Hypnose kreativ gestalten: Anleitungen und Texte für die Praxis (German Edition)

In essence, however, he did not accept that any hard and fast divisions existed be- tween different areas of intellectual activity. For Schubert, clear judgment and scientific analysis are just as capable of leading to understanding and expression as dreaming, somnambulism, clairvoyance, or ecstatic trance. These are merely different modes among which the pursuit of an understanding of nature alter- nates. He also wrote a book on the dark side of the psyche that was far ahead of its time: The book was written in On the relationship of sexuality, pain, and death, he writes: In the Chapter 2 16 Figure 2.

Seen through a telescope, at the edges of this extravagantly wasteful star dynamic forms glow against the blackness of space: These phenomena can be observed especially well during a total eclipse of the sun, when the moon shuts out the light from the fiery ball. Denker drew this sketch to record his observations of the sun's eclipse in the sum- mer of Nevertheless, this man, who had studied with Herder, Schelling, and Werner and was the close friend of the physico-chemist Ritter, at least came close to realizing his project of defining anthropology as a physics of the sacred, in fragments.

His strange books and essays can be read as expressions of a single endeavor to write poetry Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain IifX specific to nature from the perspective of the latest scientific discoveries in the era of romanticism. The French translation of his lectures on the night side of the natural sciences was published under the title Esprits des choses. Untiringly, he sought the diversity of things and sometimes found in them the absolute, hidden or expressed in a language that we have yet to learn.

Although this is a journey that can be full of tricks and dif- ficulties, it does enable a passionate relationship with the world rather than one that is characterized chiefly by lamentations. In the edition of his lectures, Schubert tucked away in the appendix cursory reflections on the progress he had made in his field. He compensates the reader for this disappointing brevity by adding a new preface. Those who embark on such travels are not able to contribute much to the state of the art and they must needs develop a precarious relationship to knowledge as property.

The demand that is currently raised because of the contemporary level of complexity of social de- velopments, namely, that any sociological theory must be able to apply the rules it establishes to itself, cannot be met with the mobility that sitting permits. At the time, he had a professorial post in Rome with a heavy workload and commitments. The Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was going to Malta, invited Kircher to accompany him as his father confessor. Kircher accepted immediately, knowing that these light clerical duties would leave him ample time for studies and research.

Malta in- terested him because of the fossils that had been found there and the opportu- Chapter 2 18 nity for speleological expeditions. The island has many deep caves, which Kircher explored for their geology. When the Landgrave no longer required his services, Kircher fulfilled a long-standing private wish and, on his way back to Rome, visited southern Italy and Sicily. It was said that when the Roman army under Marcellus attacked Syracuse — B. All the foremost writers on theoretical optics, including Ibn al- Haytham, Roger Bacon, and Giovan Battista della Porta, had looked into this legend and confirmed its probable truth through calculations involving various mirrors and their focal points.

Then, in , Descartes in his Dioptrique flatly denied that the story had any basis in reality. Even a great num- ber of mirrors would not make any difference; the temperature of the reflected sun rays would remain constant. He inspected the fortifica- tions of Syracuse harbor, calculated the probable distance to the Roman galleys, and concluded that the distance was considerably less and, therefore, the focal length of the reflected sunrays would be much shorter, than commentators had previously assumed.

Additionally, he experimented with different mirrors and proved that rays reflected by several mirrors and concentrated on the same point would indeed produce much more heat than one flat or parabolic mirror; more- over, they were capable of igniting wood. He was convinced that there were subterranean connections between the three fire-spewing mountains. During his stay in Sicily, Kircher extensively studied Mount Etna, which had been active continuously since the end of He planned to climb the volcano on Stromboli but was denied access for safety reasons.

Ego loames happujus Steer dot. Kircher's diagram demonstrates the transmission of writing using a parabolic mir- ror. The device can be used both to destroy and to communicate; in this case it was used for de- struction, but it could also have been used for prevention. Chapter 2 20 traveling on to Naples, where he intended to study Vesuvius. However, the voy- age turned out to be a nightmare experience that had a lasting impact on his thinking. Two results were his works Iter extaticum II [Ecstatic Journey], pub- lished in as ageological sequel to his fictitious journey into space of , and the two-volume Mundus subterraneus [Subterranean World] in —, in which the entire second chapter of the introduction is devoted to describing this journey.

