Wolfgang Schirmacher - Technoculture and Life Technique
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. "Technoculture and Life Technique." In: Wolfgang Schirmacher. Just Living. Philosophy in Artificial Life. Atropos Press. New York, Dresden. ISBN 0981946269.
Wolfgang Schirmacher - Technoculture and Life Technique: On the Practice of Hyperperception
Prefatory note on method
A phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre does not know in advance how the world should be, but allows the phenomena in their context to tell us how they show themselves for us. This always entails surprises, and doing philosophy turns out to be primarily an act of discovery. Concepts are in an emphatic sense provisional concepts; they remain sensually seduceable and wide open to new perceptions.
Thus, a piece of phenomenological evidence is never a definition, but a “path” (Heidegger), a well-considered interim report of a knowledge process that begins with the particular and is always revolutionary. The unconventional perception of artists and philosophers, a contrarian way of thinking and a going-against-the-grain, can be traced back to a phenomenological attitude. Its signature is a leap (which in retrospect may well have been but a step), aimed at that magical place in which asymptotically extreme proximity combines with irreconcilable distance, and authenticity is a continuous task of the self. Nevertheless, to the present-day zeitgeist, a phenomenological procedure that dialectically forces together ethical sensibility and aesthetic rigor in order to “conflate” [aufheben] (Hegel) the two in a life technique based on justice appears as a dangerous hyperperception. But a way of thinking that takes Heidegger’s fall as its beginning and recognizes in technoculture its phenomenal jumping-off place, has no fear of the plenitude of an artificial life and practices hyperperception unselfconsciously, as a matter of course.
1. Thought in the present-day crisis
A philosophy that overcomes our era must begin with a phenomenological abstention that is as necessary as it is trivial. What every reasonable person today recognizes as the basis of his or her perception of reality, the phenomenologist must not accept as a given: that problems can be recognized and can in principle be solved. If this principle of a survival-oriented world-behavior, always already optimistic and oriented toward progress, is radically [eingeklammert] (Husserl), then the everyday world is transformed “be*fore our eyes” (Merleau-Ponty) into a nightmare world. The world wide network of present-day problems, from the environment to social justice to unemployment, evokes in anyone who ventures the slightest bit beyond his or her sphere of responsibility to a deep sense of helplessness and ultimately sheer resignation. Every solution, upon closer inspection, turns out to be the entrance into a problem labyrinth with no way out. The systematic blinders of scientific and technical solutions are every bit as disastrous as the promises of salvation held up by ideologies. Only very few philosophers still fulfill their task of taking up the perspective of the whole without anti-epistemological [erkenntniswidrige] considerations, and their diagnosis is in the difference-thinking of postmodernity visible far and wide: no meaning, no identity, no accord, no progress, no rescue. Nevertheless, one should not label this a merely negative philosophy, for it contains a plethora of cultural shards and games, fractures and surfaces, repetition and creative abandonment [Verlassen], postponement and the much-talked-of absence of hope. It is nevertheless difficult for us to detect the message of the whole in our nomadic renunciation of any meaning that would affect us all, and yet such is the case. [Was ist der Fall? Dass es eine Botschaft des Ganzen gibt?] The complication is the mood of the message itself. Seen from the perspective of the whole, which can only ever be presented concretely, all attempts at a solution up until now have failed, for all functionality on a small scale contributes to the great destruction. The amply illuminated lecture hall supports the current system of energy production, which represents an ecological catastrophe, a political time bomb, and in regard to the just distribution of goods a crime against humanity.
Objectively, the political, economic, and ecological problems of the technological world seem insoluble. However, such a diagnosis can be made only by an observer who himself is not a party. Those representing certain interests would destroy the foundation of their own business if they were to admit to this insolubility. Resignation is inhumane, and yet it represents, if we follow Schopenhauer, solely the interest of universal truth, which passes judgment on the cosmos known to us: life is not worth living, for it produces suffering without end. The human being, according to Schopenhauer, is of all suffering creatures the only one that through insight can break the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten and thus become a paragon for all creation. The voluntary extinguishing of the will to life in ourselves would allow humaneness to triumph over nature. What at first appeared as resignation would then reveal itself to be a successful way out.
