Translation by Claire Cical from the book by Jean Brun « Le Rêve et la Machine », Editions La Table Ronde, 1992.
One could imagine a modern Hamlet meditating not on a skull, but on the archipelago of consciousnesses that our media try to connect together through multiple communication networks; because despite the increasingly invasive means implemented by such enterprises, Plotinus’ formula: « All beings are together, but each of them is separate » (1) has never ceased to be true. We all live at the same time, even in the same time, while our durations remain foreign to each other; we can neither permute nor change them and we do not operate transfers of sensations or feelings: we do not transfuse experience as we transfuse blood. The world, cities and trains are content to situate us or transport us in a being-together where simultaneity is nothing other than a collective solitude; the islands may be part of an archipelago, but they remain islands nonetheless. So much so that one could define the simultaneous as a chronological region where, as Leibniz would say, beings remain « without doors or windows » and live behind closed doors.
It is this archipelago of consciousnesses that the technical enterprise, to the meta-physical essence(2) of which we remain blind because we are attentive only to its utilitarian applications, wanted first to transform into a continent before working to make it burst into drifting constellations. The problem posed by separation is all the more inextricable because we cannot say where it comes from or define what would put an end to it. Considerations of a primitive monera, which would have divided and whose fragments would have multiplied to then constitute themselves into organisms, throw us a biological saga that we can only read with the cold gaze of indifference. The positivist prophecies, which sing of the social hyperorganism whose advent would put an end to the « scandal of the diaspora » of consciences, also stem from intellectual constructions that fail to meet our expectations. Lived and unthinkable, felt and incurable, obvious but unjustifiable, separation remains our lot, a lot whose stakes are not written in the structures of the world. However, around the different forms of separation, gravitates a nagging desire to overcome them, a desire that manifests itself in all enterprises to clear a path for knowledge and to build bridges to cross, or even abolish, carnal, spatial and temporal separations. Science and technology are the great strategies by which human existence strives to win a definitive victory over separation by asking knowledge and works to operate the effective saving overcomings. Science and technology are enterprises of crossing; It is therefore not surprising that, in view of their « victories », they want to go even further today and cross the threshold of man himself in order to succeed in moving the entire horizon.
The history of machines is reduced to that of man’s stubborn attempts to develop techniques of clearing and communication. Behind such determination to discover access routes and to operate passages, hides a fundamental despair of human consciousness riveted to its insularity and to this world of succession to which it is doomed by the time that passes and the displacement that condemns it to travel through space where over there is an omnipresent challenge to here. This is why space exploration machines are the sisters of the time exploration machine. Our increasingly fast machines, the exhilaration demanded of speed, the mythological names given to rockets charged with probing the mysteries of the extraterrestrial beyond by allowing, like « Ariane », to discover the door that leads out of the existential labyrinth, are children of dreams and not those of abstract scientific theories. Only a residual rationalism, so blind to the essential approach of man that it ended up denying his essence and existence, could have tried to persuade us otherwise.
If the desire to explore time has not been the subject of technical applications, it remains nonetheless that the desire to cross the barrier of time is as nagging as that of exploring space; in this sense the chrononaut must be added to the astronauts, hydronauts and cosmonauts on the list of all those who work to build bridges between distances of all kinds. Chronological explorations charm us and their very impossibility saddens us. The machine has much more than a history: it has a biography insofar as man did not simply manufacture it to make it his servant, but where he conceived it to become his companion, even his goddess; desires and fantasies are, in fact, just as much, if not more, the true causes and drivers of the development of machinery than are the needs or applications of scientific theories.
Paul Valéry emphasized that « we are a zoological species that tends of its own accord to vary its domain of existence » (3); specifying that each of our dreams is directed against one of the initial conditions of our life, he showed that man had worked to bring his dreams into reality: acting at a distance, transmuting metals, moving in environments forbidden to our species, speaking, seeing, hearing from one end of the world to the other, going to visit the stars, were all dreams that contained within them a whole program that man strove to bring into the realm of the possible and then into that of the real (4).
