Media Temporalities in the Internet: Philosophy of Time and Media with Derrida and Rorty

The essay comprises four sections. The first section provides a survey of some significant developments which today determine philosophical discussion on the subject of 'time'. The second section conisders the question of how time and the issue of media are linked with one another in the views of two influential contemporary philosophers Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Finally, in the third section, the temporal implications of cultural practices developing in the new medium of the Internet are analyzed and, in the fourth section, related to the named philosophers' theses. Introduction Collab-U CMC Play E-Commerce Symposium Net Law InfoSpaces Usenet NetStudy VEs VOs O-Journ Página 1 de 18 Media Temporalities in the Internet 10/03/2003 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/sandbothe.html Traditionally time was thought of as being a transcendent dimension of human experience and, hence, as something which would remain quite unaffected by the mere advent of new communications technologies such as the Internet. Modern philosophical thinking about time, however, has questioned traditional presuppositions in such a way that cultural determinants of its conception have become more manifest. In the following account an attempt is made to illustrate the way in which the Internet proves particularly apt in demonstrating the characteristics of two influential contemporary philosophical views of time and media: namely, those of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. To do this current philosophical debate on time is first briefly surveyed. I will then outline the way in which Derrida and Rorty link the issues of time and media, and procede to use these links as a basis for examining the forms of temporality prevalent in the semiotic environment of Internet-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). Having argued that temporality is in fact embedded in pragmatic semiotic action I will, finally, attempt to bring out and fuse complementary aspects of Derrida's and Rorty's viewpoints and to establish the importance of the close interrelationship between philosophical and political reflexion on time and media. Basic Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy of Time The current situation is characterized by a plurality of heterogenous time concepts. For this reason philosophical discussion about the problem of time assumes particular importance (see Baert, 1999; Baumgartner, 1993; Gimmler, Sandbothe & Zimmerli, 1997; Le Poidevin & McBeath, 1993; Sandbothe, 1998a). Central to contemporary philosophy of time is the attempt to relate the varying time concepts developing in different scientific disciplines to one another, as well as to everyday experience and the technological time simulacra which are today increasingly shaping this experience. Different approaches which attempt to solve this task can be distinguished. They are embedded in two basic tendencies, to be described below, which determine contemporary philosophy of time. The first basic tendency in contemporary philosophy of time may be described as the tendency to unify and universalize our understanding of time. The protagonists of this tendency are convinced that the aspect of time should be considered a new Archimedean point, unifying our everyday experience of self and the world with our academic theories about humans and nature. This point of unity, they contend further, has been emphasized in philosophy (for instance by von Baader, Schelling, Bergson, Whitehead or Heidegger), but has been ignored for far too long by science and technology. It wasn't until the second half of this century that a universal time concept was developed and mathematically operationalized at the interface between physics, chemistry and biology within the framework of the so-called theories of "self-organization" (see Griffin, 1986; Krohn, Küppers & Nowotny, 1990) which enabled the old duality of natural and historical time to be overcome (Prigogine 1983, 1987, 1997; Prigogine/Stengers 1988). With this, some believe, the resolution of the conflict between physical and philosophical thinking on time which had characterized the start of the twentieth century is on the way (Zimmerli & Sandbothe, 1993). The German philosopher of time and history, Hermann Lübbe, for instance, highlighted in his book Im Zug der Zeit, "that even the temporal structure of historicality, which according to Heidegger and the Página 2 de 18 Media Temporalities in the Internet 10/03/2003 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/sandbothe.html hermeneutic theory that followed him results exclusively from the subject's relationship to itself and its constituting of meaning, is in reality a structure indifferent to subject matter, belonging to all open and dynamic systems" (Lübbe, 1992, p. 30). Lübbe's convergence thesis can claim support from the deliberations of the Nobel prize-winning physicist, chemist and one of the founders of selforganization theories of time, Ilya Prigogine. Already in 1973 Prigogine noted (referring to his thermodynamic theory of irreversibility): "Whatever the future of these ideas, it seems to me that the dialogue between physics and natural philosophy can begin on a new basis. I don't think that I can exaggerate by stating that the problem of time marks specifically the divorce between physics on one side, psychology and epistemology on the other (...). We see that physics is starting to overcome these barriers." (Prigogine, 1973, p. 590 f.). And in the closing chapter of his book From Being to Becoming, written in 1984, he adds: "It is remarkable to note the extent to which recent results [in natural science, M.S.] had been anticipated by philosophers like Bergson, Whitehead and Heidegger, whereby the main difference consists in that they could only make such inferences in contrast to science, whereas we are now observing that these insights emerge, so to speak, from scientific research itself" (Prigogine, 1988, p . 