But can something that looks like collective suicide by the human species be called successful? Today, anthropofugal impulses are stronger than ever, and it doesn’t take a prophet to predict our species’ suicide within the next millennium. A humanity that simply continues as usual with its theory and practice, its conflict management and ideology of progress, is doomed. Admitting to ourselves that the conflicts are unresolvable, that with the theoretical and practical means we have at our disposal we are merely attempting to treat the symptoms: such an admission could well amount to a turning point. But lobbyists, whether they receive their mandate from the state, the economy, culture, or religion, reject any notion of admitting to their own bankruptcy. They see self-criticism merely as a strategy for entrenching their own influence. Thus, they represent the primary obstacle to change, and a failing of our life technique. Anyone working from the outside who exposes the failures of the prevailing forces of society will always be vulnerable to the accusation of representing interests of his own. New social movements became successful political groups and were thus domesticated. Terrorists of conscience were tried as criminals and judged to have been acting out of a psychotic craving for recognition. The philosophical clowns of postmodernity bring the initiated to laughter and tears at the grotesque spectacle of the present day, and for the rest are dismissed as “unreadable.”
But the death of God and disappearance of the subject have by no means dispensed with the philosophical promise of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, nor caused it to ossify into a mere declaration occurring in national constitutions. On the contrary: the notions of liberty, equality, and brotherhood can be used to demonstrate what is not the case today. Liberty as the core value of the western countries, equality as the primary accomplishment of the former socialist states – those who represented no ideological interest never saw either of the two values sufficiently realized. And brotherhood is often a pious wish, quite literally; it is the emotional offering of the religions, and turns up as the love of nature in the ecological discourse. In this post-Socialist age, the dichotomy between the first and third is erupting with utter vehemence, following the collapse of the second world and the melding together of the fourth and the impoverished third worlds. With an expenditure of the greatest effort, liberty, equality, and brotherhood might perhaps be realized in the more advanced industrial states, but only at the cost of servitude, inequality, and indifference toward most of the rest of the world.
II. Life Technique: Anthropomorphic, not Anthropocentric
The subject, which comprehensively organizes and prevails over the human world – whether as individual, responsible citizen or as a product of social development – is an illusion, as dangerous for ourselves as it is for the world we all share. Nevertheless, anthropocentrism continues to function as the hidden paradigm for all of our political, economic, and ecological decisions. It is only the culture of postmodernity that has broken with anthropocentrism, because of the highly anarchic and individualistic character of this culture. For the abdication of the subject (long since dominated by its own works) and the discovery of the individual are mutually dependent; the death of the one is the birth of the other. The anthropocentric subject, caught up as it was in the categories of domination and center, is overcome by the anthropomorphic individual that Hegel conceived of as the particular, which unites in itself singularity and generality.
Anthropomorphic means that the human being need not be ashamed to be a human being. We cannot do otherwise than to live as humans, and even our inhumanity bears this out. But nowhere do our existentials, upon whose description Heidegger had only just embarked in Being and Time, point to the necessity of anthropocentrism. The human world is by no means the same thing as the one dominated by and centered upon humans. Today, everything depends upon the difference between anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, for it is from this difference that we learn how death technique and life technique show themselves [1]. Strictly speaking, the leap from anthropocentric to anthropomorphic is but one of a number of possibilities of realizing the turn, and all these paths share the same origin with Heidegger’s Holzwege (“country paths”): from the human being to Dasein (existence), from Sprache (language) to Sage (saga, saying) , from Gestell (framework) to Ereignis (event, “enownment”). In the technological world, the difference between anthropocentric and anthropomorphic may well describe the difference between the downfall and the continued survival of the human race, the impossibility or the possibility of a self-engendered artificial life in which we can exist humanely. As long as we remain anthropocentrically blinded (and there exist subtle forms of this blindness), our primary conflicts will remain objectively irreconcilable, and if we deny this we are merely lying to ourselves. But in the painful transition to an anthropomorphic world view (one that does not merely pay lip service), we realize that not even the terms “objective,” “conflict,” or “solvability” are neutral. While the growing destruction of the environment and the increasing ungovernability of states are very real issues, they are caused by the anthropocentric delusions of an “objective” science and technology, which provide ways and means of domination over nature and over humans. Whoever seeks not to dominate humans and nature, but to understand and acknowledge them as existing in a relationship to oneself, helps to bring about the disappearance of the conflict. The grave problems of world civilization, which give us ample cause for pessimism, are answers to our fundamental self-misunderstanding. We get the world we deserve - there is no cause to speak of injustice here!
