Is There Love in the Technoetic Narcissus? The Universitat die Angewandte Kunst Wien paper

By Francesco Monico :: Vienna University of Applied Art – July 2008- by Springer Verlag NEW REALITIES BEING SYNCRETIC, Consciousness Reframed: The Planetary Collegium's IXth International Research Conference, Series Edition Angewandte, Ascott, Roy; Bast, Gerald; Fiel, Wolfgang (Eds.), October 2008, ISBN 978-3-211-78890-5

Editing by Christopher Emsden

The term “Narcissism” derives from clinical description and was adopted by Paul Nacke in 1899 to describe the attitude of people who treat their own body in the same way that a sexual object is treated, meaning they gaze at it, touch it and caress it until these gestures produce complete satisfaction. ii -

I- Anthropocentrism - from the Greek άνθρωπος, anthropos, "man, human being” "κέντρον, kentron, "center" - is the tendency to consider the human being as the center of the universe. The notion of “centrality” can be understood as simply one of superiority in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom, or more deeply as a kind of ontological preeminence over all of reality, a view that takes the human being to be the immanent expression of the spirit at the base of the universe.
A debate between Socrates and the sophists in fifth-century Athens offers an early example of the anthropocentric concept. Protagoras argued that 'man is the measure of all things' and as such is the benchmark and criterion of the universe. Anthropocentricism returned with vigor once more in the age of Humanism.
Today, as we begin the Third Millennium, anthropocentrism may no longer a positive value, or unambiguously so. Facing as we do the systematic destruction of Nature, efforts to understand it and digitally reproduce it, and facing as we use moist media and other emerging concepts such as that of the semi-life, we increasingly feel the need to shift our paradigm from a nearly anthropocentric one – which now seems a limit and an obstacle – to a dialectical one that is in a syncretic dialogue with Nature and Technology. This dialogue must, moreover, have a particular quality: it must be a dialectic of love.

II- Cultura, in Latin, means cultivation, and is used to refer to a land or a village or a country. When referred to a person, it means education and manners, and when applied to a culture, it means civility and refinement. In all cases, there is the concept of a way to obtain the desired quality, just as with a farmer’s manual. This kind of culture, understood as a suite of shared cognitive parameters, traditions, technical procedures and so on, all transmitted and systematically used by a social group, nation or all of humanity, placed human – as a model to mirror – in its center. In this scheme, the human person is the only model with which a member can identify, which means the culture itself essentially folds back in on itself and projects all of its desires only on human proportions and form.
Human culture in this light seems to be a kind of Narcissistic neurosis in which the individual has little wiggle room and no way to escape. The individual is obliged to assume a model of the ideal Ego as the goal of love itself. This Ego is anthropocentric, and love, when not aimed at the discovery of the other, risks becoming a suicidal weapon against society itself. Human, then, seems to be a kind of cultural primate who suffers from the deep malaise that spreads beyond the individual sphere and ends up marking, through the death of communication between species and types of humanity, one of the limits of our current society.

III- The famous squabble between Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung was over the “theory of the libido” and focused on the aspects that this theory brought to light – in particular the way a being falls in love with his or her own image and body. According to Freud, this was no accident, but rather represented a need of a person’s evolutionary stage that would end up influencing all of his or her future choices in the world of love. In short, it marked their destiny. And it was the destiny of Narcissus. Might not the same be true of culture and humanity now?

