The Hiddenness of Time

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was.

It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot 

in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it 

paid the outrage of ontology no mind. 

- China Mieville Iron Council 

By some strange happenstance or mystic wisdom I had the pleasure of reading China Mieville's Iron Council, while I was enrolled in a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More specifically I read Iron Council as I was working through Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. The effect was electric and unsettling, particularly in the way both these authors engaged with themes of time,existence, and hiddenness. 

Everpresent in Bonhoeffer's theological project is the underlying theme of an "epistemology yielded on the basis of revelation," an idea he discusses explicitly in his post-doctoral work Act and Being. The world is known, in other words, not through empirical observation nor through a process of ratiocination, rather it is known only as it is revealed. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer addresses this theme around the binary of revelation/hiddenness. The true disciple of Christ knows only what is revealed to her or him through Jesus Christ, there is no unmediated relationship with the world, with others, or even with oneself. The reverse of this, therefore, is that much is left hidden. Revelation has its own rhythm, its own timing, over which the subject of knowledge has no control. It is given, by the spirit, in the moment it is needed. 

This is a mystery, yet not a mystical fusion of the I with the Oneness of Being. Precisely in its momentous character revelation is a matter of existence, and in existence there are always others. Indeed, for Bonhoeffer becoming a person is only possible through the other. He writes, "the individual becomes a person ever and again through the other, in the moment." (Sanctorum Communio). 

In Mieville's story there is a monk who, out of the pantheon of gods in the world of Iron Council, worships the God of the Moment. This God reveals knowledge to the monk at the necessary times. Yet the discipleship of the monk is not without cost, indeed it is at the cost of the monk's very self-knowledge that the revealing comes. Without giving too much away, as the tale progresses the monk, who has joined with a band of rebels and political outcasts in search of their comrades, loses more and more of her (or his) self-knowing as she seeks the revelation needed to make important decisions. 

Bonhoeffer and Mieville inhabit very different worlds. One a theologian, the other a writer of science fiction. Yet the mysteries of existence, and of time are strongly present. Discipleship, for both, is a costly endeavour, and yet in the end proves the very grace of life. 

It is grace, it is violence, it is passion. The Christian sense of time is not one of linear accumulation. Nor yet of circulation within an ontologically fixed field. The event of Christ is singularity, forever affixed existence within which existence can take place. 

This too is the mystery of the church, the presence of Christ on earth, already fulfilled and yet waiting. Hidden yet revealed. Perhaps the Church too, like Mieville's time golem" is a clot in diachrony, who with the dumb arrogance of its existence pays the outrage of ontology no mind. 

Or perhaps it should be so. 

Omnia Sunt Communia

Omnia sunt communia 

- Thomas Muntzer (1488-1525)

All things are in common. It was this confession that led to the beheading of Thomas Muntzer, theologian and revolutionary. Muntzer's severed head and body was intended as a warning against heresy, and served to enshrine Muntzer an ambiguous role in history. Beloved more of future generations of radicals and revolutionaries than of the church, Muntzer continues to live in the shadows of theological and political discourse. Now, with talk of "the commons" and community increasingly permeating socio-cultural discourse, this ghostly figure haunts us once more - violently condemning our complacency. 

Violently, but not very loudly. From his original manifestation as a powerful theological voice in the turmoil of the Reformation and an inspiring visionary and leader in the Peasant's War, Muntzer next prefigures as a minor analogical character for the Marxist revolutionaries of the 19th century. In our own epoch Muntzer's embodiment is a literary one, in the novel Q published by an anonymous group of Italian authors under the pseudonym Luther Blisset. 

Under the banner of this novel, and some others, protestors took to the streets in Italy last November, marching against Berlusconi's proposed education reforms. The authors of the book, along with a number of other Italian writers, have also been subjected to a proposed blacklisting and banning of their books from library shelves in Italy. Muntzer continues to haunt the political powers of the world, then, not only through the content of works like this but also in the form its production and dissemination whereby the authors endeavour to make their works publicly accessible through free online downloading. 

But all is not well. For in the very aspect of "Creative Commons" and various "free" and "open" Internet organizations and technology we are faced with a farcical notion of commonality that has to blind itself to the economic contexts and realities in which it is implicated, and in some ways perpetuates a much more noxious and undoubtedly more precarious version of capitalist consumption. 

The group of authors above, who are known collectively as Wu Ming, are a case in point. Upon entering their website one is greeted with the options of downloading one of their books for free, and possibly giving a donation through the PayPal technology, or purchasing a physical copy of the book through Amazon.com. One of the concerns here, of course, is the replacement of more localized forms of exchange that for all their inequality do contain a certain level of trust, reflexivity, and responsibility on behalf of all parties involved - these forms are replaced by a megalithic enterprise that opens up a space of virtual freedom, a "commons" from which it alone profits. 

