Trent University Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics

My topic was: “Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake.”

Here are my lecture notes for this lecture (with some text pasted in from my PowerPoint presentation):

Transdisciplinary, not Interdisciplinary

My academic-intellectual work has been described as trans-disciplinary, although I am still thinking about whether or not I like this term. Jean Baudrillard, one of my favorite thinkers, did not like the term “trans”: he wrote negatively about it at the beginning of his book The Transparency of Evil. Baudrillard criticized transsexuality, transeconomics, transpolitics, and transaesthetics as contributing to a confusion of categories, symptomatic of a generalized virulent and viral contamination, a senseless promiscuity and commutability of all terms. Recently I had a fruitful conversation with Horst Hörtner, the director of the Ars Electronica FUTURELAB in Linz, Austria, about the trans-disciplinary project of bringing together art, science and fiction in creative projects to come. So I am going to override the viewpoint of one of my principal mentors Jean Baudrillard and go along happily with the term trans-disciplinary. I think that interdisciplinarity in itself is insufficient, because interdisciplinarity implies that what is required to move knowledge forward is merely dialogue and cooperation among the existing disciplines or academic-scientific fields of knowledge. My position is rather that the knowledge of different disciplines should first be brought together, and then a project of deep rethinking of everything should take place, leading, among other things, to a new classification system of knowledge. When this rethinking happens, then the whole will be much greater than the sum of the parts. We will experience a “supernova explosion of new knowledge,” as I have elsewhere called it. In other words, we will get to new knowledge far beyond what we would achieve merely by combining the knowledge of different fields in an additive way: in algebra, f(x + y) = f(x) + f(y), or in number theory,  f(ab) = f(a) + f(b).

My major intellectual achievement to date is the writing and publication of my book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. The academic journal Science Fiction Studies called my book the leading work in the field of science fiction theory. In a recent interview in Italy, with the Milanese daily newspaper Il Metro Quotidiano, I was asked the question: “Perché ritiene che Star Trek sia fondamentale per la nostra società?” (“Why do you think that Star Trek is fundamental for our society?”). This was my reply: “I 20 principi base di Star Trek sono una summa della filosofia, della letteratura, delle teorie politiche e scientifiche degli ultimi 250 anni a partire dalle rivoluzioni francesi e americane. Io definisco Star Trek l’erede e il protettore delle nostre migliori tradizioni intellettuali e dei nostri tesori culturali.” (The 20 Star Trek Basic Principles are a summation of a lot of iconic and seminal philosophy, literature, political theory, and science of the last 250 years, since the French and American revolutions. I define Star Trek as the inheritor and protector of our best intellectual traditions, our cultural treasures.). Someone added these comments of mine to the main Italian Wikipedia article on Star Trek.

Star Trek to me is also a political and intellectual inspiration. It is about dialogue and unification among the world’s great philosophies and the heretofore separated histories of ideas of the different nations. According to the story of Star Trek, humanity in the mid-twenty-first century achieved First Contact with the alien Vulcans, and humanity finally got beyond its primitive, barbaric ways and became an advanced intelligent civilization. Humanity stopped making wars. We got past our History of Violence — the title of a great film by David Cronenberg. There are still, of course, police actions and special forces interventions, but those are based on a different principle than the principle of war. A planetary culture was created. That means that people stopped thinking of themselves primarily as Americans or Italians or Germans or Estonians or Canadians, and started to think of themselves as being citizens of the planet. Of course, it is very important to respect the qualities and singularity of each and every individual culture, language, religion, and legitimate belief-system. The planetary culture is a unification of the strengths of all the individual cultures. It is the opposite of imperialism.

Stretching Intellectual History

How do we bring together French deconstructionist philosophy, German critical theory, the Italian reflection on new media art and virtual reality, Canadian media theory, American pragmatism and existentialism, British rationalism and logical empiricism, the Russian literature of novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Buddhist and Hinduist spirituality?

I studied European Intellectual History at Cornell University in the United States of America, and I am genuinely interested in the following question: how do we bring together French deconstructionist philosophy, German critical theory, the Italian reflection on new media art and virtual reality, Canadian media theory, American pragmatism and existentialism, British rationalism and logical empiricism, the great Russian literature of novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Buddhist and Hinduist spirituality? A very ambitious question, to be sure. But if one man can ask it, then we all can ask it. One area where we can clearly see important things in common between different philosophical traditions of the world is the critique of dualisms. The great Jewish-French philosopher Jacques Derrida said that Western culture and thinking are built around binary oppositions, like male and female, good and evil, mind and body, rational and emotional, nature and culture, presence and absence, speech and writing. Buddhism, in its various forms, teaches the imperative of going beyond the dualism of self and world or subject and object in its variety of meditation practices. According to both Tibetan Buddhism and the proto-Buddhist Tibetan religion of Bön, Dzogchen is the primordial state or natural condition of the human mind, a non-dualistic state called Rigpa. Beyond the binary opposition of self and world, contemplating subject and contemplated object. Even the opposition between life and death is a dualism. Questioning my love of the French existentialist thinker Albert Camus, whose work focused so much on the fear and finality of death, a Buddhist friend once said to me: “So you are going to die. So fucking what?”

The Critique of Dualisms

My work is focused on science fiction theory and media theory. The critique of binary oppositions or dualisms articulated by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and by Buddhism has important implications for media theory and its future. Media studies has operated with a binary opposition between deep thinkers like Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard who disparaged content and believed that “the medium is the message” and ordinary practitioners who wrote about content but in a way rather uninformed by theory.

Binary Oppositions in Media Theory

A second major binary opposition is that between the study of the so-called “entertainment” media (like film and TV shows) and the so-called “news” media (politics and current events).

A third major binary opposition is that between taking a critical attitude towards popular media and mass culture – as did the thinkers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory like Theodor W. Adorno – and a purely enthusiastic attitude, as do almost all of the technology and media commentators within the mainstream culture.

A fourth major binary opposition is that between real and fake. In order to address the heart of the matter of this “real versus fake” epistemological problem, one would have to talk about something like sex chat rooms. Personally I have had very little experience in sex chat rooms. As a sociologist, I believe in the participant-observation research method. Since I have not done that systematically in sex chat rooms, I cannot draw any legitimate scientific conclusions. My impression is that the people in these chat rooms and online virtual worlds like Second Life can be divided into two groups, with respect to the question of real and fake. There are a large number of participants who are engaged in all kinds of interactions while pretending to be someone whom they are not in real life in the physical world. He is 6 feet 4 inches tall and looks like a bodybuilder. She uses a photograph of a porn star or fashion model instead of herself. A man pretends to be a woman. A heterosexual woman pretends to be a lesbian. The second large group are those participants who tenaciously believe in the existence of the so-called “real.” They only want to interact with others whose behavior and self-description in the virtual realm correspond exactly to who they are offline. Members of this group are very skeptical and often accuse others of being “fakes.” I think that the epistemological stances of both groups are legitimate. You can use the Internet as a virtual playground to live out your fantasies, or you can use the Internet as a conventional democratic tool for staightforward communication with other members of your chosen peer group, wanting to meet only your fellow lesbians from southwestern Texas. And you are legitimately going to be suspicious of anyone who appears to be not really from southwestern Texas.

What does it mean to study form and content at the same time?

To consider at the same time both the media and the message?

I think that a valuable media theory – or any theory – can only come about after an intensive experience. The theory must emerge slowly, immanently, and organically from the experiences or the stories. What new conceptions of how the media really work do we need to get beyond the many dualisms that we have inherited and set the field of media studies on a new footing? Sometimes I call my work in media sociology a literary sociology, because of the emphasis on stories. What does it mean to study form and content at the same time? To consider at the same time both the media and the message? I think that it means to examine what I call textuality: the embeddedness of the media’s format in the story at the most intricate micro-capillary level (as Foucault might say), the way that the story shapes and transforms the media, the interwovenness of figure and narrative detail. I think of this notion of figure and narrative detail as being an extension of Marshall McLuhan’s practice of analyzing communications technologies through the study of their figure and ground (concepts which he derived from Gestalt therapy). The figure, for McLuhan, is the medium and the ground is the historical context. The idea of a historical context, however, seems to me to be rather old-fashioned, once one moves beyond archeological studies of artefacts like gramophone, film, and typewriter (here I invoke the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler). The received idea that McLuhan believed that the medium is the message needs to be reexamined: context was also important for him, and we need to unpack and augment what we mean by context, borrowing insights from comparative literature studies.

In my book on Star Trek, I wrote extensively about my 24 favorite Star Trek episodes, from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the movie series. The great Original Series episodes of the 1960s were written by the top science fiction writers of the time, like Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and Richard Matheson.

Focusing on the episodes themselves, my book identifies an intricate thread within Star Trek’s universe that captures the adherence of the “true fan” and accounts for the media phenomenon’s global mass appeal that had previously never adequately been explained. There is a secret set of rules that makes the Star Trek universe possible. It is the internal standards of measurement of “radical uncertainty,” “recognition of otherness,” the accident and surprise of technology, the encounter of I and Thou, and other related axioms that I call the 20 Star Trek basic principles. These principles contest the worldview of mainstream technoscience, consumer culture, and liberal humanism promoted by Paramount Pictures and Viacom.

What is on the Star Trek agenda today is the dream of making its “fictional” technologies real. Realize the teleportation transporter with the “quantum entanglement” technique of experimental physics; interstellar space travel by deconstructing the assumption in Einsteinian general relativity theory of light speed being a constant in the universe or the fastest thing in the universe, and achieve Faster-Than-Light speed; time travel with fabricated wormholes that have a rotating cylindrical center. Bring Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck to fruition as the Holy Grail of virtual reality startup company entrepreneurial research. Realize universal communication with the Klingon Language, cyborgs and androids with Artificial Intelligence, and contact with aliens as the future that “must take place.”

Beyond the binary opposition between the scientific real and the fictional imaginary, Star Trek stories and technologies are a resource for the non-economic “symbolic exchange” and “seduction” that can transform our culture. “Symbolic exchange” and “seduction” are both concepts taken from Jean Baudrillard. In my book, I claimed that Star Trek is a great text of Western literature as important as the Bible or Shakespeare. I used Star Trek as a vehicle for explaining the social theory ideas of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics. I described our contemporary techno-culture as being decisively at the crossroads between an oppressive mainstream over-signifying-simulation system and the emancipative possibilities of radical technological creativity.

The Prisoner: Confinement and Freedom in the Global Village, in the Information Society

Now I am starting to write a book (together with my friend Nolan Bazinet) on the 1960s British television series The Prisoner (a TV miniseries remake was made in 2009), which I consider to be the greatest television programme ever made, better even than Star Trek and Lost. The working title of my book is  The Prisoner: Confinement and Freedom in the Global Village. I could also call it Confinement and Freedom in the Information Society. In the famous opening sequence that begins each of the 17 episodes of the show – widely regarded as being the greatest opening sequence in television history – the protagonist who will later be called Number Six, and who is played by Patrick McGoohan, having quit his job as a James Bond-like secret agent and having been kidnapped by an unidentifiable Orwellian organization – wakes up in mysterious seaside surroundings to be engaged in the following dialogue by a man in high authority known as Number Two:

The Prisoner: Where am I?

Number Two: In The Village. (Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village)

The Prisoner: What do you want?

Number Two: Information. (The Information Society)

The Prisoner: Whose side are you on?

Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information, information!

The Prisoner: You won’t get it!

Number Two: By hook or by crook, we will.

The Prisoner is the richest, most multifaceted literary text that we possess in our cultural-intellectual heritage for explaining the predicament of society and the individual in the era of the Global Village and the Information Society. In my book, I will also use The Prisoner as a vehicle for explaining the social theory ideas of Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan (and, secondarily, Julia Kristeva – psychoanalytical concepts of intimate revolt – and Vilem Flusser – a media theorist who had a truly global and multilingual writing perspective). Both Foucault and McLuhan had double-sided theories of confinement/surveillance and freedom.

Lost: The Crash out of Globalization and into the World

In between writing about Star Trek and my planned project of writing about The Prisoner, I wrote about the recent TV series called Lost. The television show Lost premiered on September 22, 2004. En route from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, California, USA, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashes on an unknown Island in the South Pacific. The 48 survivors find themselves in hostile surroundings. Lost combines elements of drama, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, adventure, thriller and Reality-TV. It is at the forefront of the ongoing total revolution of suspenseful content and technological creativity in television. I would say that suspense is a genre where media and content are nearly inseparable, format and story are one. The Ancient Greeks considered suspense to be one of the most advanced aesthetic forms. Hence the significance of recent American TV shows like Lost, 24, and NCIS.

Going further than the retelling of stories, I wrote first-person phenomenological narratives of what each of the 14 major characters of Lost is feeling, perceiving, thinking, and experiencing from moment to moment. It starts in the opening scene of the Pilot Episode with the predicament of Dr. Jack Shephard, who awakens in the woods after the plane crash with a painful flesh wound in his side.

I, Alan Neil Shapiro, am a passionate television viewer. Television is an Old Media. But I now watch TV engrossed in practices that I have developed during my years of participation in New Media: the hyper-textual World Wide Web, online multi-player interactive video games, and social media. All the main characters of Lost – male and female – are my sexual identity avatars. They are virtual reality body-suits that I freely robe and disrobe. I inhabit their bodies and clothing as I choose. I exist inside their semiotic silhouettes. I am a rider of their purple vehicles. As the Pilot Episode of Lost begins, I wake up from oblivion as Alpha Male Jack Shephard, supine and homeless alone in the woods after a devastating aviation accident. It is my very first arrival in this particular virtual party-experience scene-space, a personal appearance financed by part of my Cable-TV subscription monthly fee, and enabled by the technological meat-machine interface of my image-saturated commodity mind. I exit the transient wormhole-like void of precision-instrumented passage between worlds quantum-leapt into an initiatory moment of surprising arousal. From now on, whatever Jack sees, feels, touches and hears, I see, feel, touch and hear. I am Jack. Jacked in.

What does it mean to take up one’s pen – or one’s word processor – and write about Lost? Are the producers of Lost consciously aware of the fact that their television show activates profound new questions for the fields of knowledge of philosophy, psychoanalysis, epistemology, computer technology, the natural sciences, aesthetics, deep ecology, and even politics and economics? Or is it the world itself – as the emergence of an intelligent, radically singular, unfathomably complex living system that has arrived at a certain point of maturity in its unfolding history – that is executing a kind of automatic writing? Is our beloved wounded planet Gaia finally starting to defend herself by transmitting new knowledge to us so that we can help her? This vital S.O.S. transmission is being emergency-broadcasted via the “low culture” mass media par excellence of TV that is now undergoing a stunning total revolution of “content.” The “stream of messages” is the conveyance for the progressive unraveling of the most advanced insights in science, art and the humanities, flirtatiously forwarded to us from the radical alterity of an “absent” elsewhere. Lost is one exemplary instance of this “message is medium” turn, but there are many others.

For many traditional humanist intellectuals and art experts, television is just the idiot box. It is the very last place that these guardians of “high culture” would think to look for the liminal appearance of ideas, sublime forms, cognitive and conceptual breakthroughs, the “new real,” or the making of history. For the previous generation of “Old Media” theorists – with its classic position that “the medium is the message” – the content of TV programs was secondary to the extensive restructuring and “patterning of human relationships” (Marshall McLuhan) or to the undirectionally encoded “speech without response” (Jean Baudrillard) operationally instituted by a primarily process-oriented communications technology. One can transcend this downplaying of the message through cultivation of the very sensitivity to the medium as “culturally framing technological-literary form” that one learns from these two thinkers. Science fiction, fantasy, and crime investigation TV shows are the literature of today. They can tell us more about what is going on in the world than any other genre of artistic expression. The real-time phenomenological details of these hyper-modern virtual narrative paintings are to be treated as the object-oriented fractal micro-constituents or graphic brush strokes of an intensively signifying language. Reversing McLuhan’s designation of it as “cool,” television must henceforth be seen as a hot medium. One passes from the negative analysis of the electronic media as externalized mediations of the human body, senses, and psyche (McLuhan) or “semiological reduction” of symbolic relations (Baudrillard) to the affirmative mindfulness of a much more personally involved moment-to-moment immersion in the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the posthuman avatar bodies whose VR experiences are the outriding vehicle for ascending to an orbital writing space of infinite hyper-textual links. To the dramaturgical enactment carried out by the scriptwriters, actors, and directors of Lost is added the act of writing by the media philosopher. Television is a hot medium now because it is suspenseful, which for the Greeks was the highest form of art; and because the “spirit of the times” in Hegel’s sense is embedded in a TV show like Lost; and because the form, format, or media is constantly present in micro-particle ways in the content, meaning, story.

