Digital Metaphysics
Martin’s labyrinth of thought began almost 40 years ago with a digital audio sampling device’s funny default naming scheme for sample files in a recording studio he was working in. This sampler’s programming algorithm asking what name to save the hybrid sample file under caught his attention and started his questioning what precisely a Computer was. It was odd to him that, at the time, no one seemed to have any answers — and, even more curious to him, there wasn’t any actually developed body of literature — just an intellectual abyss of nothingness. Thus began his turn in a different direction in consideration of this question, which, over time, became the Question of the Machine and its role in transforming our thinking and language, politics and religion, and understanding of ourselves.
So in this vein of thought, Digital Metaphysics [Digitale Metaphysik] is Martin’s first published work, reflecting the formal starting point of his thought labyrinth. What’s eye-opening about translating his first work into English with him is seeing what he was already considering as a young electric author. Here, we find the thematic roots that have matured and, over the years, becoming the deeply felt thoughts threaded throughout his major works:
Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung. Frankfurt/M 1994
Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche, Frankfurt/M 1999
Die Scham der Philosophen, Berlin 2009
Philosophie der Maschine, Berlin 2018
And he’s continued spinning these threads in examining our Machine culture in its current digital form and possibilities in his upcoming series on the Psychology of the Machine, highlighting this initial publication importance as both the starting point for understanding his thinking — and the center of his thought labyrinth.
— Hopkins Stanley
In the Éducation sentimentale series, you can read more more about the development of the intellectual process behind Martin’s thinking.
Part I
Part II
You can also glean insight into the specifics that make Digitale Metaphysik both the center and starting place of intellectual development by reading The Shorelessness of Children’s Questions in the series Conversations between Us.
Digital Metaphysics
In: Merkur, 4/1988
If there is an image for what the Philosopher calls the New Confusion1, for this state of liquefaction and softening of the solidified, it is the electronic billowing of the video clip, that garland of colors where, in the rhythm of the heart, things rehearse their revolt, where apples mutate into pears and finally into the physiognomic visage of some outstanding contemporary, where objects, shriveled up, crushed and crumpled, lose their form and transform into something else – namely into free-floating signs that follow a different regularity than in reality. Dissolved from their context, things transform back to pure color and form. In the realm of signs, that is their message; nothing is what it is.
Which, by the way, is not a particular achievement of the video clip. Even Cézanne knew how to confuse a viewer of his paintings who criticized the appearance of a pear by telling her that she was not dealing with a pear but rather with a painting. However, the video clip doesn’t care much about such subtleties. The aesthetics of video clips (if they claim anything like that) lives, above all, from the crash; from the collisions of contrasting, diverse layerings of textures and drawings; from the cheerful Sameness[Einerlei2] that subjects the principle of identity to an endurance test that doesn't outlast its viability. And that is the Glad Tidings of the video clip. Apples are Pears and Stalin is Hitler and Mickey Mouse is everyone. Who cares. Naturally, the late Dadaist reflex calls the cultural critics onto the scene, who, having grown into old and gray wannabe revolutionaries, now find themselves in the predicament of adopting a defensive and conservative attitude toward the new, but especially of turning away from it uncomprehendingly. But then there are also more contemporary exegetes, such as Baudrillard, who diagnose reality's dwindling in the free-floating signs of the unleashed mass culture. And indeed, it seems quite obvious to recognize a uniform identity of diversity [Einerlei] in the video clip, in the frenzy of images and fragments of images, a last radiance of the real; and to such a diagnosis can be added that the spirit of the times itself, however cheerfully it may behave, has found in the term postmodern a label that lets it shine through that we are all too aware of its shrinkage. You look back; howsoever it may be. Either wistfully or with the most defiant determination, the back is in front of you, and the latest trend is the most out-of-style hat. In truth, though, something has definitely been added, and that is a sign-processing machinery that will accelerate and multiply the production of signs in ways never before known. Actually, the shrinkage is only the other manifestation of this monstrous explosion: except that we don't know what it is.
