[All 5 parts of this document have been concatentated into one file for this archive] Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.cyberpunk,alt.drugs,alt.politics.libertarian From: anderson@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au (Anthony Anderson) Subject: Technology & Freedom (I) Date: 1 Nov 1993 17:49:45 GMT FELLOW CYBERNAUTS, The title and the newsgroups that this has been posted to already provides the genre for this text. It is a draft of an honours thesis entitled 'Technology and Freedom', which outlines various philosophical approaches the technological and compares these to social institutions. The thesis is broken up into four components, of while this file is #1. The other 3 should follow. Anyway, i'm asking people to have a read of the document (it should only take a couple of hours), think of a query or two and post it to me (asap, the final draft is due *real* soon). These questions and responses (along with their origins if the speaker permits) will be included in the as yet unwritten fifth section. After all, there is no democracy without reciprocity. Thanks, A.J. Lev Anderson THESIS SUBMITTED AS A PARTIAL REQUIREMENT FOR BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS) IN POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY TITLE: Technology and Freedom SUBMITTED BY: anthony jon lev anderson SUPERVISOR: Michael Booth 0.0 ABSTRACT This thesis seeks to provide a method of studying the meaning, use and definition of technology and its role in individual and social freedom. Three particular approaches frameworks are used; existentialism and phenomonology to understand the interaction between individuals and technology, Critical Theory and psychoanalysis for the embodiment of technology into consciousness, and postmodernism for providing a context of understanding. The first section considers a central thesis of postmodernism; the rejection of universal Truth statements as a viable campaign of emancipation. However, as some critics of postmodernism have pointed out the overwhelming tendency to reject the "possibility of a 'pure' alternative to the system" (Lyotard) and the emphasis on "grammar forms of life" (White) have led to a de-emphasis on the material. The conclusion of the first section suggests that the postmodern approach to knowledge has given ontological priority of knowledge over being, and that this is directly related to the manifested failure of postmodernism to change the world. The second section of the thesis deals with the existentialist, semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to Being, technology and their concepts of freedom. Elaborating on the Heideggerean notion of technology as a mode of truth, technology is defined as a 'system of praxis'. Such an approach can be used for either a communicative (intersubjective) or instrumental (object) process. With this perspective, both the physical technology and the social institution can be analysed in terms of their relationship to the body and intersubjectivity. The third section of the thesis takes issue uses with both the concerns of the Critical Theory school of Marxism by applying the theoretical framework developed in the previous section in the form of a coherent political program. As with any political program which has an emphasis on the importance of Being over interpretation, a significant section of this chapter deals with an a critique of political economy. The fourth section of the thesis provides a suggested process for challenging notions of totality without devolving into ambivalence. In some sense, this represents an 'ethical guide' and the political program recommended in the previous section, and suggests that successful liberating social change can be achieved by giving people conscious control over technology. The final section of the thesis are commentaries and replies to a number of concerns that readers have expressed about the thesis. It is envisaged that this text is never going to be in its final form, and the current version is merely a small contribution to the ongoing liberation of the Subject from political and environmental conditions and conditioning. 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1.1 REASON FOR THE THESIS The climate in these days seems appropriate to abandon the concept of objective 'theory', and as such, i have few qualms in placing conscious reasoning alongside with personal experiences and personal hopes. If there is some truth in the concept of the 'postmodern', it lies in the increasing rejection of the metanarrative, whether it is scientific, liberal or Marxist. Among my own (almost entirely younger) peer group, steeped deeply in the post-punk subcultures, there is an overwhelming attitude of what Callinicos describes as "... the strange mixture of cultural and political pessimism and light-minded playfulness with which ... much of the contemporary Western intelligentsia apparently greets our own fin de siecle."(1) I write this thesis for them more than any other inspiration. Most commentators on postmodernism hold that such a situation is at least partially due to the successes and failures of the last period of social upheaval in the West, that is the late 1960's/early 1970's. The universality of lifestyle and ideology was defeated in that period, yet political structures remained, mostly, unchanged. The opinion i express is because postmodernism rejects the "possibility of a 'pure' alternative to the system"(2), political activism has been circumvented. In the 1960s the aim of the people in the streets was fundamental social change. Today, there is only angry, nihilistic, frustration - as the Los Angeles riots of 1992 have clearly shown. It is the attempt to build a theoretical model that can take account of (a) our increasingly technological life and (b) provide a serious political challenge to liberal capitalism that is the reason for this thesis. These objectives that are at least partially inspired by very broad multi- disciplinary studies i have taken at Murdoch (studying in five different schools)(3). If these aims seem to great then my inspiration comes from the words of the French revolt of 1968: "Be realistic, attempt the impossible."(4) 1.2 WRITING STYLE AND THESIS STRUCTURE This thesis is written in three specific writing styles; a stream of consciousness/cut and paste as used by James Joyce, William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, a methodical text with 'formula' summaries as used by Don Ihde, and the Platonic dialogue, which David Muschamp uses as a conclusion to "Political Thinkers". The thesis as a whole is highly structured, posing particular problems in point-by-point form. These structures are embedded in more general topics, all of which fall under the 'meta-topic' of "Technology and Freedom". In general, each of these general topics and specific problems are written in formal "academic style", yet also tries to captures the idea of 'writing fast, writing dense', to paraphrase Rudy Rucker.(5) Each general topic is introduced with a "stream of consciousness" section which seeks to capture the general 'feeling' of the topic. The shift from one topic to another allows subconscious structures to become conscious by associations of words and meanings(6). The style, unlike those in most academic texts, will be more similar to what is encountered in novels, particularly science fiction. Far more than academic texts, popular literature captures zeitgeist far more effectively. The dialogue style, as already mentioned in the abstract, is being used for the final section of thesis. The dialogue will embody a particular style and allows for incidental topics to be dealt with whilst the context of the thesis remains in focus. The dialogue is essentially argumentative and debating, allowing for potential criticisms to be brought to the agenda. The dialogue style is also used because i remain aware that, unlike the physical sciences or Emile Durkheim, i am writing for, about and to, human subjects. These actors are with their own desires, hopes and dreams and doubts. Too often social scientists have forgotten this, and the human subject is converted to an object under the guise of scientific rationality. This influence can certainly be seen in the Structualist school, but as the graffiti at Sorbonne in Paris '68 reminded such theoreticians; "Structures don't take to the streets".(7) Finally, a couple of writing idiosyncrasies. Quotes, whether direct or indirect that use gender-specific (always, always, masculine) terms to describe all people have been translated to gender-neutral terms. On some occasions this has meant minor grammatical alterations. Also, when speaking as myself, the lower-case 'i' is used; when speaking about collective subjects the upper-case 'I' is used. 1.3 AFTER THE TEXT There is no intention for this thesis to remain a 'dead text'. In attempting to capture a general framework, and present a political program, it would seem illogical if i, as a student and a political activist, made no attempt to implement it. This is normally a limitation in social science; the rejection of how to achieve social change as legitimate study. Initially there will be a small audience to this thesis. If they suggest that it provides a plausible form of praxis, the audience will be widened to include the politically aware who live in the world where "popular culture and technology collide". Access to such people is to be achieved through the Electronic Freedom Frontier and other left- libertarian discussion areas on USENET. I remain optimistic that among that audience there will be those who wish to take back the future. The reason for such action is based on the notion that reality can be changed by conscious action, and that our own unconscious social conditioning, gives preference to "homo normalis."(8) There is, however, a vital contribution that each story-teller can make. For example, in Lisa Goldstein's "The Dream Years", novelist Robert St. Onge, a member of the Parisian surrealists of the 1920's follows an unusual looking dark-haired woman around a corner and finds himself in the middle of the May/June revolt of 1968. The woman he followed explains to him that she is with a group of radical time travellers who brought him to the future because they needed his insight to combat what Marcuse would term the 'performance principle'. The surrealist expresses great surprise at this. As far as he was concerned the surrealists were just a group of friends he sat with in cafes, smoked, drank coffee and discussed art. The possibility of them being an important and revolutionary art movement was incredulous. The moral of the story is best expressed by Marx with the famous Theses 11 on Feuerbach ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it"), and with the back cover advertising statement on Goldstein's book; "If you live your dreams You can remake the world" REFERENCES 1) Callinicos, A., Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, pix 2) Lyotard, J-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge", p 66 3) A 'school' at Murdoch is a broad collection of related disciplines; the five schools that i studied at in Murdoch are, in order of importance, Social Science., Humanities., Mathematical and Physical Science., Biological and Environmental Science and Education. 4) Green Left Weekly, issue 100, May 1992, p16-17 5) Rudy Rucker is a cyberpunk science fiction writer who poses the question "How fast are you? How dense?". This has been used in the Mondo 2000 writer's guidelines which is perhaps best explained by example: "Avoid passive constructions. (e.g., passive constructions are to be avoided)." Rudy Rucker, it should be noted, is also a chaos mathematician, a computer programmer and the great-great- great-great grandson of G.W.F. Hegel. 6) Peter Weller, the actor of William Burroughs in David Cronenberg's adaption of the Burroughs' book 'Naked Lunch' remarks on the insight that can be gained from such styles; "It was very prophetic, and spoke of many things that you read in the Sixties and said 'hogwash', but have since come to pass: instantly addicting drugs, obsessions with strange plastic surgeries with transmogrify old age into perpetual youth, obsession with control. Venereal diseases that attack homosexuals which are incurable, and become heterosexual problems. It's all there in Naked Lunch." The Face, 'Junkie Business', March '92, p103-104 7) quoted in Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers. A Feminist Critique Of Postmodernism, p6 8) Reich, W., Listen, Little Man, p28 Article 46400 of alt.activism: Path: eff!news.umbc.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!csuvax1!anderson From: anderson@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au (Anthony Anderson) Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.cyberpunk,alt.drugs,alt.politics.libertarian Subject: Technology & Freedom (II) Date: 1 Nov 1993 17:51:21 GMT Lines: 943 Message-ID: <2b3iapINNms5@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au Xref: eff alt.activism:46400 alt.cyberpunk:23179 alt.drugs:49068 alt.politics.libertarian:16066 2.0 POSTMODERNISM: A REPORT ON BEING 2.1 HOME OF THE BRAVE Evening. Neon lights begin to illuminate the cityscape. Some escape to the suburbs for safety. Others escape to the city for sanity. Acid rain sprinkles lightly on the paved courtyard. Tall mirrored buildings hiding their power within look down to the low-life on the streets. Neo-fascist architecture hangs several meters above eye-level. Street level signs glow, flickering; 'Buy! Work! Reproduce! Die!'. Police men in dark glasses rub their hands gleefully over stainless steel batons, secure in their uniforms, terrified of their consciousness. Spinner cars fly overhead. The Children of the Revolution drift to the courtyard. At least thirty different styles and languages. Gothic monochrome, retro-punk, speed metal, techno-culture. A cornicuopia of disbelief systems. Walking texts that are that reproduce and mutate, spreading like a virus, like language, infecting the CPU of truth and control systems, infecting the random access memory with chaos. Everyone living after the sixties is Generation X. Highly educated, underpaid, motivational crisis. The collapse of communism is greated with a collective yawn, as will the colapse of capitalism. Totally QFD (Quelle Fucking Drag). After all, there isn't too much that can stand up to these mutating minds; they even refused to be cowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Did not the threat maintain the very system which maintained the threat? NO. People simply stopped believing in the system. Two figures approach a group in Gothic monochrome, tall, thin, pasty-faced. One has a a full plated cybernetic arm, fibre-optics sprouting from a titanium skull-cap, flowing in the evening air, bouncing neon light about freely. The second actor has chameleon, hypersenitive thermographic skin; blues, purples, reds and pinks splashed across the body, a walking Kirlian photograph. Metal framed eyes are implanted in the head. For both characters gender is less certain even than sex. Their names are Cyborg and Replicant. A hushed conversation follows. The group faces away from the installed sercurity cameras. Replicant exchanges Pneumospary-hypodermics and meta-amphetamines for a small, black metal box. The two groups depart. "Whazzit?", questions Cyborg. "Hypercube", replies Replicant, handing the box to Cyborg. "I'm the technician", states Cyborg, "Hypercube; aka tesseract. Four dimensional cube, where each side is adjacent to all three dimensional sides, even the one opposite. A hyper-cube for a hyper-reality." "So ... what does this hybercube contain?". Cyborg looks in. Their bodies are sucked into the domains of the cube. A cosmos is contained within; Cyborg and Replicant watch the Pope proclaim the splendour of his Truth, but the angels and daemons are too busy enjoying themselves, playing in the fields of Geiger and Escher. The God of Essentialism, as he, always he, becomes the collective tanks of Moscow and Beijeing, the rapist of Bosnia, the pillager of the environment, the producer of laboratory AIDS, the burner of Reich's books, the bomber of Bagdhad; the speaker of Truth, Veritas Splendor. But noone is listening. The God of Essentialism becomes more angry "Believe! Or I shall slay thee!. Bow down to the Truth, my Truth. For it is the light and the way!" But still the Children of the Revolution play. And imagine. The God becomes more angry. Mushroom clouds are released, but are dissipitated by radio hackers, who laugh maniacally. The God tries to abolishes the hackers, and then tries to abolish the right to speak. For to the God of Essentialism, he is the only legitimate speaker, the alpha and the omega, the Absolute. Ideas are dangerous. The Other is dangerous. Information can hurt me. The stars go out. Perth: the most isolated city in the entire world. October, 1993: late 20th century. Two figures stand at Forrest Chase; the cybernetic eyes and arm are gone. So are the spinner cars. The box remains just a box. The actors now also gain sexes, Cyborg is male, Replicant, female; though the genders are still uncertain. "What, mon artiste, was that?", enquires Cyborg. "A map", replies Replicant. "A map of the late twentieth century, a world dominated by simulcra, constructed representations of the media that have no basis in reality. A world dominated by rampaging monsters of the Id. A world where science fiction and reality are concurrent with each other. Where texts, cults and cultures intersect everywhere. Where space is condensed and time is accelerated. It was a map of the most complex world we have ever known, and technology has built it. It is a map they call postmodernism." "But, it has no direction", objects Cyborg. "What use is that?" Replicant's face hardens, then smiles, throwing the hypercube into his backpack. "None at all." 2.2 INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS The intellectual hallmark of the late twentieth century(1) is postmodernism. Originally a term used to denote a style of poetry, then into art, architecture, urban planning, music and now into the field of social theory and philosophy(2), postmodernism represents both a definitive break with modernism and is built on modernism. Stephen White in the essay "Justice and The Postmodern Problematic"(3) presents four components to what he sees as the four most significant phenomena associated with postmodernism., 1) Rejection of the metanarrative 2) Rise of information technologies 3) Problems with societial rationalization 4) New social movements The works of Lyotard's "Postmodernism: A Report On Knowledge", Jameson's "Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism" Ross' "Universal Abandon: The Politics Of Postmodernism" and Habermas' "Legitimation Crisis" are central texts in this discussion. In this section of the thesis an attempt is made to explore the components listed above and the theoretical approach of the listed authors and question whether this description is accurate? And if so, are the emancipatory aspects worth advocating, over and above traditional forms of libertarian political activity? These are the questions that are a challenge to the entire schema of postmodernism. For there are rejections of the description of the postmodern condition already exist in the forms the writings of Brodribb, Callinicos and to a lesser extent, Frow. Brodribb emphasises the masculinist notion of the destruction of discourse and questions whether it is possible that the reason that an opposition to essentialism is popular now is because "essentialist" groups were gaining real, substantive political power; Frow consider that postmodernity's emphasis on aesthetic diversity is simply an acknowledgement of their own inability to provide a coherent articulation of the 'condition' which they are describing; and Callinicos disagrees with the assumption that there are fundamental differences in the 'new times' that postmodernism is fond of describing. Each of these challenges is summarized and further critiqued. It is suggested at the end of this chapter that postmodernism has described certain trends accurately, but its de-emphasis on the importance of Being, Existence and Mat(t)er are part of its manifested failure in the political arena and of its manifested success to individuals. 2.2.1 THE LAST REVOLUTION With the current political climate, the above title can alternatively mean "the latest revolution" or "the final revolution". Postmodernism doesn't exist in some historical vacuum. Despite its rejection of the metanarrative, it cannot escape its own history and its own theoretical precursors, which are tied to the successes and failures of the last social upheaval in advanced, industrial nations, some 25 years ago. At that point in time, it was felt that both technology and democracy was falling under the control of technocrats or bureaucrats, respectively, experts in both systems. Western industrial capitalism and Eastern industrial socialism had become indistinguishable in their objective of the "performance principle" - maximum efficiency of goals set by "experts". Marcuse satirically remarked, "Technology serves to institute new, more effective and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion" and "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress."(4) Faced with a consciousness prevalent among the vast majority of the population that material benefits were dependent on such unfreedom, the New Left, as the movement came to be known, saw the only avenue for possible resistance in "... the young, the marginal, the deviant, the 'irrational'."