The TV Spectacle of War

I have already mentioned the binary opposition between the study of the so-called “entertainment” media and the so-called “news” media, and the media theory project of conceptualizing the disappearance of this duality. One context where this subject can be investigated in an interesting way is in the TV spectacle of war. It first became clear to me that war had become a TV spectacle during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. One of the very first high-quality pieces of writing that I did in my life was an essay that I wrote during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspective of Noam Chomsky with that of Baudrillard and Virilio. The major cultural studies journal Social Text came very close to publishing my essay. It was one of two finalists. My essay was eventually published in the small New York City magazine And Then. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was television entertainment for the masses. It became the model for subsequent entertainment wars, like in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Although the American political leadership claimed that it was re-enacting the antifascist struggle of World War II, an epic Hollywood movie narrated by Charlton Heston, these postmodernist wars were really crossovers from the realm of novelistic fiction. It was straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. In that masterful novel of political satire, the citizens of a society of lies and multifarious internal problems are distracted from all of it by warfare with a hated enemy. Our version of Orwell’s “personality cult” is the mythologizing of heroes and anti-heroes, fostered by a culture all but defined by its entertainment industry, which distracts us from the reality of the destruction of the country that we are so proud of bombing.

A third major binary opposition is that between taking a critical attitude and taking a purely enthusiastic attitude towards popular media and mass culture. In my experiences of reading the scholarly literature in media studies, almost every writer takes either a critical or an affirmative stance towards the media under consideration, whatever it is. This is something that we really need to change. Make the analysis more mixed and more subtle.

A fourth major binary opposition is that between real and fake. Another way of considering this problem is to speak about the issue of the materiality of the media versus the idea that the media are virtual or immaterial. I think that we have been misled throughout the history of media theory into regarding the media as virtual, and we do not yet have a materialist theory of the media. Here I would like to mention the work of my co-author Anja Wiesinger from Berlin, with whom I will attempt to co-develop a materialist theory of the media. In retrospect, I now realize that various writings that I did, or thought about doing, on various media topics, were making the first steps in this direction: writings about reality TV shows like Big Brother, Survivor, and American Idol; the TV spectacle of war; TV sports like American (or Canadian!) football and international soccer; Las Vegas, casinos, and sports gambling; Disneyland and theme parks; shopping malls and department stores; the “wandering spectacle” – as I have called it, following the Situationists – of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants; computer games; 3D virtual worlds like Second Life; and advanced AI software that would enable autonomous agents with surprising behavior.

The Binary Opposition between Real and Fake

The materiality of the media versus the idea that the media are virtual or immaterial.

Following the tradition of semiotics, New Media Studies has concentrated on differences, which are believed in and by the the humanities and cultural studies to be important for both language and media.

In a way similar to the gap between signifier and signified, theories of New Media have based themselves on the difference between the 0 and the 1 in computing, on the logic of the binary or digital code, which is interpreted by scholars with a humanities background as a logic of presence and absence.

In her Master’s Thesis in the area of art history, done at the Technical University of Berlin in 2011, with some mentoring by me, Anja Wiesinger examines how media studies and media theory deal with New Media artefacts and with digitalised image archives. Following the tradition of linguistic analysis known as semiotics, New Media Studies has concentrated on differences, which are believed in and by the humanities and cultural studies to be important for both language and media. Semiotics focuses on the difference or gap between the signifier and the signified in the theory of the linguistic and cultural sign. In a way similar to the gap between signifier and signified, theories of New Media have based themselves on the difference between the 0 and the 1 in computing, on the logic of the binary or digital code, which is interpreted by scholars with a humanities background as a logic of presence and absence. According to the very often cited Lev Manovich and his book “The Language of New Media,” New Media artefacts are characterised by 5 principles: numerical representation (artefacts exist as data), modularity (different elements exist independently), automation (artefacts can be created and modified by automatic processes), variability (artefacts exist in multiple versions), and transcoding (the digital-binary logic influences us culturally). In other words, New Media objects are based on program code, on the endless reprogrammability of the binary structure and the electronic impulses. In the original meaning of the word medium, what is implied is a middle, an interspace, an in-betweenness. These are the various starting points in cultural studies for judging the media as being immaterial and virtual. The signifier and the computer bit are not viewed as material substances, but rather as structural relationships.

Problems with the Theory of New Media

The primary ideas about New Media derive from the background of post-structuralist semiotics or French Theory and from the reductionist assumption that the digital-binary computer as originally designed by Alan Turing – the long strings of 0s and 1s which constitute the so-called universal machine where nearly everything can be programmed – is the determining instance of computing.

I think that it is much more important to start with what the academic field of Computer Science knows about computing, rather than with what humanities scholars whose intellectual background can ultimately be traced to French Theory supposedly know about computing. This would be the way to eventually get to a materialist theory of New Media.

The problem with the theory of New Media, as formulated by a so-called luminary of the field like Lev Manovich, or even by many of the works in the field of so-called software studies, is that the primary ideas about New Media derive both from the background of post-structuralist semiotics or French Theory and from the reductionist assumption that the digital-binary computer as originally designed by Alan Turing – the long strings of 0s and 1s which constitute the so-called universal machine where nearly everything can be programmed – is the determining instance of computing. I think that it is much more important to start with what the academic field of Computer Science knows about computing, rather than with what humanities scholars whose intellectual background can ultimately be traced to French Theory supposedly know about computing. This would be the way to eventually get to a materialist theory of New Media. I would oppose to the emphasis on the Turing machine (for example, in the works of Jay David Bolter) an interest in higher-level programming languages. I am much more interested in object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java, and in software architecture modeling languages like UML, and in the software development field known as design patterns, than I am in the low-level binary logic of the zeroes and ones. In the higher-level programming languages, there are design patterns which are at once technical and cultural, and which, in a way, transcend the binary opposition between technical and cultural. They are both technical and cultural, and neither.

Instead of the emphasis on the Turing machine, an interest in higher-level programming languages

In the existing New Media theory, there is the idea of an endlessly reproducible or potentially endlessly existing object in a non-physical space. In a way, this mistake also derives from the endless focus in cultural studies on Walter Benjamin and on what he wrote in his infinitely cited essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.” Each digital object is believed to be temporarily created out of the 0s and 1s which are held to underlie it, and which stand for presence or absence. If we start out instead with a consideration of higher programming languages, we begin to see that the patterns are much more complex than that and that they are truly material and architectural. The idea that computers can represent everything – the Alan Turing idea of the universal machine – is a basic misunderstanding. The influence of Jacques Lacan is also, in some ways, unfortunate. Those influenced by Lacan tend to see the binary structure as a universal principle, the identification with the other, the mother, the mother’s breast, the objet petit a.

Software, to the contrary, is about specific patterns. Object-oriented software’s strategy of entity generalization and specification of instances is strikingly reminiscent of the Platonist Realm of Forms and Plato’s accompanying critique of merely technical or representational copies which do not partake of the “Idea” of the original. Software instantiation institutes a temporary relationship between an ordered ranking of software classes and the created, then destroyed, software object which is a parameter- and data-specified instance of those determining classes. In Platonist terms of iconic likeness, a software instance would be regarded as a legitimate resemblance rather than an illegitimate semblance or simulacrum, even though the distributed software object is, in a certain sense, inferior to the less tangible software class due to the former’s transitoriness. The significant contrast would be between the system of classes / objects and its predecessor, the classical “society of the spectacle” system of lowly, imitative images. Thus the radicalisation of the software development paradigm that I believe in and have written about could bring about a return to legitimate representation in Plato’s sense, getting us finally out of the era of illegitimate simulation and simulacra as described by Baudrillard. We will also have to consider, however, Heidegger’s critique of Plato and defense of the pre-Socratic Parmenides.

In the section of The Republic entitled “How Representation in Art is Related to Truth,” Socrates sounds like a guru of object-oriented software design when he says: “Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world – plenty of them. But there are only two ideas or forms of them – one the idea of a bed, the other of a table. And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in accordance with the idea.” Primary reality, for Plato, is not to be sought in the empirical world of everyday things (ordinary instances of beds or tables), but rather in the general, abstract Forms (the divine idea of the bed or table) from which “concrete” things are derived or fashioned. Socrates goes on in this passage to say that there are three philosophical categories of beds: the idea of the bed (made by God), the instance of the bed (made by a carpenter), and the imitation of the bed (made by a painter). Concerning the question of how near or far each of the three categories of beds is to the Ideal Forms of Beauty, Truth, and Excellence, it is clear for Socrates that the idea of the bed is the closest to these exalted virtues, the instance of the bed comes in as a respectable second closest, and the imitation of the bed runs a pitiful last – far removed from anything valuated as either noble or good.

The Socratic dialogue in Politeia about mimesis is a contemptuous critique and dismissal of imitative poetry and painting, which only reproduce technical copies and are said to be “thrice removed from the truth.” Painting, for Socrates-Plato, is a degraded art form of the semblance or mirror image, an aesthetic activity which demands of the painter “no knowledge worth mentioning,” and no comprehension of “true existence.” Moreover, although it “may deceive children or simple persons,” imitative painting comes up way short in its endeavor to fool the majority of members of the polity into being placated by its inauthentic, second-rate images. Media technologies of mere duplication or representation would ultimately be inadequate for Socrates-Plato because they fail as instruments of political power. This would be a starting point for explaining Heidegger’s disagreement with Plato, his critique of Plato’s so-called metaphysics (a critique which greatly influenced Derrida). Yet radicalised object-oriented software, according to my theory, would open up the space of an experimental laboratory for synthesizing what is valuable in the idealism of Plato and in the materialism and deep sense of being that Heidegger found to be so valuable in Parmenides.

To conclude, I would say that I have presented an overview of my work in media theory, ranging from television to new media to software. The common thread, I think, is that I take seriously the axiom of McLuhan and Baudrillard that “the media is the message,” yet I demonstrate the truth of the axiom in working the details of the formatted message or content, rather than using the insight as an excuse to ignore content, as many others have done.

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, BOBCATSSS 2012 was organised by students from three universities of applied sciences, namely Hogeschool van Amsterdam (NL), Hanze Hogeschool Groningen (NL), and Stuttgart Media University (GER).

Conference Agenda

Watch the Video of My Lecture

My topic was: “How can we redefine information in the age of social media?”

These were my lecture notes for my speech (with some text pasted in from my PowerPoint presentation):

I am honoured to have been invited by the organizers of BOBCATSSS to be the keynote speaker of the second day of this very interesting conference. Looking over the list of great presentations that are going to be made today, I will try to relate my speech to the subject-matter and point of view of many of today’s presentations. I see many presentations about libraries, information, social media. At the Wikipedia conference in Leipzig in September 2010, I gave a talk on “The Library of the Future,” so I can refer you to that. It is published at my website. Now I will talk about information and social media.

Names Given by Sociologists to Contemporary Society:

Post-Industrial Society, Post-Modern Society Knowledge Society, Network Society Telematic Society, Information Society

L’informatisation de la société – “the informationising of society” (Pierre Nora and Alain Minc, 1978)

Sociologists have given different names to the society that is the successor to the industrial society of the production of physical goods: the post-industrial society, the post-modern society, the knowledge society, the network society, the telematic society, the information society. By the way, I think that one of the best names ever was: L’informatisation de la société – “the informationising of society” – a report written for the French government in 1978 by Simon Nora and Alain Minc.

Beyond its restricted mathematical meaning, or its technical meaning as signs or signals in information science messaging, information more generally, in the sociology of work and culture, is about abstraction and complexity. Workers in the information society, and consumers in the society of cultural citizenship, tend to handle patterns and representations rather than physical entities. Until now, information has been regarded as being like numbers, an ordered sequence of symbols, bits and bytes of data, a change in state of an object-oriented system, transparent signifieds only without the signifiers that shape the meanings, a bunch of facts on file, the transmission or contents of messages while ignoring the media – language itself – that structures the messages at the most intricate detailed level. Now that we are in the age of social media like Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and blogs, how should sociology redefine what is information? How can social media consciously evolve to become more democratic and supporting of human freedom and human rights, rather than unconsciously becoming “totalitarian” in new ways that are reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 or the social theories of Foucault and Baudrillard? I will also make reference to the television programme The Prisoner as a narrative metaphor for understanding the contemporary sociological-technological situation of the hyper-network society.

In my book on Star Trek, called Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, I claimed that Star Trek is a great text of Western literature as important as the Bible or Shakespeare. I also used Star Trek as a vehicle for explaining the social theory ideas of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics. I described our contemporary techno-culture as being decisively at the crossroads between an oppressive mainstream over-signifying-simulation system and the emancipative possibilities of radical technological creativity. Now I am starting to write a book (together with my friend Nolan Bazinet) on the 1960s British television series The Prisoner (a TV miniseries remake was made in 2009), which I consider to be the greatest television programme ever made, better even than Star Trek and Lost. The working title of my book is The Prisoner: Confinement and Freedom in the Global Village. I could also call it Confinement and Freedom in the Information Society. In the famous opening sequence that begins each of the 17 episodes of the show – widely regarded as being the greatest opening sequence in television history – the protagonist who will later be called Number Six, and who is played by Patrick McGoohan, having quit his job as a James Bond-like secret agent and having been kidnapped by an unidentifiable Orwellian organization – wakes up in mysterious seaside surroundings to be engaged in the following dialogue by a man in high authority known as Number Two:

The Prisoner: Where am I?

Number Two: In The Village. (Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village)

The Prisoner: What do you want?

Number Two: Information. (The Information Society)

The Prisoner: Whose side are you on?

Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information, information!

The Prisoner: You won’t get it!

Number Two: By hook or by crook, we will.

The Prisoner is the richest, most multifaceted literary text that we possess in our cultural-intellectual heritage for explaining the predicament of society and the individual in the era of the Global Village and the Information Society. In my book, I will also use The Prisoner as a vehicle for explaining the social theory ideas of Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan (and, secondarily, Julia Kristeva and Vilem Flusser). Both Foucault and McLuhan had double-sided theories of confinement/surveillance and freedom. In his concepts of disciplinary power, bio-power and panoptic surveillance; and in his studies of prisons, hospitals and schools in works like Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault was concerned with the conditions of confinement in modern society. In “The Ethics of Care for the Self as the Practice of Freedom,” Foucault writes: “One must observe that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.”

Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan

Both Foucault and McLuhan had double-sided theories of confinement/surveillance and freedom.

In contrast to the opposition between power and freedom articulated in liberal political theory, where freedom is generally considered abstractly as being the absence of external constraints imposed by the state or other large institutions/organizations, power for Foucault operates in and through everyday life practices, and the discovery of freedom is to be made in understanding how we have been manipulated in many of the most intimate areas of our personal existence, and how we can concretely and creatively transform that. This liberation is a process of experimentation, and we will never know at the outset of each freedom-forging experience what the outcome is going to be. But the question that really interests me is: how do we accomplish this radical progressive transformation in the age of information and online social media? How do we achieve the next step in what social media can be? How do we get beyond the current situation where we are prisoners in a Baudrillardian-Foucaultian hybrid system of commodified consumerism that William Bogard has called the simulation of surveillance, and in post-Orwellian networks of self-surveillance and mutual surveillance? To develop the theory for revolutionizing social media for human liberation that we will then put into practice, we will need to rub together Foucault and McLuhan. From Marshall McLuhan, we will learn that our radical goal for social media is to metamorphose the strictly visual space – “a space which is an extension and intensification of the eye” – into what McLuhan calls acoustic space: a “space that has no center and no margin,” a space that is organic and integral, a space that is lived by participants as an immersive sensorium “through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses.” As he said in the famous 1969 “Playboy Interview”: we need to rebalance the sensorium, the Gestalt interplay of all the senses, in order to overcome the “atrophy of the unconscious” and the “disruption of psychic and social harmony.” “Rational or pictorial space” [this would be social media as they are presently constituted] “is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland.” We can follow Foucault and McLuhan to get from confinement to freedom in social media and the Global Village.

The purpose of Jakobson’s simulation model of communication – and of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication – is to provide technical safe passage for the transparently readable Message, which is stripped of meaning and ambivalence, rendered as fact without interpretation, become pure information.

Based on Karl Bühler’s instrumental model of language known as the Organon model – which defined the expressive, displaying, and calling functions of linguistic interaction – Roman Jakobson elaborated a classical model of communication that identified a Message transmitted from a Sender to a Receiver, as well as the vertical supporting functions of the metalingual Code, the socially self-presenting phatic Channel, and the referential Context. I think that there are three limitations of Jakobson’s model: (1) the Sender-Receiver paradigm is not sufficient for understanding virtual online software systems where a Message is sent to a shared data structure by a Publisher which is then seen by many Subscribers. (2) as Jean Baudrillard pointed out in his 1972 essay “Requiem for the Media,” the alleged objective and scientific status of Jakobson’s model merely formalizes a socio-culturally given configuration: “in a certain kind of social relationship, one speaks and the other does not, one determines the Code, and the other has the choice to either submit to it or to abstain.” (3) The Message as conceived by Jakobson, according to Baudrillard, is univocal and unidirectional. There is a mutually exclusive separation of Encoder and Decoder, which are held apart and reunited by the artefact of the Coded Message. There is no reciprocity nor presence to each other of the two terms. To quote Baudrillard scholar Gary Genosko: “The code itself becomes that which speaks, since it dictates the unidirectional passage of information and guarantees the legibility, univocality, and autonomous value of the message, conceived as information.” The purpose of Jakobson’s simulation model of communication is to provide technical safe passage for the transparently readable Message, which is stripped of meaning and ambivalence, rendered as fact without interpretation, become pure information.

