Widok Media technologies and their people. A posthumanistic view PK XIV/2 2012
8
0
0
Pełen tekst
(2) 2. Aleksandra Kil. was inflicted by Charles Darwin with his evolutionist lineage of Homo sapiens, pointing to humans’ animal origins. Freud himself contributed to the third wound, demonstrating that the id was the instance that could control a human being convinced of his or her rationality and sovereignty. These old wounds still cannot heal, with the most recent, which Haraway calls “informatic” or “cyborgian” becoming really aggravated now. The last blow consisted in combining the organic with the technological, a phenomenon manifested, for example, in the emblematic figure of cyborg. It was a blow to the system of dualisms – nature-culture, human-nonhuman, organicinorganic – and a violation of the discipline of “ontological hygiene”4, maintained by anthropocentrism. It is this part of non-anthropocentric humanities, which reflects on the relations between people and machines (especially subtle media technologies), that interests me most in the article. Yet posthumanism is not a uniform approach5, which is why we can distinguish several positions within it with regard to technology. Among them is an attitude that is not so much post- but antihumanistic, glorifying technological progress (hence the name extropianism or American posthumanism). It is characterised by a penchant for prophetic visions: it prophesies irrepressible technological progress and sees in it a chance for an improvement of the human condition, even creation of posthuman beings, free from unreliable corporeality, controlling accidental evolution. This movement is described in the literature on the subject as transhumanism. Its premises were presented in the Transhumanist Declaration, drafted in 1998 and later developed further6. Its authors include Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, Tom Morrow and Max More. We could say that Stanisław Lem, too, was a transhumanist (but avant la lettre)7. In addition to technofilia we also have technophobia, which goes hand in hand with bioconservatism, the ambassadors of which include Francis Fukuyama and Jürgen Habermas. Exponents of this approach use the term “human nature” (understood as a genome characteristic of our genre, a genome which may not be interfered with) and are very sceptical about the hybridising possibilities offered by nanotechnology, molecular engineering and digital technology. They argue that the development of these tools as well as the science that uses them leads to a takeover of nature’s powers (design of embryos’ genomes, prolongation of life, pharmacological modifications of organisms), to control of human development and thus to erasure of human subjectivity. Hence the suggestions, included already 4 . Elaine L. Graham’s term quoted by M. Bakke, op. cit., p. 17. It would be more appropriate to talk of posthumanisms, following Bakke’s example. 6 The Transhumanist Declaration is available on the website of the World Transhumanist Association, which today uses the name Humanity+. See http://humanityplus.org/learn/ transhumanist-declaration/ (access: 7 February 2012). 7 The similarity between Lem’s idea and the premises of transhumanism is examined by P. Majewski (Między zwierzęciem a maszyną. Utopia technologiczna Stanisława Lema, Wrocław 2007). 5 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 2. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(3) Media technologies and their people. A posthumanistic view. 3. in the titles of Habermas’ and Fukuyama’s works8, that the question about the future of humanity facing the biotechnological revolution requires a grim (as these authors believe) answer predicting the arrival of a posthuman world. The trend called critical posthumanism, represented by Monika Bakke, is far from both the enthusiasm of transhumanists and the alarmism of technophobes. Contrary to its name, it seems to be a rather affirmative attitude, also with regard to technology, for it tries to establish positive and non-hierarchical relations between humans and non-humans. What is criticised here is the “bodiless, colonial attitude to the theory/practice of current biotechnological research”9. Bakke focuses mainly on human-animal-plant transfigurations and, as she herself says, is rather wary of technology (without which the practices she describes often would not take place). The technologies that interest her are described as “moist” (associated with organic life), being juxtaposed with “dry”, in silico, digital technologies. This does not mean that critical posthumanism does not undertake reflection on the latter. I think that the “anthropology of cyborgs” as defined by Grażyna Gajewska, who examines bodiless robots or entirely virtual bodies (avatars), exploring the so-called popular culture and literature, is also part of this trend. Gajewska describes her attitude and research intentions similarly to Bakke: This wariness [of threats relating to the new type of relations between humans and non-humans – A.K.] should not, however, exempt us from attempts to forge new alliances with non-humans, for example with animals and machines, in order to expand what we have in common. I believe that one of the most important challenges facing us today is [...] to develop such images of humans that would shy away from a naive apotheosis of the natural human being but also from idolatry of the technicised human