The calculated crash, the crumpled objects, and the image mutants of the video clips embody the principle of the non-identical, of the dissolvability not only of objects but, most of all, the orders for which they symbolically stand. And it is precisely in this, as a symbolic deformation of the sign systems, that something is revealed in the video clip that can perhaps be interpreted as a kind of semantic-morphological meltdown, as the bankruptcy of all traditional thought patterns, in one way or another, that have suggested the glue of social coherency, in short, world order. Thereby (again falling back on a Dadaist stratagem), the overcoming of ideologies does not take place in discourse, but from the inside, as a decomposition of its smallest elements, the signs. The video clip, by crumpling, shattering, and tearing its objects out of context, isn't attacking the objects themselves, but their symbolic sign function: as carriers of meaning and significance, as ferments of a whole and the claim to totality. Deformed and deformable — every thing is merely an aggregate state of its changeability, a fluid form of appearance, a sameness of identity [Einerlei]. And if there is a message of the video clip, it is this: the practiced indifference, the anything-goes, for which technical instruments bear only the most obvious evidence.
But if we disregard the garish, regressive imagery of the video clips for just a moment, we soon discover that in it, in the anything-goes, lies an essential characteristic of the digital itself. The Dadaist crash is only a correlation, a cultural reflection of what characterizes the deep digital structure. This is because the arbitrariness of anything-goes is the constituent moment itself, that emptiness that every computer user, no matter how cursorily, experiences in one way or another (even if it is simply standing stunned in front of his device and realizing that he's just irreversibly deleted the work of hours, days, or months). For it is precisely in the system's emptiness that the computer's enormous power lies and the reason why it can serve as multiple Machines, as a control instrument for the most diverse work and processes.3 The transformation to a digit, to a pure sign, allows for dealing with the most diverse codes, such as language, images, and sounds — and beyond that, it enables processing procedures, in principle at least, that don't have to worry about the optical, acoustic, or semantic inherent law of the object; instead, it can be handled in a virtuoso and completely formal way, just as if dealing with numbers, with pure and abstract signs.
But that transformation, as the sign is digitalized, does not stop just with the processing method, the particular processing program, or the programming language. They, too (insofar as they are nothing other than machine language codes directly communicating with the processor), can be edited at will, are facultative, can be extended at any time, and are reversible — and so the user of a computer has the choice of a programming language at not only their disposal but also the possibility of extending it as they see fit, of co-designing or re-designing its syntax and its semantics. And that's precisely the emptiness of the computer: the complete reversibility and that everything which happens is only convention and agreement — and that everything could be completely different.
But where everything is at disposition, that anything-goes also captures an essential characteristic of language itself: namely that of general bindingness [Allgemeinverbindlichkeit4], or in the language of sociologists and linguists: of intersubjectivity. The liberated language, the code liberated from its universal bindingness, also contains already its dissolution within itself — and in fact, this connection is probably nowhere more evident than in the existence of computer viruses, those viral programs that are child's play to write, whose extraordinary, unpredictable subversiveness consists in the fact that any word, any character can be programmed as the code word that triggers the destruction of the system.5 Let's say please — and everything is lost.
The Digital Revolution is a shrinkage of resistance, of friction against its fabric. The record player crackle, the paper crumpling, the background inertia disappears. The sign rises above its absolute silence. Noise-free and pure. Where there is a pause in the CD player, a hole suddenly gapes, a complete absence opens up to the auditory sensation, an almost vertiginous nothingness — and really, there is nothing but a vertiginous emptiness, that completely unreal soundlessness, as is never communicated in nature and only possible in the overcoming of materiality. The digitalization of a sound does not mean the perfection of the carrier material, but it is precisely its overcoming.
Invariably, while flipping through some computer magazine, you come across some short essay with the alien and unintelligible jargon that dominates such magazines, at least to the uninitiated. And there, where otherwise only technical questions are being discussed, that’s where it happens that some user reporting on their odyssey into another computer system — suddenly language runs away from them — becoming the language of mysticism, an ecstatic chant, the desire of piercing, penetrating this world’s vault and being absorbed by the whole beyond, rising above it. In effect, modern communication networks, on their own, are comparable to medieval cathedrals that, for generations, have been monuments of coherence and world order. And just as the builders of such a cathedral became faceless workers, no longer creators but the mere executors of an assigned plan, the individual programmer who leaves his signature in the data world network also becomes faceless, a nothing in front of a gigantic, superhuman architecture. And that is precisely what the nameless scribe preserves in the system: the universal information network. Unio mystica. Digital metaphysics.