Now let us examine the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication, which was developed shortly after World War II, and emerged from the context of the telecommunications industry. Claude Shannon published his article “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the AT&T Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. In my view, the Shannon-Weaver model is now obsolete. Its goal is to isolate the Message as a technical entity, to ensure the integrity of the Message. Everything which is not this technically conceived Message gets relocated elsewhere in the system. The Shannon-Weaver model of communication is based on the assumption of a Point-to-Point transmission, a Message sent over a Channel or a Queue. In the contemporary age of Social Media, we are dealing essentially with a Publish-Subscribe model. A Message is sent to a Topic. More generally, I would say that, in the age of social media, we are in something like a deconstructionist universe. No single philosophy, however, can be “applied” to our situation in a simple way. I think that we are in a textual universe, and the primary way that I think about social media is through thinking about textuality.

Let us consider the 8 components of the Shannon-Weaver model, how we can critique the assumptions of each component, and how this leads towards a new model:

According to my view, technology has until now been considered based on a fundamental split between technical and cultural views. The engineers study technology from a purely technical point of view, with purely technical goals. People in cultural studies, or in New Media studies, or even in literary theory (in other words, in the arts and humanities) now study technologies from a cultural point of view. In my view, the original split between technical and cultural views is wrong. We need to start all over again from scratch, without a technical/cultural split. This means that we are going to think in something like a hybrid technical/cultural way. That is one way of describing it. There are many technological objects of investigation. The object of investigation today is social media. So I want to consider social media in this way. There is an object of investigation and there is a concept. The concept is information. The method that we have for doing this “something like” a hybrid cultural/technical investigation is called phenomenology. Husserlian phenomenology says look at the things themselves. Don’t think about it technically, just think about it.

Let us take the example of Twitter.

Many Publishers                     Topic               Many Subscribers

Now let us think about Twitter in a way that is neither technical nor cultural. It is hybrid technical-cultural. And it is phenomenological: let us just ask a series of questions about this Twitter situation, and see if the Shannon-Weaver model applies. And which new model would apply instead.

Technology has until now been considered based on a fundamental split between technical and cultural views

The original split between technical and cultural views is wrong.

We need to start all over again from scratch (but continue the existing knowledge of both Computer Science and Cultural Studies), without a technical/cultural split.

We are going to think in something like a hybrid technical/cultural way.

The method that we have for doing this “something like” a hybrid cultural/technical investigation is called phenomenology.

Husserlian phenomenology says look at the things themselves.

Don’t think about it technically, just think about it.

As we start to develop a new model of communication that is not so narrowly technical, and which instead proceeds from the phenomenological method and includes a cultural perspective and the newest software development paradigms, we will actively question assumptions which have been made since the mid-20^th century which have led most of society to have an Orwellian view of what information is. We will find a way out from our generalized societal condition of confinement and start anew on a path towards freedom.

In her Master’s Thesis in the area of art history, done at the Technical University of Berlin in 2011, with some mentoring by me, Anja Wiesinger examines how media studies and media theory deal with New Media artefacts and with digitalised image archives. Following the tradition of linguistic analysis known as semiotics, New Media Studies has concentrated on differences, which are believed in and by the humanities and cultural studies to be important for both language and media. Semiotics focuses on the difference or gap between the signifier and the signified in the theory of the linguistic and cultural sign. In a way similar to the gap between signifier and signified, theories of New Media have based themselves on the difference between the 0 and the 1 in computing, on the logic of the binary or digital code, which is interpreted by scholars with a humanities background as a logic of presence and absence. According to the very often cited Lev Manovich and his book The Language of New Media, New Media artefacts are characterised by 5 principles: numerical representation (artefacts exist as data), modularity (different elements exist independently), automation (artefacts can be created and modified by automatic processes), variability (artefacts exist in multiple versions), and transcoding (the digital-binary logic influences us culturally). In other words, New Media objects are based on program code, on the endless reprogrammability of the binary structure and the electronic impulses. In the original meaning of the word medium, what is implied is a middle, an interspace, an in-betweenness. These are the various starting points in cultural studies for judging the media as being immaterial and virtual. The signifier and the computer bit are not viewed as material substances, but rather as structural relationships.

The problem with the theory of New Media, as formulated by a so-called luminary of the field like Lev Manovich, or even by many of the works in the field of so-called software studies, is that the primary ideas about New Media derive both from the background of post-structuralist semiotics or French Theory and from the reductionist assumption that the digital-binary computer as originally designed by Alan Turing – the long strings of 0s and 1s which constitute the so-called universal machine where nearly everything can be programmed – is the determining instance of computing. I think that it is much more important to start with what the academic field of Computer Science knows about computing, rather than with what humanities scholars whose intellectual background can ultimately be traced to French Theory supposedly know about computing. This would be the way to eventually get to a materialist theory of New Media. I would oppose to the emphasis on the Turing machine (for example, in the works of Jay David Bolter) an interest in higher-level programming languages. I am much more interested in object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java, and in software architecture modeling languages like UML, and in the software development field known as design patterns, than I am in the low-level binary logic of the zeroes and ones. In the higher-level programming languages, there are design patterns which are at once technical and cultural, and which, in a way, transcend the binary opposition between technical and cultural. They are both technical and cultural, and neither.

In the existing New Media theory, there is the idea of an endlessly reproducible or potentially endlessly existing object in a non-physical space. In a way, this mistake also derives from the endless focus in cultural studies on Walter Benjamin and on what he wrote in his infinitely cited essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.” Each digital object is believed to be temporarily created out of the 0s and 1s which are held to underlie it, and which stand for presence or absence. If we start out instead with a consideration of higher programming languages, we begin to see that the patterns are much more complex than that and that they are truly material and architectural. The idea that computers can represent everything – the Alan Turing idea of the universal machine – is a basic misunderstanding. The influence of Jacques Lacan is also, in some ways, unfortunate. Those influenced by Lacan tend to see the binary structure as a universal principle, the identification with the other, the mother, the mother’s breast, the objet petit a.

Software, to the contrary, is about specific patterns.

Point, Click, Love amazon home page

More about Molly Shapiro

Molly Shapiro is my first cousin, the daughter of my father’s brother. I have known Molly since she was a baby, in the 1970s. They called her Molly-Dolly.

Molly graduated from Brown University where she majored in semiotics, and from Columbia University where she studied creative writing. She spent some time living in Rome, Italy. She lived in Seattle and worked for Microsoft and then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Now Molly lives in the midwestern United States, in Kansas City, Missouri, where she grew up. Many people know that I am from New York City (and Long Island) and I live in Frankfurt, Germany. My main connection to the Midwest USA is that I am a big fan of Big Ten college football and basketball. (The Big Ten is the name of an academic and athletic “conference” of 12 universities, formerly there were 10). I am a huge fan of the Michigan State Spartans. I have been a Michigan State fan since 1966 (I was ten years old), when the Spartans played for the college football national championship against Notre Dame, in a famous game that ended in a 10-10 tie. The Spartans are doing very well lately in both sports – over the last ten years, and in particular right now (ranked #11 in the country in football and #6 in the country in basketball). I am very grateful to Michigan State for compensating somewhat for the misery that I suffer – the cross that I bear – as a fan of the miserable New York Jets (football), New York Knicks (basketball), and New York Mets (baseball). And the Rangers and Islanders too (ice hockey).

Molly Shapiro is a great fiction writer (and journalist, marketing, and public relations writer). She published an excellent book of short stories called Eternal City, which won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She wrote several commissioned screenplays, including “The Bob Marley Story.” Now she has published her first novel, called Point, Click, Love. It is published by Ballantine Books (part of the Random House Publishing Group), and it is going to be an international bestseller! A German translation will soon be published by a major German publishing house. Congratulations, Molly! Your book is fantastic! I really enjoyed reading it! I am proud to be your cousin!

They are saying that your novel belongs to the genre of “chick lit.” Now I like “chick lit” (I’ve got many volumes of Brenda Joyce and Stephanie Laurens in my apartment – OK, I admit it, they were left here by a former girlfriend, but the Paige Toon I bought by myself). This is precisely the reason why I ironically introduced the “male” counterpoint of mentioning Big Ten football and basketball, my major connection as a New York/Frankfurt person to the midwestern United States. It’s something about reuniting the yin and yang of the male and female cultures.

But, Molly, they are wrong in their categorization of your book! Your novel is so much more than chick lit. Your novel is an intellectual-academic achievement. It should become part of the cultural studies curriculum at universities. I recommend that everyone who is studying or is interested in cultural studies, media theory, critical theory, semiotics, or serious 19^th-20^th-21^st-century American literature read your novel Point, Click, Love. It is a brilliant commentary on and critique of contemporary American culture and everyday life! It exposes a lot of the hypocrisy in how Americans live today. It deploys a lot of deep insights which originate from semiotics and social theory. And it is a lucid analysis of the online virtual culture of the Internet, and of social media like Facebook, and of the new forms of alienation which the pervasiveness of computer technology in business and “the private sphere” has introduced into our lives. It brings to life the simulation and virtuality and hyperreality theses of the French thinker Jean Baudrillard and the Italian thinker Umberto Eco, and explains these theories in much more understandable ways than did Johnny Baudrillard and Bertie Eco themselves. And unlike Johnny and Bertie, your writing is not only a critique. It is an affirmation and celebration of America (the America that we love!), and of online culture as well. Your writing expresses a double-sided view – both critique and affirmation – as any important work of media theory should do. Your novel is a major example of the kind of writing that transcends the binary opposition between popular culture and intellectual “high” culture that I have been talking about in my “transdisciplinary” work until I am blue in the face (a Paul Auster reference, ha ha!). This is a great accomplishment, Molly. Awesome!

Other commentators will talk about the “chick lit” dimension of the novel Point, Click, Love. I will talk about the book’s intellectual side.

WARNING: Please do not read beyond this point if you have not read the book and don’t want all the plot twists to be given away.

The midwestern thirty-something female character named Katie has divorced her high school sweetheart Rob after 15 years together as a couple. Rob had many deficiencies – he was a lazy SOB – and Katie does not miss him for a second. She is now cynical about all men, but she is nearly 100% heterosexual and realizes that she is going to need a man for sex. Katie’s family has the fantasy that she will quickly meet a second husband much better than Rob. Above all, he will be a huge economic success, “a big-time executive for a pharmaceutical company.”

“That was their fantasy, not Katie’s. Katie no longer bought into all that crap. Pharmaceutical executives were dull. McMansions fell apart after a few years, and SUVs were bad for the environment. Hadn’t they heard about global warming?”

At first, the divorced Katie with two children observes apparently happy couples all around her and feels envy. She feels left out.

“It didn’t take her long to see past that illusion. Most of those young lovers were destined to break up. If they didn’t break up, they’d end up getting married, having babies, being sleep deprived, arguing over whose turn it was to do the bath, and going to bed mad.”

Katie briefly considers a conversion to lesbianism. But to learn about being a lesbian, she does not travel to San Francisco or Berlin to experience the lesbian subculture. Instead she watches TV. She watches The L Word and concludes that lesbian couples are the same as heterosexual couples, but with more sex toys.

“And so she decided to take care of her need for sex in the same way she took care of paying her bills, finding cheap airfare, and buying her kids’ school uniform – she went online.” Online dating. Match.com.

Katie meets a man at match.com and has several rounds of email exchange with him. Then they have a phone call. Then they meet for a date in an expensive restaurant. The forty-six-year-old man named Ed tells Katie that he still believes that he might meet “The One” – the love of his life with whom he will live happily ever after. They drink cocktails and white wine. Then they eat some delicious seafood. Then they have sex.

Katie decides that Ed is “no game player” so she calls him the next night. Ed sends Katie a bouquet of red roses. They start to have regular long phone conversations. They meet up again the next weekend. They go places and they have great sex. Ed sends Katie lots of gifts and they spend every weekend together.

“After only five weeks of dating, he said it. ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ he whispered while they were lying in bed.’ Katie looked at him and, before she could catch herself, said, ‘Me too.’”

Ed starts to talk about marriage.

But Ed is indeed a game player, and he is a liar. After a few months of spending all their weekends together, Ed abruptly disappears. No more phone calls. No more messages on her answering machine. Maybe he is dead, but there are no stories in the local news about the police finding a cadaver in the lake. Katie has a key to Ed’s house and enters stealthily one evening.

“At the top of the stairs, Katie could see that Ed’s bedroom door was open and there was a light on. She tiptoed to the doorway and looked inside. On the bed she saw the back of a woman with a mess of brassy, fake red hair, her plump white ass in the air, with Ed’s hairy pink legs sticking out from under her.”

Maxine is the next member of the foursome of female friends. She is a painter and a philanthropist. She is married to a highly successful doctor, “one of the most renowned gastroenterologists in the country.” They have a large disposable income. Maxine spent time in Europe when she was young, and travels around the USA to gallery exhibitions of her paintings. Everyone thinks that Maxine has the perfect marriage. But “that was her biggest secret of all. Her marriage wasn’t as great as everyone thought it was.” After she became pregnant and had her first child, sex between Maxine and her husband Jake became less and less frequent. Then came the second child. After the third child, they stopped having sex entirely.

Then one day Maxine picks up Jake’s BlackBerry which is sitting on the kitchen counter. She discovers a long list of text messages from Deirdre, a young, beautiful and brilliant doctor who works in the same hospital as Jake. Maxine does not have the courage to read any of the text messages, so she ends up in the in-between state of knowing that her husband might be having an affair with another woman.

Maxine enters a state of long-term unhappiness, but, for many “practical” reasons, she cannot leave her husband. Instead, she escapes into the world of celebrities and the voyeuristic satisfaction of media-consumer culture’s dissection of the drama of their love lives.

“She sat on the living room couch and turned on the TV… [She] started flipping the channels until she came to an E! True Hollywood Story about Jennifer Aniston. It was an in-depth documentary with all the crucial details of Jen’s life: her rise to fame, her early loves, her marriage to Brad, and the breakup. Maxine was fascinated. More than ever, she couldn’t  believe all the many parallels between her life and Jen’s – the career success, the perfect marriage. And then Angelina came along.”

“What is literature?” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

“Of course, Maxine felt foolish. Couldn’t she find a great literary character to identify with instead of a movie star? A Madame Bovary? An Anna Karenina? A Lady Macbeth?”

Here Molly Shapiro raises very interesting questions about what is literature? in the contemporary situation. Is the appropriate object of inquiry of Literaturwissenschaft still novels, poetry, and plays? Or is it film and TV? And infomercials, computer games, and Java code?

The third member of the group is Claudia. But this story within the story is all about Claudia’s husband Steve, who is addicted to Facebook. He is another lazy male SOB who was laid off from his last job and makes little effort to find a new one. He is both a couch potato and a facebook french fry. He watches gourmet cooking shows on the Food Network but never cooks anything for himself or his family. In the number one social media software application called Facebook where you can acquire hundreds of “friends” via hundreds of mouse clicks on a graphical user interface element known as a “button,” Steve went about “creating an alternate universe for himself where he wasn’t such a pathetic loser.”

“When Steve lost his job, he went on a frenzied friend-acquisition spree, racking up some five hundred friends. His five or so ‘real’ friends would call him up and ask him to go out for lunch or to play a round of golf or have a drink with the guys, but Steve always refused, preferring to stay home and interact online with his five hundred fake friends.”

Baudrillard’s simulations and simulacra theory brought down to earth.

I think that there is such a thing as real communication on the Internet. It can be a tool for democracy. I take a double-sided view: fake and real, simulation and communication. Baudrillard and Habermas (can’t think of a funny nickname for him right now). But what really gets me is the “fetish,” the “commodity fetishism” of the high-valued real estate venues like Facebook. Sometimes I start a chat with a real person at a website in a low-rent cyber-neighborhood, a communication enabled by peer-to-peer or distributed networking technology. This person has the opportunity in this moment, in the here and now, to communicate with me, a real person. But they are willing to instantly throw this opportunity away. “Do you have facebook?” “Do you have MSN?” “Do you have yahoo messenger?” “Do you have skype?” The chance that I will successfully meet them there without something going wrong technically during the switchover process is about 20% (I kept a log). But they will willingly throw away our communication based on that small chance of meeting up in the fancy-schmancy commodified venue.

