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Immediation: Toward the selfless other?Tony Richards, Senior Lecturer, Lincoln School of Media

Tony RichardsLincoln School of Media

ABSTRACT

There has been much said recently about the increasing imbrication or embeddedness ofcommunications technologies within the intimate lifeworld of the subject. Such incursions areoften figured, both critically and politically, as invasions into the sovereign space of somebody that is proper to itself, the very selfspace of the selfs ownspace or ipseity. Thissupposed zone-of-intimacy or auto-affection (Derrida 1973) would shortly seem to find itselfopening up to a sort of hacking by so-called third parties, giving them opportunities to listen-in tothis sovereign individuals own thinking in progress and even, perhaps, affectively

experiencing or attending to the subjects very own undivided affects. Some have labelledsuch a prosthetic sense apparatus as techlepathy (Dvorsky 2004). This promise of a secondorder experiencing of the experiences ofthe other, once the sole domain of fringe fanatics,pulp science fiction writers or conspiracy theorists, has lately become a topic to be spoken ofwithin more polite circles. This article will discuss the work of pragmatically oriented scientists,for example, who are speaking of such possibilities within attempts to construct certainextensible yet subcutaneous communications prostheses. We could label such apparatusesas immediative. Where the term telepathywas an invention of the C19 thinker FrederickMyers, a term that updated for its industrialising age the long-held mystical notions ofclairvoyance, today such a previously mythical or mystical sixth senseis moving out of thesefringe realms to become a centrally and supposedly achievable goal of prospectivetechnological invention. The purpose of this article is to both provide a brief genealogicalsetting, aimed at uncovering some of the foundations upon which such inventionswould

exist, but also to provide a critical deconstruction of notions of a borrowed or stolen intimacythat such techlepathy inevitably feed upon. I will coin the Freudian inspired term prosfet ish topoint toward the sense of a prosthetic addition or stand-in for something that covers a nakedlack. This naked lack, I will argue, is a non-existent prior self-intimacy that in never naturallyexisting, cannot be burrowed into or stolen away by some secondary techlepathic apparatus.As such, and in some disagreement with Donna Haraway, I will finally argue that techne is

primaryor paleo-prosthetic and not some late-coming or invented cyborgian wound.

Keywords

Panop-tech-clair-voyance, responsibility, immediation, pre-invention,discovery, prosfetish

Introduction: Of Machinic Humans and Galvanis Wound

You could make a strong case that theres a near pathological craving for

it, a tendency that manifests through the widespread belief in paranormal

telepathy. ESP aside, it seems that this craving will soon be satisfied... it

seems a veritable certainty that we are destined to become a species capable

of mind-to-mind communication. (Dvorsky 2004)

Reflecting very briefly, and just for a moment, on the chosen title for this paper:Immediation: toward the selfless otherand with the quotation above very much in

mind.Mediationis the classical name for that which always comes between twodistant poles. The ideal of all mediation is for the mediation itself to disappear within


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such a perfect act of communication, that the act in itself might seem to never havetaken place or taken aplace. Mediation always inherently wishes, in a sense, for itsown mortality. Thus the teleological horizon of all mediation is, what we could term,immediation. What is the goal? Somewhat tautologically it would amount to theultimate reduction of distances into a sort of atomic collapse. As a lack of mediation,

immediation is just another word for telepathy. Before looking a little deeper at someexemplars of telepathy, I wish to look at some notions of responsibility and agency.

One should hear the calling of two hyperbolic selfs within this questioning concerningwhat I would propose to call here the desire forpanop-tech-clair-voyance:

Selflessinterpreted as an infinite reactivity(machinery)

Selflessinterpreted as an infinite responsibility(agency)

Reactionor responseis what, according to Derrida (2008), always classicallyand thus safely partitions the human(agency) off from the entirety of the non-human

an-agential (i.e. whether animal ormachine). Within this oppositional coupling, thatis of the reaction orthe response, the presumed cleanliness of a humanisticresponsibilityforms the self-sealing benchmark or organising pivot par excellence.The automated or machinic reaction then would form the height of irresponsibility.The animal, for Descartes (2008), was just such a reaction machine, but that thehuman also might be a machine, according to La Mettrie (1994), lead to the burning

books even in an enlightened Holland.

Outside of this partitioned history of such a seemingly safe ahistorical truthcomes the imminent arrival, as we will soon see futurologically demonstrated, ofcertain invasiveprostheses that will promise or threaten the return of this

responsible human to the status of that animal or machinic an-agency just mentioned.This would seem to be a threat or wound then to the very agency of a cherishedindividuated ego and thus also a certain ahistorical human spirit? Is this the end of theline for the sovereignly secured ego? We can see however that this threat orthis

promise is but a component part of a whole history of prior invasive woundings to theanthropo-centralised ego over the last few centuries. Such wounds to the agency-of-the-humanhave come, according to a recent historical recap by Donna Haraway(2007), within the numeric shape of four comparatively modern wounds to this once

presumed safe base of the absolute human-whole: the Copernican, theDarwinian, theFreudianand now finally the Cyborgian. So the series runs: Copernicus, Darwin,Freud and now finally Cyborg. There is obviously something strange or singular

however about this final fourth wound or nail in the coffin of this once spirituallyresponsible human agency. For somewhat fittingly for such post-humanistic

prostheses, attachments or (machinic) extensions, there seems to be within this finalfourth wounding a notable lack of proprietorial nomenclature, or of an anchoring

proper name. This residenceof the cyborgian wound lacks proper capitalisation. Canwe perhaps question this acephalic lack of a named head and in returnsupplythe

potent common currency of a founding biographical signature to act as supportivemetonymic signage? In adding the index of a name to this final fourth wound we mayfind that the cyborg is not actually a secondary invention that merely comes towound

but a primary discovery of something alreadywounded. For Haraway seems tosuggest that it is only by recently inventingsecondary cyborgic prostheses that thiswounded human is finally slain, whereas supplying a name for a discovering (along


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with Copernicus, Darwin and Freud) would strongly suggest that this cyborg wasinhumed in the human all along. What of this namethen before we next go on to lookinto the genealogy of techlepathy and the idea of the passing on of intimate affects?