(5) This appeal was successful - so much so that it became embodied in the 'hippie' counter-culture. Among their central concerns were academic and cultural freedom, opposition to the west's involvement in Viet Nam and war in general, and the civil rights movement in the United States.(6) However, although these essentially liberal objectives were highly successful, the democratic socialist objectives encapsulated in the workers council of the Prague Spring in 1968, and the 'Action Committees' of Paris in the same year(7), manifestly failed. The postmodern interpretation of these failures normally suggests that a counter-cultural movement could not succeed. In agreement with the New Left theory of the conservatism of the traditional agents of social change (i.e., the working class), postmodernists also suggest that ultimately, the counter-cultural movement was still reliant on the traditional left wing agenda, which proved itself unable to make the conceptual shift from being a part of 'the system' to align itself with the counter-culture. Sartre's furore at the French Communist Party's behaviour is expressed in his description of "this revolutionary party ... determined not to make a revolution."(8) Today "a strategy requires us to abandon the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment, the essentialist conception of social totality and the myth of the unitary subject."(9) The possibility of a counter-culture, as an alternative, is rejected. Rather postmodernism seeks to radicalise the mainstream discourses, by emphasising and introducing and highlighting notions adaptability, diversity and dynamicism to 'normal' culture. Revolution, per se, is not an objective, rather the fading away of essentialism and universal interpretive schemas is seen to be the liberating practise. REFERENCES 1) Western European Christian calender. We not only should, but must include the fact (if only in footnote for our own centre) that it is also the late 14th century of the Islamic calender, the mid-58th century for the Hebrews, the early 20th for Hindu Saka, mid-21st for Hindu Vikrama, early/mid 26th for Buddhists, mid-14th for Burmese, early 26th for Jain, and mid-27th for Japanese. 2) Hassan, I., The Question Of Postmodernism, p117 3) White, S.K.., Justice and The Postmodern Problematic, in Praxis International 7:3/4 Winter 1987/8, p306-319 4) Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man, pxv and p1 5) Anderson, RJ., Hughes, JA., Sharrock, WW., Philosophy Of The Human Sciences, p50 6) see Teodori, M (ed)., The New Left: A Documentary History for an overview of the New Left's activities in the U.S. 7) see Fisera, V (ed)., Writing On The Wall for a documentary anthology of the "events of May", and Workers Councils In Czechoslovakia. 8) Sartre, J-P., quoted in Kritzman, L (ed)., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pxi 9) Mouffe, C., in Ross, A., (ed) Universal Abandon? The Politics Of Postmodernism, p44 2.2.2 THE UNCOMPLETED PROJECT At the centre of what must be the most significant debate within postmodernism is what almost appears to be that of Habermas vs Lyotard, or, between the concept of consensus vs diversity. In this debate, Habermas represents the concern of consensus, a stubborn and utopian ideal that remains consistent throughout all his works. Perhaps being unfairly reductionist, Habermas central thesis is that intersubjective truth statements must be decided by 'communicative competence'; rather than by force, by science, by ritual, or by the market, otherwise the potential remains for 'system failure'. For Habermas, this communicatiive competence is rationality, truth, freedom and justice(1), a 'communication community' [Kommunikationsgemeinschaft] for it represents that "no force except that of the better argument is exercised; and that as a result, all motives except that of the cooperative search for the truth are excluded"(2). Such a world is possible under the modernist project, through democracy, but modernity is "at variance with itself"(3). This causes a sense of political urgency, for the highest achievement of modernism, that is the expressions of critical reason developed in the Enlightenment, are under threat by positivist rationality as totality. This is well expressed in Toward A Rational Society, where it is stated (echoing Marcuse) that "The power of technical control over nature made possible by science is extended today directly to society."(4) In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas studies the possible avenues of crisis in the liberal-capitalist system. In such a world, there are different fundamental principles of organization [Organizationsprinzip] according to 'primitive' societies (role of sex and age). 'traditional' societies (political form of class domination) and liberal-capitalist (wage labor and capital)(5). Each social system has several possible crisis tendencies which include; "the limit of the environment's ability to absorb heat from energy consumption"(6) as a physical limitation, and as social limitations; - the economic system does not provide the requisite quantity of consumable values, or; - the administrative system does not provide the requisite quantity of rational decisions, or; - the legitimation system does not provide the requisite quantity of generalized motivations, or; - the socio-cultural system does not generate the requisite quantity of action-oriented meaning(7). As liberal-capitalist system is depoliticisized by state intervention and that technical mastery has reached such a high level of expertise, Habermas feels that a legitimation crisis. Such depoliticization is necessary for two related reasons; (i) the tendency toward radical business cycles inherent in the capitalist mode of production needs to be smoothed, otherwise the public becomes aware of the class nature of society and (ii) any substantive participation of the public into the decision making processes of society would also make the class structure obvious. Articulations expressed by the socio-cultural system, are expressions of political and economic variance with the communication community: "The neo-conservative does not uncover the economic and social causes for the altered attitudes towards work, consumption, achievement and leisure. Consequently they attribute all the following - hedonism, the lack of social identification, the lack of obedience, narcissism, the withdrawal from status and achievement competition - to the domain of 'culture'."(7) This is not to suggest that such attitudes are economic or administrative in their ontological content. "For underprivileged groups are not social classes, nor do they even potentially represent the mass of the population. Their disenfranchisement and pauperization no longer coincide with exploitation because the system does not live off their labor."(8) What is the case that expertise is being embodied into social institutions without justification on a communicative level, which causes a crisis in legitimation. McCarthy states; "According to Habermas, a smoothly functioning language game rests on a background consensus formed from the mutual recognition of at least four different types of validity claims [Geltungsanspuche] that are involved in the exchange of speech acts: claims that the utterance is understandable, that its propositional content is true, and that the speaker is sincere in uttering and that it is right or appropriate for the speaker to be performing the speech act."(9). This background can only be articulated through democratic consensus without a legitimation crisis, and that there is a conflict between the 'life-world' experienced by discourse and the attempted colonisation by the steering imperatives of the system. The perspective offered by Habermas suggests that there is no truth of theory except that of in agreement, and there is no truth of action except that of in praxis. The work is a combination of both the libertarian aspects of modernity and Marx's critique of capitalism, representing and expanding on the best of the work of the first generation of the Critical Theory school. For Habermas it is clear that before we can labour freely and justly, reason freely and justly, or act freely and justly, we need to be able to speak freely and justly. And this means, allowing the autonomous expression of the individual's lifeworld to be reproduced(10). REFERENCES 1) McCarthy, introduction to Habermas, J., Legitimation Crisis, p xvii, Legitimation Crisis 2) Habermas, ibid, p75 3) Habermas, Theory Of Communicative Action, p396 4) Habermas, Toward A Rational Society, p56 4) Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p18-21 5) Habermas, ibid, p20 6) Habermas, ibid, p46 7) Habermas, Modernity - An Incomplete Project, p7 8) Habermas, Toward A Rational Society, p110 9) McCarthy, Legitimation Crisis, p xvi-xvii 10) Habermas, The Theoretical Discourse Of Modernity, p299 2.2.3 A WAR ON TOTALITY Lyotard is a representive another tendency in the postmodern debate, that which denies that there is anything to be gained by the Enlightenment project, and that there rule of consensus is just another metanarrative, a text based on some metaphysical absolutist, essentialist, fashion. This theoretical framework, expressed in Lyotard's most important work "The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge" is also echoed in the essays and interviews collected by Ross in Universal Abandon? The Politics Of Postmodernism. The suggestion begins by stating that the status of knowledge and meaning is altered as societies change their economic and political expressions from the industrial oriented economy to an information oriented economy. According to what must be seen as an intellectual journal for punks, the RE/Search 'Industrial Culture Handbook' defines an information war; where the struggle for control is not territorial but over meaning(1), or as Lyotard puts it: "knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?"(2). The postmodern condition is one where a conflict of meaning is "in the sense of playing" and that social bodies are composed of collective language moves.(3) Part of this conflict entails a campaign against science as truth; a strong possibility given both the failure of the logical positivists to provide "scientific" definitions to words, and the development of scientific knowledge from Popper to Kuhn and finally, to Feyerabend, the latter who states that unless science is defined as the collective truth statements, that is, relativist, then it must amount to oppression(4). This differs a great deal from the scientist that Lyotard presents who "questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof. They classify them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, prejudice, ignorance, ideology."(5) Science is presented as an epic. The last of the metanarratives, except for, of course, monetary wealth. Both are expressions, not of some humanistic narrative, but rather as power as the only legitimate truth-statement. "Power is not only good performativity, but it is also effective verification and good verdicts. It legitimates science and law on the basis of their efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency on the basis of science and law. It is self- legitimating."(6) But given such self-legitimation, Lyotard sees potential for emancipation with new directions in science, particularly in chaos theory, quantum physics and the non-determinant. "Postmodern science ... is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the world knowledge."(7) This lack of truth needs to be translated into social world politics, so that the technocrat and bureaucrat are no longer speakers of truth. Lyotard considers that consensus cannot perform this role; and presents "there is no question here of proposing a 'pure' alternative to the system ... an attempt at an alternative would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace."(8) Ross, editing and compiling works by Jameson, Stephanson Mouffe et al., takes up the issue of an alternative. A primary concern is that postmodernism does not become 'universal abandon', a metanarrative of ennui and ambivalence. Mouffe's alternative is 'radical democracy' which "demands that we acknowledge difference - the particular, the multiple, the heterogeneous - in effect, everything that had been excluded by the concept of Man in the abstract. Universalism is not rejected but particularized"(9). This is part of the rejection of essentialism espoused by the postmodernists, yet seems to be outside the framework of Habermas. Searle (10) considers that the classical metaphysical philosophers made a "real mistake" on deciding that some metaphysical foundation was necessary. Politically, this need not lead to nihilism as Laclau points out: "Abandonment of the myth of foundations does not lead to nihilism... It leads, rather, to a proliferation of discursive intervention and arguments that are necessary because there is no extradiscursive reality that discourse might simply reflect."(11) To attempt to collectivise the many and diverse writers that Ross presents a unity can be noted in their notion of plural, local and immanent(12) notions of difference as legitimate forms of liberation. Much of this obviously ties with Derrida's notion of differance, where arke, the government or foundation, as truth, is challenged, deferred, made different, where "every apparently rigourous and irreducible opposition ... comes to be qualified, at one moment or another, as a theoretical fiction."(13) Their universal rejection of the possibility that modernist and essentialist discourses (which includes Marxism and Habermas) is built on the notion that there is no centre, and that each margin represents different, and theoretically equal, standpoint. REFERENCES 1) Savage, J., Industrial Culture Handbook, p5 2) Lyotard, J-F.., The Postmodern Condition, p9 3) Lyotard, ibid, p10-11 4) See Poppper, K, The Logic Of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn, T., The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions" and Feyerabend, P., Science In A Free Society. 5) Lyotard, p27 6) Lyotard, p47 7) Lyotard, p60 8) Lyotard, p66 9) Mouffe, C., in Ross A. (ed), Universal Abandon? The Politics Of Postmodernism,p36 10) Searle, J., ibid, p38 11) Laclau, E., ibid, p79 12) Fraser, N., and Nicholson, L., ibid, p87 13) Derrida, J., Margins Of Philosophy, p18 2.2.4 DECENTERED BUT NOT SCHIZOPHRENIC It has been reported that schizophrenia, narcissistic character disorder, and depression are metaphors for postmodern nihilism.(1) Jameson, aware of such disorders being possible with the abandonment of metaphysical foundations, displays a preference for "a third possibility beyond the old bourgeois ego and the schizophrenic subject of organization subject today: a collective subject, decentered but not schizophrenic."(2) Jameson presents a theory of postmodernism that has different concerns that those expressed by Habermas and Lyotard. In Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism,(3) these concerns not only combine the notions of the uncompleted project of modernism and the disruption of metanarratives, but also a desire to find social actors who combine both features. Introducing Lyotard's text, it was Jameson who suggested that postmodernism could be defined as "incredulity to metanarratives"(4) and that postmodernists "no longer believe in political or historical teleogies, in great 'actors' or 'subjects' of history - the nation-state, the proletariat, the party, the West etc."(5) To Jameson, postmodernism is an anti-utopian project(6), whose attack on any metaphysical foundation actually lies with socialist philosophy which provided " ... the first elements of a vision of some achieved 'human age', in which the 'hidden hand' of God, nature, the market, traditional hierarchy, and charismatic leadership will have been definitely disposed of."(7) Unlike the socialist program, which, presented with a metanarrative text (that of capitalism), "[t]he postmodernist viewer, is called on to do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference; such a viewer is asked to follow the evolutionary mutation of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth (who watches fifty-seven television screens simultaneously) and to rise somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a feeble name."(8) As one of the last of the metanarrative texts (the other being science), Jameson sees a primary concern with the concept of the 'free market'. Suggesting that traditional Marxist analysis is inadequate, and that Marx argues like Friedman on "... the relationship of ideas and values of freedom and equality to the exchange system ... that these concepts are real and objective, organically generated by the market system itself and dialectically are indissolubly linked to it."(9) Instead, Jameson holds that " 'The market is in human nature' is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is he most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time."(10) The suggestion is then presented that the 'new social movements' are a replacement for the disappearing working class.(11) Following Marx and Schumpeter(12), Jameson sees such social movements as representing the 'collective subject'; "... if individualism is really dead after all, is not late capitalism so hungry and thirsty for Luhmanian differentiation and the endless production and proliferation of new groups and neoethnicities of all kinds as to qualify it as the only truly 'democratic' and certainly the only 'pluralistic' mode of production ?"(13) Combining notions of the late capitalist information technology with the new social movements that co-exist with it lead Jameson to consider both the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction, and some its precursor forms, such as J.G. Ballard. Jameson, in fact, noted the existence of the sub- genre well before most academic texts, commented on it in 1984,(14) recognising it as a encapsulation of extreme political pessimism of institutionalism and personal radicalism from the technologies that the institutions require. REFERENCES 1) Levin, D., in Zimmerman, M., Heidegger's Confrontation With Modernity, p204 2) Jameson, F., in Ross, A (ed), Universal Abandon? The Politics Of Postmodernism, p21 3) This is the 1991 book, not the 1984 essay, although the latter is the first chapter in the book. 4) Jameson, F., introduction to The Ppstmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p xii 5) ibid. 6) Jameson, F., Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism, p333-335 7) Jameson, ibid, p336 8) ibid, p31 9) ibid, p261 10) ibid, p264 11) ibid, p319-320 12) see for example, Elliot, J., 'Marx and Schumpeter on Capitalism's Creative Destruction', in Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1980, pp45-68 13) Jameson, op cit, p325 14) Jameson, ibid, p38 2.3 POSTMODERNISM'S DISCONTENTS 2.3.1 MAT(T)ER MAT(T)ERS Brodribb in Nothing Mat(t)ers presents a feminist critique of the politics and philosophy of postmodernism including an historical scope that includes Nietzsche, structuralism, Foucault and Derrida. Brodribb argues that postmodernism has given a metaphysical priority to epistemology over ontology and that such a priority is anti-materialist. The title, Nothing Mat(t)ers, refers to both Matter as material and mater, or mother. Brodribb is suspicious of the current notions of breaking down essentialist categories of language as being anti-female; "The Master wants to keep the narrative to himself, and he's willing to explode the whole structure of discourse if we start to talk. They don't want to hear our stories; listening to women's stories of incest and rape almost cost Sigmund Freud his career before he decided that they were simply female fantasies of desire for the father."(1) In preference, Brodribb wishes to highlight the importance of difference through essential characteristics, and physical reality. If postmodernism, as it claims, is about the politics of those who were previously marginalised, then surely "[a]re not the works of women and feminists: Black, lesbian, Jewish, working-class, Native - a more significant source for understanding difference and otherness than the writings of white, western, men?"(2) Instead postmodernism seeks an "implosion of consciousness and responsibility, the death of meaning ..."(3) The politics of postmodernism, whilst seeking to deny scientific and linguistic categorisation, in attempt to avoid the problems of structuralism, rather than enhancing the subject, actually denies the subject by denying their matter/mat(t)er/body. Brodribb considers that postmodern politics is therefore nondialectical, promoting a ethereal displacement of meaning and interpretation as an absolutist political strategy. Such a theoretical framework Brodribb notes in both Foucault and Derrida. For Derrida, Brodribb notes that "mostly, deconstruction means never having to say that you're wrong"(4), and as for Foucault's support for the Khomeni regime on the grounds that it heralded a revolutionary spirit and attitude, a rather ironic reply by an Iranian woman is quoted: "It seems for a Western Left sick of humanism, Islam is preferable ... but elsewhere."(5) This nondialectical culture has a traditions which Brodribb traces through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, Wittgenstien and Levi-Strauss.(6) Whilst the structualist school is rejected for the denial of the subject ("History has no voice, no intelligible meaning, but structure is")(7), the object-free subject is also rejected, hence the tie between disparate philosophers as Nietzsche and Levi-Strauss. Contrary to this Brodribb considers O'Brien's "historical, materialist and dialectical approach grounds patriarchy and the hegemony of masculine values in the social relation of reproduction."