‘Can thought go on without a body?’ On the relationship between machines and organisms in media philosophy^†

† The essay was written for a lecture series entitled ‘Der Körper des Denkens’, organized by Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann, and Christiane Voss which took place at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimer during the winter semester of 2011/2012.

ABSTRACT

All philosophy of media has its origin in the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa – a distinction that poses the question of whether thinking is detachable from its bodily carrier and presents the possibility of outsourcing cognitive operations to apparatuses or machines. In the Cartesian elimination of the body, Jean-Francois Lyotard identified the philosophical force of current technoscientific culture, which is in the process of freeing thinking from its forced coupling with the human body. The speculative tabula rasa brought about by the Cartesian ‘demolition’ takes the form of a technological wager in the twentieth century. Technology is an attempt to respond to the extreme challenge that cosmic development poses for human beings: to guarantee that thought remains possible even after the ultimate catastrophe of a solar explosion, which threatens all planetary life a few billion years from now. The technological utopia of an ultra-stable infrastructure that would enable the continuation of thought even after the demise of its hitherto ecological conditions perpetuates, on the one hand, the politico-theological notion of a second body, one equipped with mysterious forces that guarantee invincibility. On the other hand, the naturalism and the rhetoric of crisis with regard to the history of mankind at stake in this utopia of human self-assertion ignore the complex interplay of thought and the body, whose parallel relationship Spinoza first pointed out against Descartes’ dualism. Rather than confine thought to the body, as in a vessel, Spinoza demonstrates that thought exists only because it is, in a certain way, affected and disposed by the body, in a physical as well as cultural sense (i.e. through objects, signs, institutions, and apparatuses).

KEYWORDS:

• Cartesianism
• body
• software/hardware
• affection
• organism
• machine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Friedrich Balke is Professor of Media Studies with particular emphasis on theory, history, and aesthetics of documentary forms at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. From 2007 to 2012 he was Professor for History and Theory of Artificial Worlds at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and speaker of the graduate school History of Media, Media of History. He is working among the boundaries of political theory, literature and media, cultural history of things and artefacts, media and mimesis, theory, and history of documentary forms.

Notes

† The essay was written for a lecture series entitled ‘Der Körper des Denkens’, organized by Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann, and Christiane Voss which took place at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimer during the winter semester of 2011/2012.

1. On this notion, see Foucault (2005, pp. 47–51).

2. On (Carnap’s) neo-empirical project of achieving a ‘logical construction of the world’, on its scientific-utopian assertions, and on its context within the ‘life-reform’ movement, see Galison (1993).

3. For the original French version of this article, see ‘Descartes et la technique’, in Travaux du IX^e Congrès international de philosophie, Etudes cartésiennes, II^e partie (Paris: Hermann, 1937), 2:77–85, which was reprinted in Cahiers philosophiques 69 (1996), 93–100.

4. In the text, ‘He’ and ‘She’ are not simply used as personal pronouns; they rather designate personae, marked by gender, who represent the foundational philosophical conceptions for which the author has provided a stage. Here I have treated them as proper names and, for the sake of their recognizability, placed them in italics.

5. This quotation is from the advertisement for a lecture series entitled ‘Der Körper des Denkens', which took place at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimer during the winter semester of 2011/2012. The text was co-written by Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann, and Christiane Voss.

6. On the ontological parallelism in Spinoza (a concept to which Spinoza is indebted, though he never uses the term itself) as an alternative to all types of reductionism and exceptionalism, see Deleuze (2005, p. 109):

Spinoza’s doctrine is rightly named ‘parallelism’, but this is because it refuses any analogy, any eminence, any kind of superiority of one series. Parallelism, strictly speaking, is to be understood neither from the viewpoint of occasional causes, nor from the viewpoint of ideal causality, but only from the viewpoint of an immanent God and immanent causality.