We have more opportunities to communicate than ever before in the history of Homo sapiens. This is the elementary fact that I am referring to with the word hypercommunication, and I refrain from saying that hypercommunication is either a good or a bad thing. Now, the frequency with which we talk to other persons face-to-face, that is, in mutual physical presence, has most likely not increased—but it has probably also not dramatically declined during the past decades. If we have more opportunities to communicate than ever before, in the sense of conducting interactions based on the use of natural languages, then this increase is clearly a function of technical devices whose effects neutralize the consequences of physical as well as sometimes also temporal distance. Telephone and electronic mail, radio, gramophone, and television are such arrays. Of course there is a basic structural difference setting apart, on the one side, telephone and electronic mail, as media that allow for exchange and mutual impact and, on the other side, the more “asymmetrical” media like radio, gramophone, and television where only persons at the—irreversibly—receiving end have a perception of those individuals who initiate communication without ever getting immediate feedback.
But the most fascinating electronic communication tools are the ones that produce the physical impression of an interaction at distance, although there is but one body involved. Different from the spectators who, particularly in the eighteenth century, were intrigued by those chess-playing “machines,” we know for a fact that there is no employee of our bank or of our airline involved when we use, for example, an automatic teller machine (ATM) or when we check in at the airport by using a screen, nor are we really deceived by the mostly female voices that lend spatial presence to the navigation system in our car. And yet we often act—and we like to act—as if a real person was involved on the other side. Who, quite honestly, has never called that navigation lady “a bitch”? And who has not been pleased or put off, at some point, by the polite language, the efficiency, and sometimes the design of those airline screens helping us to get ready for the next flight?
My opening sentence, then, presupposing that we are inclined to subsume all these different kinds of technically facilitated “interaction” under the concept of communication. Many of them, like the ATM around the corner, the check-in device at the local airport, or the program at the customer service number of your Mastercard, simply replace former institutions and situations of face-to-face interaction. They are never exactly the same as the structures preceding them, but the differences between the real person (formerly) and the electronic function (today) is obviously meant to remain at a level that avoids confusion. I also think that this is the disappointingly banal reason why all these new varieties of techno-permeated communication have in the end not inspired theories as earthshaking and grandiose as some of us had originally hoped for (remember with what excitement we once read Jean Baudrillard, Vilém Flusser, or Paul Virilio?). Evidently, we are far from completely controlling, say, the addictive temptations of e-mail. But this is not so terribly different from people having spent more time than they could afford, for millennia, in pointless face-to-face conversations.
The innovation brought about by those devices, therefore, does not lie in any specific features through which they copy or exceed the possible performance of a human person—it lies in their ubiquity. Without any doubt, the number of cash machines we can use now, twenty-four hours a day and seven days per week, beats the highest number of bank employees ever hired and paid in order to provide customers with cash. Airlines will spread their welcoming presence more widely throughout the airport buildings, with those touch screens, than they ever could while they were limited to a coherent segment of space for check-in. Whatever we need seems to be more available than before through electronic communication. But, whether we want this or not, it is true that we, i.e., those who use ATMs and touch screens, become more available too.
At my university, I have the enviable privilege of a small office in the middle of the library whose occupant (and I am the present occupant) is supposed to remain anonymous. Among other things, this office, different from my other office on campus, where I see students and colleagues, was meant to protect me or, rather, to set me at a distance from the invasiveness of electronic communication (and any other type of communication that I do not actively choose), like the private space of my home where I don’t do e-mail either. I used to take care of the several hundred e-mail messages that I receive on a normal working day during deliberately limited hours of the morning and the evening in my official campus office, while the time in the carrel and the working time at home were exclusively dedicated to reading and writing. What, naively, I had not taken into account was the strange agency effect of my laptop—my laptop that I had meant to use exclusively as a writing instrument, something like a functionally much improved electronic typewriter. One day, to my surprise, the laptop screen let me know that, thanks to an upgrading of the library buildings to the level of electronically sensitive spaces, it was now making available all the messages in my carrel that I had wanted to reserve for the computer in my other on-campus office, making me thus available too to the world—very much against my intention. From the perspective of my personal work and my subjective well-being, this excessive availability was vulnerability. I know that universal availability is generally considered to be the main effect and the unconditional value of electronically provided hypercommunication. It has been celebrated as a democratic value, but it is one of those democratic values that Nietzsche would have associated with a situation of slavery. Whoever is electronically available must break all democratic rules of politeness to avoid e-mail addiction and e-mail victimage. It is considered rude—and it is therefore difficult—not to communicate. Beside that, availability undoes all hierarchies and social differences. Pretty much every day, I receive some messages in which students tell me that they have a real necessity to talk to me, that they would consider it a great favor and privilege if I set up a meeting with them—and then they continue by letting me know the time and the electronic addresses under which they will be “available.” How impossibly old-fashioned is it if I regularly feel that in this type and under these conditions of interaction it should be exclusively my privilege to be “available” or not?
