Wolfgang Schirmacher - The Virtual Human - A Trans Without Qualities
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. "The Virtual Human - A Trans Without Qualities." In: Oswald Schwemmer, Reinhard Margreiter, Karen Joisten, Erwin Fiala, Klaus Wiegerling, Emil Kettering, Stefan Weber, Theo Hug, Reinhard Knodt, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Wolfgang Müller Funk. Anthropologie der Medien - Mensch und Kommunikationstechnologien. 2002. 185 pages, Language: English, ISBN: 3923834187.
Wolfgang Schirmacher - The Virtual Human - A Trans Without Qualities
Prefatory Note on Method
To guard against potential misunderstandings, I would like to point out that in my understanding, technologies never represent mere tools that humans can use for good or evil ends. Not even the admittedly more precise definition of tools as extensions of our sensory organs (television = eye) accurately characterizes the actual state of affairs: it is in technologies that we give form to the human world in accordance with our ideas. Technologies are thus anthropomorphic modes of existence, in a strict sense life technologies, and in this regard there is no difference between organic, mechanical, or cybernetic technologies.
It is equally important not to fall prey to the fallacy of construing media and the internet as substitute worlds. Anthropologically, the aim is never to replace (even if such does occur in fact and springs from the intentions of individuals), but to augment. The urges and instincts of stone age people have not died within us any more than virtuality will ever replace that to which we presently refer as reality. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described as a rhizome that which resists the demands of the Either/Or and gives itself over to the flow of the And.[1]
Furthermore, one should not forget that humans are characterized not solely by mortality, but by natality as well: the thinkers and lovers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt [traced this curve(?)/recognized this/pointed this out (hat diesen Bogen geschlagen]. Mortality should ideally caution us to withhold judgment (not to mention condemnation) of modes of life [Lebensformen] that we will experience in all likelihood only in their early stages. At issue here is not the world of the current generation of adults! Yet this, too, must be borne in mind: our natality, i.e. the ability to begin anew, to do things differently than before (characterized by Arendt as the essence of the political) completely justifies our curiosity about the unknown (variously damned and praised) land of media. “Forever young,” we are not to be hindered by any biological age from encountering and getting to know the unexpected and the unheard-of.
1. The Anthropology of the Virtual Human
There is nothing new about the notion [Bestimmung] of the “virtual human.” Contemplation of human nature, philosophical anthropology, has always emphasized openness as the existential [I wasn’t aware that “Existential” could be used as a noun – is there another term you’d like me to use?] that determines us [The German sentence seems to be missing a direct object – should there be a “sich” in there, or is “die philosophische Anthropologie, die Offenheit” or simply “die Offenheit” the direct object? As it stands, the sentence in German is ambiguous. I went with the last option.] While we may be born into certain conditions, nothing can keep us there: the human being is a “thrown-down sketch” (“geworfener Entwurf”) (Heidegger), a project about which the initial conditions (genetic and social) are known (or will be known in the future), but whose outcome is never known. Friedrich Nietzsche characterized the human being as “the undetermined animal;” the philosophical anthropologists of 1920s Germany characterized him as the “errant creature of evolution,” the incorrigibly deficient being” and a “mistake of nature.” [The German sentence initially misleads the reader into thinking that „Irrläufer der Evolution“ , unverbesserliches „Mängelwesen“ und „Irrtum der Natur“ belong to the group of Nietzsche’s characterizations of the human being. Splitting the German sentence in two would eliminate this ambiguity, i.e. “…den Menschen charakterisiert. Als „Irrläufer der Evolution“…] Hellmuth Plessner, the most important member of this group, pointed out in his work “The stages of the Organic and the Human Being” [check if title has been translated] (“Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch”) (1928) that our place in the cosmos is in principle “eccentric.” By relating to ourselves (or as Heidegger puts it, by… [i.e. I need to speak with you about this quote. One question: can I take this: “oder wie HEIDEGGER sagt, es uns in unserem Sein und dieses Sein selbst geht” to mean this?: “oder wie HEIDEGGER sagt, indem es uns in unserem Sein und dieses Sein selbst geht…”]), we are always already trans, those who transcend ourselves. According to Plessner’s correct analysis, we take up vis-à-vis our environment a position chosen by ourselves and control with the aid of our consciousness this openness of our borders [Grenzen]. Even our subconscious ¬– at any rate in Jacques Lacan’s estimation – urges us to do whatever it is we dare to do.[2] The world is our idea, even if it is the case that according to Arthur Schopenhauer no subject is thinkable without an object, nor any object without a subject.[3]
Immanuel Kant’s central question, “What does it mean to be human?,” can be answered only thus: it means to be virtual, a creature of possibility, open to an unknown future, a trans full of undreamt-of qualities. The writer and engineer Robert Musil, in his book-of-the-century The Man Without Qualities,” (1981 [date OK? or 1930/1932?]) conjured forth the horrifying vision of a technology that has become autonomous. In this negative vision, the human being has been reduced to a statistical figure whose potential has become its weakness, and only transgression can promise a taste of the real. But endless possibilities need not lead to the indecisiveness that leaves the business of governing to the machines; they can urge the individual human being to rigorously grasp each and every chance. The American way of life, as it is now spread around the globe, serves as a good positive and negative example. Yet there would be no development at all (let alone progress) if our distant stone-age ancestor had not already been a virtual human, designed [entworfen] in light of his possibilities the same way as the human at the beginning of the 21st century.
