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On the need for ethical aesthetics: or, where I stand between neo-Luddites and cyberians - electronic tools and the artist
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Deborah J. Haynes
Or, Where I Stand between Neo-Luddites and Cyberians
This essay is a three-part meditation on the role of the artist in the encounter with new electronic technologies. I begin with a personal rationale for my claim that we need ethical aesthetics. The core of the essay is organized around three models of cultural criticism-utopian, utilitarian, and apocalyptic - that Sherry Turkle described as especially useful for analyzing electronic media.(1) The end of the essay fulfills the promise of the implied question in the title.
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Schopenhauer once wrote that thinking for oneself does not mean thinking in isolation. This statement contains an insight especially applicable to our context, where much visual art and writing consist of appropriation and pastiche. The ideas articulated here are the result of thinking for myself during periods of artistic work and scholarly research, and this is reflected in the essay's passionate, even didactic, style. If we are surrounded by dangers ranging from ecological catastrophe to extreme violence in communities all over the world, and if the arts themselves seem to be undergoing a process of rapid (de)materialization and (d)evolution, then does it not make sense to suggest rather strongly a perspective that might provide help?
Even if the arts remain a narrow zone of creative activity within our bureaucratized and technologized culture, we need visual art that is based on ethical aesthetics and informed by an apocalyptic sensibility. Related to this, I have been doing much thinking lately about the ways in which technology may be interpreted as a branch of moral philosophy. Here I am influenced by my intensive study of Mikhail Bakhtin's early work.(2) Thoroughly familiar with the Kantian framework, Bakhtin argued vehemently that aesthetics must be connected to ethics. By extension, one might argue that the Kantian separation of science from the spheres of ethics and aesthetics was a wrong move. Totally rationalized science and technology; ethics limited to narrow definitions of "family values" and the like; aestheticized arts unconnected to life: no wonder we are in the midst of quarrelsome debates about nuclear energy/ weapons/waste, genetic engineering, and censorship. Ethical aesthetics does not hesitate to engage questions about technology; indeed, it seeks to reconnect the aesthetic to the scientific and ethical domains of culture.
As I argue this point of view, I discuss the diverse work of artists presently using electronic media: multimedia performances such as Rachel Rosenthal's filename: FUTUR-FAX; site-specific interactive installations, such as Bill Seaman's Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue; digitally processed images combining drawing, painting, collage or montage, and photography, such as Camilla Benolirao Griggers's Alienations of the Mother Tongue; CD-ROMs such as MANUAL's Constructed Forest; installations such as Bill Viola's Heaven and Earth, using computer, holographic, and laser technologies; and multimedia sculptures such as E.G. Crichton's Broken Record. How can I best demonstrate what an apocalyptic sensibility looks like?
A vision of life in the future has haunted me for years. A person lives alone, in one room. All the needs of that person are fulfilled by a machine: food, contact with others, work. Everything is filtered by a complex of dials, tubes, compartments, and screens that define the parameters of the room. People live underground or in a great dome, in recycled air and artificially lit spaces. From time to time, in musing about the source of this grim vision, I have asked friends if they were at all familiar with it.
More recently, I have grown increasingly concerned about the impact of the "broadcast," that broadly cast media net that defines consumer culture and transnational nonresponsive capitalism.(3) Simultaneously, in considering the impact of electronic media in our lives, my reading has moved in everbroadening circles. Twice I encountered references to E. M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" that made me want to read it. There, in terse prose, was the description I had visualized for so long. Written in 1909, and published in 1928 in a collection of stories titled The Eternal Moment, this was Forster's only attempt at science fiction. I must have read the story in my adolescence. Forster's vision of reality, of that future world, chills me.
In another room, a single spotlight shines on a fax machine that begins to hum. A disembodied God-like male voice intones anthropocentric doctrine: "Man" is the climax of evolution, the sine qua non, the raison d'etre for the world, the rightful master of all that is. Soon, papers begin to drop to the floor from the fax machine. The light fades; now we see a room with chairs, a washbasin, a phone - meager accouterment of a life. Urgent, nearly hysterical voices replace the omnipresent speaker. A door slams; a woman enters the room, breathless. She locks the door, runs to peer carefully through an imaginary window. This room is her home; she is safe at last.