being10.. In addition, the division into “moist” and “dry” technologies may not be best suited to the dualism-combatting posthumanism and, in fact, cannot be maintained, since the digital world of computers combines with the moist, biological world of living systems, creating something that could be called a “moist medium”11. Moistmedia as defined by Roy Ascott are just predictions (though posthumanism is interested in forecasts as well). Yet devices and mechanisms which not only are based on communication between human DNA photons and signals sent by other organisms, but also are “moist” technologies already quite often participate in mechanical-corporeal assemblages. Such posthumanistic assemblages include the already mentioned figure of the cyborg, examined in her pioneering academic discourse by Haraway12, though it 8 . See F. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, Picador 2003; and J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Polity Press 2003. 9 J. Didur, after M. Bakke, op. cit., p. 22. 10 G. Gajewska, op. cit., p. 290. 11 R. Ascott, “Moist Media Art: When the jaguar lies down with the lamb”, Polish translation by D. Szawarska, Kwartalnik Filmowy 2001, no. 35–36, p. 102. 12 See D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, Polish translation by S. Królak, E. Majewska, Przegląd FilozoficznoLiteracki 2003, no. 1. The article was written in 1985. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 3. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(4) 4. Aleksandra Kil. appeared for the first time in the 1960s in exact sciences in the astronautical-military context. The most radical cyborgisation is a form of relations between a human being and a machine that abolishes all material boundaries, and, as a result of introjection, produces a single entity. Examples of such mergers include people with pacemakers or other prostheses. Among them we find not only patients, but also artists experimenting with “ontological hygiene”, for instance the internationally famous Stelarc, who tries to live with an extra ear and extra arm13. Another often quoted example of a cyborg is the English scientist Kevin Warwick14, who implanted electronic chips in his body, enabling him to connect with devices in his laboratory and communicate in this mediated way with his wife, “bonded” with a microtransmitter. Though it is probably not worth extending the notion of cyborgisation to all human-machine links15, it is used in many different cases and, as Bakke argues, can describe many different variants of biotransfiguration. I would like to examine whether it also works in modern reflection on contemporary media technology. Having recognised disciplines particularly susceptible to non-anthropocentric systems, scholars usually point to biomedicine and digital technology (Bakke) or – to use a language from almost thirty years ago – biology and communication science (Haraway). We could, therefore, suspect that posthumanistic tendencies are characteristic also of the media (understood as means of communication between people, though this means primarily carriers and codes, not social determinations of reception and institutions). Digital and networked media in particular easily enter into organic-inorganic reconfigurations. According to the film scholar and media theoretician Wojciech Chyła, “thus, it is not implants but technomedia with their interfaces that are in the vanguard of a biotechnosystem, infinitely expanding, programming and automating the functioning of the body within the autonomy of the biotechnosystem”16. Hybridisation, of which this biotechnosystem is an example, means that digital and networked media connect the human body to spaces that have little to do with organic nature; they combine senses with a nebulous array of numerical data, zero-one codes. Chyła also mentions the omniconnectivity of biotechmedia, thinking about combinations of elements between which there are no “materially evolutionary” and “biologically evolutionary” commutations. He seems to be talking about telepresence, independence of physical location of the body, which is possible in the virtual space. 13 M. Bakke’s interview with Stelarc talking about the project Extra Ear, http://www.obieg.pl/ rozmo- wy/1561 (access: 20 January 2012). 14 We can read about Warwick’s projects on his website: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ (access: 20 January 2012). 15 Hence the proposal of the term “fyborg” (functional cyborg) to describe a human being using technology to enhance his or her own capabilities. G. Gajewska, op. cit., p. 8. 16 W. Chyła, Media jako biotechnosystem. Zarys filozofii mediów, Poznań 2008, p. 299.. Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 4. