Legitimized, with legitimizing forces (albeit temporarily, as will be seen), the mainstream and capriciousness, legitimized by the same hand, marginality – eternal historical companions and allies, alternately intercepting the conflicted free will (which, moreover, is often denied in this freedom) – must establish their relationships on the principle of dominance, and no other way – for within it lies the archkey to existential dynamics – the only truly important development (though not limited to development), in relation to which the others must take the role of instruments, not goals. But what kind of world is it without mistakes and failures? An ideal machine? A perfect program? A city where a person is unequivocally denied presence. The dominance embraces the person – universally and without exception – subordinating all their extensions both reflexively-internally and socioculturally externally to a well-articulated, voluntary deformation. The degree of a person's subordination directly depends on their "morphological" development: the deeper and further their extensions are developed. Everywhere and always, through the superficial dust of civilization, it will shine through – the center of gravity of human experience, wriggling amidst the heaps of discarded materials, to which external culture found no application.
The researcher does not always manage to keep track of the shifting superiority of cultural dominants: at the moment, they are tilling the trampled soil of the lawn, filling it with the fresh wind of the era when suddenly they find themselves in the backyard, while the main action has shifted to the west. The inquisitive mind has just begun to unravel the multifaceted, jagged relationships of modernism/postmodernism with the supremacy of the latter, when some signs of the former return to the socio-cultural stage, seemingly desiring, in a reckless manner, self-completion through the violent psychosis of modernization, experiencing the stinging necessity to replace the 'construction barracks.'
The person in the information industry, an information worker and employee, is both a tool and a guide of the informational age, absorbing its ideals and ideology, and conveying them from above to the consumer masses. If magic is the complexity that is either beyond our ability or our resources to explain, it becomes inexplicable. Our world is permeated by magic, wielded by information producers. When interacting with the magical machine, they are compelled to absorb its 'character' traits (let's not deny it), fitting them onto themselves, adhering to ritualistic demands, which receive clear explanations and legitimacy through and for the machine itself. These demands are comfortably rational. But therein lies their key trick, as they form a unity that gives birth to a type of magic that, while technified, still retains that essence. Without them, magic would be riddled with gaps through which human hands would treacherously shine through. To prevent this, obedience is elevated to the highest value, ultimately leading to a voluntary deformation and intertwining of the rules of one domain with those of another. Paradigmatic steps, which expand while constricting, and fill while draining, proudly serve as the epochal nourishing soil for this mixing. The result of this process is a person who, in response, is forced to commit a cultural error – to apply progressive (modernist) technologies and gestures, instrumentally serving the soulless machinery of efficiency, to a living subject in their role as an existential analog seeker.
Fear. It is difficult to intimidate a person engaged in the information industry. With the steadfast posture of a proud warrior, he meets any challenges, even the most complex tasks and trials. This is because he firmly knows about the existence of ultimate solutions – constantly whispered to him by the demons of formal laws, logical deductions, and clear, phenomenologically robust definitions. He is prepared for tasks of any scale: the time has come when he dares to program the very process of communicating with the cosmos and the universe through language (as if no one has done this before). A noble knight of heaven and earth, of day and night, of one and zero. The very void comfortably resides within the arches of his recursive structure. However, he has not yet become the fearless knight of freedom, for there is still that which terrifies him and fills him with horror at the meaninglessness, that which is expelled from the crude idealistic digital narrative, that which defies reduction to the familiar apparatus of unequivocal 'Yes' and 'No'. Its name is Man, this machine flaw, the only important object of blind humanists, idling in their self-fabricated pseudoscientific daydreams.
The fear of man dares not engage in battle with the all-illuminating beacon of rationality, transforming into an error processed by pre-formulated constructs, bringing a soothing breeze of answers and 'thoughtful' mockery, like mechanisms of mastering the phenomenon. The guarantee of peace of mind and thought cannot cost too much, even at the price of the delusion itself. The verbal web of answers that give rise to even more questions – a non-existent trick, tedious demagoguery without end or limit, exhausting and forced, evokes a sharp desire to make a pact with reason, the subject of which will be that which lies on the very surface. This is a pact signed 'The End!'. But this is not a true end: it seems that only now does the person truly begin.
The conveyor of informational consumers produces a scared person here, pitifully hiding in the anonymized shroud of digital distance: we are closer to the world, yet further from it than ever; alienated from analog responsibility for ourselves, we are some kind of reagents-diluents of the vast digital connection. This is digital courage, though far from the courage itself.
