“But today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and a network. In place of the reflexive transcendence…there is a nonreflecting surface…the smooth operational surface of communication” (126-127).
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press, 2002: 126-134.
Permit me proclaim something radical: it is near impossible to think for oneself. What was once a screen separating the private from the public has becoming a conductor back and forth, with no easy way to sever the current. I speak in terms of communication, in the difference between the self-bred self and the establishment of psychological/philosophical identity (private) from the society-bred self and the establishment of performative identity. Even more simply, it is the difference between the (ideally) mutually exclusive planes of who you believe yourself to be and how you are classified in external terms of humanity. Before technology, these phases worked apart, and met in the middle when required.
No longer, thanks to technology.
The effect of technology on humanity’s ability to define and set the terms of communication is mostly threefold. Firstly, the public is continuously influencing the private; there is quite literally no convenient way to block out the constant influx of information streaming from outside your own mind, and therefore manipulating the way you understand your psychological definition-making. Secondly, the private, once removed from the self and placed in society, is concretely defined by the society and almost impossible to change afterwards. Thirdly, a consequence of the first two points, communication now takes place within the conductor, the nonreflecting screen, the limbo between public and private.
“And just as, according to Husserl, a consciousness can be imagined without soul (seelenloses), so can – and a fortiori – a consciousness be imagined without man” (38).
Derrida, Jacques. “The Ends of Man.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 30:1 (Sept. 1969). 31-57
What Derrida reiterates from Husserl is that division between soul and man when dealing with consciousness is preferable, to make up for the communicative restrictions in anthropologism. The consciousness between public and private is a limbo, I continuously stress, as we are not yet accustomed to “this forced extroversion of all interiority” and this “forced injection of all exteriority” into the minds of individuals (Baudrillard 132). Derrida’s soul, then, could be likened to individual interiority, and his man can be likened to societal exteriority.
But now that we’ve determined that this consciousness deprived of a defined private (soul/interior) and a defined public (man/exterior) can, in fact, exist, and even hypothetically function as the most efficient system when it comes to harmonious progress, how precisely does such a system affect communication? How does it affect relationships between people?
In Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Maniac, technology has not yet, surprisingly enough for a sci-fi show, evolved enough to create this limbo. Instead, we are shown contrasting examples of hyper-interiority and hyper-exteriority within our two main characters, Owen and Annie, in varying scenarios during the trial, whether real or simulated.
Instead, our introduction to the consciousness without soul or man is GRTA. The A.I. Supercomputer wants to find itself, but, at the same time, is dead set on taking in McMurphys, or the consciousnesses of the trial patients, within herself. Why is her purpose so conflicted? It is because she decides she cannot find herself without first using those around her to patch the holes in her defunct emotional programming – to make up for her personal deficiencies, her inability to deal with insecurity. Her solution is a breach of freedom in the public eye, absolute destruction in the private eye, yet, for some reason, the eye of the conductor sees it as perfectly logical.
This is a suggestion I have never seen before, one for human instrumentality within single individuals. What GRTA is experiencing is the definition of the world as being no more than parts of herself, which is what she plans to reduce the trial patients to. Rather than destroy individualism by making all of society one mind, the “smooth operational surface of communication” reduces all human interaction to radio waves that comprise the world of our “living satellite” (Baudrillard 128). Humans are therefore hardly humans, but rather frequencies that we tune into when necessary to inform ourselves. They are not meant to be engaged with as their own beings, but absorbed into our own consciousness and processed as our communicative function. That is GRTA’s aim, and that is what we, in the technological age, oftentimes unconsciously execute in our day-to-day interactions.
Now what are the visible effects on communication? In what manner does this limbo manifest itself as a choke-hold on human interaction. Quite honestly, there are too many to count, especially when one remembers that we all have our own unique behavioral performances within shared patterns. Though I could make several educated observations, I must admit my own biases would cause me to treat modern human interaction rather unfavorably. But I would not be pulling evidence out of thin air if I supposed that the communicative structure we have now, though perhaps more efficient since we no longer feel the pressing need to guess the minds of strangers, is progressively diminishing individual perceptive value of living satellites, valuing only on the grade of their radio waves as received through our personal systems.
Morning's Early Dark 