Emmauel Levinas
http://theology.co.kr/article/levinas.html
http://web.skku.edu/~philos//webzine/2/levinas.htm
Monday, June 09, 2008
"Being Martin Heidegger" from Salon.com
"Why is there something instead of nothing," asked philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he asked it again and again throughout his life. But, considering his at times nearly incomprehensible response to his own question and his affiliation with the Nazis during the 1930s, there are more than a few who have since plaintively wished, "Why couldn't there be nothing instead of Heidegger?"...
Polt and Fried are representative of a new generation of Heidegger scholars, a group that has unflinchingly looked at the evidence of Heidegger's affiliations with German fascism, fully investigated the ways in which his thought might have led to such a disastrous political regime and yet still found reasons to value the meditations of this provincial German. For them, Heidegger's work offers possibilities for constructively transforming one's life and for positively challenging the current direction of our technological world....
I realize this is a bit unfair, but can you offer, to the novice reader, a summary of the essence of Heidegger's thought?
Heidegger's basic problem is the question of "Being": How is it that we're able to understand what it means for anything to be? So when a philosopher like Descartes declares, "I think, therefore I am," Heidegger wants to ask, What is this "am-ness"? Or when any of us say that something "is" -- whether it's a molecule, a man or the planet Mars -- what do we mean by "is," and how does it come to pass that "is" means anything to us at all? Heidegger's answer is that we understand Being because we live in time -- we belong to a past and we anticipate a future. So without time and history, things couldn't be present or revealed to us at all. Their Being would have no meaning.
What first drew you to Heidegger?
I didn't read Heidegger until my senior year, but when I did I thought he was very refreshing because he seemed to articulate problems that I had dimly perceived in previous philosophers that I had read, none of whom had really satisfied me. They all seemed to be missing something. And Heidegger put words on that.
What was that?
That truth can't be grasped in an abstract, universal way without taking into account that we are concrete human beings living in a particular time and place. Heidegger tried to show that our particularity is not an obstacle to truth but in fact it's what makes truth possible. There's no truth apart from that. It seems to me that he does that without just falling into relativism. So I found that very appealing.
There are some American philosophers and researchers out there who suggest that there's a direct line between Heidegger's philosophy and the embrace of Nazi ideology or others like it. How would you distinguish your thought about the connection between Heidegger's philosophy and Nazism from others who see a more direct link?
One can make a reasonable case that his philosophy led him straight to National Socialism. The case would be something like this: In "Being and Time," his main work, he characterizes everyday existence and everyday language and thinking as inauthentic, in other words superficial and not fundamentally disclosive about the human condition.
So it would seem to follow that he would have no reason to support democracy or free speech or any parliamentary system, because it would all just be inauthentic, idle talk. At the same time, also in "Being and Time," he suggests that a deeper and authentic truth can be found in going back to one's roots, one's heritage, and appropriating them for some future project, perhaps under the leadership of some hero. It's not much of a stretch to see how he could be very excited by this very charismatic figure Hitler, who claimed he was returning to the German roots in a historic way. As it turned out, what he really wanted was something much more revolutionary than Nazism. The Nazis were not radical enough because they weren't provoking the German people to a confrontation with Being. As the '30s wear on, he becomes more and more disillusioned with the Nazis and comes to see them as just another product of modern metaphysics. I think he genuinely supported the movement, though probably from the very beginning he was not a standard Nazi. He was a card-carrying Nazi, but not just another average party member.
Now when I say he left the door open without forcing anybody who's Heideggerian to become a fascist, what I mean is that you could accept his view that everyday existence is inauthentic and yet still reject authoritarian tyranny.
When you say he saw everyday life as not disclosive, how should we understand disclosive?
Everyday life for Heidegger is absorbed with particular things, in particular projects, without standing back, as it were, to explicitly choose those projects. He says we do not choose to choose in everyday life. Authenticity would involve choosing to choose -- in other words, being really self-aware and free in what one is pursuing. In that sense authenticity would be more disclosive and more illuminating about the human condition.
I'm told that Heidegger isn't taken seriously anymore in Germany, that his involvement with the Nazis has caused him to be no longer viewed as a legitimate part of the debate in philosophy or about Germany.
I wouldn't state it as absolutely as that. But certainly Heidegger is not the main concern of most German philosophers. In the immediate postwar time Heidegger did have a sort of comeback in the '50s, a wave of popularity. But at the same time philosophers like Habermas emerged who have a completely non-Heideggerian approach, a much more rationalist approach. Contemporary German philosophy is much like American philosophy in that there are analytic philosophers there, and there's quite a bit of interest in American pragmatism in Germany. Of course there are pockets of Heideggerians. Still, it's in France and America and a few other countries like Japan and Italy where Heidegger is really appreciated.
Do you think it is more rationalistic and pragmatic cultures like America and France, then, that in some ways are desperate for an injection of some mystical element -- which opens them up to Heidegger?
I think that's true. The Germans had their fill of mystical irrationalism. And Americans need some of it. Of course, irrationalism is a pejorative term. But I do think we need some Heidegger. That would be one way of putting it.
What element of Heidegger do you think America needs?
Science and technology have a leading role in our culture. They're often seen as the arbiters of truth. One of Heidegger's main points is that science and technology are built upon something that cannot be understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific. Often we in America don't know what to do with poetry and art. For us they're just entertainment or relaxation. What if there were a deeper truth? Maybe there's a strain of American culture that longs for that.
There's a substantial body of work that compares Heidegger to Eastern thought and particularly to Buddhism, to the attempt to awaken oneself from the jail cell of ego and the aging, sickness and ultimate death of the body. Do you think such comparisons are valid or useful? Was Heidegger, in effect, a Western Buddha?
He was definitely interested in Buddhism and Taoism. It's also true that his thought found resonance in Japan. He gets a lot of attention in Japan. What a lot of Japanese say is that there is connection between Buddhism's notion of emptiness and some Heideggerian notions of nothingness or unconcealment. We do need to be a bit skeptical about this, though. There is one passage in the "Contributions to Philosophy," which were written by Heidegger between 1936 and 1938, in which he simply makes the remark, "Not Buddhism. The very opposite." What he means by that I don't know, except that I think he probably had in mind that Buddhism seems to try to release us altogether from existence, from the body, whereas Heidegger wants a more engaged dwelling or involvement in existence. Now it might be that that's a misinterpretation of Buddhism, and of course there are many different strands of Buddhism. But that's why I think that he might have been reluctant to say that he was a Western Buddha.
Heidegger is seen as the fount, along with Nietzsche, of much of the postmodern thought that has developed over the past three decades. Yet much of postmodern thought seems to have hit a dead end as a result of its own deconstructive strategies. The most renowned example of this is the infamous Sokal affair, in which a physicist submitted a parody concerning the supposed "hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to a leftist postmodern journal, and the editors accepted it as legitimate. Do you believe postmodernists have misused Heidegger? Or are we witnessing the logical outcome of the circularity that's inherent in Heidegger's method?
I think it is a misuse. As we were saying earlier, Heidegger points to the particularization of truth, its historicity. But I think he does not thereby become a relativist who dismisses scientific findings altogether. He is just saying that scientific statements do in fact reveal things to us, but let's not forget that they're possible only in an interpretive context. That scientific theories are open to revision, and it's possible that better interpretations may come along. Which is different from taking any scientific statement and trying to deconstruct it and reduce it to its background in intellectual history, its cultural resonances, which ultimately, I think, ends up in a sort of Nietzschean interpretation, reducing all truth to power...
But even in your description, doesn't this point up the problem with Heidegger and science? Most scientists would say DNA is not an interpretation, for example. DNA is DNA. It's a fact and it has definite predictable results in our lives.
Well, I'll try to speak for Heidegger on this question. His statements about science are sometimes sloppy and sometimes more careful. I think at his best he would say, "You're right. DNA is real. The facts we've discovered about it are real. Now, what do those facts mean in a larger sense? What are we going to do with them?" That is certainly still in question. By discovering the human genome, have we unlocked the human essence, as the Cincinnati Enquirer said in a headline a few months ago? Or have we discovered something that, although true, does not really reveal what it means to be human? By discovering the human genome, have we gained a tool that we can or should use to exploit ourselves? Or would that be a misunderstanding of ourselves as a resource or an object? These are questions of interpretation. And here is where debate and discussion and deeper interpretation are always possible. I don't think that relativizes the facts of what scientists have discovered.
One of the other areas where Heidegger's influence has been acknowledged explicitly is in the environmental movement, where some claim that Heidegger's understanding of the world and of technology informs their approach to saving the planet. What was Heidegger's notion of technology? Are these environmentalists right in their reading of him?
I don't know the details of how he has been appropriated. But I think it would be legitimate to try to use him in ecological thinking. Especially his views on technology, which are that technology is one mode in which things as a whole are revealed to us. They're revealed to us as useful and manipulable resources. And he wants to alert us to the fact that that is not the only possible interpretation of things -- that beneath that interpretation there is what he calls "earth," which is a dimension of things that can never be fully interpreted or fully used up or fully understood by the human being. It's a mysterious dimension. So the kind of ecological thinking that tries to get us to respect the mystery of wilderness is something that is very close to the spirit of Heidegger. The kind of ecological thinking that goes about trying to manage resources wisely so that we don't destroy potential cures for cancer -- that's still thinking technologically, in other words, still seeing natural resources as objects.
In the famous Der Spiegel interview, which Heidegger gave in 1966 but wasn't published until his death 10 years later, he ended by saying that given the technological developments going on in the world, "only a god can save us now," a god with a small "g." Do you think he has in mind the same kind of thing that Joe Lieberman and George Bush do when they pronounce their belief in God? How do you understand Heidegger's statement?
Heidegger did not want to go back to the Judeo-Christian God. He thought that that God had been appropriated by metaphysics, and that metaphysics and that God had died together. But there is the possibility of the coming of a new god or gods -- what he calls, in the "Contributions to Philosophy," "the passing by of the last god." It's a very mysterious notion. Quite a bit of ink has been spilled on it, but nobody really knows what it means. Heidegger was inspired largely by the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who tried to invite the gods to return to us. There are ways of interpreting this that try to bring it down to earth. Hubert Dreyfus, for example, sees it as a turning point in our culture. He says that Woodstock might have been an example of a Heideggerian god. But that sounds too human to me, all too intelligible. It's clear that he wants some kind of radical turning, some cataclysmic event that this god would have the power to bring about. More than that is hard to say...
In the end, if someone asked you, "Why take the trouble with Heidegger and his mess of a vocabulary and his involvement with the Nazis," what would you say? How would you advise him to look at a philosopher's philosophy in the light of that same philosopher's personal life? How would Heidegger urge us to approach that issue?
Heidegger himself says in "Being and Time" that philosophical insights are always based on or grow out of personal experiences. And I think he's right about that. Philosophers are human beings. It's always illuminating to think about the person behind the words. But it's also easy to slip into a dismissive mode and say, "This person made mistakes and so his philosophy must be a bunch of mistakes." That's the kind of ad hominem argument that isn't legitimate. Heidegger is somebody who, like all great philosophers, struggled with how to live, with the meaning of existence, and left behind a record of that struggle. And anybody who wants to struggle with similar issues can turn to some of these texts, including Heidegger's, and find food for thought there. Not the last word, but food for thought. Why do we struggle with the meaning of existence? Because existence doesn't mean as much unless you struggle with it.
Salon.com article
Polt and Fried are representative of a new generation of Heidegger scholars, a group that has unflinchingly looked at the evidence of Heidegger's affiliations with German fascism, fully investigated the ways in which his thought might have led to such a disastrous political regime and yet still found reasons to value the meditations of this provincial German. For them, Heidegger's work offers possibilities for constructively transforming one's life and for positively challenging the current direction of our technological world....
I realize this is a bit unfair, but can you offer, to the novice reader, a summary of the essence of Heidegger's thought?
Heidegger's basic problem is the question of "Being": How is it that we're able to understand what it means for anything to be? So when a philosopher like Descartes declares, "I think, therefore I am," Heidegger wants to ask, What is this "am-ness"? Or when any of us say that something "is" -- whether it's a molecule, a man or the planet Mars -- what do we mean by "is," and how does it come to pass that "is" means anything to us at all? Heidegger's answer is that we understand Being because we live in time -- we belong to a past and we anticipate a future. So without time and history, things couldn't be present or revealed to us at all. Their Being would have no meaning.
What first drew you to Heidegger?
I didn't read Heidegger until my senior year, but when I did I thought he was very refreshing because he seemed to articulate problems that I had dimly perceived in previous philosophers that I had read, none of whom had really satisfied me. They all seemed to be missing something. And Heidegger put words on that.
What was that?
That truth can't be grasped in an abstract, universal way without taking into account that we are concrete human beings living in a particular time and place. Heidegger tried to show that our particularity is not an obstacle to truth but in fact it's what makes truth possible. There's no truth apart from that. It seems to me that he does that without just falling into relativism. So I found that very appealing.
There are some American philosophers and researchers out there who suggest that there's a direct line between Heidegger's philosophy and the embrace of Nazi ideology or others like it. How would you distinguish your thought about the connection between Heidegger's philosophy and Nazism from others who see a more direct link?
One can make a reasonable case that his philosophy led him straight to National Socialism. The case would be something like this: In "Being and Time," his main work, he characterizes everyday existence and everyday language and thinking as inauthentic, in other words superficial and not fundamentally disclosive about the human condition.
So it would seem to follow that he would have no reason to support democracy or free speech or any parliamentary system, because it would all just be inauthentic, idle talk. At the same time, also in "Being and Time," he suggests that a deeper and authentic truth can be found in going back to one's roots, one's heritage, and appropriating them for some future project, perhaps under the leadership of some hero. It's not much of a stretch to see how he could be very excited by this very charismatic figure Hitler, who claimed he was returning to the German roots in a historic way. As it turned out, what he really wanted was something much more revolutionary than Nazism. The Nazis were not radical enough because they weren't provoking the German people to a confrontation with Being. As the '30s wear on, he becomes more and more disillusioned with the Nazis and comes to see them as just another product of modern metaphysics. I think he genuinely supported the movement, though probably from the very beginning he was not a standard Nazi. He was a card-carrying Nazi, but not just another average party member.
Now when I say he left the door open without forcing anybody who's Heideggerian to become a fascist, what I mean is that you could accept his view that everyday existence is inauthentic and yet still reject authoritarian tyranny.
When you say he saw everyday life as not disclosive, how should we understand disclosive?
Everyday life for Heidegger is absorbed with particular things, in particular projects, without standing back, as it were, to explicitly choose those projects. He says we do not choose to choose in everyday life. Authenticity would involve choosing to choose -- in other words, being really self-aware and free in what one is pursuing. In that sense authenticity would be more disclosive and more illuminating about the human condition.
I'm told that Heidegger isn't taken seriously anymore in Germany, that his involvement with the Nazis has caused him to be no longer viewed as a legitimate part of the debate in philosophy or about Germany.
I wouldn't state it as absolutely as that. But certainly Heidegger is not the main concern of most German philosophers. In the immediate postwar time Heidegger did have a sort of comeback in the '50s, a wave of popularity. But at the same time philosophers like Habermas emerged who have a completely non-Heideggerian approach, a much more rationalist approach. Contemporary German philosophy is much like American philosophy in that there are analytic philosophers there, and there's quite a bit of interest in American pragmatism in Germany. Of course there are pockets of Heideggerians. Still, it's in France and America and a few other countries like Japan and Italy where Heidegger is really appreciated.
Do you think it is more rationalistic and pragmatic cultures like America and France, then, that in some ways are desperate for an injection of some mystical element -- which opens them up to Heidegger?
I think that's true. The Germans had their fill of mystical irrationalism. And Americans need some of it. Of course, irrationalism is a pejorative term. But I do think we need some Heidegger. That would be one way of putting it.
What element of Heidegger do you think America needs?
Science and technology have a leading role in our culture. They're often seen as the arbiters of truth. One of Heidegger's main points is that science and technology are built upon something that cannot be understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific. Often we in America don't know what to do with poetry and art. For us they're just entertainment or relaxation. What if there were a deeper truth? Maybe there's a strain of American culture that longs for that.
There's a substantial body of work that compares Heidegger to Eastern thought and particularly to Buddhism, to the attempt to awaken oneself from the jail cell of ego and the aging, sickness and ultimate death of the body. Do you think such comparisons are valid or useful? Was Heidegger, in effect, a Western Buddha?
He was definitely interested in Buddhism and Taoism. It's also true that his thought found resonance in Japan. He gets a lot of attention in Japan. What a lot of Japanese say is that there is connection between Buddhism's notion of emptiness and some Heideggerian notions of nothingness or unconcealment. We do need to be a bit skeptical about this, though. There is one passage in the "Contributions to Philosophy," which were written by Heidegger between 1936 and 1938, in which he simply makes the remark, "Not Buddhism. The very opposite." What he means by that I don't know, except that I think he probably had in mind that Buddhism seems to try to release us altogether from existence, from the body, whereas Heidegger wants a more engaged dwelling or involvement in existence. Now it might be that that's a misinterpretation of Buddhism, and of course there are many different strands of Buddhism. But that's why I think that he might have been reluctant to say that he was a Western Buddha.
Heidegger is seen as the fount, along with Nietzsche, of much of the postmodern thought that has developed over the past three decades. Yet much of postmodern thought seems to have hit a dead end as a result of its own deconstructive strategies. The most renowned example of this is the infamous Sokal affair, in which a physicist submitted a parody concerning the supposed "hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to a leftist postmodern journal, and the editors accepted it as legitimate. Do you believe postmodernists have misused Heidegger? Or are we witnessing the logical outcome of the circularity that's inherent in Heidegger's method?
I think it is a misuse. As we were saying earlier, Heidegger points to the particularization of truth, its historicity. But I think he does not thereby become a relativist who dismisses scientific findings altogether. He is just saying that scientific statements do in fact reveal things to us, but let's not forget that they're possible only in an interpretive context. That scientific theories are open to revision, and it's possible that better interpretations may come along. Which is different from taking any scientific statement and trying to deconstruct it and reduce it to its background in intellectual history, its cultural resonances, which ultimately, I think, ends up in a sort of Nietzschean interpretation, reducing all truth to power...
But even in your description, doesn't this point up the problem with Heidegger and science? Most scientists would say DNA is not an interpretation, for example. DNA is DNA. It's a fact and it has definite predictable results in our lives.
Well, I'll try to speak for Heidegger on this question. His statements about science are sometimes sloppy and sometimes more careful. I think at his best he would say, "You're right. DNA is real. The facts we've discovered about it are real. Now, what do those facts mean in a larger sense? What are we going to do with them?" That is certainly still in question. By discovering the human genome, have we unlocked the human essence, as the Cincinnati Enquirer said in a headline a few months ago? Or have we discovered something that, although true, does not really reveal what it means to be human? By discovering the human genome, have we gained a tool that we can or should use to exploit ourselves? Or would that be a misunderstanding of ourselves as a resource or an object? These are questions of interpretation. And here is where debate and discussion and deeper interpretation are always possible. I don't think that relativizes the facts of what scientists have discovered.
One of the other areas where Heidegger's influence has been acknowledged explicitly is in the environmental movement, where some claim that Heidegger's understanding of the world and of technology informs their approach to saving the planet. What was Heidegger's notion of technology? Are these environmentalists right in their reading of him?