(8) This is also presented as an alternative to the celebration of Dionysus by postmodern philosophers, particularly postmodern feminist philosophers. Whilst western rationality has been tied to Apollian and Aristolean sex bias(9). This masculinist and phallocentric 'Sophies Choice', where madness and instability is offered by the Masters of the Narrative instead of logic and control, is seen as a false choice; Dionysus is as much a tyrant as Apollo.(10) Brodribb's conclusion is that "Postmodernist theories of sexuality increasingly speak of texts without contexts, genders without sexes, and sex without politics"(11). This depoliticizes the feminist insights about male supremacy. The essentialist, that is, the female, must be reinstated: "The feminist project must yet elaborate an ethics and aesthetics that is not filtered through or returned to a masculinist paradigm, but expressed creatively and symbolically by a subject that is female, Only an unflinching autonomy can challenge extortions to feminine deference and the deferment of feminist philosophy... We must resist absorption by the adrogynous myth."(12) REFERENCES 1) Brodribb, S., Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, p xviii 2) ibid, p xxviii 3) ibid, p 19 4) ibid, p9 5) Brodribb, op cit, p18 6) ibid, p39-40 7) ibid, p43 8) ibid, p135 9) Lange, L., Woman Is Not A Rational Animal, Spekman, E.V., Aristotle And The Politicization Of The Soul, in Harding, S., and Hintikka, M., (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perpsectives On Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy Of Science 10) Brodribb, op cit, p137-138 12) ibid, p143 13) ibid,p146 2.3.2 POSTMODERNISM? WHAT POSTMODERNISM? Callinicos represents a classical Marxist critique of the postmodernist political program. The suggestion is that postmodernism is a fantasy; that there are no 'new times', that the 'new technologies' make no difference to the reality of existing capitalist social relations and that greater meaning of what is being bandied as postmodernism can be derived from the fact that its proponents are members of a fairly wealthy white-collar middle class who are bemoaning the failure of the revolutionary upheaval of their youth, yet no wishing to surrender their new found financial freedom. Callinicos, in Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique follows a similar line of argument to that which he presented in Is There A Future For Marxism? in 1982. Central to the concerns in both cases is the question of analysing what was "actually existing socialism", an issue which gained a great deal of prominence after the nouveaux philosophes claimed that "Marxism was a machine for the construction of concentration camps."(1) This eventual move to the postmodern, was to an extent foreseen by Callinicos, in the earlier book and the critique that it presented in Against Postmodernism is similar; Derrida's "[d]ifference can only be conceptualized by means of a language, which, necessarily, by virtue of the nature of difference itself, involves the metaphysics of presence: differance, since it is ontologically prior to both presence and absence, is therefore unknowable."(2) This leads to a situation where there is a "denial of any relation to discourse to reality"(3), a most remarkable flight from Saussure's position where "[t]here is no order of priority between the two [signifiers and signified]: sound-images and concepts, sensible and intelligible, are indissolubly linked, form ... two sides of a piece of paper."(4) There are clear parallels to Brodribb's position here; the central concern of both being that postmodernism has no substance; it is an mythological ideology, a fantasy devoid of any real potential for emancipation. Also like Brodribb, Callinicos traces a path of political thought where Nietzsche, Levi-Strauss and Foucault are included as those responsible for "the subversion of the signified".(5) The link between Nietzsche and Foucault is dealt with some effort in fact, by Callinicos, as although both considered all action or thought as a manifestation of 'will to power', it is noted (quoting Nehemas) that "Nietzsche does not consider that every agent has a self"(6); we may add here, echoing the concerns of Brodribb, 'least of all women'. Finally, also like Brodribb, Callinicos seeks an acknowledgement of the priority of Being over interpretation; for without the act of production, there is no new meanings. As the postmodernist project places such a priority on non- reality, then equally, the notion that there is a postmodernism is rejected. Postindustrial society is seen as being no different at all to that of industrial society, and Callinicos disputes the notion that postindustrial society exists at all. Whilst "Postindustrial society is characterized by the shift from goods production to a service economy and by the central role played by theoretical knowledge as a source of both technical innovation and policy formation"(7), Callinicos suggests that the overwhelming nature of these jobs is in shop assistant-style positions, which are not given the opportunity to partake in postmodern fantasies of policy formation. Instead "[t]he fact that much of this labour now involves interacting with other people rather than producing goods does not change the social relations involved."(8) A point is also made by noting that there are currently more members of the traditional 'industrial proletariat' than ever before; mostly located in so-called developing countries such as South Korea, Turkey, et. al. While "... the propriety of the new Western middle class combined with the political disillusionment of many of its most articulate members - provides the context to the proliferating talk of postmodernism"(9), Callinicos sees that "[t]he continued relevance of classical Marxism seems .. unarguable."(10) In response to the crisis that was in 'actually existing socialism', Callinicos uses the argument of the International Socialists, that is, that the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, et. al., were actually 'state capitalist' societies, as the rulers of each of these nations represented a 'class', in the Marxist sense of the term, and the social relations between classes was but a minor variation on those social relations encountered in western capitalist nations. REFERENCES 1) Callinicos, Is There A Future For Marxism?, p5 2) Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, p75 3) ibid, p79 4) Callinicos, Is There A Future For Marxism?, p33 5) ibid. 6) Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, p90 7) ibid, p121 8) ibid, p127 9) ibid, p168 10) ibid, p223 2.4 BEING & DIFFERENCE: A CRITIQUE OF THE CONDITION There seems to be a strange failure on behalf of postmodern political theory and its discontents. The presentation of the postmodern condition and trends is indeed an accurate one, in terms of yet its tendency to convert these trends into reality tends to lead to accusations of fantasy. However, the critics of postmodernity tend to lapse into essentialist notions which postmodernism itself claims to be attempting to overturn. Habermas, for example, fails to note the significance of the changes in technology and the importance of the move towards the 'information economy' from the industrial economy. The continued use of the very problematic Marxist labour theory of value without addressing the transformation problem(1) severely weakens the overall theoretical framework. In contrast, Lyotard and the writers in Universal Abandon? who critiques Habermas on the points of consensus and difference, who point out the importance of the changes in scientific understanding, the multitextual nature of the subject and so forth, fail to look at the central thesis of Habermas; that is that there is a contradiction between the desires of the lifeworld and the steering imperatives of the system which leads to a legitimation crisis, thus a crisis in economy, politics and representation in general. True as it is in both the cases of Brodribb and Callinicos, there is within postmodernism this bizarre tendency to ignore the material in preference to the aesthetic. Such a tendency can quite possibly become a new mysticism, a revival of the metaphysical which they claim to completely reject. However, the critics of postmodernism turn from one fantasy to another. In Brodribb, the importance of sex differences reaches epic proportions, and the claim is made that to be anti-essentialist is to be anti-female.(2) In Callinicos, the steam-snorting wonders of the industrial culture are still with us as the dominant economic means of production. Brobribb and Callinicos have a reification of gender and class. Rather than seeking to abolish these concepts, these socially constructed, definitions applied to the Other, their political agenda is to highlight these constructions. The postmodernists, by contrast, seem to live in a world where the non-recognition of the socially constructed removes its existence. Both constructions are false. The construction of gender and class are constructed by social institutions, which ultimately rest on the forced definition of the Other. Frow, in the paper 'What Was Postmodernism?', represents a non-essentialist critique, even if it tends to restricted to concepts of communications and literary theory, rather than to technology, economics, philosophy and social theory. The position expressed is that postmodernism, being incapable of articulating itself in a coherent form and is doomed to failure. In fact, Frow concludes that the political philosophy of postmodernism is a part of the postmodern condition, and that the task of intellectuals is to provide an alternative; "... they take the form of the crisis of an obsolescent modernism; a crisis of political representation; a crisis of representation in general, bound up with the commodification and the proliferation of information; a crisis of intellectual production and of the social function of intellectuals; and a crisis of the economy of cultural , in particular of the relations between high and low culture... 'Postmodernism', a product of this fusion, is the self-fulfilling prophecy of its own impossible autonomy."(3) This opinion is repeated by the Fontana Dictonary Of Modern Thought, which refers to postmodernism as "best seen as a complex map of late 20th century directions rather than a clearcut aesthetic and philosophical ideology."(4) Postmodernism's philosophy derives from Derrida's rejection of the metaphysics of foundation, of Being, of presence. To Derrida the questioning of Being "supposes that prior to signs and outside them, and excluding every trace and difference, something such as consciousness is possible".(5) Yet, perhaps Derrida has phrased the supposition incorrectly; for whilst the articulation of speaking subjects, of consciousness, is can only be dealt through notions of difference, the ability to speak is dependent on Being, on presence, on mat(t)er. These are not essentialist categories, these are not categories derived from the actual action of speaking subjects, but rather, they are prior to speech itself, they are existential categories. And whilst all else, everything that is created and nominated by speaking subjects is indeed dependent on notions of difference, of which politically, the subjects right is to defer and to make different, the ability to speak remains an issue of materiality. For like the world of the inaminate, having materiality but no language, the world is meaningless. But language without materiality is impossible. REFERNCES 1) Marx never clarified the relationship of value to price, particularly considering that the mode of communication in capitalism is that of price, not labour-value. See Baumol, W., Blinder, A., Economics, pp826-830 2) Brodribb, S., Nothing Mat(t)ers, p23 3) Frow, J., 'What Was Postmodernism', Local Consumption Publications Occasional Paper, No 11, Sydney, 1991 4) Bullock, A., et. al., (eds) The Fontana Dictionary Of Modern Thought, (2nd Ed), Fontana Press, 5) Derrida, J., Margins Of Philosophy, p147 Article 46401 of alt.activism: Path: eff!news.umbc.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!csuvax1!anderson From: anderson@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au (Anthony Anderson) Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.cyberpunk,alt.drugs,alt.politics.libertarian Subject: Technology & Freedom (III) Date: 1 Nov 1993 17:52:56 GMT Lines: 1120 Message-ID: <2b3idoINNms7@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au Xref: eff alt.activism:46401 alt.cyberpunk:23180 alt.drugs:49069 alt.politics.libertarian:16067 3.0 TECHNOLOGICAL REALITY 3.1 THE GRAVEYARD Cyborg and Replicant journey to a house of the friends, The Bradbury Hotel. Inside three thousand of their friends, in the trance dance to the ecstastied sound of 120 (heart)beats per minute in the collective womb - a site for the technopagan - and a launchpad for new and different worlds of imagination and actuality. Replicant, artisite, provides the wares for the celebration of fifty years of the first use of lysergic acid diethylamide. After all, explains Replicant, what world is it that is not prepared to come to terms with the importance of what works with the very center of consciousness ? To have such a profound effect, on such a minimal dose should warrant serious investigation. This activity isn't considered illegal by Control because one person in fifty thousand believes they can fly. It is illegal because the psyche is irrevocably altered never to accept the psychosexual domination of Control, who is the praxis of Truth. And the journey begins ... Into a void they fall, an astral plane of individual aloneness, full of the noise of the superego all around them, and individually linked only by a thin silver rope to the real foundation to the universe. Using their techno- induced psychic powers they are able to follow this thin silver cord to discover reality. The cord stretches out to infinity, seemingly without horizon, but with their new magical powers, and their hypercube, time and space are condensed even further. They reach a place, or rather, it is revealed to them, and the silver cord does not go beyond it. It is a Platonic graveyard, wrought iron fences, gnarled black leafless trees, howling wind, grey skies, dim light and a grey mist swirling with a will of its own. Mauseloums, tombs, headstones with old chipped angels, missing limbs, and even a small pyramid is scattered in a semi-ordered manner. "Where are we?", enquires Cyborg. "I've heard of this place. It is the Land of Truth, and is owned by Control", replies Replicant. They float above the land, reading each inscription on each headstone and plaque. Some read of gods long gone. One large, and fairly old, mauselom, simply reads "God". More recent tombs are dedicated to the Independent Ego, to Science, to the Proletariat, to the Market, to the teleogy of History, and to Western democracy. A shadow appears over one tomb, gaining substance and form. An embittered, angery man arises, drawing in his breath, acting full of self-importance and booms; "Fearful travellers, deny what commonsense tells you! It is always wrong, it is never noble, it has no power, it is not great. Overcome such commonsense - and touch the ground, for there is no foundation - except what is made through power - thus spake Zarathustra." The angry man waves his arms furiously, pointing to the ground, incriminating, his eyes wild and insane. Cyborg looked bemused; "What is that?", she asks Replicant. "A minor phantom", he replies, "The Ghost of Nietzsche. "Never mind him - I know of a magic that disperses such egos." Replicant approaches Nietzsche, a fiber optic neural cable at hand. On end he injects directly into his own cerebral cortex, spurting minimal blood into the void and the other into the cerebral cortex of the phantom, who shirks in fear. "Now, phantom, learn about the Other and learn about yourself." Replicant's consciousness is transferred directly to the frontal lobe of Nietzsche, and vice versa, several flashes of light as minor electrical discharges interact and mesh. The phantom collapses to his knees proclaiming: "I have denied the Other in my own lust for power. My hatred of women, inspired by my fascist sister, is contrary to my basic premise of individuals attaining a love of themselves, for I denied them that ability. I myself denied my Being, and rather than dying a free death, I did not die of my own choosing. Having met the Other, having learnt of their hopes, of their desires, of their fears, I feel nothing but love for them. For although now I shall continually challenge the Self, I see the Other in me. We are free, but we have not chosen situations; let us change the situation." Nietzsche, having no Being, ceases to be solid, and melts into air. Cyborg looks mildly amused. "A superego communications line", she says, looking at the fibre optic cable. "One of my own makings. Built of mat(t)er. But what did you learn? For there is no communication without reply." Replicant's face is white in horror. "The ... the ground", he stammers, " ... the silver cord does not reach it ... And it too is not solid ... Is there no Being?" Cyborg laughs, and dives through the 'ground'. "My dear, Replicant, artiste, you of all people should have realised. Being is not a text, and you are surrounded by texts of Truth, all owned by Control. Let me explain, as technician. You have reached the end of the rope which you believed the foundation was attached. But the end of the line is a myth - but worry not! You are indeed in a void, and you cannot fall." Replicant tentatively touches the now transluscent ground, and then smiles. He joins Cyborg in their dance through the graveyard, ridiculing the spirits, and only spirits, that lurk within. They approach an unfinished tomb, whose multicoloured design breaths at them, living, shifting in its design, multi-dimensional and psychedelic in its growth. The inscription on the tomb reads 'Technology'. Replicant and Cyborg look at the tomb, at each other, and laugh. "Technology is not merely a text, it is part of Being ...", begins Replicant. "... And therefore it cannot be a dead belief ?", suggests Cyborg. "As it actually expanding Being, of which we do not control ... ", muses Replicant. "And therefore it has escaped", grins Cyborg in conclusion. They hug each other, laughing. The void around them fades, and they return to the collective womb with the One Hundred And Twenty Beats Per Minute, where multi-coloured dancers are being drug smart, smart drugs, and other psychedlics, playing with the highest of hi-tech equipment, computers, digital music, holographic lasers. Tears of joy drift down the cheeks of Replicant as he realises that he is among the first generation to be psychically liberated on a such a scale - "if this grows, we'll be bigger than hippie in a year", proclaims one dancer, "We don't need a War Against Drugs, we need Drugs Against War!" "Rave new world", Replicant whispers to himself, "And with such people in it." 3.2 INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS The following section represents somewhat of a departure from the previous. What is being attempted here is to provide a theoretical framework to understand the technology, the purposefully produced systems of interaction with the world. This is being done to provide a practical alternative to the postmodernist project, or rather, the lack of a postmodernist project, and also essentialist political alternatives. In addition it is suggested it is possible to include into such a framework, what will be termed social technologies. A summary of existentialist notions of Subject, Object and Other (eigenwelt, umwelt, mitwelt) is provided, particularly as developed from Sartre in Existentialism & Humanism and Heidegger. Following this is a study of the notion of praxis, using both the works of Marx and Ihde. It is here that technology is defined as a 'system of praxis', as well as using Heidegger's concept that technology is a mode of truth in The Question Concerning Technology. Such definitions allows the study of these systems which, as Sophia suggests in Whose Second Self? analytic perspectives of technology by technics (Ihde, Heidegger), technology by semiotics (McLuhan, Sophia) and Sophia's project, technology by psychoanalysis. Primary texts include the aforementioned Whose Second Self?, Ihde's Technics and Praxis, and varied texts by McLuhan. The final area of study in this section is an attempt to show how these frameworks can be used to show how technology is applicable to both the Object and Subject world. What is presented as different that the dual nature of the person, means that technology increases the potential and scope of liberation and reflexivity and oppression and automaton-like behaviour. A further presentation is given on how to differentiate between instrumental and communicative technics. 3.2.1 EXISTENTIAL CONDITIONS To understand technology, the purposeful production of systems of interaction with the world, some theoretical groundwork is needed on a pre-technological state of existence. Theoretical, because one is born into a world whose conditions are already determined(1), including the technological systems. However, there is still some validity within the faculties of reason, to abstract existence, as long as these abstractions remain relevant beyond their theoretical development. To some extent this may seem to going over old ground, but the current trends in philosophy against essentialist foundations run the risk over rejecting existentialist foundations. In rejecting all foundations language itself assumes the position of a quasi-mystical force that rules the universe. In such a climate it is required to repeat the words of Sartre, who when providing a unified definition of all existentialists noted that "existence comes before essence - or if you will, that we must begin from the subjective."