Amor Technologiae : Marshall Mcluhan As Philosopher of Technology [1 ed.] 9789057181870

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Amor Technologiae

Amor Technologiae Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Technology – Toward a Philosophy of Human-Media Relationships Yoni Van Den Eede

Cover design: Frisco, Oostende Book design: Yoni Van Den Eede Print: Silhouet, Maldegem © Cover photo: Yoni Van Den Eede © 2012 VUBPRESS Brussels University Press VUBPRESS is an imprint of ASP nv (Academic and Scientific Publishers nv) Ravensteingalerij 28 B-1000 Brussels Tel. + 32 (0)2 289 26 50 Fax + 32 (0)2 289 26 59 E-mail [email protected] www.vubpress.be

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In memory of Jozef Seurs

‘Dood ben ik pas, als jij mij bent vergeten’ (Bram Vermeulen)

Acknowledgements As much as this work is built around the notion of relationships, it roots itself in relation. Admittedly, my fingers were tapping along on the keyboard in writing it. But the responsibility for it – though I am prepared to fully take it – should really be smeared out across the networks of people and things I have been in throughout the past years. Looking back now, I almost feel myself immersed in those “medial constellations.” And in immense gratitude. Given that this book grew out of a doctoral dissertation, none of the following would have ever been if it were not for Marc Van den Bossche, my former supervisor. Working with him was like the “dream of technology” I describe below, but on the level of human relationships: no friction, just construction. His insight as well as his intellectually and existentially uncompromising attitude have influenced not only my work but my outlook on life as such deeply, and I can merely hope that they at least shimmer through a few of the sentences in this text. As a coach, guide, facilitator, and now and then even therapist in one, he easily qualified for the epithet of ideal supervisor. But much more than this, I would call him a friend. With my co-supervisor, Karl Verstrynge, I was just as lucky. As the person who introduced me to Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, he accounts for one of the first sparks that set the wheels of this work in motion. But his unremitting support, conceptual demandingness, astute feedback, and moreover his ever good spirits – even in conversing about melancholic music – were invaluable in keeping them rolling. I thank the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for funding my research and the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel for accommodating me. The life of a PhD student in philosophy can be solitary at times, but this was in my case more than compensated for by the presence of some amazing colleagues at my department and at the Department of Communication Studies. Through many warm conversations, friendly encouragement, and practical assistance they contributed to this work in ways that they may not even be aware of. I cannot possibly name all of them here, but I certainly need to mention Emilie Van Daele, Wim Van Moer, Gert Goeminne, Joke Beyl, Joke Bauwens, Nathalie Gontier, Else

7

Walravens, Johan Stuy, Robrecht Vandemeulebroecke, Mixel Kiemen, Katleen Gabriëls, Karen François, Patrick Allo, Jens Ottoy, Jo Dirix, Evelien Rooms, Hans De Canck, Eva Van Passel, Caroline Pauwels, Hilde Mattens, and Viviane Servranckx. I had the great fortune to travel across oceans to participate in the most wonderful conferences. But perhaps my truly great fortune was that that enabled me to meet the most wonderful people; many of them who helped me, in one way or another, with the construction of this little edifice. Once again I cannot be exhaustive – I remember all encounters, brief or frequent, with fondness – so an assuredly incomplete list must necessarily suffice. Thank you: Peter-Paul Verbeek, Paul Levinson, Andrew Feenberg, Graham Harman, Paul Majkut, Lance Strate, Eric McLuhan, Derrick de Kerckhove, Elena Lamberti, Dominique ScheffelDunand, David Zweig, Rob MacDougall, Pieter Lemmens, Stan Kranc, Graeme Kirkpatrick, Stacey O’Neal Irwin, Gregory Cameron, Paul Grosswiler, Corey Anton, Dennis Weiss, Robert C. Scharff, Marco Adria, Ashley Shew, Mogens Olesen, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Laureano Ralon, Barry Vacker, Lars Lundsten, Matteo Ciastellardi, Emanuela Patti, Alex Kuskis, Paolo Granata, Dennis Skocz, Alberto Carillo Canán, and Lynne Alexandrova. One special mention should be made, and that is Bob Logan. With endless hospitality and infectious enthusiasm he has taken me in tow, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Family and friends were instrumental in encouraging me through my efforts, if not by infusing them with fresh perspectives, then certainly by naughtily but deservedly reminding me of their pettiness. If a man can only begin to be happy if living with people that unconditionally care for but not spare him, I consider myself supermundanely blessed. Despite fear of not giving everyone their right due, I dare to specifically thank my mother and father, Rosie, Gert, Jarno and Jenna, Johan, Jeroen, Tineke, Nico, Jan, Sebastian, Tina, Tineke, Bert, Tom, Cindy, Philippe, and Nico. Finally, then, I owe the raw fact of the existence of this work, filled to the brim with elusive ponderings on medial relationships, to the good luck that I had of being able to let it ripen within the haven of a real loving one. I thank An for making that relationship happen, and for bringing me, like Noÿs Lambent in Asimov’s tale, from Eternity into Infinity.

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Content ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................7
 CONTENT ........................................................................................................................9
 INTRODUCTION................................................................................. 15
 1
 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................17
 1.1
 The Dream and the Waking Up .................................................................17
 1.2
 Approaching Technology: Theory and Praxis............................................18
 1.3
 1.4
 1.5
 1.6


Visions of Technology: PhilTech and Media Ecology................................20
 Our Approach: Amor Technologiae ...........................................................23
 Technology and Media: Many-Headed Monsters .....................................27
 Outline of This Work ..................................................................................30


PART 0: GROUND LEVEL — WORKERS AND TOOLS................ 35
 2
 INTRODUCING A PROTAGONIST: MARSHALL MCLUHAN, “MEDIA PHILOSOPHER” ......................................................................................................................37
 2.1
 The Interpretive Scope.................................................................................37
 2.2
 Enter McLuhan, Philosopher of Blindness.................................................41
 2.3
 ‘The Medium Is…’: The Thing that Eludes Us ..........................................43
 2.4
 McLuhan’s Sensualism................................................................................47
 2.5
 Criticisms .....................................................................................................52
 2.6
 What Remains .............................................................................................60
 3
 ‘LOVE IS BLIND’: BLINDNESS IN RELATION TO “WHAT WE GET”.......................65
 3.1
 The “Result” of Love ....................................................................................65
 3.2
 Blindness and Transparency.......................................................................68
 3.3
 Transparency of Use....................................................................................70
 3.4
 Transparency of Context.............................................................................80
 3.5
 Two Levels of Blindness...............................................................................84
 4
 LOVE IS HAPPINESS IS SUFFERING: AMBIVALENCE IN RELATION TO “WHAT WE WANT” ......................................................................................................................91
 4.1
 Reasons for Love ..........................................................................................91
 4.2
 Two Axes......................................................................................................93
 9

4.3
 Control .........................................................................................................98
 4.4
 Contact .......................................................................................................102
 4.5
 Copy: The “Human Fit” of Technology ....................................................105
 4.6
 Straddling Ambivalences...........................................................................111
 5
 REVISITING A PROTAGONIST: A PRELUDE TO STORIES OF ILLUSION AND LOSS, ONE AND MANY, STASIS AND CHANGE ..............................................................119
 5.1
 McLuhan, again.........................................................................................119
 5.2
 The “Flip Side” of the Tetrad: The Loss We Cannot Lose .......................121
 5.3
 Bias: The Blindness We Cannot See (nor Unsee) ....................................124
 5.4
 ‘To the Blind, All Things Are Sudden’: Effects and Understanding .......126
 5.5
 Levels of Blindness and Ambivalence, Foci of Temporary Concern .......131
 PART I: STRUCTURAL LEVEL — LOVE IN THE SINGULAR ... 135
 6
 OUT OF OURSELVES: THE LOVER AS THE ONE WHO IS EXTENDED.................137
 6.1
 Us, Humans: Lovers of Technology ..........................................................137
 6.2
 The Extension Idea: A Classic...................................................................139
 6.3
 The Specificity of McLuhan’s Extension Idea: Blindness and Ambivalence ....................................................................................................................143
 6.4
 We Reach out into the Environment, the Environment Reaches into Us .... ....................................................................................................................146
 6.5
 The Extension Idea Today ........................................................................150
 6.6
 What Is “Man”? .........................................................................................156
 7
 THE IN-BETWEEN: THE LOVE AS CONSTITUTIVE-TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS 161
 7.1
 Love Itself: The Human-Technology Relation .........................................161
 7.2
 Media and Mediation ...............................................................................164
 7.3
 ‘The Meaning of Meaning Is Relationship’: Heidegger, Bateson ............169
 7.4
 Postphenomenology: The Mediation Constitutes the Mediators............175
 7.5
 Myth: The Moment at Which All Is .........................................................179
 8
 FOURFOLD MEDIA: THE BELOVED AS THE WORKING ‘CORE’...........................181
 8.1
 Objects of Affection....................................................................................181
 8.2
 Steps toward Substance: Metaphor and Formal Cause...........................184
 8.3
 Graham Harman: Object-Oriented Philosophy ......................................190


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8.4
 Harman’s “Horizontal Broadening” of McLuhan: Against Anthropocentrism......................................................................................195
 8.5
 Harman’s “Vertical Broadening” of McLuhan: Superposing Relation with Substance ...................................................................................................197
 9
 MEDIAL NODES: AN EYE FOR OBJECTS, A MIND FOR MEDIATION, A HEART FOR HUMANS .................................................................................................................. 205
 9.1
 The Relationship Triad .............................................................................205
 9.2
 The Tetrad: Media as Effects ....................................................................207
 9.3
 9.4
 9.5
 9.6


The Medial Node .......................................................................................211
 The Word, Nature, and Human Construction........................................215
 Subversive Anthropocentrism...................................................................220
 Love is Blind; Love Is Happiness Is Suffering...........................................226


PART II: HISTORICAL LEVEL — LOVE IN THE PLURAL ......... 229
 10
 US IN THINGS: THE LOVERS’ FIGHT IN TECHNICAL FORM – OR, MATERIAL IDEOLOGY ................................................................................................................ 231
 10.1
 If We Are All Extended, Who Is Extended “Most”? ................................231
 10.2
 Andrew Feenberg: ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ .................................233
 10.3
 Media Theory and Critical Theory: A Many-Faced Discussion.............239
 10.4
 The Place of Efficiency: Fitting Feenberg for Media Theory ...................244
 10.5
 Democratization, Change, Revolution.....................................................252
 11
 MEDIATION-OF-MEDIATION: THE “LOVES” MULTIPLIED – OR, MEDIAL NETWORKS ............................................................................................................. 257
 11.1
 Worlds of Mediation .................................................................................257
 11.2
 11.3
 11.4
 11.5


The Hot-Cool Distinction .........................................................................261
 Networks in Flux .......................................................................................268
 Epochs in the History of Media: Other Perspectives................................273
 The Rift: Determinism and “Era Thinking” ............................................279


12
 POLITICS IN THINGS: CONSPIRACIES OF THE BELOVED – OR, THINGS’ HIDDEN AGENDA .................................................................................................................. 283
 12.1
 Things Conspiring to Make It Happen.....................................................283
 12.2
 Things Matter: The Larger Scale and ‘Hybrid Energy’ ...........................286
 12.3
 Politics in Things: ‘Energy’ or Power? ......................................................290
 12.4
 Media Evolution: Out of the Kernel, a New World Is Born....................296
 11

12.5
 Evolution vs. Structure: Substances Making for Change.........................303
 13
 A PAN-MEDIAL COSMOLOGY ...............................................................................307
 13.1
 ‘A Tale Told by an Idiot…’: “Structural” vs. “Historical” .......................307
 13.2
 13.3
 13.4
 13.5


The PostPhen-CTT-Media Theory Complex ...........................................309
 The Ubiquity of Ideology ...........................................................................311
 Two Heuristics, Three Components, Two Levels .....................................319
 A Pan-Medial Cosmology: Finding Our Way..........................................326


PART III: EXISTENTIAL LEVEL — LIVED LOVE......................... 329
 14
 INTO OURSELVES: IS NARCISSUS A NARCISSIST BY DESIGN? ..............................331
 14.1
 Who Are We? / Know Thyself...................................................................331
 14.2
 Technology and Identity: A Natural Bond...............................................334
 14.3
 14.4
 14.5
 14.6


New Media: Seeing Is Constructing ..........................................................336
 New Media: Identities in Crisis.................................................................341
 Four Personality Types..............................................................................344
 Narcissism by Design.................................................................................348


15
 IN BETWEEN FIXITY AND ADAPTATION: HOME IS WHERE THE BRAIN WIRES 353
 15.1
 Can You Relate? At Home with Media ....................................................353
 15.2
 Home: More Than a Place in Which to Warm One’s Bones Beside the Fire..............................................................................................................355
 15.3
 15.4
 15.5
 15.6


Heidegger: Home as Nearness to Being ....................................................357
 The Unfamiliar Familiar, the Unperceived Perceived.............................361
 Home: Our Current Brain Structure – the World...................................365
 Home and Technology: The Discipline of Letting Go..............................370


16
 LIVING THE OBJECT: COLLECTORS BY DESIGN....................................................379
 16.1
 The Beloved Object and the Collecting Paradigm ...................................379
 16.2
 What Is Collecting?....................................................................................382
 16.3
 16.4
 16.5
 16.6


12

Why Do We Collect?..................................................................................385
 From Hardware to Software: “Digital Collecting”...................................391
 Digital vs. Traditional Collecting: The Effects of ‘Speed-Up’ ..................400
 Collecting as Way of Coping with the Tensions between Simplicity and Multiplicity.................................................................................................404


17
 LIVING THROUGH THE STASIS-CHANGE DYNAMIC: LEARNING-AS-DIALOGUE ..... ................................................................................................................... 409
 17.1
 The Relationship Triad: A Matter of Tempo ...........................................409
 17.2
 A Contemporary Complication: Speed-Up ..............................................414
 17.3
 Conversationalist Existentialism ..............................................................417
 17.4
 Sedimented Speed: Two Tales...................................................................422
 17.5
 Learning-in-Conversation: Finding a Tempo..........................................427
 CONCLUDING REMARKS ON LOVE............................................. 433
 18
 CONCLUDING REMARKS ON LOVE....................................................................... 435
 18.1
 One Last Look in the Rear-View Mirror..................................................435
 18.2
 Love as Technology....................................................................................436
 18.3
 ‘Both Sides, Now’: A Final Self-Reflexive Moment ..................................437
 APPENDIX — AMOR TECHNOLOGIAE: SCHEMATIC CHAPTER OVERVIEW ......................................................................................... 439
 NOTES ................................................................................................................... 443
 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................... 479


13

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Introduction

1

Introduction

‘Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them […]’ (Pound 1927, 53)

1.1

The Dream and the Waking Up

A vivid dream of flying, and then we took off. A vision of crossing oceans by voice, and then we were connected. A fantasy of having worlds of information at our command and at hand, and then we reached for our cellphone. Would a perceptive alien life form that has been observing the earth for millions of years be amazed at the technological achievements of humankind? No matter how cynical one may be about the vast amounts of blood, suffering, and pain that have sewn together human history, one must still admit: from stone axes to ships to printing presses to steam engines to information and communication technologies (ICT), mankind has given itself an impressive track record of inventiveness. During our lifetime alone, we have seen wireless-less homes, with just one or two telephone sets, transform into havens of invisible microwaves serving laptops, phones, e-readers, and domotic appliances. We have seen cellphone masts rising, computer and connection speeds skyrocketing, and initially techno-sceptic friends finally surrendering to the ever-ongoing gadget craze. Vinyl records and tapes were superseded by CDs and these have begun to compete with downloads. It seems odd now, but not more than fifteen years ago people with a notebook computer in public places were a curiosity. We probably belong to the last generation ever – at least in the affluent West – that have written love letters by hand. In our childhood, screens were things one saw in living rooms and television stores; now screens are… about everywhere. These and other sorts of striking shifts in our “technological environment” have instigated our thinking about the simple and blunt though all-encompassing question: why? What drives us forward in our developing urge, in our neverending deployment of technologies, systems, networks, appliances, and tools? Not just “us” the designers, R&D departments, and marketeers who – on more or less

17

Amor Technologiae

idealistically inspired grounds – bring technologies into the world. But also “us” the users, consumers, and implementers of ICT and other technologies who organize our everyday life around devices and applications, and vice versa. Why do we – on both these planes – invest so much energy in technology? Why are we so… eager, to go from dreaming, to realization? What is this strange dynamic between the possible and the actual, through which not only the history and development, but also the use of technology play out? In between a dream and its realization, much has to be done. Plans have to be made, images sedimented, prototypes conceived, minds prepared, deals closed, materials assembled, strategies deployed… time must be passed. And although dreams often keep rippling through the undertow of daily life – as a fading reminder of the other night, and a vague impulse to act on them – one essentially has to wake up now and then. In fact, in order to realize the dream, one simply has no choice but to wake up from it. There it lies, at the heart of all industrial, commercial, and technical endeavor: the painful and needed consciousness of being awake. Of not being able to fly – not that easily. Of not being able to converse across the Atlantic – not without the right infrastructure. Of not having access to worlds of data – not without the proper tools, or paying for it. All these actualizations ask for, demand recognition of “shortcoming.” If all goes well – as long as Icarus glides through the air – using technology feels like dreaming. Glitches, bugs, breakdowns, crises, insurrections, … awake us to our brittle bricolage universe, where all can fail. This work is about the dream, and about the waking up.

1.2

Approaching Technology: Theory and Praxis

In what follows, we will relate the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan to several approaches within the philosophy of technology (PhilTech). The latter has grown into a full-blown philosophical discipline during the last few decades. Not that technology had not been a focus of philosophy before. But there had been very little involvement with specific technologies, or with technology in its social context. Such involvement is by us today so much taken for granted that it almost feels trite to bring into mind the ‘empirical turn’ in the philosophy of technology heralded – only quite recently – by among others Hans Achterhuis (2001a), Andrew Feenberg (1995a), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (2005). 18

Chapter 1: Introduction

These authors have so succeeded in walking the line between an instrumentalist point of view and a stance that Feenberg dubs ‘essentialist.’ The former defines technologies as just “neutral” means to human ends. The latter sketches technology as an authoritarian, mostly threatening force. Looking at how technologies work in specific contexts, and how people relate to them, use them, and possibly change them, throws a wholly different and presumably brighter light on the issue. However, old dichotomies have a tendency to persist. In theory as well as in everyday life – however artificial this distinction – instrumentalist and essentialist views continue to reign. .

THEORY: TECHNO-ENTHUSIASM VS. TECHNO-SCEPTICISM

One indication may be the way in which some recent, more or less popular publications on the “impact” of especially ICT or digital media make very diametrical evaluations. On the one hand there are the techno-sceptics who contend that digital and social media are changing our ways of living and thinking for the worst: shortening our span of attention (Jackson 2008), making young people ‘dumb’ (Bauerlein 2008), or blurring our relation to reality (Siegel 2008). On the other hand, the techno-enthusiasts praise contemporary ICT for their emancipating qualities: they will bring us more interactivity, openness, democracy (Tapscott 2008) and less hierarchy (Shirky 2008). The need of having to situate one’s research object on either the “good” or “bad” side of the moral spectrum seems inextinguishable.1 Are both techno-sceptics and enthusiasts then plainly wrong? No, authors on both sides tend to elaborate decent arguments backed up by significant empirical evidence: the disagreement thus does not result from any (lack of) scientific merit. In a sense, they are both right; and it clearly does not suffice to be empirical. PRAXIS: A LOVING EMBRACE VS. A PAINFUL REJECTION

A different type of indication, then, may be the eclectic list of numbers that demonstrate the worldwide spread and usage of digital media. Sales of electronic appliances such as cellphones, PDAs, and computers are rising explosively not only in the Western part of the world, but in many developing countries just as well (Measuring the Information Society 2011). Social networking site Facebook claims2 to have one billion monthly active users. That amounts to about 14 percent of the world population. Qzone, a social networking service in Simplified Chinese, has 480 million registered users3, which is about 35 percent of China’s population. 19

Amor Technologiae

But, one needs to just look around in everyday life and notice, however unscientifically, how within a limited time frame people have generally jumped on the technological, digital, or virtual bandwagon quite enthusiastically, and quite uncritically. Conversely, technologies and media are rejected, too – but only at the moment of their “demise.” Older technologies appear to be refused not so much on the grounds of some fundamental dissatisfaction with them, but because the newer ones have come around. These two indications are, we think, telling – specifically as they relate, or more precisely, do not relate to each other. For the enthusiasm of the mass of technoconsumers does not seem to match that of the techno-enthusiast, by far. Put crudely: using technologies is a different activity than thinking and writing about them. Users of social networking sites do mostly not join these services out of democratic vigor. Their motivations are rather practical, for instance: social connecting, self-exposure, peer pressure, et cetera. But conversely, they also do not fear or wail about the purported dangerous effects of digital media. For some reason we do not really worry about our cognitive capacities declining due to the use of search engines, or our social skills withering due to the utilization of social media. The high hopes and gross fears of theory do only minimally affect everyday and practical life, where the power of statistics sways with undeniable elegance: it seems we like technologies and media en masse – like it or not. And our “dropping” of old media is immediately linked to our adoption of new ones.

1.3

Visions of Technology: PhilTech and Media Ecology

Nonetheless, theory and praxis seem to have at least this one thing in common. By users as well as by theorists, technology is mostly still looked at in a reified way: as something that is “just there,” easily circumscribed and defined. Whereas in the philosophy of technology, as we will shortly see, every definition of technology is always up for grabs. It appears, thus, that the results of PhilTech research have by no means seeped into the collective consciousness. The old dichotomy between essentialist and instrumentalist views of technology that we mentioned, is still dominant. Which makes that a wide-ranging public debate about the forms, effects, consequences, and evolution of technology – that aims at a thinking through of technology at a fundamental level, and surpasses for instance “mere” climate change problems, however acute these may be – seems still far off. And 20

Chapter 1: Introduction

this may, in turn, be seen as the consequence of a general lack of knowledge about the very diverse mechanisms behind technological genesis and change. TECHNOLOGY AS SYSTEM AND AS THING

Exactly the essentialist and instrumentalist conceptualizations of technology appear to stand, up until this day and at least partly, in the way of such a knowledge. Let us review them briefly. The essentialist stance can be situated mostly within the broad tradition of philosophical reflection on technology that preceded and influenced PhilTech in its contemporary form, and that frames technology as comprehensive “system.” It is worthwhile to note that some of the first philosophers of technology avant la lettre have proclaimed a much wider, if not all-encompassing definition of technology. With Martin Heidegger (1977a), modern technology is nothing less than the latest, and maybe the most dangerous instance of Western metaphysics, a mode of revealing of being which he calls ‘Enframing’ (Gestell): the calculative thinking that seeps through at every level of modern existence and that aims at the uniform summoning – ‘ordering’ – of all raw materials, including humans. Not without a reason Heidegger emphasizes precautionarily that we cannot relate to the essence of technology if we tarry with the technological (1977a, 4), for we are everywhere “in it.” Jacques Ellul (1964), then, makes an analogous evaluation when he analyzes technology (technique) as an all-embracing phenomenon intended on, among other things, rationality, uniformity, and autonomy, and colonizing every area of life. The instrumentalist view, by contrast, depicts technology instead as “thing,” but it cannot be said to belong to one or another specific theoretical framework. Rather one could see it as the discursive foundation that underlies all technological endeavors in praxis as such. Technology here is taken at face value, as a thing, device, machine, procedure, complex, … that is and does something clearly delineated: as a means to an end. It is precisely against this type of reasoning that “classic” philosophy of technology – represented by amongst others Heidegger and Ellul – first starts to rally. For seeing technologies as merely means to an end leads us to disregard the deep-reaching and mostly harmful effects that they, above and beyond their functionality, have on our lives, society, and culture. The “systemic” character of technology makes it more than just a tool. It may be symptomatic that the first significant philosophies of (modern) technology are, first, so wide in scope, and second, so radically critical.

21

Amor Technologiae

THE ALTERNATIVE OF PHILTECH: IT CAN GO BOTH WAYS

Nevertheless, up until the present, it seems, both visions, in diluted or intermixed form, remain hovering through our collective and common consciousness. Often, it appears as though we prefer the instrumentalist viewpoint as long as things go well. But we suddenly revert to the essentialist stance when things go wrong. This is beautifully illustrated by the anything but died down genres of dystopian cinema4 and literature that have in recent years spawned titles such as I Am Legend, Children of Men, and The Road – stories in which technology, or the broader techno-industrial-capitalist complex, is portrayed simultaneously as doom and savior of humankind. As said, it is not enough to be empirical. Because every “perception” that we could have of matters of technologies and media, is continuously tainted by exactly these notions that we have inherited via our cultural imagery. Sedimented deeply into our view of things, these conceptualizations serve as filters placed before our eyes. And through these filters, we “read” technology – in theory as well as in praxis – as either “bad” or “good.” It is here that contemporary philosophy of technology5 provides relief, as will become clear, through posing the principle of ambivalence. Technology simply cannot be analyzed as something that just is and does something we can trace back, along a causal chain, to something in the technology. Or to be more precise: it can, but only momentarily, within specific contexts, in relation to certain actors, et cetera. When we start extrapolating to more abstract levels, vagueness becomes our reality. All technologies are ambivalent, at the moment of their construction, and even later on, at the moment when they are (widely) used. Instrumentalists, too, permit a form of ambivalence: any technology – as a neutral means to an end – can be used for good as well as bad purposes. But the ambivalence proposed by PhilTech is ambivalence by design and not just by embedment: technology is not neutral – certain values can be solidly inscribed into it – but it is not wholly deterministic either – modifications are possible. It is always to a certain degree “up for grabs.” THE ALTERNATIVE OF MEDIA ECOLOGY: FORM VS. CONTENT

Yet, the assuming of ambivalence may not completely do either. For even if we accept that technologies are inherently ambivalent – and can thus turn out either “bad” or “good” – we may not be able to see this, because of the aforementioned filters or similar ones. Even as we keep in mind the ambivalence of technologies, 22

Chapter 1: Introduction

we still run the risk of alienating our analysis from the experience of everyday users. On this level technology is not only ambivalent, but also recedes into the humdrum of daily routine. If the posing of ambivalence amounts to taking one step away from our getting a clear grip on a well-defined concept of technology, this realization takes us even a further step away: technology is, up to a certain point, always invisible. It is no longer vagueness alone that rules here; blindness plays up as well. Here especially the tradition of Media Ecology6, of which Marshall McLuhan is seen as one of the founders or at least forerunners, comes to our aid. Central to McLuhan’s approach, and that of Media Ecology generally, is the distinction between form and content. Content we consciously perceive; but form escapes our attention. This invisibility may be either by design or by embedment. It is something that happens inadvertently in our encounters and relationships with technology, and that is not necessarily foreseen by designers, users, sellers, or official institutions. But, this invisibility does not equal inexistence, on the contrary. It just ensures that the boundaries between “our existence” and “that of technology” are blurred. Technologies appear to be part and parcel of our existence in a way in which it is hard to tell where the technology ends and our life begins. Technologies and media are not just something we use, they are, quite unexpectedly, something of us, something we are.

