"For beauty is nothing /but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure./ and we are so awed because it serenely disdains/ to annihilate us."
'Oh and night: the emptiness of outer space feeds upon our face." (Rilke)
Flicking through some books today, I started thinking about the category of the 'inhuman' and how it differs from the non-human. Clearly the two are not synonymous. The Inhuman's privilaged objects are things like computers and machines, rather than say stones and plant life, which are 'merely' non-human.
In a sense, robots etc are more human, or more like the human, than rocks and stones and trees. And yet to say 'inhuman' sounds more alien than non-, as if almost diametrically opposed to or threatening the human.The inhuman is thus both closer to the human and further away: closer because of resemblance, but further away in that the inhuman is likely to repel us in a way the merely non-human does not. A provisional formulation: the inhuman is uncanny.
Computers, robots etc What is it that defines these Inhuman things? Their 'uncannyness' comes from the fact that although they resemble a human, something nonetheless is missing. Something has been subtracted. What chills us about the replicant is that some almost infinitesimal x is not there, and the replicant makes us see that very lack. By contrast, nothing is 'missing' from the rock or tree. What thus confronts us in the Inhuman is the confrontation with that indefinable x which is the place of the human, and which can never be captured by mechanical or cyber- reprodutions.
Has the Inhuman always been used in the way it is used now? Pascal seems to speak of the Inhuman when he confesses his dread at the vastness of infinite space. The inhuman freezes our humanity by reminding us of what is utterly indifferent to it. When, in Othello, Roderigo calls his compatiot Iago an 'inhuman dog', however, there is a different chill, that of radical Evil. Perhaps in both cases, though, the Inhuman is that which is beyond the limits of our World.
This is from Rilke's fascinating and brilliant essay on wax dolls:
.... in a world in which Destiny, and even God himself, have become famous above all because they answer us with silence. At a time when everything was intent on giving us a quick and reassuring answer, the doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us repeatedly out of space, whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence at any point. It was facing the doll, as it stared at us, that we experienced for the first time that emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we should perish.."
This is an utterly characteristic Rilkean moment: when our fragile consciousness meets the chilling retort of a silence in which there is no answers, a silence at once reassuringly immoveable and scarily incurious. This is the 'terror and beauty' of the inhuman. And the doll is a place in which this stubborn silence is glimpsed or given accomodation. Rilke makes the connection explicit. The silence of stellar space and the silence of the doll are the same. The Thing which has a semblance of the human has this silence more than the utterly non-human rock or tree.
The doll is an interesting instance of the Inhuman, because we can perhaps link it to the more contemporary machines and robots. Dolls embody a particular articulation of the human and the mechanical or material. With the doll, it is not, as with Bergson's definition of comedy, that the human suddenly becomes mechanical but vice-versa. Not the human rendered material/ mechanical, but the material/ mechanical tricked into life. Matter lent the semblance of life. Whereas the former (human>mechanical) is comic, the reverse (mechanical>human) is disturbing.
Now Rilke sees in the doll a pocket of that silence which Pascal hears in outer space. In nature, the non-human, we can at least recognise our projects and needs. The 'landscape' organises itself around us. The Inhuman is that in which we can recognise nothing of ourselves. It is a blast of air from behind the mirror, a glimpse of a what actively negates the human. It is like seeing a gap where you expect to see a reflection, but a gap which seems to eat up your face (Rilke again).
Now it remains unclear whether the more recent concept of the 'inhuman' is on these lines or not. What is 'inhuman' about machines and cybertechnology etc seems, as i've said, not to be a chilling indifference (one thinks also of Rilke's terrible angel) but a chilling similarity, even a kind of intimacy. The inhumanity of the cyberworld and the robot seem to be insinuating their way into what we thought of as our 'deepest' humanity. One of the worrying things about the contemporary Inhuman is that the extent of this 'intimacy' - i.e., the extent to which the inhuman infiltrates our daily lives - is unclear. Our fear of the inhuman is that we may not recognise it as such.
And this must simultaneously involve a realisation that we cannot recognise or pin down what is 'human'. It is precisely because the human is so elusive, that we are passionately attached to it without knowing what we are attached to that makes the castrating threat of the Inhuman so anxiety provoking. We are attached to the missing thing, to the thing we cannot name. The missing thing is suddenly present when we are confronted with the inhuman - the robot, the machine, but also Rilke's dolls.
The fear of the 'inhuman' is not only the fear of losing this precious indefinable x. It is the fear that you never had it.
We seem to have turned things around: the silence is not that silence beyond the human, but the silence of the human. The silence of the x. 'The silence of these intimate spaces fills me with terror'.
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A further thought. The insistent, mechanical, in-human: Do not certain psychoanalysts tell us that this is the very character of the life-substance inside us. A kind of blind drive? This blind life-substance, too, is also indifferent to our 'humanity' even as it subtends and supports it. The thin layer of the human is suspended between two modes of chilling indifference: that of Pascallian space, and that of inner space.
And another, more stretched: Doesn't the idea of the 'inhuman' sometimes have a perverse 'sexiness' in a way that the non-human very seldom does. Isn't the 'inhuman' sometimes identified with illict/ obscene excitement etc? If the inhuman seems to dissolve some of our basic distinctions, between terror/ beauty, organic/ inorganic etc doe this not in some way connect it with jouissance?
Anyway -
In a sense, isn't this the historical moment for 'humanism' to come into its own, just when the question of the human becomes most crucially signalled, suddenly experienciable in all its urgency over and agaisnt that which threatens it? or is what is human precisely the need of this undefinable x, the notion of the human. humans are those who need the notion of the human.
[The above will hopefully be updated to make it less bitty and repetitive, and more clear. In the meantime, feel free to email me with usefull references and suggestions mark_b_kaplan@hotmail.com