Technology

Marx, Freud, and … McLuhan

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Just wanted to pass along Jeet Heer’s piece, “Divine Inspiration” in The Walrus, on Marshall McLuhan, his legacy, and his Catholicism.  Excerpts below.  Click through for the whole piece which is not long at all.

  • It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, [Norman] Mailer — a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns — comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason. Mailer once observed that McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.”
  • Indeed, his faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker. Belonging to a Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most intellectuals of his era. The global reach and ancient lineage of the Church encouraged him to frame his theories as broadly as possible, to encompass the whole of human history and the fate of the planet. The Church had suffered a grievous blow in the Gutenberg era, with the rise of printed Bibles leading to the Protestant Reformation. This perhaps explains McLuhan’s interest in technology as a shaper of history. More deeply, the security he felt in the promise of redemption allowed him to look unflinchingly at trends others were too timid to notice.
  • Like Marx and Freud, he was an intellectual agitator, a conceptual mind expander, the yeast in the dough. After Marx, we can no longer ignore the reality of class difference; after Freud, we can’t pretend that our mental life isn’t saturated with sexual impulses; after McLuhan, we can’t imagine that technology is just a neutral tool. Moreover, like Darwin and Marx, McLuhan is no longer just one man but rather a living and evolving body of thought.

A few months ago I posted a link to a YouTube clip of the Mailer/McLuhan debate here, and here is a piece on Chesterton’s influence on McLuhan.

Incidentally, while pairing McLuhan with the likes of Marx, Darwin, and Freud is in some respects incongruous, what they do have in common is an awareness, sometimes overplayed, of the external forces shaping and influencing human thought  and personality.  What may set McLuhan apart on this score is his unwillingness to slide into determinism:

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”  — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The Unsettledness at the Heart of our Experience

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Unsettled — I’m beginning to think that is a helpful word to capture what it feels like to be alive at present.

[Okay, fair warning, what follows is more speculative and exploratory than what I usually feel comfortable writing on here.  Thoughts and criticism welcome.]

Unsettled is usually used in conversation to mean something like troubled or worried or disconcerted.  More literally it suggests being unanchored, untethered, without grounding, deracinated, adrift, without center.  To view it another way, it is to speak of alienation.

Is it legitimate to speak of alienation in the context of ubiquitous social networks and communication?  Might it be that our connectedness veils a deeper alienation that bubbles up to the surface of consciousness as a pervasive unsettledness?  This is my hypothesis for the moment.

We have known for a long time that as moderns we are no longer connected to place in any significant sense.  Mobility and the autonomy that it purchases come at a cost.  We hardly expect to die in the place we were born.  Most of us will move many times, from city to city, or state to state, or even country to country, before we finally move to Florida or Arizona.  Each move uproots us.  With each move we start over again to some degree.  Many of us are hard pressed to name our home in any traditional sense, so home is simply where we happen to be.  We are, then, spatially or geographically unsettled.

Is there a sense in which we are also temporally unsettled?  Is there an alienation at the heart of our experience of time as well as place?  Here I am thinking again of our mediated experience of the present.  Consider what we might call simply lived experience as a kind of baseline.  Life carried on with a certain immediacy, life lived as a subject interacting with the world beyond our skin.  Now consider what I’m going to call, perhaps problematically*, mediated experience.  This is life lived with a view to its own (re)presentation, life as conscious performance — for the camera, for Facebook, for our blog, etc.  At such times it seems we have inserted a layer of mediation between the present and our experience of it.  If so, might we then speak of a temporal alienation, a temporal unsettledness? Are we not only untethered from place, but also from time?

When we experience life with a view to its future presentation, with what Nathan Jurgenson has aptly called “documentary vision”, we are no longer in the moment as subject.  We are, so to speak, no longer acting in our own life, we are directing; we have become spectators of our own lives.  In a sense we have objectified ourselves; we are looking at our selves. In my memories of events, I often see only the image of pictures I am in.  The memory is not my own first person memory, it is an image that stands in for my own lived experience of the event in which I am an object and not the subject — perhaps because I was not, properly speaking, experiencing the event as a lived experience.

If there is, in fact, a vague unsettled quality to our experience, perhaps it is because we have managed to uproot ourselves not only from place and the stability it brings, but also from the flow of time, from the lived present, in such a way that there is something like an oddly disjointed quality to our sense of self — as if we were watching a film with a time lag between the image and the sound.

While not exactly what T. S. Eliot had in mind, we might say that this begins to answer his poetic query, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?”

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* I say “problematically” because at some level, in some sense all experience is mediated even if only by our own use of language in our minds.

“Its beauty puts to shame all our doubts”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments
Stanisław Masłowski, Moonrise, 1884

“The whole world stops as this stunning dancer rises,” Alessandro said, “and its beauty puts to shame all our doubts.”

As Alessandro, the protagonist in Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, prepares to leave for university, his father tells him, “You’ll learn more in your journeys to and from Bologna, if you make them on horseback, than from all your professors combined.”  Alessandro’s narratorial voice adds, “he had almost been right.”

