Not so the electronic, whose materiality and various forms and contents engage its spectators and “users” in a phenomenological structure of sensual and psychological experience that seems to belong to no-body. Born in the U.S.A. and with the nuclear age, the electronic emerges in the 1940’s as the third “technological revolution within capital itself,” and, according to Jameson, involved the unprecedented and “prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” including “a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious.”[28] Since that time, electronic technology has “saturated all forms of experience and become an inescapable environment, a ‘technosphere’”[29] This expansive and totalizing incorporation of Nature by industrialized culture, and the specular production and commodification of the Unconscious (globally transmitted as visible and marketable “desire”), restructure capitalism as multinational. Correlatively, a new cultural logic identified as “postmodernism” begins to dominate modernism, and to alter our sense of existential presence.
A function of technological pervasion and dispersion, this new electronic sense of presence is intimately bound up in a centerless, network-like structure of instant stimulation\ and desire, rather than in a nostalgia for the past or anticipation of a future. Television, video cassettes, video tape recorder/players, video games, and personal computers all form an encompassing electronic representational system whose various forms “interface” to constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user in a spatially decentered, weakly temporalized, and quasi-disembodied state. Digital electronic technology atomizes and abstractly schematizes the analogic quality of the photographic and cinematic into discrete pixels and bits of information that are then transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous, discontiguous, and absolute–each bit being-in-itself even as it is part of a system.[30]
Once again we can turn to Blade Runner to provide illustration of how the electronic is neither photographic nor cinematic. Tracking Leon, one of the rebellious replicants, the human protagonist Deckard finds his empty rooms and discovers a photograph that seems, itself, to reveal nothing but an empty room. Using a science fictional device, Deckard directs its electronic eye to zoom in, close up, isolate, and enlarge to impossible detail various portions of the photograph. On the one hand, it might seem that Deckard is functioning like a photographer working in his darkroom to make, through optical discovery, past experience significantly visible. (Indeed, this sequence of the film recalls the photographic blow-ups of an ambiguously “revealed” murder in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic, Blow-Up.) On the other hand, Deckard can be and has also been likened to a film director, using the electronic eye to probe photographic space intentionally and to animate a discovered narrative. Deckard’s electronic eye, however, is neither photographic nor cinematic. While it constitutes a series of moving images from the static singularity of Leon’s photograph and reveals to Deckard the stuff of which narrative can be made, it does so serially and in static, discrete “bits.” The moving images do not move themselves and reveal no animated and intentional vision to us or to Deckard. Transmitted to what looks like a television screen, the moving images no longer quite retain the concrete and material “thingness” of the photograph, but they also do not achieve the subjective animation of the intentional and prospective vision objectively projected by the cinema. They exist less as Leon’s experience than as Deckard’s information.