1
Vis-à-vis all these electronic gadgets, vis-à-vis hypercommunication as their effect, and even vis-à-vis the very trendy academic attempts at theorizing them both, I take a position resembling the attitude of those fifteenth-century monks, scribes, and scholars who feared, criticized, and finally even actively rejected the printing press. While I do not literally believe that electronic communication devices are the devil’s work and will have a generally deteriorating effect on culture at large, I give in, quite often, to the temptation of describing them as agents and symptoms of intellectual decadence and I try to know as little about them as I can possibly afford. I have learned, proudly, that my university cannot legally oblige me to change office computers each time that we are offered the opportunity of doing so—and I relish the shock that some of my colleagues go through when they realize that the size of the computer screen in my office is three and a half technological generations behind what they consider to be standard. But I doubt they could explain to me in a really convincing way why it is so much better to have a very large screen.
Nor have I ever believed in that teleological faith according to which we make inventions when we most need them. Of course this can happen, randomly or as the result of an intense effort, but it clearly is the exception. Often-times—and perhaps even most frequently—new technical devices or cultural practices emerge independently of the collective needs in their environment, and even whether, once invented, they will be broadly assimilated by a society or not not only hinges upon their practical value but may well be motivated, for example, by their aesthetic appeal. There was no real pragmatic “need” for radio and television, for example, but radio immediately and television after a long period of incubation ended up profoundly transforming not only our sphere of leisure. Once such innovations have become institutionalized, their existence and their presence appear irreversible, and it is in this sense that Niklas Luhmann called them evolutionary achievements. Such an optimistic-sounding phrase hides the experience that many of the innovations to which we refer with it end up positioning humans in situations of dependence and victimhood that greatly reduce their range of agency and efficiency. Ironically enough, some Silicon Valley companies were among the first to realize that they lost billions of dollars, year after year and with a sharp increase, due to the addiction that prevented their employees from working in front of a computer screen without checking its e-mail functions every few minutes.
At any event, the so-called evolutionary achievements inevitably add up, and by adding up they produce the impression of a trajectory we can then interpret, in a Hegelian mood, as “historically necessary.” Nobody will ever be able to prove or to disprove the historical necessity of a fact after the fact—and within this unmarked space of uninhibited speculation it has been one of the more exciting hypotheses to say, as, for example, the French paleontologist André Leroi Gourhan did, that civilization, with technology as its core, may have replaced the biological (?) energy that used to propel the evolution of our species and this happened at a time when the biological evolution of humankind has greatly slowed down and may indeed have come to a standstill.