Liberty, equality, brotherhood have been anthropocentrically distorted by us. Yet in truth, the free individual does not have to learn brotherhood; he has it as his foundation. It is quite self-evident that the renunciation of domination extends to nature as well as one’s own existence. Liberty too, which repudiates anthropocentrism, can no longer be understood as an attack on the multifariousness of living things. For the phenomena of the anthropomorphic world have their own set of laws, and disregarding these laws leads to destruction, as the example of mass tourism clearly illustrates. Vacation spots whose overdevelopment leads to the loss of their inner order and beauty become places of inhumanity in the end. Only an equality that contents itself to be anthropomorphic can protect its own quality. That liberty has led to subjugation and independence has been traded for security is a historic fact, but can justified only from an anthropocentric perspective. Anyone who wants to rule must certainly fear his opponents, and needs allies, strategies, victories (and defeats). But freedom for singularity (das Eigene) has no need to subjugate anything, but is open and playful, and interested not in the attainment of a goal but in the fulfillment of a context. The poet, his work, and his influence embodies nearly uniquely the free individual, whom equality fills and who laughs at domination. Poetic existence construed as something humane has nothing in common with misunderstood romanticism. Rather, it is something that shows itself in a phenomenological mood. But the philosopher too, this hermit sent by society into the desert [2], exhibits features of anthropomorphic freedom, and thus hardly makes a suitable educator or founder of a religion. Besides the metaphoric mode of speaking of art and poetry, philosophical thinking is the only remaining way to retain an unprejudiced insight into that which is. But contemporary philosophy is so afraid of this task that it would rather reconcile itself to its own abdication than dare to take on the grand project. No longer does it admit to the possibility of “great thinkers,” (Meisterdenker), nor subscribe to the notion that philosophers know better than others, apart from what social norms allow for. Just clarification and analysis of day-to-day phenomena, criticism only as language pedagogy or political polemics; the question castrated of its answer as the center, procrastination and refusal as verbose result -- the philosopher’s flight from responsibility takes on many forms.
One of the more clandestine escape strategies is taking the bull by the horns: criticizing man’s increasing domination over nature, fraught as it is with anthropocentrism and logocentrism. In extreme cases this can take the form of misanthropy; other possible forms are a love of nature and a hopeful new-age mindset. In every case, this critique takes issue with the technological world, this Frankenstein creation that held out the promise of paradise and created a hell on earth. This dominion as it has existed until now should be renounced, anthropocentrism and logocentrism should be done away with. Their place should be taken by a new subservience, a willingness to serve, be a partner, and belong to the true center. Biocentrism, cosmocentrism, Nature or God in the center of a new thinking, a new morality, or a new religiosity. Heidegger is cited, unjustifiably so, by such restorers of the old central power who deconstructed Heidegger as history of being and overcame him in enownment-thinking (Ereignisdenken). There is no center, regardless of the specification, that is not merely another anthropocentric mask.
The apparently selfless renunciation of the world into which we are historically thrown is only a labeling ruse: ungrasped and thus not essentially changeable, the technological world executes the spirit of its builders, indifferent to the gaggle of cultural-critical dwarves, those know-it-alls devoid of power. Whoever wants to abolish the technological world with the stroke of a pen (and the help of a computer keyboard, of course) or ignores it as a superficial phenomenon, has only wriggled out of responsibility. Such behavior is not atypical of capricious rulers who suddenly stop seeing the fun in a certain game.
The technological world, as anthropocentrically as it has been designed, has long since made a mockery of human plans. What once seemed tool and embellishment, is present and future for us and now shapes even the most intimate stirrings of our lives. Who and what I am is decided in media whose technical composedness is so universal that it no longer strikes one as so. Technology’s planetary domination, recognized as such by Heidegger, has long since changed from a domination over some other into the mode of life shared by all. Viewed phenomenologically, and thus without evasion, the phenomenon “technological world” says to us that we human beings have taken over all responsibility for the world. Not God, not nature, neither fate nor accident have created the world of today. If one subtracts anthropocentrism from these findings–taking joy in domination, taking pleasure in success, the right to kill: in short, godlike omnipotence–then we start to get a sense of what is being demanded of us. The world is our mirror, not our crown! While we do create the world in our own image, the world does not exist for our exclusive use and pleasure. Nowhere is this demonstrated more drastically than in the ecological crisis. Responsibility cannot mean domination –but what then does it mean? Can a responsibility be fathomed in an anthropomorphic sense, one that has escaped the schema of master and slave?