Indeed, the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, and bodily centered projection in space, but rather as simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstantial transmission across a network.[31] Thus, the “presence” of electronic representation is at one remove from previous representational connections between signification and referentiality. Electronic presence asserts neither an objective possession of the world and self (as does the photographic) nor a centered and subjective spatiotemporal engagement with the world and others accumulated and projected as conscious and embodied experience (as does the cinematic). Digital and schematic, abstracted both from reproducing the empirical objectivity of Nature that informs the photographic and from presenting a representation of individual subjectivity and the Unconscious that informs the cinematic, the electronic constructs a metaworld where ethical investment and value are located in representation-in-itself. That is, the electronic semiotically constitutes a system of simulation –a system that constitutes “copies” lacking an “original” origin. And, when there is no longer a phenomenologically perceived connection between signification and an “original” or “real,” when, as Guy Debord tells us, “everything that was lived directly has moved away into a representation,” referentiality becomes intertextuality. [32]
Living in a schematized and intertextual metaworld far removed from reference to a real world liberates the spectator/user from what might be termed the latter’s moral and physical gravity. The materiality of the electronic digitizes dur?e and situation so that narrative, history, and a centered (and central) investment in the human lived-body become atomized and dispersed across a system that constitutes temporality not as the flow of conscious experience, but as a transmission of random information. The primary value of electronic temporality is the bit or instant –which (thanks to television and videotape) can be selected, combined, and instantly replayed and rerun to such a degree that the previously irreversible direction and stream of objective time seems overcome in the creation of a recursive temporal network. On the one hand, the temporal cohesion of history and narrative gives way to the temporal discretion of chronicle and episode, to music videos, to the kinds of narratives that find both causality and intentional agency incomprehensible and comic. On the other hand, temporality is dispersed and finds resolution as part of a recursive, if chaotic, structure of coincidence. Indeed, objective time in postmodern electronic culture is perceived as phenomenologically discontinuous as was subjective time in modernist cinematic culture. Temporality is constituted paradoxically as a homogeneous experience of discontinuity in which the temporal distinctions between objective and subjective experience (marked by the cinematic) disappear and time seems to turn back in on itself recursively in a structure of equivalence and reversibility. The temporal move is from Remembrance of Things Past, a modernist re-membering of experience, to the recursive postmodernism of a Back to the Future.
Again “science fiction” film is illuminating.[33] While the Back to the Future films are certainly apposite, Alex Cox’s postmodern, parodic, and deadpan Repo Man (1984) more clearly manifests the phenomenologically experienced homogeneity of postmodern discontinuity. The film is constructed as both a picaresque, episodic, loose, and irresolute tale about an affectless young man involved with car repossessors, aliens from outer space, Los Angeles punks, government agents, and others, and a tightly bound system of coincidences. Individual scenes are connected not through narrative causality but through the connection of literally material signifiers. A dangling dashboard ornament, for example, provides the acausal and material motivation between two of the film’s otherwise disparate episodes. However, the film also re-solves its acausal structure through a narrative recursivity that links all the characters and events together in what one character calls both the “cosmic unconsciousness” and a “lattice of coincidence.” Emplotment in Repo Man becomes diffused across a vast relational network. It is no accident that the car culture of Los Angeles figures in Repo Man to separate and segment experience into discrete and chaotic bits (as if it were metaphysically lived only through the window of an automobile)–while the “lattice of coincidence,” the “network” of the Los Angeles freeway system, reconnects experience at another and less human order of magnitude.
The postmodern and electronic “instant,” in its break from the temporal structures of retension and protension, constitutes a form of absolute presence (one abstracted from the continuity that gives meaning to the system past/present/future) and changes the nature of the space it occupies. Without the temporal emphases of historical consciousness and personal history, space becomes abstract, ungrounded, and flat–a site for play and display rather than an invested situation in which action “counts” rather than computes. Such a superficial space can no longer hold the spectator/user’s interest, but has to stimulate it constantly in the same way a video game does. Its flatness–a function of its lack of temporal thickness and bodily investment–has to attract spectator interest at the surface. Thus, electronic space constructs objective and superficial equivalents to depth, texture, and invested bodily movement. Saturation of color and hyperbolic attention to detail replace depth and texture at the surface of the image, while constant action and “busyness” replace the gravity that grounds and orients the movement of the lived-body with a purely spectacular, kinetically exciting, often dizzying sense of bodily freedom (and freedom from the body). In an important sense, electronic space dis-embodies.
What I am suggesting is that, ungrounded and uninvested as it is, electronic presence has neither a point of view nor a visual situation, such as we experience, respectively, with the photograph and the cinema. Rather, electronic presence randomly disperses its being across a network, its kinetic gestures describing and lighting on the surface of the screen rather than inscribing it with bodily dimension (a function of centered and intentional projection). Images on television screens and computer terminals seem neither projected nor deep. Phenomenologically, they seem, rather, somehow just there as they confront us.
