Shades and Faces

Summary

Computers and internet are not just means of communication. They change radically the communication itself and the communicating ones. They adjust people to their way. They alter the image of the world and ourselves, our relationships. The possibility of social networking exerts an invincible charm to a great number of people. Social networking celebrates an existence that is free of commitments in space, time, identity, tradition, morals and customs. The person changes into a "face" (cf. Facebook). 

The "face" is downright what it declares to be. It lacks the aura, the atmosphere, the taste and smell, - it lacks the background of a shadow which creates a myth around it, makes it receptive to love, to hatred, to friendship. The "face" is solitary and uncommitted. It is not by any means in the position of contracting relationships. A relationship, as the greek word (sxesis) itself denotes, is characterised by qualities such as to have, to cohere, to possess, to focus. The "face" is overly uncommitted, fragmentary, focused on its Ego. Its communication is interaction. It lacks history, continuance, the narrative of a relationship. The "face" does not read texts but hyper-texts and gets networked in hyper-relationships. 

The lack of shadows (aura, atmosphere, taste, smell) together with the availability of a vast networking, assigns to the "face" a limitless freedom that reaches as far as libertinism. Pathologies such as the "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder", incidents of violence like "cyber-bullying" and an one-dimensional and autistic way of existence accompany people, whose person becomes distorted into a "face". 

Nevertheless in front of such a networking torrent that seduces and sweeps everything along its current, there is no other option. Nothing is to be gained either through resistance or through resorting to the old ways. The virtual world is both enchanting and destructive. Along with its inevitable acceptance comes the request for a relaxed attitude towards its demand to monopolize the world.

Shades and Faces

Marshall McLuhan, a pioneer scholar of the electronic communication media, sometimes in his speeches he would refer to the following anecdote: 

Two Navajo Indians were having a chat across an Arizona valley by smoke signals. Midway through their chat, the Atomic Energy Commission released an atomic charge, and when the big mushroom cloud cleared away, one of the Indians sent up a smoke signal to the other, saying, 'Gee, I wish I had said that.'

The Indian is very impressed. The mushroom is amazing. It is also devastating but he doesn’t know that yet. He is seduced. Seduction is seductive, it enchants and mesmerises, and "the unavoidable tragedy awaits for the end", like Seferis had once said.

Computers and Internet, at their beginnings, prior to becoming so wide-spread and implicit, had evoked a wonder equal to that of the Indian on the view of the mushroom. Somewhat 15 years before McLuhan the German philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a speech titled "The Thing". In that speech there is also reference to the atomic bomb. In those years, in the early 50’s, Heidegger speaks about airplanes, radio and television. But what he says could strongly resonate with today’s advances of the internet and social networking. According to Heidegger the new technologies and the modern mediums of communication beget a shrinking of distances, without the possibility however of such shrinking to lead to proximity. A field is created where things are neither close, nor far apart, that is things are neither present, nor absent. Since however presence and absence refer to the very way in which things exist and concern us, the demise of presence and absence equals, as it is said, a "burstin apart" of things, much more essential and foundational than the destruction resulting from an atomic bomb. The speech starts as follows: 

"All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. He now receives instant information, by radio, of events he formerly learned about onlu years later, if at all. (...) The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pevade and dominate the whole machinery of communication. (...) What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near - is, as it were, without distance? Everything gets lumped together into uniform distanceless. How? Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthy than everything bursting apart? Man stares at what the explosion of the atomic bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atomic bomb and ts explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place (...). What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?"

The medium of communication is "the extension of ourselves", as McLuhan writes in the beginning of his book "Understanding Media", more like the stilts, my example. The stilts do not just stretch the legs. They also transform the way of walking. The internet, this electronic stilt, alters our communication as well as us. In what way then do people and things present themselves in their electronic networking? How does the internet mark us? What kind of people does it make us? How does is transform our relationships? The overview of some of its characteristics can provide us with the image of our altered self, or as Elias Aboujaoude puts it, with an image of our "electronic personality" and our interpersonal relationships – as long as the words "person" and "interpersonal relationships" are still valid. 