III. Homo generator and the origin of justice
While man may not be the measure of all things in the technological world, man is the beginning of all things there. Human life technology shapes the planet. National, moral, and intellectual borders have been transcended, and the once obligatory cultures in the supermarket of world civilizations have been marked down to mere closeouts. Anthropocentrically, this would be understood as evolution, and mourned or celebrated (depending on one’s perspective) as the loss of “cultural nature.” Biotechnology has finally realized for the living world something that has long since been credited to culture and technology: we create our own world and we alone bear the responsibility for it. But who are we? What is the human being like? The challenge of a biotechnology that sets out to create the “new human being” consists in our not knowing who we are. Pronouncements on human nature, whether it be God-given or biologically proven, are fraudulently attained and irreversibly marked by anthropocentrism. Even such definitions as “the non-determined animal” (Nietzsche) and “the errant creature of evolution” (Odo Marquard) express only what we are not. Paradoxically, Heidegger recommended in his critique of humanism that we disregard the human in order to know the human, and this procedure does indeed produce meaning.
Met by our gaze, the world was transformed into an artifact. This transformation process of nature into garden, of metabolism into society, of libido into relationship, of the given into meaning, is never interrupted for even a moment, for without this anthropomorphic activity the human world could not help but break down on the spot. It is when one disregards the human, as we strictly speaking always already do in everyday life, that one is made aware that the constitution of the world is inconspicuously yet ineluctably anthropomorphic. Our society and our environment tell us in all clarity, without being asked, not what we are but how we are becoming. We once-bitten, twice shy children of progress no longer want any part of models for the future, and we are justifiably suspicious of millenarian promises of salvation. But only the anthropocentric ear hears in becoming the deceptive strains of the harp of progress, future, and salvation. Devoting itself to its inescapable responsibility for the justice of all that transpires, anthropomorphic thinking is quite capable of differentiating between the false pathos of the new and the correct diagnosis of open becoming.
The world says that the human being is the creature that can always begin anew, that goes surprising ways, transcends its givens, is ultimately unpredictable, and is capable of anything. The point here is not to judge as good or bad; what constitutes the existence of the human is its capacity at any moment for beginning anew and its fine disregard (bordering on the extreme) for facts. Man is the creature that surprises, for whom no law is good enough, and whom no end can bind. The existent creature transforms even death into a new beginning; in acknowledgment as well as in repression, and even in dying. “Natality” (Hannah Arendt) and mortality both have the quality of an endangered yet self-fulfilling creation of the artificial life as which we exist. Our most modern of technologies make us so obviously Homo generator; that is, originator of the human world and all of the life within it. This vocation is an intensification of our creativity, for Homo generator works with the most fundamental elements of existence: with genes as well as with ideologies and institutions. This originary creation from the plenitude is mundane as regards such phenomena as love and trust. In art it becomes an opus, but only since we have reached technological maturity does it become fulfilling life technology.
So then is Homo generator not a definition of the human after all, as one could contend? Does this label not limit us to but one of our potentials? But can one really understand the capacity for potential, the process of emergence, the vitality of the origin as a limitation? Homo generator, who doubts and engages in projects at the same time, lives in the in-between – how else could we relinquish our roles and nodal points without regret? We are not what we are. Neither are we what we will become. We are the unpredictable process, totalization without totality, as Sartre conceived of it.
What do responsibility and justice mean to Homo generator, who does not seek to dominate, who pursues no goals, and whose behavior is unpredictable? Obviously, man as beginning cannot contribute to a responsibility that aims to teach reasons or a justice that aims to set and follow norms. The causality employed by the sciences as well as the frames of reference employed by the field of ethics serve only to exercise domination over phenomena, to which category man also belongs. Such responsibility and justice prescribes, legitimates itself phenomenologically through an excess of domination, and is interested primarily in the consequences. The important discussions in bioethics about euthanasia, eugenics, abortion, and animal experimentation, or the debates over artificial intelligence, atomic power plants, the poisoning of our waters and the destruction of the forests are almost exclusively consequence-oriented. When definitions are employed (that prescribe what is humane, natural, ethically acceptable), then they function as legal norms that are jurisprudentially applied to the individual case. The anthropocentric certainty with which the court of reason or the higher wisdom of natural law are appropriated has still not developed a crack in its façade. But a responsibility or a justice that represents the interests of humankind (or one of its masks, such as God, nature, state) is utterly unsuited to facilitating a way out of the current crisis. We have to find our way back from the “responsibility principle” (Jonas) to the origin of responsibility, to justice, and staring fixedly at the consequences will invariably lead us astray. The consequences merely pass judgment upon us; they are useless as guiding principles, since they are hopelessly entangled in the networks of an anthropocentric world. Should the most severely handicapped have to continue living under all circumstances, should drug dealers and murderers be condemned to death, should the starving in Africa be saved with another round of aid, should animal experimentation be allowed when it contributes to the saving of human lives? Whoever frames the questions in such a way already knows the answers! Such responsibility that emanates from anthropocentric justice does not address the phenomenon in its complete form and has no interest in the situation with its background and history. That is why such justice is as empty as it is blind, and why this arrogated responsibility is a mere ritual of dogmatism.