In this technical, cultural, and intellectual environment, all I have—very modestly—been hoping for during the past ten years (and I am now sixty-one years old) is that certain objects and situations that I grew up with, and which, therefore, belong to my being-in-the-world, will not disappear under the pressure of the latest evolutionary achievements. I am also claiming the (moral?) right to be exempted from the obligation of embracing each and every technical innovation. Not necessarily because I have profound reasons for my resistance against so much communication, but because its forms and phenomena just hit me too late in life, perhaps only by a few years, to ever assimilate them all in a comfortable way. I know how ridiculous it would be if I pretended that I am trying to slow down and even to stop a historical drift. I just want polite tolerance when I give lectures without using PowerPoint and I want a chance to convince my students that it might be an opportunity for them if I do not give in to their regular demand of “using more visuals” in my courses. Theirs, much more than mine, is an everyday world of moving images, so that it might be enriching, for both sides, to be confronted with this difference. At some point, perhaps, I will end up being convinced that the gap between my own communicative style and that of my students has grown to a degree that is seriously problematic. This will be the day for me to change my approach to teaching—or, more likely, to retire. But I refuse to make the effort of laboriously adapting myself to an environment that I do not feel comfortable with and that makes me look inept. For example, there are too many potential virtues—and even democratic values—in distance learning to ever actively fight it. And yet I know that my university will have disappeared the day we are no longer allowed to sit around a table with our (not too many) students. I also know that I would not be very successful and would certainly not look good if I tried to take notes, from a lecture or discussion, with a laptop on my knees. And I believe that this is also the case for most of the colleagues my age who claim, unconvincingly, to have been early champions of the electronic revolution (I recently saw one of them drop the laptop from his knees three times in one hour of discussion). What I most fear when I use communication technologies that I have not grown up with is an embarrassing lack of grace in my behavior. In other words: the strongest reason for my anti-electronic attitude is an anticipated aesthetic judgment about myself.
2
A full repertoire exists with figures and configurations that are emblematic of a world that has filled its empty zones with technology-facilitated opportunities to communicate, and, somehow strangely, these figures and configurations strike me as emblems of solitude and isolation. The most salient among them is the lonesome walker who, at first glace, seems to speak to himself, often with great emphasis, particular expressivity, and also quite loudly, and thus appears to perfectly fit one of the traditional images of the fool as “he who talks to himself.” As we all know, the problem, here, lies in the eye of the beholder. For as soon as we discover, around the person’s neck or behind her ear, the trace of an electronic communication device, she turns from an uncanny figure of foolishness into somebody who is privileged to spend time with a beloved one, say, on her way to work. Now let us assume that the beloved one, in the specific case of the lonesome walker-talker whom we are watching, is her lover. In such a case they may well use electronic communication, during their working day, to allude to moments of erotic intensity that they remember from the night before and which they look forward to. Such an exchange will draw its specific excitement from establishing a bubble of ecstatic privacy closely surrounded by the most formal and sometimes even most public business relations. I can still remember that late afternoon when, driving back to our house, the road was blocked by all the books and furniture that the wife of a colleague had thrown through the window after she had read the daily mail to his two extramarital lovers (who didn’t know of each other: one an undergraduate student and one a senior woman colleague)—a mail that he, by confusion, had addressed to his spouse and to the provost of the university. Possible Freudian interpretations apart, interpretations, for example, about an “unconscious desire for confession” coming through in such an accident, I believe that it is the dangers of contiguity that lend a background of erotic charge to the solitude of electronic communication.
Nothing less erotic, by contrast, than those mails and cell phone calls to spouses or relatives that more than half the passengers on a normal flight feel the irresistible urge to make in the very first moment—right after touch-down—they are allowed to do so. This reaction is no different from smokers grabbing their pack of cigarettes as soon as they arrive at one of the few remaining spaces in our world where cigarette smoke is not banned; both are symptoms of addiction. Nobody waiting for us at the airport really needs to know, again, that our plane has landed, given that there is a multiplicity of screens, in the waiting area, that provide the exact same information. Nor do they need to know, ten minutes later, that we are still waiting for the suitcase at the baggage claim and that, four minutes later, it is in sight. By the time the arriving passenger embraces his wife, it may feel that he already had arrived “too much,” that his body, which he now adds to the already present mind and voice, has no existential place.
To be a body-less and space-less medium and thus never to turn into an ecological burden gives an aura of political correctness to electronic communication, at least in the perception of those who aggressively use it—and this surely is a surplus even over the always praised “convenience” of electronic devices. When you ask for hard copies to be airmailed or fedexed because your eyes suffer from reading long texts on a screen or because you want to forego the ordeal of printing endless manuscripts, you will often face the threat of a refusal that gives itself the triumphant aura of ecological responsibility. For who would be so courageous and selfish as to care more about his own remaining eyesight than about the remaining trees? Finally, there is this other aura, the ultimate aura, produced by the line, toward the end of some electronic messages: “Sent from my Blackberry.” The aristocratic design of this device, the tone conveyed by the four words quoted, and the knowledge that his Blackberry is the one body part of President Barack Obama that gives him credibility as being contemporaneous and even futuristic, these and other factors may come together in producing an effect of hierarchy in the communication with Blackberry users. Are they perhaps those happy few who let us know that they are graciously available—but that their availability should not be taken advantage of? Whenever I receive a message saying: “Sent from—somebody’s—Blackberry,” I feel that I am at the lower end of a regal message and that, rather than respond, I should wait for subsequent messages—or even orders.