The weather was unsettled but, ini- tially, without particular incident. Three days into the voyage, however, heavy seas slowed progress considerably. Both Etna and Stromboli had begun to erupt, sending out massive clouds of smoke and ash, and in the north, Vesuvius had also become active. From port to port, the situation worsened. Wherever the ship put in, they were forced to leave again quickly because of violent earth tremors that sent parts of the coastline plunging into the sea, such as the cliff- top village of St. Eusemia on the southwest Calabrian coast. Kircher described his situation in highly dramatic terms: In my distress, how contemptible all worldly pleasures seemed to me.

Honour, high office, influential positions, learning — all these disap- peared instantly at that time, like smoke or bubbles. The very same evening, Kircher en- gaged a guide, who needed considerable persuading and demanded a high fee, and climbed Vesuvius. He wanted to retrace the footsteps of Pliny the Elder Secundus and inspect the volcano at close quarters, but without sharing the same fate, for Pliny had died near there on August 24, 79 A. The eerie crater was entirely lit up by fire and gave off an un- bearable smell of sulphur and pitch. It seemed as though Kircher had reached the abode of the underworld, the dwelling place of evil spirits.

Thus, we regard all volcanoes as mere safety valves for the subterranean fire source. It was his ambition to help remedy this state of affairs. In the final book, he gives a detailed account of alchemy, which finishes with a scathing critique of the forms that the Catholic Church had anathema- tized. However, the heart of the work is to be found in the fourth book of the first volume, where Kircher sets down his observations made at the volcano. The moon he assigns to water.

The myriad forms of interplay between the two, the inner fire and water, give rise to everything that we call nature and life. Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg was also no stranger to the world below ground: As a poet, he called himself Novalis.

In chapter 5 of his un- finished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen , his alter ego in a twofold sense, Friedrich von Hohenzollern, who is an aristocrat and a miner, meets with a her- mit in the course of his travels. At one point in their dialogue the Count says: Astrologers observe the heavens and their immeasurable spaces; you turn your gaze toward the ground and explore its con- struction.

Two-page illustration at the end of the second book in the preface to Kircher's Mundus subterraneus For the engraving, awash drawing was used of which Kircher had done most himself Strasser , p. The original gives a stronger impression than this re- production of the drastic impact that climbing Mount Vesuvius had on Kircher. Out of the black interior of the volcano, deep red and sulfurous yellow flames leap high into the sky.

At the top, they become white, then dirty gray smoke. A similar, not quite so expressive drawing of Mount Etna follows page in Book 7. The drawing is based on Kircher's observations in Morello includes color reproductions of this phylum of illustrations. For astrologers the heavens are the book of the future, whereas the earth shows you monuments of the primeval world.

The lands, which have been constituent for their identity, are all grouped around a single great sea that lies at the center, exuding warmth and light, promising leisure and happi- ness. Since classical antiquity, all desires and movements have been directed toward this center, which has also been the driver of conquest. It is from the greater Mediterranean area that all technical inventions and all scientific, philo- sophical, aesthetic, and political models have come, which continue to influence our culture through the present day.

The old empires, such as ancient Greece and the Imperium Romanum, and the various forms of colo- nialism must be understood in the light of this central perspective. The entire gamut of social models, theories, and worldviews that seek to universalize have arisen from this notion of the center: In late medieval times and the Renaissance, with courageous thinkers like Raimundus Lullus from Ma- jorca, the Englishman Roger Bacon, or the later proponents of a magical con- ception of nature, whose ideas ran at odds to conventional wisdom, there existed theoretically a chance of a radical new departure.

However, the compulsion to standardize thought that was exerted by the Catholic Church discriminated against these men and others like them, which made it impossible to realize any alternatives. After thinking in systems has triumphed, the Universal — initially as Christian and later as rational — will spread and represent the special achievement of the West.

They do not live on territory that is enclosed but on fragments of land separated by the Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 25 waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The absence of something that could unify the islands and their peoples is not felt to be a lack. On the contrary, the only unifying, or standardizing, factor they have ever experienced is an invisible trace running along the sea floor — the chains of the slave trade.

The cultural and economic activities of the islanders are characterized by institut- ing flexible relations between the land fragments. Their musical expression is song with highly disparate voices. The main thrust of his critique is directed toward the entirety of European thought, which has given rise to its hegemonial position in the West and Northern Hemisphere. His ideas link him with the work of all thinkers, particularly French intellectuals, who, during the last century of uniformities and terrible destruction, did not abandon the at- tempt to give all that is heterologous a chance: As an answer to the strategy of globalization, Glissant introduces the concept of mondialite, in which the players come from the periphery, the niches, and the margins of the territo- ries of the world powers: We sense things, we follow a trail.