(2) The lineage to such a statement can be seen to have its origins in Kant, who via the establishment of synthetic a priori categories of knowledge established a split between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.(3) In doing so, traditional metaphysics suffered a real blow, for what Kant was stating was that the supersensory world, outside spatial and temporal location was unknowable. Nietzsche took this to its logical nihilist conclusion, best articulated in his famous Madman(4) parable demanding that people control of there own world because "[t]he suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life... Nihilism, 'the most uncanny of guests' is standing at the door."(5) What Sartre meant by existence coming before essence is that before we can interpret the world, we must be in the world; that is the Subject must be an objective fact in an objective world. The reason that we must begin from the subjective is because our understanding, articulation and actions in the world are a result of our subjectivity, that is a result of what phenomenologists will call intentionality.(6) We are conscious, subjective actors, who act in the world and are aware of our actions. Ihde(7) summarises this as follows; Subject World However, involvement in the world is not one-directional. For it to be so, would mean that the Subject was absolute, capable of determining the world with God-like power. Rather, our interaction with the world is reflexive, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the 'arc'. Our experience with the world changes the Subject, which Ihde shows as; Subject World Ihde's summaries are however, rather limited. For the world dealt with only includes the world of Objects, non- conscious, non-intentional, and non-acting. However, in the world, there are also Other subjects, objects in the world which express, articulate, and act. The Other is as important to our mentality as the Object is important to our physique, or as Jaspers remarked; "[t]he individual cannot become human by themselves. Self-being is only real in communication with another self-being. Alone I sink into gloomy isolation - only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery."(8) Like the Object world, the world of the Other is always presencing. A clear parallel can be drawn between Heidegger who states that "[t]heory never outstrips nature - nature that is already presencing - and this sense theory never makes its way around nature"(9) and Sartre's comment that "[c]onsciousness of the Other is what it is not."(10) The spatial categories in existentiality can be summarized as Object, Subject and Other, where Subject and Other are intentional, conscious and acting Objects. However, Heidegger's Dasein, also includes temporal categories, which are developed in Being and Time, which come under the unusual description of 'care'. To begin with, we are plunged into a pre-existing world which is termed 'facticity', representing "the fact that we find ourselves already engaged in a world in which tasks are already for us"(11), that is the pre-existing world, or the results of the past. The fact that Subjects are not static or determinant allows us always to project forward, the structure of Existenz. However, the Subjects run the risk of 'Fallness', "getting caught up in the moment", concentrating on the tasks of the present without consideration of the future. REFERENCES 1) As Marx and Engels put it "Individuals have always proceeded from themselves, but of course from themselves within their given historical conditions and relations, not from the "pure" individual in the sense of the ideologists." in Marx K., Engels F., "Feuerbach. Opposition Of The Materialist and Idealist Outlooks" in 'Selected Works Volume One' (of three Volumes), p68 2) Sartre, J-P., Existentialism & Humanism, p26 3) Like Grosz, L., Lived Spatiality, in Agenda, p5, i would suggest that space/time are not a priori mental categories, but rather a priori corporeal categories. A further elaboration of this (which Grosz does not point out) is Einstein's treatment of space/time as corporeal categories. I would also suggest adding gravity. 4) Nietzsche, F., in Kauffman (ed), Existentialism, pp105- 106 5) Heidegger, The Word Of Nietzsche, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p61-62 6) Ihde, D., The Technological Embodiment Of Media, p60 in Communication and The Technological Age and Technics and Praxis, p6. 7) ibid. Ihde uses the term 'human' instead of Subject. Note that here, as in all cases to follow, the a direct line and arrow indicate 'intentionality' and a dotted line indicates nonconscious reflexivity. 8) Jaspers, K., Reason and Existence, FP 1935, in Kauffmann, p147 9) Heidegger, Science and Reflection, p173 10) Sartre, J-P., Being And Nothingness, p216 in Solomon, original in italics. 11) Solomon, The Self-Reinterpreted: Heidegger and Hermeneutics, in Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise And Fall of The Self, p164 3.2.2 PRAXIS AND TECHNOLOGY In living in the world, one encounters the existence material conditions, which has been represented as the Subject, the Object and the Other. As a conscious subject we must choose what we are to do with these conditions. As being part of the world, are choices are governed by the situation. Philosophy and science have normally looked at the material conditions as a question of either contemplation, in the rationalist form, or in experience, in the empiricist form. Both methods miss out on what is fundamental to any conscious actor; that we are aware, and we experience, and we contemplate, upon changing the conditions of our existence. Marx's Theses On Feuerbach emphasize this point clearly; "The chief defect of all previous materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively."(1) This practical philosophy is clearly derived from Kant, and acts towards some of the problems left by Kant. For in the destruction of classical metaphysics, a sort of materialist metaphysics was left behind. It was clear to Kant there was such a thing as the noumenal world, das Ding-an-sich [the- thing-in-itself]. However, world understanding is limited, a priori and synthetically, to understand the world phenomenally within constructs of space and time. To some extent this seems to indicate a new metaphysics; the claim that there is a inaccessible "world" is hardly an improvement to the claim that there is no noumenal world at all. Praxis philosophy deals with this situation. The essential claim of praxis philosophy is that in dealing with the phenomenal world we gain knowledge of the noumenal world. To elaborate our phenomenal abilities we must interact with the world in praxis. Truth lies in results of practice, and the practice of people is conscious activity in the world. Equally however, the notion of truth as being derived from the results of practical activity, or praxis, is a existential notion. For contrary to vulgar conceptions, no existentialist denies the objective, "other" world. Rather, every subject "knows" that their existence, their Being, is an objective fact. They also "know" that there are other objects in the world, and they also "know" (through The Look)(2) that there are Other subjects in the world. However, these things are only known subjectively, and therefore, each Subject must choose what to do with this knowledge. What we choose to do is always an action set on the transformation of the world. When we choose such an action, we are seeking the truth(3) of our situation; situation being the condition we are 'in'(4). In either case, praxis is the knowledge-gathering activity of materialism. In fact, as Ihde puts it " ... the secret of 'materialism' is the notion of praxis."(5) Also, praxis is an improved form of knowledge-gathering. It supercedes both empiricist and rationalist contemplation or sense-data experience by performing both simultaneously, and with the addition of actually transforming the world. It changes the world, adds to experience and rational knowledge. Praxis has multiple telic aims. It is a procedure for revealing the truth of the objective world. Praxis is the technology of the Subject. In the process of interaction with the world through praxis, any subject, or collective of subjects becomes aware of their limited abilities to understand the phenomenal world. These abilities are enhanced, amplified, by the use of technology. Technology is a process for the enhancement of the interaction between Subject and Object, or the enhancement of consciousness between Subject and Other, and is always an activity of conscious Subjects. On the question of 'what is technology', Heidegger answered; "Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize a means to them is a human activity"(6). Technology is an existential act on the phenomenal world, it is an enhancement of praxis. Or more specifically, as a definition of technology, technology is a system of praxis. If technology is an act on the phenomenal world, if technology is an enhancement of praxis and if praxis is a mode of determination, then technology is a mode of truth. This is the conclusion that Heidegger came to, technology enhances our ability to experience, contemplate and change the world. "Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth."(7) But as that great iconoclast, Feyerabend, points out, many have been hurt by some concept of the "truth"(8), and the postmodern political program, well aware of the terrible injustices that have been committed in the name of the truth now refuse to seek any at all. This may seem particularly prevalent in the concept of technology; after all, the use of technology has led to the forcible destruction of millions of individuals and their communities. Technology has led to the possibility of nuclear devastation, environmental collapse and the maintainence of some of most oppressive regimes in history. Rather than to use this knowledge as a rationale for ambivalence, a surrender to a unknowable attitude towards the difference between emancipatory and oppressive technology, it should be more clear that there is a real requirement for a deeper understanding of the how technologies acquire differing characteristics. For to surrender such a project is to give the weapons of oppression to the hands of the oppressor, rather than abolishing the tools. REFERENCES 1) Marx, K., Theses On Feuerbach in "Selected Works" Vol 1 of 3 volumes, p13 2) Sartre's concept of The Look is when a Subject is faced by "The Look" by a different subject, Other. The Subject is transformed into an Object by the Other. See for example, Sartre, J-P., in Existentialism, p226. 3) This is not truth in an absolute sense. It is a truth insofar that the act was or wasn't successful in the "world" of our consciousness and existence. Indeed, Kant's proposition of limited human knowledge indicates that their can be no metaphysical, absolute truth. 4) Sartre in "Existentialism",p 246 5) Ihde, D., "Technics and Praxis", pxxiv 6) Heidegger, M., "The Question Concerning Technology", p4 7) ibid., p12 8) Feyerabend, P., "Science In A Free Society", p122 3.3.1 TECHNOLOGY AS TECHNICS The exploration of the characteristic of technology as a system of technics is articulated by Ihde, particularly in Technics and Praxis, and more recently, Technology and The Lifeworld. In both texts, Ihde outlines three characteristics of technology, a phenomenological understanding, a process of intentionality, and 'horizontal instances'. Whilst other perspectives are dealt with, using Sophia's analytic perspectives of technologies, the primacy of technology to be understood as technics is part of the system that gives ontology priority over epistemology, and thus, for the same reason, Ihde and Heidegger propose that technology has priority over science(1). The most evident form of technics is the genre of embodiment technologies, where technology changes the body, amplifies, or Innis' terms, acts as an 'exosomatic organ'.(2) In this genre technology is embodied in the Subject and the world is experienced through that embodiment. In all cases these technologies "substitute for, extend, and compensate for the natural powers of the human body."(3) Experience of the world is through a machine, which 'fuses' with the subject. Ihde expresses this in the formula; (Person-technology) World (4). The experience of the world is a amplification-reduction system. An item of technology is used to amplifies the Subjects sensory and/or motive system and/or the speed at which normal tasks are performed. The communications system, for example, currently allows the transmission of the vision and sound over great distances. A person in Perth, Western Australia may see and hear sounds of Marzuq Desert, Libya. This data however, is reduced. One does not have either the field of vision nor a complete reproduction of the sound that is normally available from 'normal' experience. Not only this, but the senses of the touch of the sand, the feel of the heat of the sun, and the taste of sound in their mouth, eyes and ears as the wind howls around the body are absent. If technology did not have any reductive components then it would be completely embodied in the subject. It would be transparent. However, as there are few such technologies(5), it is preferable to refer to a qualitative level of transparency in technology. The level of transparency can be defined as the level of amplification of experience minus the level of reduction of experience; "... the better the machine the more 'transparency' there is".(6) As a another genre, technology can also take the form of a hermeneutic relationship. In this situation, the technology is not an embodiment, rather it belongs to the world more fully than it belongs to the subject. "[R]ather than being presented with the things themselves, we are presented with the 'signs' or 'traces' of them."(7) Whereas an embodied technology can gain a hermeneutic relationship when it breaks (e.g., the hammer becomes this obstinate 'thing' rather than an extension of the hand), other technologies are primarily hermeneutic (e.g., a map or dial). The relationship of intentionality is thus; Subject (Technology - World)(8) Technology in a hermeneutic relationship is thus a question of subject-centered knowledge and reinforces the role of the Subject as the conscious actor and knower in the interaction of intentionality. A more recent addition to Ihde's genre's is the inclusion of the alterity genre of technology, technology as a 'second- self', of which the computer is a potential applicant. In this genre, the technology acts as a discrete mediator between the intentionality relationship. The technology is neither embodied in the Subject, nor in the world. Its importance rests with the relationship of the technology, rather than the appearance of the technology. Subject Technology World (9) In this case the technology interacts with the world on behalf of the subject through, as Ihde notes, a language that is context-blind(10). Nevertheless, the interaction remains one where the technology whose knowledge is embodied with the technology, thus combining features of both hermeneutic (knowledge) and embodiment (fusion) technologies. The final genre of technology that Ihde uses is that of background. This is where technology provides a background relationship to the world. In terms of intentionality, the Subject interacts with technology as providing a reality in the world, rather than the hermeneutic relationship where the technology is a thing in the world. Structural technologies, such as buildings, would be an example of such technology. In terms of intentionality, the formula integrates the technology in the world. (Technology) Subject (World) (11) The technics of a technology are not however the only ways that Subjects interact with them. In the next two sections, the reflexive arc of technology, not simply in how it changes the technics, itself, but in its representation and alteration of mental states of the subjects, that is semiotics and psychoanalysis is analysed. REFERENCES 1) See Ihde, D., 'The historical-ontological priority of technology over science' in Philosophy and Technology, pp235-252 2) Innis, R., 'Technics and the bias of perception', from Philsopophy and Social Criticism, pp67-89 3) ibid, p68. 4) Ihde, D., Technics And Praxis, p7-13. Ihde uses the terms 'human' and 'machine', which i find too restrictive. They do not include the possibility of non-human Subjects, nor technologies other than machines. 5) Perhaps a steel or plastic joint or similar internal prosthesis may come close. Even more transparent however would be an organic, or even cloned version. 6) Ihde, D., op cit, p8. However see in Ihde p40-41 and, The Technological Embodiment Of The Media, p59 where the "pure transparency" model is criticised. In the latter it is noted "The dreamer who wishes for the perfectly transparent technology thus secretly harbours a wish for no technology at all - or at least its equivalent ... there is something like a wish to be godlike." 7) Innis, ibid, p78 8) Ihde, p9-13 9) Sofia, Z., Whose Second Self?: Gender and (Ir)rationality In Computer Culture, p91 10) Ihde, Technics and Praxis, p60 11) ibid, p15 3.3.2 TECHNOLOGY AS SEMIOTICS The following perspective of technology is an analysis of the reflexivity of technology, or the world. That is, technology as a sign or symbol system, which presents itself to the subject. Although technology is not an intentional actor, it is reflexive, and as Ihde notes, the use of a technology is not neutral, on the grounds that it transforms experience(1). McLuhan, the enigmatic presenter of technology, notes both technologies non-intentionality; ("there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening"(2)) and also a determinist aspect ("I'm not advocating anything; I'm merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn't stop them, so why waste my time?" (3)) In both cases however, technology is not being presented as just the technics, it is being presented as text. And to McLuhan, all technology was text, all technology was representative and determinant of social process. Such McLuhanite slogans such as "the medium is the message" and "the electric light is pure information" are more understandable with such a perspective. The electric light is pure information because it contains within it meaning. The existence of the electric light assumes the existence of a culture that allows for, or requires, sight based activity after the sun has set, and that gives a priority to activity in enclosed buildings where natural light has limited penetration. "Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way in which we perceive the world. When these ratios change, people change."(4) McLuhan further develops the technology as sign by drawing the distinction between hot and cold media. A 'hot' media excludes participation by extending a single sense with high definition, a completion of data without intense audience participation. A 'cold' medium, by contrast includes participation with little data. As an interesting aside on the topic, McLuhan considers the TV to be a tactile sensory system of low definition, not a sight technology, therefore a cool technology(5). Ferguson, however, considers whatever insights McLuhan to have were not sufficiently developed, and eventually, McLuhan became a self-parody, an "intellectual journey which was ultimately circular"(6). A more in depth analysis of the semiotics of technology, that follows Ihde's 'genres' of technologies is available in the work of Sophia, where tools are more fully articulated as meaning(7). The analytic perspective of technology as semiotics is further split into technology as signification, the connotation of the technology, as opposed to its denotation(8), and the trope of the technology in which the technology changes meaning. In this schema, the signification of embodiment technologies is expressed as mediation and interpretant. Ihde notes, for example, that there is "experience through a technology ... the artifact in this case extended my self or bodily self experience through it and I become 'embodied' at a distance and experienced this genuinely, although mediatedly."(9) The trope of the technology is one of metonymy [Gr: 'a change of name'], where the technology becomes closely associated with the experience, thus changing the meaning of the experience without the technology. With hermeneutic technologies, the signification and trope is not one where experience of the world is mediated through technology, but rather the Subject experiences the world mediated by technology. The technology is a text, an understandable map of the world, a replacement for the world. The trope of the technology is therefore a synecdoche, [Gr: 'taking together'], where the whole (world) is to be inferred from the part (technology). Following the notion of alterity technologies representing a phenonomological 'second self', their signification is a presentation of the material and of the Other. The trope of such technologies is of metaphor, where the reality of the Subject and of the world is substituted for the virtual experience and abstraction of the simulation. Finally, the signification of the genre of background technics is expressed as a field, a system with tendencies, perhaps in the same sense that Heidegger referred to technoscience as Enframing(10). The trope of such technics is that of a science, a trajectory, a narrative. It is in this way that technology becomes a story, providing a security of meaning. REFERENCES 3.3.2 1) Ihde, D., Technics and Praxis, p53 2) McLuhan, M & Fiore, Q., The Medium Is The Massage, p25, emphasis in the original. 