Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
Conclusion
VIRTUALITY
IN THE FLESH
To
feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how
we come to feel it.
Santayana
BASHO,
THE NOTED JAPANESE SAGE and nature poet of the 17th century, once composed
the following haiku:
Looking closely,
An herb appears,
Flowering in the hedge!
The wholly quiet, unostentatious presence of the flowering
herb evokes Basho's wonder, and inspires him to put
the moment to verse. It is a moment absent self and
intellection, of utter openness to that which is sublime,
beyond measure or reason, in this most inconsequential
instance of beauty.
____Some
two centuries later, the British poet laureate Alfred,
Lord Tennyson encountered another small flower by
the side of the road and recorded his response in
the following verse:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
____Language
is a technology both of our making and unmaking, of
sin and salvation. As with all technologies, the word
may serve to alienate or to enact a world of beauty
and aesthetic consummation. Humanity and nature, humanity
and technology, subject and object may be cast in
fixed opposition or in flowing coorigination. The
Tibetan sage Pema Chodron once noted that, "Happiness
lies in being able to relax with our true condition,
which is fleeting, dynamic, fluid, not in any way
solid, not in any way permanent." It has been
the purpose of this study to seek insights into what
potentialities, virtualities and realities might emerge
as such ancient theories of meaning converge with
emergent technologies of meaning within a new perpetual
innovation Affect Economy.
____In
a recent issue of Businessweek Magazine was a report
titled, "Why the World Needs New Thinking."
In the article, the editors noted that,
A
once-in-a-century confluence of events is turning
our world upside down …Not one but many institutions
are changing before our eyes, and we don't know yet
exactly how or what final form they will take …
In these tumultuous times, ideas have never been more
needed and more important. In the '90s, ideas shaped
our world of entertainment, communication, and finance.
In this more uncertain period, ideas have greater
gravitas (Businessweek August 2002, 66).
The
report listed "25 ideas for a changing world,"
which included greater corporate "transparency"
and improved accountability through "open cultures."
Noting that virtual assets such as "brands"
and "intellectual property" have come to
comprise well over half the market value of public
companies in today's economy, the authors argued that
these intangibles must inevitably find a place in
corporate accounting and financial reports. These
points all touch upon themes which have been central
to this present study, and which are intimately tied
to the use of ICTs, humankind's imbedded and emergent
technologies of value and meaning. Throughout the
Businessweek report is the implicit-and explicit-acknowledgement
that the greatest danger within a political economic
paradigm which depends upon rapid innovation for the
generation of capital value is be "scared stagnant."
Today, the only thing to fear is fear itself. The
authors argue that the key to innovation lies in "hiring
diverse, even eccentric people, mixing them up in
unexpected ways, and asking them to do something unusual."
The article ends by asking,
Do
you want good ideas? Do you want to spark good ideas
in others? … Relax. Play music. Break bread with
a colleague. Read a poem. Open yourself to eccentricity.
Listen to someone else's story. Laugh. Resist the
tyranny of drones. Seek catharsis. Get vulnerable.
Do something risky. Be a rebel, with self-confidence.
And, yes, with love" (Businessweek August 2002,
169).
____These
are all fair suggestions for spurring innovation and
new ideas. Yet when an entire global infrastructure
of capital value increasingly rests upon a foundation
of human figurative transformation, it is necessary
to more thoughtfully consider our methods. This study
has argued that the first crucial step must be to
elucidate the historical, epistemological parameters
and constraints of the West's most fundamental notions
of value and meaning. Only then might it become possible
to avoid projecting into our shared future what Eckhart
Tolles described as the "collective mental illness"
of the West's past and present theories of meaning.
Neither tomorrow's children nor the global ecosystem
which must sustain them should have to bear such a
burden.
____A
great many scholars of virtuality are today seeking
the means to improve upon these epistemologies of
the past, to dissolve contemporary cognitive barriers
to a more aesthetically integrative human experience.
From the New French Theorists such as Derrida, Foucault,
Lyotard and Baudrillard, to the American and other
perspectives sited throughout this book, it is clear
that the technocultural paradigm which has been emerging
over the past several decades has us straining at
the bit of the traditional dialectic method. We want
a new method, a new embodied metaphysics.
____If
the "Virtual Subject," as Hayles and others
suggest, is increasingly "formed through dynamical
interfaces" with our communications technologies
(1999, 93), the communications imperative within the
capital-driven social network has been expressly to
co-opt these subjectivities and representational forms
into fully-integrated, purpose-designed networks of
production and consumption. This has traditionally
been the primary work of corporate communications
and of all those who research, design and manage such
information systems. In today's capital construct,
the "real" is built around highly defined,
strictly articulated profit objectives. "Corporate
culture" is management's deliberate construct.
Just as "brand" is the deliberate enaction
of value and meaning. And, very much like the institution
of consumption into which we must each be acculturated
through advertising and marketing, individuals must
similarly be inculcated in the institution and supportive
ideology of today's rapidly shifting modes of production.