To speak, think, and understand a person can only be achieved through an unpredictable language – alive, mobile, a multi-segmented insect – revoltingly unfixable, non-permanent, elusive, often entering into mutually exclusive relationships with the language sufficient for everything else. The person of the informational production runs away in horror from these thorny jungles, from the unfamiliar Other, the disobedient fool, into a territory where warm embraces of understandable schemes and algorithms await, capable of soothing with words: 'Nothing and anything are the same.'
Fixation. The world of the consumer of informational products is a world of magic, an absolute game of faith and calculated delusions; the world of the producer of informational products is a world of bare units and zeros and their cynically-functionalist joints, presenting themselves always as they are, without the 'childish whims' of transcendental motives, objective spirit, or divine particles. Once and for all compressed between the beginning and the end, the entrance and the exit, crushed by utilitarian digital hyperbole, these cubes strive for a state of rest and their perfect fixation according to all rules of the game. Fixed means preserved. Fixed means immersed in the sphere of safety, generating guarantees against disruptions and crises. Fixed means being at a safe distance from surprises and excess. Finally, fixed means not posing a threat to oneself or others. A certain anti-superposition, where nothing unprogrammed is required: neither destruction nor creation. Fixed means sporadically sterile.
Fixation is a beloved technique of informational production, lying at the heart of the continuous increase in informational efficiency. What is not fixed, with all its 'human' roots, strives towards loss, towards its cozy hut of oblivion deep in the neural forests. This is unacceptable. Everything must be fixed: sign, symbol, metaphor, person. A non-fixed sign is a lost sign, and therefore it is a mistake. An unfixed thought is a lost thought, which means lost resources spent on its production. A non-fixed person means a lost person, as control over their core entropy and historical lineage weakens. The resilient tradition of modernity has once again found a source of energy. Once more, humanity is subjected to the violence of fixation: to be described and placed in the Baconian utopian city, where all streets are born under the dictate of Cogito.
But we already have experience with madness: a person is not lost when they are not fixed, but rather a person disappears when certain forces manage to capture them in an italic snapshot of linguistic and coding constants. Fixation is the end of a person, in the sense that our pathological conscience felt in the 20th century. This is the methodological approach that carries doubt within itself, a doubt that develops and intertwines with threads of morality, through which it continues to exist, albeit in a negatively empirical way. When taken in ethical quotes, it becomes the ideological foundation of the being of algorithms, a necessary predicate for the 'checkpoint'—reinterpreted in a contemporary manner from the classical tradition of continuous improvement of modernity.
A person cannot help but rebel against their confinement in a prison of fixation (regardless of its nature: political, economic, ideological, professional, etc.), shaking its walls through a continuously rediscovered, verbally and symbolically articulated tool that affirms what is already well known and deeply utilized — the unconscious. The collision of the humanitarian and the technical seems to once again spiral in its history, which, in a certain light, appears as a process of learning a haughty self-confidence. Developing ever more sophisticated and self-assured algorithms — a sequential series of fixations — the information production, in moments of tranquility, some unfamiliar voluntaristic rest, engages with centripetal unity, placing these algorithms in a human shell, aspiring for the ideal of a 'spiritual program,' striving towards depth by modernist analogy. However, it has not yet managed to hide the leash of guiding logic, albeit unclear; it still too evidently reveals itself as nothing more than a psychological act of weakening a leash that is equally strong. A professional, high-tech illusion of choice — but nothing more. An archetypal, skillful trick — by offering more opportunities, it grips tighter and controls more deeply the intoxicated being. Yet, this is still a narrow corridor where there is no place for the 'too human.' The person once again eludes such resulting fixation, leaving their cultural manifestos on the walls of the corridor, which may yet be destined to find their place in the pages of history.
Responses. An unanswered question is always a burdensome weight, accumulating and overwhelming the muddled mind, inherently threatening it with the obscured areas of humanity, keeping it in constant tension, far from the postulates of a certain economy of life, to which, it is said, we strive by our very nature. The model of 'obedient concepts,' where anything incomplete, unresolved in any mode accessible to a limited but obedient sign, is forcibly expelled from the internal discourse, recognizes only the category of answers as significant and worthy of attention. Questions, on the other hand, are merely tools devoid of intrinsic value. They are means that exist for this purpose and are always illuminated in that context. This characteristic dynamic is a necessary limitation for the expansion of controlled freedoms and the 'institution of language,' a purposeful production of both products and human beings.