In answering to such a quest, we would offer the figure of the Galvanian

Wound,named after the 18

th

Century Italian physician andphysicist Luigi Galvani,thus giving us, in the spirit of Haraway, the four wounds of Copernicus, Darwin,Freud and Galvani. Galvani came to wound this responsible human ego byexperimentally pointing out, on dismembered frogs legs amongst other things, that

electricity was not prosthetically external to the body, but was the very intimate fluidthat powers the engine itself. It is this figure of Galvani and the consequences of itsthinking for intervening upon the body that so excited Mary Shelley when composingFrankenstein:

Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token ofsuch things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might bemanufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth

(Shelley 2000: 23)

Here then the very inhering or already existing qualities, or better quantities,of intimate animal electricity (1953) would allow for the interfacing of like withlike, of manufacture upon manufacture and of a re-coding of what itself is alwaysalready codifiedi. As discoverer then (****) of the bioelectric properties of theseanimal and human nerve and nervous systems, a whole subsequent arch or

paleo-prosthetic pan-electrical truth system was unlocked within the very heart of thehuman envelope and thus was simultaneously born the very possibility and potentialto interface and interfere with (for how canone any longer, after Galvanisdiscoveries, be seen to either invade or interferewith what was previously always

already charged with such an exchangeable currency-of-the-electrical?) the humanvia apparatuses that could lead, one might worry, toward the nameless monstrous

bridge-beingiiof a Frankensteinesque composited secondary specimen. For thisnameless, and thus simultaneously unchristened, monster of Victor Frankensteins

betokens a vision of infinite or monstrous connectivities that might circumvent thewomb. More than such de-monstrosities however, this fourthgalvanic woundopensor offers the inside up to the outside and allows for a veritable folding-out into thearbitrating open; a sort of invaginational folding-out that would allow for an electricalarchiving of what might in fact lie(and we obviously measure the semantic resourcesof this word carefully) beneath. This nowgalvanically chargedskin of the being-that-we-are would no longer be anything that folds or better holdsthe inside, but wouldnow instead convey, through the trans-portal ontology of this wound, a connection oravailability. The galvanic skin responds and thus (now only) reacts?Again then weask is this selflessness a response orreaction? Such a question is far from trivial.

Does then such a fourth galvanian wound or newly uncovered opening, anopening which we might more factually call a bio-electrical wound, a dehiscentontological openingof the selfspace onto the sheer expanse of the otherspace, offerany directional cues toward a location (for this abridged human-animal) of either aspace of response or of reaction? And further, does this galvanian wound, so called,while forcing upon us the recognitionof a now constant history, an always already

pre-existing electrical interior, contra Haraways idea of some invented Cyborgiansplit, also involve an attendant concern or hope (depending on ones frame of view) ofan additionalturning toward a further techno-scientific or pragmatological plunging


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into eitherber-responsibility orsuper-reactivity? In other words, and to put it moreplainly, does this recognition of a primal bio-electrical interior offer either apromising orthreateningfurtheranceof responsibility or reactivity respectively? Thequestion then still revolves around a certain problematic aggressive hacking into acode, but one now that isnt any longer to be morally separated off from notions of

invasive secondary prosthesis that might steal away some God or nature givenresponsibility or some inherent right to a bodily privacy. Again it is a question ofhuman response ormachinic reaction but within a rearranged field of conceptualities.We will see later however that a certain ideology of empathetic blood continues to

flow within notions of techlepathic upgrades and this latter proposed apparatus onlyserves to resecure the flow of blood between the boundary of the couple, a sort oftechlepathic-empathy.

1.Selfless Responses or Selfless Reactions?

Before moving on to some historical sketches of telepathy, I wish to remainfor a while longer on this division between a so called natural human responsibilityand a socalled invasive technological apparatus which would reduce this to someirresponsible reactivity. So, to rewind and remind ourselves of the doublingof thelatter part of our opening titles, we are working here within the dual, somewhatundecidable, orbit of two futurally directed ends of the semantic resources (and

political recourses) of this singular syntagmatic questioning concerningimmediation. The single syntagm selfless othercan mean either to radicallyreduce the self to the point of collapse (reaction) or to alternately fill it to the point ofultimate courage (responsibility). Some concrete images of these somewhat

ambivalently split ends: The first endis of the eschatological end, or of a perhapsquite worryinginterpretation; where we worry that we ourselves and all of thesehuman others, will lose our singular sovereign selfs and become just so manyreactive machines, zoo animals or beehive dwellers (the death of the infinityofdistance of the Levinasian agential autrui in the face of a new totality where we aresimply nowparts?). The second endis the more promising teleologicalpromiseof aself andan other driven or encouraged into a highly self-responsible selflessness bythe affordancesgranted by the opening-up structures of the network. Here by beingintimately hooked-up to thesociality-of-the-socialwe are thus to be brought orencouraged out of a previously protective, somewhat selfish, shell.