I don't know the details of how he has been appropriated. But I think it would be legitimate to try to use him in ecological thinking. Especially his views on technology, which are that technology is one mode in which things as a whole are revealed to us. They're revealed to us as useful and manipulable resources. And he wants to alert us to the fact that that is not the only possible interpretation of things -- that beneath that interpretation there is what he calls "earth," which is a dimension of things that can never be fully interpreted or fully used up or fully understood by the human being. It's a mysterious dimension. So the kind of ecological thinking that tries to get us to respect the mystery of wilderness is something that is very close to the spirit of Heidegger. The kind of ecological thinking that goes about trying to manage resources wisely so that we don't destroy potential cures for cancer -- that's still thinking technologically, in other words, still seeing natural resources as objects.
In the famous Der Spiegel interview, which Heidegger gave in 1966 but wasn't published until his death 10 years later, he ended by saying that given the technological developments going on in the world, "only a god can save us now," a god with a small "g." Do you think he has in mind the same kind of thing that Joe Lieberman and George Bush do when they pronounce their belief in God? How do you understand Heidegger's statement?
Heidegger did not want to go back to the Judeo-Christian God. He thought that that God had been appropriated by metaphysics, and that metaphysics and that God had died together. But there is the possibility of the coming of a new god or gods -- what he calls, in the "Contributions to Philosophy," "the passing by of the last god." It's a very mysterious notion. Quite a bit of ink has been spilled on it, but nobody really knows what it means. Heidegger was inspired largely by the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who tried to invite the gods to return to us. There are ways of interpreting this that try to bring it down to earth. Hubert Dreyfus, for example, sees it as a turning point in our culture. He says that Woodstock might have been an example of a Heideggerian god. But that sounds too human to me, all too intelligible. It's clear that he wants some kind of radical turning, some cataclysmic event that this god would have the power to bring about. More than that is hard to say...
In the end, if someone asked you, "Why take the trouble with Heidegger and his mess of a vocabulary and his involvement with the Nazis," what would you say? How would you advise him to look at a philosopher's philosophy in the light of that same philosopher's personal life? How would Heidegger urge us to approach that issue?
Heidegger himself says in "Being and Time" that philosophical insights are always based on or grow out of personal experiences. And I think he's right about that. Philosophers are human beings. It's always illuminating to think about the person behind the words. But it's also easy to slip into a dismissive mode and say, "This person made mistakes and so his philosophy must be a bunch of mistakes." That's the kind of ad hominem argument that isn't legitimate. Heidegger is somebody who, like all great philosophers, struggled with how to live, with the meaning of existence, and left behind a record of that struggle. And anybody who wants to struggle with similar issues can turn to some of these texts, including Heidegger's, and find food for thought there. Not the last word, but food for thought. Why do we struggle with the meaning of existence? Because existence doesn't mean as much unless you struggle with it.
Salon.com article
Thinking is not inactivity, but in itself the action that has a dialogue with the world’s destiny.
슈피겔
다음과 같이 요약할 수 있을 것 같다. 1933년에 좁은 의미에서는 비정치적인 인간으로서 당신은 소위 새시대의 여명임을 내세우는 정치운동에 빠져들었다.
하이데거
대학의 문제를 다루는 도중에...
슈피겔
... 대학의 문제를 다루는 도중에 소위 새시대의 여명이라는 것에 빠져들었다. 약 일년 후에 당신은 거기서 주어진 역할을 포기했다. 그러나 1935년의 한 강의에서, 이 강의는 그 후 1953년에 <형이상학 입문>이라는 제목으로 출간되었는데, 당신은 다음과 같이 말하고 있다. "특히 오늘날 국가사회주의의 철학이라는 이름 아래 시장에 판매되고 있는 것들은 이 움직임의 내적 진리와 거대함(다시 말해서 지구전체를 지배하는 기술이라는 것과 근대적 인간의 상봉이라는 것)과는 아무런 상관도 없는 것이며, 그와 같은 것은 이 <가치>, 그리고 <전체성>이라는 흙탕물 속에서 그물질을 하고 있을 뿐인 것이다"(형이상학 입문, 박휘근 옮김, 서광사, 1994, 318쪽). 이 부분은 1953년에, 즉 책을 출간할 때에 추가한 것인가? 즉 1953년의 독자들에게 1935년에 그 운동, 즉 국가 사회주의의 내적 진리와 위대성을 당신이 어떻게 보았는가를 설명(변명)하기 위해서. 아니면 그 부분이 1935년에 이미 처음부터 들어있었는가?
하이데거
그 구절은 처음부터 나의 수고(手稿)에 들어 있었으며, 그 당시 기술(Technik)에 대한 나의 생각과도 정확히 일치한다. 물론 기술의 본질을 "Ge-Stell"(닦달, 몰아세움)로 파악하는 그 이후의 해석과 일치하지는 않는다. 그 구절을 소리내어 읽지 않은 것은 청강자들이 나를 잘 이해하고 있다고 확신했기 때문이다. 우둔한 자나, 스파이, 염탐꾼들만이 나를 다른 식으로 이해하려고 했고 그렇게 했다.
슈피겔
공산주의 운동 역시 그런 식으로 분류될 수 있었을까?
하이데거
그렇다고 분명하게 말할 수 있다. 공산주의 운동 역시 전(全)지구적인 기술에 의해 규정되고 있다.
슈피겔
아메리카니즘(Amerikanismus)도?
하이데거
역시 그렇다고 말했을 것이다. 지난 30년간 현대 기술의 전지구적인 운동은 그것의 역사 규정력을 아무리 강조해도 지나치지 않은 만큼 강력한 것임이 더욱 분명해 졌다. 내가 볼 때 오늘날 결정적인 물음은 정치적 체제가 어떻게 그러한 기술시대에 적응할 수 있는가? 어떤 정치 체제가 되어야만 하는가? 하는 것이다. 나는 그러한 물음들에 대한 해답을 갖고 있지 못하다. 나는 민주주의가 그 대안이라고 확신하지 않는다.
슈피겔
"민주주의"는 여러 가지 다양한 생각들을 의미할 수 있는 포괄적인 개념이다. 문제는 민주주의라는 그러한 정치 구조의 변형이 여전히 가능하냐는 것이다. 1945년 이후 당신은 서구 세계의 정치적 지향에 대해 언급했는데 거기서 민주주의와 정치적으로 표출된 기독교적 세계관에 대해, 그리고 입헌국가에 대해서도 말했다. 그러한 모든 지향들을 당신은 <불완전한 것>이라고 불렀다.
하이데거
우선 내가 어디에서 민주주의와 당신이 언급한 것들에 대해 그렇게 말했었는지 알려달라. 그러한 지향들에서 기술적 세계와의 참된 대결을 발견할 수 없었기 때문에 불완전하다고 말했을 것이다. 나의 관점에서 볼 때, 그 것들은 기술이란 본질적으로 인간이 통제하는 어떤 것이라는 생각을 여전히 고수하고 있다. 그러나 그것은 불가능한 일이다. 기술은 본질적으로 인간이 혼자 힘으로는 지배할 수 없는 어떤 것이다.
슈피겔
당신이 보기에 방금 묘사한 것들 중에서 어떤 것이 가장 시기 적절한가?
하이데거
모르겠다. 그러나 나는 여기서 결정적인 물음을 본다. 우선 당신이 <시기 적절한>이라는 말로 무엇을 의미하는지 밝혀져야 한다, 즉 <시간>이란 무엇인가가 해명되어야 한다. 거기에 더해서 시기 적절성이 인간 행위의 <내적 진리>를 평가하는 기준인지, 또는 모든 오해에도 불구하고 사유(思惟)와 시작(詩作)이 그러한 기준을 부여하는 행위가 아닌지 물어야 한다.
슈피겔
인간이 영원히 자신의 도구를 제어할 수 없다는 것은 충격적이다. 괴테의 시(詩)에 등장하는 <마법사의 제자>를 연상시킨다. 그러나 현대 기술의 도구가 확실히 거대하긴 하지만 우리가 제어할 수 없을 것이라고 말하는 것은 좀 비관적인 것 아닌가?
하이데거
비관주의라고. 아니다. 비관주의(Pessimismus)와 낙관주의(Optimismus)는 지금 논의되는 영역에서는 매우 불충분한 입장이다. 그러고 무엇보다도 현대 기술은 <도구>가 아니다. 그것은 도구와는 더 이상 상관없는 것이다.
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왜 우리가 그처럼 철저하게 기술에 정복당해야 하는가?
하이데거
나는 정복에 대해 말하지 않았다. 기술의 본질에 응답할 수 있는 방법을 아직은 찾지 못했다고 말했을 뿐이다.
슈피겔
그러나 모든 것이 이렇게 잘 기능 하는데 도대체 무엇이 극복되어야 하는가? 하는 매우 소박한 물음으로 당신에게 이의를 제기 할 수도 있다. 더 많은 발전소가 더 능숙하게 지어진다. 인간은 지구의 고도로 기술화된 지역에서 잘 부양되고 있다. 우리는 번영 속에 살고 있다. 여기서 정말로 결여되어 있는 것이 무엇이란 말인가?
하이데거
모든 것이 잘 기능하고 있다. 모든 것이 기능하고 있다는 그 것, 그리고 그러한 기능함이 점점 우리를 끊임없이 더 확장된 기능으로 몰아가고 있다는 것, 기술이 대지(大地, Erde)로부터 인간을 더욱 떼어놓고 뿌리 뽑는다는 바로 그 것이 섬뜩한 것이다. 달로부터 지구로 전송되어 온 사진을 보았을 때 당신은 어떠했는지 모르지만 나는 정말 충격을 받았다. 핵 폭탄도 필요하지 않다. 인간의 뿌리뽑힘은 이미 벌어지고 있는 것이다. 우리에게는 순수하게 기술적인 관계만 남아있다. 오늘날 인간이 살고 있는 곳은 더 이상 대지라고 할 수 없다. 이미 알려진 것처럼 최근에 나는 시인이며 저항 운동가인 르네 샤르(Rene Char)와 프로방스에서 긴 대화를 나누었다. 미사일 기지가 프로방스에 건설되자 그 지방은 믿을 수 없을 정도로 파괴되었다. 감상적인 과장이나 목가적인 찬미와는 거리가 먼 이 시인은 만약 시와 사유가 다시 한번 힘(폭력적이지 않은)을 얻지 못한다면 그곳에서 벌어진 인간의 뿌리뽑힘은 결국 종말이 되고 말 것이라고 말했다.
슈피겔
우리는 여기 이 지구에 살아야 하고, 일생동안 거기에서 벗어나서는 안 된다고 말한다. 그러나 이 지구에 존재하는 것이 인간의 운명인지 아닌지 누가 알겠는가? 인간에게 정해진 운명이란 없다고 생각할 수도 있다. 인간이 지구로부터 다른 행성으로 옮겨 갈 가능성도 어쨌든 볼 수 있다. 그렇게 오래 걸리지 않을 수도 있다. 인간의 터전이 여기라고 어디에 쓰여져 있단 말인가?
하이데거
내가 아는 한 인간의 경험과 역사에 따르면 모든 본질적이고 위대한 것들은 인간이 고향을 갖고 있고 전통에 뿌리를 두고 있다는 데에서 기원한다. 예를 들어 현대 문학은 파괴적인 방향으로 나아가고 있다.
슈피겔
당신의 철학으로 인해 <니힐리스틱(nihilistisch)>이라는 말이 매우 포괄적인 의미연관을 갖게되었기 때문에 우리에게 <파괴적(destruktiv)>이라는 말은 의외의 개념이다. 니힐리즘의 일부로 볼 수 있고 또 보아야만 하는 문학과 관련해서 당신이 <파괴적>이라는 말을 쓰는 것이 우리에게는 놀랍다.
하이데거
내가 말한 문학은 내가 니힐리즘을 생각하는 방식에서는 니힐리스틱하다고 할 수 없다.
슈피겔
당신은 완벽하게 기술화된 상태로 이끌거나 이미 이끈 세계운동(Weltbewegung)을 분명하게 목격하였다. 이것은 앞에서 이미 말한 바이다.
하이데거
그렇다.
슈피겔
좋다. 그러면 자연스럽게 이런 질문이 떠오른다. 개별 인간이 어떤 식으로든 그러한 강제의 그물 망에 영향을 미칠 수 있는가, 혹은 철학이 영향을 미칠 수 있는가, 또는 철학이 개인이나 여러 개인들을 특정한 행동으로 이끌어 양자가 함께 영향을 미칠 수 있는가?
하이데거
짧게 그러나 오랜 숙고를 통해 다음과 같이 대답할 수 있다. 철학은 세계의 현재 상태에 직접적인 변화를 가져올 수 없다. 이 것은 철학뿐만 아니라 모든 인간적인 사고와 노력에 있어서도 마찬가지이다. 오직 신만이 우리를 구원할 수 있다. 유일하게 남은 가능성은 사유와 시작을 통해 신의 출현이나 몰락 속에서 신의 부재를 예비하는 것이다. 부재 하는 신 앞에서 우리는 몰락한다.
슈피겔
당신의 사유와 그러한 신의 도래(到來) 사이에 어떤 하나의 연관이 존재하는가? 당신이 보기에 일종의 인과관계가 거기에 놓였는가? 당신은 우리가 신을 다시 불러내 사유할 수 있다고 생각하는가?
하이데거
우리가 신을 다시 불러내 사유할 수는 없다. 기껏해야 기다림의 예비를 일깨울 수 있을 뿐이다.
슈피겔
그러나 도울 수는 있지 않은가?
하이데거
기다림의 예비가 첫 번째 단계일 것이다. 인간에 의해, 지금 존재하는 바로 그러한 모습으로 세계가 존재할 수 있었던 것은 아니지만, 동시에 인간 없이도 불가능한 것이었다. 이것은 내가 오랜 동안 전승되어왔고, 다의적이며 이제는 낡은 단어인 "존재"라는 말로 부르는 바로 그것이 자신의 개방과 보존, 형성을 위해 인간을 필요로 한다는 사실과 연관되는 것이다. 종종 조롱거리가 되고 얼마간은 부적당한 표현인 "Ge-Stell"이라고 부르는 것에서 나는 기술의 본질을 본다. "Ge-Stell"의 지배는 이런 것이다. 인간은 기술의 본질 속에서 나타나는 인간 자신이 통제할 수 없는 힘에 의해 내몰리고, 호출되고, 도전 받는다. 이러한 이해에 도달하기 위해서는 더 이상 사유가 필요하지 않다. 철학은 종말에 도달했다.
슈피겔
일찍이, 그러나 옛날에만 국한하지 않고, 철학은 간접적으로, 드물게는 직접적으로 많은 영향을 미칠 수 있고, 새로운 흐름의 출현을 촉진할 수 있다고 생각되어 왔다. 독일의 경우 맑스를 제외한다하더라도 칸트, 헤겔에서 니체에 이르는 위대한 이름을 떠올려 본다면, 철학이 간접적인 방식이지만 엄청난 영향을 끼쳐왔음을 발견할 수 있다. 당신은 정말로 철학의 영향력이 종말에 도달했다고 생각하는가? 만약 전통적인 철학이 죽었고 더 이상 존재하지 않는다 하더라도, 그것이 철학의 영향력 - 그것이 항상 거기에 존재해 왔다고 한다면 - 이 오늘날 더 이상 남아있지 않다는 주장까지 포함하는 것은 아니지 않는가?
하이데거
"다른 사유"를 통해 간접적인 영향이 가능하다. 그러나 직접적인 것은 불가능하다. 사유가 세계의 현재 상황을 말하자면 인과적으로 변화시킬 수는 없다.
슈피겔
미안하지만 우리는 지금 철학을 하려는 것이 아니다. 그러나 우리는 이 지점에서 정치와 철학의 경계선에 이르렀다. 우리가 당신을 이런 대화로 이끈 것을 용서해 달라. 당신은 방금 철학과 개별적인 인간은 ... 이외에는 할 수 없다고...
하이데거
기다림의 예비, 신의 도래나 부재에 열리 채로 있음. 부재의 경험이 아무 것도 아닌 것은 아니다. 오히려 <존재와 시간>에서 "존재자들 사이에 빠져있음"이라고 부른 상태로부터 인간을 해방시키는 것이다. 오늘날 존재하는 것에 대한 숙고는 앞서 말한 기다림의 예비에 속한다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 사실상 저 중요한 충격은 밖으로부터, 즉 신이나 다른 어떤 것으로부터 와야만 한다. 따라서 사유는 오늘날 더 이상 스스로, 자율적으로 영향을 미칠 수 없는 것인가? 그러나 그것이 가능하다는 것이 앞선 시대를 살았던 사람들의 생각이며, 내가 볼 때는 우리들의 생각이기도 하다.
하이데거
그러나 직접적인 방식은 아니다.
슈피겔
앞에서 위대한 변혁가로 칸트와 헤겔, 맑스의 이름을 언급했다. 그러나 현대 물리학의 발전과 현대적 세계 일반의 성립과 관련해 라이프니쯔로부터 온 충격도 있다. 당신은 이제 더 이상 그러한 영향을 기대하지 않는다고 말하고 있는 것인가?
하이데거
철학에서는 더 이상 기대하지 않는다. 철학이 지금까지 해온 역할을 과학이 가져갔다. 사유의 <영향>을 적합하게 해명하기 위해서는 작용과 작용함이 무엇을 의미하는지가 더 철저하게 논의되어야만 한다. 충족 이유율(근거율)을 충분히 해명하기 위해서는 먼저 기연, 동인, 촉진, 보조, 방해, 협력 등의 근본적인 구분이 필요하다. 철학은 심리학, 논리학, 정치학 같은 개별 과학들로 해소된다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 어떤 것이 철학의 지위를 넘겨 받게되는가?
하이데거
인공두뇌학(Kybernetik).
슈피겔
또는 자신을 열어두는 경건한 자?
하이데거
그러나 더 이상 철학은 아니다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 무엇이란 말인가?
하이데거
나는 그것을 "다른 사유"라고 부른다.
슈피겔
당신이 다른 사유라고 부르는 것을 좀더 명확하게 정식화해줄 수 있는가?
하이데거
내 강연 <기술에 대한 물음>을 끝맺는 마지막 문장, "물음은 사유의 경건함이다"하는 말을 기억하고 있는가?
슈피겔
우리가 납득할 수 있는 한 문장을 당신의 니체 강연에서 발견했다. 당신은 "철학적 사유에는 가능한 최고의 구속이 지배하기 때문에 위대한 사상가들은 모두 동일한 것을 사유한다. 그럼에도 이 동일한 것은 너무도 본질적이고 풍부해서 결코 개별자가 그것을 모두 퍼낼 수 없다. 개별자는 단지 자신을 거기에 더 강하게 구속시킬 수 있을 뿐이다"하고 말했다. 그러나 당신의 의견에 따르면 이러한 철학적 노력들이 이제는 분명한 종말에 도달했다는 것이 된다.
하이데거
그것들은 종말에 이르렀다. 그러나 그것이 소멸되어 사라져 버린 것은 아니다. 바로 지금과 같은 대화 속에서 새롭게 현재화된다. 지난 30년간 강의와 연구를 통해 이루어진 나의 모든 작업은 핵심적으로는 서양 철학의 해석이었을 뿐이다. 사유의 역사적인 근원으로의 회귀나, 그리스 철학 이후 아직도 물어지지 않고 있는 물음의 숙고는 전통으로부터의 이탈이 아니다. 나는 다음과 같이 말할 뿐이다. 니체가 무너뜨린 전통적인 형이상학의 사유 방식은 이제 막 시작된 기술 시대의 근본 경향을 적절하게 사유하면서 경험할 수 있는 가능성을 더 이상 제공 할 수 없다.
