Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
INTRODUCTION
For
every procedure already requires an open sphere in
which it moves. And it is precisely in opening such
a sphere that is the fundamental event in research.
MARTIN
HEIDEGGER, THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE
IN THE BEGINNING, perhaps
with the first uniquely human thought, was the Word – and our earliest virtualizing technology.
And with our first bite of that potent fruit, humanity
was cast from the companionship of the beasts and
the trees, left oneness for duality, and entered the
tensive, knotted space of earthly and virtual worlds
which humankind alone inhabits. And in that same instant,
we began the ageless task of bridging the void between
subject and object, sign and referent, ourselves and
our world.
____Thus our story, from
that moment when we first evolved – or fell – to our homo sapient condition, begins
and unfolds with humankind's creation of its unique
symbolic, social and material technologies —
such as the word "sin," the number zero,
the institution of market capitalism, digital neural
networks. In this sense, as Donna Haraway famously
noted, we have always been cyborg creatures of both
virtual and real dimensions who, in fits and starts,
have sought the wherewithal to perfect our technologies,
heal the perceived rift between these ontological
realms, and achieve a sense of unity in that extraordinary
nexus of technological and natural worlds which is
the beating heart of human cognition and culture.
____ With the human species
always, already and inextricably linked to its embedded
and emergent technologies, how are we to grasp this
coupling – a symbiosis by definition as subtly complex,
dynamic and beyond measure as our very humanity? This
study suggests that the first crucial step is simply
to recognize it as such. That we refuse the reductive
theory and methods which persist in flattening the
space within which we imagine our selves and our technologies.
In order to avoid what John Seeley-Brown has described
as the debilitating "tunnel design" so prevalent
and pervasive in communications technology development
today, we must first resist what Hannah Arendt described
as the "metaphysical fallacy," and which
John Dewey termed the "philosophic fallacy."
That is, in essence, the very human tendency to project
our metaphorical constructs and cognitive schema into
a hypostasized, otherworldly realm of Truth. As the
great European philosopher Martin Heidegger insisted,
it is in the initial act of opening the sphere of
inquiry in which lies the "fundamental event
in research." The German physicist Werner Heisenberg
similarly noted that, "What we observe is not
nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning." We want to ensure that our method
of questioning provides the necessary space-in both
theory and praxis-to explore the vital human nexus
of the natural and the technological in its full affective,
embodied and cognitive multi-dimensionality.
____ It is important
therefore to first make clear that this study approaches
the question of technology – and communications technologies
particularly – in the broad Deweyan or Heideggerian
sense. In this definition, the built human environment
is seen as being comprised of shared linguistic, social
and material technologies used in both distilling
and replicating value and meaning out of the complexity
and chaos natural to the physical environment. Throughout
this study, such value and meaning will also be referred
to as "schema" or as "technology."
In line with Samuel Weber's insightful interpretation
of Heidegger's Entbergung, technology is defined as
an ambiguous dynamic of both regulating or "securing"
as well as releasing or "unsecuring." These
processes, which will be discussed later in fuller
detail, are reflected in what Richard Coyne has identified
as the fundamental paradox of metaphor, in its simultaneous
signification of "identity" and "difference."
The list below presents paired elements which demonstrate
aspects of the ebb and flow of this tensive relationship:
Schematic :: Figurative |
Identity :: Difference |
Securing :: Releasing |
Cognitive :: Aesthetic |
Science :: Art |
Intellectualism :: Affective-embodiment |
____ Whatever stuff the human subject was made of in its
incipient state of precognitive innocence, it has
been transformed by the tensive dissonance between
identity and difference which characterizes our most
elemental technology-metaphor. For metaphor is that
basic linguistic technology which serves as a model
for other technological systems of interaction between
human organism and environment. Further, this metaphor/technology
tends to impose a fundamental dualistic structure
on human experience through dialectical dynamics such
as those listed above. This study argues that this
fundamental human cognitive phenomenon necessitates
the innovation of eco-cognitive technologies which
take into account these imposed, constructed dualisms,
and offer facilities for transcending the conceptual,
cognitive limitations thus imposed. It is further
argued that to innovate new value and meaning is to
create new technologies – both aesthetic and alienating – a
process which requires human figurative transformation,
or productive innovation. The work of figurative transformation
is seen as extending beyond cognitive reason, engaging
the full dimensionality of noninstrumental, embodied
affect-that is, the human mind coextensive with the
body. Art and the aesthetic are shown to manifest
what has until recently been the unique capacity of
the individual human subject for such productive innovation
and transformation. Alternately, the encoding, ordering
and reproduction of such figurative transformation
is accomplished through the instrumental dynamic of
securing.