What is now starting to change fundamentally is the consciousness of this virtuality. What once appeared as a curse, to lack a locus and a fixed identity, is now grasped as an opportunity. Before their computers sit programmers, graphic designers, even philosophers, who design ever better, more complex, and braver new worlds. Peter Sloterdijk speaks of a “crisis of space,” for the recognition of our general virtuality defies the familiar notions of space and spatiality.[4] As the “artificial ones of nature” (Plessner), we find ourselves not merely in a “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger); rather, we are to be defined [sind…zu bestimmen] as an active “being-for-the-world” (Deleuze).[5] Concretely, this means that humans bring forth worlds and do not merely dwell in them.
Yet would it not be conceivable that our possibilities culminate in the act of doing away with us? “What comes after us?” asked the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in its special millennium edition (1/1999) and imagined a possible future without humans as we know them: “No species persists for eternity. This law makes exceptions for only the most primitive of life forms… Let us look in the mirror: nowhere do we see a sign that the current state of evolution is an optimum.” Many prophets of the future believe that mankind is already working on its successor, the übermensch, a post-human being described prosaically: “Virtual reality gives its perceptions a new space… The physical and psychic person becomes increasingly artificial, a plan made real. The technologies of brain transplantation and targeted consciousness-expanding drugs are still in their earliest stages of development and yet they point ahead toward the end of that which evolution has brought about with such enormous effort. While it is true that in culture, we have always had a way to reinvent ourselves, but we may be at the threshold of a new phase: the rebuilding of body, mind, and emotions.”
How much self-hatred lies at the heart of such fantasies of doing away with ourselves, how strong is the belief in a “better beyond” that with the help of instrumental technology can be forced back into the here and now? With the Terminator films, Hollywood has set to words and images this technological endgame between good and evil, whereby Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the fighting robot, is allowed to switch from one side to the other. A person who seems to have had quite enough of his fellow humans is the German-American roboticist Hans Moravec: “The most intelligent machines today have computer brains whose capacity is equivalent to the brains of insects… But the machines will one day surpass us [werden sich von uns fortentwickeln]. The universe will inherit super-intelligent machines, and biological humans, their predecessors, will be relegated to a historical memory.” With such dim prospects, one of our most promising opportunities is our own death! [Is this what you want to say?] Still, it must be remembered that neither Moravec nor his critics were ever able to find out who is now right – it is thus only ever a matter of what ends one wishes to achieve in one’s work. Nevertheless, none of us can determine in advance the indirect results of our own actions (or inaction), for the nexus (rhizome) of possibilities is decidedly too complex. Thus, it may well be the case that the virtual human is the one who will overcome humans as we know them, but this means little sub specie aeternitatis. Since no historical human being can claim to be the human being par excellence, one need not regret at all the overcoming of a particular breed of humans: the human being is what the human being becomes – no more, no less.
