Your finger points to the moon,
But the finger is blind until the moon appears.
What connection has moon and finger?
Are they separate objects or bound?
This is a question for beginners
Wrapped in seas of ignorance.
Yet one who looks beyond metaphor
Knows there is no finger; there is no moon.
• Ryokan (1758-1831)
Part.1.Introduction.
Old Neos.
Electronic media, and the effects it has on the way we experience reality, are under intensive scrutiny by postmodern thinkers – the bigger the part it (or IT) plays in our lives, the more dramatic the announcements regarding its possible effects become.
Theories about reality's distortion, duplication, alienation and even sheer elimination abound, and often make one forget that while these theories, and the thinkers who bear them, are contemporary, the notions in question are far from it. As will be shown later in this essay, the problematic nature of mediated reality has been the concern of ancient human cultures for thousands of years.
This does not mean that nothing has changed. Electronic media still play a significant part in the way our reality is produced and, more importantly, perceived. By juxtaposing old issues and new ones, I am hoping to shed light on one of electronic media's most unique effects.
To sum it in a trendy postmodern phrase – I will use technology as a metaphor in order to contemplate the use of metaphor as a technology.
Part.2.
‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard mourns, or maybe celebrates, the death of the referent and the coronation of representation as the only ‘Reality', a signifier with no signified (in Foss 1983,p.11-12). This shift is often seen as an effect of electronic communication technologies that not only represent reality, but also are potent enough to produce it. For example, watching Bill Clinton on TV means watching an electronic representation of Bill Clinton, an electronically created signifier of a ‘real' (‘'!) person. On the other hand, the digital character of Dr. Aki Ross * looks just as real as Mr. Clinton's, but has no referent in reality. To Hillary's joy, the lovely Dr. Ross does not exist in the reality in which Bill Clinton exists. She is not a digital representation, but a digital creation .
Electronic media, an ever growing part of our lives, not only represents physical reality, but produces or gives birth to an apparently new reality that points nowhere beyond itself. The medium, then, ceases to be a mediator and turns into a generator.
I doubt if that was Marshal McLuhen's original meaning (Rucker et al. 1993 p.166), but it seems that today, at least as far as Baudrillard is concerned, the Medium really is the Message. Electronic media detaches us from the real, or, even worse, hijacks reality.
While the medium that Baudrillard describes might actually be the message, it is not necessarily the actual medium.
Part.3. Genesis.
The Garden of Eden was the place where Man and Woman were supposed to live in contentment, without any lack. Everything was supplied and free to use, apart from the fruits of one tree, ‘The Tree of Knowing Good and Bad', located at the center of the garden. The other famous tree, ‘The tree of life', is briefly mentioned and no prohibitions are issued regarding it.
At this stage both the Man and the Woman are still nameless. The Hebrew word Adam literally means ‘A Man', it is a noun but confused by most translators as a name. The name “Eve” appears only at the end of this chapter, post the primordial sin.
God warns his creations that whoever will eat from that tree will die. God does not threaten or vows to punish, but merely describes death as the inevitable effect of the fruit.
The snake shows the woman the fruit and encourages her to give it a try. He assures her that she will not die on the spot, but merely become godlike and know good and bad. It is important to note that both God and the Snake describe the effect of the tree not as ‘Knowing good or Bad', but ‘Knowing good and bad'. So before eating it none of these concepts exists. The woman tastes the apple and later gives her man a bite as well.
The next scene depicts God walking around the garden, calling for Adam. But Adam is hiding. Why are you hiding? , God asks. Adam replies that he is hiding because he is naked. God then replies with a rhetorical question that exposes the apple's effect:
“Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (Genesis, Ch.3, Verse 11)
Part.04. The One about the French Psychologist, Jewish Rabbi, and Aboriginal Priest meeting Bill Gates in a Zen Monastery.
Win.
Electronic media changes the way we perceive and interact with the world. In more than one way, technology simplifies human experience. Personal computers are an example of electronic media that play an increasing part in/of our lives. Using Graphic User Interfaces (GUI), computers allow us to perform complex tasks by a simple click.
Popular operating systems, like Microsoft Windows, simplify long and elaborate processes into a single image, a descriptive graphic representation.
The computer world is a never-ending stream of code, a string of ones and zeros. To facilitate control over this world and make sense of it, Microsoft Windows cuts short strings of code, and ties them to a graphic representation (which in itself is made of code). Before Windows, these processes were indiscriminate streams in the flux that is the world of code, accessible only to experienced programmers (code gods?). Now, once they are represented, they are detached from the code and are independent objects.
