RU Wetware?
Television as Cybernetics
Arthur Kroker
RUATV? Heidegger And The Televisual, edited by Tony Fry, Power
Institute of Fine Arts, (Sydney: Australia, 1993).
Wetware, edited by Geert Lovink and Rik Delhaas, (Amsterdam, De
Balie, 1991).
TV As Cybernetics
Two highly compelling meditations on electronic
technology: one from the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Australia
(RUATV?), and the other from resistance culture in Amsterdam
(Wetware). Sharing a common focus ? the colonization of the world
by televisual space ? but privileging different theoretical perspectives ? the
Australian Heidegger versus Dutch wetware aesthetics ? these two books represent
significant ruptures within received interpretations of technology and culture.
In the Australian optic, televisual space is condensed into a violent
event-scene, where TV can finally become what it always aspired to, but
heretofore could never attain: a purely metaphysical structure for a virtualized
experience where cybernetics is philosophy and vision is (telematically) severed
from the bounded space of the eye. In the Dutch watchtower, technology finally
breaks free of its material shackles in (Japanese) hardware and of its coding
prism in (American) software, mutating instantly into (European) wetware. Here,
cybernetics leaves the cold galaxy of hardware and software, dipping its
'steersman' feet in the wetware of the body. Or is it the reverse? In that fatal
synthesis of hardware and software represented by 'wetware' as the European
postmodern, could it be that cybernetics shakes itself out of the slumbering
sleep of reason, comes alive, and acquires organicity? TV as cybernetics? And
cybernetics as wetware? These are the monstrous hybrids that enucleate the
horizon of the millennium.
RUATV? overcomes all existent models of TV analysis (cultural
studies, semiology, cultural materialism) by importing a full Heideggerian
metaphysic to the exploration of television as a cybernetic system. Here,
Heidegger is finally released from sequestration in the history of philosophical
ideas, and allowed to rummage around freely in the television cabinet. What
results is a brilliant intensification of Heidegger as a theorist par excellence
of dead power (TV as the "harvesting" of the standing reserve), and the
implosion of television into a cybernetic system specializing in the
virtualization of human and non-human energies. Everything is here: the
theorisation of the "will to will of televisual hyperspace;" the reduction of
history to a floating "non-time;" the virtualization of Being by a television
technology that "constructs appearances which act as the reality of the
surrogates of a Real;" and the materialization of Heidegger's "deseverance" in a
televisual space which flips here and there, far and near into mirrored worlds.
As Tony Fry states in his essay, "Switchings:"
The televisual can be registered as the dominant transmediatic standing
reserve of all and everything rendered as representative and, as such, a unity
of the displacement, replacement, or continuation of metaphysics. TV as
metaphysics? Yes, but not as metaphysics of 'presence,' but of perpetual
absence: The televisual entraps, via encirclement, by the working together of
its lens of induction and of its screen of projection. The world pictured, as
fleeing fragment, is captured as an image, released as the imaginary and
materialised as the replicated, the simulated, which is captured as an image ?
and so self willing the televisual goes on, not being everything but leaving
nothing outside its actual or imminent power. (p.27) A televisual world that
swirls out from the screenal economy of pan-capitalism, becoming the algorithmic
code of virtual culture. Heidegger's meditations on technology float off the
page, and are arrayed in a series of profound philosophical reflections on the
interpellation of human subjectivity by cybernetics. Thus, Paul Adams ("In TV")
radicalizes Heidegger's Being And Time by rubbing the concept of
'Ent-fernung' against the hologramic void of TV. What results is a superb
discussion of television as about simultaneously the abolition of distance and
the exile of nearness: a perfect sign-switch of the time/space coordinates of
near/far. In TV, the abolition of durational space also intimates the
exterminism of spatialized time. In "Touch TV," Deborah Mallor takes us on a
voyage across the electronic frontier where Derrida is crossed with Heidegger as
a way of drawing out the paradoxical quality of the TV "framework" as both
'immediacy' and 'remoteness." Here, Derrida's 'passe-partout' suddenly goes
liquid, and TV as framework melts down into an iconic window on virtual
consciousness. Or consider Eamon D'Arcy's "The Eye and the Projectile" where the
use of the 'rocket cam' (robotically controlled and fully televisual
laser-guided bombs) in the Gulf War is a materialization of Heidegger's
'de-severance:' that point where the cybernetic vision of virtual reality
quick-exits body-bound optics, beginning to float in the (virtual) universe of