2. Ontology of Fictitious Realities
In which reality do we live? One speaks today in America of the “alchemy of new technologies,” which makes the old dream come true: transforming leaden reality into a golden age of unlimited possibilities (= virtuality). No doubt, the notion of alchemy describes a decisive trait of the reconstruction of reality carried out with the aid of technology [is this what you meant to say?]: we consciously violate the rules of natural life in order to create an artificial life that better accords with our wishes. The world as wish machine, as Deleuze and Felix Guattari predicted in Anti Oedipus (178). We acknowledge less and less the necessity of accepting fatalistically the biblical travail of existence. When the fury of nature still reveals itself (as in the raging storms with the catchy feminine and masculine names) or when the harshness of personal fate cannot be averted (as with cancer), we follow the plot as we would in a disaster movie. We are secretly fascinated and yet at the same time indignant that such a thing is still possible. Particularly to a (young) generation who has grown up taking the various technologies for granted, wars are seen as mere video games (Gulf War), horror films (Bosnia), or as (actually rather anachronistic) bomber films (Kosovo). The [gelingende] successful alchemy that transforms naturalness into artificiality is at any rate operating under full steam and is bringing forth a world that might resemble the familiar one but is in fact quite different from it.
Yet what is this, the vexingly unfamiliar within the familiar reality, and who can actually perceive it? It is at this juncture that many controversies are raised! Does it vex us that we generate a world no longer from a test tube (as we did in the first half of the 20th century), but from the computer? What are the consequences of this? Biochemistry augmented nature at first only with things that came from nature (this way of viewing the matter goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who exemplified this phenomenon with the wine grape). Information technology, on the other hand, generates a second, a more humane nature, which orients itself only occasionally to the first (mostly in order to learn something useful to the development of new technologies). Hand in hand with this goes a radical reinterpretation (not even a conscious one) of the “Role of the Human Being in the Cosmos” (Max Scheler): rather than our being a part of nature, nature becomes a part of us. Our building of a solely human world and our adopting of anthropomorphicity as our supreme measure, accords completely with ecological strivings and with the limits of growth. Our protection of nature is self-preservation.
Yet what has become of our power of judgment? How, for example, do we deal with the obvious aesthetic impoverishment such as is brought about by architecture from the computer or the rather tedious aesthetic of computer art? Is there a significant difference between the films Terminator 1 and Terminator 2, between the killer-machine played by Schwarzenegger and the next-generation computer-simulated model? And with cartoons, is it not obvious how aesthetically superior the hand-drawn Bugs Bunny is to the computer-generated heroes of Toy Story? Yet for which perception do these observations hold true? Won’t things be completely different for the children of Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 (there are no longer any children of Marx and Coca-Cola)? For them, the natural world looks like nostalgic black-and-white photography! Their reality is at present populated by Pokemons, constantly reproducing Japanese pocket monsters, and you have to catch all of them! The simulacrum needs no paradigm, as Jean Baudrillard has long since recognized, but how do we believers in reality deal with this situation?
So is this the point of controversy: Will the machine with its perfect uniformity triumph over the fallible, notoriously ambivalent human being? Vehement controversy has raged about this question for some time now, and yet the question itself seems to have been posed incorrectly. Whether technology is to become autonomous or remain controllable is a power question, which aims at control, and thus exactly the kind of outmoded thinking that is not even tenable with the military any longer. For leadership decisions are made quite differently today; they are feedback processes dependent on complex data, and have made hierarchies long since obsolete. What counts in the world of human beings is that which is simplistically called the market, the number of the satisfied, and machines are never asked whether they are satisfied. As Mitchell Feigenbaum, the Mozart of chaos theory, has demonstrated in the Hammond Atlas of the World, it is technically possible to teach a computer to draw a straight line that we would experience as beautiful (because of its irregularity). But the teaching process turned out to require an extreme effort, and the program development cost millions. It is this economic consideration, not a technical constraint, that is the reason why architecture programs produce (for the present) “ugly” buildings. Only George Lucas in Hollywood (with the best machines money can buy) has been able to come up with simulations marked by an increasing degree of anthropomorphicity. It is as a film, Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace (1999), that the past looms up from out of the future – just as Heidegger once said about the legacy of the Greeks. Who even remembers the tiny green screens of the first-generation computers that seemed to force us to adapt our seeing habits to the computer. Today, mass production (one of the most powerful weapons against economic shortsightedness) has made gigantic monitors so cheap that this interface between the human and the machine functions more and more seamlessly, and more and more to our taste.
Thus the question is not who controls the perception of the world, for humans have always answered this question themselves [is this what you’re saying?]: the answer is humans, and always will be, until the “last human” (Nietzsche). The real question is this: How can our technologies effectively realize the untapped potential of humans; how can they transform our mental virtualities into reality? The actual challenge is to prevent this development process (which does not mean the same thing as progress) from ever coming to an end. Aristotle, the father of all science, has already provided us with the suitable maxim: potential stands above reality. What was once merely thinkable, is now being built as a matter of course!