“Steve was one of those perpetual status updaters, but instead of telling the truth (‘Watching Rachael Ray make a turkey lasagna and thinking about the Chinese takeout we’ll have tonight’ or ‘Just wondering how many brain cells die from three straight hours of Call of Duty’), he’d write vague, elliptical posts about exotic travel (‘Anyone know if it’s OK to drink the water in Cambodia?’) and philosophers he’s never read (‘I’m gonna vote ‘no’ on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return’).”

“And whenever they went somewhere as a family – a restaurant, the girls’ soccer game, the mountains of Colorado – Steve would always be on his iPhone, punching in his status. ‘Bacon burger topped with brie. Gotta try it!’ ‘Sandy and Janie the big scorers!’ ‘No place better than the Colorado Rockies!’…

“It was bad enough that Steve had sunk so low, but his insistence on making everyone else think he was at the top of the world made it all the worse.”

In Facebook, you put your best foot forward, so it is fake, it is virtual. It is not “the real.”

“When Claudia met old friends and acquaintances around town, she often wondered whether they were part of Steve’s simulated universe.”

The fourth member of the group of real female friends is Annie. Annie grew up in New York City, went to prep school, did comp lit at Yale, and got an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Management. Annie’s existential-biographical issues seem to have to do with the fact that she living in a “red state,” in Kansas (in her case, not in Missouri), in the Midwest, whereas everything that is exciting and glamorous seems to be happening in Manhattan (not the one in Kansas) or in southern California, or in that ultimate mythified cultural capital of the American intelligentsia and Woody Allen’s imagination: Paris, France. Mais non, monsieur, ce n’est pas comme ça.

“Kathy,” I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America…

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all gone to look for America

– Simon and Garfunkel, America (1968 album, 1972 single)

Next (chapter 12) comes a hilarious sendup of the Los Angeles art world. Maxine is invited for an all-expenses-paid week in LA by the gallery where an exhibition of her paintings is taking place. As a Derridean deconstructionist, Molly Shapiro has given a name to her character – Maxine Walters – which is only one letter removed from the name of famous LA Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

In the discussions about art in the Los Angeles gallery, the bullshit flies fast and heavy:

“’I love your stuff,’ said Ted. ‘It reminds me a lot of Wayne Thiebaud.’

‘Oh , no, no, no,’ said a woman in a red suit as she walked down a staircase. ‘Thiebaud is much too… obvious. I think she’s more Diebenkorn. A mixture of the abstract and figurative. Thiebaud completely lacks Ms. Walters’s expressionist bent.’”

While sitting in an LA vegetarian restaurant eating a tofu scramble, Maxine espies the TV actress Calista Flockhart of Ally McBeal fame. This gets her started on a frenzy of star sightings.

“When she saw the pretty little starlet [Flockhart], she immediately remembered all the details she knew of her life – her marriage to the older Harrison Ford, the adoption of a child, the talk about a possible eating disorder. Maxine realized that she knew more about Calista Flockhart than about anyone else in the restaurant, even the person sitting across from her. The actress seemed more real than everyone else – like a massive dose of hyperreality.”

Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco on Hyperreality, by Mark Inigo M. Tallara

The hyperreal is not fake — it is more real than the real.

The allegedly real is more fake than the fake.

Or perhaps it is the opposite. Who knows? It cannot be reduced to simple formulas. It is the sociology of contemporary life and it requires careful study and thinking. Baudrillard and Eco were merely the initiators of this investigation. They did not provide the answers.

Employees in companies sit in cubicles next to each other but never speak and listen directly to one another with their mouths and ears. They do texting and emails. People open Twitter accounts and try to develop into minor celebrities, acquiring a coterie of followers of their most minute moves. “I just ordered a cappuccino. I just ordered a latte macchiato.” Claudia decides to tell her husband via a Facebook message that she had an affair with a co-worker, but she accidentally clicks the wrong button and posts this information to all of her “friends” and “followers.” Katie ends her romantic relationship with Henry by texting him in abbreviated globish: “Hen, time to move on. U r a fab guy. Take care.”

On page 210 of Point, Click, Love, the main character Katie – after an especially disillusioning encounter with an older and wealthier male – becomes fed up with the world of online dating. “When she got home that evening, she immediately went to her computer and began deleting – all the emails and all the photos and all the profiles used during those months of online dating.” But the next morning, Katie has a happy serendipitous reunion at Sharp’s 63^rd Street Grill in Kansas City, Missouri with the first man (le premier homme – Albert Camus) whom she had met in her early online dating experiences and had at the time rejected. The juxtaposition of these two events in Katie’s trajectory is one of many pieces of evidence indicating that Molly Shapiro’s novel is richly ambivalent about online dating. It would be, in my view, incorrect to say she is only positive about online dating.

And neither is Molly Shapiro entirely negative about Facebook. Claudia’s suspicion that her husband Steve is having an affair with the minor character Marjorie turns out to be wrong. “’We never even met in person,’ explains Steve. ‘Really?’ replies Claudia. ‘It was all on Facebook, a little on the phone.’ At that moment, Claudia finally saw the value of Facebook, the ability to connect with people while keeping a safe distance… More often than not, people were using Facebook as a way to work through their fantasies without causing any harm.” This could almost be said to be the media studies application of a Freudian-Lacanian theory. Facebookers could “carry on a simulated relationship full of pictures and postings.” Make that a synthesis of Baudrillard and psychoanalysis in the field of culture.

On December 17, 2011, I interviewed the Slovenian artist and media culture-cultural studies professor Polona Tratnik in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Hair in Vitro (2010-11), Polona Tratnik

Alan N. Shapiro: You use the phrase “engagements in culture” at your website to describe some of what you do. Is this idea a way of connecting together your two careers as an artist and as a professor of media culture and cultural studies (with an emphasis on theory)?

Polona Tratnik: The Ministry of Culture is an institution that covers a certain field – and this is a field of culture. When I am working in the field of scientific research or teaching at the university, I don’t consider myself as being much involved in culture. Being culturally engaged would mean that you enter the wider social field and communicate the issues with a wider public. In calls for proposals for scientific research there is a special category — social achievements, and this means also achievements in culture. It demonstrates the social importance of your work. Working as an artist or as a curator, which I also do, or organizing roundtables, even symposia, is a cultural engagement, designed for a wider public.

AS: Is there a connection between your two careers?

PT: Yes, they are very interconnected. My interest in art drew me towards deepening my knowledge about certain questions through reading texts and discussing the issues theoretically. To say it in a very condensed way and perhaps too simply: working as a scientific researcher is about deepening the discourse, and working as an artist is about communicating issues on a sensual level, establishing aesthetic situations for a wider public.

Hair in Vitro (2010-11), Polona Tratnik

AS: Your artworks appear to be about a dialogue or collaboration between art and science. You work on artistic strategies connected to fields like immunology, tissue engineering, biotechnology, medicine, and aesthetic surgery. But aren’t you asking scientists to change? The implications of these art projects seem to be to bring science closer to everyday life, and to social and political concerns. Are you asking scientists to practice science in a different way?

PT: A very important field of science that I am engaged in is philosophy: political philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of biology, philosophy of regenerative medicine. I bring philosophy and biotechnology into the sphere of art. I collaborate with people in the life sciences. Traditionally, in modernity, philosophy and the life sciences have been divided from each other. I want to see philosophy get more involved in biological issues, which means getting truly involved in biology and bringing these two knowledges closer.

AS: This reminds me of what I said to you in Milan last December at the NABA conference. There should be a new turn in philosophy, beyond the emphasis on deconstruction and postmodernism, bringing philosophy closer to biology and the life sciences, which also means re-connecting with existentialism and phenomenology. And not with Leninism, as Slavoj Žizek advocates. Reinvigorate philosophy existentially to make it into a useful dialogue partner for the life sciences.

PT: I have worked deeply on Hegel. He was very involved with mathematics and physics and applied biology to his philosophical system. Deleuze and Guattari were very involved with physics as well, and they applied geology and biology to their philosophical system. These thinkers were not hermetically closed into philosophy in their philosophizing. What I learned from Hegel is that philosophy must be in tune with the thinking of the world that is significant for a particular age, or for our age, let us say. It cannot be separated from other social fields. This also gives to philosophy an important social place. I do not understand those thinkers who would want to protect philosophy as an autonomous sphere in the sense of not being engaged with the context. Philosophy means comprehending the world, reflecting on the issues that are relevant in a certain time and space, a certain context. And natural scientists are already practicing philosophy in what they do, within their projects they need to evaluate philosophical or sociological dimensions of their work, but they don’t operate with a proper knowledge for dealing with these issues. We have to argue for the proper inclusion of philosophy in the social sciences fields, and also in the fields of natural sciences. Often exactly the contrary is taking place, philosophy has been expelled even from its own domains. In the Slovenian National Medical Ethics Committee there are 15 scientists, but not even one of them is a philosopher. But ethics is a branch of philosophy.

AS: In your artwork “Hair In Vitro” (2010–11), and some of your other artworks, you take a part or an element of the human body, for example, hair or cell tissues, and give them conditions of life independent of the human body. Hair, for example, is provided with conditions to live on its own. Your intention seems to be to decrease the separation between the human body and the outside of the body. What are you trying to demonstrate with this artistic practice?

PT: In thinking about our cultural practice of having plants in the home, or animals in the home, in an aquarium, I started to reflect about what would it mean to have another human being in that position. It is about the presence. We strive to get somebody else’s presence. We keep others in our memories, but we also already have objects given to us by someone who we love, or we feel the presence of another person in our apartment through objects they have left here, or we feel their prior habitation of a space. We also project ourselves into these memories or traces of the other. I was thinking about all these dimensions. So I thought about taking it one step further. With tissue engineering, you could have a piece of someone else on a table, next to your bed. And this element of the other person is still alive. For the “Hair” (2005) and “Hair In Vitro” (2010–11) projects, I’ve used hair. I like hair since it ensures the presence of someone else. It invokes strong affections. And it also has strong cultural connotations. I started working with skin tissue, skin cells and then with micro-organisms and hair. I was reflecting upon the question, where are the boundaries of our bodies. In the project “37°C” (2001), I was cultivating skin cells and tissues, with the help of the Blood Transfusion Centre of Slovenia, because this center has been very good in the research and development of skin tissues for the purpose of transplantations. I found it intriguing that the experience which we have of skin in our everyday life, and what we encounter in the laboratories, is something totally different. We experience skin as part of a whole complex system of the human body. But in the laboratory, you deal with living cells which you cannot see with the naked eye. You multiply them in greater quantities and you don’t get skin. You don’t have a layer of dead cells, you don’t have pigment cells, you don’t have veins and capillaries, any blood. It’s just cells in a Petri dish. Something is growing, a part of another person, you know it, but you cannot experience it directly, you cannot experience the life of it, the growing of the cells. Can this be brought back into the context or environment of everyday life? How can this be related back to skin? If we don’t do this, then there is no difference between human cells and frog cells, it all becomes a mere experimental material, a complete decontextualization, the work of the bio-tissue laboratory becoming totally removed from the human condition and human experience.

Hair (2005-2007), Polona Tratnik

AS: Is the skin the border of our bodies, of our human existence?

PT: I don’t think that the skin is the cortex or the boundary of ourselves. It is only one layer of ourselves. It is inhabited with thousands of micro-organisms. They live with us and collaborate in building our immune system. The microbes are not a foreign species. They co-compose our bodies, the complexity of our organism. I believe we should change the notion of the biological identity of ourselves being subsumed in the DNA of one organism, we should comprehend the whole complexity of the organisms co-composing this living system. Additionally, we are also constantly coming into contact with other people and environments where we make an exchange of microbes. We share. We touch. This is touching. We are other people. We co-compose the shared tissue. Thus speaking about the boundaries of bodies and transparent stable biological identities becomes very unreliable from this perspective. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was reflecting about the immersion of the subject into the tissue of the world. I am conducting a similar reflection about the immersion of an open organism into the biological tissue of the world.

AS: So you were inspired by Merleau-Ponty, an important existentialist-phenomenological philosopher, and you developed some of his ideas further to give philosophical understanding, support, and critique to the life sciences in the contemporary situation. Are you philosophizing against Aristotle’s separation of spirit and matter, and Descartes’ separation of soul and body, the reduction of the body to an automaton? Is your project to embed philosophy into the life sciences, bio-technology, and medicine?

PT: Yes, I agree with that. Another set of issues that I am working on which is also a project against Cartesianism is related to regenerative medicine. There are different branches of bio-technology. I am interested in biotechnology concerning the human being, specifically in the shift from the genetic paradigm to a paradigm of tissue engineering. The genetic paradigm was very much marked by computer culture, it was built upon understanding life as a software which can get manipulated as a program. There was the idea of designing babies, of programming certain qualities into a person. I think that this is a myth. The features of a personality are much too complex, and I don’t think that we will acquire the power and knowledge to do this. Although the possibility of altering the chances of getting certain illnesses is certainly real. The newer paradigm of tissue engineering or regenerative medicine is more haptic and tactile. It is more modest, less ambitious. It does not pretend to the epistemological position of the external objective observer knowing everything about the human subject, as in genetic engineering. One works with a physical material and there is the goal of healing the body. This is a very important political technology. How can we improve the qualities of our bodies, preserve youthfulness, and extend the active phase of life? It supports the life-affirmative politics within the contemporary society. As you suggest, it is a project that opposes the Cartesian notion of the body as composed of mechanical parts, the body as a machine. This is unfortunately still the model of the majority of Western medicine. With the idea of the body as self-regenerative, it is not like a car that gets used up during the course of a lifetime. The body is, on the contrary, constantly working to get you younger. On every level of your body, a process is constantly going on: the process of the division of the stem cells. Experimental research has shown that mistakes also take place, even potentially fatal mistakes from which tumors or cancer can develop. Vitalization and mortification are closely related processes. They somehow proceed together, but they could perhaps be separated. Michel Foucault analyzed the role anatomo-clinical medicine has for bio-power, and I aim to analyze the role biotechnology has gained for bio-power. Life is an interplay, resisting the threats of death. Regenerative medicine tries to fortify qualities which the body already has to resist the processes of mortification.

37°C (2001-2003), Polona Tratnik

AS: Do you think that the idea of technological extensions of the body which was very popular in the 1990s, for example, in cyborg theory and in the performances of the Australian artist Stelarc, is now obsolete?

PT: I would say that the idea of extensions of the body imagined with hardware technologies is still supporting the notion of the mechanical body. But Stelarc’s project “Ear on Arm,” where he aimed to surgically attach a tissue-engineered ear to his left arm, interests me, and it is very contemporary. Not only because of tissue engineering, for which the project actually demonstrated the failure to produce a sustainable tissue-engineered organ, but he introduced an original notion of an extended body which we can all share. Stelarc’s biological body is being extended in the sensorial sense, thus enabling other people to plug themselves into it. It is about networking the haptic, sensorial body. However, if we consider tissue engineering, we are at a very basic stage of the possibilities of body manipulations. We are not yet able to generate complex tissues in vitro. What we are able to do so far is only a simple technology, the multiplication of cells. We cannot yet speak about tissues in the case of artificially cultivated skin cells. The cells would have to be formed together in a certain specific way to perform a specific task. Science is today far from cultivating an artificial muscle, which would be functional in the way that the one in the body is. We have a concept of a project in this direction. It truly means working in a transdisciplinary mode.

AS: One of your artworks is called “In Vitro and Transspecies.” What is, for you, the meaning of transspecies?

PT: It means a species that is a biological hybrid composed from two different species. We were working on the idea of a transspecies, made of a mouse and a human being. This was related to the “Hair” project. When experimenting with human living material, there are usually three phases of experimental research: the first phase is in vitro, working with living cells in an artificial, highly controlled environment, which resembles the living organism. We worked in vitro with hair cells, which are very demanding to work with, because of the fragility and complexity of the system and the high possibility of contamination (because hair comes from an external environment). The second phase would be to do pre-clinical experimentation work with animals. The third phase would be clinical experimention work with humans subjects, in this case the transplantation of hair. You can work with so-called nude mice whose immune system has been disabled by genetic engineering, therefore they can accept biological material from another species which means they are designed for the experimentations that result in building transspecies. I was never enthusiastic about working with animals. I don’t want to instrumentalize other living beings. But we did stem cell research in relation to the research of hair. There was a striking idea that came to my mind in this regard. Nude mice are an example of living beings designed by humans for bare instrumental purposes. In fact, nobody cares about them, we don’t really consider them living beings. I don’t like this. By inserting the human stem cells into them one could build the immune system of the mouse. I like this because it means to reverse the logic of who is helping whom. Instrumentalize the human being to work for the good of the mouse. So if you do this, you are working on building a transspecies, you don’t only get a nude mouse with human tissue, but a mouse with a human immune system, you truly get a mouse-human hybrid.

AS: You say that you want art to be trans-disciplinary. What is the difference between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary?

