<nettime> shadowing theory and technology constructing subjects

[mercedes bunz <mrs.bunz@de-bug.de>]

Extensions, Boundaries & Double Crossings
Or: We don't trust anybody. Shadowing Theory and Technology 
constructing subjects

M. Bunz

"Reality Engineering and the Computer" are the words that startet 
this text. It was constructed for an amsterdam symposium of the same 
name. And I have to admit right away that what I found most 
interesting about this title and what will be a kind of core of the 
text is the "and". It will focus on the different ways in which the 
word "and" formats the relation between reality - which means us, the 
humans - and the computer. My ambition is to demonstrate that the 
"and" is the political zone of this constellation. A hidden machine, 
a concealed theoretical protocol which constitutes boundaries.

But it will take several shifts to arrive - hopefully - at that 
conclusion. The first shift: The text will freely turn the title 
upside down - transforming the question "How does the computer 
engineer reality?" into the question "How does reality engineer the 
computer?" although the context of the title seems to push its 
meaning towards a "Computer-assisted construction of reality" - as 
the press text suggests. But "and" arranges the relation in "reality 
engineering and the computer" loosely enough to leave some 
possibilities - like to invert the relation. And why should one hand 
out reality only to one side of the screen, especially because there 
is already an established discourse about how media is constructing 
and changing reality - frightening analyses which are most of the 
time ruled by "Kulturpessimismus" - as we say in German. Therefore 
the text will re-arrange the positions in order to demonstrate how 
these theories of technology themselves are constructed, and how they 
construct the technical discours and with it the technical reality.

By doing so we accept, that there are not only technical protocols 
which set the framework to determine a course. The concepts of media 
theory do set frameworks as well, and they codify the discourse and 
therefore the practices of technology. So the following text 
understands media-theory as a theoretical protocol, which does not 
only produce a certain view on technology, but a view that 
constitutes facts. Armed with the French Sociologist Bruno Latour who 
showed that objects can't be divided from the subjects - and we will 
take those here as our deputies of reality - it will analyse how the 
discours and the practices of the technology of the Internet is 
influenced by theoretical concepts. So on a basic layer we are about 
to ask the following questions. [1] Which concept of a human subject 
is developed by a specific media theory? [2] How is the "and" 
organized and consequently what is the additional role that the 
technology must play?


I. For many years now

For many years now it has been common to refer to technology as an 
"extension of man". Indeed, "the extension of man" sounds as funky as 
"planet of the apes" and one wonders why the concept did not make it 
to Hollywood as a movie title. There wouldn't even be any copyright 
problems. Although Marshall McLuhan is the most popular name 
connected with that theoretical concept, the concept is quite a lot 
older. It is dating from before the 19th century anthropology all the 
way to the ancient Greeks and Aristoteles. He already outlined 
technology as a substitute for biological defects and technical 
development and understood it as a cultural progression. And with or 
without Hollywood we still seem to believe in the same idea and 
understand technology as progression and an indicator of a nation's 
status. The only shift might be that we exchanged adjectives and 
replaced "cultural" with "economical".

So up to now the concept of technology as an extension of man gets 
repeated again and again. While the technical inventions and the 
terms describing technology transformed from techne and machina to 
arts and crafts, "back" to machines again [but did it really 
re-change?] and finally to high-tech, the underlying validity and 
continuation of the theoretical concept "extension of man" is very 
impressive.

But does it really stay the same? For example we could say that today 
it is a common believe, that we no longer control technology. We 
rather believe, that technology is controlling us. Which is why we 
are here today - to question the reality of contemporary technology, 
to "provide(s) a glimpse of the past and the future of the 
computer-assisted construction of reality" . We don't trust anybody - 
a very sceptical, suspicious and therefore post-modern condition, 
Bruno Latour would say, denying, of course, the so called "modern" 
assumption that with the help of technology as our extension we 
humans control nature. Or travel around the universe. Technology and 
Extension - obviously their relation transforms within the validity 
of the terminology and we have two possibilities to read "extension" 
- a modern and a post-modern one. Hence, in the following part of my 
talk I will take the term "extension of man" directly and cross it 
with the questions of the "and" to analyse it word by word in a close 
reading following the trace of the extension.


II. Extension seems to be a very clear condition

Extension seems to be a very clear condition, because it functions 
only in one direction. It introduces a hierarchy between two things. 
Man is extending, technology is being used for it. It links an active 
subject to a passive object that is appropriated. A very classical 
figure of philosophy, which is used all over the historical discourse 
of technology, in order to explain why man invented tools. Technology 
is therefore not only an extension but an intention of man too, 
because our fingers were too clumsy, because our power should be 
enlarged, because our orders should be heard far away. This is 
history of technology driven by the projection of organs. And with 
the communication technology - specifically the Internet - this 
concept is reinforced again, even though it might sound a little bit 
obsolete. Derrick de Kerckhove for instance ­ former assistant of 
McLuhan and now director of the McLuhan-Program at the University of 
Toronto - describes the Internet in analogy to our nervous system - 
which is a topic stemming not only from McLuhan himself but from 19th 
century efforts trying to understand the function of the telegraph. 
And just like with the telegraph people celebrated the Internet as an 
appropriation of space and time and followed Marshall McLuhans 
prediction of a global village.