Nevertheless, let’s not forget that the interaction with the virtual world varies each time and with each user. The virtual world can be serving the real world, like in professional promotion, in news and information feeding, in looking for a partner, or simply in the communication between acquaintances and friends. In the other end of the spectrum we find that kind of interaction which starts and finishes within the virtual, like "friends" in Facebook who have never met, and who will never probably will, trips through Google around the earth, games, virtual or pornographic sex etc. In this speech I will attempt to describe some characteristics of the sheer virtual world, which mark each of us in varying degrees. Each of us… And here I recall a phrase by Nietzsche: "The desert grows: woe to him who holds deserts."

An old Microsoft advertising slogan for Windows ’95 says: "Where do you want to go today?" Sometimes questions carry their own traps. You answer the question and, before you realize it, through your answer you are tangled with the game rules the very question consists of. When for example the parents ask their child that comes home from the party "Did you have a good time?" they teach the child to judge situations on the basis of "I am having a good time / I am having a bad time". The computer only knows of the question "What do you want?" and teaches the user to communicate with it through the usage of commands in the form of "I want to…".

"Where do you want to go today?" it actually says: you can go wherever you want. It actually says: in a degree exceptionally higher than that of the phone and television, you are not bound by the fact that you find yourself in a specific place and time, within a specific social status, with the customs of the birth-place and the culture in which you grew up and which follows you. The internet has abandoned any reference to a single culture. It is hyper-cultural. Its user does not occupy any house, or any home that would provide shelter to his familiar things and would raise a barrier against anything unfamiliar, anything foreign. The question "Where do you want to go today?" frees its addressee from any sense of home and from any dimension of familiar / unfamiliar. It addresses him as a tourist, or, as it is usually called these days, "a hyper-cultural tourist". 

We could say that a main characteristic of virtual reality is the disentanglement from the fact – the fact that I am here, I have a sex and a specific age, that I was born in a specific country and I have a given mother tongue, that I have lived in the way I have lived and that all these cannot be undone, that all the possibilities that are open to me, they are open on the basis of my facticity. Within the virtual reality of the internet a de-factification has taken place. I can have any other identity. One writes in a forum:  "My name is Caterina Fake, and I am a 45 year old male truck driver from south Chicago. (...) I think my name reflects my inner self, as I am a kind and gentle 6’5″ former Rugby player."

The hyper-cultural tourist, wandering on the electronic stilts, has a march that knows of no limits. He is an absolute tourist, which means without a place of his own from where he would start and where he would return. He doesn’t reach any borders that could block, or restrict him. Everything is in front of him at all times. The No of the there that is not here, the No of the past that is not anymore, the No of the future that is not here yet, disappear with one click. He doesn’t know of any No that could resist him, that would declare that there would be an Alien, an Other that would puzzle him, disturb him, doubt him. And so he knows neither the pain of the fall on closed doors, nor the happiness of the opening of a welcoming door. The hyper-cultural tourist, since he never meets the Other, is an autistic being. Autistic, colorless and odorless. He doesn’t feel pain and he doesn’t feel happiness. He knows only of the shallow bulimic euphoria that comes from the libertinism brought about by his autistic self-sufficiency.

The hyper-cultural tourist is rude. He communicates with the computer in terms of orders. He doesn’t know of forms of politeness such as "I would like…", "Could you…", "Please could I have…", that is forms that allow time and breath, that refer to the ability and willingness of the Other. 

The hyper-tourist is stupid. He doesn’t think. The communication with the computer doesn’t allow for second thoughts. It doesn’t give leeway for hesitation, for the question, which, according to Heidegger, is the respectfulness of thinking. In his vocabulary there is no doubt, the "Maybe…", the "I don’t know…" and the dead-end, the ambivalence and the conflict. He disregards entirely the silence and the leisure, the comfortable, free, un-rushed, free-floating sojourn in this or the other. He is restless and fragmented. He is the human pumice stone. 

