PART ONE. THE WORK
1.1. THE WAY OF RESURRECTION: TECHNOLOGY
1.1.2. Demons, Angels and Machines[1]
1.2. THE SUPER-MACHINES: COMPUTERS
1.3. ME AND MACHINE
2. GESTELL: WISDOMS OF THE GERMAN CHRISTIAN MIND
Two Theories
3. [From _God's Diary_]
4. HELLO, DR. FRANKENSTEIN
PART TWO. THE WORKING
1. Technology and I
2. THE POLITICS OF A MACHINE
3. Commodification of Body Parts
4. REAL PLEASURE
PART THREE. THE WORKERS
1. NAKED FEAR
2. THE CLASS WARS
3. NOTHING PERSONAL
The far is close. There is no "faraway" anymore. Not a space, but the space of a feeling. Thought is the place. No more dictatorship of the Outside.
I remember my fascination with the reversed perspective of the
icon; the logic of the Other World is opposite. The far away
objects on the foreground? Well, the logic of space in KOG is
different, because traveling with the speed of light I could be
instantly everywhere. There is no faraway for angels. Wow! But on
another hand, there is no close-by either. The physical three
dimensional space is re-arranged by the gaze. Like a movie!
Space? What space? The space died with God.
I sit in front of TV, watching this Byzantine method in action. The faraway events brought to my face by the close ups,
squeezing my physical environment out. No, my "natural"
surroundings haven't disappeared and this double sensitivity is
stressful and confusing. Of course, I do not notice the pressure
swamped by the action. I switch on and out of my mortal existence
and travel in God's space. Actually, the world dances around me.
How could I take it? I must be out of my mind. I am out of
myself. That's why I am motionless, paralyzed by the motion of
the world in front of me.
I have to write about technology to explain the nature of my
angst. I live in this new place which I call "American Space,"
technological space, a space of time. It's not a cultural
construct but the infrastructure. The base, according to Marx, my
true reality. It's no less real than the physical space and my
freedom or pain in this space are not cultural or intellectual,
but very real.
I broke this project down into three parts -- The Work, The
Working and The Workers. I hope that the Christian analysis of
technology (Part One) could help to understand the mechanics of
resurrection. Part Two is about "the working" of this new space.
The last -- about the experience, the soul in KOG.
I never understood why the party insisted on making the worker
into a cult. They were everywhere, with the protestant fanaticism
the Soviet mind praised the Working. As if Russian communism was
the late experience of the missed reformation. The curse of
Adam, the labor, became the focus and the subject of the
Socialist Realism. I myself wrote the plays in this "workers"
genre when the production of something (a new trans-Siberian
rail-road, for example) becomes the object of art. Yes, there
were people in it, but the process of working was the plot and
hero. Ah, we have to love the course as if it was God's gift!
According to the new Christian poetics of the workers'
kingdom, work was the best of all human activities. My life
alienated from me in labor, meshed with the lives of others,
unknown millions, alive and dead, was preserved in the artificial
"thing" -- it was a product of love! The computer in front of me
is the monument of this love no less than a cathedral or a book.
The hours of machine and human labor, the entire knowledge gained
for million years made it possible. There was a political
campaign in the seventies, the push for quality of the Soviet
products. The western goods were of a superior quality and that
fact taught me where are the real workers and their dictatorship.
Not in Russia. I knew it all along, I remember treasuring my
first ball pen -- I should have noticed that its powers were in
the hidden deep inside Love. The censors in the Ministry of
Culture had strange silent gleams in their eyes, my pages on
labor smell of Nietzsche. The subject was a politically correct
and yet nobody in the workers paradise believed in working.
The Americans made their peace with labor through
commodification. There was a reward for hard and honest labor --
the money. They too no metaphysics in working, it's just a good
business, right way to success and rewards. They don't think that
we surrounded ourselves with this love, which we call technology.
We don't know that our planes are "working" and don't fall from
the skies because of this love. There is more comradeship
and brotherhood in the car than in any church or party. And it's
humble as true love is. I wish the modernists wrote about it
in their hymns. I want the postmodern to get off this track of
being terrorized by our new brave world. Our technological
wonders are better than us. I bet there is more humanism in a car
than in a driver. The second nature knows how to love, the worker
should learn from this work how to be a human.
I live in Fairbanks with forty below in the winter and I
have no parka or winter gear. I travel though channel of love,
protected and preserved from the death waiting for me outside. If
the technology of my living conditions will break for a day, the
human life here would collapse. That much for the mercy of mother
Nature. There is more love in the electric bulb than in sun. No
know it without knowing, we pay for the bulb. No, sir, there is
nothing for free in the First Nature, we pay a higher price for
living there -- we die. Remember about it in the hospital.
I remember about it in Russia and Africa. It's easy to
remember than the lives of loved ones depend on it.