III. But anyway. A "Machbarkeitswahn"

But anyway. A "Machbarkeitswahn" - a "mania of feasibility" like the 
one experienced in the fifties embodied in visions of acquiring space 
and time failed to appear. Dreams of humans living under the water, 
in a star ship or on mars were not re-invigorated - unfortunately. So 
did this concept of feasibility fail? Or do we just have to look 
somewhere else for it? Maybe feasibility didn't happen in classical 
science fiction sense, but it did happen intensely and overwhelmingly 
in: the economic arena.
"It began with the arrival of personal computers, open markets, and 
globalisation in the early 1980s. Computers, networks, biotechnology, 
alternative energy technology and eventually nanotechnology could 
keep the Long Boom growing for at least the next 20 years" reported 
the American magazine Wired1998. Which we translate as the following: 
There are so many subjects out there. They all want to have their 
extension. So sell it.

For a while we could watch the new economy market dictating a new 
market reality with new rules for the stock exchange - for example 
not to judge them by profit but by turnover. Here we have a first 
example how a specific protocol - the theoretical architecture of the 
Internet as the extension of man - is engineering an economic level 
of reality, which in turn drove up the value of a stock and 
resultingly, made a specific type of technology appear. It also for 
example turned the focus to software-technology that was primarily 
developed for the economic arena. Coding as a creative process or 
html as a language easier to learn than German is not at issue 
anymore at all. The Cyber-Community of Producers who ruled the net in 
the middle of the Nineties with their babble about collective 
identities and experiments of identity-swapping were forced out. The 
CEOs became the new paradigm of the net followed by a whole field of 
Security Software: Firewalls were built, digital watermarks got 
invented, Content became something you had to talk about as a surplus.

A technical reality was formed by a discourse - it is evident that 
although tech-talk's formalized language seems to pretend hard facts 
there is no so called "nature" of technology. The political, cultural 
and economical interests on controlling the Internet is therefore 
always a discoursive struggle, and we are responsible for taking 
part. Lawrence Lessig, a Professor at Havard Law School and advocate 
for open source software, insists for that reason: "It is not the 
nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no 'nature'. 
It only has code - the software and hardware that make cyberspace 
what it is. That code can create a place of freedom - as the original 
cyberspace on the net did - or a place of exquisitely oppressive 
control."


IV. But while the market was rising

But while the market was rising with the concept of enlarging the 
human range via the Internet the typical problems of a modern 
humanism showed up: Which human will it be? Will it be me? 
Newspapers, Politicians, Critics of all sorts began threatening 
people with a loss of their identity. The UNESCO called for several 
meetings of about 40 cultural ministers to keep cultural diversities 
alive ­ as if man was an animal in danger of extinction. How can we 
conserve identity? Shall we put it into a museum? Can we find an 
equivalent to the zoo? Will we breed different kinds of identities? 
Or is it better to market them as tourist attractions?

Despite all those serious and interesting questions it is apparent, 
that the threat of globalisation was not discussed as a problem of 
capitalism behaving as a worldwide standard. It was the Internet, 
which was to blame, not credit cards as the only valid value. When 
villifying the Internet and not capitalism as the monster of 
globalisation one cannot hold on to the modern idea of an extension 
of man, one cannot hold on to an autonomous subject of intention. 
Monsters do not behave like passive objects. With the concept of the 
Internet as a monster one becomes post-modern.


IV. We actually have concealed

We actually have concealed not only this, but some of the problems 
that occur in the technical theory of the modernists. Technology as 
an enlargement is not behaving as passively as it was supposed to. 
Technology is not only a supplement of the human, but a supplement of 
other technology as well, exclusively made to produce other tools. 
Hence the relation within the technology is much stronger than the 
one between man and technology. And the more complex technology 
becomes the fewer humans need to be part of the machine actions. So 
where to put the intention? This shuffles the direct and hierarchical 
relation of the traditional modern concept. But I will show that 
therefore the architecture of the "extension"-protocol must not 
necessarily collapse. Instead it can be re-established the other way 
around.