We must therefore rethink the history of technology to show that it is not at all a matter of progress in consciousness that would be parallel to progress in science, but that it belongs to this dark depths lying in the heart of man and to which it gives the opportunity to manifest itself.
Machines are, in fact, both the daughters and mothers of fantasies that should be described as metaphysical; they are not only organic projections at the service of a tactic of life seeking to conquer and remake the environment, they are above all part of the strategy of existence that attempts to free itself from its own essence and to bring forth a new Being. The utilitarian function of the machine is therefore only its diurnal face; its oneiric function must be brought to light. For born of creative imagination, the machine restores to the imagination what it had invested in it since, in return, it opens up fields that it had barely glimpsed. Just as Hegel spoke of a « work of the negative », we should also speak of a work of the oneiric which is at work in this world of the waking world where technology operates.
This is why it would be necessary to call upon a new notion, no longer that of abstract idea, but that of oneiric idea, situated neither ante rem nor post rem, but born against and in spite of reality. For the oneiric idea seeks to open the locks of doors which would give on the other side of reality where they are situated. Discoveries and inventions are born from oneiric ideas whose scope and meaning do not fall within the domain of psychology, even if it is of psychoanalytic inspiration, but rather within meta-physics thought of as the quest for a counterweight to reality.
Man asks the machine to open paths for him leading him beyond his condition, he expects from it a Salvation tearing him away from himself; This is why he unconsciously entrusts him with a real eschatological mission. A mission whose « trick » consists in presenting itself as a scientific conquest of space and nature, directed by a liberating progress.
***
The entire history of technology needs to be rewritten. Especially since Descartes, a rationalist and positivist tradition has reduced technology to a set of processes made possible by the application of mathematically constituted and rigorously demonstrated scientific theories. The workshop and the factory would therefore only be the extensions of deductively established calculations and experiments carried out in the laboratory. Hercules, Prometheus and Faust would thus have put themselves to the school of rigorous physics to cease being heroes drinking from the sources of dreams and become engineers capable of transforming nature into material in order to remake it according to the needs of humanity. For a little over a century, this enterprise of possession and mastery of nature has also extended from the domain of things to that of man himself. The advent of sociology, experimental psychology and what are now called the « human sciences » has made familiar the idea that man can and must remake himself according to rational programs, starting from a planned action elevating him to the rank of self-creating being. Man has thus become the subject and object of a technology that makes him the engineer of himself, which he celebrates as the advent of autonomy and freedom. The result has been an idolatry of the fact and a blind confidence in a given progress, both for the effect and for the cause of evolution and the meaning of history. We thus live in the era of the reign of machines, insofar as they are queens and have ended up constituting a new kingdom that is added to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. The technical epic is animated by the saving optative: « Let the reign of the machine come! », it joins the cry of triumph of man who has managed to make his own the « Let there be light! » of Genesis.
Strengthened by the resources offered by technology, Humanity read, in this universe populated by machines with increasingly spectacular powers, the announcement of a new cosmogony of which it would be the author. It considered the tool as that which would allow it to build an increasingly coherent society because increasingly reasonable. It concluded that science and technology, by eliminating error and making rationally organized action effective, were alone capable of delivering not only from error, but also from fault and violence done to the human person. As a consequence, the idea of sin and the notion of Evil were evacuated in favor of that of a disease curable by therapies charged with transforming structures.
Thus, the universe organized by man appeared, according to Bergson’s triumphant formula, « a machine for making gods. » It was not necessary, it was added, to sink into a backward and fatalistic pessimism; it was important to understand, on the contrary, that man was the victim of evils whose cure depended on him alone. Psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, politics and economics were thus held to be these therapies, both individual and collective, capable of giving man a balance of which obscurantism and different kinds of organized alienations had until then frustrated him.