1.4

Our Approach: Amor Technologiae

In this work, we wish to particularly combine the two large theoretical strands of PhilTech and Media Ecology.7 The two domains have only superficially explored their mutual points of contact, but as we will attempt to show, each could benefit from such an exercise. Also, we seek to highlight a factor that both have only touched upon sideways. Although we may, on a theoretical plane, come to realize that technologies are ambivalent on the one hand, and that they do not fully come in view on the other hand, we are still left with the aforementioned schism between theory and praxis regarding the appreciation of technologies and media. As users and developers of technologies, we still appear to remain wrapped up in a profound and sincere love of those technologies, that seems to surpass PhilTech’s as well as Media Ecology’s however meticulous considerations. Oblivious of sideeffects, of consequences, of possible hazard, we proceed to continuously ‘grasp and 23

Amor Technologiae

let go,’ in the words of McLuhan (2003, 85), the media that we are so sturdily “attached” to. It is the underlying hypothesis of this work that the aforementioned persistence of the old dichotomies – instrumentalism vs. essentialism; neglect of ambivalence and of blindness – in theory as well in praxis, can and must be traced back to the disregarding of this fundamental attachment-to-technology, this love of technology that dominates, unnoticed but seemingly reciprocated, our everyday lives. OUR BOND WITH TECHNOLOGY

That “love,” surely, is more existential than emotional – although the emotional aspect must to a certain extent be accounted for. The love may be a ground condition of our lives in a technological society, perhaps even of our lives as such. Thus far not enough credit has been given to this basic longing for technology, that is nowadays best exemplified in our extensive use of (digital) media.8 The sheer vastness of the almost worldwide avid media usage asks for a broad and philosophical, but also multidisciplinary and eclectic framework that can make sense of the “deep bond” we have with technologies and media. A bond that is only intensifying – something Louis Forsdale already foresees in 1981: The technology is likely to increase, not diminish, for that is the general history of our relationship with gadgets. Restlessly we develop new communication technology as if fulfilling a preordained destiny. If we do not transform ourselves literally into cyborgs (combinations of human and machine: a person with a heart pacemaker embedded permanently in the body, for example), we can nevertheless look forward to an ever more intimate relationship between our communication technology and ourselves. (Forsdale 1981, 213)

A visionary statement, as all of us can attest to today: our relationships with media and technology have intensified to an exponential degree. Almost no aspect of our lives is not technologically “mediated” anymore. And this situation is generally looked upon as a boon to our well-being, notwithstanding the fact that now and then voices of concern are raised. HOW WE LOVE: THE COMPONENTS OF RELATIONSHIPS

But, how do we track this love, how can we trace the contours of this bond? In

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Chapter 1: Introduction

what follows we will proceed, so to speak, “by touch” – as the slightly experimental way of exploring is in uncharted territories the only possible way. The notion of love will serve us in this regard as guiding metaphor; as proverbial magnifying glass through which we endeavor to spy somewhat more closely the phenomenon we are after. More precisely, we will equip a concept of love that is most akin to our common sense understanding of it, i.e., as relationship. All love relationships consist of at least two partners. Within all relationships, there is a basic dynamic to be spotted of loving and being loved – they either flourish or flounder depending on the extent to which the balance between those two basic “directions” meets the desires and requirements of the involved parties. That push and pull, that eternal task to be taken up day in, day out, in the course of every living together, of juggling what is given and what is taken, although constituting a capricious process, marks every relationship as the relationship that it is. In all relationships, thus, we can discern conceptually what we will call “components,” to wit: three. There is a party that loves. There is a partner being loved, a beloved object. And there is, in between those two, a love that defines those parties as lovers. Obviously in most relationships the beloved object is itself a lover, and vice versa. For our purposes, however, since we are dealing with the bond that “we” have with technology, and can expect – at least from a common sense perspective – our side to resemble a lover’s profile more than that of technology, we will deploy the lover-love-beloved structure here without immediately dwelling on a possible reciprocity.9 This three-component construction is each time reflected in the chapter structure of Parts I, II and III (for a schematic representation, cf. the Appendix). RELATIONSHIPS-AS-PROJECTS

Framed as love relationships, then, our bonds with technologies and media abruptly appear as projects, undertaken through time and space. As soon as we view technology through the “love” prism, it can no longer be seen as a “force,” for we engage into a more or less conscious involvement with it. But it can also not be delineated as just a “thing,” for within the bond it becomes difficult to tell where “we” end and where the medium or technology begins. It retains some aspects of both, as we will see in what follows, but the strict dichotomous character of those terms anyhow vanishes. And moreover, no longer a separation between theory and praxis can in any way be upheld. 25

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Nevertheless, something can be said about the characteristics that the relationship has as such. As many have tried to pinpoint the phenomenon of love in itself, we can ask how our bond with technology is fundamentally structured. At the same time we must realize that notwithstanding the existence of such a structure, all loves much be entered into, carried on, and nurtured in a context of multiplicity and complexity. Although relationships as such may show a very specific face, our everyday “love work” must still grapple with externalities such as hardships and changing circumstances. This dynamic, then, between an abstract outlook on love “as is” and a concrete perspective on love incorporated in a network of many, countless loves, will be mirrored in this work’s subdivision in parts (cf., again, the Appendix). Part I, we will find, struggles with the “structural” level. Part II, then, attempts to sketch what we will call the “historical” level – at which multiplicity reigns. And Part III, finally, means to investigate how, specifically on an existential base, those two levels interact and are (or could be) integrated. We will find, in the end, that there may exist some kind of tendency to disregard the “historical” in favor of the “structural,” to stress the abstract in favor of the concrete. Nevertheless, we will see, by way of the work of Gregory Bateson, that to counteract that tendency, and make for a more stable balance between the two levels, we do not need less but more abstraction. PHILTECH AND MEDIA ECOLOGY: A SOURCE, A MARRIAGE

A proviso is immediately in place. By utilizing the notion of love to scrutinize our “love of technology,” we do not in any way seek to offer an exact or correct analysis of love per se. As said, we deploy the love concept as metaphor, as mirror. Often references will be made to an elusive phenomenon that we term “love” or “relationships.” Pinches of psychoanalytical, neuroscientific, or Platonist vocabulary may, here and there, be recognized. But we do not claim these ponderings to have any relevance with regard to specific research – psychological, philosophical, sociological – on the topic of love itself. The ideas we will build upon are mostly to be found within the aforementioned domains of PhilTech and Media Ecology. As said, we will try to combine these – and see what both can “learn” from each other. In a work about love, it is only fitting that two parties come together in an embrace of mutual recognition. Philosophy of technology must carry itself one step further and go from a philosophy of technology to a philosophy that does not so much treat of technology with philosophical tools and concepts, but analyzes technology as a 26

Chapter 1: Introduction

full-fledged existential category. Luckily, many promising beginnings are to be found in the existing literature. Media Ecology, in turn, may benefit from an encounter with PhilTech, as the latter can offer philosophical breadth and depth that the former up until now mostly lacks. Specifically the ideas of Marshall McLuhan will be central, for reasons that will be mainly set forth in Chapter 2. At the same time, this work makes a substantial attempt at reformulating McLuhan’s insights in the context of a systematic philosophy of media. Throughout and within the dynamics between several different domains more or less loosely connected to either PhilTech or media theory – media philosophy, cybernetics, Actor-Network Theory, object-oriented metaphysics, (post)phenomenology, philosophical anthropology – a fine but significantly noticeable thread can be spun that may show us the way to an understanding of our bond with technologies and media.

1.5

Technology and Media: Many-Headed Monsters

Yet before one can know a true form, as Plato by the mouth of Meno already points out, one needs to know it already, beforehand – otherwise he or she would not know what to look for. It is the same with technology. A preliminary definition or concept of “technology” and “medium” is needed before we can proceed. However, this definition must and will by implication be ambivalent, vague, and elusive itself. THE QUANDARY OF DEFINING

Everyone generally has an idea of what technologies and media are. We would do well to give these common sense definitions the credit they deserve. However, as always, common sense can do us favors, but at the same time cloud our assessment. Often in public debates or in the press, when technology is referred to, images of printed circuit boards, car parts, factories, satellites, cellphones, or astronauts instinctively spring up. When we hear the word “media,” then, we tend to think about TV stations, journalists, newspapers, radio, blogs, and the like. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the “classic” philosophers of technology deploy wide, all-encompassing definitions of technology. Likewise, McLuhan, as one of the first media theorists, has proposed a definition of ‘medium’ that far exceeds “the media” as we know them: in his Understanding Media, next to analyzing 27

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“classics” such as TV and radio, he treats of the most diverse “media” such as roads, housing, clocks, ads, games, and weapons. Let us revisit once more the system-thing dichotomy. Heidegger and Ellul proclaim technology to be a force from which almost no escape is possible. Whereas the rest of the world is thoroughly and merrily involved with all sorts of machinery, devices, and procedures, these philosophers seem to be able to assume a bird’s eye view, from where they can attest to everyone else’s folly. As already pointed out, it have been contemporary philosophers of technology, such as Don Ihde, Andrew Feenberg, Langdon Winner, and others, who have drawn attention to the inherent paradox such an attitude entails. It has slowly begun to dawn on thinkers and scholars that analyses of technology as a resolutely comprehensive system do not do justice to technological practice, and moreover leave, ironically, very little room for critique. For how can a voice be critical if even this very voice does not escape the suffocating grip of the technological? But conversely, to define technology simply as a device, an artifact, or even as a set of rules, may be too simple and come down to a complete disregard for the mechanisms hiding behind the mechanics – be they economical, social, or other. As said, looking at technology as something that just is there – like airplanes, or cameras, or espresso machines – may be fruitful but not sufficient for a mature analysis of technology. One needs to aim the spotlight on the areas where technology fades out into “something else,” however arbitrary this distinction. For this is exactly the point: technology does not stop at its “frills.” If we could ever call it a domain in itself, sure enough it shades into other domains, and through the coupling of technology to several of those domains – succinctly put, through posing continua – the philosophy of technology and other disciplines have made significant progress during the last decades. For our purposes it is relevant to briefly review some of these domains here: the body; media; politics; and ‘inquiry.’ This elaboration will at the same time serve to introduce some of the authors that will play a part in what follows. It will become clear that, as technology dovetails neatly with all these domains or concepts, it gets at the same time more difficult and easy to define technologies; and media, for that matter. THE BODY, THE SOCIAL, KNOWLEDGE, MEDIA

A first strand of technology analysis, represented by among others McLuhan, sees a continuum between technology and biological organisms, in particular the human body. Technologies are perceived as originating in the human organism, 28

Chapter 1: Introduction

or certainly as an ‘extension’ of it. The idea of the cyborg, arisen during the last couple of decades, is also to be situated within this domain. A second strand links up technology to the domain of social values and, by implication, politics. Langdon Winner is one of the first, in demonstrating how technology design incorporates social values and preferences, to make a plea for a ‘technological politics’ (Winner 1986), which one could only achieve by taking technological artifacts seriously: artifacts have politics. Nowadays, as we will see in Chapter 10, it is especially Andrew Feenberg who systematically investigates technology’s social and political character. A third strand of theory questions the distinction between technology and other forms of human ‘problem solving.’ Larry Hickman, for one, largely equates technology with John Dewey’s concept of ‘inquiry’ (1992; 2001). ‘[T]he invention, development, and cognitive deployment of tools and other artifacts, brought to bear on raw materials and intermediate stock parts, with a view to the resolution of perceived problems […]’ (Hickman 2001, 12). Not everything is technology, Hickman acknowledges, but in the broad sense of the word, it is: even ideas are technologies, for they enable us to adjust, to grow, to inquire. Language, for instance, is the ‘tool of tools’ (ibid., 46-47).10 A fourth and somewhat less prominent but for our purposes essential form of technology critique blurs the distinction between technologies and media. It also originates mainly with McLuhan, who, as mentioned, analyzes the most diverse sorts of media in Understanding Media, but takes this generality a step further in the posthumously published Laws of Media, co-authored with his son Eric McLuhan: there he simply equates media with all human-made artifacts. This definition of ‘medium’ of course embraces much more than just “technologies” as we know them. In this light, the difference between technologies and media can be seen as an apparent division turning out to be a continuum. Robert K. Logan writes: ‘[…] the distinction between media and technology is an artificial one.’ (2000, 30) The proposed continuum between technologies and media will lead us to consistently treat, throughout this work, the two terms as synonymous. THE CONTINUITIES AND THE RELATIONSHIP IDEA

These four continua – technology vs. organism/body; technology vs. the social/politics; technology vs. inquiry/knowledge; technology vs. media – make for an image of technology that goes beyond systems, devices, or even connected networks of devices. Technology debouches into the world like waves burst upon 29

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the shore. Taking together these four “non-distinctions,” one in fact becomes confused about where to look for technology exactly. This is why we seek to deploy, throughout this work, a framework that is as deep and broad as possible. The love of technology that we are attempting to frame, will have to be taxed, first, at the deepest levels of ontological structure, and second, on the widest planes of ontic happening. And we will need to account – as far as possible – for the interrelation between those two. Understanding the alternation and interrelatedness between the abstract and the concrete levels will be necessary to make sufficient sense of technology, and specifically of our bond with it. We will eventually frame our own (re)definition of the medium notion, basing ourselves on the work of some of the aforementioned authors, in Chapters 9 and 13.

1.6

Outline of This Work

Let us recapitulate, then, before we start the journey. We began in wonderment: what are those dreams that drive us onward in our constantly intensifying involvement with technology? This true love for technology of ours has not been systematically accounted for, in theory nor in praxis. But we do have the instruments to go about such a deeper investigation, for the definitions of technology, furnished by the not-so-old tradition of philosophy of technology and media study, which we have just outlined, point us in the direction of a wide-eyed approach, fitting the treatment of a theme as elusive as the “love of technology.” One who wants to treat of love, or of falling in love, may mention neural circuits, procreation, and oedipal constellations, but must also take the night stars into account – the music played, the bench on which the lovers sat, the stories they tell their friends, and myriad other factors that can never be quantified. A certain eclecticism is unavoidable. Yet such a wide-eyed approach runs the risk of falling into meaninglessness, if it is not constrained to at least a few bounds. Focusing, now and then, on the specific – things, artifacts, media, devices, procedures, … – may be one life buoy. But the focusing should take place within a framework that ensures the focusing to be not just focusing. Some crucial boundaries are to be questioned. This amounts to a self-reflexive, even paradoxical game of constituting an area of land by way of crossing borders, which we propose to do by deploying the structure at which we already hinted.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

AN APPROACH OF SUPERPOSITION

As said, we will employ concepts from the most diverse disciplines, such as philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, media theory, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, cybernetics, in order to attack the question of “Amor Technologiae” head-on. Such a multifaceted approach requires us to question our own certainty, look for our very own blind spot. Just as philosophy is, in Heidegger’s words, ‘existence’s alert awareness of itself’ (quoted in Safranski 1999, 124), an approach that attempts to go beyond talk about “people using technology” and that instead wants to install an overarching structure that enables us to get in view “humans + media” as cohesive components of one constellation, must have at its core an idea of learning that amounts to a self-reflexive critique of its own bias. We do not in any way mean to lay claim on originality. As we stand on the shoulders of giants – and can only orient ourselves on the basis of landmarks placed within the concerned fields11 – our approach is one of superposition, one of inclusion rather than exclusion. We choose to combine and compare, not so much to incise and impair. To achieve – just a little more – comprehension by way of erecting, almost in a collector’s way, an edifice of cross-referencing that is, in its analytical aspects, admittedly more “horizontal” than “vertical,” more conversationalist than monological. We will find, in the process, that in fact the aforementioned instrumentalist and essentialist perspectives each have their value, but they should be positioned within an overarching, multiplex scheme that complicates any straightforward dichotomy. Such an approach, nevertheless, needs a helmsman, a leading figure that does not necessarily fight all battles but gives plenty instructions in strategically tackling them. This will be in what follows, as said, Marshall McLuhan. The reasons for this unobvious choice will by fully outlined at the very beginning of the first part. We choose to read McLuhan as a philosopher of media, taking a hint from Graham Harman, who suggests McLuhan to be able to offer one of the most daring and innovative philosophical treatments of technology yet to be elaborated (2009a). It so becomes perfectly possible to integrate McLuhan’s media analysis with a philosophical reflection on technology. In fact it will become clear that philosophy of technology is just… philosophy, as Feenberg argues in stating that philosophy of technology forms in fact ‘[…] the foundation of all Western philosophy.’ (2005, 8)

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CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Part 0 – the “ground” level – sets the markers for everything that follows, in presenting and discussing the conceptual tools and theoretical sources that will be employed throughout this work. At the same time it already seeks to detect certain lines of force or lay specific emphases within the body of literature at hand. The two main conceptual innovations proposed by PhilTech and Media Ecology, to which we have already alluded – “blindness” and “ambivalence” – will be further transformed into full-blown heuristics here, that will guide us through the rest of our travails. Chapter 2 begins by introducing Marshall McLuhan, proposing to read him as a “media philosopher” and offering as main entry point into his thought the concepts of perception and “technological blindness.” It also preliminarily discusses some of the criticisms voiced against him, that will be revisited during the remainder of this work. Chapter 3 inaugurates the actual reflection on our bond with technology, first and foremost from a more common sense perspective, and asks: “what do we get from technologies?” It then further investigates the notion of technological blindness and reinforces McLuhan’s take on it with related or similar approaches. Chapter 4 goes on to ask the converse question: “what do we want from technologies?” It consequently endeavors to categorize the common sense “reasons” we may have for our “love.” In the course of that investigation the second heuristic, i.e., “ambivalence,” is worked out. Chapter 5 concludes the “ground” part and revisits McLuhan’s work, especially in preliminarily discussing the ‘tetrad’ on the basis of the findings of the previous chapters, in order to fully lay out the groundwork for the approach in the next parts. Part I, then – the “structural” level – initiates the closer scrutiny of the bond of “us” with technology. Here the “relationship triad” introduced above, consisting of a lover, a love, and a beloved object, is deployed at the abstract level of “structure.” It poses the question as to how this relationship “as is” or “as such” is constructed, how it functions, and how its three components interrelate. This part is played out on the deepest levels of philosophical anthropology and ontology. Chapter 6 focuses on the “lover” component at the “structural” level. Here McLuhan’s ‘extension’ concept takes central stage. It is embedded in its larger tradition, and contemporary variants are discussed. This will lead us eventually to a retrieval and reconsideration of philosophical anthropology. Chapter 7 has the “love” component at the “structural” level as its central focus. Here McLuhan’s most famous aphorism, ‘the medium is the message,’ and his notion of ‘interplay’ are at 32

Chapter 1: Introduction

stake: aligned with the contemporary approach of postphenomenology, they account for the “mediation” in between the mediators and so constitute a relational ontology. Chapter 8, however, surprisingly, in scrutinizing the “beloved object” component of the relationship triad in its “structural” guise, introduces a substantivist ontology, based on the work of McLuhan as well. Here ‘formal cause’ and the work of Graham Harman will guide the way. Chapter 9, then, summarizes and synthesizes the previous three chapters by reinvestigating the ‘tetrad’ model and proposing a reformulation of the ‘medium’ concept as medial node. It so sketches the outlines of a “pan-medial ontology.” Part II, subsequently – the “historical” level – also deals with the relationship triad, but now taking into account its incorporation into a wide world of multiple relationships. The three components, in their concrete instantiation, take forms that require quite different approaches than at the level of “structure.” Whereas on the “structural” level any analysis of the bond is situated within the “one moment,” here at the “historical” level change and fluctuation must be accounted for. In this regard reflections on the social and the political are nothing less than mandatory. Chapter 10, first, brings us back to the lover component, this time however at the “historical” level. Here multiple lovers vie with each other for domination. The ‘extension’ concept, at this “macro-scale,” takes the form of ‘ideology.’ Andrew Feenberg’s work will serve us here in particular to complement and correct a crucial lack in McLuhan’s. Chapter 11 revisits the love component on the “historical” level. Here the singular “mediation” is taken up in worlds of networks. Especially McLuhan’s distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ will be of aid here. It accounts for the ‘thermostatic’ fluctuations through space and time between medial constellations. Chapter 12, then, discusses the beloved object in the “plural” sense and asks how “things,” in their multiplicity, can “work their way” independently of human intervention or mediation. McLuhan’s ‘hybrid energy’ concept will be put side by side here with Bruno Latour’s ‘hybrid’ notion, and consecutively linked up to theories of technological evolution. Chapter 13, once again, synthesizes the previous three chapters, at this time explaining how the above findings lead up to the image of a “pan-medial cosmology.” Already here, the interaction between the two levels that will become the main focus in the next four chapters, is investigated more closely. In Part III, finally – the “existential” level – we inquire into how the two levels, “structural” and “historical,” interact, particularly in everyday life. Once more we keep to the three-component subdivision. For every component of the 33

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relationship triad we investigate how the love of technologies or media poses a task to us in a very practical sense. Our lived love, “taking place” along the three mentioned components and two levels, constantly confronts us with the project of balancing stasis and change – a project that should be as self-reflexive as possible. Lately, however, mostly due to a phenomenon that McLuhan calls ‘speed-up,’ there may have emerged a tendency to overly emphasize the “structural” and even negate the “historical.” Chapter 14, then, begins by looking into the lover component. Here McLuhan’s ‘Narcissus’ metaphor is elaborated, in relation to contemporary approaches of “identity building” in the context of digital media. Chapter 15 offers an analysis of the dynamics between stasis and change (the “structural” and “historical” levels, respectively) with regard to the relational constellations of which we at all times form a part – thus, the love component. It does this specifically by way of the notion of “home”: “home making” may be seen as a constant balancing of the two attitudes. Chapter 16, then, looks into the beloved object component from a “lived” standpoint. We scrutinize the issue through the “collecting” paradigm, which may serve as mirror for the way in which we in our day-to-day lives engage with the object. Again, we may choose to do so from either a more “structural” or more “historical” viewpoint, but an overall shift towards “structure” lurks. Chapter 17, at last, serves to summarize the results of the three previous chapters, and concludes this work. It makes, by way of ideas in Richard Rorty and Gregory Bateson, a final plea for a self-reflexive conversationalist way of doing, based on a “grounding” “defect” and “blindness,” that seeks to balance the aforementioned components and levels. We will find, along the way, the concepts of media and technology as we know them gradually evaporating, and “Amor Technologiae,” a notion much more elusive, taking their place.

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PART 0: GROUND LEVEL — WORKERS AND TOOLS

Chapter 2: Introducing a Protagonist

2

Introducing a Protagonist: Marshall McLuhan, “Media Philosopher” ‘McLuhan’s subject matter […] is not communication but the central nervous system.’ (Wolfe 2005, 165)

‘[…] McLuhan came to understand that the history of ideas could be analyzed in terms of the on-going quarrels between the Platonic logicians and the Sophistic rhetoricians.’ (Marchessault 2005, 25)

As indicated in the Introduction, the ideas of Marshall McLuhan will serve us in this work as theoretical baseline. It is therefore necessary to briefly expound the basic tenets of his thought. Before doing that we must, first, straighten out two main misperceptions with regard to how his work is mostly characterized, namely, as media theory. Instead we propose, second, to read McLuhan as a media philosopher. Consequently, and third, we introduce the core ideas of the media philosophy he works out. Then, fourth, we elaborate upon the conceptual, even metaphysical foundations on which that framework rests. And fifth, we enumerate the most important criticisms that McLuhan’s work has received, in order to finally select which parts of the framework we will discard, and which components we intend to keep, to take along “on the road” through the remainder of this work.

