Wolfgang Schirmacher

Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology
Wolfgang Schirmacher.
New York, 1994

I. Introduction

What is real? How do we know the truth? Today, these basic philosophical questions are harder than ever to deal with. Even if we trust the lessons of daily life, it is difficult enough to come up with convincing answers. For students in rural Pennsylvania, nature may still seem very real; for the kids in the big cities hooked on Nintendo, "nature" is the name of a computer game. And the video and cable TV addicts around the globe-from the farmers in India to the unemployed former Party officials in Moscow to the graphic designers in New York-leave the misery of a so-called reality behind them and embrace true life in the movies and soaps. Are they merely escapists, or are they citizens of a new world civilization that most of us still violently deny?

Let's have a closer look at the other end of the social ladder: Executives and administrators are dependent on statistics generated by information technology. For them there are no goods or customers or students, the bottom line is numbers, the sole judge of their performance. How real is politics these days? The media is the racetrack, polling tells us what we are betting, and success is measured in sound-bites and news outputs.

Most people over sixteen pride themselves on being able to easily distinguish between natural and artificial reality, but their own actions will often betray them. It's ten o'clock-do you know which program you are in? Self-criticism, humanity's sharpest weapon, advises us to ask a tougher question: How can we know what is real? Philosophy, science, even common sense, appear flawed, biased, and tainted by instrumental reason. In the postmodern age no authority seems to be left to tell us what to believe. Of course, we still have ourselves and that means thinking power, intellectual honesty, intuitive understanding.

It looks as though we can know only what we ourselves discovered as witnesses to a truth lived personally. We are victims and victimizers of life and, therefore, maybe not the most trustworthy witnesses (ask animals and plants about it), but I am the only me I've got. What we as creators, participants, and observers can know about today's reality points to an immense shift: the emergence of artificial life as the reality for human beings. Artificial life is an anthropological fact as well as a challenge being met in the two most exciting (or frightening) developments in science, technology, and society: biotechnology and communication technology. If biotechnology provides the hardware of artificial life, communication technology designs the software, which includes a postmodern culture. It is within this cultural environment that we decide how we should act, what we hope for, and, finally, what it means to be a human being.

But shouldn't we be more careful in introducing a concept as paradoxical as "artificial life"? Can "artificial" in respect to life be more than merely a technocratic metaphor? Life seems to be the one thing over which we have no control, a force of the universe rather than a human enterprise. Life can be simulated artificially, not created by us. Steven Levy, in his book Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation, disagrees and challenges us to give up the distinction between simulation and reality.1 If life is characterized by the ability to create something out of nothing, as well as the ability to change and custom-tailor itself to its environment, then self-replicating computer programs constitute life, Levy argues. The radical new computer-science technique sounds familiar: evolution. But this is exactly the reason why we should be suspicious, in duplicating a view of life which is itself a nineteenthcentury concept of trial and error and survival of the fittest, we only prove ourselves anachronistic. To condemn artificial life to the fate to which we've delivered natural life would be a real folly in light of the ecological crisis. Obviously, "artificial life" is a concept that-for better or worse-seems to mean "substitution of nature." In my view, this is completely misleading, a false understanding that has no basis in reality. An understanding of artificial life as substitution of nature promises what it can't deliver: a brave new world where technology rules supreme.

Artificial intelligence (AI) once incorporated one of these big promises-the vision of abolishing all constraints on human intelligence in a next step of evolution-but has since been humbled. Now it's just Al still struggling with all the basics of sensing and speaking. Computers may be able to do incredible things, but it is not likely that they can serve as a paradigm for intelligence-the computer metaphor is hopelessly overstated, as john Searle points out in The Rediscovery of the Mind. Humans don't compute, they understand intentionally.2And the cyborgs, those hybrids of humans and machines, have turned out to be truly at home in the virtual reality of artistic adventures.3 The brain and its artificial body, the body and its artificial brain will be considered "inhuman" when they appear.4 (So let the scientists do it to their kids first!) But realized by biotechnology and communication technology alike, artificial life could overcome its genesis in technocratic ideology and mend the flaws of its anthropocentric intentions. "Artificial life" is a prospect which should enable humanity to attain its own fulfillment instead of triggering our resistance.

Are we using the wrong terms? According to William Safire, language watchdog of the New York Times, the once influential term "artificial" has been dismissed because it means "fake" in English, and "virtual" has become the new buzzword because it reads "almost." This would certainly meet the much lesser expectations we have in this field nowadays: "almost" life, "almost" reality, "almost" intelligence would leave our traditional worldview intact, merely adding new layers to it.

