Transpolitical Technocracy and the Hope of Language: Virilio and Habermas

By Linda Brigham

Wed, 13 Sep 1995 10:45:34 PST

Just 100 years ago, a London theatre audience first heard the following exchange from the main characters in "The Importance of Being Earnest":

Algernon: ...your name isn't Jack at all; it is Ernest.

Jack: It isn't Ernest; it's Jack.

Alg: You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest. It's on your cards. Here is one of them. Mr Ernest Worthing, B.4, The Albany. I'll keep this as proof that your name is Ernest if ever you attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolen, or to anyone else.

Jack: Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country...

Such were the social consequences of speed at the end of the last century; the railroad system supported the possibility of a double identity, and so closed the gap between reality and fiction. More and more of the range of human attributes could be summed up by the play of surfaces without history or accountability: social introductions, facial expressions, identification cards, and unfortunately for one of Wilde's characters, inscriptions in cigarette cases. But while Wilde heard in the rattle of the railways the yawn of an eschatologically exhausted aristocracy, Virilio hears far more ominous things in the railway's descendants: the roar of the airplane, the crash of the bombs that aerial surveillance capacity made accurate; and finally now the explosion whose effect is nearly instantaneous with its cause, inseparable from the pushing of the button. A hundred years after Wilde, Paul Virilio subjects the entire world to an electronic panopticon through which offense and defense merge in the preemptive strike, arrival merges into departure, eliminating justice, locality and community.

This sounds like a hostile scenario into which to drop the name of Jürgen Habermas. Against Virilio's totalizing conception of mediatized perception, Habermas insists on the capacity of natural language communication to right the imbalance modern technology has wrought. Habermas would critique "The Importance of Being Earnest" on the basis of its characters' violations of the rules of intersubjectivity, not its version of special relativity. In any case, Habermas joins Virilio in his negative assessment of technological mediation as it currently exists; both men critique the impact of media on an older form of social organization held together with the cultural glue of meaning. In a sense, both are, with radically different degrees of optimism, humanists.

For Habermas, the problem with media is not ontological, biological, or in any other respect foundational. Media deformation of modern life is a byproduct of cultural breadth, of an increasingly global society; to expand, to incorporate more and more diverse groups, we see a social tendency towards what he calls in The Theory of Communicative Action value generalization -- a process detaching the basis for social cooperation from traditional norms and necessitating more rational methods for obtaining the consensus necessary to maintain social function. But, as value generalization and globalization proceed, the risk and consequences of social non-cooperation increase, and the amount of labor necessary to coordinate social activity also becomes unwieldly. Because of this, another tendency arises: the tendency in modern industrial society to shunt more and more coordinating activity into what Habermas calls steering media -- and the most powerful of these is money -- non-linguistic, and thus non-normative means for deciding a course of action in a socially significant way. Consequently, as Habermas puts it, The lifeworld contexts in which processes of reaching understanding are always embedded are devalued in favor of media-steered interactions; the lifeworld is no longer needed for the coordination of action (183). In other words, the contemporary socius is endangered because of a schism between lifeworld and system. And since Habermas views the uncoupling of meaning from social action as a byproduct of social growth, a contingency, he is able to offer at least a theoretical solution: the resubordination of media to natural language. He does not dissolve the lifeworld/system dualism, but sets up the theoretical conditions for its integration , with language as the privileged medium for the pursuit of consensus.