However, trails are not simple phenomena. They are im- Chapter 2 26 pregnations of events and movements, and even prehistoric hunter-gatherers needed to learn much in order to decode, read, and classify the signs.

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What can be found there, analogous to spores, broken twigs, feces, or lost fur and feathers, was produced entirely by cultural and technical means. By seeking, collecting, and sorting, the archaeologist attaches meanings; and these meanings may be entirely different from the ones the objects had originally. The only resolution of this dilemma is to reject the notion that this work is ground-breaking: Such a history must reserve the option to gallop off at a tangent, to be wildly enthusiastic, and, at the same time, to criticize what needs to be criticized.

This method describes a pattern of searching, and delights in any gifts of true surprises. This idea does not apply only to the extreme sociopolitical situation under fascism. For example, the most exciting libraries are those with such abundant resources that it is impossible to organize them without employing armies of staff who would ultimately engineer the loss of this cornucopia. The London Library in St. James Square, founded in as a private club, is such a library.

There, you are less likely to find the book you have long been looking for without success and more likely, in the course of Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 27 your explorations of the labyrinthine gangways with their floors of iron grat- ings, to chance upon a book that you did not even know existed and that is of far greater value than the one you were actually looking for.

Of far greater value, because your find opens up other paths and vistas that you did not even entertain during your focused search. This is a possible course to take: One simply has to try it out. However, it must be stressed that this method has absolutely nothing to do with aimless wandering and meandering. To get through open doors successfully, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames.

This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a req- uisite of the sense of reality. However, if there is a sense of reality — and no one doubts its justification for existing — then there must also be something we might call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for example, this or that has happened, will happen, or must happen here; instead, they invent: If they are told that something is the way it is, they think: Well, it could just as well be otherwise. Thus, the sense of possibility can be defined as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.

Bertolt Brecht asked the same question and included it in the title of the film Kuhle Wampe, which he made in with Slatan Dudow. The question refers to rights Chapter 2 28 over property and territory in the broad sense — ownership of factories, ma- chines, land, even entire countries or continents. It still needs asking today; however, another question is gradually taking over, which will be decisive in the coming decades: This shift is not immediately apparent in global relationships, but if one scrutinizes the microstructures of the most technologically advanced nations and their corporations, it is quite apparent.

Karl Marx wrote for posterity. Rather, we should take heed of who or what has power of disposal over our time and the time of others, and in what way. The only efficacious remedy for a melancholy and resigned attitude toward the world is to appropriate, or reappropriate, the power of disposal over the time that life and art need.

Only then is the future conceivable at all — as a permanent thing of impossibility. This is the time of history. Chronology fits us into the temporal order of things. Suffering can be chronic, but passion never is. Chronology cripples us because we are not made of enduring stuff and we shall pass. In reality, Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 29 the proponents of these ideas merely reveal themselves as infinitely presumptu- ous: The idea of preserving the minds of contemporary mortals in artificial and everlasting neural networks for future generations is another example of these rather obscene ideas.

The ancient Greeks understood only too well the dilemma resulting from chronology as the dominant time mode. They attempted to solve it by intro- ducing two more gods of time, Aion and Kairos, conceived of as antipodes to powerful Kronos, who ultimately devoured his own children.

Aion shines at the transcendental dimensions: He does nothing for us; he challenges us to make a decision. Once Kairos has passed by, it is too late. One may still be able to catch up again with the unique moment from behind, but from this position, it is no longer possible to seize hold of it. When an opportunity comes along, one must recognize it as auspicious and take it.

Just such a character is the observer in chaos-theoretician Otto E. As an actor in the world, Roessler's observer is an activist, not the distanced observer of traditional physics. This observer follows dynamic processes with great presence of mind and visualizes their change from one quality into another. This observer has only the one chance.

Due to his association with making decisions, the turning-point character of Kairos is also expressed in Greek in the adverb harmoi at this precise time, at the ap- propriate time , a word that was rarely used. All techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in a specific sense, time media. Photography froze the time that passed by the camera into a two-dimensional still, not into a moment, for a moment possesses a temporal range that is not cal- culable. Telegraphy shrank the time that was needed for information to bridge great distances to little more than an instant.