IV-The aforementioned debate between Freud and Jung took place on September 7 and 8 in 1913. For Freud, as said, falling in love with one’s own body was not an accidental event but a function of the evolutionary phases of a person’s development that invariably influences future choices regarding love and destiny. To understand Narcissism, one must have a clear view of the theory of the Libido, the main source of psychic energy. For Freud, it is sexual energy; for Jung it is abstract psychic energy; in Adler, it is the will to power. Personally, I choose to apply Occam’s razor to this set of hypotheses. Occam argued that «Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem» or, in other words, «all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best one». Thus I would rely on the impulse theory on a sexual basis – in short, reproductive and sexual energy is at the base of all human energy.
Unlike most other living species, the human race has deviated the sexual libido from its natural purpose (reproduction) and invested the bulk of it instead in the creation of a new world: The symboliciii world that has created civility and culture.
Human beings use their libido and sexual and creative energy to live, love and defend themselves. They direct their libido to themselves and to other Egos, or to objects that they sporadically decide warrants their attention. Even so, this deviation is really a sublimation. The father of the theory himself noted that the movement of the libido towards its own sublimation is not in fact a natural movement but an artificial one, at least if we take the natural world as a model, given that it occurs only among the human race.
In a certain sense, sublimation makes humankind aware of his and others’ diseases, and this awareness leads to comprehension.
Freud evidently didn’t go so far as to consider culture itself a disease. Still, in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930), he appealed to the god Logos to liberate us from this admixture of nature and culture, and seems to insist, without being too subtle, on the need for culture (the instincts that inhabit the upper stories of the psychic house, to use a Freudian metaphor). So, in a sense, Freud seems to see culture as a simple sublimation of what anyway inhabits the ground floor and the basement of the psychic house.iv Indeed, the symbol, being inherent to the human race, could hardly exorcise the raw materials and natural basis of the species itself.

V- The libido puts its trust in the symbol as a mediator for its relations with the object in its tendency to realize its unquenched desire for a definitive union of itself, as subject, with the object, posited as a natural, pre-human symbiotic fantasy. In doing so, the libido creates a world that is truly human as distinct from natural. This is the creative world of culture, and of cultural objects – in a word, it is the world of symbols, a new symbolic universe in which we are all henceforth completely immersed. This symbolic world has an architrave in the Narcissistic attitude of the human species. The myth of Narcissus seems to clearly say all there is to say about cultural Narcissism: the young, clean and handsome human, Dionysian humankind, must focus on desire and being desired for and by the world. He must desire something beyond himself, because that way even others can and will become beautiful and desired. It is a way in which vital, instinctual, sexual and creative energy can be expressed, spread and dissipated. The message is: Love otherness and project one’s own identity instincts towards the other.
Being self sufficient offers strength and vigor to the hunter. But when a hunter matures, it is a source of misfortune for him and for all those around him. Then of that human, once so loved, nothing will remain but a few tears, a faint echo – he will be recalled as a handsome Narcissus, a flower full of color but also poison. The Narcissus is a narcotic flower with beautiful petals. It stands for the handsome young humankind who rejects everybody, an image which is the foundational myth not only of psychology but also of human hermeneutics. Yet in fact it is the symbolic system and the way it functions that builds the web of meaning based on the sharing of experience. To do this, human culture is born Narcissistic, and this is a tragedy that ultimately limits the potential for this culture to really love anything other than itself.

VI- In its earliest incarnations, human culture did not have the possibility – because it did not yet possess defined and historicized symbols and the derivative desires that these engender – nor the desire – because it did not have branded and defined models – nor the will – because it did not have a goal, a telos, a purpose – to define the border, however flexible and shifting, between nature and culture. Culture in its youthful phase did not perceive the presence of nature, because it never thought to consider that presence as anything other than itself anyway. It was enough to simply listen and an entire world would appear, a world of reality made of wind, water, sun, sound and silence. It was enough to simply look and an entire world would appear, a world of reality made of colors, reflections, light and darkness.
In this phase, humankind felt a Narcissistic sensation of omnipotence. He felt the same pleasure as Narcissus, the pleasure of self-sufficiency. Reality was like an eternal womb, and the human felt no difference between himself and nature, it was a blessed state of satiety. In such a state, reality is an exhaustively complete experience of the world that ends with the traumatic separation as rituals languages and symbols break the natural womb-like cocoon and give birth to intuitions of immortality, to the idea of infinity, to the sense of being an ethereal, bodiless being free from the laws of physics. In religious terms, this would be the state of grace.
All of these sensations find their primary formulation in the era passed floating in the natural womb, of which we all have an epigenetic memory. Eventually, myth-based and magic-based cultures, and then religions, philosophies and finally sciences linked to foundation myths from both East and West, would try to restore that lost sense of unity, that unity we lost.
Love, or rather the ability to love, resides in that natural womb.