By looking away from such capriccioso ideas, instead focusing on the player as a music lover and critical consumer of the CD player’s digital sound, you might — and with some justification — take the view that only digitally performed sound enables a truly faithful reproduction, which hasn't been possible before because of analog recording media’s inadequacies. And the immanent dream of creating a perfect reality image that has always been present in conventional reproduction techniques seems to have finally been redeemed with digital reproduction. However, this notion is defrauded in the structural transformation a reality segment undergoes with digitalization. The decoded sign, transferred into the computer’s binary logic, is, although an exact duplicate, another kind of sign, namely the Nullnummer6 of a series, which works with different terms than the original and the duplicate. This is particularly evident in sampler technology of computers used for music production that allows any sound, any voice, or any piece of music to be broken down into digital information for further processing (which in the field of pop music, for example, where people aren't so squeamish about intellectual property, has led to a flood of copyright lawsuits that not only strain the conventional conception of copyright but make it seem obsolete).
The sound of a slamming door, for example, fed into a sampler and dissolved there into digital information (where it can be retrieved at any time, as a door slamming), still refers to the image; nevertheless, in this case, the 1:1 reference, is intrinsically a special case. Because insofar as the digitalization of a sound means its complete liquefaction into a numerical code, it represents nothing other than the raw mass7, which can be formed anew using specific procedures comparable to how the number of letters that can be put together, anagrammatically, to create new words. In practical terms, this means that any sound, such as a slamming door or a bird twittering, when superimposed on a keyboard, can be recalled in any pitch; furthermore, like any string of characters, it can be read backward and forwards; and finally, it can be used as a controller for another signal that is integrated into a side-chained closed looped control system.
That is, in short, a piece of decoded nature can be edited at will. (It would be erroneous to assume that derivatives of such a decoded sound would be akin to the synthetic sounds of electronics, like electromagnetic tonewheel organs. The sound signals produced by such devices are what we commonly call natural and, , should be thought of as mutants or mutagenic sounds). The natural sound deciphered, turns into pure sound, a sign, a note in a piece of future music — Here, in complete detachment of the sign from its signified, it becomes visible that digitalization is not a reflection but a transposition to a new semiotic level, the transition to a reality that cannot actually be called synthetic but, as an excess of the existent, should be called hyper-realism.
In contrast to conventional reproduction techniques, which have been nothing more than the mass duplication of an original image, digital reproduction breaks away from the dualism of primordial image and its reflection — from the tense relationship between the original and its copy. The loss of the auratic essence that Benjamin8 noted in the advent of reproduction technology finds its logical continuation here, albeit on a higher level. It is no longer the aura of the reproduced and dissimulating object that is destroyed; it is its concept of Identity. The sound, de-coded, no longer represents anything but the raw mass of its variations, comparable to a gene pool from which filiations, modifications, and variations emerge.9
Deciphered, fed into the computer, the particular form of an object, its distinctive contour, is lost — and indeed, if it is not explicitly marked as original, it will hardly be recognizable as such in the series of its clones and mutants. In serialization, the One disappears, and in its place, through its gradations, variations, and differences, its blueprint emerges, that model underlying all its manifestations. With the disappearance of the identical, deeper structure of programs, systems, and control loops, thus comes to light as: the Idea of Programmability.
The crucial thought inherent in the praxis of Digitalization is that each object, morphologically speaking, represents nothing more than the zero-number [Nullnummer] of its variations, the initial zero-pilot configuration of its serializability. So once again, anything-goes; only here, the flippant coolness gesture is less prominent than the contemplation that what is, is only an accidental manifestation, only one possibility among others. The segment of substantiveness, transferred into the Realm of Signs, loses, as it were, its prerogative — in contrast to the simulacra of the cultural process — as a statement of Identity and sign of life. Here, where reality turns into a mass of signs, it is blatantly noticeable that the Pathos over the loss of the Authentic, which accompanied modernity and the technical development of reproductive means, is overtaken by its own design and finally completely annulled — and really, where purported authenticism is handed over to the free configuration of anything and everything; where the mirroring of reality always already holds in store a genuinely creative act (and thus its annulment), the use of such concepts as authenticity and original sound becomes meaningless.
