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

3. The Platonic Teleport

3 The Platonic Teleport Who knows if being alive is really being dead, and being dead is being alive? —Plato, quoting Euripides (from an unknown source) Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product. —Heim P lato launches metaphysics, the thought-program that will give rise to cloning, artificial intelligence, and the crisscrossing of the (in)animate at the turning of the transepochal. And this Platonic template—with multiple revisions, to be sure—is teleported as far into the future as we can see. The file carries the name, among others, of cognitive science, the human genome project, AI, and virtual reality, and contains within itself, although there is no real “within,” instructions on how to overcome death and become immortal . The process will involve the construction of powerful prostheses of memory, organ harvesting and manufacture, genetic codes, and the exchange of what used to be called the “natural” and the “artificial.” 41 The planet is becoming mechanic-organic, biotechnical, and the Platonic software insures that bios and technē will couple and breed. The experience of time itself is, again, warping, bending, and folding in unexpected ways. Teleportation is itself a product of the research project launched by Plato. An article in Nature on the teleportation of photons—and it is entirely appropriate that light is the first to make the switch— opens as follows: The dream of teleportation is to be able to travel by simply reappearing at some distant location. An object to be teleported can be fully characterized by its properties, which in classical physics can be determined by measurement. . . . But how precisely can this be a true copy of the original? What happens to the individual quantum properties, which according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, cannot be measured with arbitrary precision? (Bauwmeester et al. 1997, 575) The answer has something to do with what physicists call “entanglement ,” which occurs when measurements on one particle change the properties of another in exactly the same manner. This produces what Einstein called “spooky effects at a distance.” In the most recent discourse of quantum mechanics, the discourse markers of technologics are all present: the dream, measurement, copies and originals, a structure of entanglement, and, naturally, the spookiness of the whole thing. Physics, philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis all seem linked in the same entangled web of what used to be called the Zeitgeist, time’s ghostly perturbations that echo throughout the sociality of language. The master code of the Platonic program that allows us to think teleportation and all its affiliates in telecommunications and the biosciences is the idea of mimēsis, necessary for both the reproduction of the same and for Socrates’ immortality as he makes the crossing, psyche leaving soma behind, from Athens to Hades. Language, memory , consciousness, communiques, culture, and all the rest require a concept of re-production and copying, faxing forward to a destination more or less preestablished by the choice of code and operating systems. Such an operation is not, of course, the “imitation” involved with sophistics and poetry, which are supposedly banned from the premises, but rather a signal sent through the transmitting towers, glinting in the sun, of dialectics. But to discuss, for the n⫹1 time, the problematics of mimēsis: how melancholy, how mournful. A now42 TechnoLogics grizzled Narcissus scraping his slow way, with bloodied knees, to the pond yet again and leaning over to gaze in the wrinkles of the water at his pale, dead face. What is it, at the end, that links repetition and death? How can we understand another repetition that rephrases the lines that order the difference between death and life? And yet, for what I take to be a very short moment, a moment already vanishing, we have the slightest of advantages and “today’s process of transition allows us to perceive what we are losing and what we are gaining—this perception will become impossible the moment we fully embrace, and feel fully at home in, the new technologies . In short, we have the privilege of occupying the place of ‘vanishing mediators’” ( i ek 1997, 130). We exist as nanotechnology , and its culturally parallel ports are emerging and are able, with the speed of a glance, to look backward and forward from a different cog on the unhinged gears of the history of thought. There is a history of philosophy and philosophy’s adversarially complementary others, literature and psychoanalysis, disciplines that look...