.
. .
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.
Katherine
Hayle, Theories of Virtuality
A
technological fetishism has affected most research
... concerning ICTs. However critical the research,
however far towards the 'social-shaping' end of the
agenda it seeks to go, if it starts with the problem
defined in terms of technology, then it cannot easily,
if at all, avoid the debilitating effects of that
fetishism.
Nicholas
Garnham, Information Politics
Hayle's
and Garnham's admonishments in the epigrams
above allude to the two most persistent, universal
and devastating errors in opening the theoretical
and methodological spheres in which the development
and assessment of communications technologies typically
occurs in contemporary research and design.
____ The first error
is to perceive technology as somehow distinct from
the imminent world of lived human experience, existing
rather in a transcendent, otherworldly realm of "objective"
ideas, forms or truths. This fundamental human impulse
inevitably leads – as Arendt and Dewey observed – to cognitive
and philosophic tautology, and to severing the human
construct from the essential, symbiotic relationship
which first gave it life and significance, and through
which human beings have created value and meaning
since our first signifying gesture. The objectives
of Arendt and Dewey's observations were, in fact,
divergent. In Arendt's case, she sought to understand
and build upon the inherent directionality of metaphorical
logic – from nature to experience. For Dewey, the objective
was to expose the oldest philosophical error, the
presumption that construction of locally useful cognitive
tools is actually discovery of timeless truth. Yet
both argued that the fundamental error involves taking
the result of a lived experience as its logical, and
therefore existentially necessary, preexisting conditions – or,
that is to say, to impose a hypostasized categorical
structure on experience. This is what links the otherwise
distinct observational bases that Dewey and Arendt
were drawing upon to make a point about a fundamental
limiting condition on the logic of cognitive experience.
____ Examples of this
error are as plentiful as they are endemic to the
human condition, ranging from the most subtle and
fleeting to the most profound and persistent. Echoing
the ancient Hindu and Buddhist sages, 20th century
scholars such as Erich Fromm and Gregory Bateson have,
for instance, described the ways in which elemental
linguistic technologies such as the words "love"
or "beauty" are commonly imbued with fixed
and transcendent status, shaping and often supplanting
the direct, lived experience itself. Bateson famously
noted that "The name is not the thing, the map
is not the territory." Fromm suggests that this
concept of alienation found its first expression in
Western thought in the Old Testament admonishment
against idolatry:
____ The essence of what
the prophets call "idolatry" is not that
man worships many gods instead of only one. It is
that the idols are the work of man's own hands-they
are things, and man bows down and worships things;
worships that which he has created himself. In doing
so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers
to the things of his creation the attributes of his
own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the
creating person, he is in touch with himself only
by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged
from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own
potentialities, and is in touch with himself only
in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in
the idols (Fromm 1966, 44).
____ Fromm goes on to suggest that, among the many forms
of alienation, the most frequent is alienation in
language. The word is meant to serve as symbol rather
than substitute for the living experience. The same
holds true for all other human constructs. The danger,
Fromm argues, is the timeless temptation to confuse
"experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender
and submission" (1966, 46). As I will argue in
Chapter Three, this view is distilled in the Zen Buddhist
proverb, "Examine the living words, not the dead,"
and reflects the essential Zen project of penetrating
to the quick of experience through the discipline's
unique methods of inquiry and technologies of enlightenment.