That illusion that a technical apparatus is capable of providing an "objective" reflection is annulled by the ongoing development of the technological device itself — and essentially stripped of this illusion, the world is transformed back into that enigmatic white surface which only the sensory perception of the viewer is capable of deciphering. Here, not by chance, an appreciation of the aesthetic perspective takes place — indeed (at least perceptibly in the field of the audiovisual arts), the new technical possibilities mean a release of hitherto hardly grasped aesthetic possibilities, if only because they give the artist tools allowing them not only to create a copy of reality but also to create a new form of art.
The "open concept of music" postulated by John Cage in the sixties, the notion that virtually every noise, every sound, could become part of a musical (virtual paradigmatic: Symbolic) work, has long since become a technical reality and matter of course with the decoding of sounds, enabling the composer to transform any noise into an instrument. That longing to be a demiurge10, as every artist arguably feels, gains space here in a way hardly thought possible, especially insofar as the process of nature can become part of the work itself; it escapes the deficit that's always been inherent in all mimesis: being a mere imitation of natural processes. It is not by chance that the preoccupation with computers means, albeit on a very remote level, a very particular engagement with techniques that are peculiar to nature: with cybernetic structures and control cycles, with concepts of organic growth and evolution — except that this preoccupation takes place in symbolic space, namely in the obsession with the nature of signs. The deciphering of the world coincides with its re-creation, modification, and supposed perfection. This longing for demiurge is nothing new at all, but perhaps has always been an essential drive [Antrieb11], if not the origin of art — and certainly, such a thought is, as seen in art, the symbolic overcoming of that first shame of not having created oneself, cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand12. However, what has always been a secret driving force [Antriebskraft] in the realm of the symbolic, now finds a counterpart in genetics, which certainly does not leave it at mere symbolic execution and mimesis, but which actually and without much ado becomes demiurgically active.13
The freedom of art, as the merely symbolic, becomes the freedom of science to do all that can be thought of.
Deciphering the genetic code puts the scientist in the position of a demiurge, and it is entirely likely that he will not be content with paying symbolic tribute to the natural processes, preferring to change it on his authority. And potentially, what could be called cultural digitalization is something like a foreshadowing, a preliminary exercise of what will happen with some delay in the realm of nature itself. That the Hyperrealism will be followed by a Hyper-Nature, a newly spelled out bestiary; that just such creatures will follow the image mutants, the cloned sounds, the serialized objects; and that what has long been in the fields of art and philosophy stale and commonplace, namely that the individual is dead and nothing but a decrepit Machine of the last, bourgeois century, will emerge from the mere thought and take shape – not as the destruction of the individual himself, but in the form of his clone, his corrected, slightly reprogrammed and improved version. The one who will emerge from the work on the hereditary material is no longer the archetype but already part of a series of all those drafts from which one has chosen him as the best solution.14
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
This is in reference the Jürgen Habermas’ article The New Confusion [Neue Unübersichtlichkeit] published in Merkur, No. 431, January 1988, in which he announced the exhaustion of utopian energies within the intellectual space of the FDR. In L’Éducation Sentementale I & II, Martin references this turn as a spiritual terra incognita moment, which prompted his first attempt at thinking resulting in this essay. Perhaps another way to understand this turning is as Kant’s die Unmündigkeit, or the moment of Enlightenment when you realize your own voice, independent from others. [Translator’s note]
Einerlei, often mistranslated as Monotony or boredom, has this meaning of Sameness through its Difference. Unlike monotony, it’s an odd dissimulative admixture of identity reflecting a carefree Identity of having no real preference, ready for doing something whensoever, feeling excited irregardless of the situation. Here, Martin is pointing out that buzzwords like Identity, Equity, and Diversity contain this underlying meaning — more importantly, it is a way of describing the zero-point of the equal sign’s ratio, as well as the simulacral nullnummer [zero-number] which he develops in later works as the zero-pilot of digital representation. [Translators note]
