I am fully equipped for the highly emotional experience. I disappear deeper and deeper into the whiteness of the landscape, with the sites opening in the subtle and repetitive rhythm of images, voices, and music. Everything is short, clean, just the basics. I travel through the emotional labyrinths that emerge from the intestines of linked networks. I share the rhythm of these parallel, flickering landscapes revealed in front of me, intriguing me, seducing me with their spaceless speech and imagery. No emotion, just a glimpse of it, no feeling, just the pain of it, no happiness, just the sound of it, no talk, just the word of it, no passion, just the climax of it. The intimate landscapes play with my illusions of mobility, possession and boundlessness, surprising me with their inner history and touching me with their surprising analogies. A network of liquid emotion, a fusion of the visible and the invisible. The bonds between the incongruities and spanned incommensurables may seem playful, but they are not innocent. Playfulness is just a mask for a very serious adventure taking place at the intimate landscapes. There is a clear threat of emotional attachment. Who provokes me and who gets provoked? Who fills me with lust and who is lustful? Who is mobile and who is frozen? Danger resides in the intimate link.

Throughout history, the main physical reaction of man encountering artificial creatures has been described in terms of a sudden immobility of his body: perceiving wonders, artificial creatures, monsters and other heterogeneous hybrids, the spectator becomes frozen, immobile, inactive, lifeless even. Petrifaction myths are one of the most famous and powerful disclosures of such danger; unnatural and demonic fusions of spirit and inert matter, some creatures possess the power to freeze man’s spirit and turn him into dead stone. Medusa's head as a strange combination of animal and human features, Agipa - the iron copy of the wife of the Spartan dictator Nabis (notorious for her deadly embrace of the stunned subjects), and Hephaestus, the iron man from The Iliad are just a few examples of such danger. Their terrible effects are usually in service of powerful rulers and dictators who, with the aid of their artificial aligns, not only fill their subjects with terror, but take possession of them in their immobile state, and metaphorically steal their spirit of life and freedom. Artificial creatures play an important part in the mythological structure of the world, symbolizing "transgression, a breakdown in hierarchy, a symbol of crisis and undifferentiation."[1] Old myths and religious stories render this undifferentiation in a special way: the disclosure of a monster’s body turns the relationship between earth and heaven (man and god) upside down, opening a subversive perspective on the fundamental questions as regards the human relationship with the divine. This perspective becomes even more radical, however, in case of physical monsters made by man (and designed according to the architecture of his technical imagination and virtuosity). Physical creatures made by man conform to the old Aristotelian scheme of spirit, form and matter, the scheme which influenced the philosophical perception of the difference between life and non-life all the way to Descartes and the modern disclosure of the animal machine.[2] It is, however, not the arrangement of its parts that makes the automaton rare, extraordinary and monstrous. "Rather it is the fact that matter formed by artificial means and moving of its own volition would seem to be endowed with spirit."[3] Having set the boundaries (life and non-life , nature and artificiality, man and god, the microcosm and the macrocosm) throughout the history of a unified, macrocosmic world, the hierarchy 'spirit - matter - form', becomes threatened by these creatures, and this is precisely where their dangerous monstrosity appears. Their dangerous link with artificial demonic forces (spirit) could radically transform the unified world of similarities, e.g. between things and words (Foucault), or the human and the divine, turning it upside down, "as if there were any unhappier situation than that of a man under the domination of his own inventions.