SPIEGEL: It has, of course, always been a misunderstanding of philosophy to think that the philosopher should have some direct effect with his philosophy. Let us return to the beginning. Is it not conceivable that National Socialism can be seen on the one hand as a realization of that “planetary encounter” and on the other as the last, most horrible, strongest, and, at the same time, most helpless protest against this encounter of “planetarily determined technology” and modern human beings? Apparently, you are dealing with opposites in your own person that are such that many by-products of your activities can only really be explained in that you, with different parts of your being that do not touch the philosophical core, cling to many things about which you as a philosopher know that they have no continuity – for instance to concepts like “home” [Heimat], “rootedness,” and similar things. How do planetary technology and “home” fit together?
HEIDEGGER: I would not say that. It seems to me that you take technology too absolutely. I do not think the situation of human beings in the world of planetary technology is an inextricable and inescapable disastrous fate; rather I think that the task of thinking is precisely to help, within its bounds, human beings to attain an adequate relationship to the essence of technology at all. Although National Socialism went in that direction, those people were much too limited in their thinking to gain a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and what has been under way for three centuries.
SPIEGEL: This explicit relationship, do the Americans have it today?
HEIDEGGER: They do not have it either. They are still entangled in a thinking, pragmatism, that fosters technological operating and manipulating but simultaneously blocks the path toward a contemplation of what is characteristic of modern technology. In the meantime, attempts to break away from pragmatic-positivistic thinking are being made here and there in the USA. And which of us can say whether one day in Russia and in China age-old traditions of a “thinking” will not awaken that will assist human beings in making a free relationship to the technological world possible?
다음과 같이 요약할 수 있을 것 같다. 1933년에 좁은 의미에서는 비정치적인 인간으로서 당신은 소위 새시대의 여명임을 내세우는 정치운동에 빠져들었다.
하이데거
대학의 문제를 다루는 도중에...
슈피겔
... 대학의 문제를 다루는 도중에 소위 새시대의 여명이라는 것에 빠져들었다. 약 일년 후에 당신은 거기서 주어진 역할을 포기했다. 그러나 1935년의 한 강의에서, 이 강의는 그 후 1953년에 <형이상학 입문>이라는 제목으로 출간되었는데, 당신은 다음과 같이 말하고 있다. "특히 오늘날 국가사회주의의 철학이라는 이름 아래 시장에 판매되고 있는 것들은 이 움직임의 내적 진리와 거대함(다시 말해서 지구전체를 지배하는 기술이라는 것과 근대적 인간의 상봉이라는 것)과는 아무런 상관도 없는 것이며, 그와 같은 것은 이 <가치>, 그리고 <전체성>이라는 흙탕물 속에서 그물질을 하고 있을 뿐인 것이다"(형이상학 입문, 박휘근 옮김, 서광사, 1994, 318쪽). 이 부분은 1953년에, 즉 책을 출간할 때에 추가한 것인가? 즉 1953년의 독자들에게 1935년에 그 운동, 즉 국가 사회주의의 내적 진리와 위대성을 당신이 어떻게 보았는가를 설명(변명)하기 위해서. 아니면 그 부분이 1935년에 이미 처음부터 들어있었는가?
하이데거
그 구절은 처음부터 나의 수고(手稿)에 들어 있었으며, 그 당시 기술(Technik)에 대한 나의 생각과도 정확히 일치한다. 물론 기술의 본질을 "Ge-Stell"(닦달, 몰아세움)로 파악하는 그 이후의 해석과 일치하지는 않는다. 그 구절을 소리내어 읽지 않은 것은 청강자들이 나를 잘 이해하고 있다고 확신했기 때문이다. 우둔한 자나, 스파이, 염탐꾼들만이 나를 다른 식으로 이해하려고 했고 그렇게 했다.
슈피겔
공산주의 운동 역시 그런 식으로 분류될 수 있었을까?
하이데거
그렇다고 분명하게 말할 수 있다. 공산주의 운동 역시 전(全)지구적인 기술에 의해 규정되고 있다.
슈피겔
아메리카니즘(Amerikanismus)도?
하이데거
역시 그렇다고 말했을 것이다. 지난 30년간 현대 기술의 전지구적인 운동은 그것의 역사 규정력을 아무리 강조해도 지나치지 않은 만큼 강력한 것임이 더욱 분명해 졌다. 내가 볼 때 오늘날 결정적인 물음은 정치적 체제가 어떻게 그러한 기술시대에 적응할 수 있는가? 어떤 정치 체제가 되어야만 하는가? 하는 것이다. 나는 그러한 물음들에 대한 해답을 갖고 있지 못하다. 나는 민주주의가 그 대안이라고 확신하지 않는다.
슈피겔
"민주주의"는 여러 가지 다양한 생각들을 의미할 수 있는 포괄적인 개념이다. 문제는 민주주의라는 그러한 정치 구조의 변형이 여전히 가능하냐는 것이다. 1945년 이후 당신은 서구 세계의 정치적 지향에 대해 언급했는데 거기서 민주주의와 정치적으로 표출된 기독교적 세계관에 대해, 그리고 입헌국가에 대해서도 말했다. 그러한 모든 지향들을 당신은 <불완전한 것>이라고 불렀다.
하이데거
우선 내가 어디에서 민주주의와 당신이 언급한 것들에 대해 그렇게 말했었는지 알려달라. 그러한 지향들에서 기술적 세계와의 참된 대결을 발견할 수 없었기 때문에 불완전하다고 말했을 것이다. 나의 관점에서 볼 때, 그 것들은 기술이란 본질적으로 인간이 통제하는 어떤 것이라는 생각을 여전히 고수하고 있다. 그러나 그것은 불가능한 일이다. 기술은 본질적으로 인간이 혼자 힘으로는 지배할 수 없는 어떤 것이다.
슈피겔
당신이 보기에 방금 묘사한 것들 중에서 어떤 것이 가장 시기 적절한가?
하이데거
모르겠다. 그러나 나는 여기서 결정적인 물음을 본다. 우선 당신이 <시기 적절한>이라는 말로 무엇을 의미하는지 밝혀져야 한다, 즉 <시간>이란 무엇인가가 해명되어야 한다. 거기에 더해서 시기 적절성이 인간 행위의 <내적 진리>를 평가하는 기준인지, 또는 모든 오해에도 불구하고 사유(思惟)와 시작(詩作)이 그러한 기준을 부여하는 행위가 아닌지 물어야 한다.
슈피겔
인간이 영원히 자신의 도구를 제어할 수 없다는 것은 충격적이다. 괴테의 시(詩)에 등장하는 <마법사의 제자>를 연상시킨다. 그러나 현대 기술의 도구가 확실히 거대하긴 하지만 우리가 제어할 수 없을 것이라고 말하는 것은 좀 비관적인 것 아닌가?
하이데거
비관주의라고. 아니다. 비관주의(Pessimismus)와 낙관주의(Optimismus)는 지금 논의되는 영역에서는 매우 불충분한 입장이다. 그러고 무엇보다도 현대 기술은 <도구>가 아니다. 그것은 도구와는 더 이상 상관없는 것이다.
슈피겔
왜 우리가 그처럼 철저하게 기술에 정복당해야 하는가?
하이데거
나는 정복에 대해 말하지 않았다. 기술의 본질에 응답할 수 있는 방법을 아직은 찾지 못했다고 말했을 뿐이다.
슈피겔
그러나 모든 것이 이렇게 잘 기능 하는데 도대체 무엇이 극복되어야 하는가? 하는 매우 소박한 물음으로 당신에게 이의를 제기 할 수도 있다. 더 많은 발전소가 더 능숙하게 지어진다. 인간은 지구의 고도로 기술화된 지역에서 잘 부양되고 있다. 우리는 번영 속에 살고 있다. 여기서 정말로 결여되어 있는 것이 무엇이란 말인가?
하이데거
모든 것이 잘 기능하고 있다. 모든 것이 기능하고 있다는 그 것, 그리고 그러한 기능함이 점점 우리를 끊임없이 더 확장된 기능으로 몰아가고 있다는 것, 기술이 대지(大地, Erde)로부터 인간을 더욱 떼어놓고 뿌리 뽑는다는 바로 그 것이 섬뜩한 것이다. 달로부터 지구로 전송되어 온 사진을 보았을 때 당신은 어떠했는지 모르지만 나는 정말 충격을 받았다. 핵 폭탄도 필요하지 않다. 인간의 뿌리뽑힘은 이미 벌어지고 있는 것이다. 우리에게는 순수하게 기술적인 관계만 남아있다. 오늘날 인간이 살고 있는 곳은 더 이상 대지라고 할 수 없다. 이미 알려진 것처럼 최근에 나는 시인이며 저항 운동가인 르네 샤르(Rene Char)와 프로방스에서 긴 대화를 나누었다. 미사일 기지가 프로방스에 건설되자 그 지방은 믿을 수 없을 정도로 파괴되었다. 감상적인 과장이나 목가적인 찬미와는 거리가 먼 이 시인은 만약 시와 사유가 다시 한번 힘(폭력적이지 않은)을 얻지 못한다면 그곳에서 벌어진 인간의 뿌리뽑힘은 결국 종말이 되고 말 것이라고 말했다.
슈피겔
우리는 여기 이 지구에 살아야 하고, 일생동안 거기에서 벗어나서는 안 된다고 말한다. 그러나 이 지구에 존재하는 것이 인간의 운명인지 아닌지 누가 알겠는가? 인간에게 정해진 운명이란 없다고 생각할 수도 있다. 인간이 지구로부터 다른 행성으로 옮겨 갈 가능성도 어쨌든 볼 수 있다. 그렇게 오래 걸리지 않을 수도 있다. 인간의 터전이 여기라고 어디에 쓰여져 있단 말인가?
하이데거
내가 아는 한 인간의 경험과 역사에 따르면 모든 본질적이고 위대한 것들은 인간이 고향을 갖고 있고 전통에 뿌리를 두고 있다는 데에서 기원한다. 예를 들어 현대 문학은 파괴적인 방향으로 나아가고 있다.
슈피겔
당신의 철학으로 인해 <니힐리스틱(nihilistisch)>이라는 말이 매우 포괄적인 의미연관을 갖게되었기 때문에 우리에게 <파괴적(destruktiv)>이라는 말은 의외의 개념이다. 니힐리즘의 일부로 볼 수 있고 또 보아야만 하는 문학과 관련해서 당신이 <파괴적>이라는 말을 쓰는 것이 우리에게는 놀랍다.
하이데거
내가 말한 문학은 내가 니힐리즘을 생각하는 방식에서는 니힐리스틱하다고 할 수 없다.
슈피겔
당신은 완벽하게 기술화된 상태로 이끌거나 이미 이끈 세계운동(Weltbewegung)을 분명하게 목격하였다. 이것은 앞에서 이미 말한 바이다.
하이데거
그렇다.
슈피겔
좋다. 그러면 자연스럽게 이런 질문이 떠오른다. 개별 인간이 어떤 식으로든 그러한 강제의 그물 망에 영향을 미칠 수 있는가, 혹은 철학이 영향을 미칠 수 있는가, 또는 철학이 개인이나 여러 개인들을 특정한 행동으로 이끌어 양자가 함께 영향을 미칠 수 있는가?
하이데거
짧게 그러나 오랜 숙고를 통해 다음과 같이 대답할 수 있다. 철학은 세계의 현재 상태에 직접적인 변화를 가져올 수 없다. 이 것은 철학뿐만 아니라 모든 인간적인 사고와 노력에 있어서도 마찬가지이다. 오직 신만이 우리를 구원할 수 있다. 유일하게 남은 가능성은 사유와 시작을 통해 신의 출현이나 몰락 속에서 신의 부재를 예비하는 것이다. 부재 하는 신 앞에서 우리는 몰락한다.
슈피겔
당신의 사유와 그러한 신의 도래(到來) 사이에 어떤 하나의 연관이 존재하는가? 당신이 보기에 일종의 인과관계가 거기에 놓였는가? 당신은 우리가 신을 다시 불러내 사유할 수 있다고 생각하는가?
하이데거
우리가 신을 다시 불러내 사유할 수는 없다. 기껏해야 기다림의 예비를 일깨울 수 있을 뿐이다.
슈피겔
그러나 도울 수는 있지 않은가?
하이데거
기다림의 예비가 첫 번째 단계일 것이다. 인간에 의해, 지금 존재하는 바로 그러한 모습으로 세계가 존재할 수 있었던 것은 아니지만, 동시에 인간 없이도 불가능한 것이었다. 이것은 내가 오랜 동안 전승되어왔고, 다의적이며 이제는 낡은 단어인 "존재"라는 말로 부르는 바로 그것이 자신의 개방과 보존, 형성을 위해 인간을 필요로 한다는 사실과 연관되는 것이다. 종종 조롱거리가 되고 얼마간은 부적당한 표현인 "Ge-Stell"이라고 부르는 것에서 나는 기술의 본질을 본다. "Ge-Stell"의 지배는 이런 것이다. 인간은 기술의 본질 속에서 나타나는 인간 자신이 통제할 수 없는 힘에 의해 내몰리고, 호출되고, 도전 받는다. 이러한 이해에 도달하기 위해서는 더 이상 사유가 필요하지 않다. 철학은 종말에 도달했다.
슈피겔
일찍이, 그러나 옛날에만 국한하지 않고, 철학은 간접적으로, 드물게는 직접적으로 많은 영향을 미칠 수 있고, 새로운 흐름의 출현을 촉진할 수 있다고 생각되어 왔다. 독일의 경우 맑스를 제외한다하더라도 칸트, 헤겔에서 니체에 이르는 위대한 이름을 떠올려 본다면, 철학이 간접적인 방식이지만 엄청난 영향을 끼쳐왔음을 발견할 수 있다. 당신은 정말로 철학의 영향력이 종말에 도달했다고 생각하는가? 만약 전통적인 철학이 죽었고 더 이상 존재하지 않는다 하더라도, 그것이 철학의 영향력 - 그것이 항상 거기에 존재해 왔다고 한다면 - 이 오늘날 더 이상 남아있지 않다는 주장까지 포함하는 것은 아니지 않는가?
하이데거
"다른 사유"를 통해 간접적인 영향이 가능하다. 그러나 직접적인 것은 불가능하다. 사유가 세계의 현재 상황을 말하자면 인과적으로 변화시킬 수는 없다.
슈피겔
미안하지만 우리는 지금 철학을 하려는 것이 아니다. 그러나 우리는 이 지점에서 정치와 철학의 경계선에 이르렀다. 우리가 당신을 이런 대화로 이끈 것을 용서해 달라. 당신은 방금 철학과 개별적인 인간은 ... 이외에는 할 수 없다고...
하이데거
기다림의 예비, 신의 도래나 부재에 열리 채로 있음. 부재의 경험이 아무 것도 아닌 것은 아니다. 오히려 <존재와 시간>에서 "존재자들 사이에 빠져있음"이라고 부른 상태로부터 인간을 해방시키는 것이다. 오늘날 존재하는 것에 대한 숙고는 앞서 말한 기다림의 예비에 속한다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 사실상 저 중요한 충격은 밖으로부터, 즉 신이나 다른 어떤 것으로부터 와야만 한다. 따라서 사유는 오늘날 더 이상 스스로, 자율적으로 영향을 미칠 수 없는 것인가? 그러나 그것이 가능하다는 것이 앞선 시대를 살았던 사람들의 생각이며, 내가 볼 때는 우리들의 생각이기도 하다.
하이데거
그러나 직접적인 방식은 아니다.
슈피겔
앞에서 위대한 변혁가로 칸트와 헤겔, 맑스의 이름을 언급했다. 그러나 현대 물리학의 발전과 현대적 세계 일반의 성립과 관련해 라이프니쯔로부터 온 충격도 있다. 당신은 이제 더 이상 그러한 영향을 기대하지 않는다고 말하고 있는 것인가?
하이데거
철학에서는 더 이상 기대하지 않는다. 철학이 지금까지 해온 역할을 과학이 가져갔다. 사유의 <영향>을 적합하게 해명하기 위해서는 작용과 작용함이 무엇을 의미하는지가 더 철저하게 논의되어야만 한다. 충족 이유율(근거율)을 충분히 해명하기 위해서는 먼저 기연, 동인, 촉진, 보조, 방해, 협력 등의 근본적인 구분이 필요하다. 철학은 심리학, 논리학, 정치학 같은 개별 과학들로 해소된다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 어떤 것이 철학의 지위를 넘겨 받게되는가?
하이데거
인공두뇌학(Kybernetik).
슈피겔
또는 자신을 열어두는 경건한 자?
하이데거
그러나 더 이상 철학은 아니다.
슈피겔
그렇다면 무엇이란 말인가?
하이데거
나는 그것을 "다른 사유"라고 부른다.
슈피겔
당신이 다른 사유라고 부르는 것을 좀더 명확하게 정식화해줄 수 있는가?
하이데거
내 강연 <기술에 대한 물음>을 끝맺는 마지막 문장, "물음은 사유의 경건함이다"하는 말을 기억하고 있는가?
슈피겔
우리가 납득할 수 있는 한 문장을 당신의 니체 강연에서 발견했다. 당신은 "철학적 사유에는 가능한 최고의 구속이 지배하기 때문에 위대한 사상가들은 모두 동일한 것을 사유한다. 그럼에도 이 동일한 것은 너무도 본질적이고 풍부해서 결코 개별자가 그것을 모두 퍼낼 수 없다. 개별자는 단지 자신을 거기에 더 강하게 구속시킬 수 있을 뿐이다"하고 말했다. 그러나 당신의 의견에 따르면 이러한 철학적 노력들이 이제는 분명한 종말에 도달했다는 것이 된다.
하이데거
그것들은 종말에 이르렀다. 그러나 그것이 소멸되어 사라져 버린 것은 아니다. 바로 지금과 같은 대화 속에서 새롭게 현재화된다. 지난 30년간 강의와 연구를 통해 이루어진 나의 모든 작업은 핵심적으로는 서양 철학의 해석이었을 뿐이다. 사유의 역사적인 근원으로의 회귀나, 그리스 철학 이후 아직도 물어지지 않고 있는 물음의 숙고는 전통으로부터의 이탈이 아니다. 나는 다음과 같이 말할 뿐이다. 니체가 무너뜨린 전통적인 형이상학의 사유 방식은 이제 막 시작된 기술 시대의 근본 경향을 적절하게 사유하면서 경험할 수 있는 가능성을 더 이상 제공 할 수 없다.
SPIEGEL: It has, of course, always been a misunderstanding of philosophy to think that the philosopher should have some direct effect with his philosophy. Let us return to the beginning. Is it not conceivable that National Socialism can be seen on the one hand as a realization of that “planetary encounter” and on the other as the last, most horrible, strongest, and, at the same time, most helpless protest against this encounter of “planetarily determined technology” and modern human beings? Apparently, you are dealing with opposites in your own person that are such that many by-products of your activities can only really be explained in that you, with different parts of your being that do not touch the philosophical core, cling to many things about which you as a philosopher know that they have no continuity – for instance to concepts like “home” [Heimat], “rootedness,” and similar things. How do planetary technology and “home” fit together?