Hooked Into Machine

Everything's provided 

Consummate Consumer 

Part of worldly taking 

Apart from worldly troubles 

Living in your prewar apartment 

Soon to be your postwar apartment 

And you lived in the future 

And the future 

It's here 

It's bright 

It's now 

- Regina Spektor "Hooked Into Machine" 

From time to time the tool-making capacities of the human animal become so entrenched and explosive as to strip-mine the social psyche of entire populations. Bereft of its irony, would the quote above not perfectly exemplify a kind of organicist technologism which we find embodied not only in works of science fiction but much more trenchantly in particular historical episodes. A monstrous, or  robotic, re-organizing of society so as to absorb all the quirks, failings, and conflicts into the cold unity and efficiency of the machine; the calculations of light reverberating sonorously in the untroubled spaces we reside in. Nor should we even properly call them spaces, since, while it is true that the vision is a subspecies of organicism, it lacks the contours of a geography. Properly speaking we could perhaps say that a certain virtual landscape is proposed here, a folding in of time so as to create an instantaneous constancy - "the future is here." 

To call such a vision monstrous is misleading, hence the caveat of robotic, which also does not quite express what this particular vision entails. A monster, at least, is still a form of ethical being. Take, for example, the case of Adolph Hitler, who has become the typological case of a monster in the social imaginary of modern history. Precisely as a monster Hitler remains embedded within the framework of ethical imagination - as an embodiment of horror, which is to say of fascination. Thus Hitler even now continues to perpetuate a fascist logic, because fascination -with a "pure" and unified society, body etc. - is precisely, and etymologically, the domain of fascism. Hence the wisdom of Hannah Arendt in drawing out the banality of the evil present in the figures of the Holocaust. How else to undo the potent mythos of those idolaters? 


The central question, however, has yet to be addressed. The fascination with pure bodies, and therefore the creation of imaginary monsters -to continue with our test subject these would be, for Hitler/National Socialism, the figures of Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals etc. - this fascination amounts to a paranoia which, although it is horrific, disturbing, and distorted, is not altogether new. Moreover these imagined monsters had to be affixed identities which corresponded to actual people. Identity being a rather fluid and "subjective" exercise this can take place, on a small scale, when people within certain geographical bounds are seen as different, marked in some way by gender, skin colour, behavioural patterns, economic status etc., and thereby persecuted by another group who defines the former as somehow a threat to their existence. What we begin to see emerging, then, as the National Socialist dream unfolds is the solidification of forms of identity precisely as new technologies emerge which are able to translate the idolatries of fascist identity politics into a computational regime. Thus, as Edwin Black analyzes in his book IBM and the Holocaust, the asset confiscation, deportation, ghettoization, enslaved labour, and ultimately the murder of millions of Jews was first a matter of identifying people as Jews - a task which required a quick and efficient way of entering and compiling data. This exercise in computation was made possible through IBM's Hollerith punch card technology. Thus begins the fascist politics of computation, thereby furthering and facilitating the pathology of the Nazi's and the German people. As it becomes technologized the horrors of identitarian politics become embedded as computational facts. Instances of data. 


So we must introduce another monster, and this one much more the robotic monster, though history has not regarded him as such. I am speaking, of course, of Thomas J. Watson the CEO of IBM. Watson, as head of the International Business Machines corporation, was instrumental in bringing the tabulation technology employed by the Nazis. Watson was even awarded a medal by the German government for his efforts (although he may have believed it to be a recognition for his efforts towards global commerce and international peace). At any rate Watson, an astute businessman, returned the medal in 1940. The end result of this was a tense relationship between Watson and the German IBM operation, which ended when Germany and the US went to war and the German IBM chapter was seized by the Third Reich. Watson went on to produce technology for the United States military effort, and went so far as to institute a policy that IBM receive only 1% of profits from military technology.  The question which remains, of course, is this: Why call Watson a monster - even a robotic one- wasn't he just a businessman who made a mistake, and didn't he pay for it with his war efforts? 


Right away, however, it becomes apparent that the choice between condemning Watson as a monster for his technological contributions to the Third Reich or exculpating him for his technological assistance to the American War effort is a null question . Watson was neither a fascist nor a politician  but a capitalist businessman and as such could never be considered a monster in the way Hitler is often considered one. It is precisely at this point that Watson is in some ways a more problematic figure. The locus of this problematic is that Watson, in fact, represents an incoherent modality of being. Where Hitler remains, in a negative way, a figure for ethics, Watson does not - having made the break with fascism, and therefore disoccupying the centre of political meaning.  What remains represented by Watson, however, is a digitized unit. That is, Watson symbolizes the cognitarian activation of the flow of technologized data-power. 
Watson, much more fully than Hitler, therefore fulfills the vision described in Regina Spektor's work. Elsewhere in the song she describes "herself" as part of a composite correspondence which is synthesized by the mighty power of the machine. The inconsistencies and incoherence of life - the fact that one can orient their business and technological innovations to political visions as diverse and conflicting as Hitler's German fascism or the American Democratic party's politics- have no import since they can be synthesized into an artificial reproduction of life. What we must not forget, however, is that someone, or some world, invariably pays the price for these bright futures. It could be the Jews and the Roma of Europe, or it could be, as now, the miners of the Congo who pay with their blood for the continued production of the glut of cellphone and digital technologies which we have now come to rely on as the bright and instant future.