In Virilio's case, though, it is impossible to bring critical theory to bear. Virilio merges ontology and physics in the single dimension of speed. Speed determines space and time, geography and individuality. Under conditions where the speed of light is the only limit to the transfer of effect, there is the prospect of a world without expanse and duration, particularly as speedy technology becomes annexed to human perception. This condition he sees as an excessively vulnerable one, a form of handicapping, as he writes in a recent article: We have before us the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost, along with his or her natural mobility, any immediate means of intervening in the environment. The fate of the individual is handed over, for better or for worse, to the capacities of receivers, sensors, and other long-range detectors that turn the person into a being subjected to the machines with which, they say, he or she is 'in dialogue!' (Third 11) The origin of this catastrophe is the displacement of natural space-time with an artificial one: One by one, the perceptive faculties of an individual's body are transferred to machines, or instruments that record images and sound; more recently, the transfer is made to receivers, to sensors, and to other detectors that can replace absence of tactility overdistance. ... What is becoming critical here is no longer the concept of three spatial dimensions, but a fourth, temporal dimension -- in other words, that of the present itself... 'real time' is not opposed -- as many experts in electronics claim -- to 'deferred time,' but only to present time (Third 4). In other words, according to Virilio, the habit of space and the habit of time -- a space and time without significant threats from artificial space-time -- have given way to the hegemony of simulacra, of artificially mediatized perception, of cyborgian anatomies. And this new hegemony has displaced some prior balance, implicit though never explicitly theorized in Virilio's work. In contrast to Habermas' view of our capacity to right the system, for Virilio we are the victims of this critical transition, or, in his own words, we are its powerless witnesses (Third 5).

Essentially, both Habermas and Virilio interrogate the social effects of media in terms of their relation to a prior social and perceptual condition. For Habermas, trying to reclaim rationality from its disastrous instrumentality in Enlightenment thought, the only appropriate medium for social coordination is natural language; natural language, says Habermas, is both universal and, unlike Enlightenment rationality, non-foundational. We are in crisis now because both the primary tool of assessment and the dominant token of exchange is not discursive, but non-linguistic: mediated through capital. Because of the limitations on the semiotics in which money can have significance, the domination of capital reinforces game-theoretical forms of interaction that increasingly deprive society of broader ways to address problems.

Virilio, although less concerned with agency, implies everywhere a naturalistic notion of power relations from which technology has produced a horrific deviation. Unfortunately, that purportedly natural, less dangerous form of power seems to rest on the structural foundations of traditional social hierarchies of gender and family. Only within the milieu of these stable forms can idiosyncrasy and individuality make sense. Women and children, precisely because they lack steering power, have through the ages provided a critical standpoint with respect to the dominant culture. Women's power consists in the alternative to the rational; it lies in the seductive appeal of a counter-technology that full participation in the dominant culture destroys and devalues. They occupy the site of the losers in history in the context of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History: they provide the perspective necessary to see every document of civilization as simultaneously a document of barbarism.

But Virilio's women and children by definition write no manifestos, make no attempt to divert power to themselves. Their struggle as an alternative political potential, illuminable in a latent memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger in Benjamin's essay, is completely elided in Virilio's historiography; by definition, they remain invisible. This absence of real political potential is due to Virilio's thorough-going monism; in the final analysis, Virilio's women and children, like objects themselves, do not exist as an opposition to technological hegemony at all, but only constitute phases of the catastrophic career of a postmodern flight from nature. And in the case of women, that phase is past. Their critical value to the dominant culture has been sacrificed by their assimilation. In obtaining equal rights, and a slice of technological mastery, women only increase the momentum of the reconfiguration of control speeding the contemporary world to an asocial apocalypse. Like Habermas, Virilio sees technology as steering the norms of perception into the constricted and mass-reproducible regimens of commodity capitalism, with perception itself as a premiere commodity.

I want to suggest that both of these assaults on media fail to grant sufficient complexity to their representations of media -- whether it be Habermas' language and steering media or the mediatization of the senses in Virilio's case. Both, in a sense, literalize the mediatized precept, reifying it as the cause of univocal effects, as if a mediatized world necessarily diminished human options. Indeed, this is nearly tautological in Habermas' case, following from the system/lifeworld binary. Neither Virilio nor Habermas fully explore the range of signification in non-linguistic media. Virilio's focus on the precept's transformation by the forms of media that constitute his obsessions -- cinema, aerial photography, the computer screen, and extending in to virtual reality -- ipso facto means the loss of locality and idiosyncrasy, without any humane substitute. On the other hand, Habermas' paradigmatic steering medium, money, opposed in binary fashion to natural language, even less adequately explores t he range of interactions possible outside natural language. Habermas' binary opposition between language and system aligns non-linguistic media with a socius starved by the meaningless mechanisms it has put into place, and prepares the way for his claim that natural language alone can facilitate multicultural consensus, a consensus that considers as its terms a more holistic quality of life than monetary measures can ever permit. Yet, as I'll claim below, this category of natural language is far from clear, and it is significantly intertwined with the non-linguistic media to which it is theoretically opposed.