As opposite to one another as these two selfless ends at first may seem, theyboth however find nourishment from the classical idea of the splintered atomic self.Selfless then orself-less, thisselfis thought, at the point prior to such techlepathicinvention, to be a singular separable self. Techlepathy, as we will see, would seemto supply for us a bridge across or beyond the chasm that we are. It is just this specificidea and this ideal of some previously sheltered or harboured prior-privacy, somesovereign and now coming-to-be-occupieddomain, that we will later be questioningwith our strategic use of a paleo-prostheticgalvanian woundiii. Such a paleo-

prosthetic wound, unlike the cyborgian, would see the self as always already invadedand always already inherently digital and thus in a sense archaicallycyborgic. Beforeapproaching this logical conclusion however let us concentrate on the idea of a

supposedly late coming or invented secondary prosthesis, an artificial and yet highlydesired sixth sense that would come along to cure a certain lack of being opened up to


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the other. We must however remainsuspicious of such notions of invasivesecondarity and remember that the galvanic wound is primarily intimate. It does notcome along any later than anything that would seem to be sealed away from it.

According to the techlepathic engineers and thinkers then something is seen to

be imminently coming along on the horizon to steal this Cartesian self away (weplace our ear upon the tracks and some well-attuned futurological ears can hear itsapproach). The purpose of this paper is not one that is fuelled by, or indeed whichwould wish to therapeutically work-through, the operating of models of fear or ofhope, but of a genealogically inclined uncovering of the philosophical infrastructurethat such seemingly meretechnological works are, often naively, built upon. It wouldnot then be a case of worrying over the loss of a responsibleself, or of aself-responsibility, but of a questioning of the site of some quasi-transcendent self-responding agency. Let us concentrate then on a few exemplars who would wish toexpand our closed horizons by plugging us into the sheer expanse of the post or trans-human space.

1.2 Posthuman Interfaces and Inter-Face-iality

Whoor whatparties could we call upon, as representing the promise of thiscurrently encroaching post-humous selflessness? These exemplars are oftencommonly labelled and self-labelled as the post-humanists and, nearer to the cuttingedge, trans-humanists. We will very briefly look toward three such representative

post-human resources from this transhumanistfieldbefore settling in some moresignificant depth upon our main cyborgian case study or example. These three short

examples will enable us to get a handle on this dreamscape of reaction or reponse.Representing a potent post-human dose of hyperbolic responsibility there is

John Perry Barlow. Projecting and protecting the a-domain or post-domain ofcyberspace Barlow and his infamous somewhat kooky borderless border-guardingtext A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace(1996) forms the contour ofa strong polemical opposition to those who would like to re-impose restrictions (i.e.those discourses modelled upon national territories and their attendant ring-fencedlaws, etc.) on Internet communicativity. Barlow, to paraphrase somewhat, would liketo clearly echo some valuable founding-foundational sentiments that have been so

palpably lost within the modern age of restrictions. For, as electronically-freed

techno-enabled Thoreauaniv

tele-hunters, he believes that we should be able to huntand comport ourselves out the within the cyberspatial openand boundless without anyterrestrially positioned laws picking us up through any conventionally territorialLocardian exchange-values, localised-legal values that might tightly establish or

prohibitively police our footprints and movements. Such was the reason for hispassionate declaration. For cyberspaceis a frontier and aproperlylawless, open-source pathbreaking frontier, that transcends andshouldtranscend these pre-cyberspatial terrestrial localist restrictions. Upon this royal road to the promisedunrestrictive place however, we cannot help but step upon some glaringcontradictions. In relation to such models of de-territorialised disembodied para ormeta-spaces, we have investigated elsewhere (Richards 2011) a somewhat illustrative

aporetic example of so-called tele-presence that problematises or unfurls some of thestrange logic of this wish for a transcending of territorial regimes through the


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possibility of the hunting of actual animals placed withindistant countries but shot viaan internet connection. Questions of the undecidablity(importantly not theindeterminacy) of the status or the exact coordinate-of-the-kill and inter-spatialitywere concentrated upon there. Similarly, Barlows sovereignly separatist model of

Cyberspace would wish notto touch down on any particular (lawbound) territory or

its regimes or practices, even though it cannot helpbut simultaneously touch downupon the very territories it nevertheless wishes to escape and evade being snared orcaptured within. Needless to say, Barlows is an argument withand assault uponterritor-reality that powerfully deconstructs its own premises and grounds. It is fuelledhowever by the transcendent desire of evading the soiled grasp of territory in somedream of a mythic matterless and blindingly white cyberspace, much like thesomewhat camp heavenly expanse of Powell and Pressburgers A Matter of Life and

Death. Although Barlow does not address techlepathy, there is a kindred regard withtranscended domains and an ultimate networking where the finitude of language andlegality no longer encroach.