HEIDEGGER: I would not say that. It seems to me that you take technology too absolutely. I do not think the situation of human beings in the world of planetary technology is an inextricable and inescapable disastrous fate; rather I think that the task of thinking is precisely to help, within its bounds, human beings to attain an adequate relationship to the essence of technology at all. Although National Socialism went in that direction, those people were much too limited in their thinking to gain a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and what has been under way for three centuries.
SPIEGEL: This explicit relationship, do the Americans have it today?
HEIDEGGER: They do not have it either. They are still entangled in a thinking, pragmatism, that fosters technological operating and manipulating but simultaneously blocks the path toward a contemplation of what is characteristic of modern technology. In the meantime, attempts to break away from pragmatic-positivistic thinking are being made here and there in the USA. And which of us can say whether one day in Russia and in China age-old traditions of a “thinking” will not awaken that will assist human beings in making a free relationship to the technological world possible?
Monday, June 02, 2008
Book Reviews: John Durham Peters, "Courting the Abyss"
The advocacy of complete, unfettered freedom of expression may have its roots in Enlightenment doubt and belief in the power of rationality, but it leads to some complex problems about the values of tolerance, cultural transgression and ethical conduct. Asking and pursuing ethical questions in relation to the principle of free speech runs the risk of being criticized as narrowly conservative, judgemental, puritanical or worse – fundamentalist. Such questions are not necessarily associated with any of these even though they are easily reduced to stereotype or caricature. If their dismissal cannot rest on such reductions, what satisfactory response can be made to them?
...
‘Critics of cultural offensiveness, or even those who want to come to terms with the tangle of a conflicted public sphere today, are left with little room to manoeuvre’ (p. 8). It is Peters’ intention to find more room for manoeuvre by taking liberalism itself as the problem, rather than transgression or the taking of offence, and subjecting to sharp critical interrogation its default positions in thinking about the relation between communication and democracy.
...
Here the liberal celebration of free expression does not hold up too well. In the face of the ethical perturbations raised by beliefs and practices opposite to its own, which of course include those in which racist stereotypes and caricatures are
endemic, the only viable option seems to be that of continuing vigorously to champion the virtue of tolerance.
Consorting openly and civilly with the enemy is intended to show the superiority of liberal values, as for instance when, in the name of free speech, the publication of sadistic porn is upheld, or when, in 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there was a substantial Jewish community, some of whom were survivors of the Holocaust.
Peters calls this homeopathic machismo: ‘the daily imbibing of poisons in small doses so that large draughts will not hurt’ (p. 6). The idea is that a little bit of what you don’t fancy does you good. It helps maintain the health of the moral and social order, and is the price you pay for what is the basic good of freedom of expression.
The strange logic in this is that liberty is best maintained by defending those who would destroy it, or as Nietzsche put it, what does not kill me makes me stronger. The strange machismo comes with the display of self-discipline, remaining calm and smiling when cultural taboos are flagrantly broken, or strong and righteous when extremist views are aired.
Enjoying the abuse of mockery is for Peters a central stripe in the liberal temperament, but as he points out, the drama in all this also requires the intolerant critic as a counterexample of the value of self-suspension. We are then back with the stereotypes and caricatures of bigots, prudes, puritanical exponents of censorship and the like, with their usual hostility to namby-pamby liberals. ‘The threefold drama of the liberal enabler, the convention-buster, and the outraged bystander’ shows how neatly ‘the liberals have rigged a double-bind’ for potential objectors to their system.
‘Critics of cultural offensiveness, or even those who want to come to terms with the tangle of a conflicted public sphere today, are left with little room to manoeuvre’ (p. 8). It is Peters’ intention to find more room for manoeuvre by taking liberalism itself as the problem, rather than transgression or the taking of offence, and subjecting to sharp critical interrogation its default positions in thinking about the relation between communication and democracy.
No sin, no virtue; no obscenity, no civility. This takes us to Peters’ own variant on the triumvirate of tolerant liberal, profane transgressor and outraged critic. The transgressor is the abyss-artist, and we immediately think of such notables as de Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Genˆet, along with a ragged line of rock stars and hell-raisers from stage and screen. Self-reflective liberals become abyss-redeemers, existing symbiotically with the abyss-artists, supporting them from the sidelines, supplying the right critical caption at the right time. The third option is abyss-avoidance – preference for the main highway rather than the dark ditch, and refusal of any dalliance with demons. This leads him to ask if, in order to know the abyss, we really need to see a pirate video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded by his kidnappers, as The New Republic (20 June 2002: 8) believes. Are we
scaredy-cats if we don’t? Looking in the mirror and reflecting on the dark historical record and the dark night of the soul may be better intellectual resources.
So the drama of free expression, and its chief characters, continues to unfold, with liberal righteousness one of Peters’ main targets. In going on to explore the liberal ideal of self-abstraction, and the attitude to pain and suffering that informs this, Peters turns to John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. His focus is on Stoicism as a form of public character that continues to inform notions of collective life and communication in western societies. This is linked to further discussion of the free speech contention that refusal to judge is an ethical stance, and of moral abstemiousness in the social sciences.
...
What he is most after in all this is an ethic of receptivity, openness and other-mindedness as a vital element of public communication and political democracy. One difficulty here is the question of how to regard the suffering of distant others, especially in the endless stream of news images of human pain, disaster, misery. How should we respond to this surfeit of information without becoming callous? Can we ever reasonably, responsibly, ethically, filter these images in any way? If so, how does this square with the norm of the informed citizen? Peters examines three ethical premises for the civic act of looking upon suffering – catharsis, compassion and courage – and delivers a keen-eyed review of the politics of pity.
...
It is surprising that Peters ignores the important work of Kelly Oliver in discussing witnessing. Oliver’s critique of neo-Hegelian notions of identity and subjectivity and the ways in which these inform struggles for recognition would seem to offer support for the position Peters wants to develop. Her goal is similar: how ethically responsible, compassionate relations may be possible, and how various obstacles in contemporary thought stand in the way of realizing them. For Oliver, being a witness and bearing witness are central to the development of subjectivity and agency, and to how we negotiate the tensions between our own place and circumstances and our infinite encounters with otherness. Her ethics of witnessing in the contexts of multiculturalism and modern experiences of suffering and trauma appear close to those of Peters, or at least close to some of his major concerns, for he pursues various other themes as well. These include seeking to overcome the impasse between scientific rationality, cultural relativism and moral absolutism, and trying to stem liberalism’s own illiberal tendencies. This splendid book does much to take us beyond the lame truisms of free speech theory and rejuvenate the liberal democratic tradition. It shows us the continuing relevance of various moral and philosophical traditions for thinking about democracy and communication, and the continuing importance of practising intellectual history as cultural criticism.
http://ejc.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/20/4/538.pdf
Michael Pickering
Loughborough University
...
‘Critics of cultural offensiveness, or even those who want to come to terms with the tangle of a conflicted public sphere today, are left with little room to manoeuvre’ (p. 8). It is Peters’ intention to find more room for manoeuvre by taking liberalism itself as the problem, rather than transgression or the taking of offence, and subjecting to sharp critical interrogation its default positions in thinking about the relation between communication and democracy.
...
Here the liberal celebration of free expression does not hold up too well. In the face of the ethical perturbations raised by beliefs and practices opposite to its own, which of course include those in which racist stereotypes and caricatures are
endemic, the only viable option seems to be that of continuing vigorously to champion the virtue of tolerance.
Consorting openly and civilly with the enemy is intended to show the superiority of liberal values, as for instance when, in the name of free speech, the publication of sadistic porn is upheld, or when, in 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there was a substantial Jewish community, some of whom were survivors of the Holocaust.
Peters calls this homeopathic machismo: ‘the daily imbibing of poisons in small doses so that large draughts will not hurt’ (p. 6). The idea is that a little bit of what you don’t fancy does you good. It helps maintain the health of the moral and social order, and is the price you pay for what is the basic good of freedom of expression.
The strange logic in this is that liberty is best maintained by defending those who would destroy it, or as Nietzsche put it, what does not kill me makes me stronger. The strange machismo comes with the display of self-discipline, remaining calm and smiling when cultural taboos are flagrantly broken, or strong and righteous when extremist views are aired.
Enjoying the abuse of mockery is for Peters a central stripe in the liberal temperament, but as he points out, the drama in all this also requires the intolerant critic as a counterexample of the value of self-suspension. We are then back with the stereotypes and caricatures of bigots, prudes, puritanical exponents of censorship and the like, with their usual hostility to namby-pamby liberals. ‘The threefold drama of the liberal enabler, the convention-buster, and the outraged bystander’ shows how neatly ‘the liberals have rigged a double-bind’ for potential objectors to their system.
‘Critics of cultural offensiveness, or even those who want to come to terms with the tangle of a conflicted public sphere today, are left with little room to manoeuvre’ (p. 8). It is Peters’ intention to find more room for manoeuvre by taking liberalism itself as the problem, rather than transgression or the taking of offence, and subjecting to sharp critical interrogation its default positions in thinking about the relation between communication and democracy.
No sin, no virtue; no obscenity, no civility. This takes us to Peters’ own variant on the triumvirate of tolerant liberal, profane transgressor and outraged critic. The transgressor is the abyss-artist, and we immediately think of such notables as de Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Genˆet, along with a ragged line of rock stars and hell-raisers from stage and screen. Self-reflective liberals become abyss-redeemers, existing symbiotically with the abyss-artists, supporting them from the sidelines, supplying the right critical caption at the right time. The third option is abyss-avoidance – preference for the main highway rather than the dark ditch, and refusal of any dalliance with demons. This leads him to ask if, in order to know the abyss, we really need to see a pirate video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded by his kidnappers, as The New Republic (20 June 2002: 8) believes. Are we
scaredy-cats if we don’t? Looking in the mirror and reflecting on the dark historical record and the dark night of the soul may be better intellectual resources.
So the drama of free expression, and its chief characters, continues to unfold, with liberal righteousness one of Peters’ main targets. In going on to explore the liberal ideal of self-abstraction, and the attitude to pain and suffering that informs this, Peters turns to John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. His focus is on Stoicism as a form of public character that continues to inform notions of collective life and communication in western societies. This is linked to further discussion of the free speech contention that refusal to judge is an ethical stance, and of moral abstemiousness in the social sciences.
...
What he is most after in all this is an ethic of receptivity, openness and other-mindedness as a vital element of public communication and political democracy. One difficulty here is the question of how to regard the suffering of distant others, especially in the endless stream of news images of human pain, disaster, misery. How should we respond to this surfeit of information without becoming callous? Can we ever reasonably, responsibly, ethically, filter these images in any way? If so, how does this square with the norm of the informed citizen? Peters examines three ethical premises for the civic act of looking upon suffering – catharsis, compassion and courage – and delivers a keen-eyed review of the politics of pity.
...
It is surprising that Peters ignores the important work of Kelly Oliver in discussing witnessing. Oliver’s critique of neo-Hegelian notions of identity and subjectivity and the ways in which these inform struggles for recognition would seem to offer support for the position Peters wants to develop. Her goal is similar: how ethically responsible, compassionate relations may be possible, and how various obstacles in contemporary thought stand in the way of realizing them. For Oliver, being a witness and bearing witness are central to the development of subjectivity and agency, and to how we negotiate the tensions between our own place and circumstances and our infinite encounters with otherness. Her ethics of witnessing in the contexts of multiculturalism and modern experiences of suffering and trauma appear close to those of Peters, or at least close to some of his major concerns, for he pursues various other themes as well. These include seeking to overcome the impasse between scientific rationality, cultural relativism and moral absolutism, and trying to stem liberalism’s own illiberal tendencies. This splendid book does much to take us beyond the lame truisms of free speech theory and rejuvenate the liberal democratic tradition. It shows us the continuing relevance of various moral and philosophical traditions for thinking about democracy and communication, and the continuing importance of practising intellectual history as cultural criticism.
http://ejc.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/20/4/538.pdf
Michael Pickering
Loughborough University
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Hard-Hearted Liberalism
There are plenty of nonreligious fundamentalists and religious nonfundamentalists around, and the border zones are of great interest. The key is that whatever the vaguely insulting term "fundamentalism" means, it stands less for a fight between religion and secularism than for a fight between different kinds of believers (p. 3)
Ironically, all the lather against censorship can end up creating a moral monopoly at exactly the same moment it is clamming to burst one. Making counterarguments against certain views is to ticklish that the opposition often chooses to remain silent. During his administration, for instance, Ronal Reagan declared "war" on such enemies as drugs, terrorism, and kidnapping. All were failsafe politically because critics of his policies would risk being seen as fans of drugs, terror, or child abuse. In the same way no one wants to look like a fan of censorship. To their credit some liberals have the courage of just this sort of perversity: "let the Nazis march" (sometimes followed quickly by the qualification, "so that we all can see how sick they are") (pp. 20-21).
Yet the irreducible pluralism of the world prevents any program - even the liberal one - from predominating without question. This book attempts to treat the problem of liberalism's liberal tendences (p. 25).
The public involves official "capacities"; the private concerns "peculiar purposes" or "definite persons." The public, like a statue, remains invariant regardless of audience or response. Availability, not reception, is the criterion of publicity (the BBC defended its unwatched program on precisely these grounds). The actual audience does not affect the public nature of the act. Public places are open to all indifferently (p. 26).
This book probes, ultimately, the mystery of iniquity: how to deal with the harsh moral fact that evil seems in some way necessary and even at times beneficial (p. 27).
Courting the Abyss - John D. Peters
Ironically, all the lather against censorship can end up creating a moral monopoly at exactly the same moment it is clamming to burst one. Making counterarguments against certain views is to ticklish that the opposition often chooses to remain silent. During his administration, for instance, Ronal Reagan declared "war" on such enemies as drugs, terrorism, and kidnapping. All were failsafe politically because critics of his policies would risk being seen as fans of drugs, terror, or child abuse. In the same way no one wants to look like a fan of censorship. To their credit some liberals have the courage of just this sort of perversity: "let the Nazis march" (sometimes followed quickly by the qualification, "so that we all can see how sick they are") (pp. 20-21).
Yet the irreducible pluralism of the world prevents any program - even the liberal one - from predominating without question. This book attempts to treat the problem of liberalism's liberal tendences (p. 25).
The public involves official "capacities"; the private concerns "peculiar purposes" or "definite persons." The public, like a statue, remains invariant regardless of audience or response. Availability, not reception, is the criterion of publicity (the BBC defended its unwatched program on precisely these grounds). The actual audience does not affect the public nature of the act. Public places are open to all indifferently (p. 26).
This book probes, ultimately, the mystery of iniquity: how to deal with the harsh moral fact that evil seems in some way necessary and even at times beneficial (p. 27).
Courting the Abyss - John D. Peters
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
John D. Peters at the Mcgill University, Montreal, Canada
On religion, society and territory
On Liberalism and Neutrality
On The Media
On Free Speech
On censorship
On Liberalism and Neutrality
On The Media
On Free Speech
On censorship
Monday, May 05, 2008
Kittler, Discourse Networks
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
First of all, there is no reading Kittler quickly. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 is like a technology-focused sequel to Foucault's The Order of Things. Kittler notes that Foucault ended his archaeology of discourse around 1850, just before things got going with the second industrial revolution and the expansion of media technologies--typewriter, gramophone, and film (each contributing to a medial turn Foucault does not address). The German title Aufschreibesysteme arguably translates more accurately as "notation systems" or "inscription systems"; provided that Kittler does relatively little with the idea of "network", "inscription systems" seems like a better fit with what's here.
What's here? Two epistemes and periods, each corresponding to a century mark. The discourse network of 1800 is set against the discourse network of 1900. The first is characterized by hermeneutics, alphabetization, and (original, solitary, Romantic) poetry (its emblematic figure, Goethe's Faust); the second is characterized by technological media, inscription, and exhaustive data storage and transmission (its emblematic figure, Nietzsche). In David Wellbery's foreword, he calls Discourse Networks a "genealogy of hermeneutics." (xi). After brief chapters explaining how the figures of Faust and Nietzsche prime the epoch under consideration, each section consists of three chapters.
Discourse Network of 1800 (Romantic/hermeneutic)
The Mother's Mouth (25): mother and state as producers/encoders of discourse; normalization of speech (36) via alphabet and primers; consumption and production model; Poet-Author ascendant.
Language Channels (70): language as mere channel (for love); writing from nature (inscription systems naturalized); aims of discourse are love and poetry.
The Toast (124): Literary philosophy driven by interpretation; philosophy joins poetry in the hermeneutic trap; complementarity of genders.
Discourse Network of 1900 (Modern/medially inscribed)
The Great Lalula (206; psychophysics, technological media): materiality!; discourse analytics such as counting words (190); mathematical linguistics (222); memory experiments free from hermeneutics (208); language standards and dehumanization (223); data storage; film and gramophone; typographic spatiality (257).
Rebus (265; psychoanalysis, literature): translation is impossible; transposition is possible only in untranslatability [does this anticipate digitality?] (265-273); Freud transposes dream-images into symbolic relations and written records (274); limited inscription systems determine psychoanalytic subjects; technological media destroy the monopoly of writing.
Queen's Sacrifice (347; gender): antagonism of genders.
Wellbery suggests that Kittler "establishes a positive research program for posthuman criticism" (xii) and that he does so, in part, by analyzing at the level of machines rather than the signifier. In this respect, Discourse Networks has something in common with Fuller's Media Ecologies. Kittler's explanation of technological media suggest that they are capable of subsuming human corporeality, subjugating the subject to data such that agency dissolves and Man and soul no longer apply (258) [Fuller uses this point to distinguish Kittler from McLuhan who suggests a more cooperative dynamic between humans and their extensions].
With the medial turn in the discourse network of 1900, the flight of ideas commences. Language loses its inwardness (243), and individuals learn the autonomy of linguistic expression (239). Kittler identifies one defining locus for the transition between the two epistemes, oddly enough, in talking dolls (232), which he explains shift from repeating parental phrases (dolls of 1800) to the self-relation of children's recorded voices talking or singing to children (Edison). This self relation displaces both the mother and the state--primary encoders in the discourse network of 1800.
Key terms: monopoly of writing (370), genealogy of hermeneutics (xi), presupposition of exteriority (xiii), presupposition of mediality (xiii), presupposition of corporeality (xiv), cybernetic sociology (xviii), Lacanian register (symbolic, imaginary, real) (xxxi), Republic of Scholars (4), free writing (14), free translation (19), hermeneutics (21), cloud of meaning (21), nature's production of discourses (25), mother as primary instructor (26), alphabetization (27), coercive act of alphabetizing (30), purification of speech (37), true programming (49), circuit of legitimation (61, 153), bureaucratic baptism of knowledge (61), inscription (64), silent reading (65), love and poetry (73), translation of the unspeakable (77), fantasia of the library (91, 99), poetry, author, work (109), fixed idea (110), authorial function (111), serial storage of serial data (116), reading mania (144), anthology (147), new humanists (150), deixis (168), German essay (180), genres (183), maker of words (185), free essays (185, 329), typewriter's chaos and intervals (192), mnemotechnics (196), flight of ideas (205), random generators (206), Morgenstern's The Great Lalula (212), catch phrase (222), written verbigeration (228), rebus (274), red marks on essays (330), writer as medium (331).
"Whatever the historical field we are dealing with, in Kittler's view, we are dealing with media as determined by the technological possibilities of the epoch in question. Mediality is the general condition within which, under specific circumstances, something like 'poetry' or 'literature' can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies" (xiii).
