In
Future: Technogenic Proximity Intimacy
as Medium of Social Engineering?
Seven Meta-Theoretical
Perspectives
Bernd
Ternes (2012)
The
history of human societies is characterised by an unbelievable evolution of the
capacity for distancing from nature. Nevertheless, it is also indirectly
characterised by the almost complete lack of a human capacity to create an proximityintimacy, a connection, a motivation in
relation to large-format abstract structures. All these tasks, involving media
such as belief, language, money or, finally, nation
building, have turned out, grosso modo, to be insufficient – not to say
murderous.
Now,
at the beginning and in the course of the twenty-first century, under the
conditions of an increasingly rigid technologisation of existence, might we be about to witness a
leap into the Promethean gap, giving people the ability, by
means of,
in and through technology, to ‘communicate’ with social abstractions – indeed,
emotionally, motivationally, even mantically? Might something appear that could be described as technogenic intimacyproximity,[1] understood as the late
evolutionary realisation of an ability of social systems to make relations of
spatial intimacy proximity emotionally and motivationally
accessible to relations characterised by spatial distance, proximate intimateintimate [ja, intimate distance!]
[BC1][OK] of space?
The
fact that there is still a need for the social integration of millions of
people seems undisputed. But what is the appropriate medium to achieve
this? Christina von Braun writes: “The modern sense of community is the product of the communication
society, its structures and networks. The communication system has almost taken
the place of the roots that Descartes equated with metaphysics and Diderot
with the visible God, philosophy and the natural sciences. From a system of
directives, which previously, in the religious context or in the absolutist state, determined the feelings and thought, a
technological network has
emerged that brings about a sense of community.”[2] Technogenic intimacy proximity would be the effect of a
“technological network” which no longer merely brings about the sense of
community, but co-constitutes it – and this without accepting a “schizotopia” requiring permanent attention
by forcing a spatial double existence in both real and media space.[3] – Concerning this, I would like
to make the following seven short remarks.
1)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
is
“techno-optimistically” and techno-anthropologically affiliated to a
social and economic movement that, at the beginning and middle of the 1970s in
the proximity
aims
less at retaining
the democratisation of the market made possible by ICTs than at possible new
practices of mediating man’s social integration within highly complex social
systems. That is to say that with the computerisation of the senses, of
communication and consciousness,
society will not be considered as being on a path to autism, but as on a path
to social- evolutionary change.[5]
2)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
assesses
the still emerging information- and communication-technological socialisation of mediation in such a way that the expected
change to a technological mediation of society will lead to a renewed
precipitation [OK] of cultures that can be arranged into the series: division
of labour = precipitation of two cultures (labour and management); capitalist organisation of division of
labour = precipitation of two cultures (bourgeoisie and proletariat). In contrast, the renewed
precipitation of cultures that arises in technogenic intimacy proximity is no longer founded on the
division of labour, but on the division of the work of conveyance,
that is to say, communication. It would be illusory not to accept an asymmetry
of the precipitation of culture for this changed mode of division and hence
reproduction (probably, producers and consumers of
attention). However,
it is not entirely illusory to assume that this new formation of cultures no
longer repeats what was typical of the previous division of labour, which
Claessens and Claessens describe as follows: “The division of labour in human
societies leads to the
apparently nonsensical result that the reasonable division of labour causes a
less reasonable distancing from everything that one does not do. The serious consequences of
this logical separation can be seen everywhere; it also aims at defining people
according
to what they can do with ever increasing skill.”[6] The non-defining of people claimed for the renewed
precipitation of cultures – i.e. no clear allocation of roles, no clear
formation of identity through origin, tradition, ‘heredity’, meanwhile also no clear socialisation of identity through
education – causes
brings
about a
reduction of distance to what one does not do and is not. For the normative
facticity of the increased retention [OK] of the excluded [OK] and the still not chosen or decided selected possibilities, ICTs provide the
suitable operationalisation. Possibilities and potentialities are upgraded;
real reality, in an ontic or even ontological sense, is downgraded. Reality is
no longer the (transcendental) opposite of possibility, but tentatively only one possibility
among others. After a long period of semantic coming-to-terms with the sense of
possibility (Robert Musil), technogenic intimacy proximity now means building up social
relations in and with real possibilities, no longer being able to fall back on what one is
and does – since identity no longer appears via a double negation (in the sense
of: “I am the one that does not do what he does not do”).