Then there is Ray Kurzweill the technological futurist and sometime inventorof some concrete and actually very helpful technological prostheses. To go along withthis quite solid track-record of the creation of these useful ground floor concrete-ontico-practices, he has written two impressively thick books full of futurologically

pregnant Moores law fuelled apparatuses. These aremostly centring uponpredictions of the future-fact of being able to download our psyches into permanently-existing mechanisms and thus dispose ourselves of our divisive Cartesian shells (as

just so much innocent and now unnecessary baggage).. In a sort of technologicalversion of Fukuyamas end of historyor last man thesis (itself concerning the fallof another form of dialectically-divisive-dualist curtain) there is the powerful imageof an ultimate synthesis orsingularityvthat is near and that will soon end the long

held and somewhat problematically finite (as hisresearch findings are finding)sticking-point of thisbody and its tendency toward decrepitude and its sad finalclosure. He is taking his food-supplements until soon, and somewhat luckily for him

predictably within his own (presently) predictable natural lifetime, he and we canfinally live, perhaps somewhat tech-vampirically, forever: peter[pan]occhio?

Relatedly, and very much closing in upon our mainpost-humousquarry, there isGeorge Dvorsky. Dvorsky, whilst ultimately sharing Kurzweills transhumanist

predilection for and prediction of ultimate immortality, sees a more short-termachievable goal of an imminently-to-hand (that is, soon to be integratedinto anetworked everyday experiential ready-to-hand) invention of what he proudly and

neologistically calls techlepathy. He points out how recently Chuck Jorgensen, aresearch scientist based at NASA, has invented a technology to implant reading-writing(input-output) prosthetic technologies upstreamfrom previously damaged ornon-functioning vocal apparatuses of some disabled subjects, by here hacking ortapping-intonerve signals, situated within the throat, that normally control speech.These pre-verbal nerve signals, Jorgensens experiments have found, operate innormal subjects whether or not they actually enacted the process of physically movingtheir lips. It forms a sort of hidden circuitry just prior to the actual saying that themouth merely enacts. Thus, for Dvorsky, Jorgensen has hacked into a region situatedupstream from these lips, in a region situated notionally closer to the location of thehuman organismsmythical site of the very intending-to-say, at some point spatiallyearlier than this presently disabled localised sticking or saying-point that is

broken in these particular subjects. As so often is the case however, these injured


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subjects function as test cases, or pragmatically driven thought-experiments, forsomething altogether much more radical and socially-encompassing (an upping-of-the-ante from what was only accidentally uncovered). For while this often taken-for-granted power of speech is given-back or bestowed upon those strucked-dumb andclosed-up subjects, this lucky or local repair jobcan form the basis of some more

trans-formational or trans-humanist success or proof-work. As a result then of theseborrowing-of or burrowing-into these previouslypurelyphysiological signals, hepoints to the presence here of a future inventive consequence of this very usefuldiscovery, a somewhat unintended resource to help furnish the onward teleological

journey toward telepathy. We will see later how this journey is very much set, as weindicated earlier, within entelechial family-circles where natural blood ties circulate.How does he read this discovery of a site prior to and necessary for vocalisation, evenin those without vocal ability?

It strikes him, in hearing about this space agency invention, that by the processof moving the prosthetic connection up a little, through this speaking anthropo-

biological entitys communicative-process chain, that we might totally cut out and yetalsoexpand these voco-centric (that is alsophonocentric) apparatuses out to then, asof simply waking up one morning as if from a long nightmare of enclosure, be able tocommunicateour very auto-affective intendingor meaning-to-say, without going tothe (sadly deferred) trouble of actually having to say it. We will simply just mean itand it will then, if we can still use temporally inclined words such as then,immediately happen to the other. For he states:

As I thought further about this similarity it occurred to me that the technology

required to create a technologically endowed form of telepathy is all but upon

us. By combining Jorgensens device and acochlear implant with a radio

transmitter and a fancy neural data conversion device, we could create aform of communication that bypasses the acoustic realm altogether. The

dream of mind-to-mind communication and the desire to transcend

ones own consciousness is as old as language itself[we would call this the

desire for immediation]. You could make a strong case that theres a near

pathological craving for it, a tendency that manifests through the widespread

belief in paranormal telepathy. ESP aside, it seems that this craving will soon

be satisfied. Several advances in communications technology and

neuroscience are giving pause about the possibility of endowing us with

techlepathy. As we continue to ride the wave of the communications

revolution, and as the public demand for more sophisticated

communications tools continues, it seems a veritable certainty that we aredestined to become a species capable of mind-to-mind communication.

(Dvorsky)

Speech and what it does will still be there, but will now (or at least soon) be so

much clearer and cleaner. Such a will-to-cleanliness and the washing out of whatmight muddy communication hauntsas well our main exemplar, who we will nowmove along to.


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2. Kevin Warwick and the feeling of the feeling of the inside

of the significant other

Professor Kevin Warwick works within the apparently very practicalenvironment of the University of Reading Cybernetics lab. Something of a mediadarling a few years ago (especially on a number of titillating future-shock andfuture-sex shows), Warwick has invented a series of subcutaneous or embedded

prostheses to enable communication between, for example, 1)ones own proper-bodyand the buildings which one owns (or perhaps work at) and which are thus onesextendedproperty; and 2)the ability to control technologies that operate acrossInternet connectivity (with attendant benefits to medicine and of help in augmentingor creating various other tele-extensible expertises unable themselves to travel)and finally, at least for our main purposes here, 3)an embedded batteriless chip thatenables both himself(he loves being his own guinea-pig) and his wife to share the(co-)presence or confirmation of their internal love chemicals as evidenceof their

intimate pleasure withinone anothers presence, without as a consequence having toworry about any previous uncertainties of any (perhaps)questionable vouchsafes-of-the-voiceor of any fogging or blocking-of-the-face(that this technology then seeks to

bridge and unblock). In answer to such untrustworthy bugs or glitches within thecommunicative coupling realm, Warwick is intent on upgrading both himself and hiswife Irena to henceforth avoid such difficulties.

