Prosthetic Gods

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 26 Comments

A cadre of people decked out in half space suits, half combat armor walk through a desolate, arid wilderness toward a bunker.  A door opens revealing a passageway into an abandoned underground installation.  On a platform elevator they descend hundreds of feet.  As they continue through hexagonal corridors they notice a helmet, not unlike theirs, lying ominously on the ground.  Finally, they enter a room where a solitary metallic object suspended in mid-air spins on its axis.  One man removes his armor from his right arm and extends his now bare arm into an opening in the object.  The object stops spinning.  His comrades look on with apprehension; the man pulls out his arm.  As he does so his arm morphs into a mechanical, cyborg arm.  Then, and this is the climax, from the palm of his newly mechanized arm, the Droid X emerges.

Now there’s a commercial, and if you haven’t already seen it, you can watch for yourself at the end of this post.  I first saw this commercial sitting in the theater waiting for Inception to begin, only I didn’t immediately realize it was a commercial.  Had I walked in just then I would have assumed the previews had started.  A bit over-the-top perhaps, but maybe not.

There’s a lot that can be said about this elaborate piece of sci-fi marketing, but let’s take it at face value.  It is actually a rather straightforward dramatization of an important and intriguing metaphor:  technology as prosthesis.  Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of media studies, popularized the concept that our tools or technologies function as prosthetic extensions of our bodies.  For example, the hammer functions as an extension of the hand, the wheel as an extension of the foot, or electric technology functions as an extension of the nervous system.  McLuhan, however, was neither the first nor the last to employ the metaphor.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud suggested that,  “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god.”   But man also wore his prosthetic divinity awkwardly.  Freud goes on to say, “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”

Technology as a prosthetic enhancement has been a rich concept deployed by a variety of philosophers and critics including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway.  In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway in particular argued that our technologies have been making the line between natural and artificial, machine and organism, cyborg and human more than a little fuzzy.  Often the idea of technology as prosthetic is paired with the related metaphor of amputation — something gained, something lost — so that on the whole there is a certain ambiguity about our prosthetic tools.  You can read more about the concept in a well-written overview here, but I want to focus on the very simple idea that our technologies became a part of us.

Think about this in light of the question that I asked in yesterday’s post, “A God that Limps.” Why do we react so defensively when we hear someone criticize our technologies?  The concept of prosthesis suggests a compelling response:  because we take it not as a criticism of some object apart from us, but rather as an object that has become in some sense a part of us.  We hear such criticism as a criticism of ourselves.

The more seamlessly a technologies blends in with our bodies, the more attached we become.  Take the Blue Tooth enhanced cell phone, for example, responsible for all those people seemingly talking to themselves.  Notice how this metaphor helps explain that odd development.  The device has become transparent, we forget it is even there.  This makes the communication seem almost unmediated consequently causing us to act as naturally as if we were in the person’s presence (and only that person’s presence).  Or take the iTouch/iPhone/iPad that allows us to magically touch the Internet; now that is an extension of the central nervous system!  Gone is the clunky mouse or keyboard, we now appear to be touching the information itself, the layers of mediation seem to be peeling away.

The better these tools work, the more invisible they become; or, as the Droid X commercial suggests, the more they become a part of us.  Tweaking Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law just a little, we might say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from our bodies.  Naturally, we are pretty defensive of our bodies; not surprisingly we tend to be pretty defensive of our technologies as well.

Parodying our Self-referential Obsessions

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Folks at The Onion are masters of parody.  In this very funny clip they target World of Warcraft players, but they do so in a way that gets painfully close to all of us for whom the pleasures of Web 2.0 are tinged with a dash of narcissism.  It may be that charm of social media lies in watching other people watch us so that ultimately we are captivated by our own reflection.

h/t:  Mr. Gladding

A God that Limps

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Our technologies are not unlike our children; we react with reflexive and sometimes intense defensiveness if either is criticized.  Several years ago while teaching at a small private high school I forwarded an article to my colleagues.  This was a mistake.  The article raised some questions about the efficacy of computers in education.  I didn’t think then, nor do I now, that it was at all controversial.  In fact, I imagined that given the setting it would be of at least passing interest.  The article appeared in a respectable journal, was judicious in its tone, and cautious in its conclusions.  However, within a handful of minutes — hardly enough time to skim, much less read, the article — I was receiving rather pointed and even angry replies.

