Jan. 22, 2000 by Slavoj Zizek, special to Britannica.com
The Elementary Particles, a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq, triggered a sensational debate all around Europe following its publication in 1998. Now finally available in English, it is a story of radical desublimation if there ever was one. Bruno, a high-school teacher, is an undersexed hedonist, while Michel, his half-brother, is a brilliant but emotionally desiccated biochemist. Abandoned by their hippie mother when they were small, neither has ever properly recovered. All their attempts at the pursuit of happiness, whether through marriage, the study of philosophy, or the consumption of pornography, merely lead to loneliness and frustration. Bruno ends up in a psychiatric asylum after confronting the meaninglessness of permissive sexuality (the utterly depressing descriptions of the sexual orgies between forty-somethings are among the most excruciating readings in contemporary literature), while Michel invents a solution: a new self-replicating gene for the post-human, desexualized being. The novel ends with a prophetic vision: In 2040, humanity collectively decides to replace itself with genetically modified, asexual humanoids in order to avoid the deadlock of sexuality. These humanoids experience no passions, no intense self-assertions that can lead to destructive rage.
The Death of "Man"
Almost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed "man" as a figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the then-fashionable notion of the "death of man." Although Houellebecq stages this disappearance in much more naive literal terms, as the replacement of humanity with a new post-human species, there is a common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual difference. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures liberated from Sex, and one is tempted to claim that Houellebecq's post-human society of clones is the realization of Foucault's dream of Selves who practice the "use of pleasures." While this solution is fantasy at its purest, the deadlock to which it reacts is a real one: In our postmodern, permissive, "disenchanted" world, unconstrained sexuality is reduced to an apathetic participation in collective orgies of the sort depicted in The Elementary Particles. The impasse in sexual relations (the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan's "il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel") seems here to reach its devastating apex.
Alan Turing devised his "imitation game" in order to test whether a machine can think. We communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question. Behind one of them, there is a human typing the answers; behind the other, a machine. If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is a little bit less known is that in its first formulation, the issue was not to distinguish the human from the machine, but men from women. Why this strange displacement from sexual difference to the difference between human and machine? Was this because of Turing's simple eccentricity (his homosexuality was the source of deep personal troubles)? According to some interpreters, the point was to oppose the two experiments: A successful imitation of a woman's responses by a man (or vice versa) would not prove anything, because the gender identity does not depend on the sequences of symbols, while a successful imitation of man by a machine would prove that this machine thinks, because "thinking" is ultimately the proper way of sequencing symbols.
What if, however, the solution to this enigma is much more simple and radical? What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but "the Real" of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that if sexual difference were abolished, a human being would effectively become indistinguishable from a machine? (The Real is Lacan's term for that which resists being incorporated symbolically into our universe of meaning. The Real is thus not raw reality, which we encounter at its purest in phenomena like disgust, but, rather, the stuff of traumatic encounters: experiences of violence or excessively intense pleasure. Whether fantasized or part of reality, they are "too much" for our cognitive apparatus.)
How We Became Post-Human
Perhaps the best way to specify this role of sexual love is through the notion of reflexivity, which N. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman , describes as "the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates." This appearance of the generating movement within the generated system as a rule takes the form of its opposite. Think of the later stage of a revolutionary process, in which the Revolution starts to devour its own children. The political agents who effectively set the revolution in motion take on the role of its main obstacle; they become waverers or outright traitors who are not ready to follow the logic of the revolution to its conclusion.
Along these same lines, is it not that, once the symbolic social order is fully established, the very element which introduced the "transcendent" attitude that defines a human being - sexuality, that uniquely human sexual passion - appears as its very opposite, as the main obstacle to the elevation of a human being to the level of pure spirituality, as that which ties him/her down to the inertia of bodily existence? For this reason, the end of sexuality in the form of the much celebrated "post-human" self-cloning entity expected to emerge soon, far from opening up the way to pure spirituality, will signal the end of what is traditionally designated as uniquely human spiritual transcendence. All the celebration of the new "enhanced" possibilities of sexual life that Virtual Reality offers cannot conceal the fact that, once cloning supplants sexual difference, the game is over.
Brave New World
And, incidentally, with all the focus on the new experiences of pleasure that lay ahead with the development of Virtual Reality, direct neuronal implants, etc., what about new, "enhanced" possibilities for torture? Do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new and unimagined horizons for extending our ability to endure pain - through widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new forms of inflicting it? Does this Sadean image of an "undead" victim of torture who can sustain endless pain without having at his/her disposal the escape into death also await realization? Perhaps in a decade or two our most horrifying cases of torture (say, what they did to the chief of staff of the Dominican army after the failed coup attempt in which the dictator Rafael Trujillo was killed - sewing his eyes together so that he couldn't see his torturers, and then for four months slowly cutting off parts of his body in the most painful ways, such as using clumsy scissors to detach his genitals) will appear as mere child's play.