Yet weighty questions remain: in the face of this anthropological openness, how does one gain an identity of one’s own, which as temporary as it may be, is nevertheless stylistically instructive for the formation of the personality? We will have to learn that evanescence and effectiveness are not mutually exclusive aims. On the contrary: this impermanent “myself,” barely perceptible and yet a unique motivation for my worlds of ethics, exists behind our backs as an integral part of the good life.[6] But how do I at the same time let the “face of the other” (Emmanuel Levinas) shine forth, such an important invention of mine, without which I, left by myself, would soon be bored to death (Baudrillard)?
Vilem Flusser advocated an ontology of bottomlessness that takes seriously the human as self-designed being [Selbstentwurf].[7] Laying down artificial floors (something along the lines of what Hans Jonas has in mind when he speaks of founding a new religion) is a possible but only locally effective expedient here. Believers must repress the fact that they invented the gods, and this forced amnesia has consequences that go far beyond religious faith. As Nietzsche observed, anyone who can live without falsehood must become a free artist-technologist, or else he will become the victim of his own [back world?? Hinterwelt]. The brave acknowledgment of bottomlessness, on the other hand, encourages an existence of birdlike soaring that settles only occasionally on an imaginary branch. Such openness to existence can succeed [gelingen] only through our life technologies. Just as the bird’s ability to fly makes possible its particular mode of being, it is our technologies – from our first breath all the way to the omnipresent media – that preserve us in anthropomorphic being. One of these life technologies is identity: punctual self-ascertainment and the fictitious (because it has always just been left) jumping-off-place of our world-behavior. Our identity is punctual (in the word’s “pointlike” sense, not its “habitually on time” sense) and fictitious because it can never be codified, and is reinvented in every interpretation: we never step twice into the same river. Not even memory is reliable, since we remember differently every time, and are notorious blurrers of our horizons (HANS-GEORG GADAMER).
While the human being as creature of media is characterized by a schizophrenic consciousness, a multiple personality whose core is indiscernible, the recognition of this character is not necessarily tantamount to a cultural-critical complaint. The seduction to schizophrenia that emanates from the media is at the same time a challenge to us to come up with a self-[Entwurf]: we are Homo generator, the self-generating being, and with human beings, the only thing that persists is change.
3. The return of the real: the Columbine High School massacre
But do not real limits exist for this self-[Entwurf]? Can all outgrowths of the virtual world, with its emphasis on cybersex and cyber-killing, be endorsed? Is it not the return of the real (Baudrillard) that is now being observed, a reality check that often ends in disaster for the imaginations of cyberspace? The Columbine High School massacre is still fresh in the world’s memory. On April 20th (Adolf Hitler’s birthday), two 17-year-old students there killed 12 fellow students and one teacher before killing themselves. From the six videotapes they recorded before carrying out their act, it is now known that they had planned to kill 250 people with homemade bombs and thereby launch a worldwide uprising of the oppressed. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris called their act of revenge “our own last judgment,” [check quote] but the bombs failed to go off, so that they had to rely on guns. The two students were portrayed as crazy outsiders, racist Nazis, and as infusion of evil into an innocent world. The facts that the two had their own website and loved violent computer games like Doom were quickly used to demonize the new media.
But this tragic incident can also be interpreted another way, and it must be pointed out, to the credit of the American media, that at least the New York Times considered this interpretation after the initial shock: two highly intelligent students who were by no means racists (the attack was actually supposed to take place on April 19, and its postponement to Hitler’s birthday was a coincidence) were tyrannized as outsiders in a school system that gives priority to athletes and social conformists.
The two perpetrators were characterized by one of the football players as “rejects and sick fags” [check quote]. The dominance of mediocrity at Columbine High School was not merely atmospheric, but manifested itself in the form of physical harassment in the lunchroom and fistfights, the likes of which one hopes would have ended with the bully-culture of elementary school. In their video testament, Dylan and Eric named all the people who had mistreated them since their grade-school days, relatives included. They claimed their rage had been growing for years and was breaking forth now that their situation had grown not better, but worse. It must be pointed out that the two students expressly absolved their parents of any guilt; Eric in particular apologizes in moving words to his parents for what he will do to them. (Meanwhile, both sets of parents, who did not have the least thing to do with the deeds of their sons, have been sued for damages by the victims’ families for the amount of 250 million dollars.)