Such optimism implies a naive intellectual myopia that refuses to see that the vocation of the tool is to be transformed into a weapon, because every machine sooner or later becomes a war machine. Increasingly, the army is the mobilized industry and there is no such thing as an irreversible discovery; when Pasteur perfected the biological technique of vaccination, which was only the extension of his theory on the microbial origin of diseases, it was proclaimed that humanity had just made a discovery that could never turn against it, as had been the case for gunpowder and dynamite. However, today, the manufacture of weapons making bacteriological warfare possible has come to invalidate such optimism.
We will then readily recognize that there are certainly aberrant and deadly applications of technology, but we will immediately add that everything depends on the use that is made of the latter: a scalpel, a surgeon’s life-saving instrument, can always serve as a dagger for an assassin. This is to admit that there is good and evil, that technology is not its own solution and that neither action nor forward movement are self-justifying.
The vocation of the tool and the machine to transform themselves into weapons has just found its most recent expression in a war to the death unleashed not against a nation, but against man himself. Current philosophies that rationally proclaim « the death of man » are the most accomplished expression of these approaches of existence which, anxious to tear itself away from itself, has found no other way out than in its own negation during an intellectualized holocaust intended to erase the word man from all dictionaries. The latter is now reduced to one thing among many others, born of molecules accidentally coalesced and destined to disintegrate one day.
We are here in the presence of a very significant synchronism. It was, in fact, at about the same time that man developed atomic means of destruction powerful enough to trigger a cosmic suicide by wiping all life from the surface of the earth, and that anti-humanisms arose proclaiming the « death of man ». The death they announce has nothing to do with that which could be caused by an atomic apocalypse, it results from the idea according to which man is in no way the king of Creation, as theologisms claimed, nor the master of nature, as humanisms affirmed, but that he is only a simple aggregate of natural molecules without any privileged meaning.
Finally, after having reduced distance to a measurable dimension, the modern conquerors of space believed that it would be possible to reduce it to it and eliminate the separate terms, since the separating one had been conquered. Having reified distance by thinking of it only under the category of a journey to be accomplished, they ended up believing that it was distance that generated the terms between which it was situated. The subject being for them only spatialized, it no longer had any reason to exist from the moment when distance, considered as that which connects, became the domain of communication in its pure state; a communication considered to be a flawless network, so self-referential that a champion of mass media like McLuhan affirmed that the important thing was not the content of a message, but the means by which it was transported.
The world has thus become a field of communications in which there is nothing more to communicate nor subjects who communicate. The current vogue for structuralism and the novel without a subject are part of such a context reinforced by the Marxist prejudice, considered to be an eminently progressive idea, according to which individuals are mystifying abstractions and that only the infrastructures constituting nature and history exist.
The whole drama of technical civilization comes from the fact that it results from a Faustian reversal generating hysterical fetishisms of action. It thinks, in fact, of distance under the category of what connects and makes communicate, to such an extent that it affirms that it is the relationship that makes the being. If we do not think, on the contrary, that distance is what separates and that the being founds the relationship, we sink into these encyclopedic nihilisms which are content to draw up the map of communications by persisting in multiplying them in order to finally declare: « It is thus and not otherwise. »
Reducing technology to the set of applications of a science concerned with improving the fate of humans amounts to seeing only the visible part of this iceberg floating on the ocean of ages. The submerged part causes catastrophes, of which wars are the most spectacular, catastrophes that surprise only those who have not seen that machines are, at the same time, the daughters and mothers of a dream that can at any moment become a nightmare because man is prey to an Evil that is all the more insidious because we strive to demonstrate that it does not exist.
The tragedies that technology and the world of machines engender are in no way growing pains due to mistakes along the way; they are inevitably part of the technical epic, just as aging and death are part of human existence. Making such an observation does not amount to preaching an exhilarating return to an angelically purified nature: it is a matter of demystifying the reassuringly utilitarian aspect of the tool and the machine in order to situate them in the meta-scientific context where their birth and their destiny really take on meaning.