The paradox...
The paradox - or, rather, the antinomy - of "cyberlogic" concerns precisely the fate of the body. Even champions of cyberspace warn us that we should not totally forget our bodies, that we should remain anchored in "real life" by returning, regularly, from our immersion in cyberspace to the intense experience of the body, be it in the form of sex or jogging. We will never turn ourselves into virtual entities freely floating from one to another virtual universe: Our "real life" bodies and their mortality form the absolute horizon of our existence, the ultimate, innermost impossibility that underpins the immersion in all possible multiple virtual universes.
Wither the Body?
Yet at the same time, in cyberspace the body returns with a vengeance. In popular perception, cyberspace is "hardcore pornography" (pornography, that is, is perceived as the predominant use of cyberspace). The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being," the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or, even more, in Virtual Reality), is not the experience of being bodiless, but the experience of possessing another - ethereal, virtual, weightless - body, a body which does not confine us to inert materiality and finitude, an angelic, spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated. Cyberspace thus designates a turn - a kind of "negation of negation" - in the gradual progress toward the disembodying of our experience (writing instead of "living" speech, then press, then radio, then TV). In cyberspace we return to bodily immediacy, but to an uncanny, virtual immediacy. In this sense, the claim that cyberspace contains a Gnostic dimension is fully justified. (The most concise definition of Gnosticism is precisely that it is a kind of spiritualized materialism: Its topic is not directly a higher, purely notional, reality, but a "higher" bodily reality, a protoreality of shadowy ghosts and undead entities.)
This notion that we are entering a new era in which humanity will leave behind the inertia of material bodies was nicely rendered by Konrad Lorenz's somewhat ambiguous remark that we ourselves ("actually existing" humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man. Of course the first association that imposes itself here is the notion that "actually existing" humanity still dwells in what Marx designated "pre-history," and that true human history will begin with the advent of socialism. Or, in Nietzsche's terms, that man is just a bridge, a passage between animal and superman . What Lorenz "meant" was undoubtedly situated along these lines, although with a more humanistic twist: Humanity is still immature and barbarian; it has yet to reach full wisdom. But an opposite reading also imposes itself: Human beings are in essence a "passage," a finite openness into an abyss.
Ongoing Decoding
The ongoing decoding of the human body, the prospect of the formulation of each individual's genome, confronts us in a pressing way with the radical question of "what we are": Am I such that my code can be compressed onto a single CD? Are we "nobody and nothing," just an illusion of self-awareness whose only reality is the complex interactive network of neuronal and biochemical links? The uncanny feeling generated by playing with toys like Tamagochi concerns the fact that we treat a virtual nonentity as an entity: We act "as if" (we believe that) there is, behind the screen, a real Self, an animal reacting to our signals, although we know well that there is nothing and nobody "behind," just digital circuitry. But what is even more disturbing is the implicit reflexive reversal of this insight: If there is effectively no one out there, behind the screen, what if the same goes for myself? What if the "I," my self-awareness, is also merely a superficial "screen" behind which there is only a "blind" neuronal circuit? Or, to make the same point from a different angle: Why are people so afraid of plane crashes? It's not the physical pain as such - what causes such horror are the two or three minutes while the plane is falling down and one is fully aware that one will die shortly.
Does the mapping of the genome not transpose all of us into a similar situation? That is to say, the uncanny aspect of the genome project concerns the temporal gap which separates the knowledge about what causes a certain disease from the development of the technical means to intervene and prevent this disease from evolving - the period of time in which we shall know for sure that, say, we are about to get a dangerous cancer, but will be unable to do anything to prevent it. And what about "objectively" reading our IQ or the genetic ability for other intellectual capacities? How will the awareness of this total self-objectification affect our self-experience? The standard answer (the knowledge of our genome will enable us to intervene into our genome and change our psychic and bodily properties for the better) still begs the crucial question: If self-objectification is complete, who is the "I" who intervenes into "its own" genetic code in order to change it? Is this intervention itself not already objectified in the totally scanned brain?