2.1

The Interpretive Scope

Marshall McLuhan – the conceptual body of ideas that he represents, not the person himself – features prominently in what follows. But like all good characters in a play, his persona is straddled with historical ambiguities. To his own work have been added throughout the years layers – and lore – of interpretation that perhaps not so much distort, but certainly cloud its potential and scope. Interpretations that are well-founded and obvious enough, but still threaten to divert us from a more unconfined approach of McLuhan’s work. We single out the two most important ones: both have to do with a narrowing down of what his work may “actually” be about. 37

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NARROWING DOWN MCLUHAN “HORIZONTALLY” AND “VERTICALLY”

McLuhan reached the heights of his popular success in the 1960s; nowadays his position is much more difficult to assess. Has he been influential? Undoubtedly. But perhaps for the wrong reasons. Quite a few of his stock phrases have become part of our ‘collective consciousness’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 176), even to the extent that one may be familiar with expressions like ‘the medium is the message’, ‘the global village,’ or ‘the Gutenberg galaxy,’ but not with the person who introduced them. As Ivan Kalmar suggests: ‘[I]f McLuhan’s name no longer rings as many bells as it once did, it is because history has paid his ideas the compliment of making them commonplace.’ (2005, 227) Yet the transformation of vibrant, living, dynamic, and especially ambivalent ideas into commonplaces, can be seen as a kind of intellectual delousing or sanitization of slightly threatening but otherwise unharmful material. The itch is gone, but the scratching just as well. This in itself in fact makes for a striking demonstration of what we could call McLuhan’s theory of the “dynamics of ideas” – epitomized by the terms ‘cliché’ and ‘archetype’ – that sees a constant alternation, through time, between ‘figure’ and ‘ground.’ Figure is what is consciously focused on, the center of attention; ground stands for the background of perception that exercises its influence surreptitiously, i.e., the ‘environment.’ From the McLuhan craze of the 60s to the later sedimentation of his most famous quotes into cultural common ground, McLuhan’s insights in a sense have ‘flipped’ from figure to ground. Yet as ground, they exert influences that are ‘environmental’ and thus most of the time unnoticed. Just as McLuhan endeavors to uncover the hidden effects of media environments, we should question the unspoken assumptions of his own, often unquestioned reception.12 Because time has a strange tendency to compress. Within McLuhan’s reception, two “limiting maneuvers” are common. The first concerns a “horizontal” narrowing down of the scope of his work: as if it only deals with media in the ordinary sense of the word, i.e., communications media. The second point relates to what we call a “vertical” limiting of the actual depth of his thought. In fact, we will immediately see that the “object” of McLuhan’s work on the one hand stretches out far, “horizontally,” throughout the whole of the world as it is, and on the other hand reaches out deep into the past, “vertically,” to the very origins of our intellectual and conceptual horizons.13

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Chapter 2: Introducing a Protagonist

“MCLUHAN IS A MEDIA THEORIST”

Let us begin with the “horizontal” limiting: McLuhan is mainly characterized – or to extend the theatrical metaphor, cast – as media theorist. That view is obviously justified. ‘Media’ are most of the time the particular shape his concerns take. Leeker and Schmidt credit him with two merits: the first is that he has been responsible for ‘[…] the founding of media studies as a discipline.’14 (2008, 22) But his mission is much greater. Leeker and Schmidt sense as much as they propose his second merit to be ‘[…] the founding of media studies as a humanities discipline, thus freeing it from the bounds of engineering and communication science.’15 (ibid.) In other words: the study of media is about much more than media by themselves. McLuhan himself states it bluntly in a letter16, responding to one of many critical reviews of his work (Dennis 2005): ‘[Everette] Dennis apparently imagines that media are my primary concern. This is far from being the case.’ (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 505) But then what is his concern? Is it technology? Joost van Loon claims that ‘[h]is main innovation was based on the insistence of understanding media as technology (rather than representation) […]’ (2006, 161).17 Or is it perhaps “culture”? In the words of James M. Curtis: ‘McLuhan uses media to explain cultural change much as Hegel used the concept of Geist.’ (2005, 367) Or maybe perception? Or, as Tom Wolfe suggests in one of the two mottos at the beginning of this chapter, the central nervous system?18 All of these answers seem right. They attest to the foolishness and uselessness of treating McLuhan solely as a media analyst. THE ‘BOOK OF THE WORLD’

But then the “vertical” form of narrowing down steps in. For notwithstanding the elusiveness of McLuhan’s main theme, a central node that binds all of his work together can still be found. This point is illustrated in turn by the second motto at the beginning of this chapter. McLuhan’s conversion from English literature scholar, holding a doctorate about the medieval trivium (2006), to controversial media theorist should not be seen as an abrupt career change. His interest in media springs from his involvement with the relations between grammar, rhetoric, and logic – and vice versa – and his later media analysis emanates straight from his earlier literature study.19 From his schooling under the New Criticists at Cambridge, who aspire to interpret and understand texts first and foremost by way of their formal aspects, to 39

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his doctoral research on the historical-scholarly battle between dialecticians and rhetoricians and their differing treatments of logos (ibid.), to his own teaching at Saint Louis University, where he starts to analyze advertisements in class – to the bafflement of students and colleagues alike – a thread runs that combines all these undertakings and his later investigation of media in one great effort to interpret and understand nothing less than… almost everything. This effort has as one of its central assumptions that the world as it is now always comes forth from another and earlier state of that world. McLuhan links technology and media to the oldest and most fundamental cultural dispute, namely, that between rhetoric and dialectic or logic (or ‘philosophy’).20 As long as we do not grasp that media essentially root in these age-old debates, we cannot truly understand any of their effects. The influence of technology goes far beyond purely technological matters. Hence, conversely, the study of technology and media naturally flows over into a search for the order of things. Already in The Mechanical Bride from 1951, McLuhan is on the lookout for such a structure: ‘Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality.’ (2002, 75) And in Counterblast, almost twenty years later, it is still proposed that one of our crucial missions is to ‘[…] restore, and then to understand in a connubium, the unity of all the elements which men have abstracted by their codes from the primordial matrix.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 62)21 In commenting, Douglas Coupland puts it aptly like this: ‘[…] he saw the world as a book created by God, and believed that there is nothing in it that cannot be understood – and that we fail to try understanding it at our peril.’ (2010, 23) And Judith Fitzgerald remarks, specifically about Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972): ‘[…] Take Today underscores his view that all life – mental, material, spiritual, physical – is governed by laws […]’ (2001, 152).22 Thus, media as we traditionally know them for McLuhan are a kind of crash test dummies, deployed for the actual purpose of making sense of the greater whole, “structurally” and “historically.”23 Through studying media, we read nothing less than the ‘Book of the World’ (E. McLuhan 2008, 39) as it is written now, and has been written up to this day. This makes him, more than “just” a media theorist, a philosopher.

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2.2

Enter McLuhan, Philosopher of Blindness

Nevertheless, as all philosophers, notwithstanding the broad range of their interests, have key themes, McLuhan does too. Moreover, in order to get hold of a body of ideas so large in scope as his, one needs to find suitable entryways into it. One central way into McLuhan’s thought, we propose, is the visible-invisible dichotomy.24 The totality of his thought hinges essentially on a certain idea of “blindness.” But it is a blindness into which we are apparently gladly lulled. A WAY INTO MCLUHAN’S WORK: PERCEPTION, AWARENESS, UNDERSTANDING

The core idea is quite simple, simplistic even at first sight. In all that we do, in all that we experience, some things lie clearly in our focus, while others elude our conscious attention. Some things are visible, others invisible. On the one hand this is to be interpreted literally: some data necessarily escape our senses – visual or other. On the other hand the visible-invisible opposition should definitely be read as the placeholder for a distinction between intellectual apprehension or ‘understanding’ and its counterpart, intellectual ‘numbness’ or ‘somnambulism.’ The idea that our awareness of our surroundings, of what happens around us, stays incomplete most of the time, forms a central node in McLuhan’s thought. Three key terms characterize this gateway into McLuhan’s work: perception, awareness, and understanding. The first and last of these terms are ubiquitous in his work; the middle term appears somewhat less. Yet its meaning connotes McLuhan’s central aim well. At all times we are, obviously, engaged in processes of perceiving and understanding. But the particular sort of awareness that gets coupled to these activities stays up for grabs. Our perception may just as well be blind, our understanding dumb. The question of awareness makes perception and understanding a task – a project. EARLY CONCERNS WITH BLINDNESS: THE MECHANICAL BRIDE

That it is this very project that busies McLuhan all along, becomes clear in his first big publication, resulting from his remarkable teaching at St. Louis: a collection of printed advertisements with corresponding satirical essays named The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Both the teaching and the book are groundbreaking at the time, for they bring within the bounds of academia a topic that is expected to be far too mundane, trivial, or harmless to ever deserve serious scrutiny or criticism. This is McLuhan’s first attempt at problematizing the 41

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ordinary, or at least that which is perceived as ordinary, i.e., not perceived at all. Beneath the “text” of ads, another “text,” invisible to the untrained eye, can be with some effort discerned. Philip B. Meggs puts it aptly in the introduction to the new edition, when he observes that McLuhan is on the hunt for a ‘semiotics beneath semiotics’ (M. McLuhan 2002, xi). In an earlier version of the preface, McLuhan himself appears to have mentioned that all the ‘exhibits’ – the meaningful term he uses to designate the several ads: as if they are evidence of a crime; in fact they are – he treats of, have an ‘invisibility’ to them (ibid.). This summarizes the book well. Advertising, but also media such as TV, newspapers, and magazines, have an unconscious sway on us. They help transform us into serfs of the industrial system (‘somnambulists’) unaware of the subliminal effects of the images and messages surrounding us, and unconscious of the main forces behind the ‘folklore of industrial man’ – which is not so much produced by the ‘folk’ of industrial society but by the people in power.25 McLuhan endeavors to come to the rescue with his exhibits and matching ‘probes,’ and tries to uncover ads and media for what they really are: brainwashing instruments unabashedly deployed by an industrialpolitical-cultural elite. A BLINDNESS WE ARE ATTACHED TO

After The Mechanical Bride McLuhan says to have abandoned the ‘judgmental,’ more critical standpoint in favor of a purely interpretive, neutral stance (M. McLuhan 1962, 31). But the central dichotomy between visible and invisible remains; his thought stays intrinsically a project of uncovering the hidden or unperceived, and the quote ‘To the blind, all things are sudden’ – ascribed to Alexander Leighton (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 81) – becomes one of his favorite and often-used phrases. However, crucially, our blindness has a certain particularity to it. For some reason we tend to acquiesce, and yes, even rejoice in it. As McLuhan remarks with regard to our general tendency to remain oblivious of the structures of our environment: ‘[…] the audience is very prone to participate in the dramatics with an enthusiasm proportionate to its lack of awareness.’ (ibid., 249) It is not that we are aware of our not being aware; there is some lust and pleasure involved in remaining unconscious. We must really be shaken awake as from a sweet sleep. To help the blind to see in this way: that is the mission. And it seeps into every nook and cranny of McLuhan’s conceptual framework – even his methodology, as 42

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far as one can claim him to have one. Just because we are attached in a way to our blindness, some methodological trickery becomes mandatory. Against traditional academic methods, literate linearity, and fragmented expertise, McLuhan poses the ‘probe,’ the aphorism, the ‘mosaic approach’26: ‘My own concern is with the exploration of ignorance rather than the shoring-up of existing knowledge.’ (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 464) It is so that McLuhan paradoxically27 fights our sensorial and intellectual ignorance: with ignorance. And ignorant we are, in the first instance, of form.

2.3

‘The Medium Is…’: The Thing that Eludes Us

As said, notwithstanding the immense scope of McLuhan’s work, the term ‘medium’ serves as the main placeholder for a type of reflection that is really much grander, and that circles around the question: what do we consciously perceive and what not? In this sense McLuhan can rightfully be called a “media philosopher.”28 From the 1950s onwards, McLuhan begins to devote himself systematically to the study of media29, a work that eventually culminates in his most important book, Understanding Media, and one of his most famous idioms: ‘The medium is the message’ (2003, 19ff.). Not so much the content of media – a television program, a radio broadcast, … – should be studied, but the ‘form’ or the ‘nature,’ of the medium itself, i.e., its workings or effects: the television form, the radio form, … In its form, a medium is clearly “more” than “itself,” or at least what we thought it to be. It is also an ‘extension,’ an ‘amputation,’ a constellation of ‘effects,’ and an ‘environment’ at once. These are exactly the characteristics of media that most commonly elude us. MEDIUM AS EXTENSION AS AMPUTATION

Media originate in the human organism. This idea makes up the cornerstone of McLuhan’s extension theory (of which we will treat briefly now, and more detailedly in Chapter 6). Every technology or medium is an extension of a human sense, body part, or capability – script of speech, the wheel of the foot, … But in extending a certain body part or sense, that specific part or sense gets overstimulated, and by consequence ‘amputated.’30 Extending ourselves means ‘amputating’ ourselves – not so much in a literal, but rather in a “functional” sense: something of the working or functionality of the concerned sense, body 43

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part, or capability, is altered qualitatively. In other words, extensions and their attending ‘autoamputations’ have consequences. These manifest themselves first and foremost in the way we perceive, process, and interpret sense data: our extensions ‘feedback’ upon our organism. Every extension shakes up the whole ‘sense equilibrium’ – the balance between the senses – of individuals as well as society. At this point McLuhan introduces what we will call his “central dichotomy,” a dichotomy that will return, in many guises, throughout the length of his work: it appears that some technologies or media stress visuality, whereas others exhibit an auditory-tactile tendency. Thus, phonetic literacy and especially the movable type printing press, introduced by Gutenberg, helped to produce Western capitalist society based on uniformity, segmentation, and visual perspective, thereby rendering auditorytactile modes obsolete. But with ‘electric technology’ – telegraph, telephone, television – we return to tribal conditions of simultaneity, instantaneity, and auditory-tactile ways of interacting, to the disadvantage of visually centered perspectives (M. McLuhan 1962). MEDIUM AS MESSAGE AS ENVIRONMENT

But, we do not notice this. What we mostly notice about media, is their content. Their form eludes us. And what is their form, their “real” ‘message’? The effects that they have on us, society, and culture. A medium’s effects, as said, constitute its real ‘nature.’ ‘Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 22-23) This nature, i.e., the constellation of effects brought on by a medium, stays hidden, at least to the untrained eye. Media are ‘make happen,’ not ‘make aware’ agents (M. McLuhan 2003, 73). For that reason they ‘[...] work us over completely.’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 26) In order to make sense of this state of unconsciousness, McLuhan employs the Narcissus metaphor.31 As said, all technologies or media, as extensions of a certain sense or body part, cause the ‘amputation’ of that sense or part. But with the amputation the concerned sense or part is ‘numbed’ – ‘Narcissus’ stems from ‘narcosis.’ The physical, psychological and social effects that media have on us escape us, for the parts affected become “senseless.” At this point McLuhan introduces the term ‘environment’: every technology creates an ‘environment’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 40) or a ‘service environment’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001b, 61) – as for example in the case of the automobile, where a 44

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network of roads, gas stations, and car retailers rises up around the “car technology.” However, whenever a new environment is created, we do not perceive it immediately. The ‘message’ of the medium remains beyond conscious perception. In essence, environments are the ‘message’ of media. ‘Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 304-305) It serves to scrutinize this ‘environment’ term a bit more deeply. On the one hand, it would be a mistake to equate McLuhanist environments with just the physical surroundings. Richard Cavell suggests that McLuhan’s concept of environment can be likened to Foucault’s idea of ‘episteme’ (2003, 52): the totality of the historical conditions for knowledge and discourse, at a given time and place. Hence one could also see it as similar to Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ concept – an analogy that Jean Piaget outlines (1968, 132). These symmetries suggest to keep the scope of interpretation of the ‘environment’ term wide enough, but at the same time hold the danger of limiting it. For, on the other hand, the physical environment is nevertheless part and parcel of the media-created ‘environment.’ A focus on material agency could in fact be the innovation that McLuhan has introduced in philosophy generally.32 Ironically enough, not things as such interest McLuhan the most, but the forces that they produce beneath the surface of their ordinary perception: ‘Media of all kinds exert no effect on ordinary perception. They merely serve human ends (like chairs!) and convey data, etc. But macroscopically, the content fades and the medium itself looms large, as does earth to the astronaut.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 22) Crucial in this respect is the point at which, on the one hand, ‘environment’ and, on the other hand, human perception and intellect touch. In fact, ‘environment’ is, illogically, entirely co-defined by its meeting with “us.” For it is precisely our ability of adaptation to environments that co-constitutes them. As James C. Morrison comments: ‘[…] the most potent effects of technologies are those of which we are the least conscious, because of the natural evolutionary process of adaptation to the environment.’ (2006, 178) One who wants to understand environments, must look into the way we perceive, or not perceive. And the difference between those two McLuhan will eventually phrase in terms derived from Gestalt psychology. FIGURE AND GROUND

From the early to mid-seventies on, McLuhan starts to deploy the opposition 45

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between ‘figure’ and ‘ground.’ In fact these terms become as good as omnipresent in his work. The figure, as already suggested, is where our focus of attention lies; but every figure has a ground, as a backdrop in our perception, hidden to our current focus. In practice the terms ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ can be said to plainly serve as proxies for ‘content’ and ‘form,’ respectively. Whereas we – Western ‘literate’ people – ordinarily have the propensity to look for figures (content), we tend to completely disregard the ground (form). Once again, this is a rehearsal of the old battle between dialecticians or logicians on the one hand and rhetoricians and grammarians on the other hand. McLuhan: ‘Logic itself is a technique for omitting the ground in favour of dealing only with figures, a process which the Schoolmen and Descartes handed on to the mathematical logicians of our time.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 316) But disregarding ground has grave consequences, for ground defines figure. ‘[G]round provides the structure of or style of awareness, the way of seeing or the terms on which a figure is perceived.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 5) Thorough study of media, according to McLuhan, should imply looking for their hidden ground: ‘Communication is the study of ground rather than of figure.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 309) And he immediately adds a historical example: ‘In the case of Plato, it is not a study of his thought but of the people he worked for, and the people he tried to help.’ (quoted in ibid.) The study of ground should be possible, because our utter neglect of it, and our corresponding monomaniacal focus on figure, are learned habits. McLuhan: ‘A child can see the ground or environment as easily as figure.’ (quoted in ibid., 131) This means we can also unlearn them. Nevertheless, that is excruciatingly difficult: ‘The study of ground on its own terms is virtually impossible, as by definition it is at any moment environmental and subliminal. The only possible strategy is to construct an anti-environment.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 5). We will return to that specific strategy in Chapters 12 and 17. In any case, wherever one starts, one must take media for what they really are: extensions, autoamputations, bundles of effects, environments. And all of these track back, once again, to our perception. Therefore we turn now to McLuhan’s theory of perception, which forms the philosophical-epistemological foundation of his work.

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2.4

McLuhan’s Sensualism

Principally, to state that McLuhan has a theory of perception, may not be putting it forcefully enough. Perception provides the foundational pillar of his thought, its epistemological groundwork. In his framework, the activity of the senses – working more or less in harmony – constitutes the baseline of all human cognition, and hence existence. And just like McLuhan’s main “goal” is much wider than we would have formerly expected, his philosophical foundations, too, stretch out “vertically” – into his main influences – and “horizontally” – into contemporary theories of perception. SENSORIUM AND SENSE RATIOS; PERCEPT AND CONCEPT

It should immediately be remarked that McLuhan explicitly uses the term ‘senses’ in the older sense of ‘sensorium’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 132; M. McLuhan 2005b): the totality of a human’s perception, in which senses are constantly balanced against one another. The different senses – sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch – relate to one another in a specific ‘sense ratio’33, in which one or more senses may have prevalence over the others.34 As we extend a sense or bodily function into an outer material and in a way identify ourselves with this external technology, the involved function or sense is stepped up, and at the same time numbed – and this disturbs the whole sensorial equilibrium. ‘Every new technology thus diminishes sense interplay and consciousness, precisely in the new area of novelty where a kind of identification of viewer and object occurs.’ (M. McLuhan 1962, 272) It is the mostly unconscious sensorial balancing act that defines how we experience and interact with our environment. Our sense life forms the node of our existence. This unquestionably places McLuhan in an old Western philosophical tradition: sensualism – the doctrine that sees perception as the basis for cognition.35 Francis Balle comments: ‘The sensualism of McLuhan exactly lies in the fact that according to him human activity can be reduced to sensation.’36 (1972, 45) Slightly confusing, nevertheless, may be the precise manner in which McLuhan elaborates his own version of sensualism. In the later stage of his career, he begins to distinguish relatively strongly between ‘concepts’ and ‘percepts.’ (a.o., M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 137) Whereas the term ‘concept’ still has more of a common sense flavor to it in The Mechanical Bride – as a synonym for “idea” or even McLuhan’s own ‘probe’ (2002, vii) – later it becomes a stooge for the 47

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fragmented rationality deployed by literate culture, while ‘percept’ is defined as the epistemological unit furnished by the more holistic, auditory-tactile experience that McLuhan is by then wholeheartedly defending.37 ‘Concept’ and ‘percept’ are actually to be seen in this regard as plainly synonymous to each other, in the sense that they are both epistemological “products,” the former apparently logically coherent but essentially incomplete and literally narrow-minded, because uniquely related to one sense, the latter apparently vague and ambiguous but essentially closer to the “truth,” because inherently paradoxical38, as it relates to the interplay of all the senses, i.e., touch. Touch, tactility, is the cornerstone of McLuhan’s proposed sensory infrastructure. It is at the same time a sense and the sense that comprises all the others – the sensus communis. This is how we can make sense of an at first sight misleading phrase in Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting: ‘Object as seen yields distortion. / Object as known precludes distortion.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 93) One must here not equate ‘seen’ with percept, and ‘known’ with concept; in fact it is exactly the other way around. ‘Concept’ is derived from the visual faculty. ‘Percept’ – “true” knowledge – comes from the interplay of all the senses; not from visual perspective, but from “perception from all sides at once.” What happened in the Renaissance, was that the visual sense gained priority over the rest: ‘Under the impact of perspective the seen and the known were equated, with much loss of sensory life.’ (ibid., 73) McLuhan’s percept-concept distinction must be analyzed as a critical reaction to this in his opinion one-sided view. As Janine Marchessault points out, McLuhan has a very particular definition of rationality: ‘ratio-nality’ refers to the ratios of the senses. ‘Literacy, then, and this is a central argument, should not be conflated with rationality.’ (2005, 132)39 A NOTE ON TRADITION AND “VERTICAL” INFLUENCE

Yet, however wayward McLuhan’s elaboration may be, he clearly positions himself in a respectable row of scholars who have treated of knowledge in sensualist ways. McLuhan himself says to owe his discovery of an ‘epistemology of experience’ – in contrast with an ‘epistemology of knowledge’40 – to the work of Harold A. Innis, one of his most important influences. He also credits Innis with inspiring him to take the ‘human sensorium’ as the basis of his own work (Gordon 1997a, 149-150). McLuhan interpreters, however, have qualified McLuhan’s own stance on this purported influence.41 48

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Perhaps a more valid link can be found between McLuhan’s work and the great tradition of European empiricists. Balle for instance notices much similarity between McLuhan’s sensualism and that of John Stuart Mill and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (Balle 1972, 45). Also Paul Heyer points out that McLuhan’s obsession with the role of the senses in understanding the effects of communication has a predecessor in Condillac (1988, 4). Yet the most obvious influence on McLuhan – and at the same time the least credited by himself, except maybe in his letters (e.g., (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 280-281, 370) – must undoubtedly be Thomas Aquinas. In a letter to Walter J. Ong of 1953, McLuhan announces: ‘We need somebody to do a Thomist Theory of Communication.’ (ibid., 236) It is not sure whether McLuhan is talking about himself. But retrospectively one could surely say that this is (a part of) his project, as several authors have suggested (Marchessault 2005; Stamps 1995). Just like Aquinas, McLuhan develops a notion of “cognition-as-perception-and-poeticprocess” (Marchessault 2005, 40). Perception, i.e., cognition, is a creative act. ‘The senses link knower and known through a process of analogic phantasy. In creating this linkage, they engage in a pre-conscious form of reasoning.’ (Stamps 1995, 101) McLuhan’s idea of ‘touch’ – as the interplay of all the senses – derives directly from Aquinas’ sensus communis, which in turn hails from Aristotelian epistemology. A most systematic and helpful historical analysis of the Aristotelian and Thomist traits in McLuhan’s theory is delivered by Michael Bross (1992). Whereas rationalist epistemology originates in Plato’s mind-body split and then finds further elaboration in the works of consecutively Augustine, Descartes, and A.N. Whitehead, empiricism can be traced back to Aristotle’s unified mind-body model in which none of the two is conceivable without the other: all of our knowledge of the world is based on sensory information. This doctrine is picked up and worked out by Aquinas, and later by the British empiricists – from Francis Bacon to Bertrand Russell. McLuhan, says Bross, belongs so evidently to the latter tradition that hardly any reference to Aristotle and Aquinas is found in his main works. A NOTE ON EMPIRICAL CORROBORATION AND “HORIZONTAL” RELEVANCE

This all makes clear how McLuhan’s thought is to be situated in a lineage of sensualists, that stretches from Aristotle to Aquinas to the modern empiricists. Bross goes on to highlight three premises of McLuhan’s thought that hail from Aristotelian-Thomist doctrine. Interestingly enough – and this distinguishes 49

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Bross’ analysis from other, more historical-genealogical approaches – in each case he investigates whether the idea can be verified by recent empirical research on perception. First, the senses are ordered according to a certain hierarchy – an idea that originates in Aristotle. Yet McLuhan’s categorization of touch as the most dominant sense has no base in empirical observation. The importance of a single sense, Bross points out, is nowadays measured by way of the maximum amount of information that one sense or sensory ‘modality’ can transmit to the organism per time unit – in the case of mammals and certainly of primates, this is sight (although touch plays a very special role in the early stages of their development) (1992, 95). Second, there exists an agency that can translate sensory experience from one modality to another, namely ‘common sense’ or sensus communis. This is an idea rooting in Aristotle, that empirical research corroborates only partly, as Bross shows: the central nervous system processes sensory input in both a modalityspecific and amodal, nonspecific way. Thus the old ‘common sense’ could be seen as what is known today as ‘higher level amodal processing.’ The equation of ‘common sense’ with touch, however, must be regarded with skepticism, for it would be highly contradictory that the ‘common sense’ would collect all the experiences of each modality to then translate them into one specific modality (ibid.). Third, one of the main functions of the ‘common sense’ is to determine the ‘sense ratios,’ i.e., the relative contribution of each sensory modality to the total sensory experience – an idea that again originates in Aristotle. But McLuhan moreover looks at the intentional aspect of this process: how the observer relates the content of the sensory experience back to the world – a way of doing that can be traced back to Aquinas. Yet the idea of ‘amputation’ of an overstimulated sense, Bross goes on, cannot be verified by empirical observation; there is simply no evidence for any shifts in ‘sense ratios’ that McLuhan predicts (for instance: a “tuning down” of visuality causes an intensification of the auditive bias) (ibid., 9596). This last point, we can add, is qualified in a sense by research done by Paul Bach-y-Rita on ‘sensory substitution.’ Bach-y-Rita has developed machines, attached to one’s back or one’s tongue, that transform visual signals to vibrations (Bach-y-Rita et al. 1969; Bach-y-Rita and W. Kercel 2003), as ‘[…] an attempt to use one sense to replace another […]’ (Doidge 2007, 12). And indeed, it seems that 50