The informational production defines its professional and, at the same time, (quasi)existential dynamics through the category of answers. But not questions. The impotence of questions lies in the fact that they demand from the internal dynamics, which engages in a reckless confrontation with the vague term of explanation, contradicting and opposing within the machinery of efficiency of its highest value—the external, economic dynamics, which leaves its mark on a person in the form of alienation analyzed through feelings. Answers are a measure and gesture of calming, stopping, and completing.
But what is a question if we attempt to move beyond the boundaries of the Latin words quaestio and problema? It seems to us that a question is the engine, the core of the dynamism of the human spirit, its metaphor condensed in a team of horses (even if wildly running from a burning city), with freedom in action (in a pagan spirit) being its primacy. By receiving an answer, the question approaches its legitimate, ever-persistent death, which, as it sometimes seems, it craves with its whole nature, occasionally even welcoming suicide. But is the death of a question not also the death of a person, and thus, Death itself? And is not this event of utmost value to traditional economical communication? The economic project answers affirmatively. However, the human project vehemently refutes this. For the human being, the question is the force that binds together, gluing numerous disparate and varied names into one formulation (though far from a formula). A question is not just a way of existing in life and its 'what needed to be proven'; it perhaps embodies life itself, its very flesh, albeit high-level, but still resistant to gestures of 'academic integrity'. Any other project cannot be built on answers, for they are the only suitable material for a human, humanitarian structure. Attempting to build a person on answers means to pose a question to them, to program them—an ideal approach for a technical organism. But programming a person is no longer what the words themselves indicate (or rather, the grammar of signs), as even before they manifest in the realm of the conceivable, the person has already been pushed aside, and the object becomes something else. Programming a person is a classic oxymoron and, by and large, utter nonsense. Here, the chasm between the human and the technical (informational, in our case) is highlighted to colossal proportions, a step across which can be taken only by Him alone. The collective answers are the training of history, with the faceless, ensnared object of a person being the material. It is akin to denying the 'higher questioning', and that is exactly what every production strives for, including informational production.
Home Space. As we try to show, the modernist return (which undoubtedly already has another name — as culture dislikes returning to the past without somehow enhancing it) represents a sociocultural workshop nurturing a new human being, whose dominant traits reflect the derivatives of the most dominant culture itself. Abruptly interrupted in the 'barracks of postmodernism', the process of limitless quantitative production improvements (could it have ever ended?) — modernism — continues its journey logically through qualitative enhancements, the most suitable instruments of which are information and informatization — conduits of a sort of transhuman, technical 'spiritualization'. Therefore, we find it justified to emphatically highlight the informatized person — the person of informatized production, as the key archetype of sociocultural genesis.
Once again, we turn to art – our eternal barometer – attentively listening to its vibrations. The object and environment style, named according to the highest innovative standards of non-violence, independence, and self-worth – high-tech – with its unpopular, brief, yet enticing history, highlights certain aspects of psychological threads within humans (not shying away from psychological nuances). By allowing and even constructing its semiotics through a fusion of methods that effectively operate in spaces, on one hand, of the home and, on the other, of professional deployment, it uniformly and positively perceives the directive subordination of one to the other, having already formed an alliance. However, the rules of the game in these two spaces often intersect only through a superficially compelled tangent: the home is the time and place of a living person, while work requires a production machine, the boundaries of which must be clearly defined by the formula of production efficiency. What could be the danger if the demand for clear identification within the hierarchical structure of subordinates and superiors becomes significant in a space where a person, removing all protective masks, assumes the most relaxed position, thereby becoming the most inattentive, distracted, and thus vulnerable? Without proper elaboration – in essence, forming the psychological and empirical watershed between home and work spaces – this could lead to the displacement of human, familial, friendly, personal, and similar relationships from workplace, hierarchical, subordinate relationships focused on efficiency and productivity.
The high-tech style, which hasn't gained much worldly popularity, has certain grounds for growth now, in the era of deeply pervasive informatization, in the age of constraints for the limitless – that which continuously strives for an artificial micro-world, without being confined to simple observation. Information design, showcasing its nobility above all other types of design, here, having yet to learn selectivity, might become a powerful mixing factor, including inappropriate, anti-historical, and ultimately, dehumanizing and invasive elements. Informatization, if one may say so, is still struggling to define itself, which should result, in particular, in a theoretical assertion of its types and subtypes. For now, informatization serves one purpose for everything: both for the home and for what lies beyond it.