So, graphic interfaces facilitate control over processes, but while doing so, they also alienate, or maybe detach us from them.
Zen.
Zen is a ‘method' that strives to free the mind from delusion in order to experience reality as it is. Some even say that, like postmodernism, Zen is a way of liberation from the representational way of thinking (Olsen 2000).
One of the most popular Koáns * in Zen literature raises the following question:
‘What happens to your fist once you open your hand?'
This sentence tries to examine the effect that representation, language in this case, has on our relation to the real. In the English dictionary, as well as in other Western languages, the word Fist in a Noun, an object.
Is a fist an object? In Chinese , the word fist is made of the words Rolled and Hand. So a fist is a hand in action, a process.
But what is a hand? A hand is also a plethora of interdependent processes, and so on.
Lacan.
A kindred concept is also found in the works of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan; a newborn child, fed and cared for by his mother, does not distinguish between the breast that feeds him and the mouth that is being fed. He perceives the world as a stream of uncontrollable and fragmented bodily experiences (Olson 2000, p.121).
Between the ages of six to eighteen months something occurs. Lacan calls this the Mirror stage. The baby finds himself in front of a mirror, or any other thing that he can see his reflection in. Failing to understand this process of representation, the baby misrecognizes the image he sees as his own.
This initial self-representation syndicates the child's experience into an apparent stable image of wholeness. But wholeness might not be the correct word, since once the baby recognizes what he is, he also realizes what he isn't. (Lacan, 1977, p.1-7)
The initial representation (of himself) detaches the baby from reality, from the unity that is the world, and positions him in the symbolic realm. Reality is no longer immediate and is accessible by representation alone.
For the first time, he perceives himself as an ‘I', a subject, that is separated from the other things around him. All the things he needs and enjoys are suddenly without him, he now has to call for them. He has to ask, to utter, to communicate his needs to others on which he depends.
In the realm of the real, there is no language because there is no need (Klages, 2001), but once the real is lost, he uses representation in order to call for what he needs. This calling is the first self-conscious human action, the first human attempt to shape and influence existence by using a tool, a technology. This technology is language. Note that the availability of essential things has not changed, only the baby's perception of them.
Babies, as animals, communicate from the second they are brought into this world, but only when they are self-aware do they communicate consciously in order to achieve a desired effect – it is no longer a spontaneous gesture, but a conscious action with an effect in mind.
Misc.
Similar or related notions are found in other cultures as well. American Indians, as well as the Australian Aborigies, resent when modern tourists take photographs of their families and places of worship. The photograph is said to steal the soul, or kill the essence of the thing it represents. When reading the bible, religious Jews do not pronounce the name of God, made of the letters JHVH, and simply call it ‘The Name'. Pronunciation of the actual name of God, or any other representation of it is considered a ‘denial of attributes' (Maimonides in Leibowitz,2000. p.71), a limitation of the infinite God.
Stage.05 Paying Bill at the Gates of Eden .
Once Adam and Eve, now named, have eaten from the apple, they were already outside the Garden of Eden. Once they are self-aware, immediacy is impossible and lack is inevitable. The representational way of thinking is the operating system we use to access the real, the interface through which we perceive and interact with reality.
Eve ate the apple and gave birth to the most popular operating system to date – language. Thousands of years later, her descendant, Bill Gates, made a fortune by eating another Apple (inc.) and created the most popular operating system of the modern age – Windows.
This initial technology is both the sin and the punishment. It is a system that allows us a limited understanding of, and control over, a world that we are integral parts of and would not have attempted to control unless this same system detached us from it in the first place.
As one would expect from such a divine punishment, human lack is irreconcilable. We communicate in order to extinguish need, but the more we communicate- the more we are in lack. Digital media further intensifies this by facilitating communication and thus introducing us to more and more objects that are without us. In a sense, communication does not make our world smaller, but actually bigger and bigger. Communication junkies, we try to use more and more of the substance to quench our need, oblivious of the substance itself being the reason for this same need. Oblivious.
This may as well be a terrible way to live , but did God forget about the death he promised the eaters of the forbidden fruit?
He surely did not. Adam and Even, as all other beings, were as mortal before the apple as they were after, but in the former state of mind, death was not yet terrifying, since there was no ‘I'. There was nothing to be afraid of since we were at one with the process that is reality. Initially God does not forbid eating from the Tree of Life since Adam and Eve do not yet know death, and thus have no reason to try and revoke it. It is only after they become self-conscious that God positions angels to guard the Tree of Life lest they will try to eat from it as well.
