Leonardo On-Line: Artist's Rant . . .

The Search for Redemption

Redemption from Enforced Passivity

The idea of hysterical identification, according to Freud, allows patients to express, in their own symptoms, not only their own problems and experiences, but those of several other people. Hysterical identification enables an individual patient suffer for a group of other people and to act all the parts of the drama that they are involved in. Freud characterized hysteria as a "psychic infection." Identification is not imitation. It is, rather, an assimilation based on a similar case and is derived from common elements that remain unconscious. Identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object. In hysterical identification, the object persists. Hysterical identification contains elements of and strives toward the condition of the "wanna-be."

Further explorations suggested that hysteria was in fact a dis- ease that had its origins in self-censorship, that docility called enforced passivity and known in the vernacular as "put up and shut up." Hysteria is the consequence, in other words, of social control. The need for prediction and control is our inheritance from the work of Copernicus and Galileo who, in the 1500s, delivered a blow to the human psyche so terrible that the society has not yet really dealt with its ramifications. The blow dealt by astronomy was this: humanity is not the center of the universe; God has other things on his/her mind. This blow, which is not unlike the psychic injury dealt Germany through the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War One, required the installation of reflexive mythologies in Western culture. Myth Number One, by Isaac Newton: The universe can be known through human reason. If the universe can be known, its behavior can be predicted and therefore controlled. The effects of this myth are everywhere visible.

Lewis Mumford, in his book The Myth of the Machine, writes about something he calls the "mega machine" or the "invisible machine." He describes this as

a machine made of living but rigid human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense work output and grand designs of this great collective organization . . .

Mumford goes on to discuss the qualities that the components of this invisible machine must possess in order for the machine to work. Chief among these qualities is that of docility. We might also call this passivity. The passivity is of an enforced type: The bending of the human spirit into a mechanical form requires this. According to Mumford, it is the assembly of a group of individuals with individual memories and wills into a mechanized group or megamachine of this type that built the pyramids of Egypt. Mumford also suggested that

the secret of mechanical control was to have single mind with a well-defined aim at the head of the organization and a method of passing messages through a series of intermediate functionaries until they reached the smallest unit. Exact reproduction of the message and absolute compliance were both essential.

Mumford also sees the military as a blueprint for the megamachine and notes, "through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture. . . . "

The invisible or megamachine was not unique to any one culture. Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa has suggested, for example, that one of the reasons that the civilizations of South and Central America were overrun by European invaders during the fifteenth century involves a kind of social organization among these groups that suggests the invisible machine that Mumford describes.

The invisible machine in the shape of the medieval church can be said to have at least partially inspired the intellectual revolt that is called Renaissance Humanism, for example. The megamachine is large and impersonal, and the kind of administrative method required to operate a megamachine requires a studious repression of the autonomous function of the human personality.

Since the nineteenth century, culture in Western Europe has been built on the production and distribution of consumer goods. As Karl Marx suggested, production creates product and the need for product simultaneously. We live at this moment bounded on all sides by both visible and invisible machines. In the sense that women have traditionally been individuals who must deal with the imposition of enforced passivity, we have, for the most part, all become women. And we have become women because it is becoming nearly impossible to escape the invisible machines and the passivity that they require and impose through mass media and institut ionalized fantasy. Donna Haraway, in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, calls this the "feminization" of work.

Advertising creates institutionalized fantasy. Advertising sets up and defines the terms of the fantasies. Advertising speaks to us about the search for romance and about the forepleasure that we may receive through the acquisition of consumer goods. Advertising also provides us with a shopping list from which we can select those images and ideas with which we may construct the collages of hysterical identifications that we call selves that speak to us and to others about the unconscious connections that we share.

Redemption from Self-Censorship

Women, therefore, being colonies of the male imperative, have traditionally been secondary to the artistic and creative process; they have been exempted from speech. They have been silenced, and silently they have fed and clothed the makers; they have been the models, the muses. The business of women in the arts, for the most part, has been one that might be described by the word "adjunct." In addition, as John Berger and Camille Paglia have noted, the whole visual tradition of Western European art is full of naked, distant women looking at the floor, the trees, the skies, the Glory of God; looking everywhere, it seems, but into the eyes of the beholder. These defeated, bashful images of women seem to say to us, "I am not really here---or, if I am here, you don't see me." One wonders what success the male imperative would have had in Western society if the European iconographic tradition would have been filled, instead, with paintin gs of naked, distant men looking away from the beholder while shyly covering their genitals.

The relationship between women and technology is similar, in spite of the best efforts of writers like Erika Whiteway and Tiffany Lee Brown. These two women, who insist that technology ought not be gender-identified, like Camille Paglia and Annie LeBrun, have taken on conservative orthodox-feminist victim-consciousness. Orthodox feminism would restore women to the condition of the medieval gynaeceum, in that it would restrict women, in many cases, to writing about "women's studies" and "women's issues" and making "women's art." It is interesting to note that both Whiteway and Brown are part of the renegade-publisher community at this time.

Equally illuminating with regard to the position of women and technology is the history of women and telephony, which appears to illustrate stereotypical ideas about the roles that women are assigned in cultural change: At the opening of the age of telephony, all telephone operators were boys. Eventually, the boys were replaced by women because women were nicer, more reliable, and more docile than the boys.

