The Alien and Its Media

"The soul feels like a stranger on earth." Georg Trakl

Media are the sum of alien and human being, an unholy hybrid which never 
distills into pure form because both elements forever compete for 
meaning. In an attempt to neutralize this eternal battle for 
significance, three strategies have surfaced, each of which seeks to 
silence one of either interferents or else force them into harmonious 
partnership.

The first strategy aims to civilize the media, a democratic movement 
which puts its faith in the interference-free communication of a 
wide-open society. With its belief in the existence of pure information, 
it naively presumes that the others will voluntarily restrict themselves 
to the human, all too human. It believes that mutual understanding will 
naturally arise on the level of pure communication. This form of 
censorship exiles the alien to the same camp that has long been used by 
humanity to incarcerate the mentally disturbed, diseased, perverted, 
racially impure, animals, and criminals. It is claimed that the free 
distribution of information will result in an increased awareness and 
thus contribute to the dialogue between the free citizens of a free 
society. The alien, who has accepted this challenge, turns this strategy 
against itself by becoming the leading item in its guise of catastrophe.

The second strategy defects to the alien, the absolutely foreign. The 
price it pays is the reduction of media to art and of alien to evil. This 
typical nineteenth-century charge against the hypocritical bourgeoisie is 
a demand on modern media to become appallingly strange. Its program is 
not recognition, but confusion. This way, it believes it can evoke the 
"ardor of a foreign seduction"; profound awe; fascination. But by 
surrendering all pretense of communication on the premise of artistic 
freedom, it hopes to avert evil by creating it itself. The sublimation of 
evil into the sublime intends to confine the alien's dangerous 
unpredictability to the aesthetic experience of the uncodeable, to be 
consumed within an institutional framework.

The third strategy flaunts the friendly relationship between medium and 
alien on the level of everyday life. The incredible is banalized by 
imagining a benign creature behind the terrifying masks of alien and 
human being. The alien high, such as the experience of speed or the void, 
is interpreted as a spiritual initiation into an environment that is a 
part of the cosmic universe. In this view, man has a natural gift to 
translate incomprehensible alien messages into words like "Auntie Hedl is 
with me" or "My name is Ashtar - greetings to my friends." The divine 
laser beams use state-of-the-art media to mediatize the elect who, in 
turn, use the same media to achieve a global output of their contacts. 
The hybrid character of mass media is not considered a threat, but is 
peacefully shared as a harmonious get-together.

The media are not out for communication, but for alienation. "Inasmuch as 
media communicate or enable communication, they do so as, and through, 
alienation" (Hegel). Natural contact with the media occurs only as long 
as their hybrid character is not emphasized and our attention remains 
focused on the human factor. Once the media makers and users become aware 
that it is the alien who drives their production of signs, the alien will 
opt for a new approach to the world. When a medium has exhausted its 
potential for the casual, it will become pure art, to be consigned to 
history as an example of degeneration. Artists who evoke the principle of 
evil can only accelerate the demise of their own genre. The new media 
launched by the alien will absorb so much enthusiasm that the bizarre 
alienating effects of the previous media's terminal phase are promptly 
forgotten.

The media genealogy is to be interpreted as the chronicle of the 
coming-out of the alien. Before the twilight of the gods, one still 
prepared for the material arrival of extraterrestrial brothers and 
sisters. Runways and signposts were constructed in the shape of 
earthworks and pyramids. It will always remain an archeological mystery 
whether the aliens landed just in time, left again after implanting the 
subconscious in primates, were here all along ("Are atoms spaceships?"), 
or arrive every day at the touch of a button.

They certainly must have felt at home in the Gutenberg galaxy for 
centuries. It has also been established that they have currently switched 
to immaterial modes of manifestation, through the intermediary stages of 
photography, film and radio. From the nineteenth century onwards, the 
soul (subsequently to be remodelled as the unconscious) in literature is 
increasingly experienced as a foreign body within the human body. Writers 
become "increasingly" receptive to the fact that their poetic mechanism 
is a vehicle for "outside powers": "I no longer think; I am being 
thought" (Marx). On moments like these, the alien feels obliged to steer 
humanity towards new media techniques. Through poltergeists, it 
introduces the Morse code, and through spiritist manifestations it 
creates the principle of photography. Soon, this in turn is used to 
record spirits, after which movies and television show nothing but 
ghosts. 

Contemporary media are hybridized by the alien through images tapped from 
the human unconscious: an inexhaustible reservoir of werewolves, holy 
virgins, superstars, teddy bears, oil barons, press hounds ... everybody 
on screen can be the alien. As soon as viewers come to realize this, 
television will be updated with equipment to eliminate the distance 
between image and experience by jacking in to the cerebral sensory 
center. From then on, the human factor will return as a personal 
hallucination within the unconscious, which will literally coincide with 
virtual space. As long as the alien is free to mix up images, it will not 
need to make any qualitative leaps to completely different kinds of 
media, although the possibility must never be excluded. It is only when 
we leave our own space-time and the alien drags us through the wormhole 
into the hinterlands that the end of the media as the hybrid principle is 
achieved.

The alien follows its own trajectory. It will not be confined, 
sublimated, or reconciliated. Its goals will remain hidden until the 
final message. But what is clear is that it is fond of intermingling with 
humans and feels no urge to disassociate itself from us. Its code of 
behaviour is that it simultaneously clings to us and observes a suitable 
distance. But the same rule applies to theory, which strives to coincide 
with its subject without being completely absorbed by it. Theory, too, 
defies dogmatic excommunication, considers delirium to be its limit, and 
requires a critical distance to retain its hybrid character. Just as the 
media are the alien's gift to humanity, so theory is humanity's gift to 
the alien.
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