Wahrheit "gibt es" nur,
sofern und solange Dasein ist

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit

Murder of the Body - a Jury Verdict Pending
What has modern technology done to our bodies? Since the 19th century a person's authentic home in the world has been turned into a machine and serves as an object alienated from itself as origin. The revolution of the artifacts is perceived as a negation of the natural body. Dolls function as an inscription of the body, bear our consent to the abstraction game which has been going on for quite some time now. Our culture is fascinated with the immaterial body which knows no aging process and may overcome even death. Modern technology seems to be as hostile to the natural body as premodern Christianity. The lesson of Frankenstein is lost on a society which uses plastic surgery more and more frequently to reshape the body and whose scientists would love to keep a brain alive without a body. Donna Haraway's Cyborgs are around the corner: Robots as man-machine hybrids which cannot die with bodies which will not age (only rust and rot I hope).

The lazy guys among us (and who isn't) are expecting to get with the help of these artificial hard bodies rid of work which may include thinking and love making, too. In virtual reality we could be with Jesus Christ in Golgatha (or, preferably, with Marylin Monroe any day anytime), no stinking sweat, no salty tears, no inner body noise - only the simulation of it. Today's media are a prime example of a body politics which is basically applied technology and has crossed the last frontier, the natural body. Even food, serving the single most natural behavior, displays increasingly a deep rejection of the body, turning into Cyborg food on our TV screens. The jury is out, but can there be any doubt about the verdict? Elaine Scarry, Kathleen Woodward, Stanley Aronowitz, Simon Penny, and Margarete Moorse presented evidence no jury could disregard. Modern Technology convicted, first degree murder of the body!.

But juries are notoriously unpredictable, and their verdicts depend on who they are. Philosophers after Kant and Hegel make up the jury in my court of reason and I know no better qualified group of peers to judge modern technology than these twelve individuals: Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Sīren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W.Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.Modern technology, indisputably a global force, is a distinctly Western enterprise and should therefore be judged by some of the best minds of this tradition. I do not apologize for their overwhelming German and French accent! These strange mix of thinkers is united in difference by expressing in many voices a postmodern consciousness. Iwill not bother you with significant quotes - it is the adventure of thinking which counts. "Wege, nicht Werke" (Heidegger) is what we have to consider. The verdict of this jury is still pending and their judgement deliberatly postponed. Their concern is mainly with perception, with the ills of authority, anthropocentrism and logocentrism. They attack a traditional view of the world which functions as a useless filter, darkend by trusism as well as by scientific knowledge. Strangely enough, the body is considered by these thinkers as our place of resistance growing more influential the more technological progress seems to endanger the bodily sphere. Hīlderlin's Rettende, the saving power within technology is brought forward and produced by an aesthetic experience life itself lives. Our body's experiences a being-in-the-world without chains and beyond the false dichotomy of rationality and irrationality. This everyday experience of authentic existence is called Dasein and it becomes stronger in the wake of its absence. Isn't ir Dasein which fuels our hope in a fundamental shift to be observed from the industrial to the post-industrial, from hardware to software, from seriousness to play?

Negative Dialectics of Technology: Homo Generator's Birth
It seems obvious that the media is a body-machine no longer part of a modern framework of the grand narratives of emancipation and progress but rather to the trivial postmodern tales of "everybody is an artist" and "anything goes". Postmodern media technology provides the opportunity for mass participation and blurs the distinction between creator and audience. New media forms such as camcorders and computer compose/design systems look to liberate creativity and appear to contradict the predictions of both Heidegger and Adorno that modern technology will transform creative uniqueness and artistic innovation into a ready-to-consume item of a giant supermarket called culture. But we're only fooling ourselves: the simulation of creativity in postmodern media technology is challenged by a negative dialectics of technology with its contradictions of death technologies versus life technologies, being mediocre versus becoming yourself, participating versus originating. The ideological use of these contradictions is widespread and was evident throughout the symposium by all speakers with the notable exception of Avital Ronell. Especially in the form of body vs. virtual body, reality vs. virtual reality, truth vs. fake the model of dichotomy was helpful in differentiating between friends and opponents and in addressing the political correctness of his/her own viewpoint. But the jury of philosophers found this strategy extremly unconvincing and was, quite frankly, appalled by the openly political rhetoric ruling such difficult epistemological issues. Contemporary critics of postmodern media technology such as Neil Postman, Stuart Ewen, or Paul Virilio have addressed "homo faber", the artist as engineer, and his/her product of a fast-food media and kitsch, they have failed to recognize "homo generator", the media artist, as generator of human reality and his/her responsibility for tomorrow's artificial world. How, for example, rap musicians and hip-hop techno-aesthetes re-construct black culture by living technologically has long ignored but Tricia Rose made this point impressively. The "radical technologists" may believe they use technology before they are used by it, but this is caused by a philosophical ignorance which ill fits their technological smartness. All these new radicals Andrew Ross mentioned are attracted by the overwhelming need for responsibility the rotten state of the earth displays. Each of them are a genuine homo generator just born violently in blood and shit with no knowledge whatsoever about its own destiny.

What I call homo generator realizes the hope and the angst of the philosophers after Hegel, a Dasein beyond metaphysics, a human being which needs no Being, no certainty, no truth. Modern technology is the birthplace of homo generator, but an ambiguous one. Homo generator is not a telematic tale of technological triumph over nature such as VilĒm Flusser used to tell (before he died a few month ago in a car accident) and proof a technological mutation to a higher form of living. A philosopher of technology worth his or her profession has to love and hate technology at the same time, acknowledging our debt to Kierkegaard who made such contradictory moves a powerful indirect communication. You hate your (American) breakfast and you eat it with pleasure because only together do you get a feeling for the authentic phenomenon of food in the morning. Homo generator is not a success story und will not vouch for progress, but by the same token homo generator begins to fulfill the artifical existence of humanity. This is occurs under the death threat for the species in ecocide and homo generator has to face with courage his or her own mortality, comple-mented as always by natality).