According to the notions and unwritten rules of American culture, Eric and Dylan (and their friends from the Trenchcoat Mafia) should have endured this daily harassment and ridicule over their appearance (face, hair, clothing) as good losers, and should have looked forward to their days at an elite college when the situation would be reversed. Instead, they acted like the barons [Freiherren unter allen Umständen – is this a quote?] who, in Ernst Jünger’s provocative definition, are prepared to kill, and above all to kill themselves. It is an open secret that a human being only then becomes free when the threat of being killed no longer appears threatening. One knows it, but prefers not to talk about it. For no one is more dangerous than the one prepared to die, for in his unwillingness to compromise he is invincible, [ein Ernstfall des Menschen in der Revolte – not sure what you mean here] (ALBERT CAMUS) [source?]. Suicides among young people are not unusual; each of us must certainly remember moments in our youth when life did not seem worth living. But society has reached the consensus that a youth oppressed by his environment must accept his role as a victim. Thus, while his suicide may express accusation, it nevertheless remains without consequences. This scenario contains no provision for the unfortunate victim’s sudden transformation into judge (and executioner), which constitutes a grave breach of the rules. Where would it lead if all the suicides in schools were to take their tormentors (from the ranks of teachers and fellow students alike) with them on that long journey into the night? It would lead dangerously close to that universal justice of which Schopenhauer speaks, which [die zum Minimalrecht einer Gesellschaft niemals paßt – not sure what you mean here]. Eric and Dylan, who had been treated like dirt, wanted to haunt the survivors like a nightmare, and there is much to indicate that they have succeeded. Mutual hate has increased, and the victims’ families have long since begun quarreling about the distribution of the donations made in the wake of the massacre.
In their video testament, Eric and Dylan speculate whether Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino will buy the film rights to the Last Judgment of Columbine. The role played by the new media is revealing as well, but in a different way than one would think. Cyberkill games like Doom did not cause this act! While it is true that constant exposure to media violence can have a hardening and deadening effect, this argument falls flat when one compares the effects of media violence with those of the very real violence to which the two students were subjected. Constant humiliation and fear, mortal fear, are caused by playground bullies, and adults who try to play this down have only repressed how much they themselves have suffered from it. What cannot be denied is that the way Eric and Dylan carried out the shootings reflected the influence of video games, to the extent that such games provide excellent training in hand-eye coordination. On the other hand, they shot their victims at such close range that they could hardly have missed, regardless of what kind of training they had had.
Yet the influence of the new media revealed itself in the fact that the two students got up the courage (others would say arrogance and insolence) to strike back, with any means necessary, at their tormentors and at the system that wore them down. The law calls this “self-defense,” even if the two shooters clearly used excessive force in this case. All of America wondered how these humiliated outsiders, whose sense of self-worth must have hovered close to zero, could have turned into powerful judges over life and death. Where did they get the certainty that they had the right to punish others, since the role accorded to them by society was clearly that of recipients of punishment? Perplexed investigators explain today that Dylan and Eric had wanted to become famous, and desired a greater portion of fame than the 15 minutes allotted to each of us by Andy Warhol. But it was that very hope of making it big, understandable in any young person, that seemed to have been vigorously extinguished in the two.
The explanation is simple: Eric and Dylan had found in the internet their true peers, who lived scattered in various unknown locations and yet constituted a virtual community online. The internet gains particular significance for those who feel isolated, for whatever reason, in the environments in which they were brought up. One cannot overestimate the great advantage of the internet: that one can choose for oneself one’s own communication partners. Unlike in the conventional life-world, where the choice is usually limited, the individual can search the entire internet for people who share his world view. In chatrooms, listservs, gaming communities, one can meet like-minded people – millions of them. Eric and Dylan, through their web presence and internet video game skills, enjoyed considerable respect as members of what Flusser termed a freely chosen family [or did he call it something else?] The two students must have felt all the more keenly the sting of the injustice perpetrated on them by their real environment: a world into which they were thrown and which they could leave only at the price of their presumable self-destruction. Eric, whose father is an officer, had indeed made an attempt to break out; he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps but there, too, he was turned away. One of the most disturbing moments in the video testament was when the two perpetrators, who are also victims, expressed the naively religious belief that they would go to a better world after their deaths.
It was the return to the real that doomed these two young people and their victims. The virtual communities of the internet can offer effective support only to those who have freed themselves from the spell of reality and who view the so-called real world as but one world (admittedly a necessary one) among others. Dylan and Eric returned to the reality of guns and bombs, took the lives of others, and destroyed themselves forever – an anachronism within the sphere of the virtual, a conclusion without openness, a case of malpractice in artificial life [or do you have a better way to replicate Kunstfehler/Künstlichkeit?]. Thus it is not without irony that the return to the real, yearned for by many as an antidote to postmodern arbitrariness, transpires in the form of mass murder.
