Editorial 14

According to Marshall McLuhan, we are in love with machines. But, he adds with a critical overtone, this love is nothing other than narcissism. We love machines because they are external sensory organs, organs which man has cut off from himself, amputated. In this way, what we love in machines is a part of ourselves which we have rejected. And indeed experiments with the ears of corpses were part of the early history of the telephone while many see the camera as an artificial eye and the Internet as a central nervous system transferred outside the body. McLuhan says these amputations, from the ear to the brain, protect what is a highly sensitive being. This cutting off releases the human body from the stimuli with which it is constantly bombarded and from the requirements to which it is subjected as well as facilitating the acceleration and perfection of the various organic functions - the wheel, a rotating foot. These thoughts posit the amputation of human perception in the form of the television as a survival strategy which makes it possible to come to terms with the images which the world emits. There is a minor side effect: this safeguarding of the sensitive nerve fibres has the same effect as a drug - it makes people dependent on the technical media. Man can no longer forgo this protection. How could he stand to see the starving masses without a television?

And it is this dependency which McLuhan calls narcissism: man loves the machines, because, when it comes down to it, they are he.

I believe that those who repeat by rote such nonsense are charlatans. The telephone is not the extended ear and the computer is not the amputated brain however much mischief can be done using these images. Even the notion of man\'s love of machines is an unbalanced image. Narcissus did not fall in love with the reflectory surface, but with the youth he saw in it: the secret of the telephone it not the amputated, but the network which allows callers to be identified. Neither does the computer repeat the convolusions of our brain. It processes representation in the form of the most simple, and therefore universally applicable systems of signals. That is what McLuhan is talking about when he says the media is the message, and what Neil Postman means when he says we are amusing ourselves to death. But these messages are not those of the human body. The message of the media is structured and processed communication: which gives bodies something in common. The myth of the media as artificial limbs is idolatry or the demonisation of processed communication. Primitive peoples see nature as godly because bribery and sacrifices, that is social techniques, win success from the almighty. Post-historical man imagines machines, as they get out of control, to be super-human in order to blot out the otherness which is inherent to their creations.

The notion that the media are an amputated part of man is absurd, because the anthropomorphisation of machines erases the difference between them and man, upon which their functionality is based. Technical media do not process communication because they are superhuman, but because they are in-human. This in-humanity is not, however, a moral occurrence which can be hidden by pretences of live-liness, but a historical fact. Be glad that the in-humanity is clear. Stop trying to escape from it and let it be. This step is not a gesture of renunciation: delimitation between man and machine is an overwhelmingly broad field of activity.

Beguiling stories of artificial limbs invented during the industrialised wars to keep cripples in shape, were only intended to encourage a mood of satisfaction so that the brutality which was done to the living would not seem too terrible: myths were intended to make the world seem less sinister.

Go to it, you designers! It is still easy to imagine a human(e) world: the automatic production by which we are interlinked is still structured according to the requirements of war technology, that is in hard Fordist material. In the age of genetic technology, it will be much more difficult to identify just where the inhuman begins.

Jörg Petruschat