Mistakes. A program is a fixation of certain relationships in terms endowed with clear, unequivocal meaning, devoid of any lyrical 'too human' elements. Ambiguity is the first and primary source of errors, intrinsically tied to the discourse of things in the most fundamental way. Just as a person cannot be investigated or understood (of course, through concepts) without considering the mistakes they make – an innate part of their being – so too do they intolerably integrate errors into their models of everything Else that extends beyond them, including others like themselves.
Informatization production, like any other (unless we fall into the reductionism of expressing 'human production' in formulas), does not tolerate errors as a factor openly threatening effectiveness and, consequently, its very 'materialized' existence. In contrast, a person, without errors, cannot be fully and sincerely conceived, lacking the ability to sever ties with losses and gains – those condensing engines of inspiration and gestures of openness bestowed upon them by their own mistakes. Perhaps, nothing is more intimate and human (No one, even from their transcendent 'side', is free from errors) than mistakes, just as nothing is more distant and intolerant than errors.
An unbreakable connection, both physical and otherwise, exists between a person and mistakes, manifesting at an existential level in the phenomenon of openness, whether we consider any structure or weave it into the very fabric of existence and the conditions of being (even if artificial). The 'voice' of openness always sounds like the voice of freedom, granting a person a legitimized potential to illuminate their existence, pushing it to the edge in the extreme (vital and even manic) form of error (in another, transcendental sense) – a borderline situation. The motive of production, however, is different: to ultimately expel the Error from one's discourse, then to close the 'black box', providing a magical, sterile function as the highest service value.
The strategy of informational production is as follows: to capture the object in the gripping embrace of results, to seal its poetry in a definitive and clear utilitarian pose, and finally to achieve the sensual modernist ideal – a module (devoid of history and context, according to P. Kozlovsky), trained for endless reuse. A person and the culture they create (constantly recreating) operate differently, which, in the eyes of the aforementioned force, represents nothing but naivety and helplessness – rediscovering what is already known. This does not pertain to the twists of the technological spiral – here it is about rediscovering exactly what has already been known with full confidence that, sooner or later, the achievement will cease being such and historically slip away.
Openness is always both openness to error and openness from error (to something imposed by that error). The voice of mistakes should never fall silent, for it is the voice through which a person hears themselves, recognizes and identifies themselves. Openness is a Sisyphean task – a pointless, torturous endeavor, the value of which lies in its perpetual nature; it exists within itself and always will, without the risk of being looted, interrupted, or lost, and ultimately closing off.
Thus, in concluding our thesis, let us say: a person permanently enters into a union with that which acquires its formal legitimacy through mechanically linked error. Human life is a life through errors: we grasp, fixate on a person, and in the very next moment we make mistakes in our attempts to form an idea about them. This psychological, or better yet – existential, projective delay within the framework of Man, even in some aspect of anthropology, is fundamentally irreparable until the very root is addressed...
A person. In conclusion.
The life of a person, secured by repetition, is essentially unrepeatable.
J. Derrida:
“Repetition separates from oneself power, presence, life. This separation is a frugal and calculated gesture of what postpones itself to preserve itself, what saves for later expenditure and yields to fear.”
Repetition through the violent embraces of the word – serving in the office of Logos.
Furthermore, Derrida states:
“The word is the corpse of psychical speech…”
Substituting incomprehensibility – the source of fear through danger – with a fictive softness of comprehensibility (antithesis) is a favorite trick for all things technical, and particularly, information modernity, whose second ideal might be reuse, which comprehensibility takes as the basis for its movement.
“Look into the thing – your Self is reflected in it. Listen to others – you speak through them.” Such rediscoveries and their poeticization initially arise from some fracture (whether historical or anthropological), from conventionality, from some error, treading in place, and not resolvable by any movement forward. This kind of rediscovery is a failure in the machine of efficiency, which constantly appeals to the formula ‘this has already been said,’ unless it refers to the higher spiral of development.
The information worker is the savage of the future, riding the wave of the intention of the World Spirit, regressing to a sarcastic mythopoetics of twilight, fear, and surprise—everything that cannot be subjected to programming manipulation and, perhaps, degeneration. Prepared templates and power over information are his eternal companions, never betraying him, unlike the unfortunate, annoyingly interrogative speech activity. He speaks, and in his voice echoes a digital distrust towards everything different from it, a certain digital, binary cynicism, which, however, still has to find its predetermined place—on the pages of the unconscious, eternally returning schemes.
*See.
Source: habr.com
