The Shorelessness of Children's Questions
The Shorelessness of Children's Questions
or How this Blog started (Conversation #1)
Martin Burckhardt : Hmm...It is strange, if not shameful, to read texts that you, yourself, wrote more than thirty years ago. Even if it is your own younger self who wrote these lines, you find yourself examining your writing like an anthropologist, the way Bronislaw Malinowski looked at his Trobrianders. It’s strangely like looking back at an Alien, not myself. That’s the reason why I avoided that for a long time.
Hopkins Stanley: But you made an exception for me, and I’ve enjoyed looking back with you. From my perspective, it’s like finding this resonance with someone else’s thinking so similar to mine, albeit much more deeply thought out and from a different background than that of a Nurse caring for HIV and Cancer patients. It’s been the retirement project opportunity of a lifetime, learning your thought through translating your writings into English with you (laughing)…
MB: Ah, but you do have some background in Phenomenology. I recall you took courses on both early and late Heidegger from Herbert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley?
HS: Good memory...yes, along with a semester of Kierkegaard from Dr. Jane Rubin, one of his students. That was in the early ’90s when I worked on a Nursing Ph.D. under Dr. Patricia Benner, one of his early students who sent her students to him to learn the basis of her existential research methodology. It was the time of Derrida, whom they were both cautious of, and, I think out of concern that my naivete was falling under his spell, she steered me into reading Emmanuel Levinas, whom she was reading, as a sort of prophylaxis. Short story is, I learned Heidegger through this Levinasian lens, forever puzzling over precisely what a simulacrum was, leading me to Maurice Blanchot. At some point, realizing these lofty research goals were irrelevant to my interests in clinical care, I returned to the bedside, as we say in Nursing.
MB: Yes, the more intensely you study a thing or a person, the more you discover. Funny enough, I consistently misread your name when it showed up in an email…
HS: This is not surprising how often it’s reversed with all the Stanley Hopkins in the world; I’m surprised you even remembered that...
MB: I remember mistaking it as a nom de guerre, an internet camouflage...how was it that you got interested in my way of thinking?
HS: I’d received a Tweet from Timothy Snyder’s Twitter account announcing he was moderating a presentation by this interesting German thinker. Intrigued, I logged in to find you talking about the Computer, the Universal Machine and its Psychotope, and something about the Psychoplasm under the title Alien Logic. It was funny to sense someone who’d chased many of the same thoughts and themes haunting me, many since early childhood. And in the middle of your lecture, you mentioned something about Logos, the Equal sign, and the Ratio. That immediately pulled me in since the question of how a ratio could be an equal sign always bothered me, particularly since no one ever gave me a satisfactory answer or even grasped what I was asking. Then Dr. Snyder, who I was paying close attention to at the time, said Philosophie der Maschine was one of the most important books he’d read in the past year – and I was hooked, both line and sinker, as we Americans say...
MB: (laughing) Yes, I remember receiving this quizzical e-mail from someone wanting to get on my mailing list for future English presentations, which I didn’t have any plans for at the time. That’s something you’ve certainly changed.
HS: (laughing) I’d read All and Nothing, your only book translated into English, sensing the thematic outlines but being totally perplexed by the text’s logical and mathematical language (laughing)...because, as you now know, those are not my strong suits. So I bravely contacted you, and you kindly sent me a DeepL translation of Philosophie der Maschine, and I began listening to your German presentations. Of course, as a non-German speaker, I could only understand a few words; still, between the few I understood, the English phrases you dropped from time to time, and the passion behind your words, I grasped enough to become more than interested in learning the depth of your thinking.
MB: I have to say, I was absolutely fascinated by the quality of the Deep-L translations — and also, knowing that several translators were starting to work with it, I thought it would be an interesting experiment. So I asked if you be so kind as to let me know where those translations had problems, and after a bit of conversation, you convinced me to work with you translating them into proper English as you learned what my thought was about and how I arrived here. I remember thinking you might be a bit crazy, but you were serious; then I realized we were the same age, and you were very, very serious...
HS: (laughing) I remember feeling anxious about being up to the task, but I wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity, and here we are.
MB (laughing) So you are responsible for this website.
HS: Sort of; I’m your assistant and co-translator responsible for the English side of the site. I see myself in a role of helping English speakers become more familiar with your thinking, which I find quite novel. But I’m also constantly learning from you as we work through translating your œuvre, so the English readers are learning along with me. I guess that makes me your Teacher’s Assistant, maybe?
MB: Definitely.