Redemption through the Aesthetics of Fascism

In his essay "The Art of Telling the Truth," Michel Foucault, writing of the tension between antiquity and modernity, asks the following: "What is my present? What is the meaning of this present? And what am I doing when I speak of this present? This, it seems to me, is what this new questioning of modernity means . . . "

According to Berthold Hinz, the Third Reich was a dehistoricized culture. Dehistoricization was a way of dealing with the psychic wound inflicted upon the German culture by the disastrous outcome, for Germany, of World War I. The fascist impulse in aesthetics is directed at the surface and resists depth.

It has been said that Dante's poetry was meant to be read as scripture was read, that it could be read in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, the allegorical and the moral. Dante left a letter saying that he himself wanted the Comedy interpreted as Scripture. Dante saw his poetry as an extension of Holy Writ, which meant that the content was not arbitrary or slippery. In order for expression and content to serve fascism, it seems that expression must be overdetermined and content underdetermined. Substance, in this setting, is counterproductive, because the substance or content in this setting (if it exists at all) is unstable and can be changed. Consequently, the surface features of the work are more important than the substance of the work. Fascist aesthetics are more or less the opposite of Dante's thinking about his own work.

In fascist aesthetic practice the superficial features of the work engage the beholder immediately, and one apprehends the organization of the pattern as arbitrary and not connected, except in a reactionary way, to the practice of the past. What fascism undoes is the ability of the beholder to read symbols as one might read Dante. Fascism creates an artifact of ruin which ultimately is as romantic as the nineteenth-century ruins of Fonthill Abbey. Fascist aesthetic practice is a romanticization of the intellect and the abstract; it is irrationally rational. Irrational rationality is an aura that clings to Hitler, as well.

Martin Heidegger, in his essay "The Anaximander Fragment," said that "thinking is the first poetics." This suggests the idea that thinking is something essentially mimetic and representational in nature; something that can slip and be slipped; something that is not at all tied to telling the truth. It is important to say that the United States has also become dehistoricized to some extent since the Vietnam War. Both cultures, German and American, moved toward image and away from representation. Represe ntation, as Jean Beaudrillard has pointed out, has its ultimate authority in the divine.

Berthold Hinz has also pointed out that dehistoricized cultures are searching for some kind of "metahistorical unity." Hitler certainly tried to create the image of unity in architecture and visual arts such as painting by requiring artists to work in representational and genre styles. Genre painting is an artform that speaks to the values and aesthetics of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European middle classes. Genre painting and representational architecture, two forms of art expression favored by Hitler, are essentially forms directed towards symbol making. The German citizen of the Third Reich was encouraged through spectacle and image to identify with German greatness. The citizen of the post-Vietnam United States has also been encouraged to identify through spectacle and image with the greatness of America. The interesting part of both of these identifications-with-greatness is that the citizens of these nations are encouraged to identify with the greatness of their nations precisely at those moments when the nations themselves are forced to confront the possibilities of their own actual decline in greatness.

Cyberpunk: Redemption from the Body

One of the most interesting and mostly unexamined subtexts informing cyberculture, however, lies in its ties to Greek Cynicism, a philosophical system that survives primarily through anecdote and is connected to followers of Socrates. Cynicism as a belief system is actively hostile to the physical body, as if somehow not to have a body would be a good thing, as if having a body were a form of limitation. As an example, Cynic thought and belief inform traditional Christian beliefs about sensuality and ascetic practice. Cynicism wants a divorce from the body, and cyberculture has acquired the technology that can provide it.

In cyberspace, everyone is a simulation of themselves, and this is possible, in part, because all of the visual cues that inform more usual forms of personal interaction are missing. All things are possible without these cues, and the lack of these cues gives rise to interesting debates as to what constitutes real, as opposed to simulated, identity. These debates acquire a special poignancy when disembodied voices find themselves inevitably and relentlessly attracted and pulled towards the wisps of other disembodied abstracted identities, which one might as well call "head cheese"---an idea that suggests an intellectual construct devoid of substance or context. "Head cheese" can also be used to describe a text that is fleshed out and humanized in the mind of the receiver, a quiet disembodied voice in the imagination that exists primarily as the shadows of one's own thoughts.

In cyberspace it is also possible to create and support multiple identities. It is possible even to make a claim that creation of identity and affect constitutes a form of poetry. This is an aesthetic act of spectacle that is directed at the surface and also resists depth. The ethic of truthfulness is such, in cyberspace, that multiple-identity creation is sometimes not perceived as dishonesty; the justification being that each identity is merely a fleshing out or development of some "real" aspect of the identity hacker's own personality, as he or she perceives it.

Conclusions

All the while, however, humans are laboring with great intensity to create large mechanical social structures that invite both male and female to participate in a kind of self- willed passivity that previously only females enjoyed. Donna Haraway, in the "Cyborg Manifesto," explains the blurring of categories of human, nature and machine, and suggests that privilege based upon gender and species are rapidly disappearing. Looming on the horizon as a result of this intense and competitive transformation is what mathematician and writer Vernor Vinge refers to as the Singularity: that moment when most grounds and values that define the human will collapse and have to be reinvented as the result of the creation of superhuman intelligence technologies. The posthuman era is at hand. The posthuman era is the newest and perhaps most terrifying mask of the redeemer, but it is what we wanted, it is what we have been working towards and what we have asked for. Whatever shall we do?