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blind subjects, after some practice with this machine, acquire a crude form of sight, notwithstanding their blindness. As Norman Doidge comments, it appears that ‘[…] individual parts of the brain are not necessarily committed to processing particular senses.’ (ibid., 211) Another brain researcher, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, indicates that our brains are not made up of ‘systems,’ but are organized as an array of specific ‘operators’ (Pascual-Leone and Hamilton 2001). Between those operators a continuing Darwinian competition is going on, to determine which one will process in the most efficient way the signals of a certain sense (Doidge 2007, 211-212). So, there is a certain interchangeability between sensory modalities, be it not instigated by overstimulation or ‘superstimulation,’ as McLuhan suggests, but rather by underperformance: when one sense fails, other senses will become more active. Not only will the quantity of their processing increase, they will also begin to qualitatively resemble the lost sense (ibid., 295). This shift can be stimulated by, on the one hand, the use of technological prostheses and, on the other hand, practice. Nevertheless, this nuance, however crucial, does not lessen the force of Bross’ critical assessment and reinterpretation. He indicates certain weaker points in McLuhan’s epistemological framework, from an empirical standpoint, and at the same time he hints at ways in which we can make McLuhan’s ideas about perception relevant today. The simple solution, he proposes, is to interpret McLuhan’s theory not literally, but metaphorically. The sensory functions comprise not just the isolated, afferent receiving and processing of sensory impulses (inward), but also the total, deferent response of the observer to the stimulus array (outward). These deferent components McLuhan describes as ‘outerings’ – in a wordplay on ‘utterings’ – and in fact the term ‘outering,’ i.e., extension, can be equated with technology, or medium. In this manner, Bross sees it possible to align McLuhan’s work with that of the cyberneticists, for whom every living system consists of feedback or feedforward cycles. (We will elaborate a couple of times upon the parallels between McLuhan’s framework and cybernetics thoughout the remainder of this work.) Thus: perception and technology are two sides of the same coin. A view that is certainly compatible with the aforementioned research on ‘sensory substitution,’ and that becomes particularly clear in the case of Bach-y-Rita’s machine. So although Aristotelian and Thomist epistemologies do not seem to be very much in fashion anymore nowadays, McLuhan is, bizarrely, not that far off the mark with his ‘Thomist’ theory of perception.42 51

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2.5

Criticisms

Yet, although there are indications of McLuhan’s being more astute than we would have expected, his work has through time elicited much criticism. We started out righting the misconception that McLuhan is solely concerned with media as we know them. He should be read as a philosopher, bent on nothing less than describing the laws that steer the world – but nevertheless treating ‘media’ as a crucial point of entry to that overall project. At the same time the only way available to us of “accessing” media, is through the filters of our perception. However, even if we take this particular perspective on his ideas, quite a few of the critiques that have been generated with regard to his work are still relevant. We outline them briefly here, as they will return either explicitly or in a somewhat more veiled form throughout the following chapters. NEGLECT OF CONTENT IN FAVOR OF FORM

As said, the ‘medium is the message’ probe serves as a reminder to turn our attention to form rather than to content. Several critics have subsequently denounced McLuhan for neglecting content altogether. Most famously, Umberto Eco launches the fiercest attack on the probe, from the perspective of semiotics. ‘The medium is the message,’ according to Eco, ignores the difference between the code, the message, and the channel of a medium (2005, 129). For semioticians, content is crucial. As Stephen Littlejohn comments: ‘While McLuhan teaches that the media forms themselves constitute the primary message of mass communication, semiotics makes a sharp separation between a medium and its content.’ (1989, 256) Christopher Ricks and Francis Balle, also, question McLuhan’s monolithic focus on form instead of content (Ricks 2005; Balle 1972, 46). These interpretations do very much have a value as warning signs – so as to not neglect content altogether – but they are also misled to a certain extent. Logan comments: ‘McLuhan’s intention was not to wholly ignore the content of a medium in analyzing its impacts.’ (2000, 18) Jonathan and Margarete Epstein, then, go even further and situate McLuhan within the formal sociology of Georg Simmel: good sociology ignores the specific content of interactions and focuses on the form, i.e., grammar, accompanying those interactions (2005, 428-429). It is not so much McLuhan’s aim to neglect content entirely. Rather ‘the medium is the message’ should be read as a stratagem to dissolve the unilateral involvement with 52

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content dominating cultural studies and, most importantly, ordinary perception.43 As Paul Heyer indicates: ‘In interviews, he [McLuhan] often admitted that his privileging of form over content did not imply a disavowal of the latter, but was merely an attempt to redress the obsession with content that had tyrannised almost all previous communication research.’ (2005, 8) Thus, ‘the medium is the message’ should be seen as a “counteracting” heuristic, going against the grain of exclusively content-focused approaches in communication studies. But, there is more. McLuhan’s focus on form cannot be called purely strategic. For it hinges on a central idea within his theory of media “dynamics,” namely, that the content of every medium is another medium. In that sense, ‘the medium is the message’ does not mean that content is not important, but that it always has to be viewed as form (Patterson 1990, 38). We will treat of this issue more extensively in Chapter 7. TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

Beyond the form-content debate, then, hovers the infamous technological determinism charge: is McLuhan a technological determinist? Admittedly, he suggests as much when he defines the ‘message’ in the ‘medium is the message’ probe thus: ‘For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.’ (2003, 20) As we have seen, these ‘human affairs’ concern first and foremost our sensorial lives. Every medium acts upon the composition of our ‘sense ratios,’ namely, the balance between our different senses. In his texts McLuhan often tends to depict these influences and workings by way of phrases like ‘… thanks to…’ or ‘… creates…’ For instance: ‘For many years now, we have had not government by democracy, but government by bureaucracy, thanks to the computer.’ (M. McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 1977, 110) Or: ‘Electricity […] creates musical politics.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 113) This all admittedly suggests an image of ‘media’ as well-defined, active agents that have clearly circumscribed effects on other agents, among which us humans. And this is in our view a correct interpretation of the ‘medium is the message’ probe – one, as we will see in Chapter 12, in line with Bruno Latour’s take on Actor-Network Theory. Nevertheless, McLuhan’s suggestions along these lines have helped to label him as a technological determinist, a description that has both elicited applause and raised eyebrows. Paul Heyer, among others, scorns McLuhan for disregarding the 53

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possibility that for example culture, economy, and demographics can give rise to certain forms of technology. ‘Historical change is [according to McLuhan] technological change.’ (1988, 138)44 Jean Baudrillard, conversely, in his pre’simulacrum’ period (1994), taxes McLuhan’s purported one-sidedness just as well, but surprisingly sees in it a potentially accurate description of the current state of affairs. One can find his later ‘simulacrum’ concept already shimmering in the following attestation of McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ probe: ‘It is by the technological support that each ‘message’ is in the first place transitive towards another ‘message’, and not towards a human reality.’ (2005a, 103) The imperative messages that the medium nowadays brings, says Baudrillard, are ‘the message of the consumption of the message’ and ‘the exaltation of the content as sign’ (ibid., 104). In other words, in our society now technological determinism may indeed be our reality. Yet whether one is for or against McLuhan’s apparent technological determinist stance, to really qualify for technological determinism, ‘the medium is the message’ should imply that the workings of media constitute a one-way traffic “from medium to any other entity,” and not an intricate fabric of interlocking influences “from medium to another entity to another medium to another medium to yet another entity to yet another medium,” et cetera. The latter situation, as we will demonstrate throughout the following chapters, is more the case in McLuhan’s work than the former. Joost van Loon phrases it this way: ‘Although, he [McLuhan] did consider media as having particular effects, these effects were never simply the effect of the instrument-as-such, but always induced by the social forms that were already implied by the medium.’ (2006, 166) That the medium mediates, does in no way mean that it is not itself mediated by other forms, rules, institutions.45 How this mediation works exactly, is a question we will treat of more thoroughly later on.46 However it may be, McLuhan nowhere literally posits the idea of a single causal link “starting in” a medium and “ending in” something else. A distinction often made within media theory and deployed by Paul Levinson may clarify the point. In The Soft Edge Levinson differentiates, in discussing McLuhan, between hard and soft determinism. Hard determinism implies that media have absolute, inevitable social consequences. Soft determinism by contrast assumes that media make certain events possible; events that could however just as well be influenced by other factors, for instance, conscious human action (1997, 3-5). And it is this latter version of determinism that McLuhan represents.47 54

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TELEOLOGY

The following form of criticism links up directly with the previous one. As we have already suggestively indicated above, McLuhan sketches a – mostly three-stage – historical succession of tribal, literate, and neotribal eras.48 The new sensibility, arising in the last stage due to the emergence of ‘electric technology,’ is proposed to reunite the several senses that were disassociated or isolated during the previous stages in one balanced equilibrium again. Quite some authors have not surprisingly drawn parallels between this scheme and Christian teleology. Daniel Czitrom, for one, observes how ‘McLuhan’s mature theory rests on a new version of the Christian myth […]’ (1982, 174). In his work there is just as much a sequence of Eden, Fall, and Paradise regained to be found. Namely: tribalism (oral culture), detribalization (phonetic alphabet and print), and retribalization (electronic media) (ibid., 175). Frank Kermode in a review of The Gutenberg Galaxy notices a similar analogy, however with a different accent, because specifically relating to the ideas proffered in the aforementioned book: ‘Mr. McLuhan substitutes the printing-press for Genesis, and the dissociation of sensibility for the Fall. In so doing he offers a fresh and coherent account of the state of the modern mind in terms of a congenial myth.’ (2005, 90) In any case the loss of natural balance within the sensus communis can be seen as a fall from grace. Nevertheless one should stress that, notwithstanding reasonable suspicion given McLuhan’s relatively ardent private religious convictions, in his texts he almost never lets on that this fall from grace should in any way be connected to one or other superhuman entity.49 It seems more that, if we are ever to fall from perceptual grace, we have only and wholly ourselves to blame. Any and all “punishment” we have brought upon ourselves, for the ‘dissociating’ technologies hail from us and nothing else. Moreover, from a certain perspective, as will become clear through the remainder of our argument, we can in fact safely neglect McLuhan’s musings about a prophesied ‘collective consciousness’ brought on by the full deployment and correct use of ‘electric technology’ – a “medial” ‘Pentecostal condition’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 114) – without touching the essentials of his philosophical groundwork.50 In other words: even if there were a teleology in McLuhan’s framework, we would not need it. The fact, however, remains that his “time frame” represents, as Kalmar suggests, employing a term hailing from Northrop Frye, a ‘U-shaped story’: a three-phase sequence consecutively consisting of an initial situation of primordial balance, a period of decay or discord, and an end stage of solution and fulfillment 55

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– just like Freud, Marx, and Mead before him have proposed, according to Kalmar, similar historical schemes (Kalmar 2005). Does history really proceed in that way? We will postpone a more detailed discussion of this issue to Chapter 11. LACK OF POLITICAL AWARENESS

Nonetheless, McLuhan’s purported technological determinism is claimed to have other perverse consequences than just a potential teleological tendency. Quite some critics have reproached him for offering an exclusively organismic account of technological development, and so completely neglecting political and social force fields. John B. Thompson, for one, alleges that the Canadian tradition of ‘media theorists,’ among whom McLuhan, although it has its own merits, ‘[…] is less helpful […] when it comes to thinking about the social organization of the media industries, about the ways in which the media are interwoven with the unequal distribution of power and resources, and about how individuals make sense of media products and incorporate them into their lives.’ (1995, 8) This defect in McLuhan’s framework principally hinges, according to some, on the sensualist aspect of his media concept, that sees media’s effects on sensory balances as their main ‘message.’ It appears as though media’s sole workings take place at the individual level, as William Melody comments: ‘He never seriously addressed the implications for society’s economic, political, social and culture institutions. For McLuhan, it was primarily a private affair between the individual and the communication medium.’ (1994, 258) Nevertheless one has to add to this that with McLuhan, through a change of individual ‘sense ratios,’ a transformation of society as a whole is effectuated. In other words: societies have sense ratios as well. We would call this the “tricklethrough mechanism.”51 It implies that the individual-generic human organism forms the ground or base at which essential alterations are fermented, and that from there on change spins out into ever greater concentric circles, through communities, nations, regions, eventually covering the whole globe. But the critics tackle this mechanism as a one-sided account of technological deployment just as much, or an unnecessary detour in any case. Simply put: people and institutions are “more than their sense lives.” James W. Carey for instance, critiquing what he calls McLuhan’s ‘empty organism view of the self,’ says: ‘There is, I suspect, much more freedom in perception and invention in everyday communication than McLuhan is willing to admit. […] My argument is simply that the most visible 56

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effects of communications technology are on social organization and not on sensory organization.’ (2005a, 209-211) Part of this strand of critique is the oft-heard complaint about McLuhan’s skewed reading of Innis’ work. It is said that McLuhan develops a quite selective interpretation of Innis and thus of the concept of media bias52: he rather disregards the political and social effects of media in favor of their effects on perceptual organization. Carey observes: ‘Whereas Innis sees communication technology principally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought.’ (ibid., 200) This is indeed suggested by phrases like the following: ‘[…] the form of the blindness is the form or bias of sensibility.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 83) According to John O’Neill, McLuhan could have benefited from some more ‘Innis-sense’ (2005). Yet, from another perspective this exact selectivity could be seen in contrast as a broadening of scope instead of a narrowing-down, as a radicalizing instead of a weakening. This is as much as Joost van Loon – in line with an array of thinkers who draw meaningful analogies between McLuhan’s work and the tradition of dialectical materialism and Critical Theory (Stamps 1995; Grosswiler 1998; Theall 1975)53 – suggests: McLuhan radicalised Innis’s understanding of bias by arguing that it is more closely connected to the nature of human being as a living thinking creature whose motivations and desires are endlessly diverse and never reducible to the accumulation of either wealth, knowledge or force. That is to say, whereas he kept the analytical method of dialectical materialism, he connected this to […] a more vitalistic (and one might say Nietzschean) ethos rather than a Marxist one. For a McLuhanist reading of Innis, bias of communication would not be a primarily political phenomenon, but one that encompasses the whole of the human condition. (van Loon 2006, 163-164)

Moreover, it may not be wholly correct to state that McLuhan neglects political, social, economical aspects and relations whatsoever. He conserves Innis’ distinction between ‘time-biased’ and ‘space-biased’ media, although transmogrified into the binary pair of ‘literate’ vs. ‘tribal,’ and goes on to demonstrate that the different modes associated with these kinds of media make for very distinct forms of politics, and economical and societal setups. These forms

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admittedly do all intersect at one crucial location, namely, the meeting point of individual or collective perception and ‘environment.’54 If all starts with human perception and the attending non-perception – blindness – then one must in the first instance attempt to get a grip on the dynamics of this tension. This implies that the topography of politics should be drawn differently: politics are “elsewhere” than we thought them to be.55 CONSERVATISM

Still, even if one in taking McLuhan’s hint agrees to relocate the spot at which the political reflection should start, another danger lurks – a danger moreover that goes beyond mere theoretical concerns. For, some contend that in hinting at a formal-organismic account of politics, McLuhan in fact serves to consolidate existing imbalances in power. Being thus in essence a conservative. Guy Debord famously belongs among those who heckle him along these lines (2005). Andrew Ross, also, charges McLuhan with ‘unsocial realism,’ summarizing his critique as follows: ‘Attention to form was always the endpoint of understanding, and never the beginning of contestation […]’ (1989, 119). The formal analysis that McLuhan offers may be to the point – that is the ‘realism’ – but in the end it only allows for resignation – i.e., it remains ‘unsocial’: [H]is faith in the independent and abstract capacity of new technological development to generate a more egalitarian culture relinquishes entirely the field of power struggles waged over cultural “taste.” He sees no danger in this complete withdrawal or abdication of intellectuals from the war of persuasion; it is simply a fact, made inevitable by the development of the culture and advertizing industries. (Ross 1989, 133)

Grant Havers too, although more forcefully, accuses McLuhan of conservatism: ‘Yet the paradox of McLuhan’s right-wing politics is that it is not classically ‘conservative’. It is a forward-looking conservatism, anticipating that electric technology will first demolish the liberal individualist print age, then replace it with a retribalized community.’ (2003, 523) According to Havers, McLuhan’s conservatism – his ‘right-wing postmodernism,’ as he dubs it – originates in his love for the American South and its values, but at least, ‘[u]nlike the myth-makers of the old South, McLuhan recognizes that his myths really are myths […]’ (ibid., 58

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519). Which precisely makes it postmodern. But the point can hardly be missed. Czitrom alleges McLuhan to have outlined ‘[…] a more closed and static theory of media than is generally realized.’ (1982, 148) His framework at its utopian heights indeed begins to exhibit ideological characteristics, as Balle specifically points out (1972, 72). And because of his influence on the popular imagination and the collective consciousness, this may not have been or may not be without consequences. As Czitrom avers: ‘[…] his enduring legacy may well be his role in legitimizing the status quo of American communications industries and their advertisers.’ (1982, 148)56 Perhaps this harsh judgement should be qualified given McLuhan’s aforementioned concerns in The Mechanical Bride, but indeed the criticism is to a great extent justified. Throughout Part II and specifically in Chapter 10 we will attempt to mitigate this specific ailment57 through superposing McLuhan’s outlook with that of Andrew Feenberg. ANTHROPOCENTRISM

Finally, we make mention of a critique that is not often voiced with regard to McLuhan, but that is nevertheless directly coupled to the aforementioned issues, and that will moreover play a considerable role in what follows: McLuhan’s view is in essence anthropocentric. In particular Graham Harman points to an apparent ‘people-centered bias’ hovering beneath the surface of his framework. McLuhan, as we have seen, holds that by extending our senses into outer materials we lose the natural balance – organic interplay, ‘resonance’ – among them. According to Harman ‘[…] this cedes too much ground to the dull naturalistic view of inanimate objects […]’ (2009a, 110). For what assures us that this ‘resonance’ does not take place between objects too? Harman traces this issue back to a fundamental inconsistency in McLuhan’s ontology: first he accuses visual abstraction for neglecting ‘ground,’ but then he goes on to make the human mind ‘[…] responsible for holistic resonance between things, whereas material things […] are blamed for the figural bias that had previously been described as the work of the biased human intelligence.’ (ibid., 107) This makes for a surprising criticism since, as we have seen in our discussion of the technological determinism critique, the agency of media takes central stage in McLuhan’s framework. Yet at the same time media are said to originate in the human organism and feedback upon it. We will attempt to make sense of this 59

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essential conflict within McLuhan’s body of ideas throughout Chapters 8 and 9.

2.6

What Remains

Through all of the aforesaid, we have gotten to know our protagonist a bit better. We have seen him enter the stage, introduced as philosopher instead of media theorist. Immediately we were offered an impression of his outlook on life: we are all “sleepwalkers,” lost in a world in which some things inevitably escape our conscious attention. Then he explained his ideas somewhat further by way of applying them to media: media “come from us,” but once they are out in the world they start “doing” things, things that define but elude us. He expounded consequently on how exactly our fundamental sensorial condition makes for this situation. Then entered the other characters, who engaged into a debate with our protagonist. THE STATUS OF CRITICISM

We thus started out reframing McLuhan as a philosopher and ended up with the principal criticisms towards his work. Would there have been generated less vehement critique towards McLuhan if the reception of his work had been coupled with, first, a refusal to read him as a pure media theorist, and second, an awareness of the largeness of scope he was after? What in fact has triggered such intense reaction against his work, especially in the sixties and seventies? McLuhan has a straightforward answer ready himself: ‘People feel angry when something they had ‘known’ all along surfaces. It happened with Freud.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 315) Other authors have suggested more humble reasons. W. Terrence Gordon for instance points out how McLuhan’s resolute, ‘non-judgmental’ interest for the ‘Book of the World’ – in McLuhan’s own words the ‘bland acceptance of the contemporary world as a scene’ – was misinterpreted by his critics as endorsement (Gordon 1997a, 65). And among others Gordon (1997a, 310), Janine Marchessault (2005, xv), and none other than George Steiner (1969, 88) suspect a certain intellectual laziness and the unwillingness to really read McLuhan as probable grounds for misjudgement. Admittedly McLuhan himself has, according to Jim Morrison, complicated things somewhat for his critics by, first, using television to make people conscious 60

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of the effects of television, second, his aphoristic style, and third, his refusal to stay within the boundaries of logical positivism in order to make his point (2006, 194).58 In general however, Morrison surmises, McLuhan’s accusers have focused too much on the content of his work and have thereby neglected his very own call to be wary of content and instead become aware of the ‘formal ground’ – in this case of McLuhan’s approach itself (Morrison 2006, 187). A similar argument is also put forward by McLuhan himself: according to him, the severest and even most elaborated critiques of his work obviously spring from a literate, linear worldview – the very perspectival thinking he is attempting to denounce. McLuhan clearly exhibits an aversion towards strict empirical testing and proofing, and his theorems are, notwithstanding his own expectations in this regard (in Laws of Media: The New Science; cf. M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, vii–viii), neither confirmable nor falsifiable. Several authors have put this forward as the main reason for the marginalization of McLuhan’s thought in the context of particularly North-American communication studies (T. L. McPhail and McPhail 1990, 80n.; Crowley and Mitchell 1994, 8). And indeed his work definitely has, in potency, an air of unfalsifiability to it not unlike psychoanalysis. It is probably not coincidental that McLuhan likens himself to Freud in this respect. Critics of McLuhan are said to be simply all-too ‘linear’ thinkers, as even some of his thoroughest readers suggest (Curtis 1978, 103) – an attestation which of course serves to “prove” the theory even more. However it may be, even while making abstraction of the problems of scientific rigor, there are plenty of reasons to thread cautiously in McLuhan land. Yet we should also remind ourselves of the given that even if there is cause for suspicion, the suspect may not necessarily be guilty. In the above we have tried to get both McLuhan’s content ànd form in view in an introductory manner. And so we can now more easily decide what parts of the philosophical toolbox, that McLuhan offers us, we will discard or in any way treat with skepticism, and which ones we choose to keep. WHAT WE WILL DISCARD

The criticisms we have discussed above may all be put in perspective in some way or another, but taken together they point at the one grossest weakness in McLuhan’s thought. Unfortunately this weakness also happens to be pivotal to it: the aforementioned “central dichotomy” between literate and oral – where ‘literate’ and ‘oral’ may be substituted with different respective placeholders such 61

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as ‘hot’ and ‘cool,’ ‘linear’ and ‘all-at-once,’ ‘left hemisphere’ and ‘right hemisphere,’ and many others, scattered across McLuhan’s texts. However, it is not so much the dichotomy itself that should trouble us – every good theoretical framework simply needs binary pairs as so to speak levers for heavy conceptual lifting – but the “time frame,” or the temporal dimension that McLuhan attaches to it. Thus, according to McLuhan, and as we will see many other authors for that matter, different periods in the cultural history of the West can be discerned: oral-preliterate; literate; oral-postliterate. And the changeovers between these eras are more or less brought about or at least intensified by the emergence of certain technologies. Phonetic writing and the movable type press induced Western modernity with its linear, perspectival, and individualistic bias. And today, due to ‘electric’ communication technologies, we suddenly are back in oral mode, at the mercy of all-involving, corporate-communal instantaneity. Now as we will contend, the dichotomy itself may be useful, but not necessarily its coupling to very specific technologies or media. What is more, even the dividing of mankind’s history in periods qualitatively differing from each other may not do so much harm. Rather the uncritical expectation of improvement and progress associated with this time frame could have nefarious side-effects. We will treat of what we call McLuhan’s “era thinking” in Part II. WHAT WE INTEND TO KEEP

Then, in closing, how do we go about “using” – or abusing? – McLuhan for our purposes? ‘Like a mystical religion, “McLuhanism” seems like overwhelming truth to those who believe in it and like hogwash to those who do not[,]’ Joshua Meyrowitz remarks (1985, 21). Should one plainly endorse McLuhan’s work as the way it is? No. But taking all of the above into account, we could treat it as a bundle of more or less loose threads that can guide us through a messy landscape of media, which in fact turn out to be more-than-media. As George Steiner intimates: ‘[…] it is often in the throw-away suggestion, in the local perception, that McLuhan is most interesting.’ (1969, 267) His “greater points” about certain technologies inducing specific cultural shifts are, by contrast, to be termed exaggerated. Rather, perhaps, we should see McLuhan as a ‘microblogger’ avant la lettre (Levinson 2009, 141-142), who has the gift of gathering worlds of insight into one pithy sentence. At the same time however, and paradoxically, it is important not to lose sight of the greater whole that is McLuhan’s work itself, and of the immense 62

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target he is after. It may not be fruitful to simply pick out some disjointed oneliners and expect these to magically do all the dirty work, to foster a systematic understanding of media-as-more-than-media. As Curtis points out: […] Much of his work is exciting, not so much for the information it gives us, as for the possibilities it suggests. So, in any application of his work, the persuasiveness comes, not from any one statement, but from the cumulative effect of a series of internally consistent statements. Although something which explains one particular thing may not be a principle, something which explains a number of different things in different periods probably has some more general meaning. (Curtis 1987, 10)

Exactly this approach, as will become clear throughout the remainder of this work, fits in with the “border-crossing” methodological considerations we have presented in the Introduction. In this way McLuhan can furnish a starting point not only for philosophy of technology, but for a whole new metaphysics (of objects), as Harman suggests (2009a). The balancing act in this regard consists in simultaneously not expecting too much – no system, grand theory, or solution – and expecting rather a lot: a theory that is about more than media and technology as such – and in that sense exactly about media and technology as such.