Scanned Subjectivity
The "closure" anticipated by the prospect of the total scanning of the human brain does not reside only in the full correlation between the scanned neuronal activity in our brains and our subjective experience (so that a scientist will be able to give an impulse to our brain and then predict to what subjective experience this impulsive will give rise), but in the much more radical notion of bypassing the subjective experience altogether. Through scanning, it will be possible to directly identify our subjective experience, so that the scientist will not even have to ask us what we're experiencing; he/she will be able to read immediately on his screen what we're experiencing. There is further proof which points in the same direction: A couple of milliseconds before a human subject "freely" makes a decision, scanners can detect the change in the brain's chemical processes indicating that the decision was already made. Even when we make a free decision, our consciousness seems just to register an anterior chemical process.
The psychoanalytic answer...
The psychoanalytic answer is to locate freedom (of choice) at the unconscious level: True acts of freedom are choices/decisions which we make while unaware of it. We never decide (in the present tense); all of a sudden, we just take note of how we have already decided. On the other hand, one can argue that such a dystopian prospect involves the loop of a petitio principii: It silently presupposes that the same old Self which phenomenologically relies on the gap between "myself" and the objects "out there" will continue to be here after the self-objectification has been completed.
The paradox, of course, is that this total self-objectification overlaps with its opposite; what looms at the horizon of the "digital revolution" is nothing else than the prospect that human beings will acquire the capacity of what Kant and other German Idealists called "intellectual intuition": the closure of the gap that separates (passive) intuition and (active) production - the intuition, that is, which immediately generates the object it perceives (a capacity hitherto reserved for the infinite, divine mind). On the one hand, it will be possible, through neurological implants, to switch from our "common" reality to another computer-generated reality without all the clumsy machinery of today's Virtual Reality (the glasses, the gloves, etc.), since the signals of the virtual reality will reach our brains directly, bypassing our sensory organs. As Ray Kurzweil puts it in The Age of Spiritual Machines, Your neural implants will provide the simulated sensory inputs of the virtual environment - and your virtual body - directly in your brain. ... A typical 'website' will be a perceived virtual environment, with no external hardware required. You 'go there' by mentally selecting the site and then entering that world.
Really, Really Virtual
On the other hand, there is the complementary notion of the "Real Virtual Reality": Through "nanobots" (billions of self-organizing, intelligent microrobots), it will be possible to recreate the three-dimensional images of different realities "out there" for our "real" senses to see and enter (Kurzweil's "Utility Fog"). Significantly, these two opposite versions of the full virtualization of our experience of reality (direct neuronal implants versus the "Utility Fog") mirror the difference between the subjective and the objective: With the "Utility Fog," we still relate to the reality outside ourselves through our sensory experience, while the neuronal implants effectively reduce us to "brains in the vat," cutting us off from any direct perception of reality. In the first case, in other words, we "really" perceive a simulacrum of reality, while in the second case, perception itself if simulated through direct neuronal implants. But in both cases, we reach a kind of omnipotence, being able to switch from one reality to another with the mere power of our thoughts - to transform our bodies and the bodies of our partners. "With this technology," writes Kurzweil, "you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just about anyone, real or imagined, at any time." The question to be asked here is: Will this still be experienced as "reality"? Isn't "reality," for a human being, defined through a minimum of resistance (the real is that which resists, that which is not totally malleable to the caprices of our imagination)?
The obvious counter-question arises: "But not everything can be virtualized - there still has to be the one 'real reality,' that of the digital or biogenetic circuitry itself which generates the very multiplicity of virtual universes!" The answer is provided by the prospect of "downloading" the entire human brain (once it will be possible to scan it completely) onto an electronic machine more efficient than our awkward brains. At this crucial moment, a human being will change its ontological status from "hardware" to "software"; it will no longer be identified with (stuck to) its material bearer (the brain in the human body). The identity of the Self is a certain neuronal pattern, the network of waves, which, in principle, can be transferred from one to another material support. There is, of course, no "pure mind"; there always has to be some kind of embodiment. But if our mind is a software pattern, it should, in principle, be possible for it to shift from one to another material support system. (Is this not going on all the time at a different level? Isn't the "stuff" our cells are made of not continuously changing?) The idea is that this severing of the umbilical cord that links us to a single body, this shift from having (and being stuck to) a body to freely floating between different embodiments, will mark the true birth of the human being, relegating the entire history of humanity to the status of a confused period of transition from the animal kingdom to the true kingdom of the mind.
Monads in Cyberspace
Here, however, existential enigmas emerge again, and we are back at the Leibnizian problem of the identity of the indiscernibles: If (the pattern of) my brain is loaded onto a different material support system, which of the two minds is "myself"? In what does the identity of "myself" consist if it resides neither in the material support system (which changes all the time) nor in the formal pattern (which can be exactly replicated)? No wonder Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical points of reference for cyberspace theorists: What reverberates today is not only his dream of a universal computing machine, but the uncanny resemblance between his ontological vision of monadology and today's emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. Does our immersion into cyberspace, that is, not go hand in hand with our reduction to Leibnizean monads which, although without "windows" that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more like monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with computer screens, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe?