HS: Anyhow, now that we’ve talked a bit about how we started working together, I think we should return to talking about Digitale Metaphysik or Digital Metaphysics, the first article you published in 1988 as a 30-year-old Electric Author, which is how you described yourself at the time. I kept noticing you often referenced it as the starting point throughout your works, so I asked if you had a copy I could read, leading to our translation of it...
MB: As I said: I’d avoided re-reading my old texts till our communication began. However, as a form of incorporated thinking, they determine my life’s narrative to such an extent that at the mention of a year, the text always comes to my mind with which I was occupied at that time…1994 was the history of the guillotine, 1995 the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
HS: After working with you through your three significant works on the Universal Machines and drafts of the upcoming Psychology of the Machine series, I found myself in amazement at finding their themes in this article. It was this realization of the depth from which you had been slowly thinking through these original cares and concerns and where your persistence has taken you in thinking them out over the years. But, I think even more astonishing was recognizing how these prefigured concerns have relieved-out within our present age, the prescience in your thinking...
MB: Ah, you talk like a Phenomenologist while I’ve come to think more in terms of a Psychologist, I suppose. But you’re right; when I re-read this essay with the comments from your funny perspective of Levinas and Blanchot, I see what excited you so much. This is why I initially said it’s strange to re-discover a former self in a text that can't be changed by a single letter or word. I remember, for example, that up until that time, I suffered from the most violent migraine attacks. And that then suddenly stopped...
HS: Through this text?
MB: During that time, anyway…
HS: I remember you mentioned this when I noticed my writing headaches seemed to disappear immediately after hitting the send key during our early conversations. But I didn’t realize that had happened to you after your first publication. Curiously, I’m now sensing it as speaking to how I’m continually recasting the Levinasian Primacy of the Ethical Relationship as a diachronic transcendental hermeneutical relationship between metaphysical beings. We’re always in a diachronic conversation with each other prior to Ethics and its meanings, whether we like it or not, despite our attempts at making it synchronic...
MB: Yes, perhaps. But at any rate, that wouldn't have crossed my lips back then...
HS: Why not?
MB: I think that was an after-effect of my reading of Hegel. When I read a philosopher, I always had the feeling that I had fallen into a conceptual labyrinth...one could rediscover different paths there, forks, sneaky and hidden paths — and shortcuts. But I knew: If I got involved in this, I would never find my way out again...what prompted me to write this text was less a philosophical concern than an attempt to put into words all the aesthetic sensations I experienced while working in the recording studio.
HS: What I noticed in the translation was this German word Nullnummer, which I consistently kept misspelling as Nullhammer; so transparently that I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out (laughing). Anyhow, I learned from you it means the pilot of a series..it was what Dreyfus called a Heideggerian Augenblick of genuine excitement for me, as, while you don’t talk about it in later works, it captures the notion of a simulacrum Blanchot talks about with such great difficulty when he describes the Neuter. And the notion behind it flows through your œuvre, making it an important red thread for a reader to consider when navigating your thinking. That is, if I may be so bold...
MB: Yes, the reference to zero and zero-point is really apt. I had the feeling while working in the studio that we were trying our hand at things that no one had done before...and with Johannes Schmölling, who at that time had just left Tangerine Dream and was working on his first solo album, I had someone at my side who was deeply familiar with the world of electronic music, synthesizers, and samplers.
HS: But then how did metaphysics creep into that work environment?
MB: Well, the reference to metaphysics was meant rather critically, or at least ambiguously. On the one hand, of course, I was aware that there is a longing for something higher, for transcendence, the beautiful, the true, and the good, if you will; on the other hand, I understood very quickly that the circulating fantasies about the computer didn’t have the least to do with what had spread in the discourses...
HS: What do you mean?
MB: You remember, don't you? That was the great time of Artificial Intelligence, when everyone was discussing whether humans would not one day be replaced by intelligent machines, when it was believed that the human brain could be seen as a processor, as an information-processing machine...
HS: Yes, that was the great time of Douglas Hofstadter. What I remember learning from Hubert Dreyfus, who was very involved in that discussion then, was his argument that the computer didn’t have embodied intelligence and never could be. His argument had to do with human expertise and the inordinate amount of memory it would take for an information processing device to approximate even what a five-year-old child could do...
MB: Who knows, maybe we passed each other on the Berkeley campus as shortly after writing Digital Metaphysics, I went to America and talked to researchers about this question...and I sat in Hubert Dreyfus' office one day discussing the issue. What struck me was that they were all dancing around the possibility or impossibility of a digital metaphysics but not at all reflecting on the concrete changes in the psyche, the aesthetics, and their own ways of working.
HS: What do you mean that specifically?