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Chapter 3: ‘Love Is Blind’

3

‘Love Is Blind’: Blindness in Relation to “What We Get” ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit’ (Shakespeare 1923, Act II, Scene VI)

Whereas in the previous chapter the protagonist of this work, Marshall McLuhan, was introduced, in this one the antagonists are brought in. We do this by further elaborating on the main entryway into McLuhan that we have outlined previously: the visible-invisible distinction. Other authors, within the philosophy of technology and related disciplines, have proposed “theories of blindness” similar to McLuhan’s. We start out discussing everyday perceptual blindness, and go on to specifically analyze the blindness that we tend to have towards our technological surroundings. What we see of and “get” from technologies or media always partly eludes us. Next, we discuss the obstacles to a thematization or theoretization of this “technological blindness,” to then propose a heuristic that will help us to get it in sight: the concept of transparency. A “theory of transparency” is subsequently located in the work of Martin Heidegger, Gregory Bateson, the postphenomenologists, Bruno Latour, and Andrew Feenberg. These different theories can be subdivided in two categories: transparency of “use” and transparency of “context.” In closing we investigate how these two “levels” relate to each other, and we briefly foreshadow how they will determine our approach in the following parts.

3.1

The “Result” of Love

In the previous chapter we proposed the visible-invisible dichotomy as a central entryway into McLuhan’s work. We also saw his framework to be essentially sensualist in nature. Perception, in his view, grounds our being. Above and beyond the criticisms towards his theory, then, we chose to treat his body of ideas as an eclectic toolbox of heuristic instruments with which to approach media in their elusiveness and their comprehensiveness. Yet given the specificity of our purposes – and at the same time their broadness – we now need to move out quickly into the wider realms of philosophical theory. For it is our overall “bond with technology” that we are on the lookout for. In 65

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order to arrive at an inclusive framework, thus, we would do well to also inquire into other perspectives on our relation with technologies and media outside of the bounds of McLuhanist media theory. Moreover, by linking up McLuhan’s ideas with other approaches, we can value and ascertain the relevance of his thinking in a contemporary context. The “blindness” heuristic will guide our way here as well. However, in what follows we will reframe this heuristic in terms of the dichotomy between transparency and opacity, by way of which we will attempt to make sense of the concept of technological mediation as such – what we will dub the “result” of our “love of technology.” WHAT ELUDES US

Let us first of all ponder again briefly on “elusiveness” at large. How many times have we not looked for something that eventually turned out to be lying or standing straight in front of us? As is well-known, a large part of our mental life is forged by habit. A walk home from the train station done everyday will in the end not carry the same flavor of freshness it once had those very first times. We will perhaps notice a demolished house one day – a gap where we remember “something else” to have been. But if prodded to meticulously describe that old building, we will be lost for words, helplessly scanning our memory for the erased image that perhaps was never even there – although some people are noticeably better at noticing details, landmarks, and peculiarities than others. It is the same with searching for a lost item in a familiar environment, for instance our living room: we seem to be unable to transcend this dense blur of usualness, of “everything in its right place.” Of all unnoticed in the background. At all times it appears we have to a certain extent our “head in the clouds.” But what has this to do with a possible love of technology? Love, next to a project of intense focus, i.e., on the beloved object, is also a work of neglect. When one is in love, the whole world may pass him or her by. Love is blind, so they say – even literally, as research has shown that feelings of love dampen the activity of brain regions associated with critical assessment (Bartels and Zeki 2004). Could it be that the sort of everyday, ubiquitous absent-mindedness that we have just sketched is in fact a highly diluted, highly distributed version of a lover’s disregard for certain elements in the world? More precisely: the neglect of the nature of our multifarious involvements with the technological surroundings?

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WHAT DO WE REALLY “GET” FROM TECHNOLOGIES?

For if everyday objects can disappear from view by sheer routine, surely technological devices – blending in with ordinary experience just as much as everything else – will undergo the same fate. With some effort we are able to notice the umpteen devices, boxes, wires, antennas, satellites, companies, contracts, … standing between us and a friend, a company, or a service. But do we and can we notice how most of the times we fail to notice these manifold things, and how we even evade noticing them lest our actual goals or endeavors – calling up to say hello, making an appointment, checking a timetable – be simply undermined?59 Moreover, not just devices but also the more impalpable parts or aspects of technologies must eventually escape our conscious attention, as McLuhan conjectures: ways of doing, procedures, environmental influences, i.e., effects as such. More and more of our daily communication – administration, shopping, planning – is inconspicuously transferred to the realm of the Internet. And are we for instance still aware of what the cellphone has done to our lives since it nested itself neatly into our everyday existence? Or are we still amazed about the immeasurable magic surrounding our credit card, and the system of which it forms a part, every time we pull it out of our wallet? It seems we are subject to these two sorts of blindness: on the one hand a not noticing of the media and technologies themselves; on the other hand a lack of sight toward phenomena about or around them. Whereas we can feel, practically, instinctively, the technological mediatedness of almost everything, at the same time this technological mediation, in all its “environmentality,” stays beyond our comprehensional radar. In sum: “what we get” from technology, what technology delivers to us60 escapes us, at least partly. We do not get it completely.61 Through daily use technologies gradually slip from our conscious focus. And in the end we lose sight of what we have gained through these new ways of doing, but just as well of what we have lost by them. One day perhaps, we suddenly find ourselves looking for something, something we know we had – a value, a richness, a claim – but it is nowhere to be found in this familiar scenery that we have, by now, traversed a thousand times. Our eyes cannot get hold of it. Chances are there that it is hiding in plain sight.

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3.2

Blindness and Transparency

This notion of ambiguous awareness of our technological mediatedness – we are simultaneously “in the know” and not – deserves further scrutiny. At the beginning we announced that we would move out from McLuhan into other theoretical domains. However, in order to thread firmly, we are in need of a guiding heuristic. We propose this to be the opposite pair of “transparency” and “opacity.”62 OBSTACLES TO THE THEMATIZATION OF TECHNOLOGICAL BLINDNESS

The “invisibility” of our everyday surroundings has been thematized in contemporary philosophy of technology, but up until now only sideways.63 There have been developed in recent years several approaches that help us come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world, such as (post)phenomenology, Actor-Network Theory, the ‘Critical Theory of Technology,’ et cetera. But notwithstanding the vast merit of each, these theories do not so much have as their focal point technological mediation per se. They rather focus on certain aspects of it. Nonetheless, many of the concepts elaborated within these frameworks point towards a general analysis. Through the remainder of this chapter, we will attempt to gather and synthesize these viewpoints. While doing so, we should nevertheless be wary of the feasibility of an exhaustive analysis. For the lack of an overall framework with which to make sense of technological mediation an sich may originate in exactly the phenomenon of technological blindness itself. This more specifically in two ways. First, the blindness that, as we have signalized, reigns in everyday life, affects academicscientific methods and practices just as well. Research, whether fundamental or applied, in the sciences or in the humanities, forms a domain of activities just as much entangled in (communication) technologies as any other. One should for instance consider the tremendous effects that the introduction of the computer has had on the whole of academic – and generally intellectual – practice. Yet that is just the point: such a consideration almost never takes place, because it is not needed in the day-to-day work. And from the machines “themselves” we should not expect full disclosure. As Michael Heim observes: ‘Present everywhere like eyeglasses on the end of our noses, computers will hide the distortion they introduce […]’ (1994, 14). And so their effects remain mostly unquestioned, and this is because of the first of the aforementioned sorts of blindness: in order to 68

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fluently use the medium one must be partly “blind” “to it.” Here theory needs to become more self-reflexive. It must turn its gaze towards its own, “structural” blind spot.64 Second, what moreover may help to explain at least our contemporary technological blindness, is the fast pace of technological development. This makes mediation and its attending blindness hard to assess.65 The speed and force with which during the last two decades for example e-mail has invaded work life, or mobile phones have changed the face of social culture, clothe these technologies with an air of obviousness. Yet the totally new technologies – conspicuous in their blatantly being out-of-the-ordinary – tend to attract the most attention, and not the technologies that have become mainstream, to which we have by now become accustomed. Here lies a typical pitfall for media studies: media that have a huge impact at their birth may quickly become obsolescent, leaving research results largely irrelevant. Or they may become indeed mainstream, and hence an altogether different story just as much.66 Moreover, some technologies or media eventually acquire a status of such obviousness that they become what Rudyard Kipling calls ‘technologies in repose,’ namely, “disguised technologies”: technologies that do not seem to be technologies, but appear as “natural” products instead, and that therefore escape critique (Postman 1992b, 138). In any case, many technologies and media thus get to be fully embedded into the context in which they function, and in such a way that they cannot be distinguished from this very context, from the “around” environing them. They become subject to the second form of blindness that we have sketched, that has something to do with the greater whole in which a technology or a medium is incorporated. “STRUCTURAL” VS. “HISTORICAL” BLINDNESS: PRACTICAL VS. CONTEXTUAL TRANSPARENCY

Thus: the general condition of “being technologically mediated” falls through the cracks of lived experience and theoretical bricklaying alike. Yet the distinction between either seeing or not seeing this mediatedness in the midst of our daily routines will make for a world of difference. It may be that we can only reach a deep understanding of technological mediation if we take exactly our blindness to it as a starting point. If we are to understand what we “get” from technology, we need to tackle the aforementioned two sorts of blindness. Looking for what is not there may lead us to perceive what is there. The heuristics of “transparency” and its counterpart “opacity” will get us started. For several theorists have indicated diverse ways in which technology may 69

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either disappear from view or by contrast block the view somehow. Thus, either it may appear as transparent: one does not consciously perceive aspects of the technology as such or related to it. One “sees through it,” so to speak. Or it may appear as opaque: the technology or some of its aspects come clearly in view, but may be blocking the perception of certain other things. In some cases, both features may be present at the same time, in an interrelated sense. Much of the recent research on technology has formulated one or other, more or less specific idea of technological transparency and opacity, and moreover a description of how one “state” can change into another and vice versa. Interestingly, we will find that the authors concerned here mostly treat of one of the two forms of blindness we have outlined. Either they deploy a transparencyopacity pair that is situated within the regions of what we will call “structural” blindness, i.e., having to do with something of the technology or the medium “itself.” The sorts of transparency and opacity that reign here, manifest themselves first and foremost in the use of media and technologies; they could be named practical. To this category belong Heidegger, Gregory Bateson, and postphenomenology. Or they propose a concept of transparency that essentially relates to what we call “historical” blindness, i.e., concerning something about or around the technology: the network of other technologies, media, institutions, value systems, et cetera, of which it forms an indistinguishable part. The transparency and opacity configurations at work here, can be called contextual. In this category especially the work of Latour and Feenberg is at stake. Further on, the distinction between “structural” and “historical” will become the groundwork on which, respectively, Parts I and II rest. In what follows first, we will discuss the “theories of transparency” more or less implicitly present in the frameworks mentioned.

3.3

Transparency of Use

HEIDEGGER’S TOOL ANALYSIS

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, especially to be found in The Question Concerning Technology (1977b), still serves as a cornerstone and starting point for many philosophers of technology today. But his illustrious tool analysis, developed in Being and Time (1962), may be even more interesting for the scrutiny of technology and technology use, as several authors have pointed out or 70

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suggested (Winograd and Flores 1986; Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005; Feenberg 1999; Feenberg 2002). The Question deals explicitly with (modern) technology, analyzing it as ‘Enframing,’ that leaves open only one mode of ‘revealing,’ namely ‘ordering’: the uniform summoning of raw materials, including humans.67 Being and Time, conversely, contains no mention of the word “technology” whatsoever. However, since Heidegger’s theory of transparency68 must be mainly sought beneath the surface of the latter work, rather than within the bounds of his later thoughts on technology, we will concentrate first and foremost on the tool analysis. Being and Time’s tool analysis is located in a section titled ‘Analysis of environmentality and worldhood in general.’ In order to put it in its rightful context, it is necessary to zoom out momentarily. Heidegger’s purpose in Being and Time is to rekindle and reframe the question of being: what is the meaning of being? This question, or at least the right way of posing and answering it, has somehow been forgotten throughout the history of philosophy. Western thought has concerned itself with beings instead of being itself. This distinction between ontic (beings) and ontological (being) levels of analysis will stay with Heidegger throughout his whole thinking career. Heidegger’s thought in fact can be, however thoroughly simplified, summarized as a continuous attempt to get behind the “mere” posing, describing, and producing of entities (epitomized in the doings of modern science and technology), to a ground of possibility – being – without which this posing, describing, and producing would not even be realizable.69 In Being and Time, the portal (or ‘horizon’) that Heidegger deems fit to set about this journey is Dasein, human being. Dasein has as its basic state being-inthe-world. Breaking up that phrase in its parts, Heidegger starts out with an analysis of the last component: the world. Yet to give an account of the ‘worldhood’ of the world, we cannot suffice with an ontic description of the beings (entities) in it, nor does even an ontological interpretation of their being do the job. Instead, we need to revert, paradoxically, to what is closest to us: the environment (Umwelt), or the everyday being-in-the-world. Right here, in the environment, we encounter tools. ‘We shall seek the worldhood of the environment […] by going through an ontological Interpretation of those entities within-the-environment which we encounter as closest to us.’ (1962, 94) At this moment the tool analysis starts off properly. In dealing with the world, we are always involved with entities. Tools are a special category in the sense that ‘equipment’ are ‘[...] those entities which we encounter in concern [...]’ (ibid., 97). 71

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This ‘encountering’ is not the contemplating or observing of entities. Equipment is always something ‘in-order-to.’ It points to a ‘towards-which’: a certain use. A tool always refers to something else, and to a ‘totality,’ of which it is part and parcel. The thing-as-tool shows itself only in this ‘in-order-to.’ Thus, in our handling of a tool, we encounter it not as a presence but as equipment in its totality. Here Heidegger introduces his famous distinction between readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). His archetypal example is the hammer. In looking at the hammer “theoretically” we see a presence-at-hand.70 We never discover its readiness-tohand; therefore we have to use it. In using the hammer we experience it as readyto-hand. Not unimportantly, it thereby ‘withdraws.’ ‘That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves [...]’ (ibid., 99). We are concerned with the work to be done. The tool-as-tool stays hidden. That, however, does not mean that dealing with tools has not got its own ‘sight,’ which Heidegger dubs ‘circumspection.’ It is not “blind” as such. But “theoretical” seeing and the seeing that comes with using a tool are two distinct ways of understanding. Nevertheless, there are circumstances in which the ready-to-hand suddenly becomes present-at-hand. To wit: when a tool gets broken, is lost, or stands in the way of our concern. At that time equipment enters the modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy, respectively. ‘In conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy, that which is ready-to-hand loses its readiness-tohand in a certain way.’ (ibid., 104) Now exactly the Vorhandenheit-Zuhandenheit distinction harbors Heidegger’s concept of technological transparency. Heidegger shows us that whenever or wherever technologies mediate our doings our use of them is always situated in a world, in an encounter not with the tool-as-tool, but with equipment and its totality. The technology itself eludes us.71 However, neither presence-at-hand nor readiness-to-hand is completely “blind” – as suggested, each has its own ‘sight.’ But a selective form of attention can be said to belong to both states. What is more, whenever we find ourselves on one side of this ontological divide, we lose something of the other. A ready-to-hand tool cannot be (completely) present-athand. But vice versa what is present-at-hand loses some meaning of readiness-tohand. Thus when ready-to-hand, the tool is transparent in the sense that we do not notice it “as tool.” But likewise, when it is present-at-hand, we do not see or experience it as ready-to-hand. One mode always makes the other mode transparent, but at the same time – herein lies the paradox – stands “in front of” 72

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the other; puts up, so to speak, a screen of opacity impossible to pierce through. One mode always hides the other.72 BATESON’S ‘CONSCIOUS PURPOSE’

Heidegger’s tool analysis has become foundational in philosophy. Yet interestingly, within a wholly different discipline cyberneticist Gregory Bateson has developed an idea of technological blindness or transparency that not only shares many characteristics with Heidegger’s, but moreover may extend the boundaries of the latter. With Heidegger it is prominently Dasein that experiences the states of either readiness-to-hand or presence-at-hand.73 The blindness or ‘unconsciousness’ of which Bateson speaks characterizes by contrast all mental life whatsoever.74 In order to understand the idea of ‘unconsciousness’ – and the attending idea of ‘consciousness’ – that Bateson develops, one first has to grasp his definition of what is ‘mental.’ Mental activity for Bateson envelops much more than only humans’ cognitive and perceptive powers. In fact all living creatures exhibit traces of mental life. This broadness of scope links up directly with the general definition of mental activity that Bateson furnishes, in contrast with the “classic” view, namely that the mental is strictly limited to the “thinking” activity of mammals and other animals. Much more generally, as Noel G. Charlton comments, for Bateson ‘[m]ental process is the activity involved in receiving and responding to information and in gaining and using knowledge […]’ (2008, 32). And ‘information’ – a very crucial term in cybernetics – comes down to ‘difference.’ The reception of information is always the perception of difference. Hence, all living creatures are concerned with this very basic process of perceiving and responding to surrounding events, i.e., differences: […] our sensory system – and surely the sensory systems of all other creatures (even plants?) and the mental systems behind the senses (i.e., those parts of the mental systems inside the creatures) – can only operate with events, which we can call changes. (G. Bateson 2002, 90)

Every organism – what Bateson terms ‘Creatura’ in contrast with ‘Pleroma,’ all non-organic things – has mental life. Ergo: perception and cognition. Charlton observes that ‘Bateson does not endorse the idea, supported by Samuel Butler, Teilhard de Chardin, and other panpsychists, that even the smallest single entities 73

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have mental characteristics.’ (2008, 33) But perhaps, he adds, he would have revised that view in the light of recent developments in quantum physics that suggest a radical ‘interconnectedness’ between even the smallest subatomic parts (ibid., 33). However it may be, the broad scope of the definition implies that all living creatures do not just receive signals from the environment but also respond to them actively. ‘The end organs are […] in continual receipt of events that correspond to outlines in the visible world. We draw distinctions; that is, we pull them out. Those distinctions that remain undrawn are not.’ (G. Bateson 2002, 90) Perception, however depending on the impulses coming in from our surroundings, is always a creative process – much like with McLuhan. That said, our mental life – perception, in the first instance – is at all times essentially split in two: a conscious and an unconscious part. And it appears that the unconscious part covers significantly more ground than the conscious. We consciously experience only a very small part “of experience”: The processes of perception are inaccessible; only the products are conscious […]. The two general facts – first, that I am unconscious of the process of making the images which I consciously see and, second, that in these unconscious processes, I use a whole range of presuppositions which become built into the finished image – are, for me, the beginning of empirical epistemology. (ibid., 29)

We are reminded here of Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit-Zuhandenheit distinction.75 What is ‘conscious’ for Bateson may be said to be vorhanden for Heidegger; ‘unconscious’ then stands for zuhanden. Being ready-to-hand, a hammer does not enter our conscious reflection “as hammer.” And in our everyday doings the mode of readiness-to-hand plays a much greater role than the objectifying stance of presence-at-hand. In Bateson’s view the unconscious components of mental life take up the largest part by far. ‘As only a small part of our human knowing ever reaches the “screen of consciousness” […], the bulk is unconscious knowledge of kinds shared by organisms and systems throughout the living world.’ (Charlton 2008, 32) But crucially there remain – just as with Heidegger’s tool analysis – gateways between the conscious and unconscious realms: a ‘[…] “semipermeable” linkage between consciousness and the remainder of the total mind.’ (G. Bateson 2000, 438) 74

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Nevertheless, notwithstanding the preponderance of the unconscious part in mental processes, we – humans – tend to attribute the greatest importance to consciousness. More precisely: the conscious pursuit of more or less practical goals. This is what Bateson calls ‘conscious purpose.’76 Conscious purpose is what drives us modern, civilized humans forward in our everyday smaller and greater projects. But it is only a limited knowledge of the structure of the world that is, in actuality, much more comprehensive than our mere ‘conscious’ perspectives can grasp. And such limitation holds a danger: it may make us vulnerable to changing circumstances, since a monolithic focus on ‘purpose’ is severely straining our adaptive skills (ibid., 450). Peter Harries-Jones remarks: ‘Bateson insists that all conscious-purposive action should be balanced by other forms of understanding which are not purposeful and not linked to clearly defined intentions or prescriptions.’ (1995, 50) For with ‘conscious purpose’ – although it has driven mankind forward in its ruthless development of institutions, technologies, things – something definitely is lost.77 And what is lost? The “true” perception of the interrelatedness of all things – in other words: the ‘cybernetic nature of the world.’ ‘[T]he cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the “screen” of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose.’ (G. Bateson 2000, 450) Charlton comments: ‘The cybernetic connectedness of self and world is concealed from us.’ (2008, 60) As already mentioned, this situation makes it impossible for us to make changes that are acutely necessary: […] it is very difficult for us to perceive changes in our own social affairs, in the ecology around us, and so on. […] These things undergo drastic change, but we become accustomed to the new state of affairs before our senses can tell us that it is new. (G. Bateson 2002, 91)

Bateson attributes this blindness for the ‘new,’ as his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson clarifies, to a ‘[…] mismatch between natural processes and human mental capacities.’ And she then literally uses the term ‘blindness’ to explain her point: ‘He [Bateson] hypothesized that we act in the world on the basis of a systematically distorted understanding of the effects of our actions, a sort of blindness to cybernetic circuitry […]’ (M. C. Bateson 2005, xi). This perceptual imbalance gives rise to all sorts of other imbalances: relational, social, political, …78 Fortunately, we are not completely at a loss.79 A certain 75

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“seeing” can possibly be restored, if only we are prepared to turn to the unconscious, and to the domains in which the unconscious part of mental life “takes front row,” such as eminently religion, love, and the arts (G. Bateson and Bateson 2005). Our “bad habits” can be unlearned, although with effort. We can turn a certain transparency into an opacity, or vice versa. Mary Catherine adds: ‘Today, I would argue that individuals have multiple modes of consciousness and that our various patterns of attention and inattention are learned and can be changed.’ (2005, 318) Unfortunately, at the same time, it may also be that our cybernetic blindness resides deeper than we thought, and that it cannot so evidently be unlearned. Perhaps it is “in our nature,” and we plainly cannot escape it: […] it is worth asking whether the difficulty in recognizing this basic cybernetic principle was due only to humankind’s laziness when asked to make a basic change in the paradigms of its thought or whether there were other processes preventing acceptance of what seems to have been, as we look back, a very simple idea. Was the older epistemology itself reinforced by self-corrective or runaway circuits? (G. Bateson 2002, 99)

Probably we can never reach a state of total seeing, as is also suggested in Heidegger’s work. ‘We live in a life in which our percepts are perhaps always the perception of parts […] It is perhaps so, that wholes can never be presented; for that would involve direct communication.’ (ibid., 106) Just as with McLuhan, our technological – cybernetic – blindness is something that belongs to us; albeit “us” in a certain condition, era, location, or context. We can try to aim our focus at our blind spot but we will never neutralize the blindness completely. POSTPHENOMENOLOGY’S ANALYSIS OF HUMAN-TECHNOLOGY RELATIONS

Whereas Bateson attempts to tie us again to the cybernetic order – the “greater whole” – of which we form a part, the theory of transparency found in the works of the postphenomenologists conversely appears to be more “in the details.” Yet postphenomenology’s founder Don Ihde’s technology analysis starts out, just like Heidegger’s tool analysis, from our basal condition of being-in-the-world, in which no longer any strict separation between us humans and the world can be made. Both are interrelated: ‘[…] inter-relationality implies that human > < world changes are such that for every change in a ‘world’ there is a correspondent 76

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change in the ‘human.’’ (Ihde 2010, 66) Upon this principle Ihde superposes a focus on specific technical materialities, our interaction with them, and our interpretation of them. In Technology and the Lifeworld (1990) he establishes two programs to make sense of the relations between technologies, humans, and their world: a ‘phenomenology of technics,’ that investigates how human-world relations are mediated by technologies, and a ‘cultural hermeneutics,’ that attempts to understand how technologies behave in cultural settings. These programs have in various ways been modified and expanded by other postphenomenologists like Peter-Paul Verbeek (2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2008a; 2008b) and Evan Selinger (2006a; 2006b; 2008). Figure 1. Human-technology-world relationships (adapted from Ihde 1990) Embodiment relation

(human-technology) → world

Hermeneutic relation

human → (technology-world)

Alterity relation

human → technology-(-world)

Background relation

human(-technology-world)

Within the ‘phenomenology of technics’ – by now classic in the philosophy of technology – Ihde defines four sorts of human-technology-world relationships (1990, 72-118). In embodiment relations the human “embodies” the technology to a greater (e.g., glasses) or lesser (e.g., telephone) extent. In hermeneutic relations then, the human interprets or “reads” the world through the technology, mostly unlocking a perception of it that is unavailable to the technologically unmediated eye. This happens for example with scientific instrumentation. In alterity relations, the human treats the technology as an ‘other.’ For instance one can have such a (possibly intense) relation with a car. In the schematic representation of all these cases (cf. Figure 1), the arrow stands for intentionality. In the first two cases, thus, human intentionality is mediated by technology. In the third, it is aimed at a technology as such. Yet in background relations, at last, the technology does not come “in view” at all, but resides in the background, as in the example of central 77

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heating or a refrigerator. This scheme of human-technology relations, specifically the embodiment and hermeneutic relations, is augmented by Peter-Paul Verbeek in the form of an analysis of technological intentionality (2008b). According to Verbeek, Ihde is mainly concerned with human intentionality and the technological mediation thereof. But the examination of certain cases shows that we need to extend the concept of intentionality from humans to technology. A technology itself can have intentionality too. This leads Verbeek to define two alternative sorts of intentionality: ‘hybrid intentionality’ (or ‘cyborg relation’) (ibid., 390-392) and ‘composite intentionality’ (ibid., 392-394). Simply put, he questions the dashes in the schematic representation of Ihde’s embodiment and hermeneutic relation, respectively. In the case of hybrid intentionality, the human does not merely embody the technology; the two of them merge and form a new whole. In such a cyborg relation – e.g., persons with brain implants, people who take drugs – there can no longer be made a distinction between the ‘share’ of intentionality of the human and the technology. The technology is not simply used, but incorporated. Figure 2. Technological intentionality relationships (adapted from Verbeek 2008b)

within

human-technology-world

Hybrid intentionality

(human/technology) → world

Composite intentionality

human → (technology → world)

With composite intentionality, then, the technology in the hermeneutic relation has its own intentionality towards “its” world, whereas the human intentionality is aimed towards the result of the technological intentionality. For example, a thermometer focuses on temperature, radio telescopes are aimed at radiation; but the human attends to the results of that intentionality. The two sorts of intentionality combine (cf. Figure 2). To the different human-technology relationships different degrees of transparency correspond.80 In the case of embodiment relations – Ihde partly builds on Heidegger’s tool analysis here – a technology must be transparent 78

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enough, that is, to the person embodying it, for him or her to be able to embody it. Ihde notes: ‘The closer to invisibility, transparency, and the extension of one’s own bodily sense this technology allows, the better.’ (1990, 74) Yet here, he admonishes, a ‘doubled desire’ can arise to completely embody the technology – thereby making it totally transparent – and at the same time retain the power or enhancement that it makes available. According to Ihde that desire is at best contradictory and illusory for it (secretly) rejects what technologies are: the technological mediation always has transformative effects; it cannot be wholly transparent (ibid., 75). Hermeneutic relations, then, evoke what Ihde terms ‘hermeneutic transparency’ (ibid., 86ff.). Here the transparency is not to be located between the human and the technology, as in the embodiment relation, but between the technology and the world. For example in a nuclear power plant a ‘hermeneutic transparency’ between the measuring instruments and the core must be established, so that operators in the control room would be able to properly read out the dials that tell its condition. Next, with alterity relations, the transparency moves even further away – here the human interacts with the technology itself. The technology has thus become opaque. Finally, in background relations, Ihde says, ‘[...] the role of background presence is not displaying either what I have termed a transparency or an opacity.’ (ibid., 109) Instead, here the technology is, phenomenologically speaking, present as an absence. Verbeek, in turn, does not investigate the consequences for transparency in a direct manner. Yet we can make some inferences. Does a cyborg relation exhibit the same balance of transparency and opacity as a “simple” technologically mediated embodiment relation? One would suspect that in the first case, the transparency is nearly complete, in the sense that human and technological intentionality can hardly be distinguished. Yet, referring back to the ‘wish for total transparency’ that Ihde describes, from a human intentional viewpoint, the experienced transparency can never be total.81 And what with composite intentionality? It appears that from the same experiential viewpoint no difference in degree of transparency should be noticed by the human here. The human intentionality, aimed at the results of the technological intentionality, stays indifferent to the latter as such – at least in everyday practice. From a theoretical or developmental or design-related standpoint, however, the reckoning in of technological intentionality may seriously clarify the way in which we depict technological mediation. Specifically 79

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this means we should take into account that mediating technologies have multiple intentionalities – possibly aimed at other humans, but just as well at inorganic matter or concepts.82 What we thought were “neutral,” transparent communication technologies, then, turn out to be intentionally active nodes in a network.