"Virtual reality" simulates reality by creating a "double world" in which new possibilities may be explored. Such a term is especially useful in hammering out a sharp distinction to "artificial life" and discarding the misleading "fake" analogy. "Artificial life" is human-generated and shares this characteristic with "fake"-both are artifacts. But "artificial life" doesn't imitate life, has no original, doesn't work with the blueprint of nature, and is, as such, completely different from "fake." Instead, artificial life describes the only life we know anything about: humanity. To call this reality a fake, a reality which shows itself as the human condition of natality and mortality, as Dasein, or being-in-the-world, is a flagrantly ideological and biased statement. Artificial life embraces the art of living unique to humans in giving birth to the unexpected (Hannah Arendt's natality) and releasing the event of death (Martin Heidegger's mortality). Artificial life is effected in life technologies which range from breathing to computer hacking. There is no anthropological difference between watching television and smiling at another person-artificial life celebrates itself in both techniques.

II. The Artificial Body of Media: Homo Generator at Work

Truth is a gift of Dasein, which is our place and activity in the world's process. As artificial beings by nature, our body as well as our mind is "a happening of truth at work"5 every lived-through moment. Even in the most inhumane enterprises, truth is still at work in humanity as a silent cry toward its absence. According to Heidegger, truth is not about being right or wrong but accepting "aletheia,"6 the powerful interplay of revealing and concealing, which shapes humanity's destiny. Today's media, taken as one of our body's splendid incarnations, is involved in the interplay of instrumental technology and life technology, torn between the murder of the body and its elevation (Hegel's Aufheben) to an unknown status.

If we take a critical look, what has modern technology done to our bodies? Since the nineteenth century a person's authentic "home in the world" (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) has been turned into a machine, serving 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, bearing our consent to the abstraction game that has been going on for quite some time now. Our culture is fascinated by 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 using plastic surgery more and more frequently to reshape a body and in which scientists would love to keep a brain alive without a body. Donna Haraway's cyborgs are around the corner, biorobots which cannot die, with bodies that will not age (only rot, I hope). In virtual reality we could be with Jesus Christ in Golgotha or with Marilyn Monroe, any day, no stinking sweat, no salty tears, no inner-body noise-only the s(t)imulation of it. Today's media are a prime example of a politics of the body which is basically applied technology and has crossed the last frontier, the natural body. Even food, satisfying the single most natural urge, increasingly represents a deep rejection of the body, as it becomes cyborg food on our TVs.

Or do we misunderstand what's really going on, is our perception biased, unable to free itself from the ills of authority, anthropocentrism, and logocentrism? This traditional view of the world functions as a useless filter, darkened by truism as well as by scientific knowledge. Can't we take hope in a fundamental shift to be observed from the industrial to the postindustrial, from hardware to software, from seriousness to play?

It seems obvious that the media is a body-machine that no longer belongs to a modern framework of the grand narratives of emancipation and progress7 but, rather, to the trivial postmodern tales of "everybody is an artist" and "anything goes." Postmodern communication technology provides opportunity for mass participation and blurs the distinction between creator and audience. New media forms such as camcorders and computers compose and design systems that allow the freeing of creativity, appearing to contradict Martin Heidegger's and Theodor W Adorno's predictions that modern technology will transform creative uniqueness and artistic innovation into a ready-to-consume item of a giant supermarket called "culture."

Or are we only fooling ourselves? Does the simulation of creativity in communication technology challenge a negative dialectics of technology: death technologies versus life technologies, being mediocre versus becoming oneself, participating versus originating? The ideological uses of these contradictions are widespread, especially in the form of body versus virtual body, reality versus virtual reality, true versus false. The construct of dichotomy was helpful once in differentiating between friends and enemies when formulating the political correctness of his or her own viewpoint. Contemporary critics of communication technology such as Neil Postman, Stuart Ewen, and Paul Virilio have addressed homo faber-the artist as engineer-and his or her product of a fastfood media and kitsch, but have failed to recognize what I call "homo generator," the media artist as generator of human reality and his or her responsibility for tomorrow's artificial world. Rap musicians' and hip-hop techno-aesthetes' reconstruction of black culture through living technologically has long been overlooked. The "radical technologists" may still believe that they use technology before they are used by it, but this stems from a philosophical ignorance that ill suits their technological smartness. All these new radicals are motivated by an overwhelming need to take responsibility for the rotten state of the earthand rightly so.

