Lovecraft y la ansiedad de la Red
El principio de La Llamada de Cthulhu no podría ser más inquietante para quienes tengan dudas acerca del apocalipsis cibernético que a veces imaginamos:
"Lo más piadoso del mundo, creo, es la incapacidad de la mente humana para relacionar todos sus contenidos. Vivimos en una plácida isla de ignorancia en medio de negros mares de infinitud, y no estamos hechos para emprender largos viajes. Las ciencias, esforzándose cada una en su propia dirección, nos han causado hasta ahora poco daño; pero algún día el ensamblaje de todos los conocimientos disociados abrirá tan terribles perspectivas de la realidad y de nuestra espantosa situación en ella, que o bien enloqueceremos ante tal revelación, o bien huiremos de esa luz mortal y buscaremos la paz y la seguridad en una nueva era de tinieblas". (En Felices Pesadillas, Valdemar, 2003, p. 849).
La Red podría interpretarse como ese "ensamblaje de todos los conocimientos", con efectos deslumbrantes y sin duda inesperados. Falta cruzar los dedos, y procurar que no se nos transforme la cibernética en una "abominación que aguarda y sueña en las profundidades"...
Las obras de Lovecraft están en red en el pintoresco sitio gótico Dagonbytes (www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/)
Sobre el "apocalipsis de la comunicación total" en The Matrix, en Olaf Stapledon y en Teilhard de Chardin escribí un trabajo aparecido en el libro Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004). Aquí va un trocito:
We could perhaps summarise Teilhard de Chardin’s theories as the convergence of Christianity, Hegelianism and evolutionary theory. Teilhard de Chardin contemplated human history as the gradual development of spirituality, from inanimate matter, through living forms and incipient consciousness to the full development of the spiritual potential of mankind. Teilhard’s is thus an optimistic theory of progress: the development of civilisation, science and thought will ultimately give rise to the Godhead that Christian and other mythologies place both at the beginning and the end of history-and in Teilhard there is indeed a seed of the Godhead even in the primitive universe, as it teleologically strives towards consciousness and unity. Such anthropocentric illusionism is, of course, the mythical side of Teilhard’s theories-as has been pointed out by Stephen Jay Gould (1990). The directionality of history is for Gould a perspectival effect, a retrospective illusion created by the vantage point of human observers.
Teilhard presents in an attractive way a theory of globalisation which, in spite of its pseudo-science, is for many an aesthetically (and ethically) satisfactory conciliation of progressivism, evolutionary thought and Christian spirituality. In The Formation of the Noosphere (1947), Teilhard wrote:
"No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively". (Quoted in Fusionanomaly 2002)
As the word "network" in the previous quotation may suggest, there exists indeed a contemporary offshoot of cybernetic Teilhardianism which sees in computer technology and in the development of the Internet and cell phones the road towards a spiritual integration of mankind in an overmind. The reflections on "Gaia Theory, the Noosphere and GaiaMind" by the New Age essayist Jim Fournier (2002) may serve as an example of the Teilhard/Ecology/Internet connection. It is worth noting that the Internet sites dealing with these New Age concerns abound in spelling mistakes and in links to astrological websites.
Teilhard’s vision, or that of these New Age visionaries, is a utopian dream of perfect communion in God or Nature. But a symmetrical line of reasoning has also given rise to dystopian, or nightmarish versions of globalisation and of the communicative apocalypse. Total communication becomes total alienation or totalitarian control in dystopias such as Zamyatin’s We (1924) or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The alienation effect is perhaps even greater if the dystopian controller is not a human being, not even a living being, but some sort of machine. The "robotic takeover," the rebellion of intelligent machines and the replacement of mankind by robots, has long been a staple science fiction motif, but it acquires more threatening overtones after the fin de siècle, as computers have indeed invaded our personal space, and the machinery which is bound to dehumanise the world quickly spreads a web connecting the human and the non-human, luring us into the cybernetic interface, and in fact transforming human society into one vast cyborg.
Fin de la autocita.
En Orwell o en The Matrix, el final de la historia es un Cthulhu cibernético, y no precisamente el Dios que Teilhard esperaba. Ya se sabe: es cuestión de perspectiva. Los intereses de los apicultures no son los de las abejas, y los intereses de los dioses no coinciden con los de los humanos.
2 comentarios
José Angel -
jio -
mitología angustiosa como poca creó este hombre. la obra gráfica que ha inspirado a muchos autores también es muy extensa