PT: Interdisciplinary means that you have several disciplines which are willing to collaborate. Transdisciplinary means that these disciplines really traverse into one another. Art is maybe the first field where this could be immanently accomplished. Although it also has its own qualities and in a certain sense it stays autonomous. But if it transmits methods, knowledge, and technologies, say, from the field of bio-technology, and it also behaves as a philosophy-in-action, then it becomes a transdisciplinary field. In a project like “Hair In Vitro,” you can no longer divide the fields. But I would also like to put stress on the fact that it is not really possible to “train” someone as an artist, to discipline someone as an artist, so art will never be a discipline. In a way, the same is true for philosophy.

AS: I think that it is necessary to have a classification system of knowledge. But I don’t think that the classification system that we have now is appropriate to the world and the society that we are now living in. It is based on separation, on assumptions of binary oppositions like social and individual, mind and body, natural and artificial, nature and culture, living and non-living, psychology and physiology, form and content, media and message, critical and affirmative, real and fake, reality and fiction, etc.

PT: We have the tradition of these disciplines, and it’s really about disciplining. You have certain cultures of, let’s say, laboratory work, ethnographic research; you have certain methods of how to do research which are linked to a certain discipline. Besides, there are scientific paradigms that rule each circle of scientists. This was well shown by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The disciplinarity of the disciplines is not so much related to the subject-matter or issues, but to the customary methodologies. This is really what distinguishes sociology and philosophy, for example. The disciplines follow the research canons and methodologies, which in turn dictate the scientific origins, aims, and points of view, etc. And this actually represents an intellectual enclosing. Additionally, we have social fields with their specific struggles as Pierre Bourdieu has asserted in his work, therefore one cannot ignore the fact that you have to deal with who is in power in each discipline and in each country. Additionally, there are cultural differences within the disciplines that originate from different traditions and cultures, for example philosophy in Slovenia is not the same thing as philosophy in the United States or philosophy in Germany.

AS: We don’t even have real dialogue among the different national traditions within the history of ideas. How do we bring together French deconstructionist philosophy, German critical theory, the Italian reflection on new media art and virtual reality, Canadian media theory, American pragmatism and existentialism, British rationalism and logical empiricism, and the great Russian literature of novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy? France and Germany, or France and England, can hardly even engage in mutually respectful dialogue. A very powerful German thinker who didn’t like Foucault caused the delay of the publication of Foucault’s works in German by many years. If we cannot even have meaningful dialogue among ourselves, how will we in the West have an encounter with Buddhist and Hinduist spirituality in a way that is epistemologically authentic?

PT: Yes, you are right. The ideas are always translated, adapted to culture, read in a specific way in different situations. We cannot strive for the true or the pure idea; there is a constant slippage taking place – but also an enrichment – in the process of transposing the ideas and traditions. And, regarding the “intellectual culture,” such as it might be called, there is now a hard pressure in the West – at least I can speak about Europe – for the “usefulness” of science. And this is killing the humanities.

AS: You have been a guest professor in Mexico, China, and Finland. And now you will be teaching at the University of California. What do these international experiences mean to you?

PT: In China, I was teaching cultural studies. There the perception of culture is completely different from the perception of culture in Europe. Their idea of national culture or of communities diverges from ours. The cultural understanding of the concepts that one speaks about while teaching, like dominant cultures or sub-cultures, is not the same. You start to learn how they hear what you are saying, and it is different from how European students hear what you are saying. Of course, cultural studies in China are being developed in an authentic sense, they are becoming something much different than what they were when the program started in the U.K. Teaching in China was an enriching experience. In Finland, at the University for Art and Design Helsinki Taik, they have developed a very strong tradition of  “artistic usefulness,” of design, which is now being developed in the direction of building environments, complex experiential situations, designed for people working in the economy, for example. I believe they are one of the best in the world in these practices. In Slovenia, such an understanding of art is very much alien. Our cultural experiences brought us to understanding art rather as a critical practice. I am sure that my half-year in California will give me new perspectives.

Hair in Vitro (2010-11), Polona Tratnik

Hair is a special material. In a biological sense, being part of the human skin, it regulates the body temperature. It is home to millions of bacteria that interchange with the environment and help build the body’s resistance to harmful organisms. Hair is not able to grow or continue to live when departed from the human body and cut off from the bloodstream. However, if the organism stays intact, hair will extend and renew in what is generally understood as reproduction. This is a promising prospect for stem cell research, tissue engineering and immunology – fields that are all working on ways to heal or prolong the life of the human body.

Being a signifier for health, fruition, and beauty, hair also fulfills an aesthetic function. It is a medium with tactile qualities, associated with intimacy on the one hand, and with the abject on the other hand. Charged with a sexual appeal, playing with one’s own hair is a common gesture in a flirt situation. Hairstyles express personal tastes and values. In fashion, hair is set in place and staged against the laws of nature. The desire for more hair may bring aesthetic surgery to the scene. These surgeries can already successfully transplant and grow hair.

The use of hair in the work of  Polona Tratnik, however, demonstrates that hair growth is a far more complex issue. Tratnik holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and visual culture and works as an assistant professor at the University of Primorska. In the past ten years she has accomplished many important projects reflecting on the impact of biology and Artificial Life research – in particular biotechnology – on the micro level of the human body. Tratnik’s artistic body of work of the past ten years such as 37° (2001-2003), Hair (2005) and In Vitro and Transspecies (2008) has led to her most recent project Hair in Vitro (2010) as an ongoing project in collaboration with medical institutions in Slovenia.

Hair in Vitro exports a laboratory situation into an art space. A piece of hair together with its connected skin is taken from a human donor and placed in vitro and held at the body temperature of 37° Celsius. The hair in the glass continues to grow, as part of a body separated from its body. The result is a living technological machinery-organism: the re-rendered process of enhancing the human living organism with artificial elements, parts of the human living organism transferred into an artificial environment. The project places philosophical questions of self and other into scientific and epistemological contexts. In this situation, the artificial and the natural are no longer easily dissociated from one another.

Hair in Vitro (2010-11), Polona Tratnik

Art for Tratnik provides a space for the humanities and philosophy to meet with science. She invites a wider audience to participate in sensual experiences associated with a topic that is usually withdrawn from everyday life. There is a sensual encounter with something usually hidden from the gaze. In the enclosed technical environment of Hair in Vitro, the visible is encouraged but also called into question, since hair does have tactile qualities and is withdrawn through the glass. Visibility fails to take account of life processes. It needs to be mediated by other technologies in a Benjaminian sense of revealing a different nature, other than that nature that human perception is able to grasp.

Hair cultivation becomes metonymical with the design of living material. There is no media in terms of transport or carrier which produces meaning or holds a piece together. It is best described – in the words of Tratnik – as “performing a situation.” By attributing properties of performativity to living material, the emphasis shifts towards doing and action, contrary to the notion of material objects which are passive and motionless. The time-lapsing capability of the video media adds multiple layers of time to reveal the slow growth processes on the micro time level.

Placing a living object in a machinic and sterile environment under conditions that extend its life, inciting the desire to grow and blossom, appears to be a queer moment, a crossover that questions common assumptions. This act invites and inverses thinking about strategies of healing and prolongation. Is life an endless source? Is life something that lives by subtracting energy from its environment? Is life something that spreads out infinitely? Is nature a circle striving for balance between mortification and vitalization?

Harmful bacteria, for example, are usually seen as something dreadful and threatening, something to be killed by antibiotics, by medicine. But what if the aim were to use these bacteria – or ill-designed processes such as the development of cancer – to make the body stronger, to integrate, to enforce any form of life? Do we want to stay human the way that we understand ourselves as human?

These questions can challenge the concept of Artificial Life, according to Tratnik understood as a multiplication and transplantation of body code or body cells. Her work raises questions about the border of the human body, the autonomy of the body and its body parts, and the difference between human and non-human micro-organisms. Not to mention the implications of the instrumentalization of living material for use or potential abuse.

This transdisciplinary approach in Tratnik’s work exposes to view the limits of the organization of science into the disciplines (using and reflecting on biotechnology as such) as they are formed by language, methodologies, and classification systems in knowledge production. Disciplines form a social field in Bourdieu’s sense in which social interactions take place and power is exercised. In her series of investigations, Tratnik connects local scientific practices with a more general discourse on science. For example, microsurgery was invented in Slovenia. Her projects place an emphasis on the embodied and subjective practices of scientists, and also on the scientific notion and treatment of the human body as an object of observation and experimention — therefore as something nonhuman. The work Hair in Vitro enables a broader dialogue about ethics, one which includes both the human and the nonhuman, questioning the appropriateness of these categories and their borders. The biotechnical term tissue becomes a metaphor for being a part of the giant “tissue of the world.”

On November 11, 2011, I interviewed the Italian artist Nicola Toffolini in Bologna, Italy. I spoke in English, and Nicola spoke in Italian. I have translated his comments into English.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Minuti volumi mutevoli a regime di crescita disturbato data di realizzazione: 2009 dimensioni: Altezza 160,0 cm; Larghezza 30,0 cm; Profondità 10,0 cm.

Alan N. Shapiro: Since about the year 2000, you have been doing exhibitions of your artwork. How did it come about in your biography that you came to understand that you are an artist?

Nicola Toffolini: My family wanted me to do something to prepare myself to earn money. But at a certain point I realized that I could not do that. I started to study art and graphic design. I went to the school of fine arts in Venice in 1995. What interested me about art from the very beginning was that I could do work at the intersection of many different fields of knowledge. It brought me into contact with knowledge of many kinds.

ANS: Did you have teachers or mentors at the fine arts school in Venice who especially influenced you?

NT: My teacher of painting. His name was Luigi Viola. From him I learned a conceptual vision. It wasn’t necessarily just about techniques. He taught me that art is related to ethics, that I want to find my truth, and my artwork should have a relationship to this truth. Art should be done with a sense of responsibility. Around the same time, I became interested in theatre. Since the mid-1990s I have been pursuing both theatre and art in parallel. The two activities involve fundamentally different forms of relationships with other people. In the theatre I have a direct encounter with the other, and it is a relationship of complete equality. In my artwork, I am designing things, proposing things, and other people who are specialists carry them out.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Tagliare la corda per sfondare data di realizzazione: 2009 Dimensioni variabili / Variable dimensions

ANS: That makes me think of two different meanings of the word “performance.” In the theatre, you are doing the performance. In your artwork, the technical specialists who construct the artefacts that you have designed are performing the artwork, in the sense that they are implementing the design.

NT: I work with a lot of other people. It is a collaboration. I need technical consultants. I do not have any specific technical education. I don’t know electronics systematically, only in an approximate way. In some projects, I become involved and fascinated with the technical aspects, and I work side-by-side with the specialists and I learn a lot of things. But mainly I work with intuition. I start from certain intuitions, and I try to find a poetic solution.

ANS: What was your first installation?

NT: My work with plants and with nature began in 1997 with the installation Lussureggiante prato verde della lunghezza lineare di un metro e dieci grilli. Lush green grass of the linear length of one meter and ten crickets. There were ten plaxiglass containers of ten centimeters in length each. There were small lawns and seeds of grass. The containers in the exhibition space were sound machines which reproduced the singing of crickets in a meadow. A person enters the space and influences the sound of the crickets. The visitor becomes a part of the artwork.

ANS: If we look at many of your works, there is something from nature, there is something technological or engineered, and there is often an important role for the human participant. Can you say something about the relationship among these three elements?

NT: The question is very difficult and I do not have a single answer. Nor is there any clear position taken in my artworks. The concept of nature that we have is the result of centuries of evolution and history. It is not univocal. Nature for me is very ambiguous, and we are currently experiencing a strange passage. Nature is one of those words which seems to refer to and include a lot of things, but in fact it really says nothing. Yet we continue to use it. We speak more and more about nature, but it disappears beneath our words. Maybe our concept is completely wrong. Nature has never been so far away as it is today from our actual perceptions. It has become just a screensaver on a telematic device. We imagine nature in some ideal way, but this has very little reality. It is an abstract paradise. What I like to do is to bring out contradictions, to make provocations.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Lussureggiante prato verde della lunghezza lineare di un metro e 10 grilli data di realizzazione: 1998_2000 dimensioni: Altezza 28,0 cm; Larghezza 10,6 cm; Profondità 2,7 cm.

AS: We seem to be obsessed nowadays with universal technology, universal nature, and universal information. Perhaps we are destroying the chance to have direct experience. Is the suffering of the plant a metaphor for disappearing direct experience?

NT: This is an aspect. We have an enormous quantity of information, including intimate information. We are bombarded with information on the Internet, in our society, and we are suffering at the hands of technology and living in submission to its time. Yet we try to maintain a certain equilibrium by often believing in a unique horizon, the goal towards which we believing everything is headed right now. What interests me with the plant is the object in vitro. Isolate the plant. Establish a certain set of initial conditions, a series of parameters. The result is conditioned. The plant reacts to the circumstances, and tries to grow within these conditions. So the paradox is that I continue to refer to a concept of nature – or other people see me as making artworks about nature – yet I am working with in vitro controlled parameters which are really quite far from nature.

AS: Is your work political?

NT: I don’t believe in anything. If there is something that I believe in, it would be in exactly that: nothing. The nothing. [I don't think that Nicola Toffolini believes in nothing in the conventional sense of the meaning of that word. I think that he believes in nothing in Flaubert's sense of nothing, le rien, Flaubert's goal of writing a book about nothing, as he said. It was Flaubert's love of writing itself, for Nicola the love of the hybrid nature / high-tech in vitro sculptures that he makes. -- ANS] I try to articulate questions. I look for contradictions, so perhaps this is a political aspect. A non-explicit politics. I try to go one step further in the analysis. Su la testa versus Giu la testa is a very cynical work. The plants are forced to grow in an artificial paradise. Temperature and water are controlled. The plants can do nothing else but grow. Something else that I might be able to say that I believe in is a sense of limits, for example, ecological limits.

AS: Do you think that the ecological movement has an idealized version of nature?

NT: We are living in a system that has already accomplished a lot of evil. And we are stuck in it. It is way beyond the understanding of any single individual. Changing a few things today or tomorrow won’t really save us from the vast ecological catastrophe which has already taken place, or the vast financial catastrophe. Yet there is a certain slow learning process that can happen over decades. There is no one solution. We have to go on living. I doubt if we can go back. We have to live in an experimental and conscious way. The way we consume. The way we do commerce. We cannot continue to live the way we are living now, this standard of living. We are used to not thinking, and not thinking beyond the needs of today. In Italy, no one really thinks about tomorrow. We have to change this. This is not a responsible way to have a relationship to others.

AS: There is a very bad economic crisis in Italy. And a political crisis that is perhaps more of a pseudo-crisis.

NT: Until now, everyone has pretended to not see anything. The distance of politics from everyday life, the distance from any real participatory democracy. People did not pay attention. They always took the attitude to leave it up to someone else. Nobody did anything. For twenty years. It was left in the hands of this so-called “magical personality” at the top. A populist with banal ideas. Italy is a strange country. If things are going well for a certain period of time, then everyone here prefers to disappear into apathy. This attitude returns again and again.

AS: Would you like to have an identity that is more than Italian? Do you feel European or something else?

NT: Yes. I don’t really believe in borders. There is a tendency in Italy to blame problems on foreigners, on immigants. It would be better for us to leave this provincial attitude behind.

AS: Design plays a very important role in your work.

NT: I design. That is the main thing that I do. I take the time to design in a slow way. My works finish at the stage of the study. Others achieve the realisation. Only a few of the designs get realised as projects. Many of the designs are like taking walks. They express my precession of thoughts. It is not necessary for me to realise them as art projects.

AS: So the heart of the creativity happens during the first phase. This is not necessarily art, but perhaps something else. Has the gallery system in Italy been helpful and supportive to you?

NT: I have had negative experiences with some galleries. Sometimes I felt a certain lack of mutual respect. I would like the gallerist to be interested in the work, but instead they are usually interested only in the money. Then it becomes work like any other kind of work. I have a somewhat romantic idea of “the research” (la ricerca). The research goes beyond what the system calls art. The research is a risk, it is part of a journey. I don’t want security or money. What I really want is to continue my ricerca. But it’s true that I also have a lot of friends in Italy who have helped me with my work. And various agencies (aziende) within the Italian civil society. Paradoxically, the larger works that were brought to fruition were financially supported by institutions which have nothing to do with art. Cultural associations. Small groups. This comes not from the mainstream, but from the base of society.

AS: Perhaps the problem comes not only from money and galleries, but also from the idea of art that our society has, the idea that art is a separate sphere, a separate activity, that there are individuals who are “professionals of creativity.” Is it different for you in the theater?