Anthropomorphic justice comes about in the creative act itself and seeks out the phenomenon (of which the responsible one is always a part) in its primordial mode of being. For it is unjust to have to assume responsibility for a botched phenomenon, and thus irresponsible as well. Are we supposed to let those who cause such misery dictate to us what we should take up a position on? Should we not instead ask ourselves, when we are presented in the courtroom with the result of a criminal career, whether the murderers and drug dealers were not born as murderers and drug dealers? Did fate produce quadriplegics, or is the blame not to be sought in the inhuman system of automotive transportation? Was no one capable of foreseeing that the people in the Third World have to starve because the industrialized nations have raised injustice to a principle and in so doing are copied by the ruling classes throughout the world? Homo generator knows itself to be the beginning of all phenomena, and it is this very knowledge that allows it to perceive its responsibility in the origin of justice, in the simultaneity of events, in the attentive listening to the obstinacy of occurrence.
IV. Justice as Practice in Artificial Life
From Heidegger and his fall we learned that the turning point demanded by us today breaks with the history of being and in so doing, catapults us out of the everyday world. Nevertheless, the metaphysics of presence, time, and center determines our praxis (and has also functionalized its criticism) as it always has. Yet the technological world with it conflicts is, seen phenomenologically, merely the negative of a world-enownment (Weltereignis) that we already “exist,” without ever even having come close to understanding it. All serious philosophical thinking after Heidegger works at exhibiting this fundamental turnaround, which knocks the bottom out of our contemporary view of the world and our accustomed mode of feeling. Chained to a language that has degenerated to a metaphysical messenger, we take great pains to parrot poets like Hölderlin and Celan, in order to learn from them a different relationship to language. There is no doubt that “the word” or “a principle” do not exist, neither the trenchant explanation nor the elegant theory that would bring an end to the masquerade of false problems and slapdash solutions. Such hopes are ineluctably indebted to the idea of the center. Heidegger’s exclamation “only a god can save us” echoes Hölderlin’s words and is by no means a cry summoning an authority, the savior, the new center. Instead, “a god” points forward to the poetic “Geviert” of divine and mortal, earth and heaven. One would have to be anthropocentrically blinded, and lack any sense for the interconnections that would thereby be opened up, to seize upon Hölderlin’s “Geviert” as a philosophical concept and to read a “center” into the “fourfold multiplicity” that is as comprehensive as it is decentralized.
Nevertheless, we are not speechless. With philosophical postmodernism from Lyotard to Derrida to Baudrillard, a negative speaking-out has begun that is surprisingly powerful and creative. That one cannot speak of it is a language game with many variations, and how original is it to say that there are no longer any originals. Language has nothing to do with the world – how true this is in the moment before the change, and yet: how hasty this judgment turns out to be during the change into our enownment [Ereignis] itself. It is actually very little that Heidegger wanted to convey with his term “Ereignis,” since each new term is greedily snatched up by the cultural industry as a new guiding concept and thus rendered impotent (Herbert Marcuse described this well). Yet things have turned out even worse than that, now that at the Xth anniversary of Heidegger’s [birth/death] the long-awaited Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy) have appeared, whose subtitle is Vom Ereignis (On Enownment). Nothing is sacred anymore in postmodernity, not even one’s opponent, and everything serves the fashions as mere accessory. In the midst of the current debate, the historian Ott lost no time in using Heidegger’s aphorisms to catch the Heidegger the Nazi red-handed, in Ereignis of all places (“Is that Hitler or what?”). The Heidegger apologists, equally touching in their boundless ignorance and stubborn tenacity, cite a “second main work,” which is actually nothing more than a collection of notes. But those writings in which Heidegger, who saw himself only as a forerunner, came the furthest, have yet to be published. Their tone is more earnestly questioning than knowing.
Let us nevertheless risk an attempt to decipher the signature of the world after the turning point: artificial life as an enownment of technology shows itself to us when we have completed the turn from anthropocentric to anthropomorphic. In this radical reversal of the familiar world, a life technology informed by justice takes on the meaning of a responsibility for our own creation, which we alone encounter. Such a responsibility of Homo generator does not begin only when the consequences begin to appear; rather, it represents justice at its origin. It is in the act of creativity itself that humanity decides, humanity that we bring into every phenomenon but do not force onto the phenomenon.