I was mystified, and not a little amused, by the responses.  Mostly though I began to think about why this measured and cautious article evoked such a passionate and visceral response.  Around the same time I stumbled upon Wendell Berry’s essay titled, somewhat provocatively, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” More arresting than the essay itself, however, were the letters that came in to Harper’s where the essay had been reprinted.  These letters, which now typically appear alongside the essay whenever it is anthologized, were caustic and condescending.  In response Berry wrote,

The foregoing letters surprised me with the intensity of the feelings they expressed. According to the writers’ testimony, there is nothing wrong with their computers; they are utterly satisfied with them and all that they stand for. My correspondents are certain that I am wrong and that I am, moreover, on the losing side, a side already relegated to the dustbin of history. And yet they grow huffy and condescending over my tiny dissent. What are they so anxious about?

Precisely my question.  Whence the hostility, defensiveness, agitation, and indignant, self-righteous anxiety?

I’m typing these words on a laptop and they will appear on a blog that exists on the Internet.  Clearly I am not, strictly speaking, a Luddite.  (Although, in light of Thomas Pynchon’s analysis of the Luddite as Badass, there may be a certain appeal.)  Yet, I do believe an uncritical embrace of technology may prove fateful, if not Faustian.

The stakes are high.  We can hardly exaggerate the revolutionary character of certain technologies throughout history:  the wheel, writing, the gun, the printing press, the steam engine, the automobile, the radio, the television, the Internet.  And that is a very partial list.  Katherine Hayles has gone so far as to suggest that as a species we have “codeveloped with technologies; indeed, it is no exaggeration,” she writes in Electronic Literature, “to say modern humans literally would not have come into existence without technology.”

We are, perhaps because of the pace of technological innovation, quite conscious of the place and power of technology in our society and in our own lives.  We joke about our technological addictions, but it is sometimes a rather nervous punchline.  It makes sense to ask questions.  Technology, it has been said, is a god that limps.  It dazzles and performs wonders, but it can frustrate and wreak havoc.  Good sense seems to suggest that we avoid, as Thoreau put it, becoming tools of our tools.  This doesn’t entail burning the machine; it may only require a little moderation.  At a minimum it means creating, as far as we are able, a critical distance from our toys and tools, and that requires searching criticism.

And we are back where we began.  It is that kind of searching criticism of our technologies that we seem allergic to.  So here is my question again:  Why do we react so defensively when we hear someone criticize our technologies?  Or, and this is entirely possible, is this not at all the case outside of my own quite limited experience?

Don Draper on Prozac

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment
John Hamm plays Don Draper (amctv.com)

That is the image that comes to mind while reading Ronald W. Dworkin’s “The Rise of the Caring Industry.” The caring industry consists of the “77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000, mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches” at work in the US today and the additional “400,000 nonclinical social workers and 220,000 substance abuse counselors working outside the official mental health system yet offering clients informal psychological advice nonetheless”  According to Dworkin this represents “more than a 100-fold increase in the number of professional caregivers over the last 60 years, although the general population has only doubled.”

Most conversations about what Dworkin has neatly labeled the caring industry eventually come around to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1965).  Both make the obligatory appearance, but in Dworkin’s view both are inadequate.  Regarding Lasch he writes,

Many people who go to counselors share nothing with the stereotypical self-absorbed neurotic.  On the contrary, they are average people with conventional values who face real-life problems but have no one to talk to.  Fully a third of the American population has undergone some form of psychotherapy.  It strains the imagination to think that the majority of them are narcissists.

Rieff was simply writing too soon to know the full import of the unfolding sea change in Western culture:

What Rieff had observed were the first stirrings of a new social order, one that would rest on a nation-spanning network of caring professionals.  Today, countless institutions and millions of people  are dependent to one degree or another on the caring industry.  Therapy is no longer just a “culture.”  In the form of professional caring, it has become our way of life.