NT: Working in the theatre means working live, with the pubic present, having a direct relationship, unmediated. This relationship is political. The people who go to the theatre have already made a choice to be more disposed to a meaningful interaction. In some projects that we have done in the theatre, the public is very involved. The world of art is different. There is no immediate or direct exchange. What really interests me in my so-called art work is the coherence of my research. Just now I took a break for two years. I was getting used to doing things in a certain way. The works that I will start next year will be very different than before. I want to go on with my research. I might make a mistake, but if I make a mistake, I want to be able to admit that I made a mistake and have the freedom to go back and correct it. Our society seems to offer too little opportunities to do that. I want to grow, and I need time in order to do that. I want to place myself continuously into question.

AS: There is perhaps something like a human right to make a mistake. Can you tell us something about your new cycle of work.

NT: I like to play with energy. The energy provided by the sun and water. The natural circulation of water. The idea is sort of to have installations or scupltures which surround these energies. The artwork situates itself halfway between this energy and a particular kind of technical praxis.  Capture the energy and channelize it in a way that something is achieved or brought to functionality. It will be at the same time something useful and a strange sculpture. I am moving in the direction of working on smaller and more subtle things. I want to achieve a greater sublimation of the technology and the formal method. Reduce the footprint of the computer and of the technology. Be more efficient and more poetic.

AS: You live in Florence, Venice, Udine. What is it like to live in special places like that?

NT: You wake up in the morning, and you ask yourself, what I am doing here? It is a strange emotion, to be in the middle of all this history. You start to live in a different order of time.

Nicola Toffolini’s Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo (It’s Raining, Naturally: Making Good and Bad Weather)

translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo data di realizzazione: 2002 dimensioni: Altezza 240,0 cm; Larghezza 80,0 cm; Profondità 75,0 cm

Nicola Toffolini works on the nature-technology marriage by elaborating singular ecosystems enclosed in glass and aluminium cases of marked formal elegance. Inside plants have been placed which, in order to live, depend on sophisticated electronic mechanisms, which visitors operate from the outside interactively.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo data di realizzazione: 2002 dimensioni: Altezza 240,0 cm; Larghezza 80,0 cm; Profondità 75,0 cm

In Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo, a hyacinth of water is subject to meteorological and climatic variations determined by the choice of the users to make night fall or the day rise, to make it rain or not inside the case, stimulated by sensors or by direct contact with the glass.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo data di realizzazione: 2002 dimensioni: Altezza 240,0 cm; Larghezza 80,0 cm; Profondità 75,0 cm

All the elements necessary to guarantee the life of the vegetable are contained in this micro-environment. First of all, there are a series of neon, luminous strips arranged vertically and parallel to each other which are vaguely reminiscent of solar rays and emanate a luminous flux the intensity of which varies gradually in a way that simulates the passage of the day. Through illumination, the lamps produce warmth, which causes the evaporation of the water situated at the base of the structure. Condensing in drops, the water falls again in the form of rain on the hyacinth: in this way, the mineral salts deliberately dissolved in it can reach the plant and provide it with indispensable nourishment.

The installation was realized for the national competition sponsored by Aiace-Invideo and, having been selected as the winner, was shown at the exhibition “Techne 02. Tra arte e tecnologia – Viaggio nel mondo dell’interattività” (“Between Art and Technology – Journey into the World of Interactivity”), curated by Romano Fattorossi, which took place at the Spazio Oberdan in Milan from October 2002 to February 2003.

In 2001, Toffolini had already exhibited, at the Galleria Otto in Bologna, Un metro quadro di chiassose cicale nella sezione verticale di un campo di grano (“A Square Meter of Noisy Cicadas in the Vertical Section of a Wheat Field”), an analogous installation where the growth of grass inside a case proceeded thanks to a sophisticated interactive technological setup, and was accompanied by the singing of insects.

A continuous cycle revolving around the two primary factors of life, light and water, and the consequent recirculation of air and water: weather and atmospheric events have thus been artificially recreated and follow each other with rhythms that no longer respect their natural course. Dictating their appearance is the unpredictable outcome of user interaction: a disturbance that can also have repercussions on the growth of the vegetable, however in need it is of a certain regularity in external conditions for its own biological functioning.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Un metro quadro di chiassose cicale nella sezione verticale di un campo di grano data di realizzazione: 1999_2002 dimensioni: Altezza 120,0 cm; Larghezza 120,0 cm; Profondità 6,0 cm.

Constrained within a case that protects it but also isolates it, the living being would seem to be reduced to the archeological find of a museum exhibit, to an object of experimentation, if Toffolini did not give voice to the process that engages it, amplifying its otherwise imperceptible sounds caused by the rainfall on the leaves: an organic musicality that is born of the contact between the drops seen by the artist ‘as percussions’ and the dense surface of the leaf, ’small database of sounds’. Toffolini gives to the vegetable the possibility to make heard its ’sonorous response to the water’ and to manifest its living presence within this artificial technological world: “The definitive breaking down of the internal limits of the environment,” he asserts, “is obtained in virtue of the sonorous element that has been introduced with the function of making explicit the opening beyond itself of the natural world.”⁹³ To increase the aesthetic effect of sounds, the synthetic chirping of crickets and cicada is added to emphasize the passage of day to night. A harmony of sounds which, augmenting the perception of the visitor which is also auditory, renders more concrete the communication between his external space and the internal space where the hyacinth grows. This is the purpose of the artwork: to engage the spectators and make them participants in what happens inside the case to assure the survival of the plant. Nature is enclosed in a compact and technological structure, a reality in itself, but not in order to cut it off from man, but on the contrary, to extol how much man can have an influence on nature, for good and for bad, as the title already evokes. It is a descriptive title that suggests not only the process that is carried out in the work, but also its metaphorical assumption of universal value.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Naturalmente ciclico l’ambiente polifonico per piante claustrofobiche data di realizzazione: 2003 dimensioni: Altezza 165,0 cm; Larghezza 35,0 cm; Profondità 35,0 cm,

Note: The reduced graphic resolution in this image is intentional. (ANS)

To the originality of the formulation of the titles, characteristic of the entire production of the artist, is added another element that distinguishes his mode of operating, the exhibition next to the installation of the related designs, works on paper that, as Enrico Lain points out, “are not isolated representations, so much as projects that evolve with the artworks to which they refer. They are the first concretization of a praxis, diagrammatic representations that entirely clarify the work before its materialization.”

See E. Lain, “Centometriquadri di verde acido – sul lavoro senza nome di Nicola Toffolini” (“One Hundred Square Meters of Acid Green – on the Untitled Work of Nicola Toffolini”), presentation text of the one-person exhibition of Toffolini held at the Galleria Lipanje Puntin in Trieste from December 2004 to February 2005.

On the subject of the singular title “without proper name” of the artist’s works, Lain cites as examples: Venire alla luce e lasciarci le penne (“Come to the Light and Let Go of the Feathers”), Dove comincia il suono di un albero e finisce il rumore del vento (“Where the Sound of a Tree Begins and the Noise of the Wind Ends”), Naturalmente ciclico l’ambiente polifonico per pianteclaustrofobiche (“Naturally Cyclical the Ambience Polyphonical for Claustrophobic Plants”), Giù la testa vs Su la testa (“Head Down vs. Head Up”).

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Giu’ la testa vs su la testa data di realizzazione: 2003/2004 dimensioni: Altezza 80,0 cm; Larghezza 80,0 cm; Profondità 35,0 cm,

Naturale che piove…is equipped with a figurative apparatus on paper made from designs and captions that aids in its comprehension: it is not a matter of simple project sketches but of true explanatory and detailed panels providing information on the structure of the technological equipment, on its operation in relation to the plant and the visitors, on the dynamics of the various processes. Beyond this, ample space is given to the botanical characteristics of the water hyacinth, an Eichhornia Crassipes: the richness of particular descriptions, as well as the painstaking line graphic of the images, have prompted the critic Gabriele Perretta to see analogies with the old herbaria, specifically with the Herbarum vivae icones of Otto Brunfels illustrated by Hans Weiditz, of the mid-fifteenth century, but also with the more powerful Atlantic Code of Leonardo.⁹⁵ An unmistakable style which seems to inspire Toffolini right up to the choice of monochrome: a black line on pale yellow colored paper, almost to intentionally make the panel look antiquated. But beyond the aesthetic aspect, the affinity with the scientific artist of the Renaissance is evoked by the attentive research that Toffolini directs towards both natural and technological mechanisms, and, in the ensuing practical application of these mechanisms in the realization of the artwork, by the way that he makes the effort to draw on solutions from the most advanced fields, including industrial research.

autore: Nicola Toffolini titolo: Giu’ la testa vs su la testa data di realizzazione: 2003/2004 dimensioni: Altezza 80,0 cm; Larghezza 80,0 cm; Profondità 35,0 cm,

Sabrina Zannier commented on the installation Venire alla luce e lasciarci le penne (“Come to the Light and Let Go of the Feathers“), winner in 2002 of the “Targetti Art Light Award,” and more generally on the “specific identity” of Toffolini’s work, asserting that it is “characterized precisely by a winking at the formal research of design and at the conceptual speculations of that reigning fringe of contemporary art turned towards social problems, in this case identified in the man-nature relationship behind ecological issues. Activating as a whole the increasingly necessary dialogue between culture and industry that Toffolini’s work calls for in the context of the use of technology. As the same artist underscores, in fact, a significant aspect of his participation in the Targetti competition was the precious experience born from his collaboration with the specialized technicians of the agency, exemplifying a profitable exchange of ideas and experiences among the universes of art, technology, and business.” S. Zannier, “Il premio Targetti al friulano Toffolini” (“The Targetti Award Goes to the Friulian Toffolini”), in Messaggero Veneto, March 15, 2002.

Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo

Nicola Toffolini, 2002

Naturale che piove: fare il bello ed il cattivo tempo nasce, proseguendo nella direzione che da tempo ho intrapreso, dalla commistione tra il motivo dell’interazione e la dimensione naturale. Si tratta di un progetto che costituisce un nuovo esperimento sulla via del tentativo di giocare il limite tra una dimensione supposta esterna e data, quella della natura, e una dimensione prettamente umana, quella dell’invenzione tecnologica; si tratta di un’installazione che si pone come costituzione di una natura che prende forma però proprio a partire dallo snaturamento della natura stessa.

Quello a cui ci troviamo di fronte è un ambiente sospeso definito dal volume di una teca di vetro e alluminio, in cui la natura, nella fattispecie un giacinto d’acqua (Eicchornia Crassipes) vede garantite le condizioni limite di sussistenza unicamente attraverso il funzionamento di un complesso apparato tecnico. Lo spazio della teca è infatti una cella di coltura in cui i fattori vitali per l’esistenza della pianta: illuminazione, temperatura, umidità e nutrizione, sono simulati dall’azione sinergica dei vari elementi tecnici che costituiscono l’impianto. Più dettagliatamente l’illuminazione della pianta è ottenuta per mezzo di una sorta di sole ottimizzato costituito da una serie di lampade a fluorescenza (Fluora della Osram, dimmerate), la cui emissione luminosa è centrata sullo spettro d’azione fotosintetica. La nutrizione è ottenuta invece attraverso l’adozione di una coltura di tipo aeroponico ma rovesciata rispetto alla sua forma tradizionale: il fluido nutriente infatti anziché essere nebulizzato dal basso direttamente sulle radici, è fatto qui cadere dall’alto, in forma di pioggia, per mezzo di un congegno che rinnova continuamente il ciclo vitale reimmettendo in circolo l’acqua raccolta nel serbatoio situato al di sotto della pianta.

Il proposito di artificializzare la natura non potrebbe però dirsi raggiunto col solo fatto di aver imitato altrove e con modalità extranaturali, il mondo di vita del giacinto. Con ciò infatti ci troveremmo pur sempre di fronte ad un ordine risolto in se stesso, autoreferenziale, di cui non potremmo che prendere atto a posteriori. Il gioco della mobilitazione dei confini può compiersi allora solo facendo sì che il ciclo naturale della pianta venga a dipendere dall’apporto di qualcosa di esterno alla macchina: il fruitore appunto che nell’incontro con l’installazione diventa esso stesso fattore vitale come regolatore dei ritmi con cui si produce l’intero ciclo.

Sono due le modalità in cui si dispiega l’interazione dello spettatore con l’impianto: una prima modalità, passiva, consiste nel fatto che l’avvicinamento dello spettatore, rivelato attraverso una serie di sensori di prossimità, interviene sulle condizioni meteorologiche in corso all’interno dell’ambiente, arrestando la caduta della pioggia. Una seconda modalità, questa volta attiva, consiste nella possibilità per lo spettatore, attraverso un semplice tocco della superficie vetrata, di far calare una condizione notturna in modo da interrompere l’azione di soleggiamento precedentemente in corso.

Alla luce di ciò si comprende bene dove stia il gioco sul limite naturale: l’arbitrio dello spettatore diventa essenziale nella decisione dell’andamento del corso interno di alternanza tra pioggia e sole, giorno e notte.

Lo sfondamento definitivo dei limiti interni dell’ambiente è ottenuto in virtù dell’elemento sonoro che è stato introdotto con la funzione di esplicitare l’apertura oltre se stesso del mondo naturale.

Questo intento è conseguito da un lato per mezzo dell’amplificazione del rumore, naturalmente impercettibile, prodotto dalla percussione delle gocce di pioggia sulla superficie delle foglie; dall’altro attraverso la funzione puramente estetica del canto sintetico di grilli e cicale in corrispondenza del giorno e della notte.

La peculiare modalità di interazione che si è adottata per questo progetto si caratterizza per il fatto che, laddove generalmente il rapporto interattivo tra spettatore e apparato si dispiega nella forma prefissata e monotona di una reazione della “macchina” ad un’azione dell’osservatore, qui il gioco tra i due è mantenuto aperto sulla possibilità in virtù dell’evoluzione vitale della pianta le cui possibilità di sviluppo, compreso il possibile degrado dell’organismo, riflettono le dinamiche complessive dell’interazione tra pianta, macchina e uomo.

Conference Program

This was a great conference, with lots of truly stellar presentations.

Ramón Reichert and Eva Horn did a fantastic job organizing the conference.

My topic was “Anticipating the Future through Knowledge of the Fiction in Social Reality.”

Here are my lecture notes for the speech:

In September of this year, I attended ISEA2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. ISEA is an International Symposium on Electronic Art, an international festival of new media, electronic and digital arts. The artist, academic, and curator Lanfranco Aceti was the chief organizer of ISEA2011, and he did a fantastic job. I attended a lot of panels and paper sessions at ISEA2011 where I heard a lot of statements and discussions about the dialogue between art and science. However, I had the distinct impression while listening to these discourses that, in spite of the massive focus on it by conferences of this sort, the dialogue between art and science is not going very well. The scientists don’t care about art and don’t respect it as a form of knowledge. My own view is that the presence of a third party at the table is very much required in order to bring this debate and project of the unification of knowledge forward. The third party to the debate is fiction. If many scientists do not take art seriously as a form of knowledge, it is very clear that they take fiction even less seriously as a legitimate form of knowledge. In my view, this is a very big mistake. In order to comprehend what is going on in the contemporary world – in many, many areas – we are going to need to bring in the perspective of fiction and start to show it a great deal of respect. My intention is to demonstrate the truth value or logical value of my assertion that we need a rigorous new science of fiction in order to fathom what is going on around us by explicating a number of significant examples. The precise number of examples will be 7.

I am by training an historian of ideas, and what I am most interested in is ideas. In my vision, great ideas need to be liberated from those who claim professional ownership of them. It is a great honour for me to be speaking in Vienna, Austria, the city of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the composer Arnold Schoenberg,  the painter Gustav Klimt, and the rock musician Falco. Especially Falco. My maternal grandmother emigrated from Austria to the United States of America in the early 20^th century. Just as it is one of my intellectual projects to liberate the idea of the quantum from quantum physics, to take it out of its context of professional physics and use it to understand everything, in a similar way, it is another one of my intellectual projects to liberate the idea of fiction from the specialists of literature, from the literature professors. We don’t want to just study novels, poetry, and plays with the methods of literary and narrative theory. We want to “apply” literary theory to everything. In all domains of knowledge, in all areas of our social and individual existence, we suffer in our understanding due to naïve, unquestioned, unconscious assumptions about what is real and what is fictional. We need a serious and rigorous rethinking of these categories.

At the same time, it is important for the “future design” interdisciplinary project to engage in mutually beneficial and mutually respectful dialogue with professors of literature and physics; and with professors of political science, sociology, and economics.

In thinking about what is real and what is virtual, or what is real and what is fictional, I feel that I am up against the limitations of our language itself, the system of words/terms/concepts that we constructed a long time ago. And, as Wittgenstein said, the limits of language are the limits of thought. In everyday life media advertising that one sees and hears everywhere in the consumer society – in ads for electronic services ranging from online banking to online dating to online social networks – one sees and hears words like real and virtual thrown around as if their meaning were still self-evident, as if these categories had not already fundamentally been rendered obsolete by what we are collectively living through in all aspects of contemporary life, in the media space. I have seen or heard many advertising slogans in many languages in many countries which are structured exactly like this: “Buy our service and enjoy the real consequences of virtual living, virtual communities, or virtual interactions.” This advertising copy appears to be written in the spirit of a cynicism that takes advantage of the naïveté of the consuming public, oblivious to the implications what is taking place in the world around us.