3.4

Transparency of Context

LATOUR’S ‘BLACK BOX’

The following two authors however make for a perspective that differs radically from the three previous ones, at least seen from the perspective of our purposes. We start with Bruno Latour. Latour’s frame of reference is the discipline he himself has helped founding: Actor-Network Theory (ANT) or, in the terminology he himself prefers, the ‘sociology of associations’ (Latour 2005b). ANT can be seen as a comprehensive attempt to go beyond the value-fact split in sociology and philosophy of science – a trait that these disciplines had inherited from the very domain they treated of but which appeared obsolete as soon as the ‘social construction’ of science and in fact all facts was “discovered.” ActorNetwork Theory tries to make sense of this ‘construction’ by ‘following the actors’ along the constellations that they form. Instead of the traditional dichotomies posed by ‘modern’ philosophical thought such as those between subject and object, ‘Nature’ and ‘Society,’ fact and value, ANT introduces the notions of ‘actant’ and ‘network.’ Unlike the traditional acting subject, actants – as forces of agency – can be human, ‘nonhuman’ or, mostly, a blend of both: ‘quasi-objects’ or ‘hybrids.’ They interact with each other across a mazy landscape of interrelation, intermingling and association: networks. By formulating the ‘principle of symmetry,’ then, between humans and nonhumans (1993, 94ff.), Latour has succeeded in furnishing a completely different picture of for instance modern scientific endeavors (1987) or technology development (1996) than the ‘moderns’ could ever have themselves. That has something to do with what Latour calls the ‘modern Constitution’: the “official” philosophical foundations on which modernity is grounded. The main business of the Constitution consists in ‘purification,’ that is, placing every phenomenon on either the ‘Nature’ or ‘Society’ side. Yet the truth of the matter is that even as modernity “tells this story about itself,” beneath the surface of the 80

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Constitution ‘proliferation,’ i.e., the creation of quasi-objects, has all the while relentlessly continued. Behind the scenes the Constitution shamelessly mixes scientific and natural explanations with sociological and political workings. Hence Latour’s famous statement that we have never actually ‘been modern’ (1993). This more abstract explanation harks back to a process that Latour already describes more concretely in Science in Action (1987), namely, blackboxing. There he traces a dichotomy between on the one hand what is said and on the other hand what is done in the world of scientific fact-making. Before facts become “facts,” diverse transformations take place and allies have to be found, either human or nonhuman. But once this process has come to an end, its product – a scientific fact – turns into a ‘black box,’ a “given” that is not further questioned. ‘When many elements are made to act as one, this is what I will now call a black box,’ Latour defines (ibid., 131). But what counts for science also applies to other domains of human activity.83 Technologies for instance are black boxes as well. Latour borrows concepts from narrative theory to explain this. In analogy to ‘narrative programs’ (plots) technologies have ‘programs of actions.’ Actants, either human, nonhuman, or both, could be seen as protagonists of countless stories, playing out scenarios called ‘scripts.’ ‘Translation’ takes place when a script of one actant is transformed into a script of another. The automated door-closer is Latour’s most famous example. The script ‘Keep the door closed when no one is entering,’ otherwise executed by a human (a porter or concierge), is translated, ‘delegated,’ ‘displaced,’ ‘shifted out’ to a nonhuman actant, resulting in an enormous increase of efficiency (1992, 228-229). That way moral values become incorporated in the technology.84 But once the controversy over technical, moral, and political choices stops and the technology takes its final form we forget its historical background and simply obey its functional prescriptions. Now in the tensed dynamic between the appearance as black box and the “true” hybrid nature of technologies we can again find paired notions of transparency and opacity. As black box, technologies are opaque – in the sense that we stay blind to their internal functioning and history – and transparent at the same time – in the sense that we are allowed just to use them, so to speak, without further ado. Conversely, in a manner not unlike McLuhan’s, Latour warns for the forgetting or neglecting of quasi-objects’ “real” nature. The proliferation of hybrids asks for a certain degree of control and prediction. As long as the work of purification covered everything up the moderns could continue the mixing, 81

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making and multiplication of quasi-objects ‘under the table.’ (1993, 142) This “clandestinity” should be fought just as well. When needed, an opaque black box should be made transparent and its thoughtless (transparent) use questioned.85 Latour in the end suggests – slightly optimistically – that in reopening the black box, ‘Pandora’s Box,’ we may find some hope at its bottom (1999). FEENBERG’S ‘TECHNOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS’

At last then, we turn to Andrew Feenberg’s “theory of transparency,” which is in essence closely tied up with Latour’s, as the former partly builds on insights derived from the latter. Feenberg, in working out his ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ (1991; 2000; 2002) or ‘instrumentalization theory’ (1999; 2002), has been endeavoring to find a middle road between dystopian-technophobic and utopian-technophilic views on technology. His own stance relies heavily on “classic” although mostly to a greater or lesser degree ‘essentialist’ philosophers of technology such as Heidegger, Marcuse, and Habermas, but combines particular insights of these authors with findings from more recent empirical technology research such as Science and Technology Studies (STS). The former, as we saw in the Introduction, define technology mostly as a realm or force that threatens our appropriate way of living or that should at least not invade our ‘lifeworld.’ The latter demonstrates how technologies (in the plural sense) are the end results of controversies among social groups and actors. By combining both – essentialist criticism and constructivism – Feenberg attempts to counteract the antitechnological tendencies in essentialism while at the same time retaining its critical powers (1995a). Central to Feenberg’s thought is the idea of ‘underdetermination’: technology cannot simply be explained by its functional aspects; ‘efficiency’ alone does not account for its history and effects. Technology is not just a neutral means to an end. Critical theorists have been right in criticizing an all-conquering technical rationality as the hallmark of modernity: technology has often been employed by the ruling classes to consolidate their power. Feenberg calls this the preservation of ‘operational autonomy’ (1991; 1995a; 1999; 2002). ‘Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many.’ (Feenberg 2006, 180) Yet this also does not wholly exhaust the explanation. For evidence has shown – here constructivism enters the scene – that individual actors or interest groups can modify technologies or influence the course of their development. So against 82

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and within the conservation of hierarchy there remains a possible ‘subversive rationalization’ (Feenberg 1995b). Technology is thus in this sense by definition ambivalent (Feenberg 1995a). Fundamentally, this argument hinges on the constructivist premise that technologies are the results of struggles over social values, and revolves around Feenberg’s notion of the ‘technical code’: the technical form of a technology in which social values are embedded (1991, 1995a, 1999, 2002).86 And here, in the concept of ‘technical code,’ we can descry a conception of technological blindness very similar to and moreover directly influenced by Latour’s. In most cases before a technology achieves its ‘final form,’ various alternatives, representing as many different social values, contend for hegemony. ‘Design is only controversial while it is in flux.’ (Feenberg 1999, 96) But once these controversies have been settled the technology becomes blackboxed, the social values nicely “bagged” in the technical code. ‘The fact that the system has been shaped not only by technical necessities but also by the tensions of the class struggle has been forgotten.’ (ibid., 40) Technologies appear as neutral, their social history become hidden. ‘The waves close over forgotten struggles and the technologists return to the comforting belief in their own autonomy which seems to be verified by the conditions of everyday technical work.’ (ibid., 89) A reentry into the technologies’ social realm is closed off by way of the technical code. The code is – as in the case of Latour’s automated door-closer – ‘cast in iron’ and this gives the illusion of technological necessity. ‘What were once values posited in the struggle for the future, become facts inherited from the past as the technical and institutional premises of further advance.’ (ibid., 98) Feenberg also uses the term ‘technological unconscious’ (2002, 21). ‘Often current technical methods or standards were once discursively formulated as values and at some time in the past translated into the technical codes we take for granted today.’ (ibid., 21) And this specific blindness is a typically modern phenomenon. ‘Traditional societies do not hide the substantive consequences of the exercise of authority […] But modern formal rationality serves similar social purposes under an appearance of neutrality.’ (1995a, 27) It seems as if modernity has “repressed” certain values “towards” the technical domain. Which would, we could add, however imply that there is also a “technological consciousness.” Indeed, according to Feenberg, not all values get embodied in technological designs. Some remain within the realm of discourse. Yet just as in psychoanalytic topology the conscious Ego and the unconscious Id are fairly 83

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abruptly separated from each other, notwithstanding the presence of several possible gateways (repression as “input” in the Id and away from the Ego, therapy as “output” from the Id and towards the Ego), the unconscious, i.e., incorporated, and conscious, i.e., discursive, values stay relatively apart from each other, however with the possibility of interchange. ‘[D]esign embodies only a subset of the values circulating in society at any given time. Those not so embodied appear discursively rather than technically, but the two forms of value are not irrevocably cut off from each other.’ (Feenberg 2005, 105) This has repercussions on several levels. On a theoretical plane one could be tempted to explain technology from an instrumentalist viewpoint, forgetting ‘underdetermination.’ But on a political level the consequences might even be graver, because “forgetting” the social construction of technologies grants the game to the powers that be. So far Feenberg’s ‘technical code’ largely corresponds with Latour’s ‘black box.’ Yet Feenberg diverges from social constructivists – among whom Latour – at a crucial point87: social constructivists, by invoking the principle of symmetry, run the risk of indifference, of not being able anymore to judge social inequalities. Therefore we still need a ‘global social theory’ (Feenberg 2003, 85-91). Feenberg’s proposal entails ‘radical,’ ‘deep’ democratization of technology. ‘Those threatened by technology must control technology.’ (2006, 207) Ordinary people – users of technologies – can take action by specifically forcing design changes, creative appropriation, or engaging in participatory design (1999, 120-129; Feenberg and Bakardjieva 2004). When looking at a technology one must always consider its potentials (Feenberg 2009a, 80), for this sort of ‘democratic rationalization’ in the end rests on the fundamental potentiality or ‘malleability’ of technology (1999, 193).

3.5

Two Levels of Blindness

Our love of technology, as we suggested at the beginning, is blind. We wanted to find out which form precisely this blindness takes. For that purpose we have located concepts of technological transparency – and thus “blindness” – within the most diverse theoretical frameworks. All of the above perspectives in one way or another see blindness as solidly belonging to either our perceptual, existential, or cultural setup. It may be possible to evade some of our blind spots, but we probably cannot escape them all at once. We ourselves appear to be, at least partly, 84

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the origins of the blindness of our love. Nevertheless, things get even more complicated as soon as one starts to further investigate the interrelations between the two categories of blindness or transparency that we have deployed. We synthesize in what follows the aforementioned views, and lay some of the bricks that will start to make up the structure of the remainder of this work. SPOTTING BLIND SPOTS

Heidegger sees respective modes of blindness in the states of either Vorhandenheit or Zuhandenheit; blindnesses bound to our metaphysical and ontological setup. Bateson hints at the existence of a fundamental blindness shared by all things ‘mental,’ but in the case of us humans specifically veiling the cybernetic nature of self and world. Ihde and Verbeek then, link up various degrees of perceptual transparency and opacity to different sorts of interaction with technologies, i.e., human-technology-world relations. Latour in turn locates a blindness in the social construction of technologies, or at least a blindness that is born after technologies have been socially constructed, when the ‘black box’ is closed. And Feenberg finally adopts the black box concept of Latour and points out its potential consequences and outcomes for democratic change – a blindness to be situated wholly and completely within the political realm. All of these views, although they attach to altogether different disciplines, can be said to be fundamentally phenomenological.88 It is in fact McLuhan who suggests that phenomenology has in its core always been a project of revealing blind spots.89 From McLuhan to Heidegger to Latour to Feenberg to Bateson, a thread can be said to run that unites them in one great perceptual project, namely the spotting of blind spots and the accompanying attempt of remedying them. In each case a “closure” – more or less tied to our preconceptions or to our perception – takes place: McLuhan’s ‘sensory closure,’90 Latour’s and Feenberg’s ‘closure’ of the black box, the ‘organizational closure’ analyzed by the cyberneticists (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 59-61), and not to forget, the closure brought on by the ‘natural attitude,’ mapped by the phenomenologists (beginning with Husserl). The necessary “opening up” can be, in each case, induced by paying attention, focusing differently, changing perspective. One can bend, at least to a certain extent, not seeing towards seeing.

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TRANSPARENCY AND OPACITY, TWO MODES, USE AND CONTEXT: THE TRI-DICHOTOMOUS APPROACH

Nevertheless, as said, above and beyond the unity that can be found among the discussed perspectives a crucial difference remains: that between the two sorts of blindness upon which we touched merely cursorily at the beginning of this chapter, but that has now taken on much clearer contours. Simplifying tremendously we can discern three main axes (cf. Figure 3) along which each approach can be posited. We thus arrive at three central dichotomies. First, we have discovered definitions of on the one hand transparency and on the other hand opacity. These could be rephrased as questions: “What is transparent?” and “What is opaque?,” respectively. Transparent here means that something is not perceived, that it is invisible or escapes conscious attention. It still is there in some capacity but one sees “through” it. On the contrary, opaque is something that lies distinctly in view or to which deliberate attention is paid, but in any case, importantly, “through” which one cannot look. Second, we have distinguished in every approach two (or more) different states or statuses this pair of transparency and opacity can be in, making for four (or more) possibilities in each case. The third axis, however, concerns the two aforementioned categories of blindness and it crosscuts through all of the above theories. Whereas some concepts of transparency center specifically around the “use” of (a) technology or medium, others are about what we have called “context.”91 In the first case something “about” the technology stays hidden, i.e., is transparent, during, within, or relating to the use of the technology: an aspect of the technology itself, our interaction with it, or our interaction with the world through it. With Heidegger, when a tool is vorhanden it appears as tool; the surrounding ‘totality’ of Zuhandenheit – the tool as ‘equipment’ – stays hidden. And vice versa. For Bateson, ‘conscious purpose’ prevents us from seeing the cybernetic “greater whole” but conversely a concern with the latter would definitely impede us from involving ourselves carelessly with the former. And postphenomenology sees in each of the human-technology relations one of their components recede towards the background in favor of another. For instance in the embodiment relation the technology becomes (partly) transparent, more precisely, the “link,” i.e., the embodiment, between human and technology takes on transparency, whereas the world with which one interacts appears as opaque. In the second case however, not something “of” the technology but something “around” it turns transparent, or opaque. This context eludes what one would 86

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usually call the technology from a functional viewpoint but in any case defines what the technology is. With Latour, technologies in every day use are black boxes, their history and social construction forgotten. Only “reopening” the black boxes and making technology controversial – transparent – again gives us a clear – opaque – view on the social and moral values incorporated in them. In a similar way Feenberg posits ‘subversive rationalization,’ by individuals or interest groups, in opposition to the technical rationality proclaimed “from above” but actually hiding the social construction of technology by way of the ‘technical code.’ Subversive rationalization undermines that code – makes it transparent – and furnishes the possibility of inserting new – consciously thus “opaquely” soughtafter – values in it. Figure 3. Blindness: three dichotomies

ALTERNATION

The two levels of blindness that we have just described, use and context, will determine the format of the following two parts that deal with the “structural” and the “historical” levels of our bond with technology, respectively. At the “structural” (or practical) level media appear – with emphasis: appear, merely – as singular, not enveloped in greater constellations of reciprocal interaction. A hammer is used; a task performed; glasses looked through. The domain of activity at stake can be 87

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clearly circumscribed, it concerns but a single “unit” of “mediation.” At the “historical” (contextual) level, by contrast, media and technologies are seen – again, with emphasis: seen – in the networks to which they belong, the webs of countless relations with countless other media they are in. Here media emerge as instantiations of political, social, and historical contexts. No limitation to any single “unit” is possible here; the ‘ecological’ links tied to any medium are inexhaustible. We will see throughout Parts I and II that to each of these levels a certain conception of time and space is connected. In Part III we will investigate more closely, from an “existential” perspective, how the two levels can be said to interact. Running somewhat ahead of ourselves, however, we can at this point and in closing this chapter already remark that although these two views – use and context; “structural” and “historical” – appear complementary, they are actually contradictory.92 To each of the statuses corresponds a certain valuation. In the use category, we can discern a “good” and “bad” use of a technology, not in the sense of moral judgement, but more as a measure of the ease of use with which “the job gets done” – how efficiently the work is done with the help of technology. Thus: an efficiently, smoothly working technology must be ready-to-hand (Heidegger), dovetail with our ‘conscious purpose’ (Bateson), or sufficiently cover up our relatedness to it or to the world (Ihde; Verbeek). In all cases the “technology” – or at least a crucial aspect of it – must be transparent. However in the context category, the statuses point towards wholly different estimations. Here for a technology to be susceptible to social change, to “control,” and to the mitigation of its perverse, unjust, or harmful effects, the technology must also be transparent, but not in its use: in its context. When we “just use” it, we do not perceive this context, i.e., the social construction of black boxes (Latour), or the ‘technical codes’ (Feenberg). For change to be possible, these opacities must be breached. Yet here, exactly, lies the problem: what appear as opacities in the context category, count for transparencies in use. “Use” and “control” of technology both presuppose the transparency of technology but in opposite senses: good use forces us to accept the technology as it is, political or social change requires the questioning of technology as it is. Thus: one of the basic characteristics of technological mediation is its transparency (or opacity). But this transparency seems to unfold itself “dialectically”: it is either one (use) or the other (control of context). Can we find a way of getting both in view, at the same time? As “what we 88

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get” from technology eludes us to a greater or lesser extent – our love is blind – this elusiveness, this blindness, unfolds into two aspects which seem incompatible but nevertheless belong wholly and inescapably to the totality of the “love for” that we are in. And since it is us who love, we have only ourselves to blame.

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4

Love Is Happiness Is Suffering: Ambivalence in Relation to “What We Want”

‘To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.’ (Woody Allen, Love and Death)

Whereas in the previous chapter our main focus was “what we get” from technology – a constellation of “results” that appears exclusively accessible to us through the filter of blindness – in this chapter, conversely, “what we want” from technology is at stake. And we will find here that the ways in which we confront and experience our desires and expectations towards technologies and media are essentially tainted by ambivalence. Starting from common sense, we outline several possible “reasons” for our love of technology, either “functional” or “constitutional.” The former have to do with the deployment of specific means to certain ends; the latter concern a “natural fit” that may exist between media and our human condition. In any case, it will appear that all of our motivations for using and developing technologies offer promises as well as threats. This principal ambivalence is further scrutinized by way of an investigation of some the prevalent emotional attitudes toward technology use, i.e., technology crazes, technology addiction, and technology rejection. These states, in forming exaggerations of “normal” media use, may point the way to a more balanced “love life” in cohabitation with technology.

4.1

Reasons for Love

We are on the hunt for a broad analysis of our bond with, our love for technology. In the last chapter we indirectly forced our way into the issue by asking what, in the first instance, we “get from” it. And we did this principally by inquiring into what we “get” about technology: what aspects of or about the medium do we notice and what eludes us? As we were there concerned with the technology and how it relates to us, here we conversely will concentrate on our expectations from 91

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and wishes towards it: what do we want from technology? ENHANCEMENT: WHAT WE WANT

We live through our love for our media and technologies day in, day out. Why do we feel uncomfortable going out of the house without our cellphone? Why must we check our e-mails fifty times a day? Why do we have the tendency to leave our computer always on? Why do we interact with screens all the time? The existence of most people in the affluent and for that matter even the non-affluent part of the world (Smith 2009) is intensely intertwined with media, digital or otherwise. As nearly all of humankind’s actions can be said to be driven by one or other need or want, certainly such an all-encompassing, ubiquitous bundle of activities as is coupled to our almost constant involvement with technologies must have a reason. In McLuhan’s view this is ‘enhancement.’ ‘Enhancement,’ as a synonym for ‘extension’ – and one of the four components that make up the ‘tetrad’ – includes our motives for ‘uttering’ and ‘outering’ a technology, i.e., for bringing it into the world. As we will see more detailedly in Chapter 6, the term ‘enhancement’ has multiple senses and flavors to it. For now, before we dig deeper conceptually, we will first scout somewhat more preliminarily and instinctively the domain we seek to oversee: what drives us in developing, deploying, employing media? A JUMP START FROM COMMON SENSE

So, why? As we all seem to be at least to a certain extent “in love” with technologies – in various degrees of consciousness and avidity – many of us tend to have a vague idea of the possible motives behind that love.93 Yet what we seek to get to the bottom of is the utter pervasive, even amorous character of our involvement with media. We can for instance point at several reasons why we use cellphones, computers, and other devices. A Wired writer hails a well-known brand of tablet computers as one of the ‘Fall 2010 39 Best Products,’ and muses affectionately: After just a few months, we already feel genuine affection. We loved it when we checked into our flight from the taxicab, navigating drop-downs that would have been too tricky on a phone. When we used it to sidestep the hotel’s exorbitant Wi-Fi fees. When we carried it to our brother’s hospital bedside, where the Netflix app helped him forget his pain. We love it 92

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every time we bring up a map at the trailhead, every time we find a new recipe on Epicurious, every time we watch a game on MLB at 35,000 feet. (Honan 2010, 92)

But such explanations – rightful, truthful, and soaring as they may be – mostly do not supersede the everyday reasonings of functionality: what can be done with what and how? It is a given that the in any case elusive concept of efficiency has often served as explanans for the explanandum “technology” as such.94 But what explanans can be found for the explanandum “efficiency”? And so on. If we indefinitely extend this thread of causal connections in our imagination, we arrive at a point at which we can only ask pseudo-trivial but exciting questions like: what has made this world of devices, machines, networks? Whence this stunning, almost automatic urge of us to make, break, use, and abuse things? Nonetheless it can be highly fruitful to treat those common sense reasons as starting points, and from there on proceed to the deeper-lying motives – as we will attempt to do in what follows based on formulations of both sorts of reasons by various theorists. If we want to get at the heart of the Big Love, why not first look at our myriad small loves? Our more or less illegitimate affairs taken up for several “reasons for love.” Relationships that can become quite passionate, as Sherry Turkle observes: ‘[…] everyday communications technologies – such as cellphones – these too become intimate machines that inspire strong, even eroticized attachments.’ (Turkle 2008, 15) Yet, passions can turn grim: our attachments to technology tend to harbor a darker side too. At times they take the shape of ‘love-hate relationships,’ as Donald Norman suggests: ‘Technology often forces us into situations where we can’t live without the technology even though we may actively dislike its impact.’ (2004, 157) In those cases, he goes on, we may have ‘[l]ove for the potential, hate for the actuality.’ (ibid., 159) In McLuhan’s phrasing: at all times an unpredictable ‘reversal’ into something else remains a possibility.95 In short: all technology is essentially ambivalent.

