Ghost in the Shell-Game: On the Mètic Mode of Existence, Inception and Innocence

I begin, then, properly, in and with the proper voice (that of Pierre Ménard).1 To begin, then, anew: The purpose of this study is to create an awareness of the significance of technical objects. Culture has become a system of defense against technics; now, this defense appears as a defense of man based on the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that there is a human reality in technical reality and that, if it is to fully play its role, culture must come to incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge and its sense of values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects should be the result of philosophical thought, which in this respect has to achieve what is analogous to the role it played in the abolition of slavery and in the affirmation of the val-ue of the human person. The opposition established between culture and technology, between man and machine, is false and is not well-founded; what underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. Behind the mask of a facile humanism it hides a reality that is rich in human efforts and natural forces, a reality that constitutes the world of techni-cal objects, mediators between nature and man.2 In Mamoru Oshii’s Inosensu (a.k.a. Ghost in the Shell 2),3 the inextricability of human and technical realities suggests that the established opposition between culture and nature, human and machine, is not only easily subverted, but ultimately so falsifiable that it can be technically manipulated so as to shed light on a dimension that remains indiscernible to human-ism: that it is by way of technical objects and technical existence that human beings most authentically relate to their living milieu and to living processes. Humans play with dolls/automata/avatars and wear masks (faces, façades) as part of their everyday lives, but they are ultimately blind to the technical connectors that animate them: “Life and death come and go like marionettes dancing on a table. Once their strings are cut, they easily crumble.”