Telephony complemented teleg- raphy with vocal exchanges in real time. The phonograph and records rendered time permanently available in the form of sound recordings. The motion- picture camera presented the illusion of being able to see the bodies in motion that photography had captured as stills. In film, time that had passed techni- cally was rendered repeatable at will; the arrow of time of an event or process could be reversed, stretches of time that had become visual information could be layered, expanded, or speeded-up. Electromechanical television combined all these concepts in a new medium, and electronic television went one step further.

In the electronic camera, a microelement of the image became a unit of time, which in turn could be manipulated. In electromagnetic recordings of image and sound elements, what can be seen and heard can be stored or processed in the smallest particles or in large packages. Cutting, pasting, and replacing, basi- cally invented by the first avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury, became advanced cultural techniques. In the Internet, all earlier media exist side by side. They also continue to exist in- dependently of the networked machines and programs and, from time to time, come into contact with each other.

For the anarchaeological approach, taking account of the specific character of media with regard to time has two important consequences. The first I touched upon above in relation to the concept of deep time. The field of study cannot encompass the entire process of development; exploring different his- torical epochs has the aim of allowing qualitative turning points within the development process to emerge clearly. The historical windows that I have se- lected should be understood as attractive foci, where possible directions for de- velopment were tried out and paradigm shifts took place.

Changes like these have an ambivalent significance. On the one hand, they support and accelerate economic, political, or desired ideological processes, and on the other, they ex- clude other alternatives or relegate them to the margins of what is possible. The Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 31 second consequence involves a heightened alertness to ideas, concepts, and events that can potentially enrich our notions for developing the time arts.

Such ideas do not appear frequently, but they are among the most fortunate finds in this quest. They appear in the guise of shifts, as wholly different from the states of inertia or complacency. Here the similarity to the concept of difference , introduced by Derrida to characterize the linguistic and philosophical operation, is obvious. Media and future became syn- onymous. By adding media to their curriculum, institutes, faculties, academies, and universities all hoped to gain access to more staff and new equip- ment. In the majority of cases, they actually received it — particularly after, in association with the magic word digital, media systems were established that the decision makers did not understand.

This was another reason they called the process a revolution. All things digital promised to those who already possessed wealth and power more of the same and, to those who possessed nothing, that they could share in this un- bloody revolution without getting their hands dirty. Governments and admin- istrations opened their coffers when the magic word — even better if coupled with the menetekel Internet — appeared in grant applications.

Over and above studies in their immediate field of research, they increasingly began to develop concepts for media and, in this way, tried to demonstrate to the education policy makers that in fact they were the best in the field of media studies and the right address for competency in media questions. However, the media makers and players continued to concentrate on Chapter 2 32 the business of making money and were not interested in any academic en- hancement, or critique, of their praxis.

I write of this in the past tense because I am convinced that this process be- longed to the last century, a century that needed media like no other before. It was a century that spawned so many violent caesuras, so much destruction, and so many artificial, that is, humanmade, catastrophes. The twenty-first century will not have the same craving for media.

As a matter of course, they will be a part of everyday life, like the railways in the nineteenth century or the intro- duction of electricity into private households in the twentieth. Thus, it is all the more urgent to undertake field research on the constellations that obtained be- fore media became established as a general phenomenon, when concepts of stan- dardization were apparent but not yet firmly entrenched.

My archaeology makes a plea to keep the concept of media as wide open as possible. The case of media is similar to Roessler the endophysicist's relation to consciousness: All we can do is to make cer- tain cuts across it to gain operational access. These cuts can be defined as built constructs; in the case of media, as interfaces, devices, programs, technical sys- tems, networks, and media forms of expression and realization, such as film, video, machine installations, books, or websites. We find them located between the one and the other, between the technology and its users, different places and times.

In this in-between realm, media process, model, standardize, symbolize, transform, structure, expand, combine, and link. This they perform with the aid of symbols that can be accessed by the human senses: Media worlds are phenomena of the rela- tional. The one or the other may be just as plausible from the way the objects are looked at as the bridges and boundaries that have been constructed between or around them.

However, it is not my intention to place a limit on the multi- tude of possible linkages by pinning them down. Descartes came in for a lot of criticism because, in his philosophical endeavor to bring more clarity into the world of thought, he made an essential distinc- tion between extension and the indivisible, between substance and spirit. How- ever, Descartes never suggested that there were no connections between the two. He merely said that these connections were not accessible to his system of Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 33 philosophical thinking in concepts. They belong to other realms, primarily that of experience and that is where he, as a philosopher, will leave them.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was both a sharp critic of the Cartesian system and the one to bring it to completion, also returns to this division in his Monadology, even going so far as to quantify those parts that are not accessible to philosoph- ical rationalism: This notion of tension is also understood here, as in the rela- tionship between calculation and imagination, as not opting a priori for one side or the other.