3)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
assumes
that in the future ICTs will no longer be based only on the John von
Neumann architecture, and therefore should no longer be considered exclusively
as the product of World War II and the development of the atom bomb (Wolfgang
Hagen). This is not accompanied by the trivialisation
of the serious changes
in the concept of war and power brought about by computers,[7] which in the “civilian” realm,
in the form of data traffic monitoring systems, are far from over; but it
will be noted that the (computer) idea of saveable programming will be
deployable for
the development of future social relations that cannot be subordinated to a
territorial subject-object ordinance and, at least for a certain experimental
period, will enable a further development of the psychoanalytically understood
“Fort-Da” game on and
with computers, thus making probable a transformation of the “compromise
formulas of the subject” (Hagen). In short, ICT would be able to contribute to
the anamnesis of the psycho-social
ontogenesis on a socialisation-capable technical level – thus creating the evolutive opportunity of
building up a potentiality that could turn post-symbolic and post-imaginary
social relations into absences as cultural technique despite the enormous
dangers of the sophisticated power that continues to develop in these technologies.[8]
4)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
thus
assumes a new splitting up [!] of abstract socialisation that,
in communication-technological terms, leads to a concrete and an abstract
virtuality of society.[9] Both these virtualities can also
be named with
the zeitgeist concept of the bubble. The fact of being situated in a bubble
means two things: first, the bubble of the market-society (and not merely
market-economy) assessment of value, of appreciation in value, of the
anticipated production or speculation of the surplus value of
certain products, services, above all businesses (this occurs overtly [!] through the stock exchange
computer systems); and secondly the bubble in the sense of the horizon in which
certain products, services and infrastructures are installed – thus, as a rule,
products that affect, serve and extend media-based, virtual interaction or virtual
traffic. This is a matter, on the one hand, of the increasing dependence [OK] of the operation, decision and
assessment connections within the present of a future present,
a future reality, an unpredictable
future (abstract virtuality); and, on the other hand, of an increasing filling out of the present
with interactions that can be characterised by the absence of real
consequences, the absence
of bodily presence, the subordination of real manifestation to the
purely possible appearance within a digital representational reality (concrete
virtuality). Put differently, Cornelius Castoriadis’ understanding of society
as imaginary institution (the title of a book, Engl.,
Cambridge Mass. 1987) could, due to the change taking place in the character of the realities of society,
imagination and institution, be developed or translated into an interpretation
that sees the imagination as an institution become social. This still seems to
be thought symmetrically. What one calls society would no longer be merely a
reality of the imagination, and thus real only in the imaginary, the imagined.
Instead, the extent of socialisation and the density of the apparatus-based, symbolic and
techno-infrastructural means to the ends of certain social traffics would have
reached such a comprehensiveness that society no longer needs to be
imaginatively institutionalised to create unity, boundaries and inner/outer relations. It would now be the technically
operationalised imaginations themselves that institutionalise society – now, however,
no longer only imaginatively effective, but virtually effective.
These
two virtualities could stand for what was previously indicated by the not undisputed pairing of social
integration/systemic integration. While – put roughly – social integration
addressed the problem of the development of social reproduction according to conditions and necessities that
arise through interactions, actions and expectations, systematic integration placed
certain infrastructures of systems at the centre of the problem, and indeed via constantly readjusted
dosages of “benefits” [!] that generate the individual systems for and against one
another. The tensions within
the different sites of integration drew their fuel from the fundamental problem
of the apparently irresolvable relationships between the individual and
society. For a long time, and actually still operative today, it was possible,
in high capitalist
society, to behave as if there were a necessary symmetrisation of the two distinctions
social/systemic integration and individual/society (still recognisable in social demands for
justice). However, as it appears, this constitution of society (in nuce, the belief that there is a contract
between capital and society) was a pure necessary accident in the development
of an automatic machinery called society, which is currently, in an elevated hierarchy [vielleicht: “on a higher level of social
morphing”] , dedicated to the emancipation of
culture.