VII- A large part of contemporary art, as well as a number of new religious cults based on particular and even peculiar readings of Oriental traditions, seek to submit us to a new womb-like regime, a new kind of oceanic bliss. Plenty of strands in contemporary music, be they new age or avant-garde, try to abolish individuality in favor of anonymity. Many avant-garde artists have fought for the abolition, or at least the temporary suspension, of conscious control in order to open up to unconscious thoughts, often with the goal of eliminating any trace of their own personalities. The common goal here is to abolish the borders of the Ego and to consider reality as part of ourselves. The goal is to return to the natural womb-like oceanic bliss in order to avoid conflicts and put an end to the endless chores of deepening our knowledge of ourselves and the environment that we define and which defines us. The identity between Ego and Nature was broken when the animal acquired language and, as a result, self-consciousness. So human does all he can to feel less afraid and the result is almost a paradox: the individual must be aware of himself as a figure separate from nature, but at the same time, the more the Ego’s borders become clear and well-defined, the more the individual feels alone in the world and thus at the mercy of generic “others”. And it is precisely that moment that we live a terrifying and anxiety-escalating cultural experience, one that lies at the root of our cultural neuroses.
Indeed, culture in its ebullient youth was based on a sense of omnipotence, which led it to elaborate in a somewhat discombobulated way its newfound status as different (from Nature).
So just a few minutes ago we were in Eden, wandering around in a place of marvelous identities, and suddenly now we are exposed to incoherence, to lies, paradoxes and illusions.

VIII- Culture is founded on the sharing of experiences. These experiences are either practical and concrete or psychic, and culture and psychology are thus founded on that common element in them that we share with other members of our species. The first – and only – thing that we share with our species-mates is the body (and its sexual instincts and cravings). Later come concepts, including experiential canons and parameters, which serve as a nexus between the experiences of different individuals, be they archetypes or culturally specific local customs.
And so we discover the terrible truth: We depend on others.
Culture might be portrayed as an attempt at sharing, one that from time to time, as a function of experience and awareness, turns out to be creative or pathetic in its success in influencing the sexual instinct, i.e. the libido, towards others, towards objects or, today, towards nature. The myth of Narcissus was born from a noble and astute intuition that has served over the centuries as a warning: If mankind is not able to open up to the beauty of nature because he is too focused on the beauty of that nature itself, then his destiny will be to leave no legacy behind other than nostalgia for an unachieved unity, for an unrequited and unlived love. If we reject nature because we don’t believe that it is correct to focus our libido in its direction, then the voice of nature will become sterile, and so will we. Human culture is Narcissistic because it is based on the attempt to direct the libido at itself to better confront the anxiety of the Ego’s solitude and to hide from the world’s interferences.

VI- From the advent of the earliest alphabets of the Sumerians, the libido has always been based on the economy, and it remained rooted there until it became definitively attached with the arrival of the bourgeois merchant class. This instinctual libido is projected towards the future in the same way as the economy. It also never has a static point of arrival, as its performance is always projected again into the future.

VII- It is misleading to conceive of language and culture as forces that are contrary or counterposed to Nature. Both language and culture are full-fledged members of the world of natural processes, and it makes no sense to pit artificial and natural against each other here. And if we want to overcome the imbalances introduced against nature by the industrial era and the rapacity of capitalism, then we’ll have to keep that in mind.
To do that, we must reunite human culture’s Narcissistic fracture (with Nature).

VIII- a self-admiring notion of progress - When we look closely at culture’s own desire and efforts to improve, we can see it seems to deploy a kind of Narcissistic repetition – using concepts such as evolution, and victory that embody a self-admiring notion of progress. In Nature, there is no sign that things are supposed to evolve or improve. One can talk of “differentiation by species” but there is nothing that signals victory – indeed, any such thing would depend entirely on one’s point of view.