____Within
the context of today's imbedded and emergent virtual
networks, power lies in the ability to focus attention,
direct behavior, and increasingly to harness individual
and collective affectivities and sundry representational
forms to greater innovative efficacy and enhanced
creative, productive capacity. These corporate communications
systems have traditionally been structured as manifestations
of the "Darwinian machines" described by
Levy (1998). Sophisticated and self-evolving, the
Darwinian machine is a biological metaphor for any
self-organizing, self-propagating network of sufficient
complexity. As with Complex Adaptive Systems, the
metaphor of Darwinian systems is too often applied
to human groups of producers and consumers, and even
to the ecology of the individual human psyche. Levy,
however, warns against taking the metaphor too far,
warning that, "There is nothing in the definition
of Darwinian machines which … implies subjective
experience or the dimension of interiority characteristic
of sensation, in other words, affectivity" (129).
____Yet,
as this present study has argued, capital's Darwinian
machines are rapidly morphing beyond their former
dimensions into embodied, external manifestations
of once internal self-modifying processes of human
cognition. Our internal networks and the epistemologies
which give them form and meaning are very rapidly
being manifest, evoked, enacted in the external digital
networks which both sustain virtual capital value
and define real human worth. These capital and digital
technologies of value and meaning are evolving beyond
our capacity to comprehend their new forms and dynamics
with traditional methods of analysis. In a land of
excess supply, capital merely turns to new modes of
producing and consuming new resources, new forms of
value and meaning, new subjectivities which are fully,
three-dimensionally human. And yet they are human
in a new sense.
____For
the past 100 to 200 years, capital valuation has relied
on a human subject which was a container that could
never be filled, a story in which the subject strove
tirelessly for its commodity object. In a very short
period of time, capital has rapidly spread these metaphors
of self, as well as its methods of reason and efficiency,
on a global scale. But even this is changing. In the
perpetual innovation Affect Economy, the human subject
is reconstituted, opening itself to a newly embodied
web of dynamic figurative transformation. This is
a new chapter in the human story and a fresh set of
metaphors. And humanity must ensure that its virtual
theories and methods are capable of grasping this
political economic reality and anticipating its meanings.
____This
study has contended that, within the traditional Western
dialectic, the virtual political economy appears flattened,
confined to that dimension suspended between dyadic
contradictions. However, when the sphere of inquiry
and ontological possibility are extruded into something
which more fully reflects the three-dimensional cosmos
of human embodiment, cognition and vast cognitive
unconscious, the virtual emerges as a vital and imminent
space in which to purposefully explore new eco-cognitive
technologies, enabling new meanings, and opening new
dimensions of being. This study has thus attempted
to articulate the dynamics supporting its early contention
that a key impetus driving this extrusion may well
lay in the unlikely alchemical convergence of capital
and digital in today's political economy. It has attempted
to show how our two-dimensional systems machines must
evolve beyond their current twin obsessions with efficiency
and size in order to survive in this new digital climate.
This study has also sought to convey the rare opportunity
which now exists at this unique juncture in time to
transcend what we now know. The enduring quality of
Keats' evocative equation, "Truth is beauty and
beauty truth," is illustrative of the timeless
and insatiable human appetite for integral meaning
and aesthetic experience which may be humankind's
own best hope to join in the evolution which, if this
analysis is correct, may already be preceding us apace.
As Erich Fromm once noted of scientific and technological
"progress" generally,
The
pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical
physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful
production of the fission bomb forces upon us the
manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose
our problems, we do not choose our products; we are
pushed, we are forced-by what? By a system which has
no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes
man its appendix (1955).
This
book proposes one possible means of establishes an
open-ended, humanistic framework for extricating ourselves
from this postmodern dilemma, conjectures what a new
mode of aesthetic inquiry may look like, and how the
method could work toward more purposefully designed
eco-cognitive technologies and statistical metrics
for these unfolding realities of the digital era.
In the postmodern world, it may be natural to lament
the absence of a foundation and framework to imagine,
much less to direct, our possible futures (Stein 1997).
Yet some still challenge us to identify "the
ethical content of the cultural identity we are building
with the digital aesthetic" (Gigliotti, 63).
Some still defy us to find the means to reintegrate
our representational and embodied dimensions of experience:
The
illusion that information is separate from materiality
leads not only to a dangerous split between information
and meaning but also to a flattening of the space
of theoretical inquiry. If we accept that the materiality
of the world is immaterial to our concerns, we are
likely to miss the very complexities that theory at
its best tries to excavate and understand (Hayles
1999, 94).