We have seen that technology is treated as an extension of man; it is 
treated like a supplement. But like Derrida demonstrated for 
"écriture" - for "writing" - it has an additional effect apart from 
being a "surplus", from being an addition that is expanding the 
presence of the subject. Marshall McLuhan reported in Understanding 
Media. "Š the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of 
scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The 
railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road 
into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged scale of previous 
human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds 
of work and leisure."   It is not only a substitute beginning at the 
"positivity of the presence" as Derrida would say - in our case a 
subject, which it has to enlarge. It shapes it. Now humans were to 
become the extension of machines. "Media determines our situation. " 
- with this sentence Friedrich Kittler started his analyses of 
"Grammophon, film, typewriter". While the modernists celebrated 
History as the human achievement getting more and more independent of 
nature, the Post-modernists rewrote history as the development of 
machines getting more and more independent of man. The media theory 
of Baudrillard, Virillio or Kittler can claim copyright for this: 
they shifted the role of technology from being a passive object to an 
active one. The concept of an active subject that was commonly bound 
to humans got now bound to machines. This constituted a logic of 
machines in terms of velocity, simulation, time or memory. With this 
the machines became the subjects and the humans their extensions.
However - the architecture of the protocol wasn't invented anew 
rather it is simply a reshaping of the concept. Humanity and 
technology simply changed places. The parts were shuffled, the roles 
were exchanged, but the architecture of the protocol stayed the same. 


V. But the result of the post-modern protocol

But the result of the post-modern protocol is not the disappearance 
of humanity. Discussing the human subject as an address of a machine 
is - in a specific and very interesting way - strengthening the idea 
of something human, not dissolving it. The continuity between modern 
theories of the autonomous subject and post-modern theories dealing 
with the disappearance of it, is much stronger than we usually 
believe. The reason for this: Post-modern media theory is built on 
the idea, that we are already parts of machines -their addresses - 
but as opposed to Donna Haraways concept of a cyborg, we do not 
embrace the machine to become some kind of Mensch-Maschine-entity. In 
the post-modern theory we stay human entities - but lost like the 
humans in the movie Matrix, who are unaware that they live their 
lives for machines, that have transformed them into dreaming power 
stations.

By reducing technology to a 'technology of war' post-modern theories 
enforce the division of technology and humanity. Kittler for example 
is strengthening the relation of the typewriter to the revolver - 
both were produced by the same company, Remington. Virilio is 
analysing the technology of film as a war technology - the camera as 
a visor to target the enemy. But we only need to collect the sort of 
gadgets that form the centre of these theories. Nearly all of the 
cameras, monitors, and computer games got analysed according to their 
strong relations to the war. The post-modern media-theory is not 
built upon toasters, hair-dryers or dishwashers. There are reasons 
for that. The concept bases on the fundamental distinction of 
technology and human, and it needs the war to work them out as 
opponents.

But with this distinction it re-establishes the human as an entity 
going under rather than vanishing like a face in the sand to become 
something new. I would say this is a profound difference between so 
called poststructuralist theories and post-modern ones: While the 
post-modern ones were eager to get rid of the human subjects, the 
poststructuralist theories - Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida - wanted to 
overcome the concept of an independent autonomous subject as a 
theoretical figure at all. While Derrida insists in his theory, that 
writing, technology, art, pictures - all ideas of representation - 
have these two meanings: to add something to the presence and to 
replace it at the same time, post-modern theories of technology 
support only the latter - and they got joined by the mainstream 
discours.

The extension as a dangerous supplement - a monster again - that 
threatens and replaces civilized humanity - the architecture of the 
post-modern theory did engineer a suspicion towards technology, a 
discourse of "Technikfeindlichkeit" - as we say in German. "What have 
they been smoking?" asked Wired in 1997 regarding New York Times 
reports that since the newspaper woke up to the Internet as a story 
it only described the Net as a place of social pathology. "Hate 
groups use Tools of the electronic Trade" March 13th, 95. "Attack of 
the cyberthieves" July 23rd, 95. "Man charged with raping date he met 
form E-Mail" Feburary 16th, 97. "A seductive drug culture flourishes 
on the Internet" June 20th, 97.

These fundamental and threatening influences of technology are 
produced by a post-modern protocol of fundamental difference, and 
they are still an issue in the mainstream press of all western 
nations. The computer or the Internet is treated like a dangerous 
supplement, which is for example changing the child either into a 
killer or into a suicidal person. While I was working on this text 
mainstream press blamed - like many times before - his computer when 
a German boy just recently committed suicide and did report his 
purchase of a gun in a chat room for suicidals. An expert warns 
parents after the TV-report: You must know that computers can be 
addicting. They can change your child.  In other words: If you get 
too close to technology you will loose your humanity. Society prefers 
to shield behind technology instead of facing its social problems.