Modern-minded critics love to blame the "militant media" of "homogen-erating" reality or shaping everything alike. This reductio- nistic identifying ranges from "defending the system" to "amusing ourselves to death". Postmodern critics blame media for "homo-gener-ating", a blunt act of self-creation guilty of anthropocentrism, a simulation without original. as described in Baudrillard's analysis of communication: The only irresistible pulse is to occupy the nonspace, the empty space of representation that is, par excellence, the screen.

Yet homo generator in my understanding revokes a misconception of humanity. Homo sapiens, homo faber, homo creator - none touches our core any longer. We shall of course keep on thinking, continue to make tools, and imagine ourselves to be the originator of things, of our acts and thoughts. But all this pales in comparison with the immense ability to produce new forms of life and determine the biological as well as the spiritual future of the earth. The homo generator is no longer a gifted dilettante whose successes are owed principally to chance. Homo generator does not have to settle for what's given him; he or she works instead, without any restrictions, with the fundamental building of life in all forms. Consequently, homo generator is in a position to tailor-make evolution. (Dead God help us!)

Whether or not we accept the fact, we have become homo generator, most visibly in gene technology but equally so in media technology. A philosophical challenge without precedent lies in discovering and reinforcing those traits already in accord with this new type of being. We could not have discovered gene technology or virtual reality as a capability or ours if it did not belong to our nature and if it were not a characteristic of our life technology. If we understand homo generator not as an extreme case but as the norm, one of our conjectures about humanness is then strengthened, one which has long determined us subconsciously but is uttered only with great aversion. If we penetrate all the dissemblance and tear away the last veil of analogy between human and animal, it then becomes irrefutable: we are the artificial beings among all others, our bodies are artifacts by nature.

Homo generator's body politics is to SEE/ HEAR/ SMELL/ TOUCH/ TASTE/ THINK before you act, it claims aesthetic perception as the basis of comprehending and interaction. Homo generator has no fear of his mistakes, for they are inseparable from his succeeding - as body politics teaches us. Responsibility also means being able to assume one's guilt and to reject blame for anything you have not started yourself. Homo generator is a concrete beginning, unique but not original, self care without egoism.

How do we recognize such a fabled being? Could we find homo generator as one of the high priests in the labs at Rockefeller university? Are media's superstars today following the model of homo generator? Or is a computer program more likely to represent what is challenging in human existence? Is homo generator beyond the gender issue? It is much easier to tell what homo generator is NOT (not a scientist, not Madonna, not cyberpunk, not gender neutral) than to indicate how he or she may appear. (But look in the mirror!)

I would like to follow "traces" (in Derrida's sense) in and beyond simulations in postmodern media technologies. And so, the video tape I will now screen contains an interplay of revealing and concealing homo generator which in itself may be a beginning of the body politics we desire. ( I have to warn Herb Schiller: some sound bites will last less than 3 seconds.) There is no revealing without concealing, as the poetics of truth tells us. Revealing -constructs, opens up, tears (trs) the fabric of the known. Reveal-ing through media brings back the body in amazement, in laughter, and even in disgust. But media has to become militant. What today's media took away from us, militant media may restore: generating the body, being yourself, overcoming self-censorship. As the Beasty Boys put it: you have to fight for your right to party! 'Death technologies' is a corporate identity!

TAPE "REVEALING"
Icons in politics and pop culture - militant media can force them to dance! Laughing in the face of death, as Bataille teaches us, has to break the rules of common sense and decency. Homo generator is rebel-lious, takes no prisoners, interrupts quite violently the daily routine. But all of that with a smile, please. Postmodern irony is the style of homo generator, and we should have two languages in mind, at least. The disclosure of truth is never direct, but rather a complex happening in life which needs concealing as much as revealing. Differ-ence results from the power which lies in the unknown, in the not-yet-known or never-known. Absence prevents anthropocentrism, the biggest threat to humanity. Ambiguity returns to us the insight, the intuition our bodies posess. Difference, absence, ambiguity belong to the realm of concealing, the most influential life technology we'll encounter. The ongoing process of concealing protects homo generator from partic-ipating in, buying into, being part of what others have revealed and imposed upon us as "given". This addresses gender roles as well as schools of thoughts, national identities as well as traditions.

Concealing has the saving power of disconnecting us from this phony givenness and connecting us with the body as our genuine "home in the world". Therefore, militant media fights for our right TO KNOW THAT WE DON'T KNOW (not be confused with ignorance). Traces of Non-Presence, the interplay of present and absent, the disturbance of the sublime, and the transcendence of terror indicate a concealing which will never reveal itself. Militant media draws from the hidden whose influence cannot be overestimated. Such powerful concealing allows us a postmodern technology which has abandoned the question of control. Nobody's master and nobody's slave, militant media enjoys the concealing in the obvious, in the daily routine as much as in obses-sion. We are how we eat, what we fuck (Stan Aronowicz likes to fuck work), what we want, for whom we feel compassion. The bottom line is: we are jokes in the universe which will die only with our deaths. This is the body politics of homo generator! No reason to be sad about it, but a lot of reasons to celebrate life.

TAPE "CONCEALING"

A last remark: Blaming media and technology for our cowardice, our fear of living bodily with grace is self-defeating. Militant Media and postmodern technology have the potential to restore our body: as artificial by nature, as art of living. It's easy, you just have to do it!

Department of Communication, New School for Social Research, New York