Cybernetymology and -ethics

“Norbert’s Crossing”

©1997, Alec McHoul

It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks. I do not know.

—Norbert Wiener, 1947 (27)

Steed:

I’m playing it as a journalist, getting gen on “automation in modern society,” “will the machine supplant man?”—or woman, for that matter.

Peel:

And will it?

Steed:

Not if I have anything to do with it.

—“The Cybernauts,” 1965

And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of the soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammë or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

—Jacques Derrida, 1967 (9)

”You me.” The stranger used Cobb’s own tight little smile on him. “I’m a mechanical copy of your body.”

The face seemed right and there was even the scar from the heart transplant. The only difference between them was how alert and healthy the copy looked. Call him Cobb Anderson2. Cobb2 didn’t drink. Cobb envied him. He hadn’t had a completely sober day since he had the operation and left his wife.

—Rudy Rucker, 1982 (5)¹

They are all more or less agreed then—all, perhaps, except Wiener, and he should know. The cyber (or more correctly, as we shall see, the kybern) is the figure that, rightly or wrongly, has come to stand for the end of the humanistic ideal of man. The only disagreement is over whether this figure is good (Rucker) or bad (Steed) or, indeed, whether such a judgment need be made at all (Derrida). The meaning of the cyber appears secure, then; its ethics uncertain. Is it possible that these are connected; that the uncertain ethics stems from a false security about the meaning of the term? If so, this can open on to two related questions about the term and its values: cybern~etymology and cybern~ethics.

In this essay, then, I will be attempting to follow on from the grounds established in an earlier paper in Postmodern Culture, “Cyberbeing and ~space,”² and so to mobilise a Heideggerian method (an etymology) in order to begin to open up an altered understanding of the technological domain of the cyber and, in particular, its ethics. As Heidegger shows throughout his work, early and late, it is only our modern (that is, Cartesian and post-Cartesian) assumption that language is a mere representation of beings (for example of “objects,” “nature,” or “culture”) that holds us back from seeing how the very language we speak and write is the dwelling place of our fundamental connection to Being as such. In language, for Heidegger, the fundamental event of appropriation (Ereignis), the letting-belong-together of man and Being, occurs. Language, in this view, is not the world in code, mediating “objects” to man-as-“subject,” but the house of Being wherein man also dwells as the only possible guardian of Being.³ If Heidegger’s counter-representationalist argument is correct (and this is something I have examined in more detail elsewhere),⁴ then taking an etymological path is no merely arcane or technical (for example, semantic, linguistic or lexicographical) measure. Still less is it a game with words. Instead, it should be a journey of thinking towards what most concerns us, as Heidegger says, “in its essence.”

But to say that this present investigation tries to open upon the cyber “in its essence” does not entail an essentialism in the crude sense. Rather, and the importance of this will become clearer as we proceed, Heidegger’s term for “essence,” das Wesen, is meant to emphasize “the verbal sense of wesen as ‘governing’ or ‘effecting,’ while retaining the fundamental reference to ‘presencing’”.⁵ Accordingly, a counter-representational attention to the details of cyber-language (to...