. . . . . . • Organs without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze • |
Perhaps the core of Deleuze's concept of repetition is
the idea that, in contrast to the mechanical (not
machinic!) repetition of linear causality, in a proper
instance of repetition, the repeated event is recreated
in a radical sense: it (re)emerges every time as New
(say, to "repeat" Kant is to rediscover the radical
novelty of his breakthrough, of his problematic, not to
repeat the statements which provide his solutions). One
is tempted to establish here a link with Chesterton's
Christian ontology, in which repetition of the same is
the greatest miracle: there is nothing »mechanical« in
the fact that the sun rises again every morning; this
fact, on the contrary, displays the highest miracle of God's creativity. [1] What Deleuze calls "desiring machines"
concerns something wholly different from the mechanical:
the "becoming-machine." In what does this becoming
consist? To many an obsessional neurotic, the fear of
flying has a very concrete image: one is haunted by the
thought of how many parts of such an immensely
complicated machine as a modern plane have to function
smoothly in order for the plane to remain in the air -
one small lever breaks somewhere, and the plane may very
well spiral downwards... One often relates in the same way
towards one's own body: how many small things have to run
smoothly for me to stay alive? - a tiny clot of blood in
a vein, and I die. When one starts to think how many
things can go wrong, one cannot but experience total and
overwhelming panic. The Deleuzian »schizo,« on the other
hand, merrily identifies with this infinitely complex
machine which is our body: he experiences this impersonal
machine as his highest assertion, rejoicing in its
constant tickling. As Deleuze emphasizes, what we get
here is not the relationship of a metaphor (the old
boring topic of "machines replacing humans"), but that of
metamorphosis, of the "becoming-machine" of a man. It is
here that the "reductionist" project goes wrong: the
problem is not how to reduce mind to neuronal "material"
processes (to replace the language of mind by the
language of brain processes, to translate the first one
into the second one), but, rather, to grasp how mind can
emerge only through being embedded in the network of
social relations and material supplements. In other
words, the true problem is not "How, if at all, could
machines IMITATE the human mind?," but, "How does the
very identity of human mind rely on external mechanical
supplements? How does it incorporate machines?"
Instead of bemoaning how the progressive
externalization of our mental capacities in "objective"
instruments (from writing on paper to relying on a
computer) deprives us of human potentials, one should
therefore focus on the liberating dimension of this
externalization: the more our capacities are transposed
onto external machines, the more we emerge as "pure"
subjects, since this emptying equals the rise of
substanceless subjectivity. It is only when we will be
able to fully rely on "thinking machines" that we will be
confronted with the void of subjectivity. In March 2002,
the media reported that Kevin Warwick from London became
the first cyberman: in a hospital in Oxford, his neuronal
system was directly connected to a computer network; he
is thus the first man to whom data will be fed directly,
bypassing the five senses. THIS is the future: the
combination of the human mind with the computer (rather
than the replacement of the former by the latter).
We got another taste of this future in May 2002,
when it was reported that scientists at New York
University had attached a computer chip able to receive
signals directly to a rat's brain, so that one can
control the rat (determine the direction in which it will
run) by means of a steering mechanism (in the same way
one runs a remote-controlled toy car). This is not the
first case of the direct link between the human brain and
a computer network: there already are such links which
enable blind people to get elementary visual information
about their surroundings directly fed into their brain,
bypassing the apparatus of visual perception (eyes,
etc.). What is new in the case of the rat is that, for
the first time, the "will" of a living animal agent, its
"spontaneous" decisions about the movements it will make,
are taken over by an external machine. Of course, the big
philosophical question here is: how did the unfortunate
rat "experience" its movement which was effectively
decided from outside? Did it continue to "experience" it
as something spontaneous (i.e., was it totally unaware
that its movements are steered?), or was it aware that
"something is wrong," that another external power is
deciding its movements? Even more crucial is to apply the
same reasoning to an identical experiment performed with
humans (which, ethical questions notwithstanding,
shouldn't be much more complicated, technically speaking,
than in the case of the rat). In the case of the rat, one
can argue that one should not apply to it the human
category of "experience," while, in the case of a human
being, one should ask this question. So, again, will a
steered human being continue to "experience" his
movements as something spontaneous? Will he remain
totally unaware that his movements are steered, or will
he become aware that "something is wrong," that another
external power is deciding his movements? And, how,
precisely, will this "external power" appear - as
something "inside me," an unstoppable inner drive, or as
a simple external coercion? [2] Perhaps the situation will be the one described in Benjamin Libet's famous experiment; [3]
the steered human being will continue to experience the
urge to move as his "spontaneous" decision, but - due to
the famous half-a-second delay - he/she will retain the
minimal freedom to BLOCK this decision. It is also
interesting which applications of this mechanism were
mentioned by the scientists and the reporting
journalists: the first details mentioned related to the
couple of humanitarian aid and the anti-terrorist
campaign (one could use the steered rats or other animals
in order to contact victims of an earthquake under the
rubble, as well as in order to approach terrorists
without risking human lives). And, the crucial thing one
has to bear in mind here is that this uncanny experience
of the human mind directly integrated into a machine is
not the vision of a future or of something new, but the
insight into something which is always-already going on,
which was here from the very beginning, since it is co-
substantial with the symbolic order. What changes is
that, confroted with the direct materialization of the
machine, its direct integration into the neuronal
network, one can no longer sustain the illusion of the
autonomy of personhood. It is well-known that the
patients who need dialysis at first experience a
shattering feeling of helplessness: it is difficult to
accept the fact that one's very survival hinges on the
mechanical device that I see out there in front of me.