This line pre-figures a follow-up article Martin published in Merkur titled Die Universale Maschine in 12/1990 that he ultimately develops as his notion of the great Universal Machines; here, you can begin to see how he’s formulating the Greek Alphabetic Wheelwork, which he sometimes refers to as the Printwheel [Typenrad]. [Translators note]
This is a neologism of Allegemein [Public or Universally General) and Verbindlichkeit [Bindingness or Obligation] referring here to the binding obligation of a language, meaning a shared perception between individual perspectives, providing the agreed upon metaphysical hypostasis of a shared, social reality. In his later works, Martin defines this, in the case of pre-Machine culture, as the Psychoplasm. While in contrast, in post-Machine culture, there is this additional psychoplasmic structure of the Machine’s outsourced unconscious that he refers to as the Psychotope with its notion of Social Sculpturing. [Translators Note]
As in loosing everything in a reversion back to the zero-point [nullnummer] of the zero-plot in an instant (see fn. 6 below), either by mistaken chance or malicious intent. Martin will later develop this thought of liberated language in how the Hysterical Machine can produce phantasms that continually arise from our cultural grave to haunt us socially and personally. [Translators note]
Nullnummer [zero-number] refers to a prototype of a newspaper printing comparable to a film’s test pilot for testing the suitability of a story. Here, Martin’s uses the term to describe how a sound’s digital representation is actually a simulacrum whose final dissimulation depends on how it’s processed and the specific equipment used to reproduce it in audio form. Martin will later use this notion to flesh out how the simulacrum, as the zero-number’s zero-pilot, which can be played out in any one of an infinity of synchronically reversible dissimulations, is the digital replacement of representation (see fn. 2 above on Einerlei and fn.7 below) [Translators note]
In his later thinking, Martin will go on to describe how software is a digital liquefaction of reality into a simulation, reflecting the Medieval shifting of rappresentare to representatio in Oresme’s money economy to the digital metaphysics of our information economy as a kind of nullhammer/nullnummer as a hammering fission into the zero-number’s pilot simulacrum and the dissimulative fusing of it, using the Machine and its substrate, back into a materially different form which will never be an exact reproduction, but always a flawed representation. As translators, observing how this thread reliefs out throughout our backward viewing of translating Martin’s works as he wrote them is instructive. [Translators note]
Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. German version 1939, in: ders, Gesammelte Schriften. Volume I, Frankfurt am Main 1980. [Translator’s note]
Exemplar here would be how the genotypic simulacrum phenotypically dissimulates in an overwhelming variety of functioning and non-functioning variations. Note the recurring leitmotif in Martin’s early thinking that later traces out as a Hysterical Machine capable of producing phantasms continually arising from our cultural grave and haunting us materially, socially, and personally. [Translators Note]
Here, Martin sees this longing as — a longing of and a longing to be; making it essentially the nullnummer’s source. As Martin’s thinking matures, he will take a much closer look at the Gnostic Demiurge, which becomes a vital notion underlying both the Question and the Psychology of the Machine. [Translator’s note]
Antrieb translates as the driving or powering something forward. Martin’s use of it here prefigures the development of significant threads in his later work. This includes the Kraftwerk of the Gesellschaftstriebwerk in the Philosophy of the Machine. [Translators note]
This augurs yet another major thread in Martin’s later thinking, that of the Philosopher’s Shame. [Translators note]
See fn. 9 above.
This notion of Hyper-Nature reflects how Martin thought of demiurgic longing (see fn. 10 above) in terms of how the trans debate of that moment saw the transcending and passing over this boundary as a right of transgression. But, as he delves deeper into Nicole Orésme’s groundbreaking work on the Eco-nomics of money, he begins seeing it as a phantasma, as a creation of the dividual, the splintering and re-fashioning of the self — putting the individual in the position of being a central bank, issuing its currency (its identity) as a law which all must submit, and will eventually trace it through the Gnostic Demiurge in both the Philosophy of the Machine and the series on the Psychology of the Machine. [Translators note]