MB: I just had the feeling they thought of the computer as a kind of mind-expanding drug, a kind of gift from heaven...on the flight to America, I had read a little booklet by Timothy Leary, in which he speculated that the world spirit, which previously been at home in Asia Minor, in Sumer and Egypt, had migrated further and further west...all the way to Silicon Valley, from where it would take off and seek its fortune in space, on Mars or elsewhere. And when I actually visited him in Bel Air, I realized: He had simply replaced his LSD with the computer...
HS: (laughing) I remember folks talking about the Dharma moving from the East to the West. And, being the product of the psychedelic revolution, I remember pondering how those psychedelic-drenched dreams surrounding our childhood just obscured all the problems they supposedly solved. That’s something I’ve learned to better articulate from you as a kind of Utopian fantasy of indefinite deferral – of yearning shamefully for something that never was...so was this trip a disappointment for you?
MB: No, not really. It just made me realize that the zero-point I had experienced in my work was absent in the expert’s discussions. And, like your questioning the Ratio and Equal sign, no one could answer my question about the Computer, that it was all an unknown continent in need of exploration, a submerged outsourced unconsciousness. But again, back then, I was just sensing the outlines of what would emerge in my later work.
HS: What struck me about Digital Metaphysics is that all of the thematics later emerging and developing into the threads of your mature thinking are already prefigured here. Not only is there the Nullnummer as the dissimulative zero-point underlying the later thought of the Machine as a defrauding of Nature; there’s the Gothic cathedral’s social institutionalization – and its system of spatialization, which you were already weaving together in the notion of shrinkage as a redefining the connection between spatiality and speed. Here is where I saw the beginning traces of how information is fissioned and its intimate relation between semantics and genetics, which – most importantly – later emerge in the threads of the lost form and horror vacui of the Hysterical Machine, which all plays back into the Nullnummer. It was like reading a road map from where your thinking of the great Universal Machines and their Social Drives started and where it is going in the Psychology of the Machine series.
If you recall, I was very excited after my initial translation of Digitale Metaphysik, during that period when words and meanings were still cloudy...becoming more excited in my increasing clarity with each additional pass between us. It was like discovering both the center of the labyrinth and the ball of red yarn’s beginning. I think I wrote you something about its importance to a serious academician’s work on your thinking, as well as the general public...
MB: What was it that made you want to work backward rather than forward through my works…
HS: Hmmm...I suspect it’s an intuitive understanding of needing to go back and understand the roots, the etymology of something. You may remember me telling you that I’m always wondering what a word really means, how to use its various shadings and meanings to describe something, and I’m careful about using words I don’t fully understand? It’s funny that you’re the one who essentially gave me permission to write freely once again after years of being corseted into the demands of clinical, technical writing...something I daresay you probably regretted for a short while (laughing). And I think we both have a thing for word etymology.
So, when you sent me those DeepL translations, telling me you weren’t interested in biological understandings, that, instead, you used a Historical Psychoanalytic methodology...I paused for a moment, reflecting on wrapping my head around what you meant. Then I found myself wanting to do an etymological approach to understanding your thought. I wanted to sense where you were coming from, how you got there, how the spinning of your thematic threads came about. Now I see resonance in your comment on reading Hegel — except in my case, I’ve always been fascinated in finding and puzzling over the funny, sneaky hidden twists and turns of understanding how they brought about a person’s particular way of thinking. That’s probably because, as a phenomenological-based Nurse and not a Philosopher, I’m drawn towards attempting to understand the Other, floating off in the excitement of meaning rather than falling into the abyss of its labyrinth...in any event, I remember asking if we could start with your first book on the great Universal Machines, Metamorphosen von Raum and Zeit, which you published in 1994, that traced out the cultural history from the cathedral to the computer with its observations about space and time. Very important to me, during that first attempt at translating, was finding an explanation of Semiotics that I could finally understand, which you laughed about.
MB: Yeah, it’s funny because no semiotician has ever thought about the word. But sema is not only the sign but also means seal, robe, and grave – which leads us back into the world of the pharaoh and death cult, into the midst of a cultural labyrinth.
HS: (laughing)…I also noticed this recurring resonance with your thinking in how you made philosophical notions that had baffled me for years easy to understand. Which you laughed at, jokingly telling me that at the time, your son told his schoolmates his father wrote books that were hard to understand (laughing). And then, I began understanding how you were tracing out what a sign is, what the Alphabetic Machine is, what the Wheelwork is, and their importance in your thinking. I also remember you telling me how hard you worked to avoid any mention of Phenomenology in this work.