I want to share you: Historical context of the encounter

Very interesting examples of the new body/machine relationship can be found in 17th century curiosity museums, followed by anatomical museums of the Enlightenment. In these collections, the dangerous monstrousness (link) is present only as the product of an optical deceit, as a feint of art as well as of philosophy. In the 17th century, monsters no longer appeared as the site of horrible disruption, but in deforming mirrors, automatic theatres and caoptric machines, as for example in the Musaeum Kircherianum housed in the Society of Jesus College in Rome, established by Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 80). Even though Kircher was still dedicated to the allegorical unification of all world religions and philosophies (and his position differed from the encyclopaedic dissection and classification of exhibits in the late Enlightenment), it is very interesting to observe the rhetorical, metaphysical and social structure of the artificial creatures (automata) in his complex allegorical universe of a museum. A universe, of course, that is already flirting with the scientific disclosure of optical illusions as employed by Descartes and other rationalist philosophers. The artificial and monstrous exhibits were mainly located in the so-called "Class Nine" of the Museum, which was called "Instrumenta Mathematica". This kind of discoursive context clearly indicates a change in the understanding of the artificial and its role. From then on, artificiality was understood as a product of technical genius and philosophic mastery. By means of optical illusion, most of such machines (called machinemata or mechanical contraptions) served the purpose of turning spectators into monsters and animals (the prime automata of that time), deforming people’s bodies or combining them with other bodies, animals and objects. "I myself have this machine which has rapt everyone in great admiration when they see instead of their natural face, the face of a wolf or a dog or another animal."[6] The machine is visible, and transparently articulated in a way that its form and faculties are not. Its occluding surface is removed to reveal the inside, with the key components enlarged or disassembled in an "exploded view" employed as early as by Leonardo. "The theatrum or theatre, whose etymology links it with beholding, wondering, and contemplation, is, as many titles of the period indicate, the natural place of the machine.

Even for the modern cartesian and rationalist perspectives that introduced a body without secrets by employing anatomical and rationalist procedures or the mechanism itself, the issue of hybrids remains a problematic one. I am disclosing you, it is I who produced you in the first place, I want to understand you, I want to share you, and what are you doing to me?

Despite the modern "scientific" and "anatomic" disclosure of the artificial, the excess of immobility remains. More even, it could paradoxically be read as one of the main bodily symptoms in the distopian history of modernity, having reached one of its peaks in the romantic descriptions of the terrifying (unheimliche) encounter of the human and the artificial.[20] The intervention of the artificial Other becomes dangerous, e.g. for the mesmerised Maria in Hoffmann's Der Magnetiseur or the poet Nathanael in Der Sandmann, the story about the artificial woman named Olimpia: "In her walk and posture there was some rigidness and stiffness which by many invoked unpleasant attention."[21] An encounter with the artificial woman usually results in immobility, paralysis, mortification, castration, repetition, silence, and lack of lust on the part of her admirer (lover). One of the most beautiful examples of this mortifying castration can be found in the dialogue between Edison (inventor of anartificial woman) and lord Ewald in Villiers de L'Isle Adam's novel L'Eve future. After Edison's disclosure of the mechanism of the artificial Eve (Ms. Alicia Hadaly), lord Ewald is curious how one will be able to speak (connect) with her. "With the Alicia of the future, the true Alicia, the Alicia of your soul, you will no longer have to put up with these sterile discomforts … She will definitely answer with the expected word, the beauty of which will depend on your own suggestion! Her »consciousness« will no longer be a negation of your own, but will become the kindred of a soul more appealing to your melancholy. In her, you will be able to evoke the joyous presence of your only love, this time without the fear that she might take in your dreams! Her words will never be a disappointment to your hopes. They will always be so sublime … that you will be able to awake them with your spirit. Here, you will never have to fear not being understood, as would be the case with the live one: you will only have to learn to pay attention to the time pressed between her words.”[22] It is precisely the excess of immobility, however, that makes the image of the encounter with the artificial Eve so terrifying for the man. In a dialog with a real live woman, there is always some dissonance at work: one never achieves perfect harmony but "some other word dictated by her nature, one that will make your heart sink"[23] A link with the artificial woman produces no discontinuity, no misunderstanding, and more even: "You won't even have to articulate any words yourself! Hers will be a response to your thoughts, your silence!"[24] The passages reflect the old fear of the real encounter with her kind. The possession of an artificial woman has radical consequences: one becomes silenced (inactive) in her “harmonious” presence. Who is it that speaks and who is silent? Who is “artificial” and who “real”? Who is it that behaves like a machine? The uncertainty might have given rise to the art of the surrealist Hans Bellmer and to his famous obsession with the artificial doll, "a plastic anagram, ... like the sentence that invites us to rearrange it."[25] Seeing Max Reinhardt's production of Les contes d'Hoffmann in 1932, Bellmer soon began constructing his own female doll which he obsessively photographed for the rest of the decade. He wrenched it out of shape, ravaged its internal secrets, and installed a museum of kitschy feminine trinkets in its stomach; one could see the latter through the doll’s navel - after pressing its nipple and switching on the torch the doll had in its throat.[26] I want to share your inside but what are you doing to me? You uncover my sexual agonies, and sex and death are no longer enemies. With yourself opened to me, I'm a machine to you; immobile, castrated and invalid, inflicting wounds upon myself to be with you, and the differences between us are no longer clear. The excess of immobility has a paralysing, freezing effect upon a sexual entity. Sexuality becomes quiet and lifeless, surgical dissection, a means of research, a lesson in anatomy; immobile, castrated and invalid.[27] The excess of immobility not only pertains to physical movements or senses but also to the body’s erotic energy and passion, its ability to communicate, to be unpredictable and fluid. This phenomenon is also reflected in Paul Virilio’s contemporary invalid body. It is indeed equipped with a whole array of sensorial gadgets and instruments to be able to move at incredible speed or experience infinite sexual, sensorial and intellectual adventures. In its (meat) reality, however, it is gradually turning into a body of an invalid; it is becoming reduced to its basic functions, and incapable of functioning without the aforementioned prosthetics. But the excess of immobility should not be viewed as a result of the incapacity or the obsoleteness of the body (Stelarc), but as a consequence of the radical ambiguity arising from the encounter of the human and the artificial. This is, however, no longer the ambiguity of the old mythological question "Am I alive or not?”, but that of the puzzle that emerged as early as with Descartes: “Am I a man or a machine?"[28] , with the modern subject wanting to clearly differentiate between the two. The ambiguity came into actuality with the enormous contemporary production of hybrids that are becoming our everyday partners in complex technological reality. So why are you so ambiguous to me?