For Warwick has invented himself as the worlds very first cyborg andbelieves in the future of highly integrated technologiesthat will expand our sensoryand sensual milieus and radically alter our interpersonal environments or Umweltenand that these will help to form the very horizon or extra-intra coatingor armature of

our future post-humanity. Older forms of communication via speech and facialgesture will soon be on the wane. Warwick paints us a picture of just what majortransformative upgrades awaitus. In his autobiography (or should we say his auto-cyborg-ography?) Warwick states that our childrens children will look back with

wonder at how their ancestors could have been so primitive as to communicate by

means of silly little noises called speech (my emphasis). In a television interviewthat reported on a related implanting of chips into both his wife and his own nervoussystems (and pre-faced with a section title reading linking the brain with technologyin order to upgrade the human species), Warwick states:

That was for me the most exciting thing scientifically thing that Ive been

involved with. She had electrodes pushed into her nervous system, and with

my implant-electrodes in my nervous system, electrically [intonation inoriginal]we linked our nervous systems together. So what happened,when she moved her hand chuke-chuke-chuke, my brain received three

pulses chuke-chuke-chuke. So we communicated telegraphically, nervous

system to nervous system, for the first time in the world. Quite clearly now

communicating brain-to-brain is the next step

Such replacements of external speechand of external sightby the replacementor upgrade of a more direct technological brain-to-brain thought transfer (what weare proposing to call herepanop-tech-clair-voyance) will finally transport us to thelong awaited promised land or location of the behind-of-the-face-of-the-otherandallow, as such, for a directand immediateform of communication that willfinallybeable to edit or splice out any uncertainty or undecidability from our intimate and


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significant relationships. In logical extension of this technological bi-directionaltrussing, any ceremonial swapping of rings would no longer, through such adirectnessof connection, form merely the symbolic remainder or residue of a mutualcoming together but will henceforth bind a unity through a direct technological orelectric-bloodcircuitry (and as we will soon see, in genealogical-ancestral form, with

Hegel below). For Warwick then, no longer will there be any, possibly, un-truss-worthyspeech actor any other speechless act of the bodyto be worried over,concerned by or questionedor really anything else that might fall outside of theencirclement of the ring(nor presumably, by extension, will the embarking-

promissory of the once necessary, though still perhaps perturbing, performative of theI do of the wedding ceremonyany longer need to signature-stamp the opening of amarriage?) but will allow us to really share our real spirit and feeling with oursignificantly immediatised other (a shared space or an overlapped hearth of ipseity).For the faces and the voices that will once have projected our significant others outto us will no longer form a possible undecidable barrier-entranceto what presumablylies beneath, but will provide a final cure for such uncertainty of these two sites of

mediation of, for example, the pre-immediatised voice and the face: intimate astheyare, these two communication devices also project or intimatea certain irreducibleuncertainty principle or the possibility of a radical loss of meaning. Hence, in

answer, the need for a device to intimately inter-face together with and to open up thepreviously hidden potential of the galvanian fourth wounding that we opened with.

2.1 Of Certain Double Edged Gifts-of

For these latter naturalgifts (of thefaceand of the voice) that one certainly

presently greets (through our aisthesesthat enable a quite immediately-feltinterpretation) with great pleasure and which one certainly loves-of-the-other andwhich give one so much food-for-desire-and-thought (gifts that allow the humansubject to be-with-the-other, or of the Heideggerian significant otherly oriented mit-da-sein) always immanently includean element, or at least the possibility of a risk ofa deviation from thepath-of-the-proper. Through the presence now of such prostheticgrafts, the family-plot of the couple can now truly thicken and blend into a unifiedone. In the face of such thorny difficulties (of thefaceand of the voice) who couldthen argue that these secondary prostheses, though coming late upon the scene, arenot themselves so much moreprimarythan what they come along later to sosecondarily augment? For surely the desires embeddedwithin ourseekingof the very

behind-ofspeech and of the other-side-ofthe face; such behinds, for-the-sake-of-which, we seek out our intercoursein the first place (the seeking for the catching ofits sight/site). Intercourse has always already and intimately assumedthen a distanceof mediation that is, quite paradoxically,not the intercourse itself. In answer to thisintercoursal-lackingEnvois(Derrida) then are sent out throughsuch intercourse, butthe demanded closure of the destination is not touched upon enough (in its joint-core)so a second-order envois or envoy is always already pre-supposed by the failure of the

primary internally-fissured envois to properly deliverits message and have it finallyarrive. A algorithmic paradox then exists here for intercourse: Intercourse cannot trustintercourse as intercourse itself is not the aim or the teleology of the intercourse, asintercourse is thoroughly divided by its very own intercourse. And this is theuntouchable in itself.


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Something, in excess, then cannot quite find itself being touched within suchactivities of intercourse, even as-one is speaking, looking or touching upon the verymatter of the other. What is sought-out within the operations of the sense organs is theenvois (message) that apparently might lay, or perhaps lie, behind the inter-

coursal-touchingand is then much more intimately at stake within the circulations of

the game than the surface of the loved one that one makes contact with .Mediation(orintercourse) itselfthen,in this somewhat pre-Levinasian totalising model, is nothing

but the embodied desire to erase itself as (de-)distancing (asa materiality thatcomes between).