"Words have no effect because they are skipped over; reading issues only in writing' authors' names detract from the phenomenon of the book. In retrospect the discourse network of 1800 is a single machine designed to neutralize discursive effects and establish 'our absurd world of educators'--'to the "able servant of the state" this promises a regulating schema'--founded on the ruin of words" (179).
"The discourse network of 1900 could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption" (186).
"Not every discursive configuration rests on an originary production of signs. Circa 1900 several blindnesses--of the writer, of writing, of script--come together to guarantee an elementary blindness: the blind spot of the writing act. Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the philosopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the play between type and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription" (195).
"Writing ceased to wait, quiet and dead, on patient paper for its consumer; writing ceased to be sweetened by pastry baking and mothers' whispering--it now assaulted with the power of shock" (223).
"Standards have nothing to do with Man. They are the criteria of media and psychophysics, which they abruptly link together. Writing, disconnected from all discursive technologies, is no longer based on an individual capable of imbuing it with coherence through connecting curves and the expressive pressure of the pen; it swells in an apparatus that cuts up individuals into test material" (223).
"The ordinary, purposeful use of language--so-called communication with others--is excluded. Syllabic hodgepodge and automatic writing, the language of children and the insane--none of it is meant for understanding eyes or ears; all of it takes the quickest path from experimental conditions to data storage" (229).
"As technological media, the gramophone and film store acoustical and optical data serially with superhuman precision. Invented at the same time by the same engineers, they launched a two-pronged attack on a monopoly that had not been granted to the book until the time of universal alphabetization: a monopoly on the storage of serial data" (245).
"One needs the whole power of one's vision to glimpse the overlooked visibility of texts. The black and white of texts seems so timeless that is never occurs to reader to think of the architects of that space" (256).
"After the destruction of the monopoly of writing, it becomes possible to draw up an account of its functioning" (370).
More passages to keep: x, xiii, xxvi, xxx, 9, 10, 13, 16, 20, 21, 24, 29, 32, 33, 41, 51, 53, 74, 82, 95, 97, 100, 101, 108, 109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 130, 140, 177, 178, 179, 183, 186, 190, 193, 195, 212, 215, 223, 227, 228, 229, 237, 238, 243, 245, 256, 257, 264, 267, 270, 271, 274, 275, 283, 284, 298, 299, 303, 319, 326, 344, 352, 369, 370.
Wait!: epigraphs are mathematical formulas; Wellbery: DN is like Benjamin's Work of Art essay; first half is frustratingly Germanic, referential; dithyramb (181), on counting words (190), Bildung (223), tachistoscope (260), norn (266). Also, read Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud to get the big picture in certain sections.
Source: http://eris.earthwidemoth.com/archives/001418.html
First of all, there is no reading Kittler quickly. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 is like a technology-focused sequel to Foucault's The Order of Things. Kittler notes that Foucault ended his archaeology of discourse around 1850, just before things got going with the second industrial revolution and the expansion of media technologies--typewriter, gramophone, and film (each contributing to a medial turn Foucault does not address). The German title Aufschreibesysteme arguably translates more accurately as "notation systems" or "inscription systems"; provided that Kittler does relatively little with the idea of "network", "inscription systems" seems like a better fit with what's here.
What's here? Two epistemes and periods, each corresponding to a century mark. The discourse network of 1800 is set against the discourse network of 1900. The first is characterized by hermeneutics, alphabetization, and (original, solitary, Romantic) poetry (its emblematic figure, Goethe's Faust); the second is characterized by technological media, inscription, and exhaustive data storage and transmission (its emblematic figure, Nietzsche). In David Wellbery's foreword, he calls Discourse Networks a "genealogy of hermeneutics." (xi). After brief chapters explaining how the figures of Faust and Nietzsche prime the epoch under consideration, each section consists of three chapters.
Discourse Network of 1800 (Romantic/hermeneutic)
The Mother's Mouth (25): mother and state as producers/encoders of discourse; normalization of speech (36) via alphabet and primers; consumption and production model; Poet-Author ascendant.
Language Channels (70): language as mere channel (for love); writing from nature (inscription systems naturalized); aims of discourse are love and poetry.
The Toast (124): Literary philosophy driven by interpretation; philosophy joins poetry in the hermeneutic trap; complementarity of genders.
Discourse Network of 1900 (Modern/medially inscribed)
The Great Lalula (206; psychophysics, technological media): materiality!; discourse analytics such as counting words (190); mathematical linguistics (222); memory experiments free from hermeneutics (208); language standards and dehumanization (223); data storage; film and gramophone; typographic spatiality (257).
Rebus (265; psychoanalysis, literature): translation is impossible; transposition is possible only in untranslatability [does this anticipate digitality?] (265-273); Freud transposes dream-images into symbolic relations and written records (274); limited inscription systems determine psychoanalytic subjects; technological media destroy the monopoly of writing.
Queen's Sacrifice (347; gender): antagonism of genders.
Wellbery suggests that Kittler "establishes a positive research program for posthuman criticism" (xii) and that he does so, in part, by analyzing at the level of machines rather than the signifier. In this respect, Discourse Networks has something in common with Fuller's Media Ecologies. Kittler's explanation of technological media suggest that they are capable of subsuming human corporeality, subjugating the subject to data such that agency dissolves and Man and soul no longer apply (258) [Fuller uses this point to distinguish Kittler from McLuhan who suggests a more cooperative dynamic between humans and their extensions].
With the medial turn in the discourse network of 1900, the flight of ideas commences. Language loses its inwardness (243), and individuals learn the autonomy of linguistic expression (239). Kittler identifies one defining locus for the transition between the two epistemes, oddly enough, in talking dolls (232), which he explains shift from repeating parental phrases (dolls of 1800) to the self-relation of children's recorded voices talking or singing to children (Edison). This self relation displaces both the mother and the state--primary encoders in the discourse network of 1800.
Key terms: monopoly of writing (370), genealogy of hermeneutics (xi), presupposition of exteriority (xiii), presupposition of mediality (xiii), presupposition of corporeality (xiv), cybernetic sociology (xviii), Lacanian register (symbolic, imaginary, real) (xxxi), Republic of Scholars (4), free writing (14), free translation (19), hermeneutics (21), cloud of meaning (21), nature's production of discourses (25), mother as primary instructor (26), alphabetization (27), coercive act of alphabetizing (30), purification of speech (37), true programming (49), circuit of legitimation (61, 153), bureaucratic baptism of knowledge (61), inscription (64), silent reading (65), love and poetry (73), translation of the unspeakable (77), fantasia of the library (91, 99), poetry, author, work (109), fixed idea (110), authorial function (111), serial storage of serial data (116), reading mania (144), anthology (147), new humanists (150), deixis (168), German essay (180), genres (183), maker of words (185), free essays (185, 329), typewriter's chaos and intervals (192), mnemotechnics (196), flight of ideas (205), random generators (206), Morgenstern's The Great Lalula (212), catch phrase (222), written verbigeration (228), rebus (274), red marks on essays (330), writer as medium (331).
"Whatever the historical field we are dealing with, in Kittler's view, we are dealing with media as determined by the technological possibilities of the epoch in question. Mediality is the general condition within which, under specific circumstances, something like 'poetry' or 'literature' can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies" (xiii).
"Words have no effect because they are skipped over; reading issues only in writing' authors' names detract from the phenomenon of the book. In retrospect the discourse network of 1800 is a single machine designed to neutralize discursive effects and establish 'our absurd world of educators'--'to the "able servant of the state" this promises a regulating schema'--founded on the ruin of words" (179).
"The discourse network of 1900 could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption" (186).
"Not every discursive configuration rests on an originary production of signs. Circa 1900 several blindnesses--of the writer, of writing, of script--come together to guarantee an elementary blindness: the blind spot of the writing act. Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the philosopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the play between type and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription" (195).
"Writing ceased to wait, quiet and dead, on patient paper for its consumer; writing ceased to be sweetened by pastry baking and mothers' whispering--it now assaulted with the power of shock" (223).
"Standards have nothing to do with Man. They are the criteria of media and psychophysics, which they abruptly link together. Writing, disconnected from all discursive technologies, is no longer based on an individual capable of imbuing it with coherence through connecting curves and the expressive pressure of the pen; it swells in an apparatus that cuts up individuals into test material" (223).
"The ordinary, purposeful use of language--so-called communication with others--is excluded. Syllabic hodgepodge and automatic writing, the language of children and the insane--none of it is meant for understanding eyes or ears; all of it takes the quickest path from experimental conditions to data storage" (229).
"As technological media, the gramophone and film store acoustical and optical data serially with superhuman precision. Invented at the same time by the same engineers, they launched a two-pronged attack on a monopoly that had not been granted to the book until the time of universal alphabetization: a monopoly on the storage of serial data" (245).
"One needs the whole power of one's vision to glimpse the overlooked visibility of texts. The black and white of texts seems so timeless that is never occurs to reader to think of the architects of that space" (256).
"After the destruction of the monopoly of writing, it becomes possible to draw up an account of its functioning" (370).
More passages to keep: x, xiii, xxvi, xxx, 9, 10, 13, 16, 20, 21, 24, 29, 32, 33, 41, 51, 53, 74, 82, 95, 97, 100, 101, 108, 109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 130, 140, 177, 178, 179, 183, 186, 190, 193, 195, 212, 215, 223, 227, 228, 229, 237, 238, 243, 245, 256, 257, 264, 267, 270, 271, 274, 275, 283, 284, 298, 299, 303, 319, 326, 344, 352, 369, 370.
Wait!: epigraphs are mathematical formulas; Wellbery: DN is like Benjamin's Work of Art essay; first half is frustratingly Germanic, referential; dithyramb (181), on counting words (190), Bildung (223), tachistoscope (260), norn (266). Also, read Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud to get the big picture in certain sections.
Source: http://eris.earthwidemoth.com/archives/001418.html
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Discourse Networks (1984)
That Friedrich Kittler’s concept of the discourse network was perceived as a provocation by a significant number of German literary scholars may be explained by the inherent challenge that this concept represented for the hermeneutic tradition. As David Wellbery stated in the foreword to the English translation of Discourse Networks, Kittler used “poststructuralist tools” to question a premise of textuality and interpretation that had at the time of the book’s first publication become self-evident in most German universities.
The German title, Aufschreibesysteme or “systems of notation” reveals the shift from a focus on the interpretation of texts as the basis for discovering the nature of meaning to a focus on systems for “writing down” culture or, as Kittler puts it, “inscribing” and transmitting culture. Regarded through this lens, the history of Western civilization, reveals not an historically coherent human search for tools to express meaning and being, but rather a history of media and systems which, by nature of their technological possibilities, mark a spectrum of information from which meaning is “filtered out”. As Wellbery states:
To be sure, this historicism is no longer the narrative of a subject – a hero of knowledge, labor, or liberty – in the manner of the master plots of modernity [but one of] discourse networks – the linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and bodies – that have orchestrated European culture for the past two hundred years. (Wellbery, xiii)
Thus, with this shift in focus, Kittler replaces any grand narrative of literature, human understanding or communication with a “tale of technology” – a media narrative that hovers over the world in which authors, speakers, readers and cultures mark or define themselves by means of stored and transmitted information.
In order to reveal the mechanics of a discourse network at work, Kittler begins his book with a new perspective on a sacred icon of German Literature – Goethe’s Faust.
Seen from Kittler’s perspective, the opening sigh in Faust – the “Ach” – is a pure expression of soul, but only until it is followed by another word, at which point it becomes language; once in the realm of language, the expression of the spirit becomes symbolic self-reflection, the purity of which becomes lost in “meaning”, or “trying to mean”. Thus, although the impetus for the Faustian, intellectual search for meaning is the desire for a direct connection to spirit, the soul’s search for spirit outside of itself immediately confronts the problem of mediality and language; for as a scholar, Faust undertakes his search in the world of “the word”. The first concrete spirit to which the word leads is the author. However, rather than encountering the soul or spirit of the author within the word, Faust encounters a product – the book – behind which the author...
Griggs, Deborah. "Discourse Networks". The Literary Encyclopedia. 6 February 2006. Accessed 5 May 2008.
<http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1649>
구데리안 장군
구데리안 장군의 초단파 라디오 우울 테크놀로지
이, 실 없고도 짧은 이야기는 롤링 스톤즈의 "악마에의 공감Sympathy for the devil"의 한 대목에서 출발한다.
"장군이 되어 탱크를 몰았지/
전격전이 회오리치고/
시체 썩는 냄새가 진동할 때"
이 가사를 따라가다 보면, 이 문제의 장군은 누구일까라는 의문이 생겨나게 된다. 이언 스베너니어스는 '시체 썩는 냄새' 대목에 주목하면서, 장군이 나찌 측의 장군보다는 소련 측의 장군일 가능성이 높다고 추정한다. 그리고는 "스탈린그라드와 크르슈크에서 나찌군을 격파해 2차대전의 향방을 바꾸어 놓은 러시아의 탱크부대 지휘관 츠코프 장군"일 가능성이 높다고 주장한다.
하지만 "시체 썩는 냄새"란 기계화의 총체 전쟁이 가져온 비인간화의 비참한 상황을 묘사하는 관용어구에 가깝지 않을까? 벤야민은 후각적 기억이야말로 가장 강고한 기억의 형식이라고 이야기한 적이 있다. 그것은 기억 속에 가장 오래 잔존하면서 끊임 없이 그 기억의 내용을 상기시키는 힘을 지닌다는 것이다. 이런 기억의 힘이 꼭 소련군 측에만 작용했으리라고 판단할 뚜렷한 근거는 없다. 진공의 상태로 무장하지 않는한, 독일 장병들 역시 전장 어느 곳에나 편재했던 후각적 경험으로부터 자유롭긴 힘들었을 것이다. 그러니까 "시체 썩는 냄새"란 말 그대로 전쟁의 참혹함에 대한 기호일 뿐, 가사의 맥락 상, 구체적인 지시 대상을 지닌다고 보긴 힘들다.
이런 측면에서 보자면, 스베너니어스의 방향과는 정반대로, 오히려 해석의 방점은 "전격전"과 "탱크"에 찍혀야 한다. 이쯤 되면, 프리드리히 키틀러의 지적대로, 문제의 장군이, 전쟁 초기 전격전을 성공적으로 이끌면서 기계화 전쟁의 새로운 지평을 열어 재친, 독일 기갑부대의 하인츠 구데리안 장군임이 쉽게 추정해볼 수 있다. 특히 구데리안 장군이 이끄는 독일 기갑 부대가 전격전의 선봉에 설 수 있었던 이유를 살펴보면, 이런 추정은 거의 확신에 이르게 된다. 구데리안 장군은 탱크들 간의, 기갑 부대와 다른 부대들 간의 효과적인 커뮤니케이션을 위해 초단파VHF 라디오를 사용했다. 이를 통해 독일군은 커뮤니케이션 상의 마찰을 최소화하면서, 작전 수행 능력을 극대화할 수 있었다. 이는 대규모의 작전 수행에 있어 커뮤니케이션의 중요성을 제대로 인식한 결과였다. 이에 반해, 전격전의 일차 타격 대상이었던 프랑스 기갑 부대는 마지노선의 안온함에 취해, 원시적인 수준의 커뮤니케이션 전략에 자족하고 있었다. 이를 테면, 탱크의 전차장이 해치를 열고 나와 직접 신호 깃발을 흔들면서 명령을 전달하는 식이었다. 프랑스 기갑 부대는 나폴레옹의 시대로부터 그리 멀리 벗어나 있지 못했던 것이다.
이 대목에서 중요한 것은, 이언 스베너니어스의 지적대로, 롤링 스톤즈가 미국의 팝 라디오에 수용된 밴드라는 점이다. 미국의 FM 라디오가, 도심과 교외를 연결하는 고속화도로의 자가용 운전자라는 특화된 니치 마켓을 상대로 발전했다는 점은 잘 알려진 사실이다. 락 음악을 크게 틀어놓고 고속화도로를 질주하는 남성 운전자, 그가 "악마에의 공감"을 흥얼거릴 때, 그는 무의식적으로 독일 기갑 무대의 탱크 승무원로 승격된다. 지휘관의 명령이 실시간으로 중계되던 라디오 방송은 "섹스와 마약"을 숭배하는 락음악의 FM 방송으로, 나찌의 구데리안 장군은 롤링 스톤즈의 믹 재거로 대체되었을 뿐이다. 또한, 후기 자본주의의 소비 사회로 이미 진입한 상황, 쇼핑몰에 넘쳐나는 상품들은, 전장에서 내동이쳐진 채 썩어가는 시체와 묘한 댓구를 이룬다. 실제로 쇼핑몰의 상품들과 전장의 시체들, 이 둘 간의 과도한 연상 작용은 20세기 미국적 괴물의 탄생을 가능케 하기도 한다. 시체 썩는 냄새를 풍기며 쇼핑몰 주변에 엉금엉금 집결하던 조지 로메로의 좀비들이 바로 그 괴물이다.
"장군이 되어 탱크를 몰았지/
전격전이 회오리치고/
시체 썩는 냄새가 진동할 때"
롤링 스톤즈가 이 가사를 포효하는 순간, 그들은 "하이웨이 스타"와 "스피드 킹"의 딥퍼플이 백인 남성 노동자 계급의 마초 멘탈리티로 인해 보지 못했던 락 음악의 역사적 맥락을 힐끗 엿보았던 셈이다. 아마도 로버트 벤투리와 스콧 브라운이라면, 꽤나 캐딜락 컨버터블을 몰고무언가를 배울 목적으로 라스베가스를 향하는 길목에서 꼭 한번 귀담아볼만한 이야기일 것이다.
"건축가가 되어 캐딜락을 몰았지/
가속 페달을 힘껏 밟고/
차창 너머로 네온사인이 희번득거릴 때/"
이런 맥락에서 보자면, 림프비스킷이나 콘의 하드코어 락을 틀어놓고 이라크의 사막을 질주하는 미 기갑부대 장병을, 텔레비전 화면에서 보며 섬뜩해 했던 것도, 다 이유가 있었던 셈이다. "섬뜩함"이 uncanny로 번역될 수 있다면 말이다
http://blog.naver.com/ecri11?Redirect=Log&logNo=9897558
이, 실 없고도 짧은 이야기는 롤링 스톤즈의 "악마에의 공감Sympathy for the devil"의 한 대목에서 출발한다.
"장군이 되어 탱크를 몰았지/
전격전이 회오리치고/
시체 썩는 냄새가 진동할 때"
이 가사를 따라가다 보면, 이 문제의 장군은 누구일까라는 의문이 생겨나게 된다. 이언 스베너니어스는 '시체 썩는 냄새' 대목에 주목하면서, 장군이 나찌 측의 장군보다는 소련 측의 장군일 가능성이 높다고 추정한다. 그리고는 "스탈린그라드와 크르슈크에서 나찌군을 격파해 2차대전의 향방을 바꾸어 놓은 러시아의 탱크부대 지휘관 츠코프 장군"일 가능성이 높다고 주장한다.
하지만 "시체 썩는 냄새"란 기계화의 총체 전쟁이 가져온 비인간화의 비참한 상황을 묘사하는 관용어구에 가깝지 않을까? 벤야민은 후각적 기억이야말로 가장 강고한 기억의 형식이라고 이야기한 적이 있다. 그것은 기억 속에 가장 오래 잔존하면서 끊임 없이 그 기억의 내용을 상기시키는 힘을 지닌다는 것이다. 이런 기억의 힘이 꼭 소련군 측에만 작용했으리라고 판단할 뚜렷한 근거는 없다. 진공의 상태로 무장하지 않는한, 독일 장병들 역시 전장 어느 곳에나 편재했던 후각적 경험으로부터 자유롭긴 힘들었을 것이다. 그러니까 "시체 썩는 냄새"란 말 그대로 전쟁의 참혹함에 대한 기호일 뿐, 가사의 맥락 상, 구체적인 지시 대상을 지닌다고 보긴 힘들다.