At times, it is appropriate to use arguments that generalize, for ex- ample, when addressing artifacts or systems from the familiar canon of media history. However, in the course of our journey to visit the attractions, a certain something must be evoked, a sense of what might be termed media or medium in the various constellations that I describe. Whether it succeeds in this for the reader is the decisive question for the value of my study. It is not a philosophi- cal study — this anarchaeology of media is a collection of curiosities.

Slightly disreputable then as now, the word was used by Descartes who had certainly read his Lullus and Porta 44 to refer to those areas of knowledge treated in the appendix to his Discours: By curiosities, I mean finds from the rich history of seeing, hearing, and com- bining using technical means: It is in this sense that I refer to attractions, sensations, events, or phenomena that create a stir and draw our attention; these demand to be portrayed in such a way that their potential to stimulate can de- velop and flourish.

The finds must be approached with respect, care, and good- will, not disparaged or marginalized. At center stage, I shall put people and their works; I shall, on occasion, wander off but always remain close to them. It does not bother me that this type of historiography may be criticized as romantic. We who have chosen to teach, research, and write all have our heroes and heroines. They are not necessarily the teachers who taught us or the masters they followed.

The people I am concerned with here are people imbued with an enduring something that interests us Chapter 2 34 Figure 2. They erected this monument to their inventive defender at the city's gate. The post- card was printed in Milan. Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain passionately. I have by no means made a random selection; their work in reflec- tion and experiment in the broad field of media has had enduring, rather than ephemeral, effects.

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Empedocles is visited for his early heuristics of the interface, and his expan- sive and broad-minded approach accompanies us as an inspiration throughout the entire story. Giovan Battista della Porta worked at a time when extremely divergent forces — the beginnings of a new scientific worldview and the tradi- tions of magical and alchemistic experiments with nature — still collided with full momentum.

The intellectual openness of certain individuals came into severe conflict with power structures that tried to intervene and regulate free, sometimes delirious, thought. In this constellation, there arose a micro-universe of media concepts and models of the most heterogeneous nature that is without parallel in history. His mega-instrument could also be interpreted as an early device of standardization. The tracking movement of our quest leads from Fludd to Athanasius Kircher, whose view of the world is encoded in a strict binary fashion.

The next chapter focuses on the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who declared his own body to be a laboratory and a medium, in which he intended to prove experimentally that electrical polarity pervades nature. For many years, Ritter was classified as a romantic natural scientist, but here I focus on him as an indefatigable cham- pion of an artistic and scientific praxis that understands itself as art within time.

The introduction to this section presents the invention of an electrical machine for transmitting written messages over distances in the s at the Jesuit Collegium Romanum in Rome. The development of the media in the nineteenth century has been relatively well researched. Here, with the Italian doctor and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, a pivotal figure in a twofold sense, it Chapter 2 36 is again the subject of inquiry.

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Lombroso carries to the utmost extremes the strategies and methods of measuring and media techniques as an apparatus for providing true representations. Moreover, his argumentation availed itself of media forms that the nineteenth century appeared to have left way behind it. With Aleksej Gastev we reach the first decades of the twentieth century. His ideas of an economy of time, which derive from a binary code of all mechanical operations, also open up the perspective that leads to the twenty-first century.

My research entailed traveling to places that seemed to me, schooled as I am in critique of the hege- monial aspect in media history of industrial culture, very remote indeed. I vis- ited all the places where the heroes of my anarchaeology labored. Agrigento, where Empedocles lived, I left rather quickly because, as the administrative center for the valley of ancient temples, it did not seem to have much in com- mon any longer with the place that I had found in his texts.

The latter I encountered again in Palermo where he has given his name to the gallery of modern art and to myr- iad other facets of everyday life in the city, like the neon sign of a bar. He is revered there like a Sicilian freedom fighter. In Palermo I also came across com- pletely unexpected presences from the past: The Biblioteca Nazionale there proved to be a real treasure trove. To my amaze- ment, I even found works by the English Rosicrucian Robert Fludd and was allowed to turn the pages myself, without wearing white cotton gloves or hav- ing any strict supervision.