To understand the complexity of the excessive immobility of the human body, we have to venture further and explore the modern production of man’s 'second nature' (artificial, hybrid, inorganic) - a growing "recompense for the lost support in the 'first nature'" - the human animal has to reaccustom itself to the most elementary bodily rhythm of sleep, feeding, movement."[29] Why is it that the encounter (co-existence) with the artificial becomes "the point of inversion, at which the very moment of 'spontaneous' natural power turns into an artificial prosthetic element"?

The answer to this question does not lie in the interpretation of excessive immobility - in the continuity of the archaic fear of the demonic nature of man’s own creations, or as a sign of the bordeline nature and the problematic history of the machine. The fact that modernity always reflects the body within the dialectics between the utopian and the distopian, the fact that throughout the history of modernity, the desire for a replaced, re-modulated, disciplined, non-living body has been clearly accompanied by the fear of revived machinery, does not result from some unpredictable character of hybrid mutations.[31] It is more a sign of our own borderline nature and our own problematic modern history, which have resulted in a special attitude towards hybridity and things in general. At this point, the stand of Bruno Latour can be helpful: the notion of modernity can not be imagined without its counterpole which Latour defines as »traduction« (translation) - "the mixing of genres present as something entirely novel, a hybrid between nature and culture,"[32] – that inevitably accompanies the purification between life and non-life on the representative, constitutional side of modernity. Says Latour, "so long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern - that is, we willingly subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferation of hybrids down below. As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change.


To let the other have an effect on you is not legitimate.

Your reason is gone when you let the Other affect you.
What happens if the Other loves us too much?

Augustine: City of God, Penguin Books. Dennis Des Chene: Spirits and Clocks k.a.

why he punctuates everything with the affirmative “Right On”. He “gets” it, dude. He “gets” you. He wants you to open up to him. After all, he readily grasps attitudes, practices and orientations most people, *sigh*, show ignorance of and hostile intolerance for.