이런 측면에서 보자면, 스베너니어스의 방향과는 정반대로, 오히려 해석의 방점은 "전격전"과 "탱크"에 찍혀야 한다. 이쯤 되면, 프리드리히 키틀러의 지적대로, 문제의 장군이, 전쟁 초기 전격전을 성공적으로 이끌면서 기계화 전쟁의 새로운 지평을 열어 재친, 독일 기갑부대의 하인츠 구데리안 장군임이 쉽게 추정해볼 수 있다. 특히 구데리안 장군이 이끄는 독일 기갑 부대가 전격전의 선봉에 설 수 있었던 이유를 살펴보면, 이런 추정은 거의 확신에 이르게 된다. 구데리안 장군은 탱크들 간의, 기갑 부대와 다른 부대들 간의 효과적인 커뮤니케이션을 위해 초단파VHF 라디오를 사용했다. 이를 통해 독일군은 커뮤니케이션 상의 마찰을 최소화하면서, 작전 수행 능력을 극대화할 수 있었다. 이는 대규모의 작전 수행에 있어 커뮤니케이션의 중요성을 제대로 인식한 결과였다. 이에 반해, 전격전의 일차 타격 대상이었던 프랑스 기갑 부대는 마지노선의 안온함에 취해, 원시적인 수준의 커뮤니케이션 전략에 자족하고 있었다. 이를 테면, 탱크의 전차장이 해치를 열고 나와 직접 신호 깃발을 흔들면서 명령을 전달하는 식이었다. 프랑스 기갑 부대는 나폴레옹의 시대로부터 그리 멀리 벗어나 있지 못했던 것이다.
이 대목에서 중요한 것은, 이언 스베너니어스의 지적대로, 롤링 스톤즈가 미국의 팝 라디오에 수용된 밴드라는 점이다. 미국의 FM 라디오가, 도심과 교외를 연결하는 고속화도로의 자가용 운전자라는 특화된 니치 마켓을 상대로 발전했다는 점은 잘 알려진 사실이다. 락 음악을 크게 틀어놓고 고속화도로를 질주하는 남성 운전자, 그가 "악마에의 공감"을 흥얼거릴 때, 그는 무의식적으로 독일 기갑 무대의 탱크 승무원로 승격된다. 지휘관의 명령이 실시간으로 중계되던 라디오 방송은 "섹스와 마약"을 숭배하는 락음악의 FM 방송으로, 나찌의 구데리안 장군은 롤링 스톤즈의 믹 재거로 대체되었을 뿐이다. 또한, 후기 자본주의의 소비 사회로 이미 진입한 상황, 쇼핑몰에 넘쳐나는 상품들은, 전장에서 내동이쳐진 채 썩어가는 시체와 묘한 댓구를 이룬다. 실제로 쇼핑몰의 상품들과 전장의 시체들, 이 둘 간의 과도한 연상 작용은 20세기 미국적 괴물의 탄생을 가능케 하기도 한다. 시체 썩는 냄새를 풍기며 쇼핑몰 주변에 엉금엉금 집결하던 조지 로메로의 좀비들이 바로 그 괴물이다.
"장군이 되어 탱크를 몰았지/
전격전이 회오리치고/
시체 썩는 냄새가 진동할 때"
롤링 스톤즈가 이 가사를 포효하는 순간, 그들은 "하이웨이 스타"와 "스피드 킹"의 딥퍼플이 백인 남성 노동자 계급의 마초 멘탈리티로 인해 보지 못했던 락 음악의 역사적 맥락을 힐끗 엿보았던 셈이다. 아마도 로버트 벤투리와 스콧 브라운이라면, 꽤나 캐딜락 컨버터블을 몰고무언가를 배울 목적으로 라스베가스를 향하는 길목에서 꼭 한번 귀담아볼만한 이야기일 것이다.
"건축가가 되어 캐딜락을 몰았지/
가속 페달을 힘껏 밟고/
차창 너머로 네온사인이 희번득거릴 때/"
이런 맥락에서 보자면, 림프비스킷이나 콘의 하드코어 락을 틀어놓고 이라크의 사막을 질주하는 미 기갑부대 장병을, 텔레비전 화면에서 보며 섬뜩해 했던 것도, 다 이유가 있었던 셈이다. "섬뜩함"이 uncanny로 번역될 수 있다면 말이다
http://blog.naver.com/ecri11?Redirect=Log&logNo=9897558
타자기
우리가 글을 쓰는 데 사용하는 재료는 자신의 몫만큼 우리의 사고에 영향을 미친다 _ 니체
타자기는 정보를 공간화 함으로써 그 목표를 성취한다. 알파벳 문자들은 표준화 된 배열에 따라 분산되고, 각각은 사용자에 의해 즉각적으로 이용 가능하다. 정보는 시각적인 상호작용의 부족에도 불구하고 접근 가능한 것으로 묘사된다. “공간적으로 지시된 이산적인 기호들, 이것이 타자기가 성취한 진정한 혁신이다, 속도의 증대보다도 더 말이다.
기록의 증가는, 삶의 복잡성의 증가를 보여줄 뿐만 아니라, 그것을 가능케 하는 것이기도 했다. 특히 그것은 거대 기업과 거대 관료주의의 성장을 가능케 했다.
타자기는 글쓰기 이전에 놓인 텅 빈 공간(장재성의 영역)은 감추고 있다. 따라서 역사적으로 독특한 균열의 순간에 “손과 눈, 그리고 글자를 분리시킨다.” 손은 여기에 나타나는 반면, 글쓰기는 저기에 나타난다. 타이핑은 육체로부터 분리된 정보의 공간을 만들어 낸다. 그것은 원형의 사이버 스페이스이다.
이와 같은 탈육체화는 두드러진 표준화에서 기인한다. 그것은 이미 자판 배열의 결과로 묘사된 바 있다. 손으로 글쓰는 동작이 ‘자연에서 문화로의 연속적인 전이’, 다시 말해 언어 이전의 사유에서 기호로의 전이였다면, 타이핑 동작은 ‘셀 수 있는 공간화된 원천들 중 하나를 선택하는 일’이었다. 프리드리히 키틀러는 자연과 육체로부터 집접 형성된 필기를, 문화 체계를 통해 뚜렷하게 매체화된 타이핑과 구분한다.
타자기는 육체적 통제의 상실 또는 더 나아가 육체 자체의 상실마저도 야기할 수 있었다. 그러나 결과는, 타이핑된 표준의 완벽함에 도달하기를 열망하는 필기였다.
-포스트 휴먼 디자인 _ 비정한 사물들
타자기는 정보를 공간화 함으로써 그 목표를 성취한다. 알파벳 문자들은 표준화 된 배열에 따라 분산되고, 각각은 사용자에 의해 즉각적으로 이용 가능하다. 정보는 시각적인 상호작용의 부족에도 불구하고 접근 가능한 것으로 묘사된다. “공간적으로 지시된 이산적인 기호들, 이것이 타자기가 성취한 진정한 혁신이다, 속도의 증대보다도 더 말이다.
기록의 증가는, 삶의 복잡성의 증가를 보여줄 뿐만 아니라, 그것을 가능케 하는 것이기도 했다. 특히 그것은 거대 기업과 거대 관료주의의 성장을 가능케 했다.
타자기는 글쓰기 이전에 놓인 텅 빈 공간(장재성의 영역)은 감추고 있다. 따라서 역사적으로 독특한 균열의 순간에 “손과 눈, 그리고 글자를 분리시킨다.” 손은 여기에 나타나는 반면, 글쓰기는 저기에 나타난다. 타이핑은 육체로부터 분리된 정보의 공간을 만들어 낸다. 그것은 원형의 사이버 스페이스이다.
이와 같은 탈육체화는 두드러진 표준화에서 기인한다. 그것은 이미 자판 배열의 결과로 묘사된 바 있다. 손으로 글쓰는 동작이 ‘자연에서 문화로의 연속적인 전이’, 다시 말해 언어 이전의 사유에서 기호로의 전이였다면, 타이핑 동작은 ‘셀 수 있는 공간화된 원천들 중 하나를 선택하는 일’이었다. 프리드리히 키틀러는 자연과 육체로부터 집접 형성된 필기를, 문화 체계를 통해 뚜렷하게 매체화된 타이핑과 구분한다.
타자기는 육체적 통제의 상실 또는 더 나아가 육체 자체의 상실마저도 야기할 수 있었다. 그러나 결과는, 타이핑된 표준의 완벽함에 도달하기를 열망하는 필기였다.
-포스트 휴먼 디자인 _ 비정한 사물들
매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학
[편집장과한권의책] 매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학: 매체예술, 새 미학의 가능성을 열다
매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학/박영욱 지음/향연/1만5000원
편집자로서 박영욱이라는 철학자의 책을 출간하는 일은 참으로 반가운 일이다. 다방면으로 부지런히 공부를 하고 학문적으로 체계를 잡아가는 그에게서 또 한 사람 애지자(愛知者)의 모습을 본다. 교정 면에서도 그의 글을 살펴보는 일은 노동이 아니다. 수월치 않은 전문적인 내용을 불편 없이 따라갈 수 있게 해주는 정돈된 글쓰기를 하는 덕분이다.
‘매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학’은 사회철학적 관심의 지평을 문화와 예술의 영역, 대중음악, 예술사, 매체예술, 건축 디자인 분야로 확대하여 공부하는 그의 매체와 관련된 연구서이다. 그는 이 책에서 “매체 일반에 대한 인식론적 존재론적 검토로부터 사운드 아트라는 구체적인 매체예술 장르에 이르기까지, 매체가 새로운 미학의 가능성을 어떻게 구현하고 있는지” 논의하고 있다.
“프랭크 게리가 설계한 빌바오의 구겐하임 미술관은 마치 고전역학을 비웃기라도 하듯 불규칙적인 곡면으로 자유분방하게 휘어져 있다. 수직 기둥이나 내력벽의 개념이 아예 적용되지 않는 듯 보이는 이 건물의 설계는 디지털의 힘에 의해서만 가능한 것이다. 그리고 이러한 성공의 배후에는 컴퓨터에 입력된 정교한 알고리듬 체계가 바로 현실을 그대로 반영한다는 소박실재론의 신앙이 숨어 있다. 매체에 대해서 철학적인 문제의식을 던지는 것은 바로 이러한 이유에서다.”
이처럼 이 책은 매체에 잠재되어 있는 엄청난 사용 가능성을 살펴보고, 매체가 우리에게 남기는 문제를 제기하고 있다.
점점 새로운 매체가 등장하면서 매체가 단순히 어떤 연결 물질이나 정보 전달 장치, 삶을 편리하게 해주는 기계적 발명품 이상으로, 인간의 새로운 사유나 사회적 존재양식을 가져온다는 시각이 형성되고 있다. 더불어 이에 대한 철학적 예술적 반성도 본격적으로 이루어지기 시작하고 있다. 이러한 상황에서 특히 이 책의 성과라고도 할 수 있는, 매체예술과 들뢰즈의 철학 연결, 기계에 대한 정의 작업, 키틀러 이론에 대한 논의, 사운드 아트에 대한 이론적인 접근 등은 이 분야의 연구자들에게 새로운 영감을 주리라 여겨진다.
출판 편집자가 자신이 크게 신뢰하는 저자의 원고를 만나고, 출간 작업 내내 그에 대한 기대를 확인하는 설렘을 준 책에 남다른 애착을 갖는 것은 당연한 일이리라. ‘매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학’은 그러한 점에서도 소중한 의미가 있는 책이다.
오미숙 향연 대표·편집장
매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학/박영욱 지음/향연/1만5000원
편집자로서 박영욱이라는 철학자의 책을 출간하는 일은 참으로 반가운 일이다. 다방면으로 부지런히 공부를 하고 학문적으로 체계를 잡아가는 그에게서 또 한 사람 애지자(愛知者)의 모습을 본다. 교정 면에서도 그의 글을 살펴보는 일은 노동이 아니다. 수월치 않은 전문적인 내용을 불편 없이 따라갈 수 있게 해주는 정돈된 글쓰기를 하는 덕분이다.
‘매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학’은 사회철학적 관심의 지평을 문화와 예술의 영역, 대중음악, 예술사, 매체예술, 건축 디자인 분야로 확대하여 공부하는 그의 매체와 관련된 연구서이다. 그는 이 책에서 “매체 일반에 대한 인식론적 존재론적 검토로부터 사운드 아트라는 구체적인 매체예술 장르에 이르기까지, 매체가 새로운 미학의 가능성을 어떻게 구현하고 있는지” 논의하고 있다.
“프랭크 게리가 설계한 빌바오의 구겐하임 미술관은 마치 고전역학을 비웃기라도 하듯 불규칙적인 곡면으로 자유분방하게 휘어져 있다. 수직 기둥이나 내력벽의 개념이 아예 적용되지 않는 듯 보이는 이 건물의 설계는 디지털의 힘에 의해서만 가능한 것이다. 그리고 이러한 성공의 배후에는 컴퓨터에 입력된 정교한 알고리듬 체계가 바로 현실을 그대로 반영한다는 소박실재론의 신앙이 숨어 있다. 매체에 대해서 철학적인 문제의식을 던지는 것은 바로 이러한 이유에서다.”
이처럼 이 책은 매체에 잠재되어 있는 엄청난 사용 가능성을 살펴보고, 매체가 우리에게 남기는 문제를 제기하고 있다.
점점 새로운 매체가 등장하면서 매체가 단순히 어떤 연결 물질이나 정보 전달 장치, 삶을 편리하게 해주는 기계적 발명품 이상으로, 인간의 새로운 사유나 사회적 존재양식을 가져온다는 시각이 형성되고 있다. 더불어 이에 대한 철학적 예술적 반성도 본격적으로 이루어지기 시작하고 있다. 이러한 상황에서 특히 이 책의 성과라고도 할 수 있는, 매체예술과 들뢰즈의 철학 연결, 기계에 대한 정의 작업, 키틀러 이론에 대한 논의, 사운드 아트에 대한 이론적인 접근 등은 이 분야의 연구자들에게 새로운 영감을 주리라 여겨진다.
출판 편집자가 자신이 크게 신뢰하는 저자의 원고를 만나고, 출간 작업 내내 그에 대한 기대를 확인하는 설렘을 준 책에 남다른 애착을 갖는 것은 당연한 일이리라. ‘매체, 매체예술 그리고 철학’은 그러한 점에서도 소중한 의미가 있는 책이다.
오미숙 향연 대표·편집장
키틀러의 기재시스템
[책벌레의 책돋보기－키틀러의 기재시스템] 기록매체의 발전과 서구문학 조명
현존 독일어권의 가장 유명한 매체이론가중의 한 사람인 프리드리히 A. 키틀러(Friedrich A. Kittler)는 그의 학문적 근원에서 보자면 독문학 전공의 전통적인 문예학자라고 여겨질 수 있을 것이다. 그러나 키틀러가 문학을 대하는 태도는 전통적인 문예학 방법과는 사뭇 달라 보인다. 키틀러의 견해에 따르자면 우리는 현대의 정보 기술적 규정성에 대한 염두 없이는 문학과 문학연구를 더 이상 이야기 할 수 없는 상황에 직면해 있다.
키틀러는 문학연구에 있어서의 텍스트의 의미연관성을 추구하는 해석학적 방법론뿐만 아니라 문학작품에 반영된 제생산관계의 해명을 시도하는 문학사회학적 방법론에 대해서도 비판을 가한다. 키틀러는 ‘의미’와 ‘노동’이라는 주요 개념에 근거한 해석학과 문화사회학의 방법론에는 ‘정보’라는 개념이 배제되어 있다고 주장한다. 키틀러는 ‘정보’개념에 기반하여 서구의 문예사를 매체사적 관점에서 새로이 서술하고 있는데, 문자와 인쇄된 책의 기능을 정보의 저장이라는 관점에서 바라보자면 키틀러는 정보의 저장을 가능하게하고 그 정보의 확산을 도모하는 기술적 기제들을 ‘기재(記載)시스템(Aufschreibesystem)’이라고 명명하고 있다.
키틀러는 기재시스템의 질적 변화에 따라서 역사를 3시대로 구분하고 있다. 키틀러가 ‘기재시스템 1800’이라고 부르는 시기는 구텐베르크의 금속활자 발명(1440〜1454)에서 19세기말에 이르는 인쇄 서적이 주도적인 매체로 군림하던 시기다. 괴테를 비롯한 여러 시성(詩聖)들의 권위가 절대적이었던 시기로서 지식을 축적하여 시공간적인 차이를 극복하는데 활자매체가 가히 독점적인 지위를 차지하였다.
활자매체의 독점적인 지위는 20세기에 접어들면서 사진, 축음기, 영화, 타자기 등의 발명과 연이은 녹음기, 라디오와 텔레비전의 보급에 따라서 활자 매체의 독점 시기와는 판이한 ‘기재시스템 1900’을 도출시키고 있다. 문자뿐 아니라, 이미지와 소리의 저장이 가능해진 기술적 기제의 발전은 소위 ‘구텐베르크 은하계’의 종말을 야기하게 된 것이다. 기재시스템 1900을 뒤이은 ‘디지털시대에 기반한 총체적인 매체결합’의 시기는 컴퓨터기술에 기반하고 있다.
키틀러에 따르면 데이터의 변화와 조작이 용이한 이 시기에 이르면 기술이 인간에게 접합되어지기보다는 절대적인 지식이 무한히 반복하는 루프로 전락한다. 키틀러는 말하자면 매 시기 기재시스템을 규정지우는 매체적 기술의 자율성을 염두에 두고 있어서 마셜 맥루한이 인류의 매체사에서 읽어내고 있는 ‘인간의 확장으로서의 미디어’라는 견해와는 차이를 보인다.
김영룡 문학평론가
현존 독일어권의 가장 유명한 매체이론가중의 한 사람인 프리드리히 A. 키틀러(Friedrich A. Kittler)는 그의 학문적 근원에서 보자면 독문학 전공의 전통적인 문예학자라고 여겨질 수 있을 것이다. 그러나 키틀러가 문학을 대하는 태도는 전통적인 문예학 방법과는 사뭇 달라 보인다. 키틀러의 견해에 따르자면 우리는 현대의 정보 기술적 규정성에 대한 염두 없이는 문학과 문학연구를 더 이상 이야기 할 수 없는 상황에 직면해 있다.
키틀러는 문학연구에 있어서의 텍스트의 의미연관성을 추구하는 해석학적 방법론뿐만 아니라 문학작품에 반영된 제생산관계의 해명을 시도하는 문학사회학적 방법론에 대해서도 비판을 가한다. 키틀러는 ‘의미’와 ‘노동’이라는 주요 개념에 근거한 해석학과 문화사회학의 방법론에는 ‘정보’라는 개념이 배제되어 있다고 주장한다. 키틀러는 ‘정보’개념에 기반하여 서구의 문예사를 매체사적 관점에서 새로이 서술하고 있는데, 문자와 인쇄된 책의 기능을 정보의 저장이라는 관점에서 바라보자면 키틀러는 정보의 저장을 가능하게하고 그 정보의 확산을 도모하는 기술적 기제들을 ‘기재(記載)시스템(Aufschreibesystem)’이라고 명명하고 있다.