The two-dimensional, binary superficiality of electronic space at once disorients and liberates the activity of consciousness from the gravitational pull and orientation of its hitherto embodied and grounded existence. All surface, electronic space cannot be inhabited. It denies or prosthetically transforms the spectator’s physical human body so that subjectivity and affect free-float or free-fall or & free-flow across a horizontal/vertical grid. Subjectivity is at once decentered and completely extroverted–again erasing the modernist (and cinematic) dialectic between inside and outside and its synthesis of discontinuous time and discontiguous space as conscious and embodied experience. As Jameson explains:
The liberation…from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings–which it might be better and more accurate to call “intensities”–are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria….[34]
Brought to visibility by the electronic, this kind of euphoric “presence” is not only peculiar. At the risk of sounding reactionary, I would like to suggest that it is also dangerous. Its lack of specific interest and grounded investment in the human body and enworlded action, its saturation with the present instant, could well cost us all a future.
Phenomenological analysis does not end with the “thick” description and thematization (or qualified reduction) of the phenomenon under investigation. It aims also for an interpretation of the phenomenon that discloses, however partially, the lived meaning, significance, and non-neutral value it has for those who engage it. In terms of contemporary moving-image culture, the material differences between cinematic and electronic representation emerge as significant differences in their meaning and value. Cinema is an objective phenomenon that comes–and becomes–before us in a structure that implicates both a sensible body and a sensual and sense-making subject. In its visual address and movement, it allows us to see what seems a visual impossibility: that we are at once intentional subjects and material objects in the world, the seer and the seen. It affirms both embodied being and the world. It also shows us that, sharing materiality and the world, we are intersubjective beings.
Now, however, it is the electronic and not the cinematic that dominates the form of our cultural representations. And, unlike cinematic representation, electronic representation by its very structure phenomenologically denies the human body its fleshly presence and the world its dimension. However signficant and positive its values in some regards, the electronic trivializes the human body. Indeed, at this historical moment in our particular society and culture, the lived-body is in crisis. Its struggle to assert its gravity, its differential existence and situation, its vulnerability and mortality, its vital and social investment in a concrete life-world inhabited by others is now marked in hysterical and hyperbolic responses to the disembodying effects of electronic representation. On the one hand, contemporary moving images show us the human body relentlessly and fatally interrogated, “riddled with holes” and “blown away,” unable to maintain its material integrity or gravity. If the Terminator doesn’t finish it off, then electronic smart bombs will. On the other hand, the current popular obsession with physical fitness manifests the wish to transform the human body into something else–a lean, mean, and immortal “machine,” a cyborg that can physically interface with the electronic network and maintain material presence in the current digitized life-world of the subject. (It is no accident that body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger played the cyborg Terminator.)
Within the context of this material and technological crisis of the flesh, one can only hope that the hysteria and hyperbole surrounding it is strategic–and that through it the lived-body has, in fact, managed to reclaim our attention to forcefully argue for its existence against its simulation. For there are other subjects of electronic culture out there who prefer the simulated body and a virtual world. Indeed, they actually believe the body (contemptuously called “meat” or “wetware”) is best lived only as an image or as information, and that the only hope for negotiating one’s presence in our electronic life-world is to exist on a screen or to digitize and “download” one’s consciousness into the neural nets of a solely electronic existence. Such an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore AIDS, homelessness, hunger, torture, and all the other ills the flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape. Devaluing the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world, electronic presence suggests that we are all in danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine.
Bibliography
1 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 317.
2 Robocop (1987) was directed by Paul Verhoeven; Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991) by James Cameron.
3 Reference here is not only to the way in which automotive transportation has changed our lived sense of distance and space, the rhythms of our temporality, and the hard currency that creates and expresses our cultural values relative to such things as class and style, but also to the way in which it has changed the very sense we have of our bodies. The vernacular expression of regret at “being without wheels” is profound, and ontologically speaks to our very real incorporation of the automobile as well as its incorporation of us.