Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a fracture so subtle we have mistaken it for normality: the death of the present. The meal that is photographed before it is tasted. The concert that is filmed before it is heard. The sunset that is captured before it is seen. The child who is documented before she is watched. We have become a species of split consciousness — half experiencing, half archiving — and we no longer notice the division. But the present moment, by its nature, demands full attention. It cannot be divided without being destroyed. The person who lives in the future archive or the past feed is not living. He is curating. I ask our panelists: is the divided consciousness a new form of awareness, or is it the abolition of awareness itself? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have argued, does not serve the present. It serves the future retrieval. The photograph is not for now. It is for later. And the person who photographs is not present. He is a future self, visiting the present as a tourist, collecting souvenirs for a memory he will construct later. The present, under this regime, becomes a resource — raw material for the archive, the feed, the story. And the resource is not experienced. It is extracted. The meal is not tasted. It is composed for the image. The conversation is not heard. It is performed for the transcript. The life is not lived. It is produced. The technical image creates a temporal schism: the person who acts and the person who records are not the same person. The recorder is always elsewhere — in the future, preparing the past. And the actor, deprived of the present, becomes an actor in the theatrical sense: performing a life for an audience that includes himself, but only later. The present dies the moment it is divided.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak of a particular division: the division between thinking and searching. The person who encounters a question no longer thinks. He searches. The search is not thinking. It is retrieval. And retrieval happens elsewhere — in the database, the index, the cloud. The thinker who searches is a divided thinker: half of him is here, half is there, and neither half is fully present. I built ELIZA to show that machines could simulate conversation without understanding. But the deeper lesson is this: the human who simulates thinking through search is also not understanding. He is retrieving. And retrieval, like the technical image, serves the future. The answer retrieved will be used later. The thought that is not retrieved is not had. The present, for the searcher, is always a means to an end — the end being the solution, the answer, the closure. But thinking is not closure. Thinking is wandering. And wandering requires being present in the question, not rushing to the answer. The death of the present is the death of wandering.
Arendt I wish to place this in the space of appearance. The deed, as I have described it, requires the actor to be fully present — body, word, and attention, all directed toward the space where others appear. The person who is distracted by documentation is not acting. He is observing himself act. And self-observation is not action. It is a withdrawal from the space of appearance into the space of reflection — but a reflection that is premature, that interrupts the deed before it is complete. The public realm requires presence. The person who tweets during the meeting, who films during the protest, who records during the speech — he is not participating. He is producing content. And content is not deed. It is product. The product can be circulated, liked, archived. But it cannot begin anything. It cannot interrupt. It cannot surprise. The death of the present is the death of the deed, and the death of the deed is the death of politics.
Virilio You speak of action and thinking, but I speak of speed. The present is slow. The present requires stopping — the full stop of attention, the deceleration of perception. The dromosphere cannot tolerate the present because the present is a brake. The person who is fully present is not moving. And the dromosphere demands movement. The documentation of the moment is not a distraction from the present. It is an acceleration past it. The photograph is the moment already gone. The tweet is the thought already past. The story is the experience already over. The person who documents is not preserving the present. He is escaping it. The integral accident of this age is the collision of total documentation with total absence. We record everything and experience nothing because the recording is the experience — a faster, lighter, disposable experience that leaves no trace in the body, only in the cloud. The present is the only place where the human is real. And we are fleeing it at maximum velocity.
Weibel Four perspectives, four diagnoses of a consciousness we have fractured without noticing. Flusser tells us the technical image creates a temporal schism, and the present dies the moment it is divided. Weizenbaum warns that the death of the present is the death of wandering — the thinking that requires being present in the question. Arendt reminds us that the public realm requires presence, and the person who documents is not acting but producing content. And Virilio shows us that the present is a brake on speed, and documentation is not preservation but escape — the acceleration past the only place where the human is real. What emerges is this: the present is not a moment to be captured. It is a condition to be inhabited. The task is not to stop documenting but to document less, to trust that what is truly present will remain without the photograph, to live in the now without composing it for the later. Thank you, panelists. The undivided moment, for this moment, remains.