Warsaw, Wroclaw, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Prague, Weimar, and smaller towns, whose significance will become apparent in the course of my narrative. In this way, a map, a cartography of technical visioning, listening, and — in addition to my original plan — combining came into existence, which is so very different from the geography of media that we are familiar with.

It runs through the propo- sitions I advance in the final chapter. The mythical hero with the gaze that controls is Argus, whose name derives from the Latin arguere to prove, to illuminate. He is the all-seeing one with one hundred eyes, of which only a few ever rest; the others move continually, vigi- lantly watching and observing. Supervision is the gaze that can contain envy, hate, and jealousy.

Argus was killed by Hermes, son of Zeus, who made him the messenger of the gods. Soon after his birth, Hermes invented the lyre by stretching strings over a tortoiseshell. The ancient Greeks venerated Hermes for his cunning, inventiveness, and exceptional powers of oratory, but also for his agility and mobility. He was given winged sandals and became the god of traffic and travel, of traders and thieves. Because he could send people to sleep with his caduceus, his wand with serpents twined about it, he was also revered as the god of sleep and dreams.

Hermes defies simple definition, as does the slippery field of media. In one of the magnificent frontispieces of his books, Kircher honors him with a special meaning: Empedocles Pleasure and absence of pleasure are the criteria of what is profitable and what is not. The National Library in Strasbourg had granted the papyrologist Martin permission to select one papyrus for analysis and publication from a collection of around 2, unclassified papyri. With the help of a computer, he compared the text particles over and over again with ancient Greek texts of known authorship and, in this way, identified the fragments as part of a longer text by Empedocles.

In , they presented the results of their labors in Agrigento, Sicily. Because we know the work of the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers primarily through indirect transmission — passages quoted or paraphrased by later authors — the identification of this fragment as being a direct transmission of pieces of Empedoclean text was a tremendous discovery. Possibly their significance would have been rec- ognized much earlier had they remained in Berlin where the classical scholar Hermann Diels, an eminent authority on the pre-Socratics, worked.

There, it was carefully preserved but its sig- nificance remained undiscovered for nearly ninety years. In his view, the fragment demands a radical reappraisal of previous scholarship on Empedocles. In the tradition of Aristotelian interpretation, until now the work of this poet-philosopher has been divided into two areas: At the end of the century, we were inundated with concepts of artificial bonding, unifying, and reuniting, as though by way of a conciliatory gesture. Universal machines, globalization, and technological net- working of geographical regions and identities that are in reality divided were advanced to counter the de facto divisions that have intruded between individ- uals and between people and machines because of the unequal distribution of wealth, education, culture, and knowledge.

In no way did they serve to dimin- ish the real divisions; they merely created the impression that the real gulfs were easy to bridge using market strategies and technology. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation has escalated again.

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People who had nothing apart from their bodies, their pride, their ideas of redemption, and their hate used these bodies as weapons against others who have everything but their bod- ies, pride, and ideas of liberation. These unequal opponents, however, do have something in common: In the sixth and fifth centuries B. Not surprisingly, it was a prize fought Chapter 3 40 over by many different invaders. Situated between the territories of Asia Minor, North Africa, and the mainland of Europe, it experienced rapid transitions — from periods of rich prosperity to military campaigns of destruction.

From this extraordinary region bordered by the Ionian Sea, which was a kind of dividing line, an interface, between the spheres of influence of the great powers of the age, came a host of exceptional thinkers: Acragas — in Latin, Agrigentum; today called Agrigento — was on the south coast of Sicily, the southernmost outpost of ancient Greek civilization, which faced Carthage in North Africa across the sea.

The inhabitants of his city were a rare mix of many cultures. His Der Tod des Empedokles presents the drama of a man who was a tragic failure, an Icarus who soared toward the light but flew too near to the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings together. For me, it is not important whether there is a grain of truth in this legend or any of the others about the death of the poet-philosopher.

They bear witness to his specific and dogged kind of resistance, to the stubbornness of things when confronted by attempts to monopolize and de- stroy them, including historical attempts to interpret them. At first glance, it may appear somewhat redundant in the age of unlimited reproducibility of things and organisms to study the ideas of a philosopher who Attraction and Repulsion 41 formulated his doctrine in fine hexametric poetry two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.