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(5) Media technologies and their people. A posthumanistic view. 5. In any case, he is very sceptical about the changes he is describing and, in the spirit of Fukuyama, he notes that they are “de-speciesizing”17 us and are leading humanity to extinction. For him, the new media are an example of a eugenic utopia and signify an abandonment of pedagogical ambitions (close to the idea of paideia) of the “old media” (which he calls literary, epistolary and humanistic). Instead of developing “voluntary memory”18, which is a result of education and evidence of humanisation, the new media in this apocalyptic vision destroy culture and become autonomous. Although they are created by humans (just as everything we call technology), they are breaking free from humans and even are destroying the existing ideas of the essence of humanity. We can also think about the relations between humans and digital media approvingly, and the acknowledgement of technology’s active role in these configurations does not have to signify a belief in radical technological determinism. The formative power of the media was mentioned already by Marshall McLuhan, a classic of media studies, regarded as a technological determinist, though at that time his words were more of a metaphor, and one created by mistake at that. The famous pronouncement: “The medium is the message” was once misprinted as “The medium is the massage”, which in any case was taken up by the Canadian, who said that the media did in fact “mould” their users19. Believing in Latour’s principle that not all actors are humans and refraining from regarding both sides of the human-technological tangles as passive are especially characteristic of artists. One of them, and an exceptionally versatile one at that, is Eduardo Kac. In his 1994 project Ornitorrinco in Eden, which tackled the topic of telepresence and enabled people who were in various locations to remotely control a telerobot, was probably one of the first projects exploring the possibilities of the Internet20. Perhaps today, when every Internet user can encounter similarly advanced technology during teleconferences, it no longer makes such an impression. However, this example shows that the artist’s predictions have become our everyday reality. This is my impression as well when I read about another project by Kac, namely Teleporting an unknown State21. In this project Internet users could cultivate a plant placed in a specially isolated, dark space in a Maribor art gallery. The necessary solar energy was “collected” by eight Internet cameras placed all over the world and given to the plant through a video projector after the right button was clicked on a website specially prepared for the purpose. 17 . Ibidem, p. 31. Ibidem, p. 17. 19 The story of the misprint is mentioned by Krzysztof Krzysztofek, “Zdekodowane kody”, [in:] Kody McLuhana. Topografia nowych mediów, ed. A. Maj, M. Derda-Nowakowski, Katowice 2009. 20 See E. Kac, “Telepresence art on the Internet: Ornitorrinco in Eden and Rara Avis”, [in:] idem, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots, Ann Arbor 2005, pp. 155-167. 21 Exhibition catalogue, see A. Kostić, “Teleporting an unknown State on the Web”, [in:] Eduardo Kac. Telepresence, Biotelematics. Transgenic Art, ed. P.T. Dobrila, A. Kostić, Maribor 2000, pp. 40-42. 18 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 5. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(6) 6. Aleksandra Kil. What in 1998 was within the sphere of art and intrigued us, today is similar to the logic of many of our common web initiatives and games. By clicking the right key on the keyboard of a device connected to the web, we subsidise our candidates in presidential elections, help to feed hungry children or decide what flavours or packaging will be produced by well-known companies from the food industry. In addition, there are experiences associated with using services like Skype or those that enable us to edit documents collectively. However, these ordinary humanmachine relations may lack something that Kac did not forget – breaking with the ruler (human being)-subordinate (machine) opposition and, first of all, stressing the formative power of technology. In art and its reception it is easier than in everyday contacts with the media to feel that technology is not just a tool but also an actor the “nature” of which influences the possibilities of human action. Ideas once produced not only by artists turn out to be worthy of recall – one of them is expressed in Haraway’s words about the growing miniaturisation and thus “invisibility” of technology22, which becomes ubiquitous. The “Internet of things” project23, a network connecting all devices, creating their virtual identity and locating them in a real space too, is no longer an idea straight from a science fiction novel and corresponds to the scholar’s intuition. In order not to limit ourselves to projects only, we could point to predictions that have come true in the reality surrounding us. The coming together of the organic and the inorganic takes place in media interfaces. They are defined now not only as something that brings software and hardware together, but also as “tactile” surfaces of human and media encounters. The “tactile” nature of media, derived from Benjamin’s reflections, means “that things come dangerously close to us. Distance is disappearing”24. We can feel this coming together as an encouragement to reflect on our own place in the world. Robert Pepperell’s iPad-created picture, The view of the self as part of the world25, depicts a furnished room with a window overlooking a green garden, and all this is shown from the perspective of a man lying on a couch (we only see a fragment of his body) and holding an iPad close to his body. This posthumanist self-portrait shows a human subject united with what is non-human. The medium is not just part of this relation, but also something that makes it possible to extract it from consciousness (the phenomenon of which Pepperell studies) and articulate it. There are attempts to evoke “tangibility” and a sense of intimacy by creating interfaces imitating the human skin, like in the art project e-Skin26 or in the touch screen used in iPhones (i.e. Jefferson Han’s multi-touch screen concept adapted 22 . D. Haraway, op. cit., p. 54. See http://www.internet-of-things.eu/ (access: 20 January 2012). 