the externalized nervous system. When the eye is a projectile, then the
'logistics of perspective' of the war machine privileges a double moment of
colonization: the radical separation of the cybernetic eye from human vision,
and the interiorization of the imaging-system of the TV (rocket cam) into the
nervous system of the earth-bound body. A mirrored world, where the body
separates from itself in an endless recursion: virtual reality as the mirroring
of cybernetics with itself, and the body as a trompe-l'oeil the very materiality
of which is only a necessary illusion of virtual reality. In the Australian
rendering of cybernetics, we are finally brought to the end of the terminal
history (of technology) written by Heidegger: that moment where such televisual
violence is done to the Heideggerian oeuvre that his texts are made 'standing
reserve' to the will to theory. Consequently, the paradox: Is
RUATV? a brilliant intensification of Heidegger's theory of
cybernetics, or the re-energization of the fading energies of cybernetics by the
Heideggerian turn? Heidegger as prophet of the disappearance of human experience
into the will to cybernetics? or the will to cybernetics itself as an always
failing attempt to lend coherence to a system that threatens to crash into
terminal burnout? Heidegger as critic? or the last good citizen of the
electronic kingdom of cybernetics? If Heidegger can describe the nihilism of
televisual space with such chilling accuracy, is it not because his
philosophical fate is to be standing reserve to the will to virtuality? In this
case, Heidegger can travel so deeply inside the metaphysics of digital reality
showing us all the while the sign-flips between immediacy and remoteness, far
and near, (telemetried) vision and (de-severed) eyes because his thought is the
transgression that confirms the disappearance of (rational) cybernetics into
(sub-primitive) virtuality, and of the will to power into the will to
powerlessness. Heidegger is the philosophical pulsar flashing from a
twenty-first century, whose recombinant fragments we have already experienced as
the jettison of a future lived out at high-speed as our telemetried past.
CYBERNETICS AS WETWARE
There is a deep affinity between Dutch and
Australian perspectives on technology. Operating in the shadow of the empire of
virtual reality, Holland and Australia have intellectual traditions that swing
freely between profound recuperations of the philosophy of technology and highly
original encounters with the breaking-edge of digital reality. Living in the
shadow of power is the thread that weaves together Amsterdam and Sydney as
privileged optics on techno-culture: they are gateways into the unfolding
horizon of the next century. Cybernetics and wetware, then, as the binary signs
of technology as body invader.
Wetware is the philosophical obsession of the Dutch mind: that cybernetic
point where hard- and soft technoware finally break free of their sequestration
in computer design, and enter the galaxy of bodily fluids. Wetware technology is
our telematic future: sometimes in the form of nano-cosmetics (for care of the
"inner skin"), at other times a "data-suit" (for total fibrillation of the body
electronic), and even assuming the form of "combed" architecture (for spatial
isolation of the individual as a vector of movement) and recombinant music (MTV
as the mirrored world of resequenceable body parts).
The great challenge for cybernetics today is that technology must leave the
(dry) shore of cold rationality, jumping into the pool of bodily fluids.
Cybernetics doesn't like to get wet, probably because electricity doesn't like
to short-circuit, like a wet finger stuck in a light socket. So the body must be
dried out, made "static free." That is the thesis of Wetware, a remarkable
collection of critical artistic perspectives on cybernetics dipped in bodily
fluids, published as part of Amsterdam's summer festival. While some of the
theorisations in this text tend towards the nostalgic ? particularly in the
calls for the recuperation of a theatre of 'wetware,' one that would preserve
"human remnants" from full absorption into cybernetics ("I Want To Be a
Machine") Wetware is unrelentingly precise, and chillingly perceptive, in its
diagnosis of the cyber-times.
This is a text, all the more insightful for the playfulness of its
combinatorial quality, that screens cybernetics against the body walls of
cosmetics, skin, imagery, and nerves. In every case, cybernetics is
flash-flooded with bodily fluids, resulting in a vision of the post-human
situation that leaves us stranded like dying, gasping (political) fish on the
shores of the non-time predicted by Heidegger. Not so much a metaphysics of
televisual space, but TV as wetware: that non-moment when imaging-systems begin
to swim in the blood and water of the body recombinant.
Arthur Kroker is author of The Possessed Individual
and Spasm, and co-author among others of The Postmodern
Scene. He teaches political theory at Concordia University, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.