Yet numerous objections raise themselves immediately: is it not the “postmodern Prometheus” that will one day be manufactured by the biotech industry that is being aimed at here? But would it not be the pinnacle of anthropocentrism to want to shoulder the burden of the earth like Atlas? How can we be so presumptuous as to assume that we, with our so terribly limited knowledge, can ever hope to take on the care of the universe?
These objections falsely imply that we have a choice and that we know, contrary to all appearances, that we bear no responsibility for a just world. Such purported knowledge, however, would be anthropocentric presumptuousness, while the anthropomorphic constitution of the technological world reveals itself to anyone who is prepared to apprehend reality as it is in and of itself for us. Artificial life is no utopia and no aspired-to goal; it is the simple description of a phenomenon: this is the way we live. We just don’t want to admit it - to the detriment of everyone. What would change after the turning point? How would we live if we were to live as we really live, as the “artificial ones of nature,” as life-artists in Nietzsche’s project?
Let us take two examples, which despite their disparity share an underground interconnection, to illustrate this crucial question. What mass tourism and euthanasia have in common is that both are artificial phenomena that would not be possible in such an acute form without the development of modern technology (hardware and software). The fact that good things are destroyed by overuse has certainly been observed for quite some time now by the technological world, and euthanasia is a part of most cultures. But modern technology has drastically broadened the scope of these phenomena. What was once an extremely private situation became state-sanctioned murder (in the case of euthanasia in the Third Reich), and the destruction of entire landscapes (in the case of modern mass tourism). They are certainly not the same thing, but both were conceived and carried out in the same mania of anthropocentric despotism. Today, the question of euthanasia for the mentally ill or severely disabled no longer arises, for no serious challenge may be made to their right to life. The problem arises when modern medical technology makes possible the survival of severely disabled persons - either newborns or accident victims - who previously would never have had a chance of short-term or long-term survival. What was formerly interpreted and accepted as the will of God or fate or the natural course of things, is now entirely our responsibility. In the destruction of landscapes and in the emergence of the severely disabled, we are the source of the suffering, and not simply the ones affected. Such responsibility that flows from justice can be misinterpreted as the power over life and death, over good and evil, or else justice can be construed as the mission to do justice to a phenomenon in all its diversity.
Creative responsibility that respects its own anthropomorphic constitution begins with a refusal, which is not an attempt to escape responsibility for justice, but quite the opposite: a necessary precondition for it. We must refuse to recognize problems as they are posed to us: objective necessities, justified interests, societal goals, assessment of consequences, codified or unwritten rights - all these conspire to relieve us of responsibility at the source. What is demanded of us instead is that we share the burdens and share in the solutions to problems whose emergence we had nothing to do with. “Guilt by association” is hardly a sufficient legitimation of the call for commitment and support. The miscarried and generally botched present-day world must face its problems on its own. The oft-maligned postmodern escapism is the justified refusal to reward, even by acknowledgement, the perpetrators for their deeds. But this does not mean that we are going to put up with the poisoning of our waters or the impoverishment of the Third World. On the contrary, our refusal to acknowledge prefabricated problems and help implement their supposedly realistic solutions is the very thing that enables us to generate our own world and to stake our entire existence on its emergence. Homo generator will not allow himself to lose, through compromise, his right of origin. He insists upon he fulfillment of the world, when others have long since opted for the lesser evil.
External yardsticks are as unnecessary to the art of life as they are to any other art. Every new fulfillment sets its own benchmark; it shows itself to us and convinces us on its own merits as soon as it meets with an aesthetic experience. This aesthetic experience is a decisive moment in the praxis of justice in artificial life, and much depends on our gaining practice in such a sensitivity, on our incorporating it, as a path, into our education. As proof that we are capable of the highest degree of sensitivity, we need only look to the people who every day are psychologically destroyed by contemporary reality, or who defy it with creative action; to eco-saboteurs as well as to the new modes of living. Ethics as the beauty of the fulfillment of a phenomenon is just as striking and palpable as is non-fulfillment, disruption, and destruction, the waywardness and obstruction of the present.