Also important to this study will be Karl Marx's deconstruction
of that social technology we call capital, assessing
and describing its alienating impacts on human cognition
and culture in the way capital must secure transcendent
value and meaning apart from the living value and
meaning of immediate human experience. This common
error, the dynamic of alienation, receives extensive
treatment throughout this book, and is particularly
addressed in the study's proposed method of developing
"eco-cognitive technologies," which explicitly
seek to address such biases in human cognition and
behavior.
____ A second and closely related error is found in the
time-honored Western practice of "flattening"
theory and method through the separation of information
from materiality, mind from embodiment-a convention
which has, as I describe in Chapter Two, dominated
Western thought since the age of the early Greeks.
This issue also receives extensive treatment throughout
this study and is specifically addressed in a proposed
aesthetic theoretical and methodological framework
which recognizes and nurtures an "extruded"
and integral space of affective, embodied and cognitive
ontological dimensions. To cite one example which
will reemerge throughout this study, Charles Seife
has written of the relative ease with which the ancient
peoples of the East absorbed the mathematical construct
"zero," a seemingly inconsequential though
ultimately pivotal technology (2000). Through the
millennial evolution and migration of epistemologies
through India, China and Japan, the concept of sunyata,
or emptiness, would be woven into the heart of these
cultures' values and meanings, permeating nearly every
facet of their lives. A remarkable contrast is seen
in the ways in which the founding fathers of Western
thought constructed their own epistemological legacies
around the uncompromising principles of early Euclidean
geometry, a cognitive schema with which the mathematical
notion of zero was incompatible. Plato and Aristotle
won the epistemological contest of their day, dismissing
a competing theory of meaning propounded by Protagoras
rooted in embodied human experience in favor of an
epistemology revolving around transcendent forms of
geometric perfection. Two and a half millennia in
hindsight, we now know that Protagoras had it right
after all, when he suggested that man makes reality
to his own specifications out of the conceptual void
of natural existence. Yet Western thought is yet largely
under the spell of Plato's vision of a virtual, static
Truth above and beyond embodied human experience,
fashioned so long ago around the binding principles
and "ratiocination" of early geometry. And
so today we find in Chapters Two and Four that little
more than a choice of metaphor separates Plato's divine,
transcendent Forms, and the vertiginous, untethered
signification of the French postmodernists' syntactic
philosophy.
____ Why does this matter? In the end, what
harm is actually done by making use of dualistic thought
or reductive methods which tend to flatten the space
of inquiry or even place our rather remarkable linguistic,
social and material creations on a pedestal? As it
turns out, a great deal. In fact, scholars and sages
through the ages-particularly in the East-have argued
that our very humanity hangs in the balance. And a
growing majority of scholars and scientists today
argue that the health of our planetary ecosystem may
be at stake as we hypostasize the pure virtual value
of such abstractions as "economic growth,"
"material progress" and "economic globalization."
But how is it possible that our definition of this
elemental bond matters so profoundly to both our humanity
and our world? A diversity of voices from a range
of disciplines, cultures and times have suggested
that, as Nietzsche implied, if we could only summon
the courage to peer into that void born of the false
separation of creator and creation, the void might
reveal us to ourselves. That is, by observing the
forces and effects of this relationship and the conceptual
errors it engenders both in individual human perception
and in our shared theories of meaning, we might finally
gain release from the Samsaric cycle of human affliction,
or, alternately, resolve that seeming paradox of willing
ourselves back to a state of precognitive Edenic grace.
The present study adopts the narrower, practical view
that emergent communication technologies, combined
with an ongoing transformation of capital which began
two centuries ago, generate a climate in which human
subjectivity is ineluctably transformed-and that we
require new theoretical and methodological means in
order to understand these transformations and direct
them to more human ends. Rutsky describes this as
an evolution which will necessarily involve "unsecuring
the [human] subject, of acknowledging the relations
and mutational processes that constitute it."