A Soldier of the Great War is the tale of an Italian veteran of the First World War who recounts his life story years later during a long walk with a young man he meets by chance.  It is, among other things, a book about beauty and the kind of attention to the world necessary to recognize it.  Alessandro believes in the redemptive power of beauty and throughout the story he shows himself to be remarkably attuned to the instances of beauty that permeate our experience.  Not only the beauty of a majestic moonrise, but also the beauty in more prosaic scenes.

In her absence, and in the absence of anyone like her, he was drawn to  many things that, in being beautiful, were her allies — the blue of the stage-set in the floodlights, the grace of a cat as it turned its small lion-like face to question a human movement, a fire that blazed from within the dark of a blacksmith’s shop or a baker’s and caught his eye as he passed, a single tone arising from a cathedral choir to shock a jaded congregation with it unworldly beauty, the mountaintops as snow was lashed from them by blue winds, the perfect and uncontrived smile of a child.

In his Kenyon College commencement address from 2005, David Foster Wallace, with the kind of earnestness that he was uniquely capable of pulling off, similarly insisted that

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Attention again. Attention to beauty, attention in order to love well.  My worry is that the habits we form in a wired, connected, networked, always online, linked in world combat the sort of attention that Alessandro practices as well as the kind of attention that Wallace advocated. Nothing captures this more than the posture we are all so adept at striking now: head down, focused on a small screen, with the world going by all around us — unnoticed, unattended.

The devices themselves don’t demand this, and there are ways of using them so that they do not become the enemies of attention. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a propensity toward uses and practices that form habits of misdirected  and fractured attention.

Helprin and Wallace, each in their own way, push us to look up and take notice; to come up out of the digital waters for breath and for beauty and for love.  To see, to really see the world around us and to get out of our heads long enough to be attentive to others — that is our challenge.

Bio(hacker)ethics

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Listening to  NPR a couple of days ago, I heard journalist Marcus Wohlsen being interviewed  about his recent book, Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life.  Here is the part of the interview that caught my attention:

RAZ: And of course, the question that is probably on everyone’s mind right now is: If these biohackers can do some of these amazing things, I mean, couldn’t they accidentally or maybe intentionally do something bad, you know, like unleash smallpox?

Mr. WOHLSEN: It’s a tricky question. You know, in theory, the danger is there. Science has the ability to create a polio virus from scratch or to create a smallpox virus from scratch. But, you know, in reality, these are still things that are challenging for professional scientists. This isn’t what the biohackers are doing right now or capable of doing right now or desiring to do.

So you could worry about that. You could worry that somebody would make a big mistake and create a sort of microbial version of Frankenstein’s monster or, you know, a terrorist might start playing with this stuff and create something nefarious.

But, you know, really, if you’re going to start questioning whether it’s safe for people to be doing this at home, you really have to start questioning, you know, the whole field of biotechnology and genetic engineering and where it’s moving.

Well, yes you would, wouldn’t you?

Kindles, Books, and Half-hearted Endorsements of the New

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Megan McArdle on the Kindle and the Book:

The Kindle was only released in November of 2007, just three-and-a-half years ago.  By 2009, Kindle book sales briefly surpassed print sales on the day after Christmas.  In July of 2010, the eBook format overtook hardcovers, and six months later, it surpassed paperbacks.

Today, according to Amazon, eBooks have surpassed print books entirely; they are selling more Kindle editions than they are selling from all of their print formats combined.  Since April 1st, they’ve sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print editions.

She is not surprised and this is part of the reason why:

And like many Kindle owners, I’ve found that I buy more books than I used to.  The impulse purchases are now completely irresistible: I can have the new memoir about someone’s dead tax cheat of a husband right this instant, rather than waiting two whole days . . . by which time, I’ll have forgotten about the Washingtonian excerpt that made me want to read it.

Score another one for the frictionless life and disposable reality.

She concludes:

I’m pretty sure the print book’s days are numbered for anything except specialty applications.  The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.

But wait, there is a tinge of melancholy:

… it will change a lot of the dynamics of life for book people.  My first adult books were pulled from my parents’ giant trunk of mystery novels, and the shelves in their bedrooms–will there be a family Kindle account, and will they be able to control access to the juicy stuff?  Peter and I are already wondering if we shouldn’t merge our Amazon account, but do I really want my archives cluttered up with his comic books and movie tomes?  Does he want to have to scroll through a long line of trashy police procedurals?  What will happen to the pleasures of pulling a random book from the shelves of a home where you are a weekend guest?

Not too worry, it was only momentary:

They’ll be replaced by other pleasures, like instant gratification.  And it’s probably more gain than loss.

Or was it:

But I’m just a little bit sad, all the same.

Why do we feel compelled to ratify what are surely trivial pleasures, if pleasures at all, while suppressing our instinctive regret for the passing of deeper more substantives pleasures?  This is not an indictment of the Kindle, nor a defense of the book.  I’m just intrigued by the recurring “this is better, yes its better, it must be better it’s new and the old is passing, it must pass” feel that attaches to pieces like this.  Who exactly is being convinced?

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H/T to Mr. Greenwald for passing the McArdle post along.