4.2

Two Axes

Unwittingly almost we have just hinted at two main characteristics that most of our “loves” for technologies and media and specifically “what we want” from them 93

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share. First, these loves often both thrill and disappoint us. Second, they dovetail with many motivations behind our everyday activities and at the same time they seem to be grounded in some deeper and broader drive to ‘outer’ ourselves. Along the two axes constituted by these aspects (cf. Figure 4), we plan to sort in the following section the different common sense “reasons for love” that theorists have recently put forward. Before that, a closer look at these axes is in place. THE FEELING OF AMBIVALENCE: FASCINATION

The first axis as suggested incorporates the principal ambivalence that we have indicated in the Introduction to be a central aspect of our dealings with technology. For our purposes here, however, we need to briefly scrutinize this phenomenon more specifically in relation to “what we want” from technologies. As a feeling, technological ambivalence has probably been best framed by way of the concept of fascination. Fascination means first and foremost etymologically: bewitchment, enchantment.96 One who is fascinated by something or someone is spellbound. This fascinating thing or person incites feelings of wonder and of fear at the same time. Thus, one could suggest, in exactly that way we are spellbound by our media which appear to exert a strange, exhilarating, but sometimes just as frightening force on us. Don Ihde has given extensive attention to the fascination with technology, especially in the context of ‘culture transfers’ or ‘technology transfers’ from one culture to another. When culture transfers are mentioned we commonly tend to think of the trumpery zealously embraced by indigenous people. Yet Ihde points out that it is not such a big step from trumpery to ‘today’s screens, videogames and word processors’ (1993, 36). It appears that an almost universal fascination with movement, light, and sound – Aboriginals seem to be the exception (1990, 126) – can be sufficient to initiate a transfer process (1993, 33) and, by extension, adoption of a foreign technology in one form or another. The same could be said of our “intra-cultural” and remarkably rapid embrace of new technologies as soon as they reach the market. This fascination with modern technology, Ihde remarks, is thoroughly neglected by Heideggerians and other ‘substantivist’ philosophers of technology (ibid., 109). But several other authors, we may add, have taken it into account, and have moreover warned for its detrimental aspects: from McLuhan who elaborates upon ‘[…] this passion for mechanical strait jackets today […]’ (2002, 33) to Derrick de Kerckhove who alerts 94

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us to ‘techno-fetishism’ (1997b, 2-3) to Neil Postman who cautions: ‘[…] we could be ruined not by what we fear and hate but by what we welcome and love, by what we construe to be a gift from the gods.’ (1992a, 168). All see a certain love and partly condemn it. The feeling of fascination has an intriguing paradoxicality to it. The fascinated one longs to be with the object of desire and at the same time seeks to flee it out of fear or disgust. In a certain sense this sensitivity can be said to characterize perhaps the whole of our technological culture. Don Ihde, in sketching the most extreme case of our desire to bond with technology – that we already mentioned in the previous chapter – refers to the dream of a ‘totalized technological culture’: a dream that is always contradictory, since we simultaneously long to have and not have the technology (1990, 117). A paradoxical desire that appears to be very similar to what sometimes may be experienced in human relationships. Figure 4. Ambivalence: two axes

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FUNCTIONAL VS. CONSTITUTIONAL REASONS FOR LOVE

The second axis then retrieves an age-old philosophical distinction, upon which we already touched in the previous chapter: that between ontic and ontological. At the ontic level we are concerned with beings; on the ontological plane being ‘as such’ is at stake. According to Heidegger we have in all our thinking and doing the tendency to revert to the former rather than to the latter. That also counts for our understanding of technology: as he says, the ‘essence’ of technology is nothing technological.97 We cannot suffice with just instrumentalist or functionalist explanations of technology, i.e., technology as means-to-an-end. Such merely treat of beings. On probing deeper we find that technology constitutes a very specific, historical mode of ‘revealing’ of being as such. Just so, our “functional” “reasons for love” offer explanations merely tied to our interaction with things in the world. But the broader motivations that we propose to call “constitutional,” since they are immediately linked up with “the way we are,” i.e., with our human constitution or condition, do not so much concern our concrete doings, they rather have to do with the base on which those doings take place, from which they emerge, and through which they are proceeded. We need both sorts of explanations. Our “functioning” is completely grounded in our “constitution,” and at the same time the latter only noticeably comes about or emerges through the former. The deeper level is but accessible by passing through the surface level. Interestingly, as we will shortly see in more detail, the “reasons” that have been discussed by several theorists within the latter category – the functional level – fall apart into two classes. Within the functionality of technology two main strands of “usefulness” can be discerned. The first is probably known as the most obvious answer to the question as to why we use media and technologies: “because they make our lives easier.” They make us get things done. They help us navigate, sometimes literally, our existence in a very practical manner. In short: they grant us more control, over all sorts of different phenomena and activities – information, planning, work, leisure – and in a general sense over nothing less than the reaches of space and time. ‘Part of the appeal of new technology is the sense of control it gives us,’ Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan observe (2009, 51). And control can lead to comfort and to an array of other possible advantages. For reasons of clarity we will distinguish in our subsequent discussion of this class of reasons between three striking shapes that “control” may take: the betterment of our endeavors or work; the enhancement of ourselves or augmentation of our capacities as such; and the 96

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rise of our power, either political, social, or physical. The second strand of applicability of media, then, may ring familiar just as well. Media, and ICT in particular, help us to get in touch, put us in contact with each other. The unabated adoption and development of ICT may point to a continuing ‘demand for communication’ (Feenberg 1995a, 40) that is either deeprooted in our human condition or a fundamental aspect of our cultural constellation (and many others at that). Yet the terms “information” and “communication” are more problematic than they seem. Information can be seen as a fundamental part of all communication. As soon as we communicate, we transmit information, whatever form this transmission process may take. But conversely, as soon as information is transported, communication takes place. To a certain extent information and communication continually overlap; and this makes the term ‘information and communication technologies’ relatively confusing. To clarify things somewhat, in the following elaboration of “reasons” relating to “contact,” we will treat of on the one hand information – as so to speak the “material” of communication – and on the other hand interaction – as the “process” of communication. Control and contact, in sum, seem to be two broad categories of motivations behind our avid use of technologies. They may be said to represent respectively the Apollonian and Dionysian drives guiding our deployment of media98: the former is set to conquer the outside world from “out of” our selves, the latter conversely steers towards “surrender” to a world of relations that exceeds and supersedes those mere selves. Yet as said, above and beyond these mainly functional driving forces a more general principle may reside. There may be a deep constitutional reciprocal attraction between us and media. Possibly all the good reasons we can think of to use media add up to this crude belonging together. In essence: there might exist a fundamental convergence between humans and technologies, or put more starkly, a very commonsensical principle of “like attracts like.” Our love for technology may just be as Heim suggests (cf. infra) the materialization of a Platonic love in which the lovers were once part of one and the same whole.99 Here the hypothesis of a “fit” between humans and media – of a mutual willingness toward each other so to speak – is at stake. Just as the functional “reasons” it has been in recent decades the focal point of several analyses of technology. In our discussion of them we will distinguish again between several aspects of this “fit”: media fit our thinking (cognitive level), our need for sensory stimulation (perceptual level), our neurological-psychological setup (psychological 97

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level), our instinctively instigated social behavior (social level), and our craving for transcendence, magic, or spirituality (transcendent level). In the following three sections we will treat more extensively of all of the aforementioned functional and constitutional “reasons,” all the while crossing them with the first axis, i.e., of ambivalence. For we will see that with each of the potential advantages offered along the lines of the concerned motive a potential flip side or a dangerous potentiality may be matched. To each promised happiness a possible suffering corresponds.

4.3

Control

MAKING OUR WORK MORE EFFICIENT (VS. GENERAL ILLS)

Media and technologies can be said to make our work – in the most generic sense of the term – more efficient. We cannot possibly treat of the concept of efficiency detailedly here.100 It may be generally stated that efficiency has a qualitative as well as a quantitative aspect. It is about achieving a certain end as well and as fast as possible, in the process producing a maximized outcome. The hunt for efficiency nowadays appears nothing less than global. It is tightly coupled to the capitalist production and consumption system. At the same time pursuing efficiency could very well be a deeply ingrained impulse of our human condition; as human species we seem eager to cultivate a certain obsession with improvement. We may clarify this point by highlighting one core component of efficiency: speed, or more precisely, the mandate to increase speed.101 “Doing things faster” seems a central concern of many, particularly in the affluent West. Our obsession with efficiency happens to coincide with a need for speed, so much so that we could expect it to be a part of our biological setup. Bob Hanke puts it, with Mark Kingwell, concisely: ‘[…] ‘We want to be velocitized’ […]’ (Hanke 2005, 123). Heim also suggests: ‘Efficiency, speed, and networked communication are in our bones. Our life rhythm moves to the tempo of the computer.’ (1994, 7) Still, the question remains if this longing for speed is truly an integrated aspect of our human-organic heritage or whether it is instead closely tied-up with specific cultural constellations and hence certain epochs in human history. Bob Hanke in commenting on ‘[…] the west’s will-to-speed […]’ (2005, 124) observes: ‘Within modernity, we have always believed faster is better.’ (ibid., 123) It is well-known that not all cultures have the same interest for speed as “ours.” Daniel Boorstin 98

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famously argues that technology has created needs we did not have before (1978, 8-9).102 Perhaps our love for speed derives from the use of technology and not the other way around. But we do not necessarily need to make a choice between both opposing views. The need for speed and the demand for efficiency at large as we know them are probably not universal. Particular cultures, like the Amish103 for instance, seem not to care so much for them. Yet through the lengths of history humankind has always attempted to surpass itself in the most general sense of the word. However it may be, the quest for “harder, better, faster” seems a given, be it culturally contingent or not. Still, this longing for efficiency, as one of the “reasons” to employ technologies, has several downsides to it, by now so familiar that it seems trite to cite any one specific source on them. Seen on a larger scale our ‘appetite for something more,’ as Paul Levinson puts it albeit in another context (1997, 78-79) has also brought us pollution, disease, starvation, poverty. Many of the ills of our contemporary world – humanitarian, social, ecological – have undoubtedly been induced or at least facilitated by the economical inclinations implied in the global capitalist system of production. In short and simplistically put: the urge to do our work better makes many other matters worse. REINFORCING OURSELVES (VS. DISEMBODIMENT)

Next, media and technologies enhance our capacities. They augment, extend, and enforce our bodily, perceptual, and mental abilities. Obviously this point relates immediately to the previous one as the extension of our human capacities has consequences for the efficiency with which our work is done. Nevertheless it deserves specific elaboration because of the possibility that we often seek this extension for the sake of extension itself; and not just because it makes our work easier, faster, or more profitable. Perhaps we are fascinated by the sheer expansion, augmentation, or improvement of ourselves as such. McLuhan104 observes: ‘When reading or when in the motor car or watching TV or listening to the radio we are pretty unaware that we’re merely obsessed, fascinated with a little bit of ourselves, stuck out there, in another material.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 540) Finding ourselves back in another material: perhaps this is the motive behind many endeavors in the technical domain. As for instance R. Murray Schafer suggests, man has always dreamt of storing and keeping sounds: ‘[…] the recent technological developments 99

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were merely the consequences of aspirations that had already been effectively imagined.’ (1994, 90) A similar desire for perfect storage of our memories possibly drives the development of computers and other storage technologies (MayerSchönberger 2009, 34). However, this fascination may be more than mere wonderment over the retrieval of ourselves in foreign materials. As cognitive scientist Andy Clark105 wants to show, ‘extending’ could be an elementary and even constitutive aspect of our cognitive activity. It is not that we have at a certain point in time “as humans” discovered that we can enhance our capacities by way of tools, devices, or techniques – we in fact have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs.’ Our devices and tools must be seen as full-blown components of our mind. Hence the disruption we feel when cellphones or computers fail. ‘The temporary disability caused by a dead battery is unnerving. It seems we just aren’t ourselves today.’ (2003, 10) In this sense the use of the term ‘extension’ may be misleading. One cannot wholly speak of extension if this extension is actually taking place within what is extended, i.e., our ‘mind.’ In other words, ‘extensions’ are part and parcel of mind and thus not really ‘extensions’ as we know them.106 A crucial discussion in this regard hinges on the role of the body within this process of extending. Whereas for Clark and other authors cognition, perception, and other activities always stay embodied, i.e., closely tied up to our bodily (and biological) setup, others see our extending into specifically ICT as a giving up to a certain extent of our bodily conditions. Heim for example analyzes the love for computers as an instance of the platonic Eros: it first extends our bodily capacities and subsequently denies them (1991, 60-63). McLuhan, also, alerts us to the appearance of a new sort of human due to the intense use of electric technology: ‘discarnate man.’107 Nevertheless, whether we lose some “body” or not, and whether we notice it or not, we can in a broad sense certainly be said to use technologies to make ourselves more. HEIGHTENING POWER (VS. ABUSE)

Then, technologies give us power, in a physical, political, and social sense.108 These various sorts of power are obviously often interrelated. Political power can be enforced through the use or the threat of physical power; social power often flows over into political power and vice versa. Of course this point too relates to the previous two, as the following quote from Schafer illustrates:

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Traditionally the machine symbolized two things: power and progress. Technology has given man unprecedented power in industry, transportation and war, power over nature and power over other men. Ever since the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution, Western Man has been infatuated with the machine’s speed, efficiency and regularity, and with the extensions of personal and corporate power it afforded; and this enthusiasm for technological noise is now nascent in the rest of the world as well. (Schafer 1994, 179)

Yet, inquiring somewhat further into the specific forms that this power takes, we find that the power that media and technologies grant us can be seen from the perspective of two different groups, i.e., the establishment or hierarchy, and ordinary citizens or users. On the one hand, as we saw in the previous chapter by way of the work of Andrew Feenberg, technologies can be analyzed as means deployed by the elite to consolidate its power. On the other hand, however, and as Feenberg also demonstrates, media can just as much function as means to capture power “from below” by ordinary users: individuals, interest groups, minorities, …109 But the term “power” may have other connotations that do not directly or apparently relate to political forces. It may carry a flavor of hope, of merely feeling empowered, or even of consolation. Neil Postman for one, in a reference to C.P. Snow, suggests that perhaps our current enthusiasm for technologies has a social origin in the historical context of the Industrial Revolution. In fact the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century – often vilified as the starting point of our alldestroying, dehumanizing, dangerous, blind love affair with technology today – was welcomed by the poor in those times as an entry into a possible betterment of their living conditions. It was essentially associated with hope for a better life (1992b, 38). Don Ihde, then, remarks upon how the uncritical embrace of technologies is sometimes instigated by the ‘fear of falling behind’ (1990, 136). We may employ technologies to stay “on top of things.” And Paul Levinson, at last, points out that in precarious contexts like war, the love of technology can be intensified, as happened for instance in the case of radio (1997, 89). Media can simply offer us comfort in times of intense dread. In all these slightly differing ways technologies can and do form means for “ordinary” people to gain some power, reinforcement, or just solace. As much as they can be controlled “from above” through technology, they themselves can at 101

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times claim back at least a little bit of that power through the use of technology just as well – as has also been, and not in the least, evidenced in recent years by protesters in countries like Iran, South-Korea, Tunisia, and Egypt.110 Over and against a potential abuse a ‘subversive’ use, to use Feenberg’s term, can be posited. To summarize: technologies and media give us more control and make us get the work done; they enable us to enhance ourselves; and they empower us. Yet there is more to media than simply their ability to give us control. They also help us to get in contact, either by providing information or by enabling interaction.

4.4

Contact

MORE INFORMATION (VS. INFORMATION OVERLOAD)

First, information – however elusive and all-encompassing, again, this term is – can safely be called a good on which our very survival depends.111 Common sense tells us: we need and want information day in, day out, every minute and second of the day. An unstoppable need for information, to have it as fast as possible and in as many places as possible, is likely one of the reasons for the massive success of recent digital media, as Paul Levinson suggests: The iPhone starts to satisfy the longstanding human need to have any and all information, anytime we may want it, wherever we and the information we seek may happen to be. […] [T]he iPhone makes real what we envision in our mind’s eye – brings to the little screen in our hand the newspapers, video clips, Web pages, Friends on MySpace and Facebook, twitters and blogs that previously we only had been able to think about, to imagine, until we arrived home or in our office or another place that housed a computer. (Levinson 2009, 188)

This remark fits in with Levinson’s ‘anthropotropic theory’ that analyzes the development of communication media in terms of the simulation or ‘replay’ of ‘natural,’ i.e., face-to-face communication.112 In developing information technology, according to Levinson, we attempt to replicate face-to-face communication, but enhanced or with a “plus,” i.e., the transcendence of spatial and temporal limitations. The mobile media of today, says Levinson, are exquisite instances of such a ‘replay’: ‘[…] mobile media have made every place more useful 102

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than it used to be.’ (ibid., 189) Information is something we receive and transmit all the time, but if we can do this throughout the reaches of space and time we should definitely be in for a higher chance of survival. There is however discussion about how much information humans actually need. Once again this debate hinges on the question whether this specific need forms a component of our human condition or makes for a culturally implanted desire. Neil Postman for instance – Levinson’s mentor – is not convinced that “more” information is plainly the highest good to be attained. “More” information eventually leads to information overload and we are in his view ‘informing ourselves to death’ (1990). Moreover, our hunger for always more information – whatever the reasons for it, aside from maybe a certain intellectual, practical, and ethical laziness – diverts us from the ‘real’ problems in the world, as for example hunger or poverty. Even though it is a given that more information can sometimes help to solve some of these problems, Postman remains suspicious that much of the attention, paid to a lot of information transmitted around the globe nowadays – for many illustrations one only needs to browse the YouTube lists of most popular videos – could be more constructively and fruitfully invested in other, more urgent issues. INTERACTION (VS. DISRUPTION)

Second, interaction – however broad also this concept may be – surely accounts for one of the main “reasons” for our deployment of media in general and of ICT in particular. According to multiple sources the ‘formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships’ is one of the most important motivations for using the Internet (Ramirez, Jr. and Broneck 2009, 293). In fact it is possible that our need for interaction is biologically speaking more fundamental than our need for information, as Bob Logan indicates: the human ability to communicate is given by instinct; but the processing of information we have to painstakingly learn (2000, 137). Yet as said, the word “communication” sounds misleading in the sense that all handling of information in fact comes down to communication. It pays moreover to distinguish communication from interaction in the sense that the former term designates a functional, abstract process, whereas the latter stands for a “lived,” existentially and socially grounded activity of everyday life. As Donald A. Norman suggests: ‘To the technologist, the technology provides a means of communication; for us, however, it provides a means for social interaction.’ (2004, 103

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157) Social interaction exceeds mere information processing or transferring, and naturally flows over into the domain of emotional bonding. For example, Norman further observes in relation to text messaging: [O]n the whole, the point of the frequent messages is not information sharing; it is emotional connecting. They are ways of saying to one another, “I’m here,” “you are there,” “we still like each other.” People need to communicate continually, for comfort, for reassurance. […] The ability to use short text messages so effortlessly has become a strong, emotional component of many people’s lives. (Norman 2004, 149-150)

Technologies like digital and mobile media intensely enhance our connectedness, enable us to always keep in touch. Nevertheless here again, on the flip side of enhanced connectedness, possible disadvantages hide. For one, we may be faced with the all-too well-known phenomenon of constant disruption to which much attention has been paid in social and media studies in recent times (Jackson 2008; Watson 2010; Carr 2010) – with either optimistic or pessimistic evaluative results. Norman himself, more pragmatically, proposes that we either get used to the interruptions as a part of life or that we try to limit and organize our mediated interactions through technology. ‘We need technologies that provide the rich power of interaction without the disruption: we need to regain control over our lives.’ (2004, 159) This will be essential because, as he further adds, our biological framework has not been adapted to our new technologies: ‘[…] we evolved to interact with others in the midst of other activities, but the evolutionary process could not anticipate communication at a distance.’ (ibid., 155)113 Still another strand of critique warns for the detrimental effects that the ubiquitous and sometimes exclusive use of social media may have on our abilities to interact with other people in person or face-to-face. Even if we could get used to the interruption, spending too much time interacting through communications technologies may cause certain social skills to wither; skills that have been adapted through thousands of years to circumstances in which communication has been essentially impeded by limitations of space and time (Small and Vorgan 2009). And this may in turn affect our emotional and psychological setup; we could lose the capability of truly bonding with others (Turkle 2011). As it stands, interaction makes for an extremely complex process. At any 104

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moment the technology at hand shapes what we understand interaction, relationships, and human contact to be. The early McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, sees technology taking over our most humane aspects and mechanizing them, and concludes cunningly: Totemistic worship of mechanism is recorded not only in a dozen popular hygienic and social rituals for avoiding human contact, but the very word “contact” has come to mean getting a business prospect inside the network of one’s private success mechanism. (M. McLuhan 2002, 141)

In short, as in the case of all of the above “reasons” we have enumerated, there at all times exists a two-way influence between what drives us to use a technology and that technology as such. If we use media and technologies for reasons of information gathering and interacting, the latter (ends) will be co-shaped by the former (means). In any case, our human or cultural need for information and interaction may surely be said to amount for a vast “reason for love.” Yet as indicated before, perhaps even deeper, more fundamental motivations – next to or even behind or underneath control and contact – can be found. Technologies and media “fit” with certain core aspects of our human setup: cognition, perception, psychological type, social behavior, and the capability of religious experience.

4.5

Copy: The “Human Fit” of Technology

COGNITIVE: BETTER THINKING (VS. LAZINESS AND DISTRACTION)

First, media – especially ICT – fit our thinking, our cognitive structure, and vice versa. We have already seen how Andy Clark analyzes tools and technologies as full parts of our ‘extended mind.’ Sherry Turkle, from another disciplinary angle, suggests in Life on the Screen: ‘We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity.’ (1995, 26) We use ICT as thinking tools: ‘things we think with’ (Turkle 2007). ICT – media with screens – help us think. What is more, this cognitive-conceptual matching has a deeply self-reflexive character. ICT aid us in thinking about thinking itself, about the mind, about consciousness, as Turkle hopefully intimates: ‘[…] are we watching the slow emergence of a new, more 105

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multiple style of thinking about the mind?’ (1995, 180).114 However as always this hopefulness may also betray an underlying threat: what if ICT only dovetail with the more “idle” part of our conceptual makeup? This is the fear of media critic Peter K. Fallon who asks whether media like television are a further fulfillment of enlightened rationality or rather new ways of distracting ourselves from the harsh realities of life (2009). Fallon, influenced by Neil Postman, answers in favor of the latter option115 basing his analysis on the distinction between propositional and representational thought. Whereas the former is learnt and proceeds by way of language and logic, the latter is innate and takes place through mostly visual objectification. In our current culture, according to Fallon, communications media help the latter mode to thrive to the disadvantage of the former. Depending on the way one thinks, the match between thinking and technologies shows a wholly different face. PERCEPTUAL: ENHANCED PERCEPTION (VS. OVERLOAD AND STRESS)

Second, media, again specifically ICT, quench our thirst for images and sounds. A thirst that appears unremitting. Bruce E. Wexler notes: ‘Adult humans do not like to be without sensory stimulation, even if they have no instrumental need for information.’ (2006, 83) For some reason our senses strive to be constantly tickled; our brains are conditioned to the right amount of sensory stimulation (ibid., 5081). Sensory stimulation is essential to the normal development of the brain: the more complex one’s environment is, the higher one’s IQ will turn out to be; all play and learning hinge on the search for stimuli (ibid., 72-78). What is more, recent research even shows that people feel happier when focused on something (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010). This should count as another illustration of the suggestion that the use of media goes beyond mere information gathering. We notice this firsthand, for instance, in browsing our profiles on social networking sites. Most of the “information” we find there is not necessary for present or even future activities let alone our survival. We perhaps only browse out of the sheer need to stimulate ourselves, to keep our “brains buzzing.” In an almost childlike way we are deeply enthralled by colors, shapes, and movement. Neil Postman puts it more poetically in relation to television: ‘Life, as we like to say, is not a highway strewn with flowers. The sight of a few blossoms here and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable.’ (2006, 87) ICT and digital media eminently fulfill this need; they are all about ‘sounds and vision.’ ‘The power of the icon,’ as Paul Levinson (1997, 106

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37, 46, 48, 162) dubs it, is particularly strong in them. The greater and more constant availability of digital media may dovetail quite well with our natural need for sensory stimulation. For instance, e-mail stimulates us more intensely and more continuously than classic mail: an e-mail can arrive at any moment, “snail mail” just once a day. The same goes for social media such as social networking sites: one can interact almost constantly with friends and relatives, whereas before these moments were limited to specific and sometimes scarce occasions. And mobile technologies enable us to access these services almost everywhere. Here too, however, a potential catch lurks. For much depends on the right amount of sensory stimulation. If our senses are stimulated too much all sorts of ills start to appear. Some authors, of which we already made mention in previous sections, warn that teenagers’ intense involvement with ICT may have disadvantageous consequences in the longer run: the non-stop confrontation with stimuli may stunt the normal development of their social and abstract reasoning skills (Small and Vorgan 2009, 31-32). Norman Doidge further alerts to the empirically observed fact that television-watching brings us in a state of continuous ‘orientation response,’ an evolutionarily acquired reflex to immediately react on changes in our environment (2007, 309-310). This may be one of the reasons why we often feel we have to keep on watching.116 And Neil Postman, at last, points to the cultural and intellectual loss that a television culture is doomed to bring upon itself (2006). In short, the fitting of our perceptual needs with digital media appears a balancing act that requires much practical know-how. PSYCHOLOGICAL: NEUROLOGICAL EXTENSION (VS. LOSS OF “OTHER” ASPECTS)

Third, technologies “fit” us on a neurological and psychological level. In fact this point can be said to synthesize the previous two to a certain extent. Several authors have drawn attention to the structural similarities between our “internal” construction on the one hand and the “external” apparatuses that are digital or electronic media on the other hand. Doidge notices a reciprocal compatibility between our nervous system and electronic media. The two work in similar ways, in the sense that the nervous system can be seen as an internal medium that transmits messages from one side of the body to another. Electronic media, according to Doidge, do the same for “humanity,” i.e., they connect parts (or people) that are separated from each other. This convergence between humans’ nervous systems and media makes sure that 107

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the two can be easily coupled. Because of the plasticity of our nervous system and specifically our brain117, it can easily merge with electronic media to form a greater blend. ‘Indeed, it is the nature of such systems to merge whether they are biological or man-made.’ (Doidge 2007, 311) This is an observation motivated and grounded by recent research in neuroscience; however the insight itself is not so new. Norbert Wiener, the “father of cybernetics,” already hints at it in the early 1950s. Wiener contends that as humans we are constantly involved in a struggle against entropy. Nature tends to dissolve the organized; humans strive to keep organization intact through ‘control and communication.’ (1954, 17; 1961)118 Now it appears that this aspiration of ours fits in well with the way communications media work. ‘It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.’ (ibid., 26) So ICT fit with the structural organization of our nervous system and the goals that that nervous system deploys. Yet another convergence is to be found in psychology. As Jan Derksen observes, ICT meet fundamental emotional needs that originate in early childhood. ‘The cellphone directly links up with emotional experiences in early childhood with regard to the mastery of fear and the obtainment of safety.’119 (2009, 111) This is according to him the reason why mobile phone technology is so popular. The parallels are striking. Just as the specific content of the exchange between a mother and her baby has little relevance, the interaction between mobile callers is mostly trivial (“Where are you?”). It isn’t about anything but the contact. However, Derksen cautions for the potential dangers of this convergence. We are attracted to communications media because of a deep-seated emotional demand for attachment. But the fast, noisy, and colorful world of multimedia seems to ask for a certain personality type and repulses others: ICT suit extravert, narcissistic persons better than introvert, inhibited ones (ibid., 109-110). This is particularly a threat for the latter who in certain senses fall behind in a society keen on the use of electronic media.120 In sum, there is a convergence between our internal setup and external ICT, that moreover immediately harks back to the way in which we think and perceive, but much depends on what aspect of this internal constellation we wish or are able to stress.

