Paranoia in the Age of the World Picture: The Global "Limits of Enlightenment"

A fleeting cloud shadow over a concealed land, such is the darkening which that truth as the certainty of subjectivity—once prepared by Christendom's certainty of salvation—lays over a disclosing event [Ereignis] that it remains denied to subjectivity itself to experience.

—Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture"

Paranoics cannot step outside a complex of interests designated by theirpsychological fate. Their mental acuteness consumes itself within the circle drawn by their fixed idea, as human ingenuity is liquidating itself under the spell of technical civilization. Paranoia is the shadow of cognition.

—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

In 1989, the year that Francis Fukuyama declared the "end of history," a series of photographs of the planet Neptune was published in the New York Times. In one of these photographs, Neptune assumes its contours against an otherwise unbroken dark as a dense oval of light contained within a brighter ring that ripples out to space. The caption that accompanies the series explains how the fragments of the previously undiscovered arcs coalesce into complete rings of dust driven by tiny moons. The article elaborates on how scientists have determined that the red- and pink-hued moon Triton carries a nitrogen atmosphere. The Great Dark Spot on the planet's southern hemisphere is a storm system as wide as the earth, or perhaps the shadow of what we do not know cast by what we do.

When the Neptune photographs were published in 1989, they were presented as the stunning proof of advances in astrophysics and in the technologies of image production. Once disseminated in the newspapers, this proof joined the repertoire of images that comprise the screen memory contents of a collective cultural imaginary and left an internal imprint in consumers of scientific culture. Yet from a romantic and reactionary standpoint, the photographs "colonized" the imagination in the name of "what we know now." This colonization involves the interpenetration of boundaries: the external photographic image becomes memory-image miniaturized in the mind's eye, and the inside reflects the outside, or at the very least accommodates it on a nonconscious level. At this level, the imaginary haplessly absorbs the aesthetic effect of the images and the physics implicit in the mechanical techniques that make them possible (what Walter Benjamin once referred to in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as the "unconscious optics" of film). The paranoia that I sometimes experience in my encounters with new technologies concerns the unconscious results of such an accommodation. What happens when this internalized "mechanical element" returns to the outside world?

My reaction to the pictures of Neptune is romantic and performative: it is intended to enunciate a paranoid defensiveness about the destruction of the imagination by the forces of progress. This paranoia has a long lineage in the German philosophical and sociological traditions, which have explored the impact of industrialization on the configuration of knowledge and on the formation of alienated and reified subjects. Such anxiety is evinced in Ferdinand Tönnies's 1887 distinction between an aggressively alienated and mechanistic Gesellschaft over and against a spiritually committed, consensual, and organic Gemeinschaft and in Georg Lukács's theory of reification in History and Class Consciousness. A Mandarin wariness permeates Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which traces the negative legacy of Enlightenment ideals in shaping subjects who introject and reproduce the forces of their own domination; it also haunts the writings of their nemesis, Martin Heidegger, who, in the analytic of Mitsein in Being and Time, vents his disdain for the "they" that saps existential resoluteness. Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture" signals his growing disquiet about the deepening influence of the mechanical sciences on the ethos of free inquiry that Immanuel Kant once identified with the domain of "public" reason. In exploring these paranoid refractions, the following will chart a passage from the 1989 Neptune photographs to Heidegger's world-as-picture in order ultimately to traverse the "outer" and "inner" spaces...