The concrete meaning of this in the case of euthanasia is that only necessary suffering has a place in artificial life, only unavoidable pain, only anxiety and loss, whereas self-inflicted suffering possesses no rights and cannot represent a problem. If a doctor is confronted with a newborn with an “open defect in the vicinity of the cervical and thoracic vertebrae, with a discharge of cerebrospinal fluid” [3], then one can no longer even speak of responsibility, but can only feel pity. No rule can be derived from such cases. Instead, anthropomorphic justice demands that doctors (and the rest of us as well) do all they can to prevent severe disabilities in the first place, and forbids them to knowingly condemn to martyrdom any creature capable of feeling pain. Prevention, early diagnostics, accident prevention, radical changes to the transportation system - there are many unattempted ways of attacking at its origin the problem of having to decide for others what a life worth living is, of preventing this problem from arising at all. [Is this what you want to say?] Mass tourism, too, is also a kind of cancer that can be healed when one returns to the origins and does not become entangled in the web of conflicting interests. We know quite well what a “therapeutic” landscape is supposed to look like, just as we are quite aware that the mass tourist by virtue of his existence destroys the very thing for which he has paid. Thus, the vacation landscape should be treated as a scarce commodity that in post-capitalist society is distributed neither in exchange for money nor on the basis of nationality or privilege. Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth, to choose an unusual example, has already demonstrated how equality and justice can be preserved: by computer-generated random selection, whereby the winner must agree to being excluded from future lotteries for several years hence.
In the sphere [Horizont] of artificial life, justice, which legitimized itself as responsibility toward others and was a mask for anthropocentric dominion, becomes a “released” [gelassen] praxis of creative interaction with the world. This releasement is not resignatory, but militant to the point of communication break-off. For the goal is not mutual understanding among people. Rather, what must fulfill itself is the phenomenon and the situation in which we, as those responsible for justice, are in no way privileged. Thinking after Heidegger’s fall denies itself by turning away from and distorting the prevailing world view and thus it is in the very act of negation that it corresponds to the end of metaphysics. This is also the meaning of authentic postmodernity and the actual reason for its surprising persistence. But philosophical thinking cannot remain negative in the long run, for it is magically attracted by the already existing other world, which our problems of today have only obstructed: artificial life. Homo generator exists, if we only dare to exist it. Prize-winning pedigree pigs in London recently refused to drink the local water, despite a severe heat wave. They insisted on clean water and were apparently prepared to did for it.[4] In the quality of our resistance, we should not let these London pigs surpass us in life technology.
V. Technoculture: the praxis of hyperperception
Technoculture reveals itself as the symbiosis of modern technology and postmodernity. This amalgamation of human activity and zeitgeist is a well-known phenomenon. It only becomes surprising when one takes a closer look at it. According to traditional conceptions, culture is whatever is not nature, but Arnold Gehlen pointed out that the human being is “by nature a cultural entity,”[1] culture here being understood as the ordering of life and the interpretation of existence. With the help of culture, the human being determines her place in the world. The cultural identity thus attained is ethically not neutral and must be supplemented by cultural criticism, which has been fulminating against the “curse of technology” since the turn of the century […since the beginning of the 20th century]. The eminent cultural critic Günther Anders associates modern technology with the apocalypse; Auschwitz and Hiroshima are his “negative muses.” What has technology made of us? We live in a “world of apparatus” and treat nature as a “mine to be exploited.” According to Anders, the failure to think of and keep in mind the consequences of technical activity is irrational. Working from the tradition of a phenomenological criticism of technology, Anders diagnosed in his primary work the irreversible “antiquatedness of the human being.”[2] But how could this cultural criticism, which still admits of norms, as cryptic as they may be, fail to take notice of Adorno’s dictum which in Negative Dialectics asserted the “failure of culture” [Mißlingen der Kultur]? “All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is rubbish.”[3] For Adorno, meaning and values, all that is lofty and progressive, have been unmasked as ideology. As is generally known, postmodernity concludes from this fundamental criticism that norms, identity, and universality are to be dispensed with and that the free play of the world must not be burdened with anthropocentric objections. What is capable of embodying culture [kulturfähig] is a kind of minimal ethics and trash art that views its “weakness” (Vattimo) as its actual virtue, and thus neither in Adorno’s nor Anders’s sense.