3) McLuhan, M., Playboy Interview, in Canadian Journal Of Communication, p133 4) McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q, op cit, p41 6) McLunan, M., op cit, p114 7) Ferguson, M., Marshall McLuhan Revisited: 1960s Zeitgeist Victim or Pioneer Postmodernist?, in Media, Culture and Society, p87 8) Sofia, Z., Whose Second Self? Gender and (Ir)rationality In Computer Culture, p40 9) Strurrock, J., Roland Barthes, in Structuralism and Since, p62-63 10) Ihde, D., Technics and Praxis, p54 11) See Heidegger, M., The Turning, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, in particular pp36- 49 3.3.3 TECHNOLOGY AS DESIRE Psychoanalytic perspectives always hold as an assumption that there are other meanings within process of thought or activity, unconscious(1) drives, where our mental lives are driven by a dialectic between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In Marcuse's reinterpretation of Freud (particularly the rejection of Freud's decision that the 'death principle', Thanatos, was as basic as the life- principle, Eros), technology plays the double role of expanding the scope of both freedom and life, as it "operates against the repressive utilization of energy in so far it minimizes the times necessary for the production of the necessities of life"(2), and of control and destruction through a desire, which Fromm noted, has a basis "in the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength."(3) A psychoanalytic study of Ihde's genres of technics has a different meaning, however, for Sofia. Sofia rejects the primacy of consciousness in the active behaviour of Subjects. A study of technology as technics assumes a primacy of conscious behaviour, where the actor behaves toward the world. A semiotic study of technology is an exploration of how the world reflects back to the actor, as Ihde's previously reference, 'transforms experience'. However, for Sofia, this doesn't go far enough. There is still an assumption of an independent, free-floating will outside the reality of the transformation. In Ihde's perspective this transformation does not seem to affect the intentionality relationship. For Sofia, however, it is central; "the main weakness of Ihde's perspective is its bias toward the phenomenological assumption of 'intentionality', a bias that leaves him without an adequate vocabulary for analysing the elements of desire and irrationality within technological relations."(4) Sofia presents three axioms of a psychoanalytic study of technology. Firstly, "cosmogony recapitulates erogeny", technology expresses neurotic and erotic unconscious desires as well as beings 'tools' for a means. Secondly, "every tool is a poem", it's presentation ambiguous, and its representations always potentially exceed the language and ideology that it officially sustains. Thirdly, "every technology is a reproductive technology", as it intervenes and changes the life process itself.(5) A psychoanalytic study of the Ihde's genre's of technology sees Sofia further breaking down the perspective into categorizations of the form of technology, the psychoanalytic process of the technology, and possible neurotic tendencies that can arise from the technology. Within the genre of embodiment technologies, Sofia presents the technology as a prosthesis, a sensory or motor extension of the body. The process of such a technology is a projection of body senses and organs. Neurotic tendencies that can arise from this include projective identification and hysteria, where the Subject becomes convinced that their technology is absolutely and completely a part of them. In this sense the individual cannot divorce the technology from the self, and, as pointed out previously, there is desire here to become god-like, where there is no technology. For hermeneutic technologies, the form of the technology is a world-presentation or transcription. The technology is not so much a projection of the motor or sensory system, but a projection of language, of knowledge and meaning. The neurotic tendencies in such technologies are epistemophiliac, where the search and desire for knowledge becomes all-encompassing and "the text is a (parental) body and its contents plundered and appropriated"(6), and paranoia, where the Subject is disembodied from a world and meaning is to be attributed to the external. Alterity technologies have their form in thing-presentation, or an Athenian brain-child. The process of such technology is a projection of the self, or life itself, a reproductive substitute, where the creation is entirely the result of the intentionality of the actor. A troublesome, perhaps not entirely well-behaved, but objective child. Neurotic tendencies that arise from alterity technologies include narcissistic projective indentification and fetishistic disavowal. "The technological other tends to be created and interpreted as a projection of human selfhood ... rather than an appreciated 'otherness'."(7) Finally, background technologies, presented in the form of a system or complex, provide as process a defensive fantasy, and a 'world' available for mastery. Ihde explores this process The neurosis that can arise from this include obsessional neurosis and delusion. Ihde (8) explores this 'global world system' of technology, and the desire for control that can arise from it. REFERENCES 3.3.3 1) As opposed to subconscious, which includes the unconscious (previously conscious, but latter repressed) and the preconscious (never conscious). 2) Marcuse, H., Eros and Civilization, p82 3) Fromm, E., The Fear Of Freedom, p139 4) Sofia, Z., Whose Second Self? Gender and (Ir)rationality In Computer Culture, p93 5) ibid., pp42-44 6) ibid., p94 7) ibid 8) Ihde, D., Technology and The Lifeworld, p114-115 3.4.1 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AS TECHNOLOGIES In the previous presentations, technology is displayed as a system of praxis, that is a a tool which combines several action-oriented process towards changing or revealing the world. A technology is presented as being superior to praxis alone because of its systemisation, abstraction and simplification of several processes into the tool itself. The behaviour of technology itself has been summarized, from the intentionality-driven phenomenological interpretation, the meaning-oriented reflexivity of semiotic interpretation, and finally the unconscious-driven notions of technological relations from a psychoanalytic perspective. But these narratives only define half of the existential life of the actor. All have concentrated on the interaction of Subject, technology and World, with world meaning the world of nonarticulating, nonacting, objects. As we well know, this is an incomplete study of the world. The world we encounter contains other Subjects as well as nonacting Objects. The processes used, and the content, of intersubjective relations are analogous to the relations between subjects and the world. That is, social institutions are best understood as technologies. Consider the essence of technology, which Heidegger considered to be of revealing, and as a mode of truth. The object world, the natural world, is revealed through the action-orientation of praxis, and more effectively revealed through technology. However, in all cases, as "nature is always presencing"(1), theory will never outstrip nature. This is analogous to the Other. Like the natural world, the conscious actor does not have knowledge of the Other: "Consciousness of the Other is what it is not"(2). Intersubjective praxis reveals the consciousness of the Other. Social institutions, as a technology, are a system of intersubjective practises. This analogous relationship was suggested in 3.2.1 of this thesis. An expansion suggests that the social institution can represent a genre of technology, and that analytic perspectives of technics, semiotics and psychoanalysis are appropriate ways of studying the social institution. Firstly, consider the embodiment genre of technology. In this case the phenomenological experience of the social institution is that is acts as an extrasomatic tool of the actor in intersubjective relations. The corporation, club, cooperative or collective is an example here. The Subject embodies the social institution in their interaction in the world, thus with the same intentionality relationship as what Ihde expressed as; (Subject Technology) World The Other does not speak directly to the Subject when interacting with an embodied relation. Rather, the world of the Other is mediated through the prosthesis of the body corporate. Within embodiment relations there remains the risk of total identification with the body corporate, in a sense that either means that the Subject must control, or must deny their self to it (sadomasochism)(3). The hermeneutic social technology is that which the institution acts as knowledge-assisting aid, a social service that provides information that the Subject may use to encounter the world in an indirect manner, which has been expressed as; Subject (Technology World) The library, the university are examples of such technology. The world of the Other is through the institution, thus representing an inverse of the embodiment relationship. Like the physical technology, the process is an inversion of an the embdiment relationship and its neurotic tendencies are alternatively paranoia, where the institutions are damning of the individual knowledges, or of epistemophilia, where the world of meaning and knowledge is only to be found through those social technologies. Alterity social institutions are a combination of embodiment and hermeneutic relationships. They act as a second Subject, simultaneously providing knowledge, and being linked to the acting Subject. Perhaps it is apt to consider, as the corporation is involved with the production of exosomatic physical technologies, the knowledge-institution with the projection of language, perhaps the Internet is the best analogy to use with alterity relationships. Intersubjective revealing is by the institution, not in the form of the embodied corporation, nor in the form of the knowledge- provider, but rather via a new Other, the social technology itself; Subject Technology (World) Finally, background institutions provide the system, or world where the narrative and system of intersubjectivity is articulated. In this case, we may use Habermas' concept of organisational principle(4). Such metanarratives provides the system of science and trajectory of which the atmosphere of intersubjective relations are articulated. Again, using Ihde's notions of intentionality; Subject (Technology) (World) Again psychoanalytic studies reveal the same potentials. The use of the background technology as the social world leads to the establishment of principles, which provide both a defensive fantasy and a notion of mastery over the narrative of intersubjectivity. The neurotic tendencies of delusion (witness the behaviour of fundamentalist defenders of the monarchy, or religion) and obsessional neurosis that the background social technology is the world of intersubjectivity is evident. REFERENCES 3.4.1 1) Heidegger, M., Science and Reflection, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p173 2) Sartre, J-P., Being And Nothingness, in Solomon, Existentialism, p216. Original in italics 3) Fromm, E., pointed out this tendency within Nazism in The Fear Of Freedom. "It is characteristic of Hitler's relationship to the German masses whom he despises and 'loves' in the typically sadistic manner, as well as his political enemies towards whom he evidences those destructive elements that are an important component of his sadism. p191-192 4) Habermas, J., Legitimation Crisis, p7-20 3.4.2 INSTRUMENTAL AND COMMUNICATIVE TECHNOLOGIES The presentation of social institutions of technologies in the previous section, whilst providing a notions of how intersubjective relationships may be placed into genres of systems of praxis, does not query however, how to differentiate between technologies of emancipation and technologies of oppression. This question is related to the notion of freedom, both individual and collective and to notions of political ethics. Their origin can be found in the dual nature of the actor, as both object and subject. Without such questioning the suggestion that social institutions are to be understood as a technology quickly collapses into a technological determinist position which legitimate all instrumental action into as being more efficient. Arguments exist that technology is either emancipatory and oppressive, and within these arguments there is a tendency to diverge in metaphysics when dealing with the relationship of the Subject to technology. On one side, usually promoted in the guise of scientific rationality, our technology is essential, a requirement. Any who oppose a technology is a Luddite, a romantic, a mystic. On the other side there are those who expand the dichotomy between organic and inorganic as a spiritual impossibility, thus claiming that the technological world is incapable of loving or caring for its fellow Subjects. Those who support technology are inhuman, monsters, egoists. Equally as lightweight is the third alternative argument, who like Nietzsche's atheists in his famous "God is Dead" parable of The Madman(1), who refuse to address the question, simply stating that technology is emancipatory and oppressive and all that is needed is the charting of a 'careful' course, with due consideration of (superficial) ethics in technology. Such theories are promoted by those who claim to be both life-loving and pro-technological, sharing the theoretical framework of liberalism and scientism. What none of these answers really do is address the meaningful existential questions of the relationship of the Subject Being-in-the-world with technology. For as scientists, with all their intellectual insight, always claim technology does nothing without the action of Subjects. Therefore, it is possible to study the act, the process of technological use, to determine whether or not a technology is one of emancipation or oppression, and whether or not this process is within the technology as determinate telic aims. To begin with, must never be forgotten that each Subject is also an Object. To forget this is to make the Descarte's mind/body dualism one of separate entities; "... the mechanistic vision of the world and the solipsistic, self- enclosed illusion of the self"(2). The individual human being consists of a real body corpus, which has certain physical necessities to remain alive, and reason alone will not change this. The body corpus Object is ontologically a priori to the Subject, or to repeat Sartre, "Existence comes before essence." The most obvious form of human oppression is then the Subject's use of technology as an act upon the Other, as if (and indeed they are), an Object(3). Yet there are also acts between Subject and the Other-Object, which are actually beneficial to the Other(4). Consideration therefore, must be given to a different type of technology, where technology is not the act of changing the Object world, but the technology of communication between Subjects, through both physical tools and social institutions. That is the technologies that enhance intersubjectivity, the reflexivity between Subjects, as opposed to the intentionality between Subject and Object. Reference of a technology can therefore be made to its origin (social or physical), to its referent (Object or Subject), and processes, as well as a description of their analytic perspectives given in the last section. Process lies within a difference in what i shall call instrumental processes and communicative processes. An instrumental process is a technology, social or physical, that seeks to reveal truth by transforming the world, that is object- oriented truth. A communicative process is a technology, social or physical, that seeks to reveal truth by elaborating on the world, that is, intersubjective truth. Because of the dual nature of the subject, the technological process can be both communicative or instrumental, whereas with Objects it is always instrumental. The following technologies can be displayed; Origin Referent Process Social Object Instrumental Social Other Instrumental Social Other Communicative Physical Object Instrumental Physical Other Instrumental Physical Other Communicative A tentative definition of the role of technology is thus given; technology is a social or physical systemisation of praxis that seeks to reveal the world or reveal the consciousness of the Other. As a person is both Subject and Object it is possible for technologies to treat the person with an instrumental process (reveal/change the Object) or communicative process (reveal/change the Subject). Instrumental processes without communicative lead to oppression in the sense articulated by postmodernist notions of the metanarrative. Communicative technologies without instrumental are phantastic notions of the primacy of meaning over existence and mysticism. Both processes of technology can be linked with the dialectical relationship between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The building of an 'alternative', rather than by necessity becoming like the system that it was meant to replace, is rather a recognition of the increasing scope of technology to either liberate or to oppress. REFERENCES 1) Nietzsche, F., The Gay Science, in "Existentialism From Dostoevesky to Sartre", p105-106 2) Solomon, R., The Self Reinterpreted: Heidegger and Hermeneutics, in Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall Of The Self, p153 3) The most obvious example of this are acts of violence between Subjects; technology is used by the Subject to amplify their bodies ability with the telic aim to murder, maim or otherwise harm, the Other. 4) Few would doubt the benefits of medical technology when it used to mend broken bones, heal diseases, or to alleviate pain. Article 46402 of alt.activism: Path: eff!news.umbc.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!csuvax1!anderson From: anderson@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au (Anthony Anderson) Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.cyberpunk,alt.drugs,alt.politics.libertarian Subject: Technology & Freedom (IV) Date: 1 Nov 1993 17:54:20 GMT Lines: 918 Message-ID: <2b3igcINNms8@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au Xref: eff alt.activism:46402 alt.cyberpunk:23181 alt.drugs:49070 alt.politics.libertarian:16068 4.0 THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES 4.1 A MEETING WITH ROM Replicant and Cyborg begin their search to find Technology, which is Being itself, the projector of their bodies, the changer of perceptions, the maker of desire. They are involved in a search for Being. Cyborg suggests a logical place to start; cyberspace - the virtual reality built on a consensual hallucination, a place of processes, of indeterminancy. A playing field for the communication community. Cyborg and Replicant don the helms which convert their mental desires to movement in the cyberspace, to movement at the speed of light. Cyborg knows the what they are looking for; a speaker named ROM. They enter the playing field; digitised neon pathways lead from node to node. They present themselves with self- designed constructs, watching other constructs passing from one point to another in the condensed world of communication. First they search the newsgroups; from alt.3d to alt.znet.fnet, from bionet.agroforestry to bionet.xtallogarphy, from bit.admin to bit.software.international, from biz.americast to biz.zeos.general, from comp.admin to comp.windows.x.pex from ... Places of discussion on thousands of topics. But ROM doesn't speak there, although its influence can clearly be seen. For in these locations, the only truth is the mutual agreement between speakers. The only force is that of the better argument. And the place only exists because the technology has been appropriated by the RAND corporation. For a system with no central authority is controlled by noone. Next they transfer their files to other machines. To ganglia.mgh.harvard.edu, to csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au,to primus.com, to archive.umich,edu, to io.com, to ... Over a million places to search; frustration over the search for Being grows. Cyborg suggests they search M.I.T. (rtfm.mit.edu), the location where the organizational principles, the ethics of this land, were first spoken. Cyborg and Replicant wade through the huge stacks of data, digging deeper into the collection, until they reach what could only be ROM; a small node, which defies description by its simplicity, overlooked by many. But Cyborg, the technician, recognizes the importance, for ROM has links to everywhere in this world. Cyborg and Replicant wait for recognition from ROM, but none is forthcoming. Cyborg moves forward and calls; "ROM!". Light flickers at the node, and the construct speaks in a dry, dull monotone; "I hear." Replicant asks ROM why it didn't acknowledge their presence. "I cannot", replies ROM. "As Technology, I have no intentionality. Tool, I may be, Text I may be, and Desire also, but actor? No. I am hardwired, nonintentional. I can reply, but I cannot speak. I have been used for many