Representation makes the ‘I' a finite string, a limited existence with a beginning and an end, a birth and an inevitable death. It is not a coincidence that the first thing Adam and Eve have done after eating the apple, the second technology that emerged from the first one, is sew fig leaves in order to hide their genitals.
This was the first attempt on part of humans to efface their methods of production in order to forget death.
Stage.6.Conclusion. “Will the real medium please stand up”.
Whether as a result of a Lacan-ean mirror stage, or a divine punishment for eating the forbidden fruit - our immediate access to reality was lost long before electronic media was even dreamed of. Once we started to reflect on reality, reality itself became a mere reflection.
If, as Baudrillard suggests, electronic media is reality then our perception of this reality is, necessarily, produced by another media. Both the digital Dr. Aki Ross and the ‘real' Bill Clinton are mediated by another ‘technology', the human representational way of thinking.
And now the ground is ready to make my own dramatic announcement: Electronic media does not produce reality , but serves as a Metafictive agent in the production of realism .
By acknowledging electronic media's role in the production of reality (as Baudrillard does), we forget the real producer of this reality – our own innate representational way of thinking.
We mistake the message for the medium, falsely believing that we are facing reality without mediation, but this perception itself is mediated by another medium that we are oblivious of.
Realism is a text that effaces its own production (Barthes in Lacey,1998 p.193). Electronic media draws attention to its own nature as a mediator and creates a fictional self-consciousness (Waugh,1984 p.1) that renders us oblivious of the real mediator – and thus makes us feel that we are once again integral parts of the real – wandering innocently in the Garden of Eden, which, in actual fact, has never been so far away.
A thousand mountain ranges
separate
the one who reflects
from the one who is truly present.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
October 2003.
Dror Poleg.
Baudrillard, Jean., 'The precession of Simulacra', in Foss, P., Simulations (New-York, 1983). pp. 1-13.
Baudrillard Jean., 'The implosion of Meaning in the Media and The Implosions of the social in the Masses', in Woodward, K.(ed.), The Myths of Information : Technology and Postindustrial Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980). pp.137-148.
Marshall, Erik. 'Fatal Strategies and Film Studies', in Film-Philosophy , vol. 6 no. 44, November 2002. [phttp://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n44marshall] ( 20/10/2003 ).
Tofts, Darren., & McKeich, M., Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Sydney: Interface Books/21C, 1998), Chapter 2: The Technology Within, pp. 36 – 58
Rucker, R., & Serious, R.U.,& Mu, Q., Mondo 2000 : A user's guide to the new age (London: Thames and Hudson 1993).p.166 & 144
Murphie, A., & Potts, J., Culture & Technology ( New York : Palgrave, 2003). pp. 1 –10
Postman, Neil, Technopoly : the surrender of culture to technology (New-York: Vintage Books, 1993).
Lacan, Jacques., Écrits: A selection (New York: Norton, 1977). pp.1-7.
Ryokan, Taigu. ‘Reply to a Friend', in Huang, M.H, & Smith, L (tr). Poetry of Ryokan . [http://www.yakrider.com/Poetry_n_Essays/Poetry/ryokan.htm] ( 20/10/2003 ).
Reps, P., & Senzaki, N.(ed.), Zen Flesh Zen Bones (Shamballa Press, November 1995).
Olson, C., Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking ( New York : State University Press, October 2000). pp.115-131.
‘Genesis' ,in The Holy Bible, King James Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1999). [www.bartleby.com/108/] ( 27/10/2003 ). Chapter 3.
Leibowitz, Y. 5 Books of Faith ( Jerusalem : Keter Publishing House Ltd,2000).
Grigg, R., The Tao of Zen (Charles E Tuttle Co., June 1994), pp.191-199,225-229.
Waugh, P., Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), pp.1-19.
Lacey, N., Image & representation : key concepts in media studies (Basingstoke: McMillan 1998). pp.189-193.
* Dr Aki Ross is the protagonist of the 2001 computer-generated (CGI) feature, ‘Final Fantasy'.
* A Koán is a “'problem' that Zen teachers would use in guiding their students towards release” (Reps 2000, p.11). “What is the right answer to a Koán? There are many right answers and there are also none…For the Koan itself is the answer, and by the time there is a right answer the Zen is lost…”(Ibid, p.91).