키틀러는 기재시스템의 질적 변화에 따라서 역사를 3시대로 구분하고 있다. 키틀러가 ‘기재시스템 1800’이라고 부르는 시기는 구텐베르크의 금속활자 발명(1440〜1454)에서 19세기말에 이르는 인쇄 서적이 주도적인 매체로 군림하던 시기다. 괴테를 비롯한 여러 시성(詩聖)들의 권위가 절대적이었던 시기로서 지식을 축적하여 시공간적인 차이를 극복하는데 활자매체가 가히 독점적인 지위를 차지하였다.
활자매체의 독점적인 지위는 20세기에 접어들면서 사진, 축음기, 영화, 타자기 등의 발명과 연이은 녹음기, 라디오와 텔레비전의 보급에 따라서 활자 매체의 독점 시기와는 판이한 ‘기재시스템 1900’을 도출시키고 있다. 문자뿐 아니라, 이미지와 소리의 저장이 가능해진 기술적 기제의 발전은 소위 ‘구텐베르크 은하계’의 종말을 야기하게 된 것이다. 기재시스템 1900을 뒤이은 ‘디지털시대에 기반한 총체적인 매체결합’의 시기는 컴퓨터기술에 기반하고 있다.
키틀러에 따르면 데이터의 변화와 조작이 용이한 이 시기에 이르면 기술이 인간에게 접합되어지기보다는 절대적인 지식이 무한히 반복하는 루프로 전락한다. 키틀러는 말하자면 매 시기 기재시스템을 규정지우는 매체적 기술의 자율성을 염두에 두고 있어서 마셜 맥루한이 인류의 매체사에서 읽어내고 있는 ‘인간의 확장으로서의 미디어’라는 견해와는 차이를 보인다.
김영룡 문학평론가
Review on Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
매체이론이나 매체예술에 관한 논의에서 새로운 매체의 속성을 규명하는 것에 연구의 초점이 맞춰져 왔다. 이러한 경향에 대해 매체연구가 지나치게 매체 자제에 함몰되어 있는 것은 아닌가 하는 지적도 있어왔다. 그렇다면 우리는 왜 이렇게 매체의 문제에 집중하는 것일까?
그것은 바로 매체가 그 시대 사람들의 사유방식과 인식체계 그리고 역사사회적 구조에까지 영향을 미치고 있는 점을 중요하게 바라보고 있기 때문일 것이다. 오늘 소개할 독일의 매체 이론가 프리드리히 키틀러(Friedrich A. Kittler) 역시 시대마다 새롭게 등장한 매체에 집중하고 있는데, 그는 한 시대를 대표하는 매체들이 그 시대의 역사사회적 변혁와 새로운 담론형성의 토대로 기능하는 것으로 보고 있다.
독일과 미국을 넘나들며 활발히 활동하고 있는 매체이론가인 프리드리히 키틀러는 아직까지 국내에는 본격적으로 소개되지 않았지만 최근 전공자들 사이에서 그의 매체이론 연구에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있다. 오늘 소개할『축음기, 영화, 타자기(Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)』는 1985년에 처음 출판된 독일어 본이 아닌 1999년 미국 스탠포드 대학 출판부에서 출판된 영어본을 참고로 했다.
키틀러는 그의 저서 『축음기, 영화, 타자기 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter』에서 1900년대에 등장한 세 가지 매체: 축음기, 영화, 타자기가 인간 사회에 가져온 변화에 주목하였다. 키틀러는 이 책보다 조금 앞서 출판된 Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985)을 통해 매체의 변화에 따른 1800년대와 1900년대를 시대적 변화에 주목하면서 데이타를 선택하고 여과하고 생산하는 체계의 변화가 시대적 패러다임의 변화에 미친 영향을 규명하였다면, 『축음기, 영화, 타자기』에서는 1900년대의 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 세 가지 대표적인 기록 매체가 그 시대의 담론을 구축하는 세계관, 제도, 사회체계까지도 변화에 좀 더 초점을 두고 있다.
키틀러가 매체와 사회적 변혁의 관계를 바라보는 관점은 푸코(Michel Paul Foucault)의 사유체계에 빚을 지고 있다. 키틀러는 매체의 변화가 바로 담론의 변화를 야기한다고 보며, 푸코가 시대마다 단절적 episteme가 존재한다고 보는 것과 같이 매체의 단절적 혹은 변혁적인 속성이 시대의 변화를 가져오는 것으로 보고 있다는 것이다. 따라서 이 책에서 그는 1900년대의 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 세 가지 대표적인 기록 매체가 그 시대의 담론을 구축하는 세계관, 제도, 사회체계까지도 변화시켰음을 보여주고 있다. 책의 구성은 제목과 마찬가지로 1. 축음기(Gramophone, 2. 영화(Film), 3. 타자기(Typewriter)의 3장으로 구성되어 있고, 기록매체를 통해 ‘영혼’을 담을 수 있을 것이라 믿었던 1800년대 낭만주의 시대와는 달리 소리, 이미지, 문자를 기록하는 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 1900년대의 새로운 매체들은 인간을 더 이상 낭만주의 시대의 영혼의 존재가 아닌 기계적 매커니즘으로 파악함으로써 인간이라는 대상 자체에 대한 인식마저 변화였음을 지적하고 있다.
키틀러는 자신의 논의를 전개하기 위해 1900년대에 등장한 매체와 그로 인한 사회적 변화를 연결시키기 위해 다양한 사료들과 매체의 발전의 토대가 된 것으로 본 신경생리학이나 뇌신경학 분야의 연구, 라캉의 정신분석이론을 자신의 풍부한 철학적 이해를 연결시키며 글을 전개하였다. 키틀러의 이와 같은 글쓰기 방식은 그가 얼마나 다양한 분야에 해박한 지식을 가지고 있는지를 알아차리게 하지만 한편 독자의 입장에서는 복잡한 미로를 헤매는 듯한 어려움에 빠지게도 한다. 이 책을 소개하면서 사실상 키틀러의 책을 얼마만큼 이해했는지 자신이 없다. 그럼에도 불구하고 매체와 사회체계 사이에 맺고 있는 관계를 고찰하는 키틀러의 탁월한 관점은 앞으로 새롭게 등장할 또 다른 매체와 그로 인해 변화될 우리의 세계를 이해하는 유익한 관점을 제공할 것이란 점에서 그의 저서를 간략하게나마 소개해 보았다.
글.이주연 (앨리스온 에디터)
그것은 바로 매체가 그 시대 사람들의 사유방식과 인식체계 그리고 역사사회적 구조에까지 영향을 미치고 있는 점을 중요하게 바라보고 있기 때문일 것이다. 오늘 소개할 독일의 매체 이론가 프리드리히 키틀러(Friedrich A. Kittler) 역시 시대마다 새롭게 등장한 매체에 집중하고 있는데, 그는 한 시대를 대표하는 매체들이 그 시대의 역사사회적 변혁와 새로운 담론형성의 토대로 기능하는 것으로 보고 있다.
독일과 미국을 넘나들며 활발히 활동하고 있는 매체이론가인 프리드리히 키틀러는 아직까지 국내에는 본격적으로 소개되지 않았지만 최근 전공자들 사이에서 그의 매체이론 연구에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있다. 오늘 소개할『축음기, 영화, 타자기(Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)』는 1985년에 처음 출판된 독일어 본이 아닌 1999년 미국 스탠포드 대학 출판부에서 출판된 영어본을 참고로 했다.
키틀러는 그의 저서 『축음기, 영화, 타자기 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter』에서 1900년대에 등장한 세 가지 매체: 축음기, 영화, 타자기가 인간 사회에 가져온 변화에 주목하였다. 키틀러는 이 책보다 조금 앞서 출판된 Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985)을 통해 매체의 변화에 따른 1800년대와 1900년대를 시대적 변화에 주목하면서 데이타를 선택하고 여과하고 생산하는 체계의 변화가 시대적 패러다임의 변화에 미친 영향을 규명하였다면, 『축음기, 영화, 타자기』에서는 1900년대의 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 세 가지 대표적인 기록 매체가 그 시대의 담론을 구축하는 세계관, 제도, 사회체계까지도 변화에 좀 더 초점을 두고 있다.
키틀러가 매체와 사회적 변혁의 관계를 바라보는 관점은 푸코(Michel Paul Foucault)의 사유체계에 빚을 지고 있다. 키틀러는 매체의 변화가 바로 담론의 변화를 야기한다고 보며, 푸코가 시대마다 단절적 episteme가 존재한다고 보는 것과 같이 매체의 단절적 혹은 변혁적인 속성이 시대의 변화를 가져오는 것으로 보고 있다는 것이다. 따라서 이 책에서 그는 1900년대의 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 세 가지 대표적인 기록 매체가 그 시대의 담론을 구축하는 세계관, 제도, 사회체계까지도 변화시켰음을 보여주고 있다. 책의 구성은 제목과 마찬가지로 1. 축음기(Gramophone, 2. 영화(Film), 3. 타자기(Typewriter)의 3장으로 구성되어 있고, 기록매체를 통해 ‘영혼’을 담을 수 있을 것이라 믿었던 1800년대 낭만주의 시대와는 달리 소리, 이미지, 문자를 기록하는 축음기, 영화, 타자기라는 1900년대의 새로운 매체들은 인간을 더 이상 낭만주의 시대의 영혼의 존재가 아닌 기계적 매커니즘으로 파악함으로써 인간이라는 대상 자체에 대한 인식마저 변화였음을 지적하고 있다.
키틀러는 자신의 논의를 전개하기 위해 1900년대에 등장한 매체와 그로 인한 사회적 변화를 연결시키기 위해 다양한 사료들과 매체의 발전의 토대가 된 것으로 본 신경생리학이나 뇌신경학 분야의 연구, 라캉의 정신분석이론을 자신의 풍부한 철학적 이해를 연결시키며 글을 전개하였다. 키틀러의 이와 같은 글쓰기 방식은 그가 얼마나 다양한 분야에 해박한 지식을 가지고 있는지를 알아차리게 하지만 한편 독자의 입장에서는 복잡한 미로를 헤매는 듯한 어려움에 빠지게도 한다. 이 책을 소개하면서 사실상 키틀러의 책을 얼마만큼 이해했는지 자신이 없다. 그럼에도 불구하고 매체와 사회체계 사이에 맺고 있는 관계를 고찰하는 키틀러의 탁월한 관점은 앞으로 새롭게 등장할 또 다른 매체와 그로 인해 변화될 우리의 세계를 이해하는 유익한 관점을 제공할 것이란 점에서 그의 저서를 간략하게나마 소개해 보았다.
글.이주연 (앨리스온 에디터)
Monday, April 28, 2008
Orality and Lieteracy - Walter Ong
When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be reestablished only when oral speech begins again. Writing and print isolate. There is no collective noun or concept for readers corresponding audience (p. 75)
There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is one reason why 'the book says' is popularly tantamount to 'it is true.' It is also one reason why books have been burnt. A text stating what the whole world knows is false will state falsehood forever, so long as the text reader. Texts are inherently contumacious (p. 79).
In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1963), Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old moral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic). The term idea, for, is visually based, coming from the same root as the Latin video, to see, and such English derivatives as vision, visible, or videotape. Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it. Plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering, retardant orality (pp. 80-81).
the first script, or true writing, that we know, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the year 3500 BC (pp. 83-84).
There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is one reason why 'the book says' is popularly tantamount to 'it is true.' It is also one reason why books have been burnt. A text stating what the whole world knows is false will state falsehood forever, so long as the text reader. Texts are inherently contumacious (p. 79).
In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1963), Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old moral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic). The term idea, for, is visually based, coming from the same root as the Latin video, to see, and such English derivatives as vision, visible, or videotape. Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it. Plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering, retardant orality (pp. 80-81).
the first script, or true writing, that we know, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the year 3500 BC (pp. 83-84).
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Keyworks in Media and Cultural Studies
Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks
Revised Edition.
Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner.
Contents:
Preface to the Revised Edition viii.
Adventures in Media and Culture Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks ix.
Part I: Culture, Ideology and Hegemony 1.
Introduction to Part I 3.
1 The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas 9.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
2 (i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of "Ideology";.
(iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material 13.
Antonio Gramsci.
3 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 18.
Walter Benjamin.
4 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 41.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
5 The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article 73.
Jürgen Habermas.
6 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an 79.
Investigation).
Louis Althusser.
Part II: Social Life and Cultural Studies 89.
Introduction to Part II 91.
7 (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today 99.
Roland Barthes.
8 The Medium is the Message 107.
Marshall McLuhan
9 The Commodity as Spectacle 117.
Guy Debord.
10 Introduction: Instructions on How to Become a General in the 122.
Disneyland Club.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.
11 Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory 130.
Raymond Williams.
12 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture:The Unnatural 144.
Break .
Dick Hebdige
13 Encoding / Decoding 163.
Stuart Hall.
14 On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research 174.
Ien Ang.
Part III: Political Economy 195.
Introduction to Part III 197.
15 Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication 201 .
Nicholas Garnham.
16 On the Audience Commodity and its Work 230.
Dallas W. Smythe.
17 A Propaganda Model 257.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
18 Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era 295.
Herbert I. Schiller.
19 Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, 311.
Feminism, and Political Economy.
Eileen R. Meehan.
20 (i) Introduction; (ii) The Aristocracy of Culture 322.
Pierre Bourdieu.
21 On Television 328.
Pierre Bourdieu.
Part IV: The Politics of Representation 337.
Introduction to Part IV 339.
22 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 342.
Laura Mulvey.
23 Stereotyping 353.
Richard Dyer.
24 Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance 366.
bell hooks.
25 British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity 381.
Paul Gilroy.
26 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses 396.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
27 Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers 422.
Néstor García Canclini.
Part V: The Postmodern Turn and New Media 445.
Introduction to Part V 447.
28 The Precession of Simulacra 453.
Jean Baudrillard.
29 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 482.
Fredric Jameson.
30 Feminism, Postmodernism and the "Real Me" 520.
Angela McRobbie.
31 Postmondern Virtualities 533.
Mark Poster.
32 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media.
Convergence, and Participatory Culture 549.
Henry Jenkins .
Part VI: Globalization and Social Movements 577.
Introduction to Part VI 579.
33 Disjuncture and the Difference in the Global Culture Economy 584.
Arjun Appadurai.
34 The Global and the Local in International Communications 604.
Annabelle Sreberny.
35 The Process: From Nationalisms to Transnationalisms 626.
Jésus Martín-Barbero
36 Globalization as Hybridization 658.
Jen Nederveen Pieterse.
37 (Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against 681.
The Gobal, Regional, and Local Levels of World Television.
Joseph Straubhaar.
38 Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical / Reconstructive.
Approach 703.
Richard Kahn and Douglas M. Kellner.
Acknowledgements 726.
Index 730
Revised Edition.
Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner.
Contents:
Preface to the Revised Edition viii.
Adventures in Media and Culture Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks ix.
Part I: Culture, Ideology and Hegemony 1.
Introduction to Part I 3.
1 The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas 9.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
2 (i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of "Ideology";.
(iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material 13.
Antonio Gramsci.
3 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 18.
Walter Benjamin.
4 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 41.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
5 The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article 73.
Jürgen Habermas.
6 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an 79.
Investigation).
Louis Althusser.
Part II: Social Life and Cultural Studies 89.
Introduction to Part II 91.
7 (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today 99.
Roland Barthes.
8 The Medium is the Message 107.
Marshall McLuhan
9 The Commodity as Spectacle 117.
Guy Debord.
10 Introduction: Instructions on How to Become a General in the 122.
Disneyland Club.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.
11 Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory 130.
Raymond Williams.
12 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture:The Unnatural 144.
Break .
Dick Hebdige
13 Encoding / Decoding 163.
Stuart Hall.
14 On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research 174.
Ien Ang.
Part III: Political Economy 195.
Introduction to Part III 197.
15 Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication 201 .
Nicholas Garnham.
16 On the Audience Commodity and its Work 230.
Dallas W. Smythe.
17 A Propaganda Model 257.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
18 Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era 295.
Herbert I. Schiller.
19 Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, 311.
Feminism, and Political Economy.
Eileen R. Meehan.
20 (i) Introduction; (ii) The Aristocracy of Culture 322.
Pierre Bourdieu.
21 On Television 328.
Pierre Bourdieu.
Part IV: The Politics of Representation 337.
Introduction to Part IV 339.
22 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 342.
Laura Mulvey.
23 Stereotyping 353.
Richard Dyer.
24 Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance 366.
bell hooks.
25 British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity 381.
Paul Gilroy.
26 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses 396.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
27 Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers 422.
Néstor García Canclini.
Part V: The Postmodern Turn and New Media 445.
Introduction to Part V 447.
28 The Precession of Simulacra 453.
Jean Baudrillard.
29 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 482.
Fredric Jameson.
30 Feminism, Postmodernism and the "Real Me" 520.
Angela McRobbie.
31 Postmondern Virtualities 533.
Mark Poster.
32 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media.
Convergence, and Participatory Culture 549.
Henry Jenkins .
Part VI: Globalization and Social Movements 577.
Introduction to Part VI 579.
33 Disjuncture and the Difference in the Global Culture Economy 584.
Arjun Appadurai.
34 The Global and the Local in International Communications 604.
Annabelle Sreberny.
35 The Process: From Nationalisms to Transnationalisms 626.
Jésus Martín-Barbero
36 Globalization as Hybridization 658.
Jen Nederveen Pieterse.
37 (Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against 681.
The Gobal, Regional, and Local Levels of World Television.
Joseph Straubhaar.
38 Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical / Reconstructive.
Approach 703.
Richard Kahn and Douglas M. Kellner.
Acknowledgements 726.
Index 730
Desire for communication; Introduction, The Problem of Communication
Desire being most intense when the objects is absent, longings for communication also index a deep sense of dereliction in social relationships. How did we get to the pass where such pathos attaches to the act of speaking with another person? How did it become possible to say that a man and woman "are tuned to different frequencies"? How did a term once associated with successful transmission by telegraph, telephone, or radio come to carry the political and intimate aspirations of so many people in this age? Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried about "communicating" as if they were thousands of miles apart. Communication" is a rich tangle of intellectual and cultural strands that encodes our time's confrontations with itself. To understand communication is to understand much more. An apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer world, the notion illustrates our strange lives at this point in history. It is a sink into which most of our hopes and fears seem to be poured (p. 2).
The other mode - the one Benjamin preferred, as I do - saw in every at of historical narration a constructivist principle. The historian did not wait for the past to speak its fullness but was an activist who brought ages into alignment with each other. Time, for Benjamin, is not just a continuum; it is full of ruptures and shortcuts-"wormholes." we might say (p. 3)...As Benjamin knew, the present can configure the past so as to open up new points of redevous (p. 10).
The Varied Senses of "Communication"
1. Partaking, Connection or linkage
2. Transmission
3. Exchange
4. Symbolic Interaction, as a blanket term for the various modes of symbolic interaction
The notion of communication theory is no older than the 1940s (when it meant a mathematical theory of signal processing), and no one had isolated "communication" as an explicit problem till the 1880s and 1890s.
