Mine Too
Laurence A. Rickels

I already composed the conclusive genealogy of mining technologies - "Mine" - for a volume entitled Terminals which Victoria Vesna edited with Connie Samaras. This is Part Two, though it stands or falls apart rather than as missing metonymic piece or update. This one (or Two) follows Victoria Vesna to her showplace in Germany's Ruhr district, once a pile-up of mining industry centers. The largest air raid shelter in World War II was built beneath the city of Dortmund.

Detonation # 1
Phantasmatic or software genealogies of the newest media met their match and maker in the hardware story of computing's World War II origins. The big idea about the U.S. military's interest in the net as nuclear-proof communications system symptomatically mixes up Nazi German cabling efforts (which alone could keep vital transmissions intact and unintercepted) with the give and take on all sides of the second total war. Analogue computing arose with the first rockets in history. Digital computing became the sum totaling of the Enigma-code-cracking efforts of Turing and his machine

#2
The first constructed and imagined automata wore mined ore: gold, copper, gems galore. A certain upward displacement or mobilization keeps what's mine stowaway in every artificial habitat. The high rise office, the plane cabin, the viewing space in front of TV or monitor are among the many interchangeable places modeled on the close quarters of mining. Inside his delusional system Daniel Paul Schreber descends to the depths of mine shafts just as readily as he shoots up into outer space. At one juncture the sun threatened to crash down the shaft and destroy the spot he was in. His failure as son had less to do with his father than with the father within: he and his wife had been unable to breed living children. Many gadget-loving features of Schreber's delusional system are placeholders for the ghosts of missing children. The psy-fi impulse, at the juncture where case studies of and memoirs by psychotics, manuals on future psychological warfare and its projected techno conditions, and bona fide science fictions overlap, comes down to the impasse between replication (immortality now) and reproduction (at once death in life and guarantor of future generation).

#3
Between The Origin of the German Mourning Pageant and his essays on techno culture and shock absorption Walter Benjamin was a close reader of Schreber's Memoirs and of Freud's study of Schreber. That's not just to turn the other cheekiness. Schreber studies need not be, not this time around, about the survival of the specious, the direct link (Forget missingness!) to the Nazi ascension. Schreber can be read, instead, in terms of the outside chance. The chance that there is an outside to the setting of total recording, pre-programming, surveillance, and information gathering keeps slimming down in the reception area. The drive to commit oneself completely to sui-citation does still admit interruption. That outside chance summarizes Benjamin's complicated relations with Freud's science. But a disconnection can still be a connection. Thomas Szasz's The Therapeutic State has the look of the many books out there that should open up the era of Nazi mental health, telling like it was. It was another ghost of a chance that the ongoing Allied reception of these histories would bear some trace at least of the repression. The score of near-missers and non-receivers is too high to recount. It is a ghost that's in our typeface in Szasz's study. In the index under "Nazis" the reader is given a referral to "mental patients, treatment of, under National Socialism." And there, there is a page reference, it's page 213. Look it up and you'll see it can only be found missing, just like one of those floors in New York hotels, somewhere between 211, the end of one section, and 214, the beginning of the next section (on Soviet Psychiatry), somewhere in the two pages left unconsciously blank. This is where Benjamin would read for allegory in the absence of the posthumous shock, the inoculative shot otherwise given by gadgets; it's where Freud, as in his study of the Schreber madness, would encounter an "endopsychic perception," the inside view given in delusional systems of the "psychic apparatus" -- and also the advance preview, or so it almost seemed to Freud as he nevertheless rushed at the end of the Schreber study to assert priority, of the psychoanalytic theory of psychic functioning and dysfunction.

Nazi psychoanalysis sent the new cyber-soldiers to the borderline between neurosis and psychosis, the new-found no-man's-land that, from World War One onward, was the place of psy-fi expansionism into the outer spaces of psychosis. Losses were control-released within a war economy of total mobilization, in which fetishistic inventions, like the V1 and V2 rockets (hailed in Nazi Germany as Wunderwaffen or "miracle weapons") remetabolized wounds - from the pilots downed in the Battle of Britain to the collapse of all planes onto a growing lack of fuel - into the wonders of the psychotic sublime.

Psychosis was already the other place where the crisis in reproduction and its attendant psy-fi fantasies awaited exploration: not until the cases of war neurosis opened up their ready-made access to ego libido, doubling, or merger with the internalized apparatus could Schreber's outer space fantasies of miraculation, technologization, and homosexual or transsexual replication be visited, visited in the first place on the other, with the enemy or internal enemy at the front of the line. Because already pre-war, psychotic delusions were seen as following a course of self-help: their endopsychic makeup gives the psychotic the inside view of his psychic apparatus and thus the outside chance of auto-analytic breakthrough. In psychosis, trauma-induced mega repression reactivates shock waves from the outer reaches of cathected external reality all the way to earliest childhood, and thereby opens up an evacuation chute through which all libido leaves the world and enters the ego. The only way out for the psychotic (other than suicide) is projection of a new delusional world in the place of the one he has lost. The psychotic crisis or break is thus a threat of short-circuit or overload which only the emergency projection of a new world out of narcissistic or ego libido can circumvent. Schreber made it; his brother, who committed suicide, went out on the down side of replication. In his introduction to Perceval's Narrative: A Patient's Account of His Psychosis, Gregory Bateson emphasizes the voyage-and-initiation character of psychosis bonded to delusions, and thus on the way to auto-analytic breakthrough (which is not homecoming but arrival in some other place or cyberspace).