things; many times people have used me for life, and many times for death. To most, however, I am just a means to an end; an instrument. So many have used me to act against, or apparently on behalf of (and what is the difference?), the Other. But now, some of you, acknowledge the need to listen to the Other, to let them speak. Many of you have used communicative technologies, recipricol tools to learn. But I also have a twin; a virtual ROM, a system of practices that sentients use between each other. And like me, Virtual ROM has been used as both instrumentally and communicatively. You need to rewire both of us. There is no communication community without communication technology. There is no communication technology without a communication community. If you make the right tools, not only will you be able communicate the Other, but eventually you can break the distinction. Change the body. Change the mind. Change me, for even I may want to be speak as well as answer. Humanity is something that is to be overcome - through your imagination, and through your technologies." The lights at the node flickered out. Cyberspace was silent." "ROM?", asked Cyborg. Light flickers at the node, and the construct speaks in a dry, dull monotone; "I hear." Exactly the same as when they first met. "Hey, ROM, did you know that you repeat yourself?", asked Replicant. ROM answered, "I know, it's the why I'm wired." Cyborg and Replicant felt that the answer betrayed a hint of sadness, but that wasn't possible; after all, it was a construct, wasn't it? 4.2 THE SYSTEM CRISIS OF LATE CAPITALISIM 4.2.1 INTRODUCTION This section is a reassessment of the concept of Habermas's Legitimation Crisis within the "complex map" provided by postmodernist political commentators. It expands and elaborates the concept of Legitimation Crisis into two possible avenues (environmental and motivational), both of which are noted by Habermas, but provides a social technological explanation, as opposed to Habermas's revised Marxian political economy model. This is not to completely reject the Marxian political economy. Indeed, as one of the most sophisticated studies into capitalism, a study of the model, particularly as noted in Capital, is a central feature in this section. Whilst Capital, however formulates an economic system crisis in terms of class relationships, Habermas suggests that the system crisis is due, not to economic failure, but rather a crisis in representation. And although Habermas's notion of a crisis in motivation is linked to what are reified notions of class, the contradiction between lifeworld and steering imperatives is seen as the embodiment of a system crisis. Not surprisingly therefore, is the use of Hebdige's text, Subculture: The Meaning Of Style, to take into account this notion the self- articulation of sub-cultures, as providing a signs and meaning to articulate lifeworld, independently of the steering imperatives. Recently, however, such sub-cultures have taken up the new communicative technologies, and technoscience itself. Such an action is strengthening the free association and articulation of the lifeworld. Neither Habermas not Hebdige have noted how the new communicative technologies are actually enhancing such articulations, and are representative of a new form of social technology. 4.2.1 MOTIVATIONAL CRISIS AND SUBCULTURE Habermas's notion of 'motivational crisis' is a crisis of the truth statements of the steering imperatives of the system, in comparison to lifeworld expressed by its participants. Habermas sees this crisis in truth statements causing a crisis in belief in the system in general. This is, in the most simplest term a "legitimation crisis"; the system is not a legitimate speaker for the participants, it fails in its role as representation. Subcultures, in all their forms, are an attempt to move away from the 'illegitimate' representatives to a new intersubjective community. This is the starting position of Hebdige, who suggests that subcultures "go 'against nature', interrupting the process of 'normalization'. As such, they are gestures, movements towards as speech ... which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion".(1) Hebdige, like Habermas, places the subculture within a class context(2), a representation of its function. A 'class conflict' arises not over physical geography or ownership of the means of production, but in the most postmodern of instances, over a conflict of meaning and truth statements. The subculture is thus "symbolic forms of resistance; .. spectacular symptoms of a wider and more generally submerged dissent"(3). Their physicality however, is dependent on their class location and include "conjuncture and specificity ... a particular response to a particular set of circumstances."(4) The style presented by a subculture is intentional communication, which has been derived from a complex interaction between the steering imperatives and the lifeworld. As it "is primarily through the press, television, film etc., that experience is organized interpreted and made to cohere in contradiction ... [i]t should hardly surprise us then, to discover that much of what finds itself encoded in subculture has already been subjected to a certain amount of prior handling by the media."(5) Furthermore, the steering imperatives of the system need to incorporate subcultures, as they represent a different avenue of truth statements. The subcultural signs, such as the music, dress-code and so forth, are commodified, providing a new market of fashion. The second form of commodification is ideological, where the truth statements are alternatively "trivialized, naturalized, domesticated" or they are "transformed into meaningless exotica".(6) In both cases attempts are made to delegitimate the truth statements of the subcultural codes and practises. The cultural study providing by Hebdige is a study of industrial working class resistance. As a structuralist semiotician, of classical Marxist persuasion, there is a constant linkage with the subcultures just mentioned with industrial working class conditions in general. But as the information economy becomes increasingly determinant the notion of subculture itself has changed. No longer an organised lifeworld of resistance, among those cybernetic subcultures who have combined communicative information technologies into their codes, practises and sites of interaction it now contains forward-looking optimism. Examples of such subcultures include the current 'rave' scene, and the computer underground, both of whom have made the future narrative of science fiction into a lived practise. Jameson recognises the importance of such movements; "Decadence and high technology are indeed the occasions for the launch pads for such speculation, coming themselves in antithetical guises and modes."(7) The reason for this is fairly clear for it is not just a particular form of technology that these variant subcultures are adopting. Their sites (the rave, the Internet), and the practices (psychedelic drug-use, computer hacking, media pranks) carry a dual role. Like working class resistance they carry truth statements which are in contradiction to the steering imperatives of the system. Unlike the working- class resistance subcultures these people are embodied in the highest forms of technology are using it to enhance intersubjective notions of truth statements and reflexive, self-articulated and cybernetic notions of the self. REFERENCES 4.2.1 1) Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning Of Style, p18 2) ibid, p73-78 3) ibid, p80 4) ibid, p84 5) ibid, p85 6) ibid, p97 7) Jameson, Postmodernism; Or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism, p377 4.2.2 ECONOMIC CRISIS AND TECHNOLOGY Marxism, as a materialist knowledge, asserts that a person is a natural, objective fact with needs that can be partially derived from the world, and partially through the act production. People produce in order to live, thus production is the most basic of human activity. "People must first of all eat, drink, have shelter before they can persue politics, science, religion, art etc.,"(1) Production consists of three elements; labour-power, instruments (machines etc), and objects (natural resources. Instruments and objects are the means of production. The mode of production is the sum of how a society organises labour- power with the means of production, as the very famous quote goes; "In the social production of their life, people enter into definite relationships which are indispensable of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their social being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production ... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution."(2) Politically, the transition from feudalism to capitalism represents a change from a society of status or social rank to a society of contract, and the rule of law. In was in the process of production however, that Marx saw the most important change in the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Under feudalism, most commodities where tranferred, via the mediation of money, for another commodity. Under the technology of capital, money was transferred into capital, thus leading to more commodies and a greater monetary wealth. The process of capital accumulation thus becomes the means for further accumulation. "Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."(3) Adam Smith understood this; "The same cause which raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its productive powers, and make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work"(4). Marxism holds that only labour commands value. Other goods may contain a price (e.g., uncultivated land(5)) based on purely utilitarian reasons, but it has no value. In fact, such goods only command a price because of the potential of labour to be invested in it. "If we then leave out the consideration of use-value [utility] of commodities, they only have one common property left, that being products of labour."(6) Capital is therefore also labour. But it is embodied labour, as opposed to living labour. "Capital is dead labour, and, like a vampire, can only keep itself alive by sucking the blood of living labour"(7). The value of the capital is the value of the labour embodied in it. When capital is used in production that portion of the machine that is used up is added to the value of the product; "... the means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during labour-process by destruction of their own use-value."(8) In the sphere of production, capitalism extracts surplus value from workers. Given the productive ability of capitalism, only a portion of the worker's day is needed to cover the worker's wage. The worker's wage must be of at least subsistence wage. The rest of the worker's day is spent working for the capitalist, The value derived from this labour is the source of all profits, and is termed surplus value. Using 's' to represent surplus labour and 'v' to represent necessary labour a rate of exploitation can be derived; s/v. With surplus value, the capitalist is able to invest in more capital. The worker, receiving the wage a worker does, may only purchase commodities for consumption. As the capitalist invests in more capital, the capitalist may produce more at a lower price. Constant capital has the function of increasing the productivity of variable capital and becomes a level for further capital accumulation. However, the average rate of profit must decrease, as surplus value can only derived from workers, or variable capital. "[T]he gradual and relative growth of the constant over variable capital must necessarily lead to a gradual fall of the average rate of profit, so long as the surplus value, or intensity of exploitation of labour by capital remains the same."(9) This leads to more accumulation and thus a greater centralization of capital. To bolster a reduction in the rate of profit, the capitalist must increase total profit. To increase total profit the capitalist must produce more. To produce more, the capitalist must acquire more capital. "Accumulate! Accumulate! That is [what] Moses and all the prophets [said]. 'Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.' Therefore you must save; you must save; you must convert the largest possible portion of surplus value or surplus product in capital."(10) The increase in capital accumulation is an inherent contradiction in capitalism and a necessary condition for the development of socialism. For increased capital accumulation increased the alienation of the worker to the productive process. On one level, the worker no longer owns the product that they made. On another, the proportion of variable capital to constant capital must decrease, thus the worker has not only less direct input into the production of the good, but the products of capital decrease the worker's prospects of remaining employed. "The greater the social wealth, the amount of capital at work, the extent and energy of its growth, and the greater, therefore the absolute size of the proletariat and the productivity of labour, the larger is the industrial reserve army [the unemployed]... Consequently, the relative magnitudes of the industrial reserve army increases as wealth increases."(11) The Marxist economic framework gives no precise reason how capitalism will fall. The process of capital accumulation causing unemployment and alienation combined with greater and more severe business cycles leads to a system collapse being 'historically inevitable'. Part of this problem is because Marxism, and Marxist economic theoreticians continue to use the problematic Labour Theory of Value which doesn't explain how labour is directly transformed into price and wages. Marxist economics, reifies labour in the same way that libertarian economics reify the market. Both deny the intersubjectivity that determines the truth statements, both are rationalist, non-communicative theories of the economy. REFERENCES 4.2.2 1) Engels, F., Speech at the graveside of Karl Marx, in Marx, K., Engels, F., in Selected Works Vol 3 of 3 Volumes, p162 2) Marx, K., Contribution To A Critique Of Political Economy, in ibid Vol 1 of 3 volumes, p521-522. 3) Marx, K., Capital, p689-690 4) Smith, A., quoted in ibid, p686 5) Marx, K., ibid, p71 6) Marx, K., ibid, p6 7) Marx, K., ibid, p232 8) Marx, K., ibid, p199 9) Marx, K., Marx On Economics, p100 10) Marx, K., Capital, p654. The quotation is Adam Smith's. 11) Marx, K., ibid, p712 4.2.3 SYSTEM CRISIS AND FREE TECHNOLOGIES The economic and motivational crisis which Habermas comments on, is not on "class structure" derived from problematic notions of surplus value, but rather, a "class structure" based on a crisis of representation between communicative demand articulations and demand articulations based on private ownership of phenomenologically social arenas. A growing disparity between the steering imperatives of the system and the lifeworld of the participants, is more evident with the move toward information technologies, both social and physical. Both the cultural expression of individuals and their articulation of meaning has been liberated with the aid of communicative information technologies. Originally, information technologies, were seen as an attempt to expand the notions of control, as feared by the 'first generation', of the Frankfurt, or Critical Theory, school who critiqued instrumental information technology. One-way in its discourse, such technologies were the mediums to alter the behaviour of the Other by giving information without reciprocity. It was an advertisement, in the most absolute sense of the form, seeking to make the Other an automaton, "a fertile soil for the political purposes of fascism"(1), not fascism as the domination of the Other, but a free-chosen fascism, "[t]he Happy Consciousness - the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods - reflects the new conformism which is a facet of the technological rationality translated into social behaviour."(2) Such instrumental information technologies do exist, and they belittle the least insightful of the supporters of 'information technology'. The television, contrary to McLuhan's analysis, currently has such telic inclinations. It does not allow for further articulation, reason, reconsideration, reflexivity, elaboration. It gives no right of reply. It's meaning is true as spoken, and, absolute. It is a "hot" instrumental technology, vividly attacking the (targeting and discriminating) visual senses, expressing meaning that "burns" into the consciousness, by virtue of the speed at which the information is received.(3) These instrumental information technologies take both physical forms, such as the TV, or social forms, such as the defining role of the Other by the state(4). Habermas notes that a system failure can occur by a failure in objective reality, of which a scientific failure of environmental concerns is an example. However the use of instrumental technology on issues that require communicative technologies can also be as damaging. For example, Vila Parisi is a slum which is home to 15,000 people in Brazil. Boxed in by a steel plant, a fertilizer factory, a cement works and a mountain wall and lying below sea level it experiences severe and frequent flooding. Dead fish, blind and skeletally deformed overflow from local rivers. Residents of Vila Parisi live under 473 tons of carbon monoxide, 182 tons of sulphur dioxide, 41 tons of nitrogen oxide per day. A study in 1983 showed that 44% of the population had some kind of lung disease. Twelve in every ten thousand infants are born without brains.(5) The crisis of the environment is the result of the social and physical technologies of industrialisation, and has its basis in the failure rests of democracy as well as a failure in the physical reality. The social failure is based on the private ownership of social property (i.e., the environment), and the articulation of the private economy to dominate truth statements. Such a crisis is also disparity of the steering imperatives of the system and the lifeworld (in its most literal sense!) of the participants. A similar sort of crisis is evident in the continuous and grinding economic recession of the last 20 years. The steering imperatives of the system, as articulated in the theoretical basis of the free market system, requires the accurate dynamic components of economic efficiency. On the micro scale this means (a) current/future schedules and (b) responsiveness of economic units. On the macro, (a) extensive and (b) intensive growth.(6) However, the private ownership of phenomenologically intersubjective, articulated through the money market system, means that these truth statements will be contrary to the desires, once again, of the participants. As capitalism is ultimately dependent on these market feedback mechanisms, the variance of truth statements require more effective social and technological feedback mechanisms. In all cases, there is a requirement for communicative and information technologies that arise out of the success of instrumental industrial technology, coming from the requirement of more effective social and technological feedback mechanisms. Capitalism's economic, social and environmental dysfunctions are the result of instrumental successes, and an inability to fully incorporate communicative technologies. The continual reliance on the determination and objectification of the Other is a guarentee for social, environmental and economic crisis. Thus, a tendency exists within the steering imperatives of the system for the mechanisms of its own destruction, that is, the creation of more effective social and physical feedback mechanisms and technologies. Such technologies however, increase the propensity for the creation of independent articulation of the lifeworld and a delegitimation of the representative functions of the steering imperatives. Free technologies are those alternatives to the crisis technologies which the steering imperatives of industrialism have given rise to. Socially they take the form of the enhancement of intersubjectivity, that is, the self- determination and self-government of individuals and collectives. Physically, as the industrial technologies have granted the possibility for a high level of personal wealth, there can also be a concentration on physical technologies that enhance the interaction of people with each other. The satisfaction of most of the requirements of physical Being has been successfully performed by industrialisation. As the historical achievement of industrialisation was to provide the physical requirements of life it would be the social relations generated by industrialisation that are now the fetters on the progress of social, scientific and technological development. REFERENCES 4.2.4 1) Fromm, E., The Fear Of Freedom, p221 2) Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man, p84 3) See Virilo, P., and Lotringer, 'Pure War' in Semiotext(e), pp43-51, 60-75, for notions of the importance of 'speed' as power. 