"American" is not a synonym of communism, but a stage of
it. "American" is a manifestation of the new age and the most
advanced incoming universal culture. "Universal" literally. Our
high tech is the first primitive form of the new proto-divine
existence. Charles Darwin would put them in the very beginning of
the evolutionary ladder. "Technology is a systematic of an art"
(Webster) -- I can live with this definition of the future. Alas,
we have to remember the Greek meaning of art (craft and skill)
and forget about "non-practical" understanding of art. We have to
remind ourself that "artificial" is simply "devisedd by art" -- no
negative connotations attached. "Tekton" (Greek) is a builder,
carpenter Jesus.
Of course, there is the conflict between the two natures.
In the fanatical love of cars the feeling of physical
homelessness plays a part. It is at the bottom of what
the bourgeois were wont to call, mistakenly, the flight
from oneself, from the inner void. Anyone who wants to
move with the times is not allowed to be different.
Psychological emptiness is itself only the result of
the wrong kind of social absorption. The boredom that
people are running away from merely mirrors the process
of running away, that started long before.2
"The flight oneself, form the inner void" can't be anything
but the establishing the outer void, which is technology and its
culture. Speed formalizes my alienation from myself through the
Great Void, replaces my psychological emptiness with the actual
movement. Entertainment is a technology of divorcing myself from
I and I have to stay busy in order not to return where I came
from. Obviously each of us within the techno-motion is stripped
of identity. Traffic of movies do equalize. It's not a democracy
of the different but the sameness which needs no freedom. Here
all three -- Work, Working, Worker -- unite: Car, Driving and
Driver. To keep me from being bored by the highway, I need
additional changes. My radio is on. My return to myself, driving
a car, is more difficult than while I'm walking.
Not that simple, my fellow Americans.
In American Space you have no time. Adorno has continued
Dante's travels in Inferno:
Running in the street conveys an impression of terror.
The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to
escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold
itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining
face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look
ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if
treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the
limbs. Once people ran from dangers that were too
desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a
bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. Traffic
regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but
they have not pacified running. It estranges us from
bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that
something is amiss with security, that the unleashed
powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be
escaped. The body's habituation to walking as normal
stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form
of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the
spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering,
breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right
to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command
or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of
passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in
the nineteenth century.[3]
Even getting out of the car I find myself on the street,
another technology prepared for my perpetual motion. I'm being
directed, the space is measured and pre-arranged. Urban space is
active, it distracts me from being alone. I am still with them,
people and the outside, the real source of my terror. I stop. The
system continues to work and I am working as a part of it.
Are you working out? Everything is work, even resting.
The techno-culture is inside me. I don't need hardware to
function as computer. I'm hooked and wired. I like it, I paid for
it. I better remember why. I must remember that I have to keep
the distance with the Second Nature with the same precision I
keep my separation from the First Nature. Of course, I have to be
strong not to dissolve myself into the new womb, becoming a child
and embryo. This human world offers me peace and comfort forever.
I have to work to preserve myself from becoming the worker. I
better watch myself, paradise is a biggest test offered to us.
It's easy to lose your soul in a shopping mall.
One must know how to love. It's impossible without loving
the present. Remember it, when you read my pages full of rage and
anger about the spectacle of paradise. Remember, one must hate in
order to love. Be outrageous, be a true son of the End and the
Beginning.
Apocalypse is the best thing which happened to us.
Resurrection is even better. Technology fills the void left by
the end of the world and -- I do not notice the loss of myself
and the world. That's the trick left out of the book of
Revelations. John had his visions, we had the actual thing. He
didn't know that the end won't be noticed. Well, I didn't notice
my birth either.
Yes, it's always both and extreme. Very bad and very good.
Finally, the real Power is in technology -- an organization
of knowledge. Ridiculous to talk about computers without
mentioning the power. We pretend that it's just a business of
linguistics. Knowledge is power and technology is knowledge. A
hard drive is an expression of the Nietzsche's will for power.
There is a stone hidden inside my PC, the war machine. What do
you think takes place when I turn on my computer? I attack.
I had no plans to write about "technology." I had to yield
to the pressure of the cultural environment, the constant usage
of this word. My subject is me and not the world outside. But how
can I tell you about my feelings without talking about OUR
reality. We share the world, so I share my thoughts about it.
That much I can do for a reader.
Oh, yes, the title of this introduction to theology of
technology. I hope it's self-explanatory. Technology is nothing
but the mechanics of the divine. We are at the very beginning of
this process of creating God. That's right, the One you know. We
will have it. It's just a matter of time.
NOTES
This directory I started when I staged "Reckless" by Lucas in 1996 (You can rent the movie they made from the play). I struggle with the text full of postmodern insights to understand the playwright, who didn't understand himself (very much like myself). I even wrote an article and mailed it to the New England Theatre magazine only to recieve a letter with a friendly advise not to write "personal" scholary articles. Genre was my problem -- always. Here is one of the versions of this paper Reckless Death