Now we might question whether Dworkin’s take on Lasch and Rieff is itself adequate, but the main point he makes in bringing them up seems sound:  the profound transition in American life that gave rise to the caring industry predates the 1960’s and 1970’s.  The caring industry is rooted in the “seemingly placid 1950’s, when mass unhappiness and mass loneliness began.”  Dworkin goes on to remind us that

So great was people’s unhappiness during the 1950’s, and so suddenly did it emerge, that both the political and medical authorities called it a “mental health crisis.”  Rates of alcoholism and juvenile delinquency skyrocketed during the decade, which popular magazines dubbed the “Age of Anxiety.”

If you’re familiar with Mad Men, and just now it seems few are not, you’re probably taking exception to my title since Mad Men is set in the early 1960’s, not the 1950’s.  But keep in mind that the early sixties were much closer to the 1950’s than they were to “The Sixties” which really start up mid-decade and spill over into the 1970’s.  In a fascinating essay titled “The Other Sixties,” Bruce Bawer argued that the early sixties as a period had a certain integrity of its own, but it was still a period when “men wearing ties and neatly pressed suits on all occasions” was the norm.

Freud's Couch

And so the image of Draper on Prozac, or perhaps Draper on the couch, to imaginatively capture the period in which far-reaching transformations in American life gave rise to the caring industry.  This is, in fact, a connection made explicit in the first few episodes of the first season in which Betty, not Don, Draper ends up going to a psychiatrist for her “nerves.”  Part of Mad Men’s brilliance derives from its poignant, and sometimes painful, explorations of the growing  unhappiness and loneliness of the era that Dworkin identifies with the birth of the caring industry.  If this were all Dworkin was intending to drive home, that the caring industries roots go back to the 1950’s, then it would be merely an interesting and compelling historical narrative.  But there is more, Dworkin argues that the rise of the caring class was necessitated by the breakdown of peer groups which had previously provided the resources and support ordinary people relied upon to navigate the difficulties and hardships of life.

Today’s caring professionals offer the same service to lonely, unhappy people that friends and relatives once did . . .   People want to be able to go about their daily lives with the knowledge that someone is there for them.  This basic truth led to the rise of the caring industry.  Millions of unhappy people use professional counselors to compensate for having no one to talk to about their everyday problems.

Dworkin details a number of factors contributing to this sad state of affairs:  Americans were increasingly moving to new towns alone, “urban renewal projects that tore down impoverished but vibrant inner city neighborhoods,” decreasing attendance at church or synagogue, longer work hours, a loosening of family ties, and more.  The end result:  “many people found themselves with neither the time nor the energy to listen sympathetically to a friend’s problems.”

We were becoming, as a classic work of sociology from the 1950’s put it, The Lonely Crowd.

Dworkin concludes his essay by arguing that the rise of the caring industry is most significant because it marks the end of a civilization based on an ideology of love.  This is Dworkin’s most expansive and sweeping argument and, consequently, the most controversial and debatable; but there is a certain plausibility to it.  In his view,

Many people today meet their basic psychological needs, including self-esteem, fulfillment, and identity, not through a social system of friends, intimates, and communities, as people did in the age of love, but by working directly with a caring professional.  Although lonely, they are psychological stable, and society is spared the tumult of an earlier era when people satisfied these needs through loving communities.

Dworkin’s thesis possesses a certain explanatory elegance, but it also raises a number of questions.  I wonder, for example, what difference the rise of social media might make to his analysis.  Nonetheless, there is one claim Dworkin makes that strikes me as being quite right.  The chief problem with the ideology of love, as Dworkin describes it, is that it finally encouraged people to love humanity.  “But it is impossible to know humanity in the concrete; humanity is a fiction, it cannot be loved.”

We cannot love an abstraction.  But we can love and befriend the particular people that are our families, friends, and neighbors.  It is a messy business, loving real people; but apart from it, we become faceless members of the lonely crowd.

The Metaphysics of Baseball

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

America’s greatest contribution to human civilization?  According to David B. Hart:  baseball.

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

Read the rest of Hart’s Platonic reflections in “A Perfect Game” at First Things.