Further, it may seem rather anachronistic to place this discussion at the beginning of a quest to examine the relationship of humans and machines from a specific perspective. Yet, at the end of the s, at approximately the same time as Alan Turing was writing his famous essay on intelligent machin- ery and Norbert Wiener was publishing his book on the reciprocal relationship between control and communication using cybernetics, the eminent physicist Erwin Schroedinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin and London on the re- lationship of the ancient Greeks to nature, in which he declared the atomist Democritus as his hero.

At the time, Schroedinger viewed his own subject, the- oretical physics, as in deep crisis, triggered by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the growing strength of biology, plus the historical experience of World War IFs destructive violence and force, of which the natural sciences had been co-organizers. For these reasons, Schroedinger thought it appropriate to revisit the origins of systematic thinking about nature. Thus, he took up a committed position that objected strongly to an erroneous understanding of the Enlightenment.

It is following an entirely new trend. It centres around math- ematical and scientific enlightenment. The traces of ancient ideas, still linger- ing in philosophy, jurisprudence, art and science constitute impediments rather than assets, and will come to be untenable in the long run in the face of the development of our own views. As we scan its wind- ings over hills and vales back in history we behold a land far, far, away at a space of over two thousand years back, where the wall flattens and disappears and the path was not yet split, but was only one.

Some of us deem it worth while to walk back and see what can be learnt from the alluring primeval unity. However, it makes good sense to rethink and re-examine the constellations of the period, which were clearly highly conducive to bold and free thought, in spite of the conflicts of the powerful that dominated everyday life. The social trend toward consolidation was outshone, for a time, by the intellectual expansive impetus of the few.

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Little is known for certain, however. Diodorus of Ephesus writes of his appearance: Besides stopping the spread of the plague, this intervention also provided Selinus with wholesome fresh water. As a thinker allied with the Pythagorean tradition, he was greatly involved with music, which he invested with healing powers and is reported to have utilized in therapy. Empedocles was above all a public figure. Promoting conciliation, he intervened often in the struggle between Syracuse and Agrigento for domination of the island, and he championed the idea of Sicilian political unity.

He refused, however, to assume any political office. It is said that he desired to exert influence by virtue of his reputation and not through exercise of power. On the other hand, Anaxagoras explained all things in the world of phenomena through the prin- ciple of mixing: Attraction and Repulsion 43 Figure 3.

In this illustration of optical perception, the most important nineteenth-century machines of acceleration — the clock and the train — are brought together with electric warning signals, the objects being per- ceived here. His concept of na- ture is informed by three principles. The second principle concerns the mode of how the composition comes about. For Empedocles, there is no beginning or end to all that is, and therefore neither creation nor destruction.

Some thing can- not arise out of no thing, nor can something become nothing. Like Anaxagoras, he conceives all natural processes as types of mixing. The four elements corre- spond to the properties hot, dry, wet, and cold. These four operate in all exist- ing things and organisms; later, this concept became a basic principle of chemistry.

For these are the only real things, and as they run through each other they assume different shapes, for the mixing interchanges them. For example, he sees plants as being highly sensitive and having many analogies with humans and animals: These forces generate all motion. Translated into terms employed by modern science, we speak to- day of energy, and, with reference to the elements, of matter. With the inter- play of energy and matter, which is governed by affinities among the elements, we have arrived at the paradigm, which is regarded today, in both physics and chemistry, as fundamental to the analysis of natural phenomena at the macro- and micro-scale.

The ideal form is the dominion of Love. However, unlike Par- menides, Empedocles does not view this state as eternal or unchanging; it is sub- ject to constant motion, is in a continual state of flux. Perhaps the language Empedocles uses to describe this state reflects something of his own fate and that of many of his intellectual contemporaries, like Anaxagoras, who were forced into exile.

Love is banished to the outer lim- its of the chaos that is besieging Love. Within this highly flexible framework of the constant motion of elements and their infinite mingling, there is embedded a concept of perception of the one by the other. Empedocles does not make a principal distinction between un- derstanding and sensory perception: Empedocles did not see an active agent on the one side, primarily concerned with enjoyment and causing suffering, and a passive body on the other, which mainly suffers and endures: In order for the others and the other to be active, Empedocles presents all living things with a won- derful gift.

He wraps them in a fine skin, or film, which not only protects them but is also permeable in both directions. Passing back and forth through them is a constant stream of effluences that are not directed at anyone or anything in particular. If there is antipathy, the streams do not meet. In the extant fragments, the example of the eyes illustrates most clearly what he means by the work of Love as an essential component for successful perception. One of the finest surviving fragments gives a poetic and accurate description of the structure of the eye: In the same way the elemental fire, wrapped in membranes and delicate tissues, was then concealed in the round pupil — these kept back the surrounding deep water, but let through the more diffuse light.