The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by introducing the notion of the "preestablished harmony" between the monads - guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing monad - repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of communication: How does each of us know that he/she is in touch with the "real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra?
More radically even...
Brain in the Vat
More radically even, what about the obvious Heideggerian counter-thesis that the notion of the "brain in the vat," on which this entire scenario relies, involves an ontological mistake. What accounts for the specifically human element is not a property or pattern of the brain, but the way a human being is situated in his/her world and ex-statically relates to the things in it; language is not the relationship between an object (word) and another object (thing or thought) in the world, but the site of the historically formed disclosure of the world-horizon as such. To which one is tempted to respond: So what? With the immersion into Virtual Reality, we will effectively be deprived of the ex-static being-in-the-world that pertains to human finitude. What if this loss will open for us another, hitherto unimagined, dimension of spirituality?
Does, then, the full formulation of the genome effectively foreclose subjectivity and/or sexual difference? When, in the summer of 2000, the completion of a "working draft" of the human genome was publicly announced , the wave of commentaries about the medical and ethical consequences of this breakthrough rendered manifest the first paradox of the genome: On the one hand, the idea is that we can now formulate the very positive identity of a human being, what he/she "objectively is," what predetermines his/her development; on the other hand, knowing the complete genome - the "instruction book for human life," as it is often referred to - opens up the way for technological manipulation, enabling us to "reprogram" our (or, rather, others's) bodily and psychic features. This new situation seems to signal the end of a whole series of traditional notions: theological creationism (comparing human with animal genomes makes clear that human beings evolved from animals, sharing as we do more than 99 percent of our genome with the chimpanzee), sexual reproduction (rendered superfluous by the prospect of cloning), and, ultimately, psychology or psychoanalysis (does the genome not realize Freud's dream of translating psychic processes into objective chemical processes)?
Here, however, one should be attentive to the formulation which repeatedly occurs in most of the reactions to the identification of the genome. "The old adage that every disease with the exception of trauma has a genetic component," says Maimon Cohen, Director of the Harvey Institute for Human Genetics at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, "is really going to be true." Although this statement is meant as the assertion of a triumph, one should nonetheless focus on the exception that it concedes: the impact of trauma. How serious and extensive is this limitation? The first thing to bear in mind here is that "trauma" is not simply shorthand for the unpredictable chaotic wealth of environmental influences, so that we are lead to the standard proposition according to which the identity of a human being results from the interaction between his/her genetic inheritance and the influence of his/her environment ("nature versus nurture").
It is also not sufficient to replace this standard proposition with the more refined notion of the "embodied mind" (see The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch). A human being is not just the outcome of the interaction between genes and environment as two opposed entities; he/she is, rather, the engaged embodied agent who, instead of "relating" to his/her environs, mediates, creates his/her life-world. But "trauma" designates a shocking encounter which precisely disturbs this immersion into one's life-world: a violent intrusion of something which doesn't fit in. Of course animals can also experience traumatic ruptures. Is an ant's universe not derailed when a human intervention totally subverts its environs? But the difference between animals and people is crucial here. For animals, such traumatic ruptures are the exception; they are experienced as a catastrophe which ruins their way of life, whereas for humans, the traumatic encounter is a universal condition, the intrusion which sets in motion the process of "becoming human."
Tarrying with the Negative
Humans are not simply overwhelmed by the impact of the traumatic encounter (as Hegel put it, he/she is able to "tarry with the negative": to counteract its destabilizing impact by spinning out intricate symbolic cobwebs). This is the lesson of both psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition: The specific human vocation does not rely on the development of humanity's inherent potential (on the awakening of dormant spiritual forces or of some genetic program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other's desire in its impenetrability. In other words (and pace Steven Pinker), there is no inborn "language instinct." There are, of course, genetic conditions that have to be met for a living being to be able to speak; but one actually starts to speak and enters the symbolic universe only in reacting to a traumatic jolt. And the mode of this reacting - the fact that, in order to cope with a trauma, we symbolize - is not "in our genes."
So there is no cause for panic about the fate of human freedom in the digital universe. It is, on the contrary, precisely in the digital universe that we confront the abyss of freedom at its purest - not freedom as an inborn property of the human mind, but freedom as the capacity to ground our identity upon contingent encounters.
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Slavoj Zizek is senior researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Tarrying with the Negative, The Metastases of Enjoyment, The Indivisible Remainder, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject. His last article for Britannica.com was "When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal."