Ольга Буренина - Абсурд и вокруг: сборник статей
Describing the conditions of existential absurdity depends on metaphors drawn from our experience of ordinary absurdity: any clash, out-of-placeness, or incongruity. For example, finding sleepers in the refrigerator or an umbrella in a bath makes us laugh because these things are out of their «proper» places. When familiar thing are juxtaposed in unexpected ways, the absurd is created, which often strikes us as funny. Actually, a particular situation in real life can be considered as an absurd situation when it possesses discrepancy between our desires and reality. Hence, when we find ourselves in an absurd situation, we usually try to change it by changing our own desires. This, in fact, is an attempt to match reality with our own desires, or to distance ourselves from that particular situation. Naturally, since it is not always possible to distance ourselves from the absurd situation, nor to distance the absurd situation from us, we usually try to imagine a certain change that could prevent absurdity. For example, in the realms of logic, aesthetics, or ethics harmony, it is easy to point out elements that upset proper balance and «fit». Asking for the love life of the moon and earth is logically absurd. Interrupting Beethoven's 9th Symphony for a commercial is esthetical absurd. When a notorious murderer or a criminal becomes the president of a big philanthropic foundation, we consider this act to be ethically absurd. In each of these examples of obvious incompatibility, we immediately know how to correct the clash or disharmony. Ordinary contradictions have obvious causes and solutions.
But the deeper sense of total absurdity does not arise from a specific clash we can analyse. It is more than this. It is free-floating, all-engulfing sense of disharmony, a non-intelligible problem of something out of its place, indeed it is a feeling that human existence itself seems to be «out of place». When we ask for the ultimate meaning of the accidental universe, the only answer is — silence. We cannot imagine what modification would create fundamental harmony. This absurdity is not the intellectual perception of clash or disharmony but the existential collapse of our whole sense of order. Seen from within the absurd, nothing has a proper place.
One of the 20th century's most popular non-realistic genre is absurd. The root «absurd» connotes something that does not follow the roots of logic. Existence is fragmented, pointless. There is no truth, so the search for truth is abandoned in Absurdist works. Language is reduced to a bantering game where words obfuscate rather elucidate the truth. Action moves outside of the realm of causality to chaos. Absurdists minimize the sense of place. Characters are forced to move in an incomprehensible, void-like realm. Danish philosopher Srnren Kierkegaard was the first to use the term «absurd» in its modern context. His application of the term related it to what he considered the incomprehensibility and unjustifiably of Christianity. Existentialist philosophers such as the Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre and the German, Martin Heidegger propagated the use of the terms in their work. In the philosophical world of the novel, Albert Camus employed absurdism to portray the difference between man's intent and the resultant chaos he encounters.
In modern civilization man is posited as the subject of knowledge in science and technology, animating the utopian projects of industrial civilization, and culminating in great urban conglomerates, as in the sealed universe of commodities which constitutes the omnipresent mall. Technique, defined as the ensemble of means, is the driving force of social development, more important than the ends it is supposed to serve. Unfortunately, technique became an end in itself and the society is organized around it. Of course, we are all aware that we need certain changes to subdue technique, but I think it is too late now to change the course of technique. However, technique is frequently pictured as the only hope for a better future and the only means of making the world more humane. And that is the sort of statement that French philosopher Jacques Ellul calls the technological bluff. Technology is a discourse on techniques: therefore, the bluff lies not in the failure of techniques as such but in presenting them in a falsely optimistic light. The author formulated in 1954 two laws of technical progress: first, it is irreversible: second, it advances by a geometric progression. Thus, a computer revolution changes nothing in the nature of technical progress, although products are new. This progress is hampered not by internal mechanisms, but by the maladaptation of the social body to it, since society is rooted in the past and constantly refers to it. On the other hand, technique is future- oriented and discards as valueless everything that cannot be incorporated into the web of techniques.
The extraordinary influence of technology on the world has always been a paradox to me. That scientific and technocrats minds could produce unparalleled effects on the course of human activities during the last fifty years, still seems absurd to most people today. Technical progress gives rise to a new aristocracy, technocrats, who combine authority with competence. Their knowledge is indispensable for the proper functioning of the society.
However, if they talk about democracy, ecology, culture, etc., they are «touchingly simplistic and annoyingly ignorant». For instance, when stating that everyone will have access to data banks, only other technicians are meant, not poor farmers or the young unemployed. Technocrats are also the main source of the technological bluff, since when picturing tomorrow's society they often disregard such problems as pollution, growth of armaments, or stagnation of some countries, especially those from the Third World. In their eyes, to halt building nuclear power stations is the same as returning to the caves. Technical progress is good by its very nature and thinking otherwise is a mark of obscurantism.
One of the features of the technical world is uncertainty. Technical progress does not know where it is going. This is why it is unpredictable. It always has both positive and negative effects, and they are inseparable; technical progress also creates more problems than solutions. On that point Ellul says: «using techniques always pays off in the short term and then brings disaster»[277]. The last factor contributing to an increase of uncertainty of the future of techniques are internal contradictions of the technical system and society. For instance, a vulnerability to accidents grows proportionally with the size of organizations. Similarly, the more powerful a technique is, the more it disturbs the world. Some people think that the techno-discourse is a discourse about humanity and the ways of advancing it; of course, by the means of techniques. Some humanists, on the other hand, think that the technique can be saturated with traditional values. Today's culture only has an operational value detached from tradition, molded by the technical progress and economic needs. A human being enslaved to work in the position of the technical individual is not alienated by the mere fact of that position, but by the structures of power and meaning that operate contemporaneously with it.
When the power of industrial capitalism societies locked human beings in such positions, the psychic and existential economies involved were open to other futurities than just the technological; for example, the political. That such futurities no longer exist- or no longer bear the same meaning- does not mean that they were not real; indeed the direction of cultural and social progress through new dispensation of the technological, in spite of its nobility in ascribing integrity to past manifestations, and in desiring the unification of the social, cultural and technological fields in a different order of possibility, relies upon a model of past blindness and present insight which is in itself historically circumscribed. With one word, bad culture chases out good culture. Despite many statements, man has lost control over technical development.
If technique is the event of creation whose paradigms in history have been lost (paradigms of values and belief, as well as more specifically material paradigms of existence whose effects are unknown since they are particular of individual experience), technology is the ideology of power divorced from ethical, precisely because it excludes negativity, specially the negativity of its own blindness. Yet it always requires an ethical adjunct: particularly we can reject the fear of the omnipotent robot by arguing that machines are always going to be in the service of man. But this assurance comes not from within technology, since it requires a consciousness of the negative even if we only reject it as unreal.
Technology always defines itself as insightful, in the claims to give access to creativity. But we should not forget that technology is industrialized power. Let's take for example information technology. Information technology seeks mediation as a supreme value, thereby occluding the problem of the economic hegemony exercised in the world by those economies that control technology. By claiming a mediating role, by situating the idea of finality within outmoded metaphysics, technology projects negativity into the non-technological. I would like to make a digression to this point — Nuclear power is a symbol of our civilization. However, as Gunther Anders points out, «it is not a symbol of our civilization just because it is an innovation in physics (although that is true), but also because the its possible effect or probable effect has metaphysical nature, which is not true about any previously man-made effect. I call the effect of nuclear energy metaphysical, because the adjective „periodical“ presupposes an ongoing development of history and continuation of future periods. We, the ordinary people, cannot rely on this presupposition, because as Anders noted, „The period of change of periods ended after 1945“[278].
The conflict between industrialisation and what is known as basic needs of technology in economic planning for the Third World highlights the role of technological finitude, which the ideology of power can never admit. It is not sufficient to argue that technology creates its own values within an ever-expanding horizon of development; that resembles the spurious argument that the market economy is free of ethical values. In the current global economy, all the values of technology are created under the sign of power. Conversely, what was only ever of virtual significance and applicable to technology as well: namely, that all values of technique are created under the sign of mortality. Technology, in its use and in the meaning derived from that use, is now the material form of immortality, of a reality which is becoming more and more virtual as it distances itself from the irreducible negativity of the human experience.
