TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

7. The Drone of Technocapitalism

7 The Drone of Technocapitalism The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. —J. G. Ballard O n the occasion of his 100th birthday, Ernst Jünger briefly commented on the century in which he has lived. Concerning the year of his birth, 1895, Jünger recalled the Dreyfus affair in France and Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which “finally made the invisible visible and made possible new measurements of the organic and the inorganic world.”1 This is where we today exist: on the (in)calculable line between the two domains, the organic and its other, as the ontological lines that demarcate values shift, forever shattering. But even as the ancient grid shifts, the lines of power are being reorganized by the flows of capital and knowledges, a socialtechnical organization of the planet that “not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xv). Ours is the time of the realization of cybernetics, when machines wait on the threshold of thought and human beings are treated as 123 components of the machine world that can be cast aside, or recast into new forms, when no longer needed. In such a period, what of ethics? Can there be an ear that listens to the call of conscience if the ear is severed from a body, itself artificial, and the system of the automaton governs the possibility of the knowledge of the invisible world, the distinction between the right and the wrong, and the image of what it means to be a human being? As we are becoming posthuman , what of the humus, the humility of the earth? The appearance of the automaton brings with it a swarm of humming questions that concern, among other things, * the nature of the lines between the animate and the inanimate (the living and the dead) * how to distinguish the real from the unreal or the genuine from the artificial * the meaning, in the Xerox age, of production, reproduction , presentation and representation, i.e. the entire range of the history of mimēsis (Plato is never far away) * the question of time and the forgetfulness of time brought by the automation; its entrance en-trances both adults and children, like the hypnotic effect of staying too long in a video arcade. This is, perhaps, the most difficult aspect of the technological to think. Jünger’s 1957 novel, The Glass Bees, addresses all of these questions . In the novel we find ourselves listening to the threatening hum of mechanical bees and looking at dozens of severed ears that float in a pond on the estate—a walled-in “restored” Cistercian monastery within the walls of a manufacturing and design center— of Giacomo Zapparoni, the founding director of a multinational company that specializes in the cyberneticizing of film, business, and the military. As each sphere becomes another site for the colonization of informatics, they all become more and more meshed into a series of overlapping platforms. Entertainment, moneymaking , and the war machine become integrated into a massive cyborg in which the individual becomes enmeshed in the machinic and the nonhuman. This is not, in kind, a new development, but it is a new phase of intensification of the absorbtion of the flesh and the finite by the inorganic. Traditional boundaries are ruptured and Captain Richard, a down-and-out ex-cavalryman, is seeking a job from Zapparoni. In the 124 TechnoLogics process of narrating the scene of the interview, he gives us a history of his own past and his struggle to understand the intellectual and ethical implications of his encounter with the automated bees, the cut-off ears, and Zapparoni himself, if it is Zapparoni himself, for there might be no distinguishable “real” entity behind the global media events that go by the name “Zapparoni”). In the “ghostly production of post-industrial capitalism,” Negri writes, the “mechanisms [that produce exploitation] remain intact and become even more powerful” (1999, 10), and Zapparoni is a figure for the absolute exploitation not just of labor, but of nature and of the human itself. If Zapparoni’s...