I want to re-situate both distinctions and interdependencies among media, thought, and perception by way of an anecdote. A couple months ago, N. Scott Momaday, the renowned Native American author, visited my institution, Kansas State, with a reading of his work. Actually, his presentation was an oratorical performance, not a reading at all. Essentially, this reading that was not a reading consisted of a series of reflexive reflections on the distinctions between oral and literate culture. He recounted his own written account at the end of The Way to Rainy Mountain, in which he records an oral exchange held with an ancient Kiowan woman, Ko-sahn. Ko-sahn shared two stories with him. The first was drawn from the oral heritage of the Kiowans, the story of the Night of the Falling Stars, a report of the Leonid meteor shower in 1833, several decades before her birth. The second story she drew from her own experience, an account of the last Kiowan Sun Dance in the 1870s. But as Momaday orally recounted his written history of these oral narratives, his recounting itself became a piece of oral legend. He told us that as he was finishing The Way to Rainy Mountain, the writing got rough, went dry. As he hung over his manuscript, Ko-Sahn herself rose from the page where he had attempted to inscribe her. And it was a conversation with this being, Momaday claimed, that became the conclusion of The Way to Rainy Mountain that we now find in the published text.

Why would this incredible tale be appropriate to an oral report of a written account of an oral memory and an oral heritage? Think of Ko-Sahn's account of the Night of the Falling Stars. She had never seen the falling stars, but she described them as if she had, just as Momaday reported the apparition of Ko-Sahn herself from his manuscript. The whole medium of exchange occupied a fantastic plane. Now fantasy is, of course, a relative term: software is a kind of fantasy, according to Friedrich Kittler. In the case of oral culture, fantasy compensates for the absence of extensive indexing: no one can point to a book and say there, read that. People's memories are books. And visualization is a powerful mnemonic, a form of ink, or a magnetic charge, the medium appropriate to the delicate hardware of the cerebral cortex. And to ask whether Momaday really saw Ko-sahn appear from his manuscript is to ask, essentially, what is a sign? A fantasy or a reality?

But this performative lesson in media theory grew more complicated. Juxtaposed to the account of Ko-Sahn was a brief reference to Jorge Luis Borges, described by Momaday with special emphasis on his blindness, a blind man working with and about books he could never see. Momaday introduced Borges as the author of The Aleph, a story in which the ostensive medium -- writing -- encounters paradoxes along the lines of Momaday's own so-called reading of his work that night at Kansas State. To briefly summarize, Borges' aleph is a point in space, a topological oddity that displays within its finitude the contents of all space and all time. In the story, through some kind of cosmic accident, this aleph-point appears in the basement of one of the story's characters. In describing the aleph, superficially an experience of sight, the narrator runs into all the limitations of his medium. He's trying to describe simultaneity in the linearity of natural language, infinity in a finite space. And he is a bitter, jealous individual, who prizes revenge over the potential for wisdom.

One of the referents of the aleph is, of course, Georg Cantor's designation for a set of transfinite numbers. The aleph is the first in an infinite series of transfinite sets. Now Cantor did not prove the existence of transfinite sets by counting -- he would run up against the same media limitations as Borges' narrator. Cantor's proof was in a sense geometric, a diagonal proof, elegantly plain to anyone who could recognize that the hypotenuse of a triangle would have to be larger than either one of the legs.