IX- Narcissistic Progress - And so there you have cultural progress: coalesce cultures so that all virtues and perfections can be attributed to its actions (a neutral mind might not always agree), and hide and remove all of its defects. (The negation of sexuality in fundamentalist societies might have something to do with this approach.) Moreover, anthropocentric culture, remaining in its Narcissistic mode, tends to repress – in favor of cultural and economic progress – the actual concrete and operational use of all our possible cultural acquisitions…
Progress is posited as a way to exhaust all the dreams and desires that individuals and humanity have never seen come to fruit – that’s why the son becomes a hero able to replace the fathers, while the daughter will marry a prince and thus compensate the mothers. This investment in the future occurs because the weakest point of anthropocentric Narcissism is the immortality of the self. This after all is put to a rough test by reality, and in order to avoid the implacable condemnation to failure in the present, the idea is to shift the time frame to the future, and thus channel instincts into the path of progress.
Anthropocentric culture has instinctually invested in the future and narcissistically hides in the future of the supposed progress.
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X- This anthropocentric cultural narcissism negates the free flow of love. To fall in love, the human being has to leave his or her libido free to make contact with nature, and the natural object has to become a sexual ideal. But as long as human culture will be anthropocentric and hence narcissistic, the sexual ideal will be churned through a displacement machine: The individual will love that which she or he once was, and no longer is – hence the myth of purity and origins, like the Renè Morel hyperrealistic virtual heroesv, or the myth of others who possess virtues and qualities that are elusive to us, like the karin Andersen's theriomorphic womensvi
But what we really need is to love nature in and of and for itself, and the same for technology. That is, we need to confront the relationship of identity between humans and animals and humans and technologies.

XI- What emerges here is the image of an anthropocentric culture based on egoism and lost in the darkness it itself has generated. But so it is: humankind has tried with all his might for millennium to flee from the feeling of being alone in the world, in the galaxy, in the universe. And humanity will be alone until he discovers how to love his origin (Nature) and his present (technology).
To do that, humankind has to overcome the narcissistic wound with the womb-like oceanic feeling, and to abandon anthropocentrism in order to become the loving father of technology (humankind must be responsible of his creation).

XII- It may be easy to see the ghost of Sigmund Freud in my paper. I could have tried to find other sources of inspiration (H. Marshall McLuhan i.e. Technological Narcissismvii, and Christopher K. Lash i.e. The Culture of Narcissismviii) but the doctor from Vienna is always good to stir up the chickens and cause some discomfort. He had a penchant for a particular kind of research, one that delved into just those surface aspects of human life that anthropocentric culture considered obvious and stupid. Yet in my view it was that basic-ness, that simplicity, that was the sign of Freud’s great power as a philosopher of science. Narcissism today is covered in a vast bibliography that has so widened the field that it is actually rather had to define the term with any precision.ix.
I understand technoetic narcissism to be the result of the original fracture between humankind and Nature, a fracture that came as a byproduct of the acquisition of the first technology – rational language – and became exacerbated over time with the advent of other technologies and arts.
This fracture has stripped humankind away from the union with Nature and triggered a mirror-like mechanism that blocks us from loving otherness.

XIII- In order to analyze a culture at a moment of change like today, we have to be willing to scrutinize attentively the vortex encompassing good and evil, love and death, narcissism and love that shapes the matrix of our psychoculture. That means we have to manage our sense of boundaries and come face to face with the natural expir-ability of things – their non-being, if you will. And we have to do this in a balanced way, since it is impossible to cure all of our ills. The cure for anthropocentrism is in fact constrained only to reduce our suffering.