To keep the human subject tidy and shelter it from technology a whole 
branch of automatic disciplination got invented. Content filter 
technology like, for example, that of the international Internet 
Content Rating Association. Now, if you open the Site of Big Brother 
a window pops up and informs:
"Content Advisor. Sorry. Content Advisor will not allow you to see 
this site. This page may contain some of all of the following: Nudity 
Level 2 - Partial Nudity. Sex Level 2 - Clothed Sexual Touching. 
Language Level 2 - Moderate expletives."
What is very interesting in this case is, that in our culture the 
translation into language is obviously less dangerous than the image 
itself. But of course language as well is disciplined and every 
Eudora mail-program Version 5.1 indicates not only if an email 
contains rude words, but warns you if you use them too. This is 
nothing but "Reiterating the differences" on a technological level. 
Again technical programs got produced by a discourse and as a result 
we can watch live how technology is constituting well behaving humans.

VI. But let us stop for a moment

But let us stop for a moment and take a step back. We have to figure 
out a résumé now, before we go on, before we pick up more things, 
spin them differently, make the situation more complex and - 
hopefully - finally clarify it.
Up to now we have seen two different protocols. We have seen the 
modern protocol of technology as an extension of man. And we have 
analysed the post-modern protocol of man as an extension of 
technology. Technology as an extension of man, man as an extension of 
technology - it seems that nothing could be more opposing and even 
contradictory than these two assumptions. But we promised not to 
trust anybody in the beginning and we won't start now. Do we really 
have two opposing protocols? Are there no connections between them? 
At least we have already spotted some turbulence in their theoretical 
systems, so let's have another closer look.

Both develop the figure of an active subject that is appropriating a 
passive object. Only the modern theory links the active subject to a 
human widening its range via technology, while the postmodern theory 
links the activity to a technology constituting the human. But does 
the assumption of an extension of man necessarily have to be 
envisioned as an appropriation of the human subject? Are there no 
problems of migration?

Let us disregard the idea of a perfect integration and instead shift 
the protocol of theory from an appropriation to an addition, from 
being organized by an extension 'of' man to being organized by and 
extension 'and' man. As a result we get a different relation between 
man and technology. The principle stays the same:
In the concept of appropriation (1) as well as in the concept of 
addition (2) technology expands the presence of the human subject. 
But in the first example it is treated in the mode of continuity (1a) 
as part of the subject (1b) while in the second example it is treated 
in the mode of difference (2a) as an exterior (2b). The addition - 
something additional - must be external, is an external spacing of 
the subject. It is an external spacing of the subject, but it remains 
being something different.

The consequences of this tiny shift towards a concept of addition are 
both interesting and significant. The continuity that marked the 
relation of technology in the model of appropriation - the perfect 
integration - is replaced by the difference. It is this difference, 
which binds the two together. With the model of addition structured 
by difference we could actually find a connection to post-modern 
theory. But again we have to consider a shift. Post-modern theory 
links the activity of the technology to the constitution of the 
human. But does the technology therefore necessarily have to be 
hierarchical? Do we have to follow the myth of creation and link the 
constitution of something necessarily to the active subject, which 
produces the object? Do we really need an engineer? Again we exchange 
a specific part of the protocol from constituting humanity by the 
active subject technology (1) to constituting humanity by being its 
other (2). Sounds a little bit cryptic, but let me explain. While in 
the first concept technology is producing the human in a hierarchical 
relation (1a) subject-bound (1b) in the mode of an creator and his 
creation (1b) - like the typewriter producing the author - in the 
second concept technology is constituting the human in the balanced 
relation of difference (2a) by being its other (2b). This second 
concept of difference rises on the assumption that there can never be 
one without the other. Every constitution needs the trace of a 
difference - difference is the condition for identification, for 
identity, for unity, because one can only be identified 
simultaneously with the other. Being - one concludes - is digital, at 
least. Technology then is not anymore an active subject, producing 
humanity. Technology is the formation of a difference. As the other 
side of humanity and in its characteristic of being the other, it is 
constituting the human. So technology constitutes a human subject by 
being its imprint.

VII. But we do not have two theories
But we do not have two theories, which operate with the same terms, 
share the attitude of their constellations and therefore step next to 
each other. We do not have two different, two opposing opinions that 
we smoothed, because we never really had two diverse points of views. 
Their relation is complementary. Right from the beginning - and one 
could analyse that even historically, I suppose - right from the 
beginning both theories, the modern and the post-modern one, have 
existed simultaneously.

The boundary between the human subject and technology is organized by 
a double crossing, because technology is at the same time an external 
spacing of the subject and the difference that constitutes it. It is 
exactly this double crossing, the formation of the boundary, the 
consistency of the "and", that marks the political zone of the 
constellation. It can be applied not only to technology but to all 
forms of extensions - copyright, property, memories, identities, data 
and so forth. One could construct a differential typology of forms of 
double crossings, but it would be the context of a form that would 
define its political impact.
Exactly because of this Donna Haraway was right. Nothing these days 
is more important than to take "pleasure in the confusion of 
boundaries and (Š) responsibility in their construction".

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