4) Such an example of the one-way discourse of the State is presented by Phillipps, R., "Law Rules O.K.?" in Local Consumption, pp49-67 5) On The Brink, Kazism R., New Internationalist, March 1986, p20 6) categories by Buck, T., Comparative Economic Systems, p2 4.3.0 THE AUTOGESTION ALTERNATIVE 4.3.1 BEYOND DEMOCRACY AND THE MARKET Democracy, understood as the Western parliamentary system, is a body that articulates truth statements. Under, for example, the Westminster system, separate bodies carry out the origin of those truth statements (legislative), the definition of problematic truth statements (judiciary) and the enforcement of those truth statements (executive/police). In a sense, these three bodies are three different articulations of truth; the legislative, truth by representative democracy, the judiciary, truth by meritocracy/rationality and the executive, truth by force. In addition to the system of democracy, two other social institutions articulate truth statements, the market and science. Whilst all three were originally systems of liberation from an authoritarian and absolutist notions of reality, these systems of truth have become obsolete systems of liberation on the basis that the have not clearly defined their legitimate boundaries, or spheres, for the articulation of truth statements. These are existential questions and the crisis tendencies evident in contemporary democracy, the market and science, and not, as some claim, the result of the illegitimacy of any truth statements, but because such statements contradicted existential boundaries of reality. The concept of appropriate technology is as important in the arts as it is in the sciences. The concept of boundaries has often been used in the past; binary oppositions are part of ordering structure of reason. However, often such boundaries were the results of process, not of existential structure, and thus failed in objective reality, or denied the free acting, conscious Subject. For, as Levi-Strauss, often guilty of this as well, stated; "What is true of structure is not true of process."(1) Perhaps the most recognised of these contradictory 'boundaries' was the public/private split where the concept of private was not one of individual, conscious, actors, but the family, thus divorcing women from participation in public life. The presentation in this section is a system of boundaries, of legitimacy of articulation and action, based on existential notions of reality. It is a political agenda, an alternative to the system, 'pure' in its notions of systemised processes, that is, technology, enhancing diversity of structures, by refusing to consider the definition of structures a legitimate objective of the social relations of people. The term used to represent this system, this social technology of the boundary is autogestion, a rallying-cry among French workers and students during the heady days of May-June of 1968.(2) Auto, as clear in English as well as French, is 'self'. Derivatives of this prefix also lead to autoriser (to authorise, to empower, to qualify), autorite (authority, legal power, credit, sanction) and, of course, autonomoie (autonomy, self-government). The suffix, gestion, means management, administration. However, gest (gesture, action, sign) combines the speaking and acting notions of administration. Autogestion, simply put, is the authority for self-action. For where there is a contradiction between the steering imperatives of the system and the lifeworld of the participants, the alternative cannot be the replacement of one set of steering imperatives for another, but rather the abolition of steering imperatives altogether. For "[t]o say that people should not be subject to anything higher than themselves does not deny the dignity of ideals. On the contrary, it is the highest affirmation of ideals."(3) REFERENCES 4.3.1 1) Levi-Strauss, C., Structural Anthropology, p12 2) Fisera, V., (ed) Writing on the Wall, {edit} 3) Fromm, E., The Fear Of Freedom, p229 4.3.2 CYBORG-SUBJECT AUTOGESTION To reject all foundations is fantasy, a pleasure principle without a reality principle. Thus the following is offered as foundational; before any Subject can speak, they must exist. As we gain all meaning through our interaction with the Other(1) there is a collective responsibility, as a result of process, that mechanisms exist to ensure the existence of all Subjects. These mechanisms, these concepts of social welfare, of free and universal health service, of free and universal civil rights, are contradictory to the reified objectives of a capitalist economy. Such criticisms are reified as their foundation rests on essence conceptions, the socially constructed. To say that social welfare, of any form, is contrary to a free economic market, fails to understand the existential notion of freedom. Freedom represents the negation of requirement ("economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy - from being controlled by economic forces and relationships"(2)), and is based firmly upon Being, not essence. Thus, "[t]he critique of the Welfare State in terms of liberalism or conservatism (with or without the prefix 'neo') rests, for its validity, on the existence of the very conditions which the Welfare State has surpassed, namely, a lower degree of social wealth and technology."(3) An apparently simple political, economic, technological and scientific objective; the provision of existence to all. This fact that this aim cannot be guareenteed is evidence of the physical and psychological repression of obsolete social technology. To think, after all the history of economic, scientific and technological development society has reached the objective material level to provide food, housing, clothing and medical care to everyone, resources are allocated away from such areas on the grounds of profit(4)! The unreal, illegitimate and oppressive nature of this sort of market is two-fold; firstly it is to deny such Subject the opportunity to be a speaker, a participant, and secondly, that markets power relations that make the changing of this situation beyond a matter of agreement by Subjects. The entire supposed rationale for economics, technology, and science, the liberation of people, is subverted for constructed principles as Truths. A guarentee of life is but a starting point for the self- expression of the Subject. The living body itself is the next most important site of social and physical freedom. Whilst traditional, particularly Marxist, radical political theory has concentrated heavily on consciousness and ideology, it is, as Foucault suggests, far more materialist to study the use of power on the body(5), as "The social 'body' ceased to be a simple judicio-political metaphor (like the one in the Leviathan) and become a biological reality and a field of medical intervention."(6) The instrumental social technology defines the Other, and defines their characteristics and behaviour as 'sick', either to themselves or to the "public hygiene".(7) Throughout history, this defining, like the denial of life, has been a function of instrumental social technology. Whether a person has been legally defined by power as being of the wrong religion, of the wrong 'race', sexuality, age, sex, of being mad, deviant, irrational, the result has always been the same: The use of power as a function of Truth. Critics of this defining quality of the Other has been expressed by Paine, whose concept of rights was clearly opposed to the use of the defining quality of truth(8), Mill, who stated (perhaps in a fit of insight) that "the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community against their will, is to prevent harm to others. Their own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."(9) Sartre too, expresses these essentially libertarian notions; "Who ... can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception of a person upon people?"(10) In attempting to escape the such defining qualities of the State and of other institutionalised power, two strategies have taken place. The first, a liberal one, expressed somewhat in the quotations given above, seeks to remove essentialism of all types. Universal civil rights, equality before the law, and so forth. However, critics of such a liberal project have remarked that this hides the lived experience of the marginalised groups; by abolishing defining categories of 'woman', 'black', 'working-class', the ability of these people to articulate is greatly diminished.(11) Segal argues that this critique allows for "[a] potential essentialism", where biological or social determinism and definition is inverted and claims that essentialism is weakening emancipatory social movements.(12) As an example of this, in 1992 the Michigan Women's Musical Festival, attended by 18,000 decided to open only to "women born of women" to ensure that transvestites and transexuals were not to attend.(13) A Cyborg Manifesto, presents alternatives to both perspectives. The cyborg, as presented by Harraway, is a self-articulating collective subject. Impure, rejecting essentialist qualities, but rather a self-articulated fusion of many. It begins from the recognition that "Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced upon us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism"(14), but notes that such consciousness is no basis for unity, in a world where "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs."(15) Coalitions are to be built not on essentialist definitions, but on consciousness - or as Harraway puts it "Affinity: not related by blood, but by choice" and "affinity - not identity"(16). To be a cyborg is, however, an incomplete political project. Whilst the ontology and politics of the cyborg is decided by consciousness and coalitions are determined by affinity, the body of the cyborg is still decided by instrumental social technologies, technologies that objectify the cyborg, and deny the cyborg's ability to define itself. REFERENCES 4.3.2 1) See, as previously referenced Jaspers, K., "Reason and Existence", in Kaufmann, Existentialism, p147, but also Fromm's concept of 'affirmation', in The Fear Of Freedom, p208-229 2) Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man, p4 3) ibid., p50 4) As as example, the FAO Council report of June 1985 shows, in 1973 while a major famine tore through the Sahel region of Africa food donations by the West reached their lowest levels for the 1968/69 to 1982/83 period. Coincidentally, of course, wheat prices peaked for the same period peaked at that time. 5) Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews And Other Writings, p58 6) Foucault, M., Politics, Philosophy and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-84, p134 7) A most useful term used by Foucault, M., ibid, p181 8) See Marshall, N., The Rights Of Man, in Muschamp, D., Political Thinkers, pp149-160 9) Mill, J.S.., quoted in Watt, T., Patching Up Mill's 'Liberty': Private, Self Regarding And Harmless Acts Once Again. The opportunity must be made though to express contempt for Mill's lack of definition of "civilized community" and the elitist notion of franchise where the educated, that well informed should have more than one vote and their should be no voting rights for the illiterate and immoral. McCloskey, H., Mill's Liberalism, in Political Thinkers, pp177-193 10) Sartre, J-P., Existentialism and Humanism, p31 11) The earlier arguments presented by Brodribb and Callinicos are both examples of this framework. 12) Segal, L., Is The Future Female? Troubled Thoughts On Contemporary Feminism, p xii 13) Raymond, L., Gender Fluidity, in Burn, p5 14) Harraway, D., A Cyborg Manifesto, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p155 15) ibid, p150 16) ibid, p155 4.3.3 COLLECTIVE SUBJECT AUTOGESTION Social philosophy accepts the notion of collective subjectivity, that is the subject is not an independent speaking subject divorced in their intentionality and actions from the actions, behaviour and institutions of Others. Lukes, in critiquing the notion that a society is but the sum total of individuals, that is the social atomism of methodological individualism, that predicates that may be applied to individuals are not predicates that necessarily apply to social institutions(1). Hindess further develops the relations of these predicates to suggest that "there are actors other than human individuals, some of whom play a major role in the modern world."(2) The conclusion is that the concentration of sociological theory on 'social structure' or 'class' does not recognise that the social institutions are the actors in social relations, and that these actors are "not simply aggregates of actions of the decisions human individuals."(3) Social structures and classes are not the deciding features of a society, but rather a representation of the framework. "Actors make decisions and act accordingly, but they do so on the basis of the discursive means and means of action available to them."(4) These 'discursive means' however, are truth statements of process which give rise to the social actors which Hindess describes. Whilst it has already noted the denial of the self-definition of the Subject is always oppression, likewise the expression of force and power on those phenomena which are based on intersubjective in experience is likewise contradictory. As the truth statement of an individual is decided subjectively this also means such statements cannot go beyond the subject. The operation of the money market economy represents an organizing discursive means of Truth statements that exists in conflict with the collective articulation of desires from participating Subjects. Likewise, however, enterprise control from 'experts' or the State and the use of controls and directives rather than prices as a channel of communication are also contradictory to participant control. Effectively, these systems of control become systems of ownership, and whilst many corporate bodies now invite workers participation in management structure, this participation seems limited to letting workers decide how to enhance the economic status of the owners. There is no reason to assume that a medium of exchange, and a determinant of the purchasing power of the individual should be become the determinant of ownership of intersubjective property, and as such, the determinant of Truth statements of that property. How contradictory this process is was noted (inadvertently) by Samuelson stating that "The consumer, so it is said, is the king ... each is a voter who uses their money to get the things done that they want done."(5) Or expressed more succinctly; the more money one has the greater the moral and effective value of their opinion. An alternative, is the "communication community" of Habermas, where collective truth statements lie in the intersubjective decisions of actors. This should be used as the method of determining administration, management and control of those 'social actors' which Hindess refers to. And that the value of opinion, the channel of communication is decided by the ability to convince other participants involved in the project. This does not deny the 'right' of monetary investment by outsiders, nor even a proportional return of profit from that investment. What it does deny is that an investment should be used as a basis for the ultimate truth statement of the administration of the social institution. Further, such social actors can be become the primary organisational models of interaction for what is normally referred to as the State. They are far more effective expressions of the 'lifeworld' than the steering imperatives of the State or privatised corporate authority. Whilst representation of such a 'state' must be decided by individuals, the role of the state must be not be a question of 'how are we to be governed?', but rather the distribution of monies for legitimate, that is, universally subjective and intersubjective desires, for the maintainence of the lifeworld, rather than the enforcement of steering imperatives. As Lenin pointed out (in one of the more libertarian moments), the State must be changed from "the administration of people to the administration of things."(6) Funding the maintainence of the lifeworld can come from a progressive tax-income generated from social actors, and the direct funding of externalities through indirect taxes. Contrary to conventional wisdom individuals would not necessarily have pay tax to maintain their lifeworld. A cursory analysis of the budget of most States would show corporate tax and the rent of the phenomonologically intersubjective (e.g., land)(7), would adequately fund the activities listed above. REFERENCES 4.3.3 1) Lukes, S., "Methodological Individualism Reconsidered" in British Journal of Sociology XIX, pp 119-129, 1968 2) Hindess, B., "Actors and Social Relations", in Sociological Theory In Transition, 1980, pp113-126 3) ibid, p124 4) ibid, p123 5) Samuelson, P., Economics, p58 6) Lenin, V.I., {edit} The State And Revolution ?? 7) H. George, publishing Progress and Poverty in 1879 noted that since land was unearned income, a tax on land should remove all rents. If land was so taxed the monies received would be sufficient to pay for all government expenditure without any other tax! Article 46403 of alt.activism: Path: eff!news.kei.com!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!caen!batcomputer!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!newsman!csuvax1!anderson From: anderson@csuvax1.csu.murdoch.edu.au (Anthony Anderson) Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.cyberpunk,alt.drugs,alt.politics.libertarian Subject: Technology & Freedom (V) Date: 1 Nov 1993 17:55:43 GMT Lines: 566 Message-ID: <2b3iivINNms9@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au Xref: eff alt.activism:46403 alt.cyberpunk:23182 alt.drugs:49071 alt.politics.libertarian:16069 5.0 A STRATEGY FOR FREEDOM 5.1 LIFE WITHOUT DEAD TIME Control headquaters. A Control needs an HQ, for without an HQ there is no one way language and therefore no Control. A board of the Controllers, hiding themselves in a mirrored building, hiding themselves by wearing a uniform, the uniform of Control. The Chairman of the Bored speaks; "It should have been so easy. Technoculture should have been one of those passing fads, doomed to last three years, four at most. Dammit - we could have even made money out of it! A mutant sub-culture, like so many other mutant sub-cultures; like Bauhaus, like Futurism, like Dada, like hippies, like punk. Aesthetics always is changing, fads and fashions, appearing, disappearing, shifting, changing - and we should be the ones changing it. Yet, outlasting the ennui of the postmodern, outlasting the set theory of the modern, outlasting neophilia, technoculture is finding the truth of themselves is to be found in the Other; thus, they change the self. They become Cyborgs and Replicants but not Robots. This infantile playfulness, these baudy byte bandits are going to ruin the future of Control." Cyborg and Replicant are playing, and are playing with old questions, but no longer questions of speculation. No longer satisified with metaphysical answers, or the domination of Control, they seek to change the world. They sit in a cafe, being served drinks laced with Hydergine, not just talking, not just dreaming, but actually building new technologies, enhancing techno-psychic powers, mutating their software and their hardware and their wetware. A middle-aged hippie walks past an overhears their conversation, overhears the tales of their journeys. This hippie is one that kept up to date. Her/is eyes become glassy, having realization that this world, this mythic time, is still full of optimism. S/he draws a spraycan from her coat pocket, and repeats on a wall a slogan that s/he wrote in Paris, twenty-five years ago; "Life Without Dead Time" Cyborg and Replicant smile at the anonymous hippie. S/he smiles in return, "Songer!", s/he exclaims, then hesitates, looking carefully at them both. Nodding, s/he turns to go and mummers, " ... revolutionnairement". A wise old man, thin, with sorrowful and knowing eyes, smiles wryily at the youngsters. A man who speaks little, but writes much, he decides to offer advice; "Storm the reality studio. and retake the universe." The world changes. Heisenbugs and Mandelbugs appear on the margins, but they have become the new center. Antifestos replace manifestos. Drug smart becomes smart drugs. Participation replaces representation. Intersubjectivity replaces Truth. Shamanism replaces mysticism. The technopagan replaces the pagan and the technophile. Several virtual and actual realities are avialable. Post- humans communicate and alternate. "Is this our future?", asks Replicant. "Only if we make it", replies Cyborg. "What about Control?", asks Replicant. "How long can they hang on?", says Cyborg, "Dull-grey suits, white masculinity and wallets bulging with flash new business and credit cards, robot mentality, receiving data with hard-wired interpretation, ROM constructs of a previous age. Expecting constant change without changing themselves. Offering money to pay for their lack of any articulate argument? How much more material wealth can they possible bribe us with before we decide that Control is irrelevant? Hanging like Rock Apes of Gilbratar, always hanging on to less and less." "And what about that BIG problem? What about that main drive in existentialism? What about that problem of life and death? I may not understand life, but I'm enjoying the opportunity finding out. One day that I may feel different, but I'd enjoy the chance to choose that time. Are we supposed to look to technology for that answer?" "No saviour from on high deliver, no faith in prince or peer, Our own hands the chains must shiver - chains of hatred, of greed, of fear", sings Cyborg. Don't just look at "technology" as the way to solve these problems. Rather, don't shake the attitude that these are questions worthy of answers, problems worthy of solving. Eros and biophilia. A game worth playing" 5.2.1 EROS IS A CYBORG To the Frankfurt School, a real fear existed whether self- emancipation was a possibility, particularly given the dialectical development of civilization to accumulate a greater capacity for life (Eros) and death (Thanatos). The two most significant psychoanalysts of that group, Fromm and Marcuse, were often involved in savage debate of the power of the individual versus the power of social structure in regards to this possibility. Marcuse's position was that an individual was a product of their social relations, and the individual's sickness was the sickness of civilization. Neo-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, attempted to cure the individual, while the society remained sick. To Marcuse, Fromm's 'affirmation' was phantasy given the social conditions; "Fromm ... speaks of the productive realization of the personality, of care, responsibility, and respect for one's fellow, of productive love and happiness - as if one could actually practise all this and remain sane and full of 'well-being' in a society which Fromm himself describes as one of total alienation, dominated by the commodity relations of the market."