As I stated before, uncertainty is an essential part of technique: there is no assurance that a technical act will succeed, whether in the fabrication of an object or the creation of an artwork, in social negotiation or in political planing, in the phenomenology of individual experience or in the exploration of intersubjectivity. The difficulty of this experience of uncertainty can be seen in twentieth century artistic and philosophical works, especially in the philosophy of Derrida, psychoanalysis of Lacan or the fiction of Beckett. The Dionysian aphorism of Nietzsche became the evidence of finitude and absurdity in the aphorisms of Wittgenstein and the paratactic manoeuvres in post-Modemist poetry.
Technique is what inhabits and informs the head of Janus, technologically evacuated by the renunciation of archaic notions of the unified self; but that is a „self“ which we find as a spectacle, as an object, whereas any useful notion of the self must be on the ground of an event-structure, unable to posit its mortality and negativity. For example, the functioning of microprocessors is limited by the limitations on their memory, since their experiential dynamic is entirely pro-active: memory is for use. This dichotomy is perfectly illustrated by Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape. The aged Krapp is listening to a tape he made at the age of thirty-nine, on which he is declaring the happiness he has found in love and his consequent decision to cease recording, since there will no longer be any need for it. The old man listens over and over again to the lyrical speech of his younger self now becoming unbearably poignant in his loneliness and decrepitude. The tape» s memory and the man's memory belong to two different worlds, which can never be reconciled except in the desperate shuttling back and forth of rewinding. Krapp exists, if anywhere, in this catastrophic movement, which is nothing but the event-structure, the concrescence, of his mortality. The machine, once a solace and a pleasure, has become an instrument of torture, not because it has the inhuman power of automatism but because it consigns him to the melancholy of defeat. There is no mediation possible except in a continuous dislocation and dismemberment of subjectivity. The imagination of mortality and effect of mourning shadow the efficient memory of the machine from which Krapp is excluded by the mere fact of his difference.
This leads us to the observation that real technology and virtual technology are of different natures, if real and virtual are taken to refer to the degree to which mortality composes the experiential field of their operation. The first involves a conflictual meaning and the second a non-conflictual meaning (i.e. the assumption that there is pure information, which has a value per se). It could be argued that this is a false distinction, since all technology becomes real as it becomes past: the Gothic cathedral, the great iron structures of the nineteenth century and the supercomputer are all the real solutions to virtual problems. The difference lies in the excess of means, which characterized those earlier technologies: the cathedral or the bridge employs more strength than is necessary for the weight to be borne, the technical means exceeding the effective end. The supplement is a supplement of the human imagination unsure as to the response of the material: the structure is a priori so threatened by mortality that excessive means must be used to guarantee its survival. In information technology, on the other hand, there is a convergence of means and ends. It uses the information it generates as its own material: it is the apotheosis of subjectivity projected into the domain of the material, which thereby becomes virtual (subjective-in-itself).
Furthermore, information technology, like all advanced technologies, is surrounded by a financial and political network that constitutes its true technical ensemble. Electronic fund management is a fusion of the financial and the technological to the point where they become synonymous. In that way, failure — including the «failure» of the South to be as efficient as the North — is an essential part of creation, having value when it re-activates the memory of time and the experience of mortality. Failure in technology has no such effect on technology, which is and always will be deprived of the transhistorical genetic function which consciousness is. The sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the failure of a transplant operation are perceived as a tragedy and as a technical problem on two different registers, the human and the inhuman. Technological failure destroys the mediation between these two domains, where the failure of technique, the creative event under the sign of mortality, reinforces it. Deaths due to technological failure are instantly expelled from the technological sphere, which cannot admit of mortality. In this context, I would like to quote Herbert Markuse: «The knife (direct device), and even the gun, are much more a „part“ of the individual that uses them because they connect the individual intimately with its goal. Moreover, more importantly, unless they are used for a particular purpose to satisfy particular human needs (e.g. surgeon, housewife), their use becomes criminal — it is an example of an individual crime, and as such, it should be given severe punishment. Contrary to that, technological aggression is not considered a crime. A driver who drives a car or a boat too fast is not called a murderer even though that might be the case. Moreover, those who launch missiles are less likely to be called murderers»[279].