24 P. Celiński, Interfejsy. Cyfrowe technologie w komunikowaniu, Wrocław 2010, p. 138. 25 R. Pepperell, The view of the self as part of the world (2011), http://pepperell.blogspot. com/2011/11/view-of-self-as-part-of-world.html (access: 9 February 2012). 26 See http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/e-skin/ (access: 20 January 2012). 23 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 6. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(7) Media technologies and their people. A posthumanistic view. 7. by Apple27). In Derrick de Kerckhove’s view, touch is an important sense in the era of new media: clicking an icon on a screen (i.e. pressing the right button) is an action, with the icon itself becoming a verb28. I believe that these new media phenomena of tactility can be regarded as cyborgising29 – a transformation of humantechnological relations is certainly noticeable here, and broader definitions of the cyborg can be found in many publications, including Bakke’s and Haraway’s. Its emergence does not necessarily result from a full and permanent conjunction of organic and inorganic parts; these can be quite casual unions. This would be the case of digital, “tactile” media or biotransfigurations – when technology contributes to the creation of such posthumanistic embodiments as Edunia, a plant with human DNA30. In A Cyborg Manifesto, which is also a feminist manifesto, the figure of the cyborg is a subversive (female) body, abolishing established boundaries, expressing science’s entanglement with ideology. What was once considered to be a matter of a distant future when it came to media were neural interfaces31, directly linking the cortex with devices receiving electric signals sent by it. Today they can be used by participants in employee events, who are offered the Mindball game produced in Sweden – a headband reads brain waves which, in turn, control a ball32. In such cases we can talk of disintermediation, because the media lose the status of intermediaries contained in their etymology. They are not so much an extension of the human body (as McLuhan wrote) and they not so much go beyond humans’ integral corporeality, but they become embedded in it. That is why, given the dynamics of biotransfiguration, these organic-inorganic alliances, it is worth rethinking, also in the context of media, Haraway’s words: “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine”33. The American biologist and philosopher is aware of the dangers stemming from ontically unhygienic mergers. The blurring of the category of subject and object has its epistemological and ethical consequences. In addition to the appealing freedom of transforming oneself and one’s experiences, the hitherto rigid human subject receives a task that tests his or her flexibility. Haraway’s manifesto contains not only praise for deinstallation of divisions, but also encouragement to create them responsibly. 27 . See http://multi-touchscreen.com/ (access: 20 January 2012). See D. de Kerckhove, “Umysł dotyku. Obraz, ciało, taktylność, fotografia”, Polish translation by A. Maj, [in:] Kody McLuhana..., p. 47. 29 Unlike P. Dudziński, for whom they still have the status of cultural fantasies; idem, “iPod Classic i jego (krótki) żywot”, [in:] Do rzeczy! Szkice kulturoznawcze, ed. J. Małczyński, R. Tańczuk, Wrocław 2011. 30 Edunia, that is petunia with a fragment of E. Kac’s DNA. For more on the project entitled Natural History of The Enigma, see http://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig.html (access: 7 February 2012). 31 See P. Celiński, op. cit., p. 108. 32 See http://www.mindball.com.pl/090226120804/ (access: 20 January 2012). 33 D. Haraway, op. cit., p. 82. 28 . Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 7. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(8) Prace Kulturoznawcze XIV/2, 2012 © for this edition by CNS. P_K-Kil eng-korekta.indd 8. 2014-02-17 12:01:51.
(9)
Powiązane dokumenty
„Iinną częścią religii praw d ziw ej jtest nasza pow inność w obec człow ieka.. A ugustyna, zw ykło
Quaedam autem po- tentia est, quae non semper est in actu, sed de potentia procedit in actum; sicut invenitur in ge- nerabilibus et corruptibilibus” (S. 2, co.); „materia
POSTAWY SPOŁECZEŃSTWA POLSKIEGO W LATACH NIEWOLI” - „W
For infinite I, use Theorem 2.9 of [9], which says that if all the τ -additive topological product measures on finite subproducts are com- pletion regular, and all but countably many
In mathematical logic, we don’t really bother with determining whether a given sentence has truth value 0 or 1 – instead we will be investigating truth values of sentences combined
Postawił go na silnej podstawie metodologicznej, żądając najbar dziej stanowczo oparcia systematyki na kryterjach natury praw niczej. Zbyt głęboko jednak usiłował sięgnąć,
24 M. Pyziak-Szafnicka, [w:] System prawa prywatnego, t. Olejniczak, Warszawa 2014, s. 1464–1465, gdzie nie wskazano likwidacji podmiotu jako sposobu wygaśnięcia
(i) Copy the tree diagram and add the four missing probability values on the branches that refer to playing with a stick.. During a trip to the park, one of the dogs is chosen