Homo generator realizes the hope and the angst of the post-Hegelian philosophers, a Dasein beyond metaphysics, a human being that needs no Being, no certainty, no truth.8 Modern technology is the birthplace of homo generator-but an ambiguous one. Homo generator is not a telematic tale of technological triumph over nature, as Vilem Flusser used to tell it (before he died in a car accident in 1991), nor proof of a technological mutation to a higher form. Homo generator is not a success story and will not vouch for progress, but by the same token homo generator begins to fulfill the artificial existence of humanity. Jean Baudrillard analyzed this phenomenon in communication when he wrote: "The only irresistible pulse is to occupy the nonspace, the empty space of representation that is, par excellence, the screen."9

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 she spiritual future of the earth. This 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; he or she works instead, without any restrictions, with the fundamental building of life in all forms.

Whether or not we accept the fact, we have become homo generator, most visibly in gene technology but equally so in communication 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 human capability 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 but artificial beings among all other beings, 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 or her mistakes, for they are inseparable from his or her 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 caused yourself. Homo generator is a substantial beginning, unique but not original, self-care without egotism.

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? Do the superstars of today's media follow 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. I would like to follow "traces" (in Jacques Derrida's sense) beyond simulations in postmodern communication technologies. There is no revealing without concealing, as the poets have long demonstrated. Revealing deconstructs, opens up, tears the fabric of the known. Revealing through media brings back the body in amazement, than acknowledging how the fundamental changes in our lifeworld through media are taking form.

A valid media criticism should be based on media aesthetics, the judgment founded on experience. Instead, experiences with media have been held up to a value system not intrinsic to communication technology itself. What is missing is an unbiased sensual experience with media, a round-the-clock treat with film and video, sound studio and computer graphics, multiple. television channels and a working remote control. Missing is living with fax and laser printer, with notebook computers and High-Definition Television (HDTV), being at home in computer conferencing, missing are legal hackers riding the waves of cyberspace. Hyperreality and virtual reality are concepts that up to now have only pretended to have experienced what they describe. To experience a phenomenon aesthetically we share in it, follow its own style. An account of this exploration should describe the phenomenon in its own terms. Living media is most adequately experienced in the industrialized countries, where it is a universal phenomenon, not a life style of the happy few. The noise and crime, the homeless, the cars, and the garbage of Manhattan are not contradictions of but, rather, comple-ments to the artificial life style media demonstrates so convincingly. It's all human-made, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful, but no longer controlled by humans. New York, the media center of the world, designs an art of living which fails as often as it succeeds.

In terms of ontology, it is the human contribution to Being. But no one ever intended it to be this way: we don't want to participate in performance art, each one of us is simply fighting for survival. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's insight into the unintentional event which he termed "cunning ; of reason" might be helpful in understanding media.11 But we then have to sidestep Hegel's belief in progress and should anticipate, following Arthur Schopenhauer, that this art of living may lead to the infamous art of torture.12 What was once called mass media has radically changed in meaning. Instead of media for the masses, we can observe the birth of a potential media of the masses. Only with regard to distribution is "mass" still a topic-in terms of audience, we are back to tailor-made programming of subversive irony, which mocks even the most serious things. Gone is the archaic dichotomy of form and content that reinforced the taboo of seriousness.

Performance is the signature of truth. This second law of media asks you to sign your name to the event, with no credit given for the hidden agenda. Media babies nurtured by shows, soaps, and trash movies live happily with collage, parody, and pastiche characteristic of the realm of performance. "Tele-Vision is Tele-Action" (Paul Virilio). There is no dialogue outside media, and all the action takes place within. Truth is hard work, done with a smile. No media event has the authority to enforce action-propaganda's heyday is over. Media has to seduce and open up a field of action which has no goal other than playing life, rearranging a never fixed lifeworld. Media's seduction has nothing to do with the so-called power of pictures: media seduces by style alone.

Style is the medium of action. This third law of media addresses the "deframing" of our perceptions. Style is a self-evolving activity producing a gaze and opening the ear. It is not the author's viewpoint, or his or her aesthetic judgment that style expresses. Style is a game playing with time and language in which you discover and forget the self. Style is neither an identification tag nor a tool of power but a composition never made before, in a language free of fixed meaning but still meaningful to you. Media needs style in order to resist the displacement of creative production through mechanization. In today's highly technological media the machine's mood of standardization is restricted to machines.

Through style alone the self overcomes the hidden danger that attends every use of technology. What you call your tools (or toys, at best) and for which you claim "total control" is, in fact, shaping your imagination and limiting your options. New media personalities tend to be cyborgs without knowing it, locked into their multimedia programs in joyful bliss. They seem to have forgotten that until now computers had no sense of beauty: "Whatever a computer draws in graphics looks like shit" (Mitchell Feigenbaum) -unless it is copied from a human design.