3
Not only do I have so many more opportunities then ever before to communicate, which, if I only managed to control myself, might well be a blessing, these opportunities also make instantly available to me a large portion of those humans whose segments of lifetime overlap with mine, among them many whom I actively care about, like the two of my four children living in Europe and my only granddaughter. What do I complain about, except about the victim status that comes from having to be so terribly available myself? My answer is that hypercommunication erodes those contours that used to give form, drama, and flavor to my everyday. Here is an example. Whenever I agree to give a reasonably well-paid lecture these days (“reasonably well paid” meaning that the organizers, on whichever grounds, attribute a certain importance to it), I am being asked, early on, to provide a title and a summary of non-negligible length, for the purpose of (mostly electronic) advertising. Almost at the same time, somebody will demand that I make available a manuscript of my lecture to those who, for one reason or the other, will not be able to attend. On the day of the lecture at the very latest, somebody will want me to sign a form giving my consent to the production of a recording. All this is partly flattering (one feels “in demand”) and partly nerve-racking (especially for somebody who relies, for lectures, on scarce handwritten notes, i.e., notes that normally are the very condensed result of a long reflection process). But, taken together, all these interventions tend to flatten those contours and hard transitions that used to give a specific event character to lectures in the preelectronic age. Who attends a lecture, thus the new ideal, should to do so in rereading or relistening to an already known text and who chooses not to attend should definitely not lose the possibility of reading it or to listening to it at a later date. As we are so eager to make our consciousness universally available, we end up spreading thin our physical presence: nothing is ever absolutely new any more and nothing is ever irreversibly over.
If hypercommunication levels the excitement coming from the discontinuity implied in any beginning, it also smooths the pain or the tragedy of ending and separation. Your girlfriend may be eight hundred (or six thousand) miles away, but, in contrast to when I was young and the telephone was both very expensive and even more unreliable, there is the consoling privacy of Facebook (if it produces “privacy” at all, I have to ask, admitting that I have never used Facebook). The price to be paid for this palliative effect is that our ideas, our imaginations, and our daydreams are each time less where we are with our bodies. You see people meeting for dinner at gorgeous places on Friday night, only to be lured away by a ringing cellphone or by an SMS message right after sitting down. And when they arrive at the meeting that they are now coordinating, their minds will again be ahead of their bodies.
Together with the contours of eventness and with the existential contrasts between presence and absence, private and public, we may also lose, with so many “sites” juxtaposed on the Web, a sense for what matters and what does not. Of course, some sites receive many more “hits” than others—but the hope that electronic sites of all kinds will ever provide the physical and intellectual intensity of a discussion in physical copresence has long vanished. Has anybody ever seen a truly good debate in electronic form, a debate where mutual argumentative resistance turns into mutual inspiration and new ideas? While it is difficult to explain why electronic discussions produce, at best, spiritual mediocrity, we all know that this is the case—inevitably somehow. Even on my best friend’s Web site I can only be alone, and what I may feel there, as a hint of closeness, never transcends the closeness of a tourist or that of a voyeur. Is there anything more pathetic than those tens of thousands (I fear hundreds of thousands) of blogs that are being written with such self-importance—and will forever remain unread (for good reasons, I want to add)? On the Web, to eliminate the risk of catching a cold is balanced, at least for me, by the loss of the chance to be moved to tears—not to speak of the senses of touch, taste, and smell that must remain unaffected.