MB: Although the book refers to a critique of Kantian a priori, which are not philosophical positings but refer to mutable human artifacts and techniques, I would never have called myself a philosopher at the time. It’s funny you’ve held on to those funny memories for so long (laughing)...what preoccupied me was a child's question, something that Heidegger described quite wonderfully in his Being and Time, namely that when you use a tool, you take it into service as an extension of your body, but forget, as it were its autonomy. The hammer, as Heidegger says, only becomes visible when it is missing or broken. And this is precisely what led me to my second question, which has become the blueprint of Metamorphoses. It was: What kind of tool is the computer when I look at it in its independence? This is, of course, a boundless question because the computer is not exhausted in a specific purpose. It is not a tool but a space...
HS: Yes, that was something you wrote to me in our correspondence about the Metamorphoses — that the Universal Machine is connected to a movement that recodes space, time, and motion. This is your sequence of thought: space→time→motion→worldview→language of power, isn’t it?
MB: Yes, exactly.
HS: I find myself referring back to it frequently as a reminder of how and what the Machine’s function is. And that, it seems to me, is the thread that characterizes your questioning and leads us out of Philosophy’s philosophical labyrinths again. And it goes back to your reading Hegel and finding ways to keep from becoming lost, doesn’t it?
MB: Indeed. In Nietzsche, I found the wonderful formulation that before him, there had been no psychologist in philosophy but only idealists and higher swindlers.1 But that is exactly where I think the problem of Philosophical self-seduction comes in: that you conceal the Universal Machines which catapult you up into the heavenly kingdom of the mind, where you forget the Machine is your creation and not a god. Insofar as this question about the Universal Machine goes, it’s a walk into the unconscious, into the constructed labyrinths of Philosophy where you can easily get lost. Now, this is not a metaphor but shows itself in exceedingly concrete ways – and in such a way that you can make a wrong picture of the past by forgetting what it actually was or deliberately concealing it. Isn't it true, as Kant claims, that space and time are the apriori of the mind and its intellectual capabilities? And if you ask a philosopher when the time of the mechanical world view has begun, he would say, in the 17th century, with Descartes. The strange thing about this is that Descartes was five centuries late, that the Engine of the mechanical clock was ticking in society already in the 12th and 13th centuries. So the question is no longer: What does the philosopher say? But: What does he conceal? And why does he do that?
HS: With which you leave Philosophy behind, as a kind of high-minded swindle or fraud...
MB: Yes, I couldn’t help but read Plato as a brilliant illusionist who has cast a spell over entire generations of philosophers. Yet the magic trick itself is quite simple. As Lacan put it in a nutshell: If you want to conjure a rabbit out of a top hat, you have to put it in beforehand.
HS: This is the trick of pure reason: you spread the dirt so evenly that it becomes invisible. And that’s why you moved forward to take a psychological point of view, the Psychology of the Machine!
MB: As you say, it’s all about dirt — and that’s why you have to deal with the shame of the philosopher.
HS: What I think is interesting here is that, while Heidegger called for the End of Philosophy, instead, he turned around and moved right back into it, trying to re-establish thought’s purity anyway, with his un-concealment/concealment of aletheia.
MB: All philosophers, from Heidegger to Derrida, have lost themselves in paradoxes as far as the birth of philosophy is concerned.
HS: (laughing) There’s this beautiful line I keep thinking about in Digital Metaphysics: that back is front and the most out-of-style hat is the latest trend. And the prescience you had in using the term Einerlei, which you explained to me, doesn’t mean monotony but the excitement of sameness we currently celebrate as buzzwords of Identity, Diversity, and Equity.
MB: It’s funny that you see this connection here. But I really think there is a deep longing to leave one’s self behind. Taken as a slogan: Forget yourself!
HS: The other thing I hadn’t sensed before was that this move towards the Psychological View is one of understanding, which, in a sense, would be a kind of empathetic view, meaning it’s about understanding the how and what of the Other’s thoughts as a diachronic conversation rather than explicating a predictive structure of synchrony. Which is another way of saying it resonants with my Nursing point of view...(laughing)
MB: That’s true on the one hand. But there, it gets complicated very quickly. Because you're no longer dealing with individual psychology but with a collective psychic apparatus, a psychologically charged environment, or, as I have later christened it: a Psychotope. In this Psychotope, people have to find their way around, they have come to terms with themselves and others, and they do that in quite different ways. And this concerns not only philosophers but all people indiscriminately. Why else do we talk about digital natives?