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
is
particularly interested in concrete virtuality. Concrete
virtuality secured
itself – one might say – intra-psychically through the fact that individuals
come ever more frequently into
positions that either no longer force a difference between decision and exclusion
(hence, no longer a difference between that for which one decided and that
which in the decision for something wasn’t chosen and was therefore excluded),
that no longer require a distinction between the
reality of a sign (image) and the symbolising [!] of
reality, or reveal the irrelevance of the difference between the absence and
presence of a ‘not-I-world’. All these differences are exchanged for [!] a
heightened competition between the temporal concepts
of ‘present present’ and ‘future present’ – in short, for the becoming-factual
operationalisation of the application of time to social, communicative, and
material [!] space.
If one grasps this new kind of
social modelling in the socialisation-theoretical
concepts of socialisation and individuation, then concrete virtuality assumes
the task of individuation;
it should make sure that individuals that still do not understand themselves as
things proceed beyond the social space to
a temporally configured form of existence. From spaces – to time. Abstract
virtuality, on the other hand, should make sure that the fundamentally opposed
need for security, resistance to temporality, minimisation of future risk and
provision
socio-structurally disappears; its
socialisation function would thus be a kind of temporary perpetuating of a
growing number of no longer perpetuated social (not technical) traffics in
society.
While abstract virtuality renders
social mediation increasingly temporal/simultaneous
and de-materialised, [!],
concrete virtuality assumes the task of configuring human individuals in such a
way that they no longer suffer under this society’s colossal volatility.
Technogenic intimacy proximity
understands itself as the cautious
appearance of an effective psycho-social reaction to the new pressures of
abstract and, above all, concrete virtuality.
5)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
assumes
that, in the coming decades, within end-modern societies, a profound change
will appear regarding
the mode-ensemble of the conditions for enabling intensive social relations.
With the theoretical supposition that the existential dimensions of Dasein [vielleicht das deutsche
Wort “(Daseinsdimensionen) ” in Klammern zusetzen] ‘private’, ‘communal’ and ‘social’ can be
socio-anthropologically proven [OK] for human populations, and are
therefore also to be encountered in hypercomplex social systems, for the
modes of the intensity of social referentiality, in contrast, a historical field of variation [!] is assumed in which technogenic intimacy proximity starts to become a candidate for
the guaranteeing of the mediated sociability of the individual member of
society, after [!] the modes ‘lacking
socialisation’, ‘oppression’, ‘sanctions/life obligations’ as well as ‘religious or rational motivation’
hit up against the border of the extrinsic and intrinsic guaranteeing of intensive social participation.
While the law-oriented disciplinary society attends to the maintenance of the extrinsic observance
and production
of social relations and was supplemented by the rule-oriented control society
that “monitored” the intrinsic observance and production of the social
relationship, technogenic intimacy
proximity
assumes
a continued development of the control society into a technological
“society” in which an exclusively ex- and intrinsic observance and production of the benefits [!] of society will no longer be
maintained through communication-technical standardisation, but through a “new”
abstractly motivating version [frame,] which is guaranteed in an
operationable potentiality for absence beyond common semantic, normative and
culturally handed-down techniques (language, love, interaction). This profound
socio-psychological incision in the identity [!] of human individuality (the becoming
invisible and the de-personalisation of the individual as a mimesis of the
becoming invisible and impersonality of the
communication-technological infrastructure) will not be
exclusively
correlatable with a descriptive tradition that focuses on processes of
reification. It will also be correlatable with a reconfiguration of
the individual as a producer of data and
electronic-traces which is currently still not calculable in its volume – in
this sense the historical implementation of biopolitics described by Foucault
continues in the area of information politics. The very probable radically
expanded new data-configuration order correlates with a probable, marginalised
symbolic, or rather semantic, order, whereby it is still not clear how “enduring” mantic forms of
communication and social relation will be without subsequent semantisation and
classification in the symbolic order.