Yet, the same goes for all of us: to put it in somewhat
exaggerated terms, we are all in the need of a mental-
symbolic apparatus of dialysis.
The trend in the development of computers is towards
their invisibility: the large humming machines with
mysterious blinking ligthts will be more and more
replaced by tiny bits fitting imperceptibly into our
"normal" environs, enabling it to function more smoothly.
Computers will become so small that they will be
invisible, everywhere and nowhere - so powerful that they
will disappear from view. One should only recall today's
car, in which many functions run smoothly because of
small computers we are mostly unaware of (opening
windows, heating...). In the near future, we will have
computerized kitchens or even dresses, glasses, and
shoes. Far from being a matter for the distant future,
this invisibility is already here: Philips soon plans to offer on the market a phone and music player which will
be interwoven into the texture of a jacket to such an
extent that it will be possible not only to wear the
jacket in an ordinary way (without worrying what will
happen to the digital machinery), but even to launder it
without damaging the electronic hardware. This
disappearance from the field of our sensual (visual)
experience is not as innocent as it may appear: the very
feature which will make the Philips jacket easy to deal
with (as no longer a cumbersome and fragile machine, but
a quasi-organic prothesis to our body) will confer on it
the phantom-like character of an all-powerful, invisible
Master. The machinic prothesis will be less an external
apparatus with whom we interact, and more part of our
direct self-experience as a living organism - thus
decentering us from within. For this reason, the parallel
between computers' growing invisibility and the well-
known fact that, when people learn something sufficiently
well, they cease to be aware of it, is misleading. The
sign that we learned a language is that we no longer need
to focus on its rules: we not only speak it
"spontaneously," but, an active focus on the rules even
prevents us from fluently speaking it. However, in the
case of language, we previously had to learn it (we "have
it in our mind"), while invisible computers in our
environs are out there, not acting "spontaneously" but
simply blindly.
One should accomplish here a step further: Bo
Dahlbom is right, in his critique of Dennett, [4] where he
insists on the SOCIAL character of "mind" - not only are
theories of mind obviously conditioned by their
historical, social context (does Dennett's theory of
competing multiple drafts not display its roots in
"postindustrial" late capitalism, with its motifs of
competition, decentralization, etc.? - a notion also
developed by Fredric Jameson, who proposed a reading of
Consciousness Explained as an allegory of today's
capitalism). Much more importantly, Dennett's insistence
on how tools - externalized intelligence on which humans
rely - are an inherent part of human identity (it is
meaningless to imagine a human being as a biological
entity WITHOUT the complex network of his/her tools -
such a notion is the same as, say, a goose without its
feathers), opens up a path which should be taken much
further than Dennett goes himself. Since, to put it in
good old Marxist terms, man is the totality of its social
relations, why does Dennett not take the next logical
step and directly analyze this network of social relations? This domain of "externalized intelligence,"
from tools to, especially, language itself, forms a
domain of its own, that of what Hegel called "objective
spirit," the domain of artificial substance as opposed to
natural substance. The formula proposed by Dahlbom is
thus: from "Society of Minds" (the notion, developed by
Minsky, Dennett, and others) to "Minds of Society" (i.e.,
the human mind as something which can only emerge and
function within a complex network of social relations and
artificial mechanic supplements which "objectivize"
intelligence).
NOTES
[1] G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius
Press 1995, p. 65.
[2] Cognitivists often advise us to rely on commonsense
evidence: of course we can indulge in speculations about
how we are not the causal agents of our acts, of how our
bodily movements are steered by a mysterious evil spirit,
so that it just appears that we freely decide what
movements to make. In the absence of good reasons, such
skepticism is nonetheless simply unwarranted. However,
does the experiment with the steered rat not provide a
pertinent reason for entertaining such hypotheses?
[3] Benjamin Libet, "Unconscious Cerebral Initiative
and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action," in
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1985, Vol. 8, p. 529-
539, and Benjamin Libet, "Do We Have Free Will?", in
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999, Vol. 1, p. 47-57.
[4] Bo Dahlbom, "Mind is Artificial," in Dennett and His
Critics, ed. by Bo Dahlbom, Oxford: Blackwell 1993.
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