The hyper-cultural tourist is not a person. He is a "face". Through entering facebook and related social networks the co-being with the others, the interpersonal relationship undergoes a transformation. The person gives its place to the "face". The "face" is transparent. Is outright what it declares to be. Not that it communicates everything with the outmost veracity. But whatever it is that the "face" communicates leaves nothing hidden. The "face" presents itself in the one and only way in which it informs me of itself. It has no mystery, no aura: It has no colors and no smell, it has no atmosphere and rhythm, its look doesn’t narrate any stories, its body, eyes, and hands, do not speak. The "face" that is, doesn’t have any shadows. I do not have the chance to know the "face" through its shadows and it has no chance of knowing itself through my own eyes. And so it doesn’t not converse with me. Its words are not been said as a response to my own presence, are not born through the atmosphere, or the aura of our meeting. The questions, the mysteries, the charm, the myth are absent from the space between us. The "face" does not converse. The "face" chats. Everything takes place on a washed-out, cold light. The light without shadows is after all, in a wide but also narrower manner of speaking, pornographic.

Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher who lives in Germany, says in an interview on a related topic: "(…) a transparent world would be a world that would have a rather weak taste. The mystery can deepen the Being. Today the place of enchantment has been taken over by quantifiable availability. The magic loses its place to the number. Transparency has no aroma. Also transparency steals from time its fragrance. The transparent time is without happenings, without narrative, it’s time without history. The erotic also presupposes the mysterious. Where mystery is all gone starts pornography. The latter razes the Being. It empties is and de-mythologizes it."

But for the shadows writes the poet Paul Celan:

ALL IS DIFFERENT from what you think, from what I think, 

The banner still ripples, 

The small mysteries are still unchanged, 

They still cast shadows, it is from this that 

You live, I live, we live.

And elsewhere: 

He speaks truly who speaks shadows

Han, in the interview mentioned above, refers to the short story "The marvelous story of Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso. Peter Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil for a marvelous little sachet full of gold that never ends. At the end of the story Schlemihl, the hero of the story, gives to Chamisso, the writer, the advice: "And you, my dear Chamisso, I ordered you as the theme-guard of my marvelous story, so that, once I’m gone from the earth, it could become a useful lesson for many of its habitants. But you, my friend, if you wish to live among people, learn above all else to honor the shadow."

The greek word for "relationship", sxesis, is derived from the verb to have. In have, we also hear, among many other words, the verbs to possess, to provide, to cohere and to take care. Characteristic of a relationship is that the one "has" the other, refers to him or her as an extension of himself. That is why we take pride in, or feel embarrassed for, our partner and children. That is why a conflict is so painful, that is why a separation is like an amputation. The hyper-cultural tourist doesn’t have relationships. The argument with some "face" will not give rise to any questioning of him, no conflict between them could ever either open up the one for the other, or lead to their separation, and of course to mark them.

The "face" makes "like". The "like" does not signify a relationship. It’s the expression of satisfaction from the side of the sender that feeds the smugness of the receiver. And so each one remains in the microcosm of his own Ego, of his own egosphere, that has no doors and frames but "windows". The word "relationship" doesn’t fit with the type of communication that takes place in the social networks. Perhaps, along the lines of the "hypertext", the text in the internet that together with its interfering links does not develop any sequence, any narrative and any self-containment, and thus it cannot absorb your attention; we could talk about "hyper-relationships". The "hyper…" overshoots the relationship to space, it depletes it from the gravity of its continuance, of its history, it takes away above all that which gives her its liveliness: the heart. Hyper-relationships are underweight and anorexic, anemic and soulless; arid and shadowless; monologues that self-feed from the monologues of others.