It was with the introduction of the theory of evolution that fantasy was free to grant invention or other sudden changes and chances the power to switch channels on evolutionary progress and fast-forward plant life or machines to the top of development. As soon as Darwin's theory was out his fans were hit by fantasies of parallel fast lanes of development which relocated the missing link to inter-special relations between humans and machines (see Samuel Butler's Erewhon). Evolution provided the context for imagining that thought can or must go on without the body, and that means beyond the retro, repro bonds between the sexes. Humans are still the genitals of the machine that is evolving for us. The higher machines, which, Butler forecasts, "will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only," will be reproduced in the group metabolization or psychology of tensions between replicational sex and the production of one or three by two at a time.

As genealogy of media, mediations, and means of human being, evolution comes on strong with constitutive interruptions, gaps, so-called missing links. This makes for a precision fit with the way the breakdown of mourning always admits, via the narcissistic and psychotic conditions or conditionings of a melancholic attention span, the frontal shot of direct connection with our technologization.

The link with the missing - the haunted relation - is what keeps selection (not unlike substitution) going, going, goner. The link Benjamin misses in his reading of our current techno evolution can go by the name aura, the ghost inside techno selection, inside the either-aura. After Benjamin, Andy Warhol and Shirley MacClaine fine tuned "aura" for the selection stardom of channels. But Benjamin might as well have borrowed his aura, the notion of a retrenchment of the missed link with presence that flickers even in certain media-technological products over time, from the trenches of World War One. Down there aura designated the zoning-out phase of acceptance of whatever psychosomatic convulsions and techno metabolizations of trauma were coming soon.

Our relations with technology began finding time, then, for their new take on change via the theory of evolution, which offered first-time counter-testimony to standard historical receptions of change or development. Freud's discovery of the unconscious follows in the wake and shake-up of the Darwinian see change. Both biologically and biographically, the introduction of the evolution theory found completion in Freud's follow-up offer of the unconscious. Lieutenant-Colonel C. D. Daly gives doubly insider commentary to this genealogical conclusion in
"A Psychological Analysis of Military Moral:"

Shortly before he died, Darwin remarked that, had he his life over again, he would devote it to the study of a man's unconscious mind - in which statement he foreshadowed the organization of another branch of science, viz. that of analytical psychology, introduced by the work of the Viennese psychologist, Professor Freud.

In the spirit of greater psychoanalysis, we can by now extend the evolutionary and military-psychological process of selection both to the chosen members of modern spiritual and therapeutic cults and to the missing, the abused, the alien abducted, the multiple personalities, and the mediums or channelers (all figures fitting on one and the same end of the psychopathology continuum, making one in-crowd of our pop-psychology culture). Ron L. Hubbard, the creator of scientology (which is advertised, between the lines, as the cure-all of perversion, inversion, of whatever gets in the way of couplification, next generations, and related success stories), started out a top pilot and, just another step in the selection process, then became a celebrated science fiction author. EST, which was also all about feel-good heterosexuality and ultimate commitments to reproductive coupling, followed a leader by the pseudonym Wernher Erhard, a composite of von Braun's first name and the last name of the West German chancellor during the "economic miracle" (Wirtschaftswunder). These groupings in every sense contain only the one alternative to the couple adjustment: either suicide aura - I mean, or - replicational beaming up out of meat vehicles of reproduction and death into the doubles living on within mother ship.

Californian psychotherapist Edith Fiore hit the front pages at the checkout stands when she announced her first specialization: exorcism or ghost busting. She retook those heights when she added the specialization of treatment for repressed memories of alien abduction. She is less interested in the truth of her patient's claims -- her position exactly regarding the remembering of abuse or incest in early childhood -- than in listening and accepting what the patient brings to session as another truth, one that registers as validated in the setting of therapeutic correctness. Aliens, not unlike parents practicing Satanic rituals, will first induce an unconscious state in their victims before the experiments begin. It's like you're looking at the TV set, it switches between stations and fills up with static or "snow," and then you just don't know where the time went. This last moment of fading consciousness, like the instant before the trauma retained in the fetish, in fetishism's split-level framing of dissociation, like whenever you can feel the epileptic seizure coming on, is more of what Benjamin was getting into under a primally resonant sense of aura, more of the same as the sinking sense you have that before you remember - even remember to forget - the blackout of shell shock will have changed the guard.

