Experience, Time and the Religious: from Classical Subject to Technological System

Abstract

Abstract This essay addresses the question of experience in today's 'technological modernity'. The essay sets up the earlier classically modern notion of experience in Kantian critique and finds that it is irreducibly connected to Kant's self-identical subject. We interrogate the temporal dimension in Kant's transcendental aesthetic in the context of such experience and subjectivity. We then shift our attention to today's technological modernity. Here we first consider perhaps the dominant voice in cultural/social theory - in Badiou, Zizek and Lacan - in which the subject is constituted through the subtraction from experience in the context of a mathematical notion of time. This subtraction from experience takes place in the register of the real. We criticize this and attempt to rescue experience, through consideration of, not the real but the imaginary in the more phenomenological thinking on temporality of Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler. We then break with the apriorism of both Heidegger and Badiou in an attempt to take experience back to its radical empiricist roots. We do this through drawing on the religious thematic in the late science-fiction writing of Philip K. Dick. We set this up in contrast again to today's notion of the religious as subtraction from experience in Badiou's St Paul and Zizek's Christ. We draw on Dick's Gnosticism to reconstitute experience and the subject as a technological system. Dick's 'vast active living intelligence systems' operate, not in time, but as time. They constitute a socio-technical imaginary that engages structurally with cultural objects. Here experience is fundamentally empirical: yet this re-casting of the subject as socio-technical system at same time largely effaces the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental.Keywords experience, Kant, Stiegler, Badiou, event, technology, ontology, Philip K. Dick, gnosticism, religion, modernity, technological modernity, ChristologyThe notion of experience has long been central to social and cultural theory. Perhaps most centrally we have encountered it in Walter Benjamin's notion of 'shock experience'.1 Shock experience is central to Benjamin's understanding of urban modernity. In shock experience everyday continuity and predictability is interrupted by the quick and jarring succession of movements of, for example, the automobile assembly line or the succession of images in cinema. This sort of experience is rendered in German as Erlebnis and we encounter it more recently in the sociological work of Gerhard Schulze on 'Die Erlebnisgesellschaft'.2 But there is another equally central notion of experience, this time as the German Erfahrung. This is less the shock of a succession of experiences, but the sort of empirical experience upon which knowledge is grounded. We encounter it at the outset of modernity in Francis Bacon's thinking on the experiment in scientific method: indeed in French the English 'experiment' is rendered as l'experience. And it appears, as empiricism becomes more explicitly formulated, in Locke and in Hume. Both Erlebnis and Erfahrung, as all experience must be, are very much based on perception. But Erlebnis is experience as immediate perception of, for example, the spectacular, that is connected with the disruption of the everyday.3 The second kind of experience (Erfahrung) is also a question of sense perception, yet is tied into knowledge and the process by which we acquire knowledge.Both types of experience are an important stake in today's global information culture. The age of technological media gives us a society of the image, of the interface, of surfaces in which the volumetrism of classical and neo-classical columns is flattened out into the surface of Robert Venturi's decorated shed,4 or the hundred foot high building side images of today's Downtown Los Angeles.5 It gives us the proliferation of media screens, not just in private but in public spaces, the giant public World Cup screens in one hundred city central squares, electronic adverts, the subways full of smartphone screens, of iPads, Kindles, MacBook Air and a further array of portables. …