The goal of science is to understand the nature of things as they really are. In this sense, I am a scientist. But notice how it makes less and less sense nowadays to make statements like: “Science is about discovering the nature of reality.” or “My commitment as a scientist is to discover the nature of reality.” The New York University physics professor Alan Sokal said things like this very often about fifteen years ago, in the mid-1990s, when he was being widely interviewed after attacking French postmodernist thinkers for allegedly having inadequate scientific knowledge. The ground beneath our feet has shifted considerably since then. Reality – regardless of whether we think of it as scientifically objective or as socio-historically constructed – has been radically destabilized. The word “things” seems to be about all that we have left to speak about our passion for basic knowledge, our situation (to use two of the favorite words of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre). I find the use of the word “things” in this context of basic knowledge, basic experience, and basic culture fascinating, like “the nature of things” or “the order of things” (the title of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in English translation). “Back to the things themselves” was a dictum of Husserlian phenomenology, and I believe that we are now in a situation where existentialism and phenomenology must become important again. Only in this way can philosophy become relevant — by building a bridge to the life sciences, to the analysis of bio-power and embodiment, and to the challenges of genetic engineering, topics which are of great importance today.

Yet what does it say about the state of our knowledge when we must rely so much on an abstract word like things? Or on bare life, which the philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes the centerpiece of his great work Homo Sacer? At the end of the seminal science fiction film Blade Runner, the android replicant played by Rutger Hauer says to Detective Rick Deckard: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”

This is a famous twenty-first century soliloquy, although written in the twentieth century. It is reminiscent of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be – that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” In the German version of Blade Runner, the soliloquy goes like this: “Ich habe Dinge gesehen, die Ihr Menschen niemals glauben würdet. Gigantische Schiffe, die brannten, draußen vor der Schulter des Orion. Und ich habe C-Beams gesehen, glitzern im Dunkeln, nahe dem Tannhäuser Tor. All diese Momente werden verloren sein in der Zeit, so wie Tränen im Regen. Zeit zu sterben.“

I think that to continue to use the term “reality” is begging the question, because it is now indeed very problematic to know just what reality is. My goals are those of science. But I believe, along with the French philosopher Alain Badiou, that we will need a kind of Platonic invention of a new system of concepts for understanding what we have previously called the real and what we have previously called fiction.

In partial disagreement with Alain Badiou, I do not think that it will be a group of philosophers who will do this rethinking of the basic categories of how we relate to and classify knowledge and existence. It will a group of thinkers-slash-practitioners. They will be inspired by existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus and Paul Goodman – and even writers-slash-novelists like George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Henry James – and how about the American contemporaries Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth – who are outside of philosophy? In September 2011, I spoke at length about Albert Camus’s ideas in my speech called “What is the Meaning of Life?” that I gave at the Plektrum Festival for Electronic Culture in Tallinn, Estonia. Next weekend in Vienna there will take place an important conference on the ideas of the anarchist thinker, novelist, social critic, and co-founder of Gestalt Therapy Paul Goodman, on the occasion of his centenary birthday.

The thinkers of the “new real” will also have practical skills like in software development, database performance optimization, hybrid technical/cultural network topological design, and hybrid physical/digital architectural design. The neo-Platonist project of which Badiou dreams will be a multidisciplinary project. I am sure that, in the end, Badiou will agree with me on this.

Academic philosophy itself long ago chose to reduce itself to a technical discourse, for purposes of careerism and institutional power, and thereby disqualified itself from taking the leading role in the revolution of ideas and of knowledge that is to come very soon.

Following the scientific method, I will make an hypothesis, and then I will attempt to find out if the hypothesis is correct by carrying out a number of experiments.

Here is the hypothesis: What we call reality is, in fact, a very restricted idea of what reality is, because we have excluded from our concept of reality that which we have called fiction. Fiction as the other of reality. Fiction as the second term in the binary opposition, the exiled counterpart in the dualism:

Science is not about discovering the nature of reality. That would be a tautological statement, since it is science, in the currently prevailing paradigm, which has generated the concept of “reality.” And it was an idealist, not a performance-based, generation. We cannot allow science to be based on a tautological first principle.

Once we stop to exclude (F) from (R), stop to posit (F) as the oppositional other of (R), and instead combine (R) and (F), then a supernova expansion of knowledge takes place. I discuss the supernova explosion of knowledge on pages 174 to 176 of my book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance.

I am not anti-science. I am a critic of much of the existing Wissenschaften that are believed in and practiced at most universities. And I am an adherent of a newer, more advanced science, something like the Star Trek science of the more advanced and peace-loving civilization that I hope that we will someday become.

To explicate this geometrically expansive rewriting of our knowledge paradigm further, we need to enter the tricky world of Mathematical Set Theory. Here I reference the work of my Irish mathematician friend Alexis Clancy, who is influenced by Georg Cantor. Set Theory studies collections of objects, and we note also the importance of object collections in contemporary programming languages like C++ and Java. Advances in Mathematical Set Theory will also help to move us from Computer Science 1.0 to Computer Science 2.0.

The two sets that we are looking at in our diagram, the one enclosed within the other, are not really distinguished from each other by their respective sizes. It is really rather a question of density or magnitude. The argument that we really need to make is that Reality (R) is not compact whereas Fiction (F) is. This compactness of Fiction derives from the fact that Fiction is unbounded, infinite, and continuous. Reality, as we have historically designed and fashioned it, is bounded, finite, and discrete. This quality of discreteness, of divisibility into clearly separable identities and differences, is what makes Reality as we have defined it in the digital age is so useful yet at the same time so impoverished.

Academic philosophers have written bookshelves full of volumes on Nietzsche which are sitting up in the library stacks. But there is a great deal of confusion surrounding Nietzsche. The multitude of scholarly works have not succeeded in delivering to the public or to young students any clear understanding of the ideas of this greatest of German philosophers. The humanities professors have been talking about Nietzsche for 30 years, but not much has been understood about him. The Wikipedia article on Nietzsche tells us nearly nothing. It is about facts and not about ideas. And the Wikipedia article on Albert Camus is absurd. It claims that Camus was an adherent of an imaginary (in the bad sense) and non-existent philosophy that some Wikipedia contributor decided to call “absurdism.” There is no such thing as “absurdism.” What did Nietzsche say? My own reading of Nietzsche, what I think really counts with Nietzsche, is that he was calling for a Gay Science, something like a science of fiction.

[Someone at the conference said critically that I am contradicting myself by saying that "reality" is problematic yet making claims like that I know who the "real" Nietzsche is. First (generally), I don't think that contradictions in themselves are bad. They can be the expression of a broader worldview that is not yet fully expressed or articulated. So-called contradictions can be worked out later. Second (more specifically), I think that criticizing the ideology and discourse of "reality" yet at the same time believing in some "real" things is the more correct epistemology -- more correct than being totally skeptical about "reality," which amounts to a disorienting relativism. And, in my work, I use the term "the new real" as a proactive alternative to the old idea of "reality."]

Before I proceed to the 7 experiments that I am going to conduct, 7 examples within the scientific-academic array of disciplines considered as a whole (I prefer the German word Wissenschaftler to the two English words scientist and academic), 7 examples where the reintroduction of fiction into the core of knowledge will lead to a scientific expansion of knowledge – and, paradoxically, also to a compression of knowledge – we will require some definitions.

What is reality, as “they” have defined it?

What is fiction, as “they” have defined it?

And what are the 7 experiments?

The scientific definitions of reality and fiction appear to be “behaviorist” definitions. We are dealing with a scientific knowledge that has an elective affinity with or a power of attraction towards objects of inquiry which “behave well” according to the expectations of how this science would like its objects to behave. Something is considered to be scientific and scientifically “real” if it something that we can be quasi-certain about, those behaviors which can be grasped palpably and tangibly, which are greifbar in German, behaviors which are repeatable, and about which there is “scientific” consensus among those who consent. What nonconformist geniuses like Marcel Proust or James Joyce believed apparently doesn’t count for much, that is, until eventually someone comes along and writes a bestselling book with a title like Proust Was a Neuroscientist or The Theory of Relativity in Finnegan’s Wake.

Fiction, on the other hand, is that which we deem to be “just a story.” Anybody can think up a story, and one story is just as good as another. Even the so-called “postmodernist” and “social construction of reality” critics of science make this assumption about stories. They believed for several decades that they had knocked science down a peg by asserting that science is “just another story.” At the ISEA2011 conference in Istanbul, I heard someone – a rather well-known Australian artist-and-academic influenced by so-called “science-and- technology-studies” say: “I used to respect science until I realized that it is just one more culturally constructed story.” This commonplace pseudo-critique of science is wrong, divisive, and ineffectual.

According to Wikipedia, whose collaborative authors firmly uphold the current scientific paradigm: “Reality is often contrasted with what is imaginary, delusional, in the mind, dreams, what is abstract, what is false, or [the granddaddy of all pronounced opposites to reality] what is fictional. Fictions are not considered real.” [end of citation from Wikipedia]

That is our operational, behaviorist, and pragmatic definition of fiction: fiction is that which is not real; fiction is the opposite of reality. This is an ideological procedure, and so far we have come up short in our efforts to analyse it.

An effectual, yet little understood, critique of the ideological operation of “the real” in all domains of contemporary society, including science, including – surprisingly – art, including politics and the media, is the system of criticism to be found in the thinking of Jean Baudrillard. The number of people on the planet who have seriously read and seriously understood Baudrillard I can count on the fingers of two hands, and I believe that I have had personal contact – at least virtual contact via e-mail as Baudrillard himself would have said – with all of them. Everyone else has ignored him or caricatured him. Baudrillard said explicitly “I am not a postmodernist,” and this was a correct assessment.

[To say, for example, that he was not interested in computer simulations is wrong, because his use of  the word "simulation" within his system of concepts was totally different from its meaning in ordinary language. His analysis of technology is most cogently expressed in his writings on photography, and the concepts there could be the basis for a more general and affirmative theory, practice, and poesy of technology.]

Baudrillard’s great insight was that the insistence upon the Real in contemporary culture and science is a binary opposition. As he wrote in his great book Impossible Exchange: “The real divested of the anti-real becomes hyperreal, more real than the real, and vanishes into simulation.” The media in which genuine thought flourishes is that of radical and recurring uncertainty. Thinking cannot be exchanged for anything, neither any declaration of truth in presence nor any alleged reality. Thinking is the great enemy of modern consumer society. It is precisely that which must be suppressed at any cost because authentic thought exists in an impossible exchange, and we are living in the society of universal exchange. Our endless cultural signifying-processing in and through social technologies functions on the permanent insistence on the exchangeability of everything. The “other” of this insistence on the Real is the excluded term of the pair: radical uncertainty or Fiction. The insistence on the Real insists so much on its being purified from all fiction that it transforms itself into a monster. Baudrillard had several names for this monstrosity, the best of which is the Hyper-Real. He also called it: Simulation, the Simulacrum, the more real than real.

But the challenge (the challenge of “the new real”) is that of transforming fiction from a negatively defined term into an original, creative term. This is a Nietzschean challenge, a Nietzschean project, as defined by Nietzsche, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morals. There he starts to explore the question of how values can be proactively originated rather than being derived reactively, the same question of “how does the new come into world?” that I have written about elsewhere (for example, in my essay on the TV show Lost).

My vision also entails going beyond Baudrillard. To see his positions and keywords – the language-terms of his self-contained system – as merely the beginning of the project of infusing knowledge of fiction into knowledge of the thing formerly known as reality. The new study of the science of fiction benefits from a great deal of input from the field of semiotics.

So now I come to the 7 Experiments: Applying Fiction to the Study of 7 Areas of Contemporary Life.

Number 1: DNA or the genetic code. The DNA code at the border between fiction and reality.

The dominant ideology, the prevailing view on things in our society, what one reads and hears everywhere about genetics, about DNA, is that it is the master code of life. Life is defined in those little informational blueprints. This belief-system is, of course, reductionist. It appears to the statistically-oriented mind to be something like 50% of the correct explanation. But is reductionism necessarily bad? Of course, I personally think that reductionism is bad. But that is not a compelling argument. Most people in our society don’t think that reductionism is bad. Why? Because they have no idea what reductionism means. Nobody has ever explained it to them in a way that they can understand. And even if they did understand, they would, at first glance, have no compelling reason to abandon reductionism. Critical leftist intellectuals seem to think that reductionism is bad because they say that it is. No. Reductionism will only become bad, and will only fall, on the day when critical leftist intellectuals present a compelling argument against it, a compelling critique. We need to read books in the philosophy of logic that explain clearly what a valid logical argument is. The arguments against “DNA reductionism” that have so far been presented in the academic literature do not meet the stated criteria. A well-known attempt at a critique of the “DNA as master code” ideology is that of Susan Oyama, a Professor Emerita of Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, for example in her book The Ontogeny of Information.

Oyama tries to critique the ideology of DNA as the master code of life by saying that the wrong question about life as an informational system is being asked. The right question about life would be too difficult to ask because our current computing paradigm does not yield sufficient computational power to support software programs that could answer it. Science is pragmatic and only asks questions that it is able to pragmatically answer. The allegedly awesome insight of Susan Oyama is that DNA is not static. DNA only becomes valid “information” that truly explains and corresponds to the reality of the organism in the actual living process of cell functions and the interaction of the organism with its surroundings. Real information only comes into existence in the process of ontogeny, which means the development or developmental history of an organism. So we must consider acquired traits in addition to heredity. Susan Oyama is constructivist. She is interactionist. She is dialectical. Everybody loves her work. It is frequently cited in the critical theory literature. Oyama has supposedly “deconstructed” the myth of information.

But no, Oyama has not deconstructed information. You would have to deconstruct the myth of reality in order to deconstruct the myth of information. Oyama has in fact remained within the same paradigm of believing in the reality and importance of information. She has merely tried to extend and expand the scope of what that professed great information is considered to be. She sees the larger picture of life processes. From the grounds of her commitment to the interactive and developmental dimensions, she believes that she is standing at a location from which it is possible to present a cogent argument as to why “our ways of thinking about the phenomena of life must be altered.”

I do not find it to be a compelling argument.

Information makes us into prisoners. Living under its rule, we are trapped by society’s expectations of us, by society’s definitions, written in its terms, of what our lives and our life’s activities mean. It is true that the living organism decodes in real-time, from the informational body of its genetic heritage, the behaviors that it needs to know in each instant in order to survive and live on. But the organism also has existential freedom. The living organism chooses what it does. In the here and now. It lives its story. It writes its narrative. It is the author of its own development. DNA is not destiny. Anatomy is not destiny, as Freud sometimes seemed to be claiming. We always have choices, we discover choices, which can be regarded as being the fictional dimension. Every human being is condemned to freedom, to the freedom of his or her decisions. She must choose among the different possibilities, the potentialities, the quantum paths, the possible futures.

Is the same true for animals? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on which fiction is in command. Orwell’s Animal Farm? H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau? In the catastrophically negative Nazi fiction of a concentration camp, there are very few choices. But Roberto Benigni demonstrated in the film Life is Beautiful that there might even be some. The living organism can be the writer of stories, of fictions. Existence is not formed by the interaction of entities of any kind, but is rather designed by the living existent (Emmanuel Levinas, Gianna Maria Gatti) in free choice. Existence cannot be grasped by any language or conceptual terms; it remains a dynamic indeterminacy.

Number 2: CNN or the news of the world.

It is almost too self-evident to require mentioning that the discourse of “the news” is at least as much about fiction as it is about any so-called reality. The news must be analysed as being in a strange tension between fiction and reality. I find it especially interesting when the news media reports with haughty morality on a crime while making itself into an accessory to the crime in the very act of reporting on it. Shortly after Amanda Knox was released from prison in Italy and returned to the United States, I saw a headline story about Knox on the front page of the German Bildzeitung, a sensationalist “yellow press” daily newspaper. Knox had stated that, while in an Italian prison, a prison guard had threatened her with sexual abuse. The graphical formatting of the article, the picture of Amanda Knox, the content and typography of the headline text – it was all a carefully orchestrated operation of supplemental sexual abuse of Amanda Knox. A sexual abuse carried out by the newspaper, its readers, and even by someone just glancing at it in the subway like me. An act of abuse practiced on the individual, in effect, by the entire society.

Watch any consecutive hour of “CNN Headline News” and you will see many incidents similar to this. The former dictator Gaddafi’s daughter poured boiling water over the head of her nanny. We observe the nanny suffering in her hospital room, in her hospital bed. It is one of the major headline stories of the day. It is shown six times an hour. In short, the news is fictional. The news is entertainment. The news is about making money for the news industry. In Cool Memories, Baudrillard wrote that he wanted to created a Situationist-like stealth agency that would “gather news of unreal events in order to disinform the public.” But it seems that this ironical project is no longer necessary since the news media themselves are now practicing the self-irony of doing exactly that.