This will involve, he argues, no less than "opening
the boundaries of individual and collective identity,
changing the relations that have distinguished between
subject and object, self and other, us and them"
(1999, 21). This study explores the question of how
we have come to arrive at this historic juncture,
and how we might better navigate the terrain of the
future through what Jameson referred to-in figurative
terms-as a process of "global cognitive mapping."
As Jameson suggested, in a techno-cultural space too
complex and chaotic to be represented as a totality,
such "cognitive maps" may offer the best
means of navigating the techno-cultural world around
us (Rutsky 1999, 21). However, where Jameson viewed
such a map as a purely theoretical means of gaining
a broader understanding of the postmodern space, this
study seeks to propose the first step toward an articulated
method of cognitive mapping through metaphor analysis.
But before we move forward, it will be important to
survey the past.
____ Only a few centuries ago, with the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution, the Western world was first compelled
to turn its full, collective attention to the profound-and
often wrenching-impacts of our technologies on the
experience of being human. This signaled a turning
point and the onset of an accelerated transformation
in capital which has now been roughly two hundred
years in the making. It was at this time that Marx
first described the cause and effects of alienation
to the Western world, his analyses given unprecedented
and unforeseen weight and urgency by the jarring political-economic
and existential transformations of that era. Seminal
scholars of that time, such as Burke, Hume, Kant,
Schiller, Hegel, and Schopenhauer took aesthetics
as their driving method and metaphor in addressing
the impacts of this industrial-and existential-revolution.
By the turn of the 20th century, seminal American
and European scholars such as William James, John
Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Alfred Whitehead had
begun to more fully elucidate the inadequacies of
dualistic epistemologies and reductive methods in
grasping the ever-intensifying socio-technological
dynamics of the day.
____ Today, these voices are by no means limited to select
philosophers or scholars. At the threshold of the
21st century, there is a gathering confluence of voices
from a diversity of disciplines, suggesting a convergence
of capital, digital, social and biological which is
straining against the flattened parameters of Western
theory and praxis. Among such research relevant to
this study has been, for example, Mathew Rabin's seminal
work in bridging economics and psychology, giving
rise to the compelling insights of behavioral finance.
Robert McNeil's groundbreaking synthesis in environmental
history details the effects of successive technological
and political economic transitions on the natural
environment. Also notable are the sweeping, interdisciplinary
implications of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's work in the
new mathematics of network dynamics. Crucial to the
present study is the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
and Mark Turner in closing the gap between the cognitive
and social sciences through their research into metaphor
and the embodied ontogenesis of value and meaning.
And scholars of virtuality, such as Katherine Hayles
and Carol Gigliotti, have been particularly resolute
about the need to move beyond our familiar theories
and methods in order to redefine a more humanly multi-dimensional
space in which we create both our technologies and
our selves.
____ By setting out with a clear view of the ambiguous
character of technology, the persistent conceptual
biases concomitant with human cognition, the ways
in which these have given shape to Western theory
and method, as well as related trends in the emergent
political economy, this study proposes a specific
alternative approach to ICT research and design. This
book suggests a means of explicitly acknowledging
an integrative aesthetic space of information and
materiality, mind and embodiment, within a grounded,
multi-dimensional framework of cognitive ecology.
It is therefore necessary that the study begin by
exploring a means of framing fully extruded inquiry
into contemporary technologies, and specifically digital
ICTs. The project is, in this important sense, immediate
and pragmatic. What is sought is a practicable approach
to researching and developing information and communications
technologies which is public, transparent and capable
of open deliberation. Yet, because these digital technologies
are so profoundly implicated in sweeping transformations
in current and emergent social, biological and political
economic realities, the project requires that certain
essential epistemological, ontological and teleological
issues first be carefully addressed in order to provide
that proper sphere of inquiry, the necessary space
within which to articulate such a method. This book
will therefore consist of two parts: Part I will consist
of a careful review of available literature, focusing
on the crucial act of opening the sphere, of articulating
an appropriate method of questioning, in a way which
it is hoped may yield fresh perspectives and novel
results for the method and case studies to be presented
in Part II.