The desire then is to both obviate and bridge and once bridged, the mediatorydevice(for this is now what we are calling these various ontical intercourses, insympathy with this totalising model) disappears to become immediate: the ultimateteleology of speech or sexual intercourse here would reducewriting, as excess, fromitself (as undecidability, improbability; difference) and of course as diffrance.

Thus, as with Dvorsky and his speech-thought based techlepathy, Warwickwould now techlepathicallyconnect and interface with his own wifes veryorganismic,as well as orgasmic, interiority and to be(rather than previously, perhaps,notdeterminably enough to be) his wifes own intimate ipseic pleasure; a pleasurethat he himself has gifted or given to her and most certainly and symmetrically vice-versa (more thansimplya mise-en-abyme mirroring?). The previously dominant inter-

personal, inter-spatial or inter-facial economyas excess-beyond-total-exchangevanishes within a lossless and vastly reduced economy and a sort of jointinterpersonal Umweltarises within its previously divided wake. Obviously we arequestioning concerning this techlepathy or of what I would prefer tolabel here (todistance us from Dvorskys unproblematically inclusiveterm but also to bring out a

Derridean overtone of the envoi) apanop-tech-clair-voyance.

3. Certain Philosophical Questions Concerning the Problem

of Thought-Transference: Hegel & Tele-Familiarity

A so-called pre-panop-technological clair-voyance, as we asserted, involvesthe desire of the reduction of the fog or the spatial interruption that is the distance ofthe aesthetic apparatus of sight from its interest on a grand scale. Clair-voyance, bydefinition, reacts from a significant distance and yetis as close, intimate and

immediate as being-their. This clear-vision(as the word translates) or augmentedsecond-sight at a distance, as well as forming the dream-life of many a historicallyconcrete couple, has also been the concern of some prominent thinkers. Just as forFreud (as Derrida points out in his Telepathy, where Freud played-with and leaned-toward telepathy as possibly existing inter-personal cashable currency ofsoul-exchange), so Hegel wrote some words on this subject for his own audience (also to

be delivered in the publically engaged situated lecture format) in talking a little abouthis own particular example and use of clair-voyance.

He was not however, as his English translator Wallace is at pains to point out,exactlysoldon clair-voyance, but this lackof being-sold-on-it was not so much the

result of a doubtas to its veracity (i.e. as something that actually canhappen), but onits proper place within a communicative system or circuitry that places a pure


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(human) spirit pyramidically at the top and thus somewhat above its base level ofintercourse. Clairvoyancethen isprimitivebut it nevertheless does exist. So basethough it may be, it still nevertheless does have a function to provide, if only as a

powerfully figural illustration, within the circle of spiritual family values. Such anactivity (of the figure of) clair-voyance can certainly travel well, if only to be tamed

through figuration and symbolically transformed into the gold-standard or unity of theactualityof spirit. It is in this former figural aspectof its presence, at the very least,that it has a rather uplifted and upright existence.

It exists as something then that, within the grand Hegelian tradition, is to belifted-up (the famously powerfully teleologicalAufhebung) into the human spiritualrealm: a realm that, most importantly, centres around the inviolable solidity of a filial-familial unity. In the particular passage of the lecture where Hegel talks ofclairvoyance and the family unit together, we find echoes that closely approximatethose of the aforementioned Freudian excursions into the family+telepathy coupling.But there will soon be a problem that will inherently and intricately haunt these high

functioning figurations, these telepathic family ties. We will have to wait a littlelonger to see these problems bubble on their surface.

Both of these excursions (Freud and Hegels) bind-to or feed-from the solidityof a blood-based family unit. For blood circulatesthrough the channels of thesedistantly placed archorpaleo-prosthesesand bring out within these channels ofdiscourse only what is all together most proper, and thus alreadytogether, alltogether. Thefigureof blood that circulates through clair-voyance containsdifficulties however, as we just alluded. Hegel himself states as much (and backed-up,as we will see in his footnotes, by certain conceptual clarifications of his Englishtranslator) in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit. He states within the universal

first-person that:

The family tie constitutes my actuality.There can be people who, when in the

external situation some change occurs, know about this in their own

inwardness, their genius. So we have now to consider what exists in the form of

presentiments. A man of forceful, sound self-feeling is bound to the usual

condition of knowing. -But there are several examples in which, removed at a

distance, a subject suffered a loss, nevertheless experienced an immediate

sensationof that loss, believing that he had heard the noise or some such thing

(Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, p130)

Clairvoyants also know about distant objects. The individual is actual, and to

his actuality belongs everything that concerns him. Since clairvoyants know

their actuality, and their actuality is this concentration of feeling, -they know all

of this in an immediate way

(208 Wallace reads: so they know of this without the mediation through

which one otherwise knows of such objects existing outside oneself. They

know in an immediate way).


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This is particularly true of blood friends

(209 Wallace adds: the same blood. Family is an ethical, but also a natural

unity. Actuality of the one is substantially included in the substantial actuality

of the other).