XIV- Conclusion I: That is the Model, This is Me. - There is plenty of rhyme and reason to culture. It has a model and a method. The model is everything that is shared from experiences passing through the unifying parameter of the (human) body – meaning the senses, proportions, extension and frontiers – which turns into tradition (or cultural translation). The method is the ability we have to read the model (critical education).
Humanity moves through a kind of action-reaction carried out by dualistic opposition; That is the model, this is me.
The Ego is aligned with the method and the methodological reading of the model has been anthropocentered in the modern age (man is the measure of all things). But today - in the face of the complexity of technologies, the spread of what I’d call the intelligence of the Artificial, of generative and emerging systems, of Moist Media, of Semi-Life - the anthropocentric model is in crisis. Or rather, it’s simply obsolete, and has to be replaced with a method based on an Integrated Ego that is merged with technology and Nature.
In order to exist, this Ego has to be the fruit of a cultural tradition organized so that experiences of such a kind are unified into shared concepts. It is precisely to activate just this process that I propose new concepts of Technoetic Narcissus, the Integrated Ego and the end of anthropocentrism.

XV- Anthropocentric Culture- The integrated person of the 21st century is a young, well-endowed, energetic and online individual characterized by heteronomy, heterotopy and cybernation. This individual does not know who they are, nor where they came from, nor – even less! – where they are going. As a result, the modern person lives in a world without limits, in the absence of limits. Currently, the modern body and psyche is engaged in a pioneering phase of advance and occupying the world’s space rather than mapping its boundaries. Anthropocentric culture is a defensive bulwark that is responsible for the illusion that borders exist between the Ego and the world.
This illusion inevitably reveals its own incoherence and also generates anxiety.

XVI - Question I- The question is, or rather becomes: Will the new Integrated Ego resolve this problematic, or whether it too will produce a culture that is inevitably split between a paralyzing anxiety and a will to conquest – between oceanic bliss and stultifying damnation, between the nymphs and Narcissus?

XVII- The New Narcissus and the Structuring Delusion- Anthropocentrism enters into a crisis point when we understand that culture is a the victim of a Narcissistic wound and that this blocks us from loving other species. And understanding that anthropocentrism is a mistaken paradigm is a “structuring delusion” –a special form of knowledge. This delusion contributes to the emergence of an instinctual aggression that is healthy useless and needed for human growth and cultural adaptation today.

XVIII - Conclusion II- Humanity has to disenchant himself from anthropocentrism and open up to Nature – through zootropy – and to technology – through technotropy – in order to be able to live up to the challenges that this era of mutations requires. - The term zootropy means to go towards animals, or to be drawn towards them, but at the same time, to be transformed by them or, put otherwise, to be influenced by a different dimension of being. Roberto Marchesini, pg.191, Meltemi 2007 - The term technotropy means to go towards technology, to be drawn towards or fascinated by it, but at the same time to be transformed by technology, or rather transformed by a different dimension of the senses, the body and its presence. Francesco Monico, CR9 Anhgewandte, 2008 - Our isolation is over. Today, after having broken the chains of religious conformism, we have a new vision of who we are, of the animals around us, of the limiited way we are separated from other species, and of the more or less accidental genesis of the borders we have drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Peter Singer 1994, p. 186 Ed. It.

XIV – Is There Love In The Technoetic Narcissus? a On Line Video installationx – Based on flower Narcissus, part of the Amaryllidaceae family. Its name derives from the Greek word narkào (= To quieten) and refers to the penetratine and inebriating smell of the flowers. Some scholars claim the name derives from the Persian word for this plant, نرگس , pronounced Nargis. There are many bulbous species of this type, including one that grows in temperate grassy woodlands of Italy called the “poeticus”. Such species have an oval-shaped bulb strongly psychoactive. From March 21 until June 21, 2009, the growth and flowering of a Narcissus Poeticus, as a new media Artwork, will be broadcast on Italian television, via Streamit [http://www.streamit.it/] on a dedicated Channel in which Freud's seminal text “Zur Einführung des Narzißmus” and texts by contemporary artists and philosophers against anthropocentrism will be scrawled along the bottom of the page. The 'participant public' can send, via SMS, their reactions, impressions, opinions and ideas at any time during the broadcast. This is an experiment in giving art the form of a communication operation - an online TV experiment (the kind of artwork typically seen at the end of the television age.) It is also a fitting review on the end of Anthropocentrism, and, insofar as there is an inevitable delay in a video installation, an allusion to the concept of “Horror Pleni”.