Number 3: The cultural logic of late capitalism. Beyond the analysis of Fredric Jameson.

I liked the early books of Fredric Jameson like Marxism and Form and The Prison-House of Language. We read them at Cornell University in the late 1970s. Those were works of intellectual history and literary theory. Jameson’s later book, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is a major study of architecture, video, space, economics, film, and many other things. It is an important book, and I cannot broadly comment on it here and now, or perhaps try to deconstruct it. I will limit myself to stating my disagreement with one of Jameson’s well-known assertions, which is that the cultural logic of the postmodern era embodies a loss of contact with history, what he calls a “crisis of historicity.” Jameson writes about what he claims to be “the evident existential fact of life that there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life.”

My own sense of contemporary American society is quite different from this assessment. I have written at length about Jean Baudrillard’s book America, and have taken Baudrillard’s more positive account of the spontaneity and creativity of everyday life in America as the point of departure for my writings in the field of “America Studies.” I see this “fictive playfulness” in baseball, in the sociology of sports and gambling, and in American music, television, cinema, and literature.

I think that one can find many connections between American culture today and the original democratic values and principles. Ultimately it is a question of whether one wants to encourage the renaissance of these values, or be a contributor to their demise by taking the stance of the critical critic. I also do not take an entirely negative view of capitalism in the same way that theorists like Jameson, Zizek, Agamben, Negri, and Badiou do – they who so unilaterally identify themselves with the Marxist critical theory tradition. I think that my mind works differently from theirs. I am just as negative as they are about capitalism regarding those things which it is correct to be negative about. Yet there is still room in my mind for celebrating and being an advocate of the positive things of capitalism. Those theorists have their beloved dialectical method, and I have my own intellectual-epistemological method. I have explained it elsewhere (for example, in “The Car of the Future”), and I will explain it more as time goes by.

Steve Jobs was a capitalist, and I think that he made some very significant contributions to human emancipation. He made computers into tools of empowerment and creativity for the individual. I have met sociology and cultural studies students in Germany who are being taught the critical theory tradition and who swear to me their undying belief that nothing good for human emancipation could possibly come out of capitalism (or “commodification”). I think that it is very sad that big-salaried professors teach that to their students, and it is not limited to Germany. By focusing more on the real basic principles of American democracy and the spirit of entrepreneurship, on their fictive dimensions, so to speak, we might succeed at bringing out more their liberatory potentials.

Number 4: The architecture, design, and coding of software.

I have written extensively about my ideas for making a revolution in computer science, upgrading it from Computer Science 1.0 to Computer Science 2.0, by infusing real knowledge from the arts, sciences, and humanities. This project has many aspects. In the here and now, I will focus on the dimension of fiction. In what ways can the project of Computer Science 2.0 – the creation of software that is more powerful than what exists today – benefit from the development of a science of fiction and its application in the architecture, design, and coding of software? I will summarize three major ideas.

Number 4, Point 1: The Q-Bit of Quantum Computing can acquire the value of 0 or 1 by autonomously perceiving what is going on in a system in real-time, in a “receiving” way, going beyond the explicit setting of the value of a bit as 0 or 1, and bit-based data structures, by the subject-centered programmer, which is the only kind of setting of values that existing computer science can do. This systemic perception or receiving of information from an “elsewhere” has something crucially to do with the question of how does one obtain quantum information in a way that is not a statistical reduction, a statistical aggregation of many possible outcomes; and it has something crucially to do with the question of how does one obtain quantum information without destroying it in the act of obtaining it. According to “deconstructionist” theories of literature like those of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, the poet or novelist is not so much an “authorial subject” as someone who “transcribes” words which she receives as inspiration from an unknown “elsewhere.” The way in which the Q-Bit receives its information “receptively” from the real-time state of a system is something like poetry or music.

Number 4, Point 2: How can software more effectively be made? One possible answer has been suggested by software developers in the “Object Spaces” (also called simply “Spaces”) community. According to Wikipedia, Object Spaces is a paradigm for distributed computing and “global” (system-wide) object coordination. Our view is that Object Spaces is the start of the right road towards making a qualitative revolution in computer science: a major upgrade in how software is made, and in the power of what it can do. Improving the overall situation of software development will be made possible through adapting an Object Spaces approach which can be described as holistic, since it takes on infrastructural challenges with an application-centered unified programming paradigm.

Any interaction in an Object Space software system has a triadic structure which has a strong affinity with the core concept of the original semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was a nineteenth-century “American pragmatist” who is indisputably the most important figure in the history of semiotics. Peirce’s idea of the triadic sign relation occasioned the definition of semiosis as an “action or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.” The representation of an object operates as a sign, and meaning emerges from the triadic relation among sign, object, and interpretant. Every human thought is a sign, the mediation between an object and an idea. Reasoning or cognition is the interpretation of signs.

Number 4, Point 3: Previously (in “A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software”), I wrote about the “non-destructive space of observation.” By this term I meant a state of consciousness, reached through meditation, that is a part of quantum “reality.” It is a special subjective space available to the “quantum observer.” It corresponds to the “objective reality” of what is “there” that we call the quantum physical nature of “reality.” But this is a double-edged sword. We can just as easily strip the quantum of its prestigious “objective” status in physics, and appropriate it as a useful concept for computer science design. The software system is quantum because we conceptualize, design and implement it as quantum. It is an exemplary exercise of the will to fiction, which is a phrase summarizing my interpretation of Nietzsche.

This “unrepresentable” information must be represented. Yet in a write-only way! Reading the information will be crucial as well, but it will require a new, special kind of reading. It is read only in order to no longer be what it is. In the act of reading, the information is transformed from its own quantum state into the domain of real-world usefulness. To write the information, we will need to make a correct description of the quantum informational space.

A certain linguistics science is also going to be very important in defining the protected format of the quantum information. The realm of similarities not identities in language is the poetic dimension of language, the (often) cross-language nearly-endless signifying-signified chains of words that were studied in a certain tradition of Continental semiotics which culminated in Derrida’s book Of Grammatology. Until now, only semantics and syntactics as branches of linguistics have been considered by computer science in relation to the question of language understanding. Semiotics and grammatology have not yet been considered by computer science.

Number 5: What is real and what is fake in democracy.

In his swing song Cocaine Blues, the legendary Johnny Cash makes fun of both the criminal who is the protagonist of the ballad and who has committed murder, and the hypocritical and non-democratic criminal justice system that tries and convicts him.

Cocaine Blues was written by T. J. “Red” Arnall, probably in 1947, based on the earlier classic song Little Sadie, whose author is unknown. Cocaine Blues was famously sung by Johnny Cash on January 13, 1968 at his Folsom Prison concert.

Yes, I sang Cocaine Blues during my lecture!

Early one mornin’ while makin’ the rounds
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down
I went right home and I went to bed
I stuck that lovin’ .44 beneath my head

The criminal is so ruined and made depraved by his addiction to cocaine that he takes the life of a human being as a matter of routine, without skipping a beat. The lively upbeat tempo of the song establishes a contrast of deep irony between form and content.

Got up next mornin’ and I grabbed that gun
Took a shot of cocaine and away I run
Made a good run but I run too slow
They overtook me down in Juarez, Mexico

The mythical escape of the American fugitive to Mexico, depicted in dozens of  Hollywood films and TV shows, does not function anymore in an age of globalisation where borders between countries mean less and less.

Laid in the hot joint takin’ the pill
In walked the sheriff from Jericho Hill
He said Willy Lee your name is not Jack Brown
You’re the dirty hack that shot your woman down

The names of Willy Lee and Jack Brown – essentially the anonymous no-names of societal underclass nobodies – completely ironise and deconstruct the allegedly significant difference between a real name and a fake name.

Said yes, oh yes my name is Willy Lee
If you’ve got a warrant just a-read it to me
Shot her down because she made me sore
I thought I was her daddy but she had five more

In the Folsom Prison live concert version, Johnny Cash says “she made me slow” instead of “she made me sore.” It is clearly a “Freudian slip” of some kind, the substitute word emerging from somewhere within Johnny’s complex and vast mind.

When I was arrested I was dressed in black
They put me on a train and they took me back
Had no friend for to go my bail
They slapped my dried up carcass in that county jail

The phrase “had no friend for to go my bail” demonstrates the incredible flexibility of the English language. In order to get the word “bail” to the end of the line, so that it can rhyme with “jail”, grammar rules are legitimately reversed and turned inside out.

Early next mornin’ bout a half past nine
I spied the sheriff coming down the line
He coughed and coughed as he cleared his throat
He said c’mon you dirty hack into that district court

The paradoxical juxtaposition of the chronological time of everyday life routine and the deciding of the fate of a man’s life continues. At 9:30 am, most people in the capitalist society are beginning their workday, doing their pencil-pushing and so on.

Into the courtroom my trial began
Where I was handled by twelve honest men
Just before the jury started out
I saw that little judge commence to look about

Here we reach the heart of the song’s critique of “really existing democracy” (as opposed to the real principles of American democracy as first defined at the end of the 18^th century by writers like Thomas Paine and James Madison – Madison was the fourth President of the United States and he was a political theorist!). A man accused of a crime is supposed to be tried by a “jury of his peers.” But the truth is that you would be hard-pressed to find twelve honest men in all of the United States of America, let alone in downtown Jericho Hill, South Carolina. And in the society described by Cocaine Blues, justice has no stature. The judge’s attribute is that he is “little.” And he does not think or contemplate. He goes through the motions without awareness, limited to the activity of “looking about.” The phrases “county jail” and “district court” emphasize the local nature of the proceedings — in a sense the opposite of the universality that we identify with secular or divine justice.

In about five minutes in walked a man
Holding the verdict in his right hand
The verdict read murder in the first degree
I hollered Lawdy Lawdy have mercy on me

A man is going to be sentenced to life imprisonment, and it is decided in five minutes.

The judge he smiled as he picked up his pen
99 years in the Folsom pen
99 years underneath that ground
I can’t forget the day I shot that bad bitch down

Come all you hypes and listen unto me
Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be

Number 6: Art becomes rigorous like science via fiction.

Paste in this text.

Number 7: What is natural? What is artificial?

Paste in this text.

This is the English version of the interview that appeared in Italian.

Mattia Nicoletti: Can technology be predicted? How can Star Trek have a vision about future technologies?

Alan N. Shapiro: Technologies of today were inspired by Star Trek. Cell phones derive from the hand-held communicators of The Original Series of the 1960s. Virtual worlds like Second Life, and more advanced VR environments, take their inspiration from the Holodeck virtual reality system of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Face-to-face video teleconferencing, like we are doing now on skype, was originated by Star Trek in the 1960s. Many computer scientists, physicists, and engineers chose their professoion because of their love for Star Trek. Therefore it is normal that they will work towards inventing the technologies that Star Trek depicts. Teleportation or “beaming” is a cornerstone of our science fiction technocultural imagination, and experimental physicists at IBM and many universities are working towards inventing teleportation technology, which they have already realized for photons, atoms, molecules…

MN: I read the 20 basic principles of Star Trek on your blog (amazing!). But the reality that we are living is based on constant change. In order to survive, people today have to face change at all costs. How can this be compatible with living according to principles?

ANS: You are asking me what is the relationship between living by a set of ethical principles and the importance of living in a highly flexible and adaptable way that contemporary reality demands in everyday life. The 20 Star Trek Basic Principles are a summation of a lot of iconic and seminal philosophy, literature, political theory, and science of the last 250 years, since the French and American revolutions. I define Star Trek as the inheritor and protector of our best intellectual traditions, our cultural treasures. Many young people today make the mistake of believing that they can live new and exciting things merely by participating in new technologies and new media. But nothing new or exciting will happen until they acquire basic culture. By that I mean knowledge of the literature, art, architecture, music, and philosophy of the twentieth century, at least.

MN: The financial downturn is for some a way to free creativity. In your personal vision, can people today find a way to survive the crisis by using new technologies?

ANS: No. My viewpoint is exactly the opposite of that. Yesterday I got on a subway car after work. The six people around me were all talking on their cell phones as if we were in their living room, or playing with their little texting gadgets, or with MP3 music in their ears. This is the normality today. I didn’t like their noise, the banality of their conversations, so I started singing a song out loud – Johnny Cash in fact, or maybe it was Falco – and I was the one looked at as crazy. Being constantly jacked into a network or bombarded with information is not creativity. Creativity requires silence and time. This connects to your statement about the financial downturn. If you have no job, then at least you have time. You can do something creative, but I would not say with technologies. You would be better off to do a radical social choreography of the people and situations around you. You readers can inform themselves about social choreography at my website, and at www.choreograph.net.

MN: I read the text of a lecture of yours about the dialogue between science and art, and the role of fiction in mediating their conflict. How can fiction be considered as science?

ANS: At my keynote lecture at the University of Vienna this weekend, I will introduce the idea that we need a science of fiction, which is not the same thing as science fiction, and it is not the study of literature. Our scientific methodologies in both the natural and the social sciences have assumed that their object of investigation is reality. But this idea of reality in fact puts pressure on the objects of investigation to be well-behaved in the sense of conforming to our expectations.. Fiction and radical uncertainty are happening everywhere, for example in the so-called “news”. We need to systematize a science of all these extreme phenomena which have been excluded from “reality.”

MN: How can Star Trek, first developed in 1966, be an inspiration for the future?

ANS: The most important thing about Star Trek is that it is a political inspiration. According to the story of Star Trek, humanity in the mid-twenty-first century achieved First Contact with the Vulcans, and humanity finally got beyond its primitive, barbaric ways and became an advanced intelligent civilization.

Becoming a truly advanced and intelligent civilization means 4 things:

(1) Humanity stopped making wars. We got past our History of Violence — the title of a great film by David Cronenberg. There are still, of course, police actions and special forces interventions, but that is based on a different principle than the principle of war.

(2) A planetary culture was created. That means that people stopped thinking of themselves primarily as Americans or Italians or Germans or Estonians, and started to think of themselves as being citizens of the planet. Of course, it is very important to respect the qualities and singularity of each and every individual culture, language, religion, and legitimate belief-system. The planetary culture is a unification of the strengths of all the individual cultures. It is the opposite of imperialism.

(3) The system of separate disciplines of knowledge at universities was brought into question. It came to be understood that, if all of this knowledge that was trapped in the minds and jargons of the separate disciplines were brought together into a true dialogue, and into a project of real thinking and rethinking, then the whole would be much greater than the sum of the parts. Knowledge would expand by a factor of hundreds. At the Star Trek Academy, knowledge is taught and experienced in a way completely different from our universities in the year 2011.

(4) An advanced human civilization has technologies much more advanced than the technologies that we have today. The reason is that the development of technologies is no longer considered as being only an exercise of engineering as it is today. The knowledge of philosophy, linguistics, art, literature, history, architecture, sociology, etc. has become part of the technology development process.

MN: In a similar way, can utopian writers such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley provide a way to understand our society?

ANS: Orwell and Huxley wrote the famous dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World. Dystopia is a nightmarish negative vision. It is the opposite of the utopia of Star Trek. Right now the worst nightmares of Orwell and Huxley are coming true. The information society is becoming a society of surveillance by the state and big corporations, in order words, Big Brother. And we can add Kafka to the mix. It is also a society of self-surveillance and mutual surveillance. We are all keeping close watch on each other. You pretty much have to watch every step you take or you can get yourself into all kinds of trouble fast. I recommend watching the 1960s British TV show The Prisoner to understand the information society of today in the era of the Global Village. I am starting to write a book with the working title, The Prisoner: Confinement and Freedom in the Global Village. The thinkers focused on in this book will be Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan. Both Foucault and McLuhan had double-sided theories of confinement and freedom.

MN: Thanks to technology, the universe of television is changing with better screen contents. Do you think that, by understanding the way that technology is moving, movie studios and cable TV can understand the right way to survive?

ANS: There are a lot of great TV shows today which continue our excellent traditions of drama, comedy, and social satire. In areas like news, sports, finance, and weather one cannot be especially happy about the direction that television has gone in, taking over the multi-modal aesthetic of the Internet and Microsoft Windows.

In the film industry, there is too much emphasis on special effects and animation technology, and too little emphasis on the quality of the stories. This is especially true in science fiction films. Many people claimed that Avatar was a great film. I did not think so, and I have already almost entirely forgotten it. Avatar was mostly about special effects and the story was a cliché. Hollywood studios make clichéd stories because they are afraid to take risks. But great science/fiction films like Jurassic Park, Blade Runner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness. They connect with our archetypal stories and myths, but at a level which is at the heights of writing and literature, not in the usual ignorant and clichéd ways.