The sphere of actuality also extends to persons that interest one, belong to

ones environment, but extends further to such objects as belong to ones

circle and of which one can therefore know in ones emotional life []. Here

belongs the phenomenon of second sight of the Scottish [] Also the prophet

Muller of Heidelberg can be mentioned []. The occasion of his capability is

noteworthy. At the death of his father he threw himself on top of his father,

and with the most inner fervour prayed to God. The father was awakened, and

this highest effort, this positing of the soul outside of itself, had fixed this

predominantly emotional life in him. (Hegel, ibid. p136)

The figure of the composited blood-friend. Thus distance and mediation areshort-circuitedin such clair-voyance by an immediation where blood flows withinone large body composed of two geometrically distinct coordinates; a clair-voyant

sang-clairthat flows over and penetrates the barriers of skin and thus not at allanything like a haemorrhaging out from an invasive wound. It is only through thisbloodthat such communication can (ethically) flow. And yet simultaneously the

blood must also simultaneously be composed of thesocial(hence the bloodfriend)which Wallace reads as composing of the ethicaland natural family: ones spousethat one has a bond of spirit with binds itself here by the placing of an immense,though hidden, weight upon the word ethical while placing a more open andseemingly clear weight upon the (seemingly less contestable) word family. Thus there

is a naturalistic arch-responsible blood-bond that ties an ethics of the one to theother, without any real blood being present. All of the burden is placed upon thissomewhat structurally uneasy bridge-term then of the blood friend. But what cannot

be questioned, even apart from this questionable real-distance, is that blood is blood.But what of this blood that flows through what is not in fact in itself composedof

blood?

Back to the Future: Panop-tech-clair-voyance

In answer to this questing but what ofwe come back to something, a

spectral metaphoricity that is composed of blood but which, while not openly spokenor overtly speaking within this dialectics, is nevertheless fuelling our presentlyinvestigated and investigating exemplar (Warwick) and his frighteningly embeddedand electrically-enabled panop-tech-clair-voyance. In such apanop-tech-clair-voyancewe would not be dealing with, a secondary invasive prosthesis (that wouldinvadethe prior-primacy of the a priori natural body-proper) but of aprosthesis thatcompletes the call-of-blood. This calling-of-bloodwill complete a lack thatapparently, as with Dvorsky and his confidently coined techlepathy that hedemonstrated, in his peremptorily fashion that we exhibited earlier, always needed to

be completed. The love-envoisent out from the blood-friend (a rather inherently-aporetic appellation as we have just seen) receives something alreadyclose-by andalreadyinterior. It just completes it more, or signs most fully what was there already.


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From a position where it was previously unable (through the seeminglyinherent blockage of sensory-deprivation) tosee insidewe come to see the actuallyexperienced position of the blood friendthat so concerns Warwick and his pre-invention. A pre-invention in a long-long-long line commun-ication inventions. Againit is a long story whose recounting would seem to be coming to a present-day close:

Warwick sees himself as carrying out the work and the challenges that would placehim in direct filiation with the tele-technological communication apparatus ofAlexander Graham Bell (he would indeed like to be remembered as an inventor ofsimilar life-changing, geo-space-bridging prestige). And, just as in the 19thcenturywhen technological photo-graphs and tele-phones were partnered by an occultish tele-

pathy, we come full-circle and find telepathy itself, to be no longer a spectral or occultthing

This is not however akin to tying two yoghurt cartons together with a piece ofstring in order to colloquy more immediatelywith our blood-friend loved ones, butmore an super-intimate soliloquy of the (behind-the)face-to-face(behind). This would

be something altogether more than a de-distancing electric speech, but of a sort ofpanoptechlairvoyant electric immediacy. This bypassing of the previous externality ofthe face takes each of us/them inside them-usin a sort of intra-circuitous technico-

blood-grouping. But of the distance brought shorter, to disappearing..? Is therenothing more to say? Questions that we opened with of selfless otherness? Surely toconnect sosnuglyto the other, we must already be at home most cannily withinourselves? And if we are soon to be together with each other, there must have been a

privacy that can later be made to join within a new properly compounded blood-privacy?

If the history of mediation or communication has always also been a history of

the desire for the bridging and the bringing closer of previously distant distances(according to McLuhan, Ong, Levinsons Digital McLuhan, thesystems/cyberneticists, etc.) and of vanquishing missing or errantexcesses that mightotherwise fall to the tomb (and whose seeds might not be deposited within theknowledge-bank) we have two questions perhaps toproblematiseit. One is theLevinasian ethical question concerning totality, another is the more permanent orineradicable (and less ethically inclined) Derridean/Bataillian problem of a generaleconomy and diffrance.

For economy of time we will move onto the second question concerningpanop-tech-clair-en-voyance, the disappearance of diffrance. For unlike Levinass

respect for the alterity of the autrui (and of the face as something that stops andstartsour having-of-the-other), the possible bypassing of the facial does not for all thatimplode these alter-spatialities. For the selfhere is not, prior to this possibility of asolid-bridging, in control and possession of its owness, to then be able to take-controlor totalise (and not leave to excess or infinity) that which comes before this spatialcoming before(the other).