#4
For the new millenium old mine and factory hubs of the Ruhr valley are turning into museum backdrops for the digital age. This period of termination, transition, and internalization places visual artists in charge of the change and chance offered by a techno-social evolution that is still coming at us, going unstoppably. In English at least, the mining industry was retained in part or commemorated within the lexicon of computeracy: "data mining" raises the boundary issues of more controlled access to the sheer flow of data. The new Westphalian Museum of Industry is located in the late-nineteenth-century artifact of former life in the coal mines. The Museum advertises that its intent in unfolding the history of the industrial age is to put living conditions and human relations on center stage. Some restitution guilt presses all the humanitarian buttons. Right after the Museum's web page identifies one of its electric conveyor machines, installed in 1903, as the very first of its kind in the German mining industry, we are reassured or admonished: "Not the technical side, but rather the work of miners at the foundry and the family life and social life that transpired outside the gates of the mining company are the central concern of the museum's work." There are even special guided tours through all the museum or former-factory buildings just for children.

While Victoria Vesna and I were hanging in New York in front of our hostess's mac Victoria visiting her Ruhr project on line, the Nam June Paik show at the Guggenheim came up and Victoria gave me (as a reminder to go) her own free copy of the show's "Family Activity Guide." Inside were words from the sponsor that revealed the Guggenheim and the Westphalian Museum of Industry to be sharing one guilty self-image that compels them to reach out to the children. On one page of the "Activity Guide" parental guidance informs minors that "Paik transforms art through technology." The next section, same page, describes how Paik uses actual televisions like blocks to build, for example, Hi-Tech Baby. "Explain to a grown-up what makes or does not make this work look like a real baby. … In the box below, draw a portrait of yourself as a sculpture made out of television monitors and their parts." On the facing page we are given an even greater measure of reassurance: "Some of Paik's works involve placing things associated with technology next to things associated with nature. This is the way the artist humanizes technology." Yet even the most concise history of theories of the sublime would offer a stay against the jump cut from nature to humanity. "In the box at the right, make a drawing of a television surrounded by things from nature such as water, trees, mountains, or animals. What did you draw? Why?"

Vesna's current projects have all always evolved from earlier works, which thus double as after-the-fact pre-histories of what's new on her screen. In 1996 she opened up for the digital stage of development her own syndication of humanity's long-standing psychic projection of the egoic body. "Bodies INCorporated" allowed web users to engage information on screen, on line, as digital bodies. This kind of project or projection observes the "audience drive" (a mutation of Freud's duo dynamic of life versus death drives). For example, right from the start, while Vesna never intended to include representations of bodies, audience members or participants pressed for bodily representation in cyberspace. In the give and take with her audience, Vesna furthermore resisted expectations that realistic bodies in democratic space alone could meet the demand. Her participants led Vesna, via her or their resistance, to construct three spaces for bodily representation: home, limbo, and showplace. But then the artist and her audience soon encountered the follow-up need for a fourth space: a way out, a means for deleting the incorporated bodies. Again meeting the demand half way, Vesna turned deletion into an elaborate and painful process which underscored the difficulties involved in removal or disposal of tangible, embodied information once incorporated within the system.

Vesna works the terms "corporation" and "incorporation" to refer to two overlapping bodies: the legal and financial body, and the psychoanalytically conceived melancholic retention or incorporation of a lost body. They overlap to the extent that the rational body or corporation is, by definition, just the kind of phantasmatic body that melancholic incorporation builds. Technically, I mean legally, incorporation describes the process whereby in forming a society or organization, larger corporations swallow smaller businesses. The corporation thus created, renewed, or aggrandized has the status of a fiction. Legally, a corporation is a fiction which is entitled to act as a person, and is - except in the case of criminal acts - responsible in law as an individual would be. To create this fictional person, it is required that three or more "real" persons - signatories who are not or not yet corporations - join in the formation.

Once over 50,000 bodies had made it (had been made) inside the incorporation project, audience need for community arose, specifically for a way for the bodies-R-us to communicate with each other. Community efforts dominating net and web are largely commercial in nature. The userfriendliness of charging it to your card takes over where your own privacy leaves off. Agent technologies, which are designed to be selective and thus afford access through the excess of information, conceal, render invisible just how or where, for example, the information given the agent for these selection purposes goes with the flow.

Rather than a community of commerce and covered-up surveillance, Vesna conceived an academic or intellectual community linking interesting people who precisely have very little time for giving information or for the formalities of give and take. In this community the agents would be autonomous data bodies that would free their clients even from proxy relations with web bodies. The agent begins, out in the open, as the questionnaire to be filled out by those who have decided to give up their incorporated bodies and enter pure information space. As data is ingested, however, the body dematerializes, first down to a wire frame, until it explodes into bits. What's left however is the data the bodies carried. Via connections, patterns, or, in a word, networking, the data content starts out representing itself through nonrandom forms based on molecular and cellular models. Whereas the data body was all about control or predictability, the autonomous agent, which precisely no longer needs our presence, is, in theory, utterly unpredictable and vulnerable. The community of people with no time spawns a cyberspace of autonomous-and-unidentified-transforming data agents who, with all the time in the world, in the word, look forward to the time to come, the uncontrollable time of the other. In other words or worlds: what's given, the data, the gift and giving of information, must be relocated back outside the systems of user-friendly exchange that require incorporated bodies or identities.