262; See Sandbothe, 1998a). Some of those theories of time which attempt to analyze the problem of time from the perspective of media studies and technology theory are also to be ranked within the tendency toward unification and universalization of time described by Lübbe and Prigogine. Advocates of these theories, most of which argue post-historically, stress that the time concept of selforganization theories, supposedly discovered as a basic structure of nature and history, is in truth nothing but the scientific ennoblement of forms of temporality arising in the simulatory technologies of complex computational models. Hence, unlike Lübbe, the French dromologist Paul Virilio describes the establishment of the new unitary technological time not as the universalization of historical temporal structures, but far more as being their radical destruction. Virilio's basic media-philosophical diagnosis states that the "cinématique" (Virilio, 1990, p. 53) technologies which have spread in the twentieth century aim at a radical dissolution of those temporal structures which have been considered as ineluctable basic constituents of human existence from Augustine through to Heidegger (Virilio, 1991, p. 336). For Virilio this strong destructive thesis is at the same time linked with the idea of a transhuman time regime of pure speed (Virilio, 1984, 1994), inscribing itself in the human soul worldwide via television and computer networks. The transition from the old opposition between natural and historical time to the new uniform simulatory time of technology comprises, according to Virilio, the essentially apocalyptic logic of the occidental history of technology. Against this background the unification and universalization of time marked by science and technology is described by him not (as by Lübbe or Prigogine) as the originary discovery of an inner convergence point between nature and history, but as the technological victory of inauthentic, natural time stuctures over the authentic temporality of history. Of course, from Virilio's perspective, one shaped by Christianity, this can only amount to a Pyrrhic victory: for the history of this suppression, Página 3 de 18 Media Temporalities in the Internet 10/03/2003 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/sandbothe.html which began with the technological Fall of Man, continues, for Virilio, to testify ex negativo the hidden unity of an eschatological temporality, and it is only this latter temporality which, according to him, can lay claim to true universality. The second basic tendency in contemporary philosophy of time is best understood when one first reminds oneself of the basic presupposition common to the advocates of the unification and universalization tendency. Time is apprehended by them as being a uniform and universal basic structure, exempt from historical contingency and cultural change. Thus Lübbe and Prigogine consider self-evident the "ontological universality of the aspect of temporality" (Lübbe, 1992, p. 31) in the "participatory universe" (Prigogine & Stengers, 1981, pp. 267ff., 287ff. This concept goes back to Wheeler, 1979, pp. 407ff.) of self-organization that envelops man and nature. And Virilio's programme of critical exposure is underlain by the religiously motivated idea of the story of decline of a divinely preordained temporality, one occurring under the banner of technological evolution and branded as 'devilish'. Supporters of the second tendency, the tendency to historize and relativize time, assume in contrast that the role time plays for human understanding of self and the world is a system of practical and technical habits which are culturally divergent and, within individual cultures, subject to change in contingent conditions over time. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty supports this approach with particular refinement. According to Rorty, radical thinking about time must do away with the theologically founded conception that time and eternity come together in the human (Rorty, 1995b). Instead Rorty demands, "that we [should] try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything our language, our conscience, our community as a product of time and chance" (Rorty, 1989, p. 22). According to Rorty, we will only achieve this when we no longer mystify time, but understand it in a radically reflexive way as being a product of chance. 1 The interrelations between the conceptions of time currently discussed in academia, as well as the question of the relationship between scientific time concepts, technological time simulacra, and our everyday understanding of time, are to be dealt with pragmatically on the basis of the historization tendency advocated by Rorty. The convergence of different vocabularies of time emphasized by supporters of the unification and universalization tendency is, from Rorty's perspective, by no means proof of an intrinsic coincidence between natural and historical time or some inner tendency of modern technology to destroy time. The mathematical and technological operationalization and successful functionalization of the vocabulary which, until now, has served the purposes of human self-description illustrate only the historical ability to adapt, inner flexibility and contextual boundness of even so highly attuned vocabularies as those found in physics, mathematics, or logic. The different vocabularies we make use of for differing purposes and in varying contexts are accordingly to be understood neither as convergent in an intrinsic sense, nor as founding or destroying one another in an eschatological sense. Rather, they are themselves subject to change over time, in the course of which they become related and disjoined in various and contingent ways according to the various historical situations Página 4 de 18 Media Temporalities in the Internet 10/03/2003 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/sandbothe.html