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

Conclusion: Heeding the Phantomenological

Conclusion: Heeding the Phantomenological Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brothers and sisters, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? —Zarathustra P erhaps, though, in the end nothing has changed. After all, we all wake up in the morning, go about our business as we live out our numbered days, and then slip away, at one time or another , into sleep at first and then, at last, into the night of nothingness . We continue to hope for a long life, for love in its many forms, and for a graciously courageous death. We are anxious about being absorbed into the Borg, the hive-mind of technology, and we want technology to produce faster computers and more precise medicines . The wish is still alive, and we all willingly participate in it. Postmodernity, one name for the opening to the posthuman, is not all that bad for those of us with luck enough to have money for housing and food. We’ll just continue to limp along, as human beings always have. With the advent of technologics, nothing has changed—nothing fundamental, at any rate. As I have tried to demonstrate through readings of Platonic mimēsis, the “prefer not” of Bartleby, the immortality machine of Marx, the logic of the drone, the installation of surveillance from Oedipus to Lacan, and the 193 twisting of temporality in the transepochal, to be human has always been to be posthuman, the machinic has always been embedded within the organic. From a certain perspective, then, one that we might still call that of the line and the point, we are where we have always been. Walking in place. But the logic of the line and the point, as the basic trope of time, history, causality, knowledge, and identity, is precisely what I hope to have called into question. At each “stage” of the development of technologics —a thinking pragmatics that wants to peel the name and the mind away from the body, that wants all things to be disposable as calculable utility, and whose deepest dream is to abolish death— there has also always been the presence of the disrupting and multiplying effect of ghosts, those absent ones who nonetheless make demands on us and of us. We have never been where we have thought ourselves to have been; we have always been elsewhere and other than now. The human has always been structured as a structure of displacements and deferrals. Mutation, therefore, can occur. As Baudrillard reminds us, “[I]n relations between things there is always a hiatus, a distortion, a rift that precludes any reduction of the same to the same” (2000, 71).The phantomenological must supplement the phenomenological, with its historical links to the appearing of the clear daylight of consciousness. Things have always been the same, and the same has always been troubled by ghosts, riven by wights that wait, that speak, that demand an attempt at justice. These are two general conclusions to be drawn from this discussion of technologics. But in the transepochal something is changing, something different is emerging. We can all feel it; we are trying to articulate it. The posthuman is the crisscrossed moment during which the most primordial of dreams is being realized empirically, when what has been operative in the ideal realm of thought, as forms of repetition , comes to be instantiated in an externalized form as a cyborg. The earth is coming under the dominion of the electronic, everything is being mediatized, and the elements of the (in)organic are changing places. What is to come is not predictable. The posthuman is not something given, programmable, a conclusion of the linear sequence of cause-and-effect. How could it be? It is, at least for a moment , an open possibility to be shaped by an untold complexity of forces, including but not limited to intentionality. The posthuman is not—not necessarily—the antihuman as a dystopian vision of absorption into the machine, as the cataclysmic end of humanity in which freedom, ethics, and vocation vanish for194 TechnoLogics ever, although this is one of the many possible trajectories the species could take. Katherine Hayles and Jean Baudrillard are among those who have...