____ Specifically, in Chapter One, salient features of
the current and emergent political economic and environmental
context will be described. Reflecting a line of Enlightenment
thinking running from Goethe to Spinoza to Hegel,
Marx once noted that, in the industrialist's factory,
"we have a lifeless mechanism, independent of
the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage"
(in Fromm 1961, 51). This state of being, for Marx
and other like-minded thinkers, represented the Modern
alienated laborer, subsumed within the systems machine,
yet worshipping its products as consumable godheads.
But the machine isn't what it used to be. Today, we
live in a "perpetual innovation economy"
characterized by automated technologies of reproduction
sufficiently advanced that the human production of
meaning has become the increasingly dominant means
of generating surplus value. Over the past three decades,
figurative transformation and its social and aesthetic
encoding in "content" have become the crucial
driving forces behind the generation of capital's
value within the political economy. And so we may
wonder, together with the French New Theorists, whether
the Modernist, Enlightenment themes have any currency
in today's postmodern, digital world. This chapter
posits specific ways in which they do, arguing that
it is in postmodern political economy, through our
embodied labor, production and consumption, that we
most dramatically confront the virtualizing and alienating
impacts of our emerging technologies.
____ Chapter Two describes how, since the time of Plato
and Aristotle, two broad, well-traveled paths have
comprised the accepted modes of Western inquiry into
the nature of meaning and value. Together, these traditions – rationalism
and empiricism – may be seen as divergent methods of
arriving at an ultimate, objective truth independent
of subjective intervention or interpretation. These
modes of thought have proven stunningly successful
in defining the normative parameters-the accepted
spheres of inquiry – of all subsequent attempts to define
the nature of value and meaning over the past two
and a half millennia. This chapter seeks to elucidate
several of the key impacts of these epistemologies
in order to understand clearly how it is that both
our economic and environmental realities are today
straining against the confines of the preternatural
cognitive model inherent in these still dominant modes
of thought.
____ In Chapter Three it will be shown that, in line with
contemporary findings in cognitive science, Eastern
thought has argued for several millennia that human
cognition comprises a relatively minor, error-prone
facet of human experience. In the Zen Buddhist traditions,
for example, it is said that a vastly larger dimension
of "cosmic unconscious" lies beneath and
beyond reason and cognitive order. It will be argued
that Eastern – and particularly Zen Buddhist – thought
has held for several millennia what Western scholars
such as Dewey and modern cognitive science have more
recently asserted, and which this analysis suggests
may coming to pass in 21st century political economy.
That is, by removing cognitive barriers to the free
play of figurative transformation, one opens the way
to the limitless, creative renewal of value and meaning
in human experience. By way of supporting this book's
eco-cognitive methodology, two historical 'case studies'
will be presented here, outlining ways in which Indian,
Chinese and Japanese cultures have defined the sphere
of inquiry within which pre-scientific technologies
have been contextualized and developed in these other
places and times to withstand the test of generation
upon generation of human experience. Specifically,
I argue that both the Yogic and Zen disciplines represent
forms of eco-cognitive technologies appropriate to
their respective cosmologies and cultural milieus,
and provide lessons which are profoundly relevant
as well to our current era of political economic transformation.
