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CULTURE AND
TECHNOLOGY 4 |
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From Techno-narcosis: Another Hi(n)t of Technology
"You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high.
And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room's gloomy
solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, 'It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."- Charles Baudelaire
"If, in 'modernity,' we still suppose there to be some affinity between, on the one hand, the experience of fiction (literary or otherwise, whether from the perspective of the 'producer,' the distributor, or the consumer) and, on the other hand, the world of drug use; and if we imagine this affinity even when the poet does not search for any 'artificial paradise,' in that case the writer is accepted only to the degree that he allows himself to be reintegrated by the institutions. He restores the normal order of intelligible production; he produces and his production generates value. This legitimation has to do with the evaluation of a productivity which is at least interpreted as a source of truth, albeit one that comes through the medium of fiction. The drug addict, in our common conception, the drug addict as such produces nothing, nothing true or real. He is legitimized, in certain cases, secretly and inadmissibly, by certain portions of society, only in as much as he participates, at least indirectly, in the production and consumption of goods."- Jacques Derrida
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This leads to one of the last aspects of narcosis in its relation to art that I want to explore. This has to do with the loss of the self within both the state of being in narcosis as well as in art. That is to say, in both artistic production and narcosis, there is an opening up to agency that only unveils a lack of agency, or, rather, a subjectivity only in dependency, the habit becoming that which the self negotiates, that to which the self becomes beholden, the substance to which the self is defined and refined. In artistic production, the product, the work of art comes to contour the subjectivity of the artist, becoming one of the products that defines the perception of the artistic self. For the addict, subjectivity also is contoured by a relation to the product, to the narcotic, to that, as Heidegger says, "for which the addiction hankers." In other words, within the state of narcosis as well as the existence of the artist (indeed, perhaps within being itself, as we'll discuss in a moment), there is a revelation of the eccentricity of identity, of how the self is defined as much from without as from within. This notion of the eccentricity of identity is something we want to return to when we get to the subject of techno-narcosis.
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To gain some focus within this haze of ideas, I wish to, however, turn to a particular passage, or quote, from Heidegger, because the themes of the eccentricity of identity, of being on drugs, being in a state of narcosis are purposeful echoes towards which I want to move, and, indeed, the quote I want to look at has to do with the movement towards.
What one is addicted 'towards' is to let oneself be drawn by the sort of thing for which the addiction hankers.
(Martin Heidegger)
I've already suggested above the idea that the addiction has agency, when I mentioned the way that addiction comes to define and refine the self, even while entering identity as an impurity, making identity impure, injecting a foreign substance into the self, a parasitical poison that corrupts any illusion or allusion to the purity of identity, of the self's hallucinogenic dream of being identical to itself, and not always already eccentric to itself. The structure and stricture of the relation between drugs and subjectivity leads to the revelation that our addictions, whatever they may be, to whatever or whomever they may be, come to define us. They are more us than us, to play with Lacan's definition of the objet petit a. But, for Heidegger, that which we become addicted 'towards' is losing our self by becoming a being drawn, drawn to and by the sort of thing that the addiction hankers for. The agency of the addiction trumps the agency of the subject, may, indeed, be the agency of the subject and hankers for that which defines the addiction, the secret parasite, the para-site of the secret.
Yet, in the way that addiction exerts an agency, we may perhaps begin to open up to that other quasi-entity, quasi-agent, that other active ingredient within all the meanderings of this seminar, namely technology. Although we have yet to begin to discuss the agency of technology, we have started to make an approach and one of the ways towards that approach, as well as one of the ways to look at how narcosis becomes vital to an understanding of technology, especially in our day, is to look at the relation between narcosis and technology, this techno-narcosis that I've hinted at.
On one level, drugs and technology (and it is in this way that we can add the aura to Benjamin's list of addictions) are things that we only notice when they are absent. All of these haunting absent presences lead us to the necessity of thinking the haunt of invisible presences, the places where such quasi-entities reside, their haunts and how the haunt us, again recognizing that not all hauntings are bad, just as not all drugs are bad.