4
But what do I really want, what is my—practical—ideal? One strong wish that I have is for the continuation of that “philosophical reading group” as which we—about thirty faculty and students—meet at Stanford every Thursday night for a good two or three hours, with the aim of discussing, in small segments, just one philosophical book (mostly classics) over a period of ten weeks. Regardless of whether the text chosen for a certain trimester is close to my own working agenda or not, the energy of that reading group has become my intellectual lifeline. But there is no doubt that, for all its intensity, our philosophical reading group has lost, in recent years, important participants to an ever growing number of other workshops whose emergence the electronic gesture of juxtaposition seems to foster.
I also have a much more romantic, archaic, and unrealistic memory of a moment I loved, a memory that I am obsessed with, a recollection of a world that was never mine and must by now be gone for ever. About fifteen years ago a former student of mine took me to a small town in Louisiana called New Iberia, with the purpose of visiting a former plantation that boasted of being “the home of the first pair of blue jeans.” On our way back to the car, I believe, we walked by a bayou where two very old black men stood looking into the water. After a few minutes, one of these two very old black men turned to us to explain, very politely and in a French whose sounds were conjured up from the late seventeenth century, that alligators up to three feet long were very tasty and tender, whereas the flesh of four-foot-long alligators was tough and impossible to eat. Five or six years later, I returned to beautiful New Iberia with my family. For the second time in my life, I saw the first pair of blue jeans and I again walked by the bayou where, I swear, I saw those same two very old black men again who had not aged and told us, with the very same words as the first time, what they felt my family and I should know about the gastronomic qualities of three- and of four-foot-long alligators. No event in my entire life had clearer contours, and no experience is more present in my memory than that double communication with two very old black men at New Iberia, Louisiana.
5
We cannot avoid “having” a body that we occasionally use and whose effects we more frequently bracket—but we are fast losing the ability to “be” a body, that is, the ability to let the body be an enhancing condition of our existence. Nothing, by contrast, is more Cartesian in the sense of body free than all the different kinds of electronic communication, nothing is more seamlessly connectable with our consciousness than they are, and nothing is more withdrawn from the dimension of space. This is the reason why electronically based hypercommunication brings to its insuperable completion the process of modernity, as the process in which the human subject as pure consciousness has emancipated itself from and triumphed over the human body and all other kinds of res extensae. Not that there was much left to be conquered, for consciousness, at least in mainstream Western culture, before the first chip was invented and before the first personal computers were sold. But, in order to become perfect and, above all, irreversible, the democratically enslaving principle of universal availability needed the reduction of human existence through the computer screen. Since within this dimension, contours, discontinuities, and borders tend to vanish, we now spend most of our lives in the invariably same position, i.e., in front of the eternal computer screen. We are there while we fulfill our professional duties, when we communicate with our beloved ones, and, most of all, when the threat arises of being alone. For we have traded the pain of solitude caused by physical absence for the everlasting half-solitude of those who make themselves infinitely available.
Everything melts together; everything is “fusion.” But in spite of all the talking about it, I cannot see any “mixed realities” that would deserve this name. It may all be my fault, i.e., a consequence of my mostly deliberate old-fashionedness, if I insist that a sensual perception will always remain separate from a concept or from a thought. What seems to be new is that, most of the time, we focus neither on the one nor on the other side of this spectrum, which must be the reason why our new pride is based on the particular type of alertness required in order to manage an existence of complex simultaneities. While I was writing this text, I occasionally checked incoming e-mails and, as it is mid-July, I also just saw who won today’s stage of the Tour de France (it was, to my great American regret, Alberto Contador from Spain). This predominant situation of early twenty-first-century human realities converges with the impression that the “imperceptibly short” present of the historicist construction of time, that is, the construction of time that emerged in the early nineteenth century, which became so dominant that we tended to confuse it with time in and of itself, that the imperceptibly short present characteristic of the historicist chronotope has now been replaced by an ever broadening present of simultaneities. In today’s electronic present, there is neither anything “from the past” that we need to leave behind nor anything “from the future” that could not be made present by simulated anticipation.
Some of us old ones feel that this is simply too much—and that, at the same time, it is not enough presence. If the process of modernity has largely been a process of disenchantment, we have now written Rational Reenchantment on our revolutionary banners. But I am fully aware that this is but another Gray Panthers’ revolution.