6)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
understands
itself as a concept of a motivational-emotional relation of proximity [relation of intimacy] to social abstractions which –
as missing link – should be related to Kluge/Negt’s concept of “political raw
material”; and should hence also be related to the forms and measures described
by Kluge/Negt that are able to turn this raw material into a
public sphere. Hence, technogenic intimacy proximity should be developed as an
interface that actually suitably links the anthropo-cosmos with the
socio-cosmos, and in such a way that a new, or at least different, cosmos might
arise
– perhaps that of curture/nurture as the synthesis of a new dimension of Dasein
(besides the dimensions of the living, the social and the psychic, or those of
the private, the communal and the societal). This would be characterised by the fact that it links the infra-psycho-structure
of invariant feelings with the infra-socio-structure electricity understood as
the one that remains invariant to all systems of movement in space and time.
While this section [nicht abschnitt,
sondern anschnitt; vielleicht schreiben: “point of vieww”] [BC2]relates to the invariance of the
feelings and the invariance of electricity to the environment, a further
dimension of interface could be made out in the variant feelings and in
technogenic intimacyproximity, and indeed in the dimension of telematic media. These
could allow access to the anthropology of the impulse, to the anthropology of
the so-called congenital social reactions, and thus, in short, to the
pre-reflexive area of the ‘emotional apparatus’ and thereby bring about that the type of
emotional-motivational involvement depends on the type of medium. The sense of
such a section
point
of view lies
in the exploration of evolutively effective
extensions of anthropologically so effective forms with which people have made
themselves
independent from their respective embeddedness in environments/media (of physics,
geography, meteorology, fauna, flora). Technogenic intimacy proximity would be the attempt, after the
realisation of the technologies of distancing from the media of life and living conditions – that which have been thousands of years in
the making and catastrophically put to work in the
modern era – , to now detect a highly artificial
and new human dependency on media in the dimension of
the socio-anthropological. Put simply, this means that man
continues to develop. This further development of anthropo-techniques urgently experimenting via the
socio-cultural plasticity of socialisation correlates with a presently equally
identifiable beginning of the further development of bio-techniques in the form of the genome,
genetic and life sciences. Whether and to what extent here a complementary or even antagonistic
relation between anthropo- and biotechnologies is to be expected in the future depends on
whether, through technogenic intimacyproximity, in the intensity of social
relations, a real alternative can be developed to the “(pheno-)aesthetics of
human existence” in which, as it were,
the new sharpening of a “programme [!] of Dasein” (bio-, pharmaco-, gene and brain technology) will be culturally
superseded [!].
7)
Technogenic
intimacy
proximity
moves
between a
“However,
one cannot traverse the horizon. One must remain in the boundarythreshold. And then descend into the abyss of the
opened thresholdboundary. Tumble in all directions, also upwards”[10]
and
a
“He
will learn freedom || to break out to wherever he wants”.[11] [!]
It
is currently impossible to distinguish between tumble, fall and breaking out,
just as the borders between truth, myth and a deeper meaninglessness have also become less sharp.
Technogenic
intimacy proximity
assumes a collapse of what for
man, over thousands of years, has become socio-culture: interaction with what
is present [!].
It aims, however, at the learning of the freedom
to break out, and not for individuals, but for social man
as such: the breaking out into a social sphere in which the, for man, so
essential intimacy proximity
towith
others and to the Oother [vielleicht: “Other”] could
be produced through the intimacy with proximity
to technologically
operationalisable absence. Certainly that has already been tackled in and with
the evolutionary
invention called language; and certainly, the linguistic imagination has had an
enormous,
scarcely to be underestimated, support in the explosion of the
pictorial [!] visuality
of our period.