***
The history of the machine is heavy with concerns hidden by those that arise from practical applications masking the essence of the machine universe. The gestation of the latter implies, first of all, the desire of man to transform his status as a creature into that of a Creator by making the machine the being of a new essence that owes it movement and life. Such a desire has never ceased to manifest itself latently around speculations and works concerning automatons, the Golem or robots; many modern cyberneticians moreover assimilate the latter to living and thinking beings, whose operating time would not differ in any way from the Bergsonian lived duration. This is how, especially in the United States, the entry of history into a new era is given as an indisputable truth: the era of the robot sapiens.
This gestation then presupposes the desire to build a future Eve, according to the expression of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam struck by Edison’s technical prowess, who could become the daughter, then the lover, of those who would have made her. This is evidenced by the speculations of the futurists on the « steel Isoldes » and all contemporary science fiction, to which comics have given great diffusion, gravitating around sexy robots. But the construction of such machines also implies what Freud called the « death drives »; we never cease to speculate, in fact, with voluptuous shivers, on the revolt of the robots making the human species disappear to make way for an unheard-of mutant.
Thus, birth, erotically transmitted life and death are recovered by man thanks to the technology from which he asks the power to get his hands on the controls of life, in the biological sense of the term, and on those of existence in all that it has of mysteriously lived.
Those who were tortured on pyres or in crematoria writhed in pain, every movement of their bodies expressed a tragic but fruitless effort to tear themselves away from the tortures inflicted on them. Technology was born from a comparable effort by man twisting himself not only to free himself from the threats imposed by the outside world, but to tear himself away from his own essence and his own existence. If we forget this, the history of technological societies, with their extensions in frenzied eroticism, in drugs that dissociate consciousness and in exterminating hysterias, will appear as an absurd story told by idiots asking progress to angelize their errors.
In its principle, in its vocation and in its use, the machine is an existential instrument; as evidenced by the expression that has become commonplace and praises the virtues of a device by calling it a « machine for living ». An existential prosthesis, the machine is one of the by-products of this failure of creation that constitutes manufacturing that tricks by making its practical applications admired with a view to the conquest of space and the improvement of the standard of living. The machine constitutes one of the concretions of human history, it is part of the essence of it in the same way as life and death.
Remained for man the domain of artistic creation thanks to which he opened windows through time and through space. He thus made beings or places emerge that he recognized as already being memories; the masterpiece was a dream that gave onto dreams and that translated an aspiration that no reality could fulfill; it involved a process of deepening inscribed at the heart of this questioning that man can mask, but that he cannot eliminate by a definitive answer: Who am I? Questioning within which the me, the you and the we find themselves in an opening from which are born the seriousness and the sacred that give them meaning. The work of art is never a seizure or a capture, it is always a bridge whose first pile rests on the world, while the second is lost in the Invisible.
But the machinist dream swept everything away in its path. Thus, the announcement of the death of God was followed by the announcement of the death of art denounced as an alienating entertainment. Marinetti, anxious to break with the past and with the present that prolongs it, sang the beauty of locomotives, racing cars and aeroplanes. He founded the moral religion of speed that gives man a feeling of ubiquity; he demanded that libraries and museums be burned, as they were considered the hideous sepulchres of a bygone world. Then, the Russian constructivists and productivists of the Soviet revolution saw in art a bourgeois distraction that had to be put to an end. Today, it is constantly repeated that artistic production is only a small chapter in a much more general production that is part of a work to which machines have given a spectacular scope and output. The machine is then elevated to the rank of a work of art, it is even asked to manage graphic constructions or musical scores.
