Абсурд и вокруг: сборник статей

The conflict between industrialisation and what is known as basic needs of technology in economic planning for the Third World highlights the role of technological finitude, which the ideology of power can never admit. It is not sufficient to argue that technology creates its own values within an ever-expanding horizon of development; that resembles the spurious argument that the market economy is free of ethical values. In the current global economy, all the values of technology are created under the sign of power. Conversely, what was only ever of virtual significance and applicable to technology as well: namely, that all values of technique are created under the sign of mortality. Technology, in its use and in the meaning derived from that use, is now the material form of immortality, of a reality which is becoming more and more virtual as it distances itself from the irreducible negativity of the human experience.

As I stated before, uncertainty is an essential part of technique: there is no assurance that a technical act will succeed, whether in the fabrication of an object or the creation of an artwork, in social negotiation or in political planing, in the phenomenology of individual experience or in the exploration of intersubjectivity. The difficulty of this experience of uncertainty can be seen in twentieth century artistic and philosophical works, especially in the philosophy of Derrida, psychoanalysis of Lacan or the fiction of Beckett. The Dionysian aphorism of Nietzsche became the evidence of finitude and absurdity in the aphorisms of Wittgenstein and the paratactic manoeuvres in post-Modemist poetry.

Technique is what inhabits and informs the head of Janus, technologically evacuated by the renunciation of archaic notions of the unified self; but that is a „self“ which we find as a spectacle, as an object, whereas any useful notion of the self must be on the ground of an event-structure, unable to posit its mortality and negativity. For example, the functioning of microprocessors is limited by the limitations on their memory, since their experiential dynamic is entirely pro-active: memory is for use. This dichotomy is perfectly illustrated by Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape. The aged Krapp is listening to a tape he made at the age of thirty-nine, on which he is declaring the happiness he has found in love and his consequent decision to cease recording, since there will no longer be any need for it. The old man listens over and over again to the lyrical speech of his younger self now becoming unbearably poignant in his loneliness and decrepitude. The tape» s memory and the man's memory belong to two different worlds, which can never be reconciled except in the desperate shuttling back and forth of rewinding. Krapp exists, if anywhere, in this catastrophic movement, which is nothing but the event-structure, the concrescence, of his mortality. The machine, once a solace and a pleasure, has become an instrument of torture, not because it has the inhuman power of automatism but because it consigns him to the melancholy of defeat. There is no mediation possible except in a continuous dislocation and dismemberment of subjectivity. The imagination of mortality and effect of mourning shadow the efficient memory of the machine from which Krapp is excluded by the mere fact of his difference.

This leads us to the observation that real technology and virtual technology are of different natures, if real and virtual are taken to refer to the degree to which mortality composes the experiential field of their operation. The first involves a conflictual meaning and the second a non-conflictual meaning (i.e. the assumption that there is pure information, which has a value per se). It could be argued that this is a false distinction, since all technology becomes real as it becomes past: the Gothic cathedral, the great iron structures of the nineteenth century and the supercomputer are all the real solutions to virtual problems. The difference lies in the excess of means, which characterized those earlier technologies: the cathedral or the bridge employs more strength than is necessary for the weight to be borne, the technical means exceeding the effective end. The supplement is a supplement of the human imagination unsure as to the response of the material: the structure is a priori so threatened by mortality that excessive means must be used to guarantee its survival. In information technology, on the other hand, there is a convergence of means and ends. It uses the information it generates as its own material: it is the apotheosis of subjectivity projected into the domain of the material, which thereby becomes virtual (subjective-in-itself).