In hyper-relationships is inherent a unique kind of violence. When I punch the other, my arm hits against his body. When I offend someone, I can see the tension in his face. The violence of hyper-relationships doesn’t meet anything at all across it, and so it doesn’t even register as violence. American pilots in the war of the Gulf were saying that the bombardments they were carrying out resembled a video game. In mobbing in the school, in work, in politics, there is no one there to ridicule. Nothing prevents the hyper-cultural tourist from being a hyper-cultural terrorist as well.

"Problematic" with the narrower meaning of the word would be those attitudes where the virtual world gets confused with the real world, or it even replaces the real world. Perhaps it refers to today’s version of those people who in the past resorted to a phantasy world, with pink clouds, with scenarios, with imagined dialogues. That inner world was much more alive than the other, the outside, the real world that was experienced as grey and weak, as hopeless and unbearable. Internet, facebook and the like, where their usage exceeds a certain limit, would be the modern version of that lonesome world that would no longer be characterized by inwardness, but certainly by the sinking in an autistic fairytale; a fantasy transformed onto electronic stilts. Perhaps modern pathologies such as internet addiction, "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder", a certain type of depression, lie on the toxicity of that kind of existence that we assimilate more or less when we operate as users of the internet.

Where people with such issues end up at the door of the psychologist or the psychiatrist, are usually dealt with on the basis of past terms, that is like those addicted to alcohol and drugs. Perhaps more attention should be paid to this particular kind of dependence, to the specificity of the relationship with the computer and the internet, if it is for a communication, a therapeutic communication to take place. 

I began with McLuhan’s anecdote about the Indian that marveled on the atomic mushroom. The internet is amazing and wonderful. It exerts an attraction that resembles that exerted by the Sirens towards the sailors that passed from their places. It was their beautiful songs. In Greek mythology the other mythical creatures that sing are the Muses. Martin Poltrum, Austrian psychiatrist, makes an interesting remark about the difference between them.

Muses (...) only start speaking when one asks them to, praises, or honours them. Muses are harmless. Even though they might say the wrong thing, this is something they admit from the beginning. However, this also means that Muses first and foremost listen. They listen to the poet and they say to him that, which he asks for. The poet takes the Muses as seriously as they take him, his care to know, his question, as well as his plea to learn. Here exists a great difference with the Sirens.  Sirens also sing. Indeed they sing beautifully and lovely. That is what the myth tells us. They sing so beautifully and their song is so full of promises, that the sailors who pass by find it impossible to sail away from their melody. Sailors wish to be close to the Sirens. Through their song the Sirens give the promise of beauty, sweetness, lust, but instead they bring desolation, torment and death. It is even been said that everything surrounding the Sirens become ashes. When one closes in on them, in a way he blazes with passion and burns. Siren’s entity consists in provoking through love and bringing death, when one approaches them. Sirens speak without any invitation to do so. They sing to the passing sailors seeking out their attention. Sirens lack exactly that, which describes the Muses: Sirens are deaf. They don’t listen. They don’t care about the passers-by. They don’t care about Odysseus who aches for his home, Penelope and Tilemachos. They take no interest in Orpheus and the Argonauts and where they want to go once they pass by their island. Sirens wish for this one and only thing: Attention in any price. It is of no interest to them whether in this way they prevent the passers-by from continuing on their own life path. To surrender to the Sirens means a real, or psychic, death.

The virtual world seems to exert an overwhelming charm and attraction, like that of the Sirens. Why that of the Sirens? Because the Sirens do not answer to any invocation of ours, they don’t listen to us, like Muses do, they call out for us, they provoke us with their allure. "Where do you want to go today?" It is so seductive! We cannot say no to it. 

Let’s pay more attention to this allure. Homer’s word for the influence of the Sirens is "thelgousin". With this word Homer describes even how Hermes using his magic wand wherewith he "lulls peoples' eyes", shuts their eyes and puts them to sleep. The verb "thelgw" is used almost everywhere under the notion of charming and deceiving. The Sirens lure humans. These head towards them like sleep-walkers. It is already a fair wind that brings Odysseus’s ship to the island. And while they are approaching, suddenly the wind ceases, a calm spreads everywhere and, Homer writes, a God puts the waves to sleep.