But wouldn't this prove the tool status of computers? Are their limitations not the best evidence of our control? In today's media world and inventions. This artificial lifeworld reveals laws that follow the "open-system irony" described by Richard Rorty.13 Such irony is an observation, not an opinion, and allows for a polyphonic language of several codes. Sören Kierkegaard called it a "mastered irony" that doesn't want to shock or provoke but expresses the sense of a break.14 There is no final word in the artificial lifeworld, and homo generator "being him or herself, only more so"-is used to indirect communication. We have to take the ironic laws of media evident in a postmodern world both seriously and not seriously. Aesthetics simultaneously perceive success and failure in communication technology and experience media as our body living playfully in oppositions.

The first law of media is: The self is the focal point. This self is not the ego of domination or the subject of modern times but the activity of "caring for one's self." Taking care of oneself is now the activity of media. In advertising, to use a telling example, the message remains the same in any production: "You, only better!" Advertising, indeed ail media, addresses the "Ideal Ego" (Jacques Lacan), the primary unity we lost with the mirror phase and through the distraction of language. The promise of mediation in media hints at a possible reunion with the world. The self is in no way satisfied by being apart and single. The self wants to overcome its separateness without losing its specialness. The self of media is an activity. In media we are confronted with the challenge of writing our own lives-with camcorders as well as with computers, with answering machines as well as with films. Mouse and remote control are only the beginning of interactive features in media that allow us to edit and cut, stop and go, break and let flow whatever situation we encounter. In media we write our autobiography--and if we don't, somebody else will do it for us. The care for self is a project, not a given fact, and its other side is neglect.

What can a self, which by definition doesn't care about having a fixed outlook and a secure place in society do? It has to become a creative self. Such a self is the nightmare of traditional media hype and the dream of innovative media producers. This creative self is elusive, interrupting the conventions of dominant culture by twisting it around. Bart Simpson, as well as Beavis and Butthead, are the icc this style it's hard to tell who is the controller and who is controlled, and after a while it no longer matters: instead of ecstasy and intensity, the styles of the self and multimedia express connectivity and application, the skills of an instrumental lifeworld.

And more bad news is ahead: Professor Feigenbaum of Rockefeller University, one of the famous chaos theorists, finally taught his computer how to draw a beautiful curve entirely by itself. It took Feigenbaum more than two years, and the result is a glimpse of true computer style you may admire in the first map of the world drawn by computers.15

Style is openness, a life search that "de-appropriates" (Avital Ronell) given realities. The gaze as exchange of seeing and being seen, the ear as confluence of hearing and being heard, and writing as expression and learning do not need recording but aspire to fulfillment. Media fulfills itself in mediation, which has no outside goal. This mediation without goals rejects synthesis and embraces life games artists play: acting without believing, waiting without expectations, living without the will to survive.

The fourth law of media states: Mediation is the flow of media. Mediation is no longer a deal between partners or a communication following established rules, but an innovative process of media to which we belong. In such a mediation there is not even the goal of mutual understanding, because the flow needs breaks. Dissent is the salt of mediation and designed to eliminate anthropocentric arrangements, the mafia practices of humankind. Mediation floods any content, fills the artificial lifeworld, evokes the "fourfold" (Geviert),16 and allows us to be life's own artists.

Notes:

1. Steven Levy, Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

2. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

3. See "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway," in Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-26.

4. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

5. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 36.

6. Martin Heidegger, Aletheia. Vorträge und Aufsätze III (Pfullingen 1967).

7.See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The lustmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 31-37.

8. See Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiburg/München: Alber-Verlag, 1983); (Ereignis Technik: Wien: Passagen-Verlag, 1991)).

9. Jean Baudrillard, "The Telecratie and the Revolution," Newsline (March-April 1992), p. 1.

10. See Lutz Mommartz's video, Joseph Beuys: Social Sculpture (11 min, 1969).

11. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum Publishing. 1991i), p. 126.

12. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 581.

13. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 73.

14. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony . (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989).

15. Hammond Atlas of the World (Maplewood: Hammond Inc., 1992).

16. Geviert, German for "squared," is a poetic metaphor. For Friedrich Hölderlin's description of the "fourfold" elements of a comprehensive understanding of human existence: heaven, earth, gods, and mortals, see Martin Heidegger's "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). A poster-installation "Philosopher-artist's GEVIERT' has been my contribution to the exhibition "The Rape of Language" (Kunstverein Hofgarten, Munich, Germany, in May 1993). See Wolfgang Schirmacher, "The City as Geviert Questions Arising from a Philosophy of Architecture, Sentence Building," Architecture-Theory-Criticism, ed. N. Hellmayr (Freyberg: Graz 1993).