Sorting Theoretical Debates in (and via) the 1920s
Three visions
1. Propaganda:
Dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion (Lasswell, Lippman, Bernays, Carl Schmitt, Lukács)
2. as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational relations (Ogden and Richards)
3. Solipsism:
For Kafka, as I will argue in chapter 5, interpersonal communication is no different from mass communication: both are broadcasts to invisible, absent, or veiled audience. Lukács sees solitary selfhood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals. Lukács's analysis give us a way to see 1920s worries about isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin (p. 15).
The dream of perfect communication through semantics recapitulates the dream of telepathy, a meeting of minds that would leave no remainder. Again, communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near.
4. Martin Heidegger:
inauthenticity of communication, his disdain for public sphere. Heidegger took politics as a matter of sorting out friends and enemies, not of compromise and discussion. No one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for communication as information exchange (p. 19).
5. John Dewey:
as pragmatic making-do in community life. Like Mead, Dewey thought the ability to place oneself " at the stand point of a situation which two parties share" was the distinctive gift of humanity (p. 18). Communication in Dewey's sense is participation in the creation of a collective world, which is why communication for Dewey always raises the political problem of democracy.
Dewey took the disappearance or distortion of participatory interaction as the most alienating feature of the age. Heidegger's notion of the fall from authentic encounter was not entirely different. The notion taht grace is found in dialogue was widely shared in social thinkers of the 1920s: Buber wanted to replace I-It relationships with I-Thour ones; Heidegger called for authentic confrontations: Lukács called for a joyful reconcilation of subject and object (p. 19)...
In sum, five intertwined visions are clear in the 1920s: communication as the management of mass opinion; the elimination of semantic fog; vain sallies from the citadel of the self; the disclosure of otherness; and the orchestration of action. Each captures a particular practice. Heidegger wants uncanny poetry in the woods, Ogden and Richards want universal clarity of meaning, Dewey wants practical participation and aesthetic release, Kafka narrates nightmares of interpersonal asymptotes, and Bernays wants to manufacture goodwill as Hitler wants to manufacture bad will. Heidegger's celebration of language's uncanniness lives on in deconstruction's repeated exposé of the impossibility of communication; Ogden and Richard's project survives in semantics and in the culture of scientific research more generally and informs what is probably still the dominant view of communication, the successful replication of intentions; and Dewey's vision anticipates language pragmatics and speech act theory's interest in language's seemingly modest, but astounding ability to bound people in action. For Heidegger communication revealed our simultaneous togetherness/otherness as social beings; for Ogden and Richards it allowed a clean meeting of minds; and for Dewey it sustained the building of community and the dance of creation (pp. 19-20)...
Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Certainly each has much of originality. But their lineages are clear enough. Habermas, like Dewey (though it is Mead he more frequently invokes), takes communication as a mode of action that not only implicates a morally autonomous self but is also a process that, if generalized, entails the creation of a democratic community. Habermas is emphatic that communication is not the sharing of consciousness but rather the coordination of action oriented to deliberation about justice. The term has for him an undeniable normative tint. Levinas, in turn, builds on the phenomenological inheritance of Hussel and Heidegger to understand communication not as fusion, information exchange, or conjoint activity but as a caress. The failure to communicate is not a moral failure, it is a fitting demise for a flawed project. As he wrote in 1947 of modernist isolation: "the theme of solitude and the breakdown of human communication are viewed by modern literature and thought as the fundamental obstacle to human brotherhood. The pathos of socialism breaks against the eternal Bastille in which each person remains his own prisoner, locked up with himself when the party is over, the crowd gone, and the torches extinguished. The despair felt at the impossibility of communication... marks the limits of all pity, generosity, and love... But if communication bears the mark of failure or inauthenticity in this way, it is because it is sought as a fusion. The failure of communication, he argues, allows precisely for the bursting open of pity, generosity, and love. Such failure invites us to find ways to discover others besides knowing. Communication breakdown is thus a salutary check on the hubris of the ego. Communication, if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings (pp. 20-21).
Technical and Therapeutic Discourses after World War II
Information theory (Technical):
Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication
Communication theory was explicitly a theory of "signals" and not of "significance"
Some have gone so far as to suggest that all inquiry into human affairs should redescribe itself in terms of a new trinity of concepts: information, communication, and control.
Therapeutic Discourses:
Carl R. Rogers recommended expanding the method of small group understanding to much larger forums, such as the strained relations between the American and the Russians. If both parties attempted to understand rather than to judge, important political fruit might result. An all but messianic vision of therapeutic communication as the balm of souls, couples, groups, and nations pervade the text: putting it to use, he suggested, was worth trying, given "the tragic and well-nigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the existence of our modern world" (p. 27).
Not only the bomb, however, shaped communication theory; as Kenneth Cmiel has shown, the fear of democratic disaffection and the moral enigma of the Holocaust presided over efforts to think through communication in the 1940s. Cynicism and evil were the fundamental problems that Robert Merton, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas faced first in the 1940s, and in each case the resultant vision of communication was some kind of answer to the intractable questions. Merton saw communication as an agency of national community buildings; Arendt as a means of discovering truth and, later, of giving birth to new political orders and Levinas as an ethical obligation to the otherness of the other person. This threefold crossing of modernization, antimodern, and postmodern theorists is fateful for the rest of the century's social thought. Merton saw communication as a kind of Durkemian social glue; Arendt as a disclosure of the political potentials of human association; and Levinas as a respect for the autonomy of others, a respect that made communication in an instrumental sense all but impossible (p. 29).
In the postwar ferment about "communication," then, two discourses were dominant: a technical one about information theory and a therapeutic one about communication as cure and disease. Each has deep roots in American cultural history. The technicians of communication are a diverse breed, from Samuel F. B. Morse to Marshall McLuhan, from Charles Horton Cooley to Al Gore, from Buckminster Fuller to Alvin Toffler, but they all think the imperfections of human interchange can be redressed by improved technology or techniques. They want to mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means... The therapeutic vision of communication, in turn, developed within humanist and existentialist psychology, but both its roots and its branches spread much wider, to the nineteenth century attack on Calvinism and its replacement by a therapeutic ethos of self-realization, and to the self-culture pervading American bourgeois life. Both the technical and therapeudtic visions claim that the obstacles and troubles in human contact can be solved, whether by better technologies or better techniques of relating, and hence are also latter-day heirs to the angelological dream of mutual ensoulment (pp. 29-30).
The message of this book is a harsher one, that the problems are fundamentally intractable. "Communication," whatever it might mean, is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure but involves a permanent kink in the human condition...My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros is intended as a corrective to truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds (p. 29)
Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways to share one's hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a matter of faith and risk than of technique and method (p. 30)/
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
The other mode - the one Benjamin preferred, as I do - saw in every at of historical narration a constructivist principle. The historian did not wait for the past to speak its fullness but was an activist who brought ages into alignment with each other. Time, for Benjamin, is not just a continuum; it is full of ruptures and shortcuts-"wormholes." we might say (p. 3)...As Benjamin knew, the present can configure the past so as to open up new points of redevous (p. 10).
The Varied Senses of "Communication"
1. Partaking, Connection or linkage
2. Transmission
3. Exchange
4. Symbolic Interaction, as a blanket term for the various modes of symbolic interaction
The notion of communication theory is no older than the 1940s (when it meant a mathematical theory of signal processing), and no one had isolated "communication" as an explicit problem till the 1880s and 1890s.
Sorting Theoretical Debates in (and via) the 1920s
Three visions
1. Propaganda:
Dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion (Lasswell, Lippman, Bernays, Carl Schmitt, Lukács)
2. as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational relations (Ogden and Richards)
3. Solipsism:
For Kafka, as I will argue in chapter 5, interpersonal communication is no different from mass communication: both are broadcasts to invisible, absent, or veiled audience. Lukács sees solitary selfhood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals. Lukács's analysis give us a way to see 1920s worries about isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin (p. 15).
The dream of perfect communication through semantics recapitulates the dream of telepathy, a meeting of minds that would leave no remainder. Again, communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near.
4. Martin Heidegger:
inauthenticity of communication, his disdain for public sphere. Heidegger took politics as a matter of sorting out friends and enemies, not of compromise and discussion. No one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for communication as information exchange (p. 19).
5. John Dewey:
as pragmatic making-do in community life. Like Mead, Dewey thought the ability to place oneself " at the stand point of a situation which two parties share" was the distinctive gift of humanity (p. 18). Communication in Dewey's sense is participation in the creation of a collective world, which is why communication for Dewey always raises the political problem of democracy.
Dewey took the disappearance or distortion of participatory interaction as the most alienating feature of the age. Heidegger's notion of the fall from authentic encounter was not entirely different. The notion taht grace is found in dialogue was widely shared in social thinkers of the 1920s: Buber wanted to replace I-It relationships with I-Thour ones; Heidegger called for authentic confrontations: Lukács called for a joyful reconcilation of subject and object (p. 19)...
In sum, five intertwined visions are clear in the 1920s: communication as the management of mass opinion; the elimination of semantic fog; vain sallies from the citadel of the self; the disclosure of otherness; and the orchestration of action. Each captures a particular practice. Heidegger wants uncanny poetry in the woods, Ogden and Richards want universal clarity of meaning, Dewey wants practical participation and aesthetic release, Kafka narrates nightmares of interpersonal asymptotes, and Bernays wants to manufacture goodwill as Hitler wants to manufacture bad will. Heidegger's celebration of language's uncanniness lives on in deconstruction's repeated exposé of the impossibility of communication; Ogden and Richard's project survives in semantics and in the culture of scientific research more generally and informs what is probably still the dominant view of communication, the successful replication of intentions; and Dewey's vision anticipates language pragmatics and speech act theory's interest in language's seemingly modest, but astounding ability to bound people in action. For Heidegger communication revealed our simultaneous togetherness/otherness as social beings; for Ogden and Richards it allowed a clean meeting of minds; and for Dewey it sustained the building of community and the dance of creation (pp. 19-20)...
Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Certainly each has much of originality. But their lineages are clear enough. Habermas, like Dewey (though it is Mead he more frequently invokes), takes communication as a mode of action that not only implicates a morally autonomous self but is also a process that, if generalized, entails the creation of a democratic community. Habermas is emphatic that communication is not the sharing of consciousness but rather the coordination of action oriented to deliberation about justice. The term has for him an undeniable normative tint. Levinas, in turn, builds on the phenomenological inheritance of Hussel and Heidegger to understand communication not as fusion, information exchange, or conjoint activity but as a caress. The failure to communicate is not a moral failure, it is a fitting demise for a flawed project. As he wrote in 1947 of modernist isolation: "the theme of solitude and the breakdown of human communication are viewed by modern literature and thought as the fundamental obstacle to human brotherhood. The pathos of socialism breaks against the eternal Bastille in which each person remains his own prisoner, locked up with himself when the party is over, the crowd gone, and the torches extinguished. The despair felt at the impossibility of communication... marks the limits of all pity, generosity, and love... But if communication bears the mark of failure or inauthenticity in this way, it is because it is sought as a fusion. The failure of communication, he argues, allows precisely for the bursting open of pity, generosity, and love. Such failure invites us to find ways to discover others besides knowing. Communication breakdown is thus a salutary check on the hubris of the ego. Communication, if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings (pp. 20-21).
Technical and Therapeutic Discourses after World War II
Information theory (Technical):
Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication
Communication theory was explicitly a theory of "signals" and not of "significance"
Some have gone so far as to suggest that all inquiry into human affairs should redescribe itself in terms of a new trinity of concepts: information, communication, and control.
Therapeutic Discourses:
Carl R. Rogers recommended expanding the method of small group understanding to much larger forums, such as the strained relations between the American and the Russians. If both parties attempted to understand rather than to judge, important political fruit might result. An all but messianic vision of therapeutic communication as the balm of souls, couples, groups, and nations pervade the text: putting it to use, he suggested, was worth trying, given "the tragic and well-nigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the existence of our modern world" (p. 27).
Not only the bomb, however, shaped communication theory; as Kenneth Cmiel has shown, the fear of democratic disaffection and the moral enigma of the Holocaust presided over efforts to think through communication in the 1940s. Cynicism and evil were the fundamental problems that Robert Merton, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas faced first in the 1940s, and in each case the resultant vision of communication was some kind of answer to the intractable questions. Merton saw communication as an agency of national community buildings; Arendt as a means of discovering truth and, later, of giving birth to new political orders and Levinas as an ethical obligation to the otherness of the other person. This threefold crossing of modernization, antimodern, and postmodern theorists is fateful for the rest of the century's social thought. Merton saw communication as a kind of Durkemian social glue; Arendt as a disclosure of the political potentials of human association; and Levinas as a respect for the autonomy of others, a respect that made communication in an instrumental sense all but impossible (p. 29).
In the postwar ferment about "communication," then, two discourses were dominant: a technical one about information theory and a therapeutic one about communication as cure and disease. Each has deep roots in American cultural history. The technicians of communication are a diverse breed, from Samuel F. B. Morse to Marshall McLuhan, from Charles Horton Cooley to Al Gore, from Buckminster Fuller to Alvin Toffler, but they all think the imperfections of human interchange can be redressed by improved technology or techniques. They want to mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means... The therapeutic vision of communication, in turn, developed within humanist and existentialist psychology, but both its roots and its branches spread much wider, to the nineteenth century attack on Calvinism and its replacement by a therapeutic ethos of self-realization, and to the self-culture pervading American bourgeois life. Both the technical and therapeudtic visions claim that the obstacles and troubles in human contact can be solved, whether by better technologies or better techniques of relating, and hence are also latter-day heirs to the angelological dream of mutual ensoulment (pp. 29-30).
The message of this book is a harsher one, that the problems are fundamentally intractable. "Communication," whatever it might mean, is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure but involves a permanent kink in the human condition...My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros is intended as a corrective to truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds (p. 29)
Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways to share one's hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a matter of faith and risk than of technique and method (p. 30)/
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Any idea where Svalbard is?
"Applies to the whole of Svalbard"
Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Europe. It consists of a group of islands ranging from 74° to 81° North, and 10° to 35° East. The archipelago is completely controlled by the Kingdom of Norway and is part of it. As of 2005, Svalbard has a population of approximately 2,400 people. - drawn and edited from Wikipedia
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Orality and Literacy 2
For anyone who has a sense of what works are in a primary oral culture, or a culture not far removed from primary orality, It is not surprising that the Hebrew Term dabar means 'work' and 'event.'
The fact that oral people commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to eb assimilated to things. 'put there' on a flat surface. Such 'things' are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection (p. 33).
The fact that oral people commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to eb assimilated to things. 'put there' on a flat surface. Such 'things' are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection (p. 33).
Orality - Walter J. Ong
Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing the Word (Walter, J. Ong, 1982), Intro - ch2 The modern discovery of primacy oral culture
primary orality
textuality
secondary orality
oral literature
preliterate
text of an oral utterance
formulaic elements
Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possessions of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and its destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen,is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself (Ong, 1982, p. 15).
After being shaped and reshaped centuries earlier, the two epics (Iliad and Odyssey) were set down in the new Greek alphabet around 700-650 BC, the first lengthy composition to be put into this alphabet (Havelock, 1963, p. 115) (p. 23).
Havelock's Preface to Plato has extended Parry's and Lord's findings about orality in oral epic narrative out into the whole of ancient Greek culture and has shown convincingly how the beginnings of Greek philosophy were tied in with the restructuring of thought brought by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggressive, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche. In a more recent work, Origins of Western Literacy (1976), havelock attributes the ascendency of Greek analytic thought to the Greek's introduction of vowels into the alphabet. The original alphabet, invented by Semitic peoples, had consisted only of consonants and some semivowels. In introducing vowels, the Greeks reached a new level of abstract, analytic, visual coding of the elusive world of sound. This achievement presaged and implemented their later abstract intellectual achievements.
His (Marshall McLuhan) gnomic saying, 'The medium is the message', registered his acute awareness of the importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media. Few people have had so simulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did (p. 29).
primary orality
textuality
secondary orality
oral literature
preliterate
text of an oral utterance
formulaic elements
Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possessions of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and its destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen,is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself (Ong, 1982, p. 15).
After being shaped and reshaped centuries earlier, the two epics (Iliad and Odyssey) were set down in the new Greek alphabet around 700-650 BC, the first lengthy composition to be put into this alphabet (Havelock, 1963, p. 115) (p. 23).
Havelock's Preface to Plato has extended Parry's and Lord's findings about orality in oral epic narrative out into the whole of ancient Greek culture and has shown convincingly how the beginnings of Greek philosophy were tied in with the restructuring of thought brought by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggressive, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche. In a more recent work, Origins of Western Literacy (1976), havelock attributes the ascendency of Greek analytic thought to the Greek's introduction of vowels into the alphabet. The original alphabet, invented by Semitic peoples, had consisted only of consonants and some semivowels. In introducing vowels, the Greeks reached a new level of abstract, analytic, visual coding of the elusive world of sound. This achievement presaged and implemented their later abstract intellectual achievements.
His (Marshall McLuhan) gnomic saying, 'The medium is the message', registered his acute awareness of the importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media. Few people have had so simulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did (p. 29).
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Historical Materialism & Dialectical Materialism
Historical materialism is the theory of social change, developed by Marx and Engels, in which history is divided into a series of epochs (or modes of production), each characterized by a distinct economy and class structure. Historical change in this view is fueled by the progressive expansion of the productive capacity of the economy, as well as the development of technology and the forces of production. This becomes manifest in class conflicts and revolutions. One of the reasons the historical materialist approach works so well in both Marxism and medium theory is that it shows that ideas actually come from somewhere and gives an agency. Ideas and social change don’t fall from the sky, and the appeal to this is clear in both schools of thought.
Dialectical materialism, in Marxist terms, encompasses those aspects of its philosophy beyond its theory of history (such as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology). The term wasn’t used by either Marx or Engels, but later became the dogmatic philosophy of the Soviet Union, building on works such as Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. Dialectical materialism, for our purposes here, might be characterized by its materialism and rejection of skepticism. The material world, in this view, is held to have a primacy over the mental, so that the material is a precondition of one’s consciousness (which would seemingly make sense for someone like Innis, McLuhan, or Edmund Carpenter). The material world is then knowable through the realm of empirical studies. Beyond focusing solely on its materialism, the philosophy itself is dialectical, in that it sees reality in its ever-changing state of development, arguing not simply that change exists in the world, but rather that the reality of that world is characterized by varying properties and their emergence.
Leveretter, M. (2007). Spirits in a Material World: Hauntology, Historical Materialism, and Phenomenological Medium Theory, Western Journal of Communication, 71(4), 336-358.
Dialectical materialism, in Marxist terms, encompasses those aspects of its philosophy beyond its theory of history (such as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology). The term wasn’t used by either Marx or Engels, but later became the dogmatic philosophy of the Soviet Union, building on works such as Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. Dialectical materialism, for our purposes here, might be characterized by its materialism and rejection of skepticism. The material world, in this view, is held to have a primacy over the mental, so that the material is a precondition of one’s consciousness (which would seemingly make sense for someone like Innis, McLuhan, or Edmund Carpenter). The material world is then knowable through the realm of empirical studies. Beyond focusing solely on its materialism, the philosophy itself is dialectical, in that it sees reality in its ever-changing state of development, arguing not simply that change exists in the world, but rather that the reality of that world is characterized by varying properties and their emergence.
Leveretter, M. (2007). Spirits in a Material World: Hauntology, Historical Materialism, and Phenomenological Medium Theory, Western Journal of Communication, 71(4), 336-358.
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