Nowadays, the products of big industry are themselves idolized(5) to the point of being considered masterpieces. The success of so-called Pop Art and a social acrobat like Andy Warhol bear witness to this. The meticulously reproduced tin cans, the bottles of fashionable drinks « photographed » by hand, the « sculptures » made from compressed manufactured objects, machines « freed » from any utilitarian function invade the museums of contemporary art in Europe, America and Japan. The waste itself, since it is also part of what the machines manufacture, is sanctified and offered to the admiration of the public, this is how « sculptures » or « paintings » are reduced to assemblages of waste of all kinds piled up on top of each other; moreover, the school of « garbage collection » glorifies these spin-offs of production and considers them to be bearers of a message. Since there is no longer high or low, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, all notions denounced as repressive, anything is considered consumable and admirable from the moment that this anything exists and has been produced. Man has thus become omnivorous and consequently also coprophagous.
Now the « In the beginning was the action » of Goethe’s Faust appears in all its light and in all its implications. Action is no longer only that of which man is the subject, it makes and unmakes man who is considered only as a focal point of it. This Action, which acts in and through history, is now considered to be what truly moves the men who had believed to make it. Action, it is specified, manifests itself in nature which it stirs according to force fields which materialize in provisional realities, in the manner of the figures to which magnetic spectra give birth.
Parmenides’ opponents claimed that there was no being except Becoming; today we would readily say that there is no being except Action: being has become an opus resulting from an operari, the factum of a facere without assignable author. Machines are both its concretions and its motors, its effects and its causes. As such, they constitute different kinds of springboards that man has developed to leap above himself, they are the engines of an Elevation that is no longer thought of except in terms of mobilizable forces. The machinist dream thus prolongs a dream of power that man strives to realize in order to access a first and founding Action, called Nature or Evolution, to which he would belong and of which he would constitute only a simple chapter. The builders of Babel today work in laboratories and factories.
Meta-physical and meta-scientific, the origin of technology lies in a « misfortune of consciousness » that we must be careful not to reduce to a romantic cliché stemming from a simplistic theology of sin or some morbid dolorism. Because, despite the progress of all kinds that self-feed their own triumphalisms, the human condition remains universal and eternal insofar as it stems from the lived experience of an original and constitutive Lack. We remain separated by the flesh that prevents any sharing or exchange of experience; separated by time whose irreversible flow does not allow us to truly relive what we have already lived, nor to leap over the moments in order to arrive more quickly at what we feverishly await; separated by space where all the dramas of distance, presence and absence are played out; separated by death that tears the other away from us while waiting to tear the world away from us. The plurality of consciousnesses is like a continent dislocated by a cataclysm. Time and space remain the frameworks of our existence, which we collide with without managing to break them. They show us the perpetual spectacle of plurality: plurality of places, plurality of moments offer themselves, in fact, to our desires or our fears and refuse our powers. Around these different forms of separation, which make each of us a torn and heartbreaking being, gravitate the experiences of suffering, love, temptation, remorse, hope or despair. In short, the rock to which Tantalus and Prometheus are chained is one with themselves. Atlas still bends the knee under the weight of this world.
***
The word phenomenology has been so overused that it has been almost completely emptied of all meaning; this is why it is important to recall the rich meaning it had in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This ambitious work wanted to show how the absolute Spirit, that is to say ultimately God, had phenomenalized itself, in other words had manifested itself, in and through time, in the course of a permanent Revelation taking history as its theater. Each civilization would be an incarnation of the Absolute; when it dies so that another can be born, it would repeat the Passion of Christ who died on the Cross and then rose again.
In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel had then wanted to show how God spatialized himself in Nature which was a concretion of the Idea. Unlike the Hegelian philosophy of history, it was impossible to secularize this philosophy of nature and clothe it in scientific clothing; This is why the Philosophy of Nature provoked the sarcasm of scholars and many philosophers. However, behind Hegel’s dialectical excesses, there was hidden the idea that neither distance, nor presence, nor the plurality of beings were self-explanatory but that they constituted so many manifestations that it was important to account for; the Philosophy of Nature contains within it a phenomenology of distance. The biologists who speak of a primitive monera, of the proliferation of cells coalescing into organisms, then who charge evolution and natural selection with doing everything else to finally lead us to today, proceed in the same way. But, unlike Hegel, they believe they can base their speculations on a science of matter. Hegel, for his part, retained the profound feeling that nature itself belonged to a world of distance and plurality that mathematics could not approach.