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SOCIAL: NATURAL BEHAVIOR (VS. INFANTILISM)

What is more, there is, fourth, another “fit” between us and technologies that goes beyond the aforementioned dichotomy between internal (neurological or psychological) and external (media). It appears that our social behavior, obviously exceeding us or our internal setup, combines smoothly with our use of, again specifically, ICT. According to empirical research by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass we tend to interact with computers and other media in ways that are to be called social, i.e., we interact with media as if they were humans: for instance, we are polite to them, keep the appropriate distance to them, et cetera. Reeves and Nass have termed this ‘the media equation’ (1996): the way in which we approach media resembles the way in which we approach other people, i.e., our modes of behavior in the two cases do not essentially differ. Donald Norman comments: With computers, we often fall for the social dynamics […]. Basically, if something interacts with us, we interpret that interaction; the more responsive it is to us through its body actions, its language, its taking of turns, and its general responsiveness, the more we treat it like a social actor. (Norman 2004, 137)

In short, we embrace (electronic) media, as such, as social actors. Reeves and Nass explain this phenomenon in terms of human evolution: we are not adapted to technology, only to interaction with other humans. ‘Modern media now engage old brains.’ (1996, 12) Yet from another, more anthropological-psychological perspective this urge to anthropomorphize inorganic matter – be it in technological form or not – could also be traced back to our fascination with automatons, and even further back to the Golem legends (of which the Frankenstein legend can be seen as an industrial era derivative). The calling to life of something lifeless appears to be a deep-rooted human desire. Possibly the spurious growth of technological developments is even partly instigated by this drive, as James Carey suggests: ‘The growth of technology was in part an attempt to build an automaton: a machine that appeared to perfect human functions, that was, in short, lifelike.’ (2005b, 43) Don Ihde, also, treats of the enthrallment with automata as a backdrop to our fascination as such with technology (1990, 101; 1993, 41). This deep-seated longing of us to create, as a sort of god, “our equals,” may furnish an archetypal background to ‘the media equation,’ as we appear here only too eager to approach lifeless machines – 109

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computers for example – as living creatures that deserve to be incorporated in our framework of what is socially appropriate among humans. Yet here again a danger lies in wait. Perhaps indeed media do “fit” us in the sense that we tend to react socially to them. ‘But then,’ Langdon Winner comments, ‘children have always fantasized that their dolls were alive and talking.’ (1986, 14) Could not the automatic response of us to interact with ICT as if they were social actors be branded in a certain sense as infantile? Reeves and Nass suggest as much in pointing out that on conscious reflection, people do come to realize that it is “merely a machine” that they are dealing with. But the evolutionarily instigated reaction at first retains the upper hand (1996, 7-12). Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that not all evolutionarily determined behavior is to be morally and practically recommended; in other words, what we most naturally do, is not necessarily the best thing to do. TRANSCENDENT: MAGIC AND RELIGION (VS. SELF-DECEPTION)

This leads us to the fifth and last point: media and technologies respond to our need for magic, transcendence, even spirituality. Surprisingly perhaps, quite a few authors have hinted at an essential connection between technology and magic, spirituality, or religion. Arthur C. Clarke’s third ‘law of prediction’ for one reads: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ (1999, 2, 19ff.) Frank Zingrone talks about ‘insistent technologies,’ namely technologies that need to be born because they root deeply in prehistorical imagination (2005, 5-6). Also, there appears to be a certain convergence between the conceptual framework of Christian religion and the idea of technological progress. Whereas science and technology are often thought to be religion’s natural adversaries, historical research proves otherwise: the two “streams” – religion and science – have more often than not been intertwined, as amongst others David F. Noble shows (1999).121 In line with these convergences some representatives of the transhumanist movement have clearly clothed their discourse in religious or spiritual terms – a few of them are inspired by the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Steinhart 2008). We should encounter these approaches without disdain; it is a given that for the longer period of its history mankind has dealt with the world in religiously or spiritually tinted ways. To find that even scientific and technological advances are in fact instances of those ways may not be too surprising. Not so much time for 110

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us humans has elapsed since, on an evolutionary scale. Nevertheless here again, there is a potential dark side. Some have drawn analogies between modern technology and ‘cargo cults,’ for instance during the conference organized in 1968 by Gregory Bateson on the ‘Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation’ (M. C. Bateson 2005, 71ff.). Tolly Holt there comments: It is this dream of plenty as expressed in the Christian apocalypse and the cargo cults in thousands of cultural forms which, combined with our technological cleverness, is about to put us out of business altogether, in a way which is much more fundamental than the nitrogen cycle even, if that can be. (M. C. Bateson 2005, 92)

In other words, our almost religious devotion to technology could lead us down a path of environmental, biological, and social destruction. And even if this does not happen, the ‘cargo cult’ of technology may be simply unable to fulfill its promise. Ted Schwartz, during the same conference: ‘The cargo of things that technology brought us doesn’t really end history. It leaves us still with a kind of emptiness that just isn’t filled by any technological event that produces goods more abundantly.’ (ibid., 89) Moreover, and even if we stay behind unfulfilled, at last, there remains the risk that the cult has for a long time diverted our attention from more important issues – a problem that, as we have already seen, Neil Postman hints at, in this case specifically in relation to magic: ‘What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place.’ (1992b, 94) Time spent on the supernatural may just as well be time wasted.

4.6

Straddling Ambivalences

In the above, starting out from common sense considerations and elaborating further upon these on the basis of various theoretical sources, we have listed numerous “reasons” for our love of technology. We can be said to use, deploy, or develop technologies and media because they promise to deliver on certain expectations of ours that are either relatively conscious and part of our everyday concerns – functional “reasons” such as control and contact – or rather unconscious and appending to our human condition – constitutional “reasons” 111

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rooting in a “natural fit” between us and media. But beneath every one of those motivations, a possible menace lies in ambush. Over and against every promise there must always be posited a threat. In everyday life, however, we can hardly differentiate between these different levels of “reasons,” nor is it always that easy to distinguish promises from threats. Although we are able, when urged, to enumerate a couple of motives that move us to use certain media – and these will probably be mostly situated on the functional plane – our everyday interaction does not usually reach this level of self-reflexivity. Here again, comparison to our “general” love lives may bring solace. Just as ‘the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of’ (Blaise Pascal) and love is not in the first instance a phenomenon that dictates deliberation, so our “love” of technology manifests itself first and foremost through a series of actions and reactions that stray from conscious consideration, and that are meant to straddle the ambivalences inevitably brought on by the more or less successfully pursued fulfillment of our desires. Just as we fall in and out of love with people, we appear to be falling in and out of love with media and technologies; and sometimes that love even reaches hazardous levels of intensity. Each of these “moments” exhibits certain characteristics. In the remainder of this chapter we treat of three phenomena, corresponding to these states, that receive considerable attention in the popular press now and then. FALLING IN LOVE – TECHNOLOGY CRAZE

The first phenomenon comprises what we could call the “technology craze”: the intensely excited atmosphere – “hype”122 – surrounding particularly the launch of new devices or software, more or less orchestrated by marketing departments, more or less consolidated by media coverage, and more or less intensified by the actions of certain individuals or interest groups, such as fan communities or bloggers. Technology crazes tend to involve intense and sometimes mass enthusiasm for a newly developed technology, and could thus be seen as, first, moments of “falling in love” with technology, but also, second, concrete instances of the aforementioned fascination with technology. These crazes get to be most often played out in the press, on the Internet, but also and perhaps most vehemently within the smaller social circles of friends, colleagues, and family. It goes to show that a technology craze – or as Norman would term it, ‘technology mania’ – is a social phenomenon123, at the center of which commercial 112

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interests, consumer desires, media mechanisms, and technical advances intersect. According to Norman it is, seen from the consumers’ side, especially the domain of the infamous ‘early adopters.’124 These are the people who are ‘[…] in love with technology […]’ (Norman 1998, 25). They have a keen interest in new technologies as such and are eager to be the first to try and test them. The market cunningly caters to their needs in developing tools and devices rich in functionality, efficiency, but also – and maybe most importantly – novelty. ‘New technology, functionality – that’s what these early adopters purchase.’ (ibid., 25) The bulk of the consumers who buy the same or updated technology somewhat later, Norman goes on, are not so much interested in the technology as such, but mostly in what can be done with it. Yet what we describe as technology craze exceeds in our opinion the technology mania of the early adopters.125 Technology crazes are perhaps the most intense at the moment of the appearance of the new technology, but they may certainly persist or even increase throughout its stepwise adoption by larger crowds. The continuing “buzz” encircling several models of smartphones, which was a new and largely marginal technology a few years ago but is not so much anymore now, may be pointed out as an example. In fact the massive adoption of a technology might even be more representative of the craze phenomenon than the embrace of it by a relatively small “in-crowd,” for the societal, psychological, economical, political effects of this large-scale adoption can be expected to be much more significant. The boundaries of the phenomenon however are hard to pinpoint: where does the technology craze end and “normal use” begin? Is it at the point where people no longer feel these heavy aspirations about the technology126, when they so to speak stop dreaming about it, and where the technology slides back into the humdrum of everyday life? The point where the feeling of being in love flows over into a less passionate but more stable relationship – where “in love” becomes “love”? We return to this question right away. OBSESSIONAL LOVE – TECHNOLOGY ADDICTION

The second phenomenon, then, forms a peculiar sort of complement to or rather radicalization of the first and it is nowadays commonly known as ‘technology addiction.’ As people can become addicted to almost anything – substance, experience, or activity – it does not come as a surprise that one can also become dependent on (a) technology. Recently, however, not only the popular press has 113

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reported on groups of persons purportedly being addicted to several ICT-related activities such as texting, gaming, or surfing; academic research has also begun to show interest in this phenomenon. Several authors have suggested, based on empirical research, the existence of technology addictions to for instance texting, gaming, chatting, Internet porn, et cetera (Young 1998; Block 2008; Doidge 2007, 103-112). And these addictions often harbor potential dangers just like any other addiction, from ‘text message injury’ (Batista 2001) to stunted brain development. But our behavior does not even have to be too extreme to exhibit certain characteristics typical for states of addiction. The incessant checking of e-mail for instance can be shown to have a pattern similar to that of operant conditioning (Small and Vorgan 2009, 55).127 On a larger plane some have suggested media to be addictive or potentially addictive as such. Susan Sontag observes as much in relation to photography and the avid mainstream adoption of it by ordinary persons, i.e., non-professional photographers: Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted […] It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. (Sontag 1979, 24)

Eric McLuhan also analyzes – in the vein of his father’s work – media as plainly addictive and he warns for the possibly catastrophic withdrawal symptoms, cautioning in one and the same breath for the potential uselessness of media training: We all know that media are addictive. […] Eliminate one; the withdrawal symptoms are cataclysmic. […] Those engaged in teaching “media literacy” and other media-training courses are actually in the business of peddling toxic and addictive things to naïve new users/addicts-to-be. (E. McLuhan 2010, 84-85)

Extravagant as these statements may be, they do suggest that media can have in themselves and to a certain extent drug-like qualities.128 If the passion for a technology – during a technology craze, i.e., in its “falling in love” stage – turns into an obsession, and the technology becomes, truly in the physiological114

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psychological sense of the word, an addiction, do we not have the same situation then as when the lover becomes all-too dependent on the beloved: all-too involved with the – more or less imaginary – object of his or her affection? Instead of a relatively peaceful, stable relationship – “normal use” – a pandemonium of desires and wants is erected, in which love must become a torment, in particular for the lover. With regard to technology, nevertheless, there may be other factors in play. Technology use is as much a part of everyday life as love is. But whereas the theme of “love” comes in focus very often – e.g., in movies, songs, conversations – the use of technology seems a subject too mundane to give too much conscious attention. One addicted to a technology may not be as obtrusive as an obsessed lover – because our uses of technologies are clothed in the familiar colors of for instance work and entertainment. Here again, just as the infatuation with technology may elude focused cultural or intellectual attention, technology addiction, notwithstanding its apparent conspicuousness, may face the same fate. FALLING OUT OF LOVE – TECHNOLOGY REJECTION

Yet another, third phenomenon perhaps evades the collective consciousness even more, namely: “technology rejection.” This is, obviously, the “falling out of love,” the leaving, the break-up. Our former feelings of amorousness for a certain technology now appear stale and hollow. Perhaps the happiness once brought on by the thrill of the new gave way to the suffering naturally associated to the “labor of love.” And then the once so desired object of fascination is callously cast aside. Technology rejection, in one form or another, has been a theoretical focus for many authors ranging from Jacques Ellul (1964) to Edward G. Ballard (1978) to Richard Stivers (1999; 2004) to the likes of Theodor Kaczynski. And it is well known that some cultural groups refuse to go along in the uncompromising, repetitive process of adoption and consumption of the ever new, or at least choose to do it on their own terms, like for instance, again, the Amish. These however are rather instances of technology rejection in which no former infatuation has taken place. They seem similar to simply staying with one’s spouse, and choosing not to go along with this or that potential partner instead. Above and beyond such a conscious choice to not adopt a specific medium or technology there exists a form of rejection that is perhaps much more ubiquitous but almost never specifically commented upon: the discarding of outdated, obsolete, or out-fashioned technologies – even when these are still fully functional. 115

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Zygmunt Bauman (2005) has written extensively about “discarding,” albeit not in the particular context of technology use: in what he calls our ‘liquid culture’ we need to constantly ‘shed our skin’ and reshape our identities lest not to fall behind in the capitalist-consumerist race. This entails purchasing ever new products and discarding the old ones. In this way, technology rejection must surely be said to exceed merely functional aspects. We do not just move on to new devices, gadgets, and tools because of the final breakdown or wear of our old gear. By contrast, we discard our old things because we feel the need to get new ones. Just so, there seems to be no better spark available in order to blow up a present relationship than the ignition furnished by the fire of a new one. WHAT IS “NORMAL” OR “GOOD” LOVE? BALANCING THE THREE “COMPONENTS”

Let us recapitulate. We have endeavored to analyze “what we want” from technologies and media. Our desires and expectations toward them, so it appeared, may seem simple and straightforward in theory, but once put to practice and to the test they begin to churn out ambivalences unstoppably. However, it could be that these ambivalences are masked in our everyday dealing with our wants and “reasons” by the main emotional attitudes towards media and technologies that we have just outlined, and moreover in a highly surreptitious manner. Every one of these “feelings” specifically demonstrates one of the aforementioned categories of “reasons.” The craze magnifies our Apollonian desire to be overwhelmed by the “other.” The rejection, conversely, may be said to originate in our dissatisfaction with certain technologies in relation to their purported ability to enforce, enhance, or strengthen us – spurring our Dionysian urge-for-control to go look for alternatives. And the addiction is just a highly intense and pathological form of the “fit” we naturally have with media. In other words: technology crazes let us passionately embrace, fall in love with, be ecstatic about more or less new technologies. They let us idolize the “beloved object.” Addiction, then, makes us obsessively embrace, pathologically depend on, suffer slavery to certain technologies. It wraps us up in the relation of “love.” And technology rejection, at last, comes down to the refusal of or simply diminished interest in specific technologies, hence throwing us back again upon ourselves, the “lover.” All are essentially based on exaggeration. The three states can be analyzed as 116

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borderline cases of what we, overall, accept as a “normal” characteristic of everyday life, namely, the use of technology for specific causes and goals. But the exaggeration can teach us something about the baseline activity. Technology crazes, addictions, and rejection illustrate how our bond with media takes place along three “components”: lover, love, and beloved. These locations will further define the structure of the argument to follow; we will elaborate on them again at the end of the next chapter. The states of exaggeration exquisitely demonstrate the ambivalence of technological design and use: one may benefit from the use of certain technologies but one may also suffer harm. In the craze, the addiction, and the rejection, these two possibilities lie in very close vicinity of each other. This also essentially means that the ambivalence is spread across the three components. Even more so, it functions on the basis of some interchangeability between the three locations (or at least the stress laid on them). A craze for instance does not need much to flip into an addiction or into rejection.129 “Good” and “bad” are two sides of the same coin here – the passion, either exciting or pathological, of being hooked up or forming a unity with technology. This close relatedness of advantage and disadvantage goes against the grain of all bipolar treatment of technology – technology as either “good” or “bad” – upon which we touched in the Introduction. If we approach technology from a relationship perspective as we propose to do, we find that inconsistency, ambivalence, and uncertainty make up the rule rather than the exception, just as they reign with a strong hand over human relationships – projects that are constantly in need of refinements and that require the most subtle balancing acts… Who could ever analyze one particular relationship as “good” or “bad,” except for those specific instances in which unqualified abuse is involved? The same goes for our relationship to technology: God and the Devil conspire to make it a complex but challenging mission filled to the brim with excitement and hardship, with happiness and suffering, inextricably intertwined. As we may love for specific reasons – asked for what attracts us so much in a particular person, we may list a few of them – something always escapes too. It is this strange, evasive thing that we are attempting to track down. So our love for technology is not a sentimental teenage infatuation. It is a complex, ambivalent, “grown-up” relationship full of struggles and doubts, and every now and then a fiery rekindling of passion. It is tainted by subdued desires and fears. We are mostly just as bad in holding up a stable and satisfactory relationship with technology as we fail in keeping our relationships with other 117

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people vibrant, healthy, and challenging. But sometimes some people seem to “get the hang of it.” They are able to navigate the sea of ambiguities with almost superhuman steering skills. Often they do this by employing an intelligent mix of common sense convictions and lots of patience and tolerance. If we are to find the same dynamical balance in our relationships with technology, do we not have to try to deploy the same sort of strategies? That is why we need to start asking the mundane question: why do we think we love? Every commonsensical answer we can come up with will be fragmentary, and will not exhaust the explanation. Yet by combining, recombining, building on these temporary blends, and patiently continuing work from there, we may perhaps force an entrance.

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5

Revisiting a Protagonist: A Prelude to Stories of Illusion and Loss, One and Many, Stasis and Change ‘There is no inevitability where there is a willingness to pay attention.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 128)

The last three chapters served to introduce the authors and the conceptual tools that play a substantial role in the work at hand. This chapter forms a preamble to the larger argument that will follow in that it revisits the work of our protagonist Marshall McLuhan in the light of the two central heuristics that have been worked out in the previous two chapters, namely, blindness and ambivalence. Combined, and seen from the perspective of McLuhan, these attest to a grounding, fundamental “loss” associated with every medium or technology, but a loss that we can nevertheless never get wholly in view – our “blindness” to it is just as constitutional. We do however have at our disposal other conceptual instruments, developed in what came before, that will assist us through the following Parts in further investigating our relationship(s) with technology, above and beyond and despite the “loss” and “illusion” that characterize them. A brief explanation of our proposed methodology closes off this chapter.

5.1

McLuhan, again

Our purpose in this part was to present the “workers” and “tools” with which we endeavor to take on the task of describing the dynamics of our bond with technology. At the same time throughout this presentation we sought to highlight some lines of force appearing within the body of theory at hand, and relevant with regard to our specific aims. These are first and foremost the dichotomous heuristics of use and context (or “structural” and “historical”), blindness and ambivalence, “what we get” and “what we want” from technologies, the functional and constitutional “reasons” for the use and development thereof, and finally the three components of the relationship that we briefly mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. Those conceptual tools will guide us in structuring the 119

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remainder of our argument. We began by introducing Marshall McLuhan as a philosopher of media bent on uncovering the blindnesses that at any time affect the perception of our media environments. Then we turned to our main research question and took a first stab at a description of our love of technology, from the perspective of “what we get” from it: what perceivable “result” does our bond produce? The concept of technological mediation as such was scrutinized here by way of the distinction between transparent and opaque, and we went on to find theories of transparency related or similar to McLuhan’s theory of blindness in the work of various thinkers. We discovered eventually that blindness – and hence the “result” of our bond with technology – can manifest itself essentially at two levels, i.e., of use and of context; levels that are in a certain sense mutually exclusive: one cannot use and criticize a technology at the same time. But every love is not only formed by a “what we get,” it is principally also grounded in a “what we want.” Or, what one gets out of a relationship is judged on the basis of what one expects from it. We thus focused, consequently, on the broad scale of “reasons” that we could possibly have for employing and deploying technologies and media, and found every one of them, although seemingly straightforward as such, inherently infected by ambivalence. Every need harbors a potential danger if it is tailored to improperly or in an unbalanced manner. And in the most extreme instances of our love for technology – the craze, addiction, and rejection – we see this ambivalence spreading across three components: lover, love, and beloved. The first and third can be said to harbor the aforesaid “reasons” of control and contact, respectively. The middle term points in the direction of a “fit” we naturally have with media and technologies. A balance, then, seems to be required between these functional and constitutional “reasons” in order for “normal love” to happen. Before we proceed to further investigate how our relationships with technologies precisely “work,” however, we need to revisit McLuhan’s theory in the light of our findings in the previous two chapters. In our introductory chapter on McLuhan we already utilized the concept of blindness as a main entryway into his work. Now we start out by quickly situating the idea of ambivalence in his theory. We thereafter briefly elaborate upon blindness again, but now in terms of the crucial concept of ‘bias.’ Next, we outline the ‘probe’ of ‘understanding,’ which we up until now have merely touched upon. ‘Understanding,’ as we will see, serves to combine in McLuhan’s work the concepts of both ‘bias’ and “loss.” We end with 120

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a short synthesis, meant simultaneously as an overview of things to come.

5.2

The “Flip Side” of the Tetrad: The Loss We Cannot Lose

In the previous chapter we concluded that “what we want” from technologies is at all times and at least in potency twofold. And as we saw in the Introduction, contemporary philosophy of technology distinguishes itself from former approaches in that it makes the ambivalence surrounding technology use, implementation, and development one of its focal points, as happens for instance in the work of Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde. Already in McLuhan, we will see now, such a concept of ambivalence can be discerned. THE TETRAD

Ambivalence with regard to technology means, very simply put, that “things can go both ways.”130 The design of a technology, and the way it is implemented and marketed in a societal context, ‘affords’ certain possibilities of use (J. J. Gibson 1986, 127ff.) but there is no guarantee whatsoever that those will be the only ones available. Other uses may be worked out, possibly within different contexts, and these may even find their way back into the design. And then the “cycle” starts again. Such a view, as we have seen, goes against the grain of both the deterministic approach that assumes technologies to have fixed, ingrained effects, and the instrumentalist view that sees technologies as in themselves non-determining means to an end. Approaches that reckon in the ambivalence of technology, by contrast, mark the latter as, in Feenberg’s words, ‘underdetermined’ by technical factors alone. What specific form technologies eventually take depends on multiple actors and contexts. Rephrased from a different perspective, this means that in the attestation of what a technology is we are always at a loss, figuratively and literally. The technology cannot just be said to “do this or that” as it is meant to, it also has principally unforeseen consequences. Surprisingly perhaps, a similar idea is already present in McLuhan’s work. In fact it meanders through the whole of his media-related research, however it probably finds its most pithy expression in the probe that McLuhan develops towards the end of his life together with his son Eric, and that is meant to summarize and synthesize his most central media-theoretical insights: the ‘tetrad,’ 121

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also known as the four ‘laws of media.’131 With the tetrad McLuhan purportedly means to have found the ultimate formulation of his theory of media evolution. All media – and those include, as we will later see in detail, all ‘human-made’ artifacts – work and evolve according to a set of four laws: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. Every medium in its effects (its ‘message’) enhances something, makes something obsolete, retrieves something that was obsolesced before, and reverses into its “opposite” when pushed to extremes (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988; M. McLuhan and Powers 1989). When analyzing the workings of a medium one should always ask how the medium relates to these four processes. The tetrad incorporates and integrates many of McLuhan’s main probes, such as the cliché-archetype dynamic and the ‘rear-view mirror,’ to which we will return later on. But for our purposes at this time, the role that the figure-ground dichotomy – already discussed in Chapter 2 – takes up in the tetrad is the most interesting. First and foremost, tetrads as such are a means or a method of perceiving ground. ‘[T]etrads are a means of focusing awareness of hidden or unobserved qualities in our culture and its technologies […]’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 6). Yet within every tetrad, also, a figure-ground tension is at work. Whereas enhancement and retrieval act as figure components, reversal and obsolescence must be regarded as ground aspects. We disregard