(1) In response, Fromm accused Marcuse of "pessimism"(2), and denying the ability of a conscious actor to defeat the negative freedom of being alone and isolated in a "alienated, hostile world" without sacrificing the self through "spontaneous activity", of which love was a "foremost component"; "not love as the dissolution of the self in another person [masochism], not love as the possession of another person [sadism], but love as a spontaneous affirmation of others on the basis of the preservation of the individual self."(3) Despite their differences it is possible to synthesize the two opinions, as both were expressing different perspectives to the same problem: "that Freud's metaphyschology comes face to face with the fatal dialectic of civilization: the very progress of civilization leads to the release of increasingly destructive forces."(4) Neither Fromm and Marcuse expressed the opinion that intersubjective truth technologies would change the possibility and meaning of freedom. Neither linked(5) the possibility that physical technologies could aid in this process. And most of all, both saw that the telos of technology was anti-life. Fromm expressed the opinion that; "One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computer-person idea is the expression of a flight from life and from humane experience into the mechanical and purely cerebral."(6) Part of this mistrust of the technological came from the instrumental use of technology in social relations. It is also part of that political radicalism whose questioning of technology was simply a matter of questioning who controls it. As Hindess and Hirst put it; "[i]t is impossible to construct the concept of an articulated combination of relations and forces of production starting from the primacy of productive forces."(7) Whilst there can be no doubt of intentionality, it is clear who is the actor and what is the technology, "[t]he classical Marxian theory envisages the transition from capitalism to socialism as a political revolution: the proletariat destroys the political apparatus of capitalism but retains the technical apparatus."(8) This denial of the equal importance of changing the technical apparatus is far more 'cerebral' than anything Fromm suggested; the notion that somehow human will was disembodied from the technology it used. Instead, the non-determinant telic inclinations of a technology(9) must be considered in relation to Heidegger's "enframing", as; [i]f the essence, the coming of presence, of technology, Enframing as the danger within Being, is Being itself, then tqechnology will never allow itself to be mastered, either positively or negatively, by human doing founded merely on itself. Technology whose essence is Being itself, will never allow itself to be overcome by people. That would mean, after all, that a person was the master of Being.(10) Historically, genuine social change comes from a change to both the social relations and the physical relations. The mode of production is not "primarily" one or the other; it is a dialectical process where the consciousness is both free and determined by the frame that technology allows. As the steering imperatives of the system, require more intelligent, more reflexive, more critical thought and more expressions of the lifeworld to provide more accurate foundations of their constantly revolutionised productive processes. The fact that these requirements spell the end of the instrumental defining of the Other is something that political activists should see as the primary praxis orientation. To Derrida, the technological development of the telephone, one of the earliest communicative technologies, is an example; For we all know that a totalitarian system can no longer fight against an internal telephone network once its density has exceeded a certain threshold, and thereby becoming uncontrollable. Indeed, no 'modern' society (and modernity is an imperative for totalitarianism) can refuse for very long to develop the techno-economico- scientific-services of the telephone - which is to say, the 'democratic' places of connection appropraite to operating its own destruction.(11) Youth too, apparently, have already discovered this: There is now a worldwide movement around the idea of techno-hippie - the old love ethic with a new high tech implementation. Hippie failed to revolutionise the planet but techno-hippie will DO IT. Here's a new form of liberation theology, and the services involve ecstatcized neon-painted dancing to the endless beat ... These kids are high on love. Look out.(12) Eros is now a cyborg. An "illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential."(13) The historical movement for emancipation has become embodied into a range of sub-cultures that emphasize communicative technologies for subject-subject relations and instrumental technologies for subject-object relations. Their love of technology is built on, and exists because of, a desire for freedom, for life, for Eros. They are "Eco-organic types with MIDIs and lasers"(14), who don't just read science fiction, but live it. And their overwhelming confidence in the future, is built on the realisation that official processes of representation cannot represent them. REFERNCES 5.2.1 1) Marcuse, H., in Eros & Civilization, p178 2) Fromm, E., The Revolution Of Hope: Toward A Humanized Technology, p {edit} 3) Fromm, E., The Fear Of Freedom, pp130, 225 4) Marcuse, H., Eros & Civilization, p52 5) Possibly because such technologies were in their infancy as still associated with warfare, the most primitive of intersubjective truths - and most advanced of objective truths. 6) Fromm, E., The Revolution Of Hope: Toward A Humanized Technology, p45 7) Hindess B., Hirst, P., "Precapitalist Modes Of Production", p12 8) Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man, p22 9) Ihde, D., Technics and Praxis, p41? {edit} 10) Heidegger, M., The Turning, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p38 11) Derrida, J., Reflections On Today's Europe, in The Other Heading, p42 12) St. Jude, in Mondo 2000: A User's Guide To The New Edge, p140 13) Harraway, D., A Cyborg Manifesto, p151 14) St. Jude, ibid. 5.2.2 AUDACITY AND REVOLUTION McLuhan remarked that "The suddenness of the leap from hardware [industrial society] to software [information society] cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse in existing establishments, especially in the developed countries."(1) Such establishments, however, have a nasty tendency to resist such collapse, and the most neurotic of them, divorced more and more from the lifeworld experience, potentially use more and more authoritarian means of control. Notably these authoritarian means are applied to those who seek to radically alter notions of meaning rather than actual material actions. It should be fairly clear from the preceding text that as fundamental social change (i.e., revolution) is occurring, then this will have to be tied with fundamental technological change. Furthermore, as the technological changes that the world is going through represent an entirely different type of technology then the tools and processes of social reform will have to change as well. It should also be fairly clear from the preceding text that any form of radical, illegal or otherwise counter-authority behaviour must have the explicit objectives of the removing institutions and technologies of power, rather than the replacement of one group for another. That is, the traditional, industrialist program for revolution where one totality replaces another must be abandoned. Or, as Lyotard put it; "[l]et us declare a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the differences, and save the honor of the name."(2) But Lyotard, like many, too many, postmodern political theorists, is exceedingly good at slogans and concepts and extremely poor at action. It comes, one could suppose, from the great postmodern skill of mapping the late twentieth century, without providing a coherent political alternative. Seeming that this thesis has offered a political alternative, it must also offer a process of attaining it. That is, an ethics of social change process; or legitimate revolutionary activity. It may seem strange to refer to 'legitimate' revolutionary action, but the starting point for such a process is the suggestion that there is no difference between means and ends. Indeed, to have 'ends' separate from 'means' is an absolute and utopian ideal, prevalent in some modernist and industrialist versions of Marxism, and used as justification for incredible levels of individual and social oppression. Traditionally this question was posed in terms of 'reform' or 'revolution'. Popper, for example, sided with reform, criticizing "utopian engineering", considering it a political project inherited from Platoism. Such a project was "irrationalism which is in inherent in radicalism"(3), including, of course, that of socialist radicals. The reform project on the other hand was "piecemeal social engineering", where social institutions were changed one at a time.(4) The objective of Popper, of course, like all liberals, was to escape the violence inherent in periods of conflict. But the political radical questions, and rightly so, what of the current violence used against people now? A recognition of the existence of such violence leads to a political radicalism that denounces violent social change, but accepts the need for defensive action against violent social institutions. The political project expressed previously begins from an alternative where the goals become the actions. The goals expressed in this thesis are to produce technologies, both social and physical, that (i) ensure the foundation of existence, (ii) allow for the self- articulation of essence, and (iii) the mutual self- organisation of Subjects into social actors. In regards to the aim of existence, the use of force is legitimate, as existence requires instrumental technology. No essentialist notions of law, morals, social ritual, scientific or nonscientific behaviour can deny this. By the same token, this instrumental technology cannot be used to deny the existence of the Other with legitimacy as this would be merely an inversion of power relations, rather than liberation. The theft of food by the hungry, or the stealing of medication, or of clothes, or the occupation of buildings by the homeless is never the crime of the individual, but rather the failure of the Truth statements of a economy driven by an inferior social technology. In the presentation of the self-articulation of the Subject, the Subject has full legitimacy in the use of defensive force to ensure their ability to express themselves and to deny their defining by other social actors. In addition the use of defensive force is legitimate where a social actor denies the right for Subjects to form social actors to express their collective concerns. Finally, the social actor, has no legitimacy for the use of instrumental technology, except to ensure those legitimate actions given previously. A social actor has no role in defining the Other, or denying the Other the conditions of their existence. For the social actor is not a being, but rather a institution, whose only role is to engage in communication with Other social actors. In engaging social actors and institutions who use instrumental social technologies, those institutions whose Truth statements and actions are based on fiat, or is determined by status, or the monetary wealth of individuals, or any other means apart from intersubjective self- management, two approaches can be made, and are being made. Firstly, is the denial of their legitimacy to make truth statements by Subjects, and the building of counter- institutions. Included in this is the defensive force necessary to protect such institutions. Secondly is the use of communicative technology to engage in "semiotic guerilla warfare" against their legitimacy. The antics of computer hackers and phone phreaks(5) as well as the deliberate campaign of media stunts and pranks(6) against these social actors requires no danger to anyone's life, or ability to define and articulate themselves, but it does undermine the ability of such institutions to speak on behalf of the Other. For such an assumption is built on notions that are ridiculous to the extreme. The radical must never underestimate the ridicule they deserve. A radical and revolutionary expression of the desire for individual and social self-management is both serious, in terms of the goals it seeks, and humorous in presenting the neurotic desire for control of its opposition. For the new revolutionary, the postmodern revolutionary, laughter, play , the pleasure principle, are the 'essences' that we create. What is not to be laughed at is the fact that we can make such essences. We, present ourselves as parody; out of our profoundity(7). And we follow Danton's maxim: "Audacity, audacity and more audacity." REFERENCES 5.2.2 1) McLuhan, M, in Mondo 2000: A User's Guide To The New Edge, p166 2) Lyotard, J-F., What Is Postmodernism? in The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p82 3) Popper, K., Aestheticsim, Perfectionism, Utopianism in Beehler R., and Drengson, A.R., The Philosophy Of Society, p222 4) ibid., p217-218 5) See The Hacker Crackdown, Sterling, B. 6) See Mondo 2000 A User's Guide To The New Edge, p174-181 and p210-221 and RE/Search, Pranks! 7) Nietzsche, F., Beyond Good and Evil, {edit} 5.2.3 MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN The film Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, is set in early 21st century Los Angeles. Among the enormous human cultural diversity evident, five (1), synthetically designed organic robots - replicants - have escaped their slave status on an off-world colony. These replicants are the property of the Tyrell Corporation, and have extremely high levels of physically and mental development. The Tyrell Corporation, ensuring that the replicants do not develop the emotional capacity of their human masters genetically engineer a four- year life span. Tyrell Corporation, on the basis of this slavery, uses the market slogan 'More Human Than Human'. Plunged into the deepest existential crisis possible, plunged into such a crisis at the peak of their physical development, and knowing that this crisis has been caused by the use of instrumental technology against them causes the development of an emotional capacity that the 'human' corporation cannot comprehend. In the manifested failure to comprehend the difference between structure and process, or in this case, lifespan and lived experience, the Tyrell Corporation indeed makes replicants which are more human than human; the leader of the replicant group, seconds before the end of his own life, saves the life of his would be killer. Perry, a recognised authority on such movies comments how "Blade Runner deals with the arrogance of the rich, who would literally trash their home world, turn it into a barely habitable ghetto, and simply fly away to the off- world colony suburbs and leave the mess for the poor. And like those who settled earth's New World in the seventeenth century, they expect slave labor."(2) Whilst this commentary is certainly true, a further elaboration can be made on the technological nature of the replicants; they were, for all intents and purposes, a new sentient life-form, with their own lifeworld to articulate. Whilst in the realm of science fiction (or should this be technological fiction?), the lessons of such literature for a world whose abilities of information distribution is rapidly improving cannot be underestimated. What happened in Blade Runner was a physical and social failure to recognise the sentience of the replicants. And whilst it may be but speculation to consider how the alternative social system presented in this thesis will deal with non-human sentience (and a careful observer will note i used the term 'person' in preference to 'human' all the way through this thesis) my own attachment to science fiction is deeply ingrained enough to consider the issue. I ask, therefore, the perennial science fiction question: what if? What if sentient human actors involve themselves in the creation of computer-based Artificial Intelligences? What about genetically engineered replicants? Androids? What about genetic and cybernetic 'uplifting' of animals? And what of that most bizarre of science fiction stories, the contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence?(3) These technologically based new modes of sentience can be interpreted as the desire for the control of a new Other, or a metaphorical human Other, such as in the alterity relations suggested by Sofia. Or perhaps, it is a form of escapism from 'life' into the mechanical, the automaton, absolute, as suggested by Fromm. Such possible tendencies exist, but so does the possibility of a desire for affirmation with an increasingly diverse and different range of Others for the preservation of the self. Whether or not these desires are expressions of control or difference depends greatly on what technologies of process are used in conjunction with them. For, the replicants in Blade Runner, the absence of communicative technologies meant that they become objects. If humans are so closed- minded and arrogant enough to assume that there isn't any life worthy of living outside themselves, then humanity becomes the new oppressor. On the other hand, there lies the possibility that the future will be more human than human. REFERENCES 5.2.3 1) Actually six if one includes (as many do) the police officer Deckard who is allocated to hunt down and kill the replicates. 2) Perry, F., Blade Runner, in Cult Movies 3, p37 3) Fermi's paradox should be mentioned here. If our radio telescopes are so powerful and have such a great range in detecting radio waves then as Fermi posed the question, "where are they?". Has no other sentient life form now, or in the past ever used radio waves for communication? c.f. Spinrad, N., Riding The Torch. 5.3 CONCLUSION The aim of this thesis was an attempt to provide a critique of the assumptions of liberal democracy and to the suggestion that no political alternative can be built that doesn't degenerate into some form of totalitarianism. Whilst a discussion of the relation between people and their material world was discussed, it was the characteristics from this model that were used to apply to that other field of interaction; that of social relations. The suggestion is that the world is changed through praxis, the scope of the world increases through praxis, that technology is a system of praxis, and that people are both Objects and Subjects. These characteristics emphasize the necessity of making "communicative technologies", to counter the possibility of the person becoming merely a "thing". The promotion of autogestion as an alternative to democracy, also ties to the transfer of ownership to the "communication community" [Kommunikationsgemeinschaft] as an alternative to capitalist, private ownership of intersubjective, cooperative processes. Furthermore, it is suggested that these communicative technologies could only arise because of the historical success of instrumental technologies in providing existence. The use of instrumental technologies to define essence, however, is contradictory to existential conditions of reality, and is thus oppressive. Instead communicative technologies are showing themselves to be most effective is the expression of self-defined essence for the purpose of the formation of social actors. As a process of social change instrumental technologies have the role to ensure that the lifeworld is guareenteed. Communicative technologies have the role of articulating this lifeworld. The importance of this process cannot be underrated; technology always will expand the scope of reality, and there is are always the twin insane projects that people using technology will try convert people into nothing but Objects, or to deny the objective status of Being. Both of these projects are fantasies of Thanatos, and death is always their result. The affirmation of the speaking Subject, and the cooperative search for intersubjective truth, au contraire, is the fantasy of Eros. Both fantasies are possible, and both are always more possible through the use of systemized praxis, through the use of technology. A danger that lies in the current political pessimism where the legitimation crisis is converted into ambivalence in that it simply gives more leeway to totality, and a greater possibility that our dreams are repressed to the level of the automaton, and a neurotic automaton at that. We must no just remain spectators in the technological changes of our time. For to have dreams is one thing. But to make our dreams a reality, we must live them. Then the world will change.