But freed from the role of molding the human and [Weltenrichter - do you mean “Welteinrichter”?] and fitting out the world, another culture has developed, which neither practices arrogant exclusion nor views everyday life with condescension. Modern technology is no longer derided as an opponent, but rather recognized as our present way of life, all aspects of which are subject to technology’s influence. Technology and culture have entered into a symbiosis which demonstrates its vitality every day. The culture bound up with technology has become as multinational and transcultural as the latter’s planetary proliferation. A technoculture, both technology and culture present Janus faces, which Heidegger has postulated [/conceptualized] as Gestell and Ereignis, and which recur in my book Technik und Gelassenheit in the differentiation between death technology and life technology. Whether premature death or a life of releasement - it is the same technology that contains these possibilities. The decision as to whether cyborgs, those future amalgamations of machine and human being, are to become “technofascists” or Homo generator, will not be made outside the realm of technoculture.[5] An active technoculture is a “wish machine,” such as Deleuze and Guattari have postulated in Anti-Oedipus, and expresses in its technological fantasies unquestionably legitimate wishes. The erstwhile compartmentalization of pop culture and serious art, which threatened the freedom of imagination and interaction, has become a differentiation between styles. Mainstream culture no longer bears a derogatory connotation; technical reproducibility is seen as an opportunity, and that which my neighbor possesses can also have an “aura.”
Yet the status of art in technoculture is by no means unthreatened; it’s just that the danger has become immanent. Reduced to a form of information society and without access to the sublime, to irony or experimentation, art would lose its culture if it could no longer be “humanized nature (Kojima)[6] and celebrate a “life technology of extravagance”.[7] But in light of a reality that no longer differentiates between nature and culture, that realizes its dreams in the computer and that is becoming increasingly virtual, art is challenged to strengthen perception and intensify its individuality.
VI. On the difference between artistic and philosophical perception
Perception in its excessive form of hyperperception discovers in the life-world changes vis-à-vis origins [discovers things in the life-world that have changed from their origins]. Artistic hyperperception is the actual opening of the artistic eye; in it, the events become visible and reveal themselves to the senses of the artist. Philosophical hyperperception describes how the [change vis-à-vis origin] announces itself in language, image, and institution, and formulates in concept, context, and question the meaning of the change. Such a concept of hyperperception should not determine, but rather render visible, how hyperperception initially and usually occurs. The implied division of labor between artistic and philosophical hyperperception, between the [“Es gibt welt”] of art on the one hand and systematic understanding on the other, also remains open for border crossings. Both modes of perception need each other and occur, in the artist as well as in the philosopher, often side by side, and sometimes as an amalgamation [ungetrennt].
This provisional definition of the praxis of hyperperception has learned from the phenomenology of perception how it is performed by the great teachers of phenomenology, and does not refer to traditional conceptions of perception by thinkers from Aristotle to Kant. For Aristotle conceived of perception as fundamentally passive[8], a prejudice with a long chain of consequences. Kant was the first to acknowledge perception as a product of our activity, as Schopenhauer pointed out[9], but for Kant this only applied to the senses. the decisive role for intuition [Anschauung], this active perception, is laid out in Kant’s well-known principle: concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Nietzsche understood perceptual activity as selection, but immediately added that it is “easier to replicate than to perceive.” Yet post-Kantian philosophy on the whole is looking for a perception capable of doing more than merely providing rationality with eyes. Hegel, for all his conceptual acrobatics, is of course an eminent phenomenologist as well, and with dialectical limberness shows himself capable of discerning widely overlooked details and perspectives. Schopenhauer and the Romantics bring the body and feelings into the center of self-perception, while Feuerbach and Marx pull forth the sensual and economically-entangled human being from the darkness of history. Nietzsche’s Dionysius is made symbol and paradigm of a playful perception of the overabundance of life, and ever since, hyperperception has been the signature of the artist-philosopher.[5] For a phenomenology of perception that points back to hyperperception, the world is not what we think up or manufacture, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, what we live through[10], the life process before all interpretation, Husserl’s “primordial streaming” (“Urströmen”). The world forms itself before our eyes, but we still need to look actively and, as Marcel Proust puts it, to “sympathize masterfully.” Being needs the human being in order to “present” [anwesen], as Heidegger emphasized. Artistic hyperperception, by virtue of its often extreme subjectivity, is of all forms of apprehension of phenomena the one most open to the world. There is [Es gibt, “it gives” (Heidegger)] world in the work of art, truth is set in motion [ins Werk gesetzt] the life-world becomes visible as convocation of human being and thing. Schopenhauer compared this artistic perception to a “disinterested mirror,” yet without taking away from the artist the samurai’s ability to carry out, from a state of “ingenious calm” (Jean Paul), his stroke of genius.[11] In Nietzsche, the will to art becomes decisively visible: in the anthropocentric will to lie, the meaning of perception is initially obscured, only to shine forth once again anthropomorphically, in the hyperperception of active nihilism, more brightly in Schopenhauer’s sense than ever before.[6]
Translated by Daniel Theisen