What is going on is incomparably wider from the phenomenon of seduction of men by beautiful and alluring women. The island of the Sirens is the place of absolute calm. There are no storms and dangers; everything is friendly and sweet, the elements of nature, as much as the "sublime" Sirens that call for you: "come!" It is the place that is free from any kind of trouble, any kind of dispute, animosity, danger, any kind of pain. That is it lacks any kind of Alien. So, it is not just the embrace of the Sirens. The whole place is an embrace that is on offer for you. In this space you can finally rest. Sleep! 

Eric Schmidt, the general manager of Google up to a year ago, in a recent speech with the title "Building the digital future", he quotes a phrase by George Bernard Shaw that says: "You see things and you say: why? But I dream of things that never were, and I say, why not?" The excerpt is from the book "Back to Methuselah". We find ourselves in the Garden of Eden. The words come from a snake that speaks to Eva. Moreover the snake speaks, writes Bernard Shaw, "with a strange, charming musical whisper". Like a Siren. It says that it has "conquered death". Eric Schmidt goes on with his speech. His words have taken the seductive tone of the snake: "Why this is like this? Why couldn’t it be better? Why is there unfairness in the world? Why can’t we fix that?" In the book, the snake even says how it is done: "You imagine what it is you desire; You want what you imagine; You create what you desire."

The technology of the internet promises a world not only without limits, not only limitless, not only accessible everywhere and anytime, but even a world without injustice. Doesn’t it remind us of the place of the Sirens? And doesn’t Eric Schmidt’s speech itself incite us to that place? Doesn’t it sing to us "Come!"? Doesn’t it open a huge embrace towards us? Doesn’t it lull us, or better, doesn’t it stupefy us with the promise of its utopia?

But today it is, let’s say, a beautiful day. Friedrich Hölderlin, in an introduction to his poem "Celebration of Peace" ("Friedensfeier"), he writes the following: "Please read these pages only if you're feeling kind. (...) But to those who find my language too unconventional, I confess I can't help it. On a beautiful day almost any kind of song can be listened to, and Nature, where it comes from, will receive it back."

Konstantin Kavafis speaks about a "warm and poetic" day in his poem "Alexandrian Kings": 

The Alexandrians were gathered

to see Cleopatra's children,

Caesarion, and his little brothers,

Alexander and Ptolemy, whom for the first

time they lead out to the Gymnasium,

there to proclaim kings,

in front of the grand assembly of the soldiers.

Alexander - they named him king

of Armenia, Media, and the Parthians.

Ptolemy - they named him king

of Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia.

Caesarion stood more to the front,

dressed in rose-colored silk,

on his breast a bouquet of hyacinths,

his belt a double row of sapphires and amethysts,

his shoes fastened with white

ribbons embroidered with rose pearls.

Him they named more than the younger ones,

him they named King of Kings.

The Alexandrians of course understood

that those were theatrical words.

But the day was warm and poetic,

the sky was a light azure,

the Alexandrian Gymnasium was

a triumphant achievement of art,

the opulence of the courtiers was extraordinary,

Caesarion was full of grace and beauty

 (son of Cleopatra, blood of the Lagidae);

and the Alexandrians rushed to the ceremony,

and got enthusiastic, and cheered

in greek, and egyptian, and some in hebrew,

enchanted by the beautiful spectacle -

although they full well knew what all these were worth,

what hollow words these kingships were.

A beautiful day, as much for Hölderlin as for Kavafis, is a welcoming day. It accepts everything, and accepts warmly, without testing, without judging, without allowing or forbidding things. But a day like this allows things to leave as well, in their own time, without holding anything and without getting hold of anything. 

Perhaps, in a day like this, the song of the Sirens could be heard as one more way of singing in itself. Perhaps some Alexandrians would have liked the "faces", would have become excited. Maybe, enchanted, they would transform to "faces" themselves, "although they full well knew what all these were worth"...