____ Chapter Four presents how the onset of the Industrial
Revolution in Europe compelled Western scholars for
the first time to address the existential impacts
of the symbiosis of human and technology, turning
at last to the fundamentally aesthetic work of more
fully integrating the systems world within the life
world. Here I argue that the work of the aesthetic,
properly understood, is identical to the work of what
in Western thought has traditionally been cordoned
off as the domain of spirituality and religion. This
is because art, like the best of religion, seeks an
integral continuum of embodied, cognitive and affective
human experience (Bateson 2000). Therefore, any method
which purports to be appropriate to current and emergent
political economic and ecological realities must by
definition take full and careful account of this continuum
of human experience and environment, which, though
always a feature of the human condition, is only recently
emergent within the global economy as a primary source
of capital's value. Because the work of technology
has traditionally been seen to stop at the door of
human subjectivity and affect, this chapter will pull
heavily from current cognitive science, as well as
the later works of Dewey and Mead, which hold that
science and ratiocination are situated within the
more expansive domain of affect or cognitive unconscious,
and which provide what I find to be the most subtle
and penetrating arguments addressing the powerfully
unique human need and faculty for art and aesthetics.
____ With our sphere of research thus opened and extruded,
Part II will turn to the task of articulating an eco-cognitive
method of ICT research and design.
____ In light of the political-economic context, our survey
of relevant Western literature and thought, and the
Eastern pre-scientific studies, the question is directly
addressed in Chapter Five as to whether a contemporary
ontological framework for a eco-cognitive method is
feasible in a postmodern world in which there may
be said to be as many valid realities as there are
varieties of imbedded and imminent technologies. Specifically,
are there means of purposefully articulating the systems
world within the life world in a way which enhances
rather than constrains that life world? Drawing on
research in the cognitive sciences, as well as organizational
theory related to knowledge management and sensemaking,
it will be suggested that a process of cognitive mapping
through metaphor analysis presents one humanistic
and open-ended aesthetic and ethical basis from which
to assess information and communication technologies,
purposefully nurture their integrative qualities,
and thus maximize opportunities for evolving our relationship
with capital into a more humanly, three-dimensional
"economy of human qualities" (Levy 1998).
____ Chapter Six presents a pair of in-depth case studies
in which the methodology is applied and the results
analyzed. These case studies, conducted with interpretive
communities in Asia and in the United States, test
the relevance and effectiveness of the eco-cognitive
method in real-world corporate and nonprofit organizations
functioning within the contemporary political economic
context.
Finally, I conclude with a discussion of ways in which
the proposed eco-cognitive method of inquiry may offer
new means of envisioning and enhancing our notions
of human worth and of evolving our technologies of
meaning and of value. With the political economy already
preceding us apace, the proposed approach to researching
and designing communications technologies is seen
as an urgent step in the direction of grounded theory
and method.
____ Yet even as we proceed in mapping the genetic and
metaphoric horizons of embodiment and the cognitive
unconscious, there will always remain the temptation
and danger of returning to the comfortable epistemologies
through which the West has been grappling with such
issues for two and a half millennia. In her text The
Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim
documents the surfeit of religious and otherworldly
metaphor invoked to discuss and describe advanced
digital information and communications networks, describing
that such transcendent themes tend to be particularly
prevalent during periods marked by sweeping technological
innovation (1999). And in Digital Biology, Peter Bentley
provides one concise example of both the ageless project
of bridging the void between virtual and natural dimensions,
as well as the stubborn Western resolve to exploit
instrumental observations of the natural world in
order to transcend it.
Follow
me into a different universe-the digital universe
of our computers. I will show you the marvels that
inhabit this strange new environment…. They are
just the same as you and the natural world that surrounds
you…. Together, they comprise digital biology….
Within these digital universes, we grow a new type
of nature (2002, 3).
____ If we succumb to such facile, familiar metaphors and
methods, we risk moving forward – though only within
an inhumane, flattened space of instrumental reason – seeking
in vain to atone, to heal, or to bridge that aching
void through evermore complex technologies of salvation
and transcendence. And so a major goal of this study
must be to vigilantly avoid the pervasive impacts
of the venerable dualisms of rationalism and empiricism,
subjective and objective truths, in favor of the hopeful
human impulse toward art and beauty – or more specifically
toward an aesthetic integrity realized in that uniquely
integral, multi-dimensional space of embodied, affective
and cognitive human experience.
____ First, however, it will be useful to open with a discussion
of key macroeconomic shifts widely seen occurring
in the global economy.
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