Yet, there is also a very practical, material relation between technology and drugs that maps out a very particular moment, the contemporary moment within the larger narratives outlined above. This would again have to look at the relations between legal and illegal drugs, between designer drugs, drugs produced in labs through technology, from LSD to ecstasy and beyond, to the legal drugs of contemporary labs, the pharmaceutical industry, one of the most profitable industries within this country, one that raises a plethora of questions about the exchange of information across borders, and, when it is a matter of drugs, the patrol of borders is always an important issue. This is a pharmaceutical industry that is often in the business of creating drugs to deal with the problems brought about due to contemporary society, such as social anxiety drugs. The medicating of the body through the pharmaceutical industry, however, does not reorder a disjunctive body. Drugs that deal with social anxiety disorders only lead to further disorders. That is to say, there was no idyllic past, where the body did not experience disorder. We just shift the locus of our disorders. We double reality and now can place those addictions out on the web, forge a community centered on disorder.
Again, however, one should not be so quick to damn or applaud the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, one of the interesting things about technology and drugs is how both topics, along with sex, tend towards damnation or applause quite rapidly. Indeed, there is a whole relation between technology and the sex industry that we could trace out along these lines too. Regardless, sex, drugs, and technology are all topics that one is typically quick to express one's objection to or allegiance with. I would say that, in part, it is because these all broach a more anxiety producing subject concerning our subjectivity, not only as individuals, but as a society, suspending us between the illusions that we have about ourselves as individuals and as a community, and exposing the more conflicted and conflated 'nature' underlying our identities, if that is even the right word.
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On one level, all of these themes around narcosis from philosophy, art, and literature inter-connect with technology around the theme of doubling reality, of the production and construction of worlds of illusion, of artificial paradises, and, again, there is a long history to this, from the Platonic ideal forms to Baudelaire's hallucinations and to the play of the double up to our own age. Reality is, at least, doubled, always reproducible and we've had a chance to examine the various technologies that double reality, just as we will be looking at some of the other ways of doubling reality.
Both technology and narcosis lead to a doubling of reality, to an opening up of brave new worlds (and one could inject the writings of Huxley here, although their dystopic vision of narcosis would have be tempered with a more subtle analysis than that which he provides in both Brave New World and The Doors of Perception.) But it is not so much the issue of doubling reality, of making two or more realities that exist side by side, in a relation akin to Kant's phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Instead, it would be a matter of mirroring, but a mirroring that distorts and expands, two mirrors held up to each other creating a depthless play of surfaces. Within techno-narcosis, it is not so much a question of doubling reality that is at stake, but reality's double, the doppelganger, a theme that runs its own course through philosophy, art, and literature.
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The world of the web and virtual reality is not so much a matter of doubling reality, of a reality that is separate from the real world, but of a reality that is the double of the material world, a virtual twin, the screen or virtual mirror into which we stare, within which one can experience the effects of techno-narcosis. It is a world within a world within a world within a world en abyme. There is a loss of the sense of time. There is an inducing of the trance like state, and it is addictive. One only has to point to the growing number of sites dedicated to Internet addiction.
Within techno-narcosis, there is a loss of the physical presence of the body, a sense of forgetting about eating, of losing the will to move, of staying in a languid fluid state. Indeed, almost every word in Baudelaire's poem on hashish could be virtually doubled and applied to the virtual worlds of today, and, again, one has to look into the return of guilt, the labeling of the state of narcosis as evil, as immoral that pervades Baudelaire and that lies at the root of many negative views of the Internet. Of course, within an analysis of techno-narcosis, one would have to look at the physiological injuries and transformations brought about by staring at the computer screen and typing on the keyboard, the least of which may be the manifestation of carpal tunnel syndrome. Lastly, there is a very language to the Internet that hints at this relation to techno-narcosis: 'hits' on a web page, being wired, going wireless.
Again, looking at language may be perceived as a mere rhetorical ploy, and yet, language too is reality's double, sometimes pointing towards other realities, the doubling of reality, but, at root, creating something that is not separate from reality, but inseparable from reality, its Siamese twin, joined in a para-sitical fashion where one cannot be separated from the other. Yet, at the same time, to really return to where we began, in understanding this inseparable separateness to the other, from the other, at the heart of technology, narcosis, language, and art, however eccentric this heart may be, however mechanical it may be, lies our relation to the other, and while technology, language, narcosis, and art may at one level mark our separation from the other, our disconnection from the other, they all, each in their own particularity, offer a bridge, the hope of bridging the distance between us.
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