Is the self a self before it comes to wish to hold itself out to the other? Is theself a monad looking for something outside, itself? Does the self need to build a

prosthetic bridge toward the other, or is the prosthetic of the bridge-outside alreadyinside? For Derrida we are perhaps always already telepathic and thus always already

invaginationally wounded:


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The truth, what I always have difficulty getting used to: that

nontelepathy is possible. Always difficult to imagine that one can think

something to oneself, deep down inside, without being surprised by the

other, without the other being immediately informed, as easily as if he or she

had a giant screen inside. (Derrida, Telepathy)

Andyet,we still seek to supplement this arch-telepathy, butperhapsthebetter to hide or bury ourselves away from this prior techclairvoyant substratum thatwe have always already so thoroughly been composed of? Remember the galvanianwound of the arch-electrical. Prostheses ofprosfetishesdo not hide away a lack butoffer the threat or the promise of an extension to hide the existent alreadyness of a

prior extensionbeneath the apparent prior lack of this invasiveness. Just as for Leroi-Gourhan the hand is not in any way invadedby the prosthetic tool but alreadyavailable for it and calling-out for it in its very shape and ability tograspor clasp ontowhat is outside, so the body (as galvanic already, but more as vibrating withinvagination) is a quite uncanny abode: not of itself but of what is thought to be

prosthetically outside.

In a twiston Harawaysdesire to have responsibility given to (toChristianise?) the animal -after Derridas question of animal possibilities of response-we might ask: and say the human reacted and has only everreacted?What if theresponsibility of the individual was only ever the panop-tech-clair-voyant machinicreaction ofthe other, ofan alterity, inside? A reaction machinery unable ever to standor have stoodon its own two feet in anyself-responsible way?

[T]hen comes the last stage, the one that is still before us, but that I seeseeing us coming and that softwarily, will have anticipated us right from the

start. In this way a life [that] is totally transformed, converted, paralysed bytelepathy would await us, given over to its networks and its schemes across thewhole surface of its body, in all its angles, tangled up in the web of historiesand times without the least resistance on our part (p243)

Such threats, offered within the voice of the somewhat camp quotation above,offer a return to a poverty of world, but where for all that were the riches that would

be lost or divested? What would have been the location of such a resistance on our

part that might be stolen away after a notionally prior self-resistance is divested andreturned into an amorphous animality-machinery? And where, in truth(?) was thatsolidity ground, in truth, a ground that has always-already been always-already

lacking? To return to Haraway (and in truth this essay has been really nothing but along and tangled struggle with all the responsibilities that Haraway would to extendinto the animal kingdom) we might question this expanse of presencing-christianity

For here we spot, right here in the above closing (and we believe quite fair)

thumbnail sketch in the above paragraph, a contradiction in Haraway, if not a strangeaporetic deep-cut within the skin of that pathetically celebratorycyborgian fourthwound and one that Luigi Galvani already helped to have us recognise as dehiscent oropen. Galvanis electrical-technical interior does not seek to open a chasm, an abyss,or a wound between theanimal and thehuman but to wound the safe biblical distanceof a safe anthropocentric division (a division of which both Heidegger and Uexkllalso partake of). In rightly seeking to question this rather neat divide however, why


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give responsibility unto to the animal and thus share out something of the humanindividuals presumed possibility of answer from the bottom of an owned-responsibility? And so, without wishing to re-establish the dividing line between thehuman and theanimal, we might ask the question: and say the human reacted?

Preliminary Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques (1973) Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: Northwestern UniversityPress.

Derrida, Jacques (2008) The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow), NewYork: Fordham University Press.

Descartes, Rene (2008)A Discourse on Method, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Galvani, Luigi (1953) Comment on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion,Cambridge MA; Elizabeth Licht Publisher.

Haraway, Donna (2007) When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Hegel, GFW (****)

La Mettrie (1994)Man A Machine, Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company.

Malabou, Catherine (2008) What Should We Do With Our Brain?, New York:Fordham University Press.

Malabou, Catherine (2009) How Is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today?:Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection, and Neurobiological Emotion, Qui Parle

Richards, Tony (2011) Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within theper- formative field of tele-presence, International Journal of Performance Artsand Digital Media, 7: 1, pp. 7795.

Shelley, Mary (2000) Frankenstein, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics ad Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford:Stanford University Press.

iSuch thinking of a nature that is always-already prosthetic obviously plays into

a series of Derridean-inspired researches that include work such as Stiegler,

Wills, Malabou and also to an extent Haraway, though, as we point out elsewhere

in this article, Haraway tends to side-step the more thoroughgoing Derridean

critique of prosthetics as already written into the prior nature of the organism.

Also Stiegler tends to create too much of a clean break between the human and

animal domain by re-hominising certain aspects of grammatology (or what he

calls programmatology) through leaning too much no the work of Leroi-Gourhan.


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iiWe could talk here obviously of the Heideggerian ontico-ontological cardinal

difference between being and beings and how a responsible Dasein can only be

a singular being and not an ontical being of properties and machine tools. As

soon as Frankenstein sows pieces togoet==iiiA pre-existent paleo-prosthetic process somewhat akin, we believe, to Derridasconceptually related network of concepts such as invagination, diffrance,pharmakon, the trace, supplement, hymen and arch-writing

ivWe are not far from the New England golden pond of ThoreausWalden and

those paradoxical individualists who would wish to transcend imposed law,

whilst simultaneously believing in some law of the self. If Skinner hadnt already

laid claim to Walden 2 as a title for his own utopian fiction, Barlows ownpolemical tome could justly have been a sequel to Thoreaus own passionate

yearning for transcendent dismbodied dwelling. This strange cocktail oftechnology, transcendence and territory is very well embedded also within MITsNew England sensibilities.

vHe has even created the Singularity University to foster and further this aim.

immediationv6

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