HS: Yes, I think that particularly attracted me to your thinking — and why I was interested in understanding your intellectual backstory. And now I’m very intrigued that we’re no longer talking about individuals but what you call Social Sculptures. That’s something that I didn’t realize was much of the resonance I’d initially felt in that presentation on Alien Logic until this conversation — after years in clinical practice, it wasn’t so much the question of how individual patients reacted to their particular situations that interested me; it was this sense they were in conversation with the social sphere of their world; with me, as an alien actor, attempting to understand how that world came into relief in a larger picture. So my sense is that the Psychotopic stage, with its Institutional Social Sculptures, is an unknown Psychology, that of the Machine which structures our world. And the longer we don't understand its psychology, the longer we're at its mercy, even though, like an individual's unconscious, it's a human creation...as a Ph.D. nursing student, that would have been intriguing. And as a citizen living in the current Culture Wars, it becomes even more interesting...
MB: The strange thing is: in a similar way that the experience in the recording studio gave me the feeling of seeing a zero-point in history, that is, as a point of departure into unknown lands and new creative potentials; this simple question about the Psychology of the Machine has led me into areas of seeming terra incognita. When you leave the well-trodden paths of historiography, you find yourself in the regions that no one has written on before. So it becomes what you mentioned earlier as a kind of Historical Psychoanalysis. And that’s how I found myself because I had identified the clock, or more precisely: the medieval Wheelwork automaton as a Universal Machine and precursor to the computer, suddenly busy studying medieval scholastics. This wasn’t for theological or conservational reasons but solely because I wanted to understand the Philosophical repression of the present. This is scary at first, if only because the Universal Machine, in its shorelessness, knows no bounds.
HS: When you say it knows no bounds, what do you mean? Like it simply reproduces in its image at random with no inherent value of good or bad utility? Or is it so nebulous in its Universality that it’s hard to pin down something specific, resulting in the spinning of all these strands tending to obscure its various forms either historically or in the present?
MB: Maybe it’s best to return to the notion of the Nullnummer in Digital Metaphysics that you referred to. It becomes a question of what you said about Blanchot’s Neuter, the difficulty of describing what’s left of something when its identity has been stripped away, or rather fissioned and reduced, becoming hammered into its nothingness. Or even better: morphed. What’s left as its residual? Only a zero-pilot, a series of 0’s and 1’s, a ghost or a shadow of what the thing once materially was. Intuitively, I was reminded of what I had read about the victims of the Hiroshima bomb. The radiation heat had completely dissolved their bodies, but at the same time, the atomic flash had burned their shadows into the earth. In this sense, the simulacrum was a spiritual nuclear fission. The only difference from the bomb is that another life follows this symbolic death. Just as we got accustomed to the alphabet, we will live with zeros and ones – and since it is our lot, we will have to cherish that.
HS: (laughing) That’s this shortcut of rappresentare to repraesentio you once gave me...which takes me to my thinking about how you think of genetics and the Machine. A genotype is a simulacrum that phenotypically dissimulates in metabolic response to its environment. A Machine given a Nullhammered Nullnummer, a zero-point to reproduce, makes copies in response to its mechanical environment and software quirks that are not inherently good or bad. That discrimination comes from the human user…
MB: Yes, but pulling your excitement back to the discussion about the move beyond Philosophy into the Psychology of the Machine, that's where the preoccupation with the medieval counterfeit coin kings segues seamlessly into the dogmatic history of usury, the sale of indulgences, the building of cathedrals, and cartography – And in all this, the Universal Machine is the underlying question, how it materializes, how it fuses something new through magmafication. That’s what you’re tracing through how I used Nullnummer in Digital Metaphysics and the funny way you kept misspelling it as Nullhammer – and you’re right. If I have become accustomed to it over time, it is because reading the sources become, if you will: a dialogue with the dead who speak a clear language and where I no longer have that initial sense of fright. Just as we’ve already proclaimed a digital metaphysics today, which is another way of saying we have turned the dear God into a programming nerd, so did the Middle Ages retrain him as a watchmaker...
Perhaps that was the most beautiful thing about this questioning, what you like to call the Gift of transcendental hermeneutics, is that from that moment on, after seeing the Nullnummer and its attendant Question of the Machine, I never again doubted the meaningfulness of my writing...it just went on and on...one question brought the next one on the go...
HS: On through infinity, and thankfully so. All the strands you’ve spun into red threads from this original essay have led to precious insights about the Question of the Machine, far beyond Heidegger’s End of Philosophy and into the Psychology of the Machine, I dare say. And it’s a non-apocalyptic vision of practicality, especially during the current Culture Wars. You know, in this funny way, you’ve just continued answering this initial question I put to you; that of what a post-atheistic age looks like, one in search of the spirituality of understanding the commonalities between us in our infinite conversation of transcendental hermeneutics...
MB: Yes --- and it's thanks to you that I'm now looking in a mirror instead of just obsessively looking forward.
HS: Ha! Stay tuned folks for our next conversation...(laughing.)