What is geometry to a blind man? Certainly not meaningless, any more than books are meaningless to Borges. Geometry is a set of schemas. To use a more precise term, I'll substitute for the term geometry Charles Sanders Peirce's term, diagrammatics. Diagrammatics constitute a technique for iconizing complex material, rendering it more apprehensible to the intellect. Peirce's diagrammatics are only visual in a metaphorical sense; diagrams puts a schema before the mind's eye, to use Peirce's phrase. In terms of the actual senses employed, the matter is contingent. For example, visually, a diagram for the number six would line up dots in rows of three over three, rather than six in a line, because three objects are immediately graspable, while more require counting. A diagram appealing to a different sense would operate according to the same principle, although the details might differ: it might be that tactile discrimination, for example, optimizes other arrangements.

What's significant about a diagrammatics is the combination of this media contingency and conceptual univocality. The direction of greater simplicity is always universal in terms of a given medium; for example, in a numerical system, it is universally clear that 3/9 is more complex than 1/3, that 3/9 is on the way to becoming 1/3. But the precise direction in which simplicity lies varies across media. Moving back to the original example of oral versus written, vividness is important for the medium of memory, but indifferent to the medium of writing. Nonetheless, relative to the media differential in question, diagrammatics provide a universal directionality and a basis for consensus in terms that the Habermasian category of language is too fuzzy to be useful in.

Since Habermas' steering media tend to be quantifiable entities like money, they seem more readily submit to a diagrammatics than natural language does, and the very ease of locating the direction of optimization makes the system all too accommodating to the socially destructive moves of game theory. But this might just be an illusion produced by confusion over the category of language, by the fact that we easily aggregate so many technologies -- speaking, writing, remembering, word-processing -- under the term natural language. There may in fact be much more of a continuum between linguistic and non-linguistic media, offering alternatives for resolving perceived and real contemporary perils; it may be that all non-linguistic media do not have the reductive effect of money. Because of their media contingency, diagrams are an anti-foundational source of universality, just as Habermas claims natural language is. And given the fact that the range of media have exploded, given the range of techniques f or non-linguistic communication and control, it might be that steering media ought not be segmented off from the lifeworld at all, but that a starting point should be a mixed-media one, one that acknowledges the relativity of media, and deprivileges natural language in order to speed processes of a more liberal form of consensus than that offered by money.

Of course the relativity of media also imply that the distinction between a valid and invalid physique that Virilio wants to maintain is invalid. He writes with a certain ill-humor, If every one of us is obviously in agreement about the inalienable right that the handicapped person has to live as others do and therefore with others, it is no less revealing to note the similarities that now exist between the reduced mobility of the equipped invalid and the growing inertia of the overequipped, valid human population (Third 11-12). Such a suggestion is somewhat Strangelovian. The media contingency of diagrammatics fail to privilege a priori any particular physical constitution. It becomes equivocal whether we are dependent on the disciplines that socialize the natural body in a Foucauldian fashion or whether we are vulnerable through the commodification of a variety of prostheses.

Nonetheless, my purpose here is not techno-utopian. I think Virilio's warning concerning the undoing of physical geography has cogency, despite its inclination towards hysteria. Even more so, I find Habermas' sober analysis of the unwanted multiple consequences of steering media to hold great critical value. But both Virilio's condemnation of the manipulated precept and Habermas' methodological distinction between lifeworld and system fail to do justice to the media density of human cognition. The task of making sense in any culture is already heavily laden with technology. It is true that the accelerations of exchange facilitated by media have changed the world, in some ways disastrously. There is little doubt that transnational capital is responsible for much global violence, for a dreadful standard of living in many parts of the world, and for a backlash against the civil rights of all kinds of people. But nature was never very kind either, if it existed at all, and the limits on who is permitted free speech were always imposed by non-linguistic means. Reductive schemes to right these immense wrongs perhaps participate in the same austere prejudice that elevated the mind above the body and made it a God, starving its subjects into a so-called humanist metaphysics -- a metaphysics of scarcity.