4. Ethics of Virtual Life
A turning (Heidegger) toward the media, such as is currently taking place in the form of what Reinhard Margreiter refers to as the “medial turn,” would conceive of media as the place without location where we carry out an ethical life. The third globalization (Sloterdijk) now makes possible a global behavior [Weltverhalten] in which such anthropological constants as love, hate, and schadenfreude remain recognizable yet can still be bracketed [eingeklammert] (Edmund Husserl); i.e., stripped of their direct efficacy. We do not live exclusively in media (we merely do so with increasing frequency), but we do go there to confirm our own existence. Does my life succeed [gelingen]? This question, fundamental to any ethics, that can be answered only on an individual basis (which Dylan and Eric answered with an emphatic no) is posed perpetually by us (and others) in the media. In a precise sense, the media are our autobiography: we inscribe our life in the media, at least to the extent possible. A Spielberg film would indeed have the lives of Eric and Dylan succeed [gelingen] after the fact, but only if the futility of their escape to reality could be made clear.
As long as interactive media remain in their beginning stage, our life will be inscribed in the media by others, by the programming executives and creative personnel, with more or less regard for us, the spectators. The only means we have at our disposal for changing the text of the mass media are the viewer ratings! But in the internet, the situation is already starting to look different. Without active participation, which leads to more and more refined representation and surfing techniques, this medium will remain inaccessible. Without creative intelligence we will quickly fall prey to corporate interests, just like in real life. Yet for netizens, the true world citizens, a (somewhat altered) maxim by Goethe applies: “Tell me with whom you surf, and I will tell you who you are!” The cybergenius who invokes (produces) the net in us stands in need of constant improvement. Perhaps anyone can be a Mozart or a Picasso if he or she only has the right software, but without personal effort (and the occasional flash of genius) nothing is going to happen here, either. Ability is indeed a requirement here (not just good intentions) for stimulating the genius of others via media and thus turning appearance into reality. Electracy (Gregory Ulmer) is the ability to carry out electronic communication, and it is a skill that must be learned, just like speaking, reading, and writing.
Yet the media contribute to a good life (the domain of ethics) only if they do not set out to do so. The images propagated by advertising and soap operas of the good life are lies and distortions. Only when virtual life in the media becomes a matter of course and founds a virtual family behind our backs (Dawnja Burris)(8) does another existence start to develop. The virtual human, this trans full of unexpected qualities, preexists every theory that tries to explain it, and can be described in retrospect, but never prescribed. Ethics as dwelling with oneself and with the things has also always been medial, as far back as the oral cultures with their epics we lived a medial life, long before it attempted to capture reflection in concepts. In the development from orality to literacy to electronic communication, none of this has changed fundamentally: the media as life technology precede the truth technology of philosophy.
The successes and failures [Gelingen und Misslingen] of our medial life must not be ignored, but given careful attention. But attention does not mean a simple trashing of the media, as well-thought-out or unreflected as such a trashing might be. Nor does it mean the creation of arbitrary standards for a virtual life. Instead, ethical attention urges us to enjoy our media experiences and the insights gained through them as one would enjoy a remarkable film, but to forget as quickly as possible, on the way home, what pleased or displeased us. This apparently paradoxical interplay of attention and forgetting can only with great difficulty be given a theoretical basis, but in a practical sense it is very much a part of our ordinary, everyday art of artificial life. The beautiful moment cannot stop and tarry, the auspicious encounter cannot be repeated – on pain of a reversal into bitter disappointment. Nevertheless, we need not fear that we have learned nothing from success and failure ([Gelingen und Misslingen] when we wisely refrain from transforming our medial experience into a theory (and set of instructions). For in the process of forgetting, we strengthen imperceptibly (and thus all the more enduringly) our feeling, our intuition, and our taste for that which is peculiar to ourselves alone. The trace of the moment remains invisible-visible, since we have refrained from developing Heidegger’s “wrong path” (Holzweg) (which leads into untrodden territory) into a road to happiness. Relinquishment gives, and the virtual human lives well when he has forgotten his virtuality. Even more: when he, as the mystic Meister Eckhart urged, can forget even this forgetting.
Translated by Daniel Theisen