The development of means of communication is essentially metaphysical insofar as it aims to abolish distances; not only does it demand that speed cancel out what separates here from there, but it also leads to no longer respecting a distance in which the respect due to the human person is rooted. Our entire technological civilization is based on the idea that distance can and must be conquered by machines; it has thus forgotten that distance is what separates and not what vehicles capable of moving move through faster and faster.
Prometheus and Faust do not want to recognize that distance is a matter of the experience of breaking and tearing. This is how man has conferred on the machined pantheon erected by his hands a true ontological status in the name of which he believes himself authorized to extirpate his own essence and his own existence from the field of what is. Daughter and mother of dreams, the machine was ultimately entrusted with the mission of erasing the dreamer himself from the universe of things.
The reintegration of man into nature, of culture into the natural, of human action into the play of cosmic forces, represents this supreme stage of mechanization where the work claims to have eliminated the one who had been its subject. The Word has today shattered into alphabets that give birth to no sentence or message. The dream has disappeared since there is no longer a distance where it can unfold, nor a watchman who can confide in it. The dawns only illuminate themselves, no one is there to look into the secrets of the night. Everything now functions without having a function. The ocean of structures has swallowed up Icarus who can no longer fly away.
But now science and technology are asked to revive the dreams they claimed to have realized. Science fiction is, in fact, invested with the mission of opening to man the frontiers of the world that technology had arranged and of making the imagination sail beyond what science had explained. We expect from reason extrapolations that can give birth to dreams again. This science fiction, widely disseminated by books, comics, video games and cinema, has taken on the considerable dimensions of a most significant phenomenon. Time, space, the solar system no longer appear as what must be conquered or explored, they have become what must be broken in order to access parallel transuniverses whose infinite dimensions open onto mutations and desires radically different from those we have already known.
In addition, recently, new devices have offered us the opportunity to inject these transuniverses into our world in order to re-enchant life. In fact, new « living machines » have just emerged; they are « presence simulators », distributors of « virtual realities », responsible for embedding adjacent worlds in everyday reality and making « contributions » of the kind that mediums claim to be able to make. They bring forth synthetic telepresences that derealize the world that science had wanted to master by rationalizing it; surrealism has become technically operative. Such devices, which are beginning to invade the market, are added to these drugs that are expected to open the doors of perception and break down the walls of reality. So much so that humanity, which has asked the understanding to denounce the illusion of Salvation, now demands that science provide it with rescues through illusion.
The situation is all the more serious because any critical analysis of technology or the notion of progress is immediately rejected; a political Manichaeism reduces it, in fact, either to a puerile utopia advocating a return to some good old days gone by, or to an unforgivable lack of confidence in man. Progress is thus considered to be a set of irresistible, untouchable forces whose infallible finality cannot be discussed.
Now it is a question of understanding that scientific research and technical inventions do not only constitute means of action that man would have had the merit of equipping himself with in order to improve his lot; they also animate and intensify the convulsions of existence anxious to free itself from its own gangue. For man expects from these bewitching creatures that machines have become that they will finally tear him away from his being.
A sign that man intensely feels that neither the world nor himself can suffice him.
1. Plotinus, Enneads VI, 6-7.
2. Since Heidegger and his disciples announced the end of metaphysics, it has become unclear what exactly is meant by this term; this is why we write metaphysics in order to eliminate any connection with a discipline that would claim to enumerate and define the attributes and properties of substance or Being.
3. Paul Valéry, Excerpt from a lecture given at the University of Zurich on November 15, 1922, in Variété, Paris, Gallimard, 1924, p. 36.
4. Ibid., pp. 33-36.
5. This is evidenced by the almost obsessive generalization of the use of the word product in everyday language to designate services; this is how banks or postal and telephone companies praise the many products they make available to their customers.