The same holds true for acoustic perception. For Empedocles, hearing is a sen- sation that takes place inside the ear, at the threshold to the outside world. He describes hearing entirely in physiological terms. To listen is to hear in sympathy; for Empedocles, this presupposes inner motion: Nothing is above anything else; everything exists side- by-side, in motion, and with constant interpenetration.

Nor does Empedocles propose a hierarchy of the senses; Plato and Aristotle will introduce this idea later. Seeing is not privileged over hearing, nor taste over touch and smell.

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This lat- ter example provides a further illustration that the Agrigentine poet-philosopher understands perception as an active process: The principles of constantly changing combination and exchange apply to all natural phenomena, including inorganic ones. Just as Em- pedocles sees vision in organisms with eyes as presupposing an inner fire as the driving force, he also sees this process at work in rocks and metals. He ascribes special powers to stones, which he also conceives of as wrapped in a porous skin.

Magnetism appears to be an impressive confirmation of this conception: For him, perception comes about when exchange of effluents takes place. The philosopher and student of nature Democritus, who developed his ideas at around the same time as Empedocles but in another, distant city, Abdera in Ionia , 27 suggested a different conception: Democritus conceived of the world as consisting of two opposing en- tities, which need each other: Fullness is not solid but consists of a multitude of the smallest units, which Democritus named atoms.

So small that the human eye cannot see them, atoms are elementary substances composed of the same material but with an infinite number of different sizes and shapes. Everything that exists is composed of these multifarious forms in motion, including the human sensory organs. The streams that emanate on the one side from the perceiver and on the other from what is perceived com- press the air between them. This ex- change should be imagined as a kind of balancing, a reciprocal scanning of the many forms via the intervening layer of compressed air, which has the status of an interface between the perceiver and the perceived.

It is the issue of whether the idol that appears on the compressed air is true or false.

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Of the things that are, only the atoms in motion and the void are true — the material elements and the medium: They are not a consistent and reliable reality but, instead, permanently changing states. In the first century A. His only reserva- tions in a Democritean sense concern the occasions when the scanning concep- tion of vision clashes with the conceptions of reason.

In his book on classical theories of vision, Gerard Simon elegantly describes the questions debated by the early philosophers when they turned their atten- tion to perception, the complex relations between seeing and what is seen. His critical rereading of the surviving text fragments of the early natural philoso- phers led him to the following conclusion: Their object of study was not light and its radiation, but vision. Observations of nature, mind, and the soul, as well as the mathematical calculations made by the early philosophers, cannot be separated. Their conception of physiology encompassed it all.

Later, the Catholic Church joined in the censure of atomism. They needed the soul as an authority external to matter and the human body, controlled by free will but at the same time in a complex relation of dependence upon Divine Providence and its institutions on Earth. Within such a system of atoms in motion, be it ever so complex, the Fall from Grace is an impossibility; at best, there are only catastrophes for which no one is responsible.

The two ancient Greece specialists Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi have put the jigsaw puzzle of papyrus pieces together to reveal a fragment that, more than two thousand years after the ideas of Empedocles originated, will occasion ex- tensive reinterpretation of the little we know of his work. My montage of text fragments bears absolutely no comparison to their labors. What I have tried to show is how one can arrange some of the extant text particles of Empedocles and Democritus on perception to extract ideas and statements that have some bear- ing upon the frenetic contemporary sphere of activity that is theory and praxis of media: Interpreted technologically, it is a theory of double compatibility: Beginning in , Jacob Leupold published an eight-volume work, Theatrum machinarum, with a total of 1, pages on the classical interface of the latter type.

Illustration of different types of cogwheels, which must mesh exactly in the perfect me- chanical interface. This treadmill, dating from , is a hybrid. Here, the function of the second, compatible cogwheel is taken over by human muscle power. Physically, it is a theory of affinities, which can be described in psychological terms as a concept of reciprocal giving and receiving of attention. Economically, it is a theory of extravagance. In media-heuristics terms, which draw the above aspects together, it is eminently suitable as a theory of a perfect interface.

Yet, because it is perfect, building it will never be possible. However, precisely because it possesses this potential impossibility, the theory is entirely worthy of consideration for dealing with existing inter- faces, which purport to have already established compatibility between the one and the other. Die Abenteuer Der Kommunikation.

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