<nettime> Re: Florian Kramer on Schirmarcher

[Cubitt Sean <S.Cubitt@livjm.ac.uk>]

entertaining, yes, really, and I did enjoy the way Florian pinpointed the
historical moment. But there is something a bit messy, a bit depressing
even (if that isn't too European)  about a slippage that scarcely appears
in the 1991 text, but is front stage in the 2000 one. In the older piece,
Aristotelian aisthesis appears as a sort of peircean Firstness, a
prediscursive and therefore undifferentiated and non-objective perception.
Eco opines (Kant and the Paltypus) that this is an individual moment, but
unstable, as it is promptly broguht in to Secondness, the constitution of
the undifferentiated perception as an object (as when we distinguish a
sudden prick of pain as either a muscular twinge or say an isect bite) at
which point the perception is not only objectified but constructed as a
social event, soemthing that can be recognised by another, after which
(Thirdness) it can become meaningful, a sign. I think that even the
prediscursive is social in the human animal, a residue of triangulating
eyelines in tribal hunts perhaps, but this is not important right now. 

What is is that this instance of prediscursivity has become a major
platform in the proposal that there might or perhaps should exist an
unmediated communication. Sure, Spinoza can talk about a theological
principle -- effectively the same that fires up Virilio in his more
theological moments, for example the introduction to Paysage d'evenements.
But this isn't a matter of unmediated communication: the term is not
oxymoronic or dialectical, its a non-sequitur because 1. communication,
whether we think of it in semiotic or informatic terms, is about transfer
of signification/information, ie it presumes that there is a *difference*
between the poles of the communicative act. No difference, no
communication. Mediation, as Florian so rightly says, is 'in between', ie
it is a process of difference (I don't agree with Deleuze and Guattari on
the break in machinic flow here, but they are talking about the same
phenomenon 2. if communication communicates it takes *time*: there is no
such thing as instantaneous communication. Data can be transferred
extremely quickly, but even the most pious cognitivist will admit to a
phsyiological temporality involved in decoding or even in perception
itself. Time also functions in the crucial role of misunderstanding, the
equivalent of random mutation in disursive evolution, as it does also in
3. the essentially *spatial* dimension of communication, a further
function of the formative nature of difference in communication and
mediation.  Anything else would be telepathy, a fine dream, but one which
leads to the peremptory triumphalism of, for example, Joel de Rosnay (Le
Cerveau planetaire) and Pierre Levy (L'Intelligence collective) as indeed
to the whole tradition deriving from Teilhard's noosphere, including the
devoutly Catholic MacLuhan. 

The anti-Teilhard tradition of bataille and Baudrillard offers only the
obverse, and here I also take issue with Schirmacher's reply. In place of
the plenum of Teilhard, Band B take up the void from Heidegger. But the
void is no description of what we have. We have somehting crammed to the
gunwhales with, as Eco says, 'More'. More of the same. This is not, as
Baudrillard argues in The Perfect Crime, a bogus tent pitched over the
grinning Big Empty, but a plenum of nullity. To be precise, it is the
nullity of exactly Schirmacher's unmediated communication: a simulation in
which difference is elided or erased in favour of the repetition ad
infinitum of the same -- communication that only tells us what we already
know: more of the same. It is in effect the realisation of those attempts
to discover or create perfect languages which Eco so successfully mocks in
both Foucault's Pendulum and the recently translated In Search of the
Perfect Language. . 

This plenum only looks full from inside however -- which is where
Schirmacher appears to be standing when he imagines an upcoming generation
mythering away at Pokemon in preparation for taking over the media
universe. Maybe some of them, mostly in the wealthy middle class suburbs.
But a lot more are doing crack and practicing gunnery in the playground,
experimenting wih their sexualities, dying in wars, refugee camps and
famines, getting drunk and hanging around in malls. I don't hold this up
as a way of saying No To Philosophy (on the contrary, they are why we
try). I want instead to argue that the plenum may be full (or for that
matter the void empty) but it is not universal. It is global, indeed, but
as Vattimo argues, it is not all-conquering but progresses by
contamination. And in return, it is contaminated. These are the borders
where communication continues and where difference is experienced (the
reason perhaps for the white suburban success of hip-hop) 

What is also new is the border we all cross daily between the human and
the mechanical. There too there is an extraordinary difference, one that
requires us to recognise our devices as more than tools, as Schirmacher
argues. They are increasingly poles of mediation, senders and receivers,
or members of our communicative communities. This is the importance of
mechanical evolution: its participation in the evolution of mediation. And
this is why philosophy is ill-equipped to deal with it: the dead god is in
the detail, the fine distinctions within as well as between media,
distinctions critical to the dubious project of convergence. Aesthetic
philosophy (and in most cases that I have come across, the sociology of
the media on either side of the Atlantic) is simply too abstract and
general to perceive the minutiae where the experience of space, time and
difference make a difference. And of course, philosophy still wants truth,
or at least something that will be true for a recognisable stretch of
time.  But what is true about mediation -- and this is why philosophy
wants to eradicate it -- is that it is not only temporal but temporary.
Can philosophy deal with the ephemerality of accelerated modernity and the
mediations that are its absent essence? Alternatively, perhaps phiosophy
can do something: it can teach us how to do ontology again, as we come
round one more time to principles like difference. 

best

sean

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