place"
teach us more about life than our own brothers and sisters, and the recent
finale of the sitcom "Seinfeld" resulted in a higher rating than any real
life event including sports.  Bugs Bunny was never meant to leave Toonland
but Roger Rabbit  already had to, and today Bart Simpson is as real as
Beavis & Butthead for kids and adults alike – just a different body outfit.


3. Concealing Humanity: Media's Secret Task

The postmodern decision of cloning humans reveals homo generator – but it
also conceals something.  What is hidden from us are the ethical worlds we
belong to.  By cloning freely with media and designing a lifeworld in
between natality and mortality, we pay no attention to the artificial life
which always has been (and always will be) generated by humans.  Concealed
from our consciousness, humans live ethically, a good life behind our backs.
Only in feelings, in fascination, satisfaction, joy,  but also in mourning
do we get a hint of ethical worlds never present, never absent.   To be
sure, we'll miss even these subtle hints if we try to find some reasons for
feeling happy or sad: to fix the fulfilled moment is the best way to destroy
it.   It is the time- honored advise of wise men to enjoy life without
knowing why, to live happily without expectations and, last but not least,
to act without believing in the principles of your action.  We call this
relaxed attitude towards life with its simple pleasures our art of living.
It is a widespread practice which needs little theory and is rooted in
judgment and prudence instead of smart concepts.  Cloning humans with media
works very well in distracting our attention from this ethical art of
living, invisible to the censor and beyond good and evil.  In media we
simulate humanity to the point of not recognizing ourselves anymore, and
this life-consuming activity helps us to stay clear of authentic humanity.
All the noise and excitement, the ups and downs of cloned humanity serves
just one purpose: to fulfill the secret task of media in keeping our minds
occupied with the insane things while in the meantime our undisturbed life
techniques generate human sanity – behind our backs but not without our
active trust.

However, it would be totally wrong to assume a God or history or the
evolution of the brain is pushing for a development which benefits humanity
without our participation.  There is nothing like a deus ex machina making
sure we come out alright at the end!  Humans are alone and fully responsible
for artificial life which is the only life for us. This responsibility is
ethical and, therefore, never fulfilled through intentional control. Even if
it cannot be helped that we clone solely openness, cloning humans with media
and biogenetics is to be done in the spirit of control and needs to be
concealed in order to become authentic.  Isn't it surprising that all our
progress has not brought humanity any farther – for all the new discoveries
in science, society, and culture humans are basically unchanged: Love and
hate, generosity and envy, trust and distrust are still the bottom line.
What cloning does with its spectacle is to reveal our fundamental activity
as homo generator and at the same moment to conceal the way the way any
generation makes a home in the ethical worlds of bioscaping, soul, geviert
(balance) and kairos (timing).   It is the signature of truth to erase its
signing right after the fact in order to allow the ongoing folding,
unfolding and refolding to be done in peace.  So we certainly should be
grateful for the cloning done by media but we have to get more experience in
perceiving our imperceptible actions of true humanity.  In ethical life
humanity fulfills itself, of which we are vaguely aware and which we need to
forget at once.  Pushing hard for this forgetting is media's strongest
claim.

Footnotes not included

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net