Technogenic intimacy proximity
builds on this; but it sees,
besides the comfort and relief provided
by [!] language
(Heidegger) and images (Leonardo da Vinci), something with
its own independent and
with an intrinsic value
arise: a new potentiality for abstractions such as society, responsibility
and to motivationally produce an intimacy
proximity towith onethes neighbour
[vielleicht eher: “generalized
other”].
This
is currently still not imaginable – just as it is no
longer imaginable
that the market should have been the last
candidate for a social space-time in which people encounter each other in
impersonal relations as supplements of commodities.
[1] The differences between this term
and other terms such as ‘technological formation’, ‘technical civilisation’,
‘technology as social relation’, ‘technical age’ among others are not taken
into account here.
[2]
Christina von Braun, “Altes Wissen in neuem Gerät”, in Zeitschrift Paragrana,
issue
2/2001: Horizontverschiebung.
Umzug ins Offene?
(ed. by Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf), p. 62-80, here p. 67.
[3]
Günther Anders, Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 2 vols.,
Munich 1992, vol. 2, pp. 85f.
[4] “Computers are mostly used against
people instead of for people, used to control people instead of to free them,
time to change all [OK] that – we need a ... People’s
Computer Company”, according to the text of a flyer from the early 1970s of the
same company. See Wulf R. Halbach, “Zeichen der
Technologistik. Körper, Körperschaft, Räume”, in
Manfred Faßler and idem. (eds.), Inszenierungen von Information.
Motive elektronischer Ordnung,
Gießen 1992, pp. 53-68, here p. 54. On the following page, Halbach points out that
the “Homebrew Computer Club” founded in 1975 – the first of its kind – was made
up of precisely those members are still among those dominating computer
technology today (e.g. Apple).
[5] For the first version, see Bernd
Beuscher, “‘Hacker’. Auf dem Weg in eine autistische Gesellschaft”,
in Fragmente.
Schriftreihe
zur Psychoanalyse,
issue 35/36, 1991: Unterbrochene
Verbindungen,
pp. 251-264.
[6]
Dieter Claessens & Karin Claessens, Kapitalismus als Kultur,
Frankfurt am Main 1979, p. 27.
[7] “The universal technicity of power
begins to assume the position of the totalitarian ideology of the political
state of exception; not openly, not in the discourse of an ideology, but in the
form of an intrinsic technology/politics”, according to Wolfgang Hagen,
“Rechner Krieg und Rauschen. 12 Thesen zum Medium Computer”,
in Fragmente. Schriftreihe zur Psychoanalyse,
issue 35/36, 1991, pp. 267-276, here p. 271.
[8] “Camouflage, invisibility as guarantee of the most powerful effect, is the
signature of the infrastructure of the modern period. The historically
progressive becoming-invisible of the infrastructure [...] is on the one hand
analogous to Jacques Lacan’s differentiation of the real, the symbolic and the
imaginary in terms of what is analysable; on the other hand as that which
eludes the classical medium of the historical description”, according to
Wolfgang Ernst, “Bausteine zu
einer Ästhetik der Absenz”, in Bernhard J. Dotzler and Ernst Müller (eds.): Wahrnehmung
und Geschichte. Markierungen zur Aisthesis
materialis,
Berlin 1995, pp. 211-236, here p. 225.
[9]
For the following, see Bernd Ternes, “Konkrete
Virtualität, abstrakte Virtualität. Notizen zu einem neuen Stand
gesellschaftlichen Modelns”, in Soziologische Marginalien,
vol. 3, Marburg
2000, pp. 181-188.
[10]
Dietmar Kamper, Nach
Dannen, ins erste Futur, unpublished manuscript, Otzberg
2000.
[11]
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche
Werke, ‘Frankfurter Ausgabe’, vol. 4: Oden I,
ed. by Dietrich E. Sattler & Michael Knaupp, Frankfurt am Main 1984, p.
202.