____Yet
this present study is not as optimistic about the
future as it is about the successes of the ancient
past. A great deal of further articulation and real
world testing of three-dimensional modes of inquiry
and eco-cognitive technologies such as those presented
here clearly remains to be done. One crucial and difficult
step, for example, would be to further detail and
articulate the statistical methods required for adoption
in science and industry. Yet such efforts to flesh
out and seek a continuum of integral human experience
must be pursued. For this method's simple, essential
proposition is that our external networks of mediated
representation may be made to better reflect, integrate
and empower the full range of our embodied humanity.
If it does not provide sure answers, this study should
at least present some interesting opportunities to
continue the cycle of inquiry.
____For
example, if many of the time-tested eco-cognitive
technologies span the full range of body, cognition,
affect (and beyond), is contemporary virtuality already
so inherently two-dimensional in its own embodiment
and primary metaphors that it cannot help but flatten
and fragment our human worlds of representation and
experience? (Turkle 1995, Diebert 1997). Assuming
the internal contradictions within capital here described
are borne out in further research, will capitalism
find a way to evolve into its next morphological state,
or will it eventually and inevitably implode? And,
if so, what might take its place? Will the new virtual
networks serve to more effectively mine human creativity
for value with technologies ever more evolved, subtle
and penetrating? Or might our human worth one day
be measured and rewarded through instruments wiser,
more just and more humane than we can yet imagine?
____In
looking for answers to these questions, it is both
instructive and humbling to bear in mind that men
and women throughout the ages, and from disciplines
ranging from philosophy to biology, have sought to
transcend reductionist, two-dimensional thinking and
Darwinian machines by imagining more fully human epistemologies
and technologies.
____In
De Anima, Aristotle dared to step outside Plato's
doctrine to develop his conception of a living entity's
"vital function" or "Entelechy,"
which he proposed manifested the actual from the merely
possible, linking idea and reality. In the 17th century,
the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz sought support
from Aristotle's entelechies for his concept of "monads,"
the animating force and ultimate reality he believed
to be the essence of all material beings. In the early
20th century, the embryologist Hans Driesch sought
to offer an alternative to the mechanics of Darwinism
and to stem the tide of reductionist biology, becoming
the last great proponent of the theory of "Vitalism."
Today, biologists working in "edge-of-chaos"
theory argue their position that the Darwinian machine
is incomplete in its description of life. In The Garden
in the Machine, in which Claus Emmeche argues for
the viability of artificial intelligence, the author
cautions against the temptation to ascribe life with
"mythological meaning":
Today,
complex-system research is itself at risk of being
driven into an advanced form of essentialist thinking
with its continual assertions that life is a collective
property of complex self-organized systems that can
emerge from many media. To a certain extent, biology
… has always contained arguments against an all
too metaphysical view of its problem areas and empirical
domains (Emmeche 1994, 165).
And
yet, at the end of this text, Emmeche himself allows
that, "Life itself, of course, is something completely
different. Artificial life will hardly mean anything
for the way we experience a nightingale" (Emmeche,
166).
____Just
as Emmeche and his research colleagues are justified
in their scientific pursuit of taking the Darwinian
machine to its logical extreme, it may be argued that
we are similarly right and justified in scrutinizing
both ancient and modern theories and technologies
of meaning and in nurturing those which empower rather
than disenfranchise the dimension of human affective-embodiment
or soul.
____In
the absence of art and emotion, the German dramatist
and philosopher Friedrich Schiller feared a time when
"material needs reign supreme and bend degraded
humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke." A time
in which "we see not merely individuals, but
whole classes of men, developing but one part of their
potentialities, while the rest, as in stunted growths,
only vestigial traces remain" (1796, 167). It
should follow that the work of evolving our as yet
nascent information and communication technologies
to full compatibility with the three-dimensional human
being must be seen as a central responsibility of
each generation, using every possible tool at its
disposal-ancient or modern, virtual or real, global
or local-rather than a pursuit to be carried on at
the edges of science and industry. We must collectively
seek and find new ways to experience virtuality in
the flesh. Perhaps the lives and labor this study
seeks to expand and explore can best be expressed
in the following passage:
In
the end, what is important is our ability to promote
a sense of artistic concern, genuinely aesthetic criteria,
a spirit of creation within the very heart of political
action, as in the most "purely technical"
branches of engineering, or-and why not?-economic
practices (Levy 1998, 189).
And
so, perhaps it is appropriate to end with the playful
verse of an ancient Japanese poem which has (perhaps
appropriately) outlived the identity of its author:
The
fruit of the pear tree
And the pear
Are the one fruit of this tree.
In eating it,
There are not two tastes.
The original Japanese verse is full of word play,
so that it may also be read as follows:
The body of existence
And non-existence
Are both this one body.
In emptiness
There are not two tastes.
The poem seems to ask, can one know the taste of the
pear by studying it intellectually and theoretically?
Can one sustain the life of the body-mind through
reason? To truly know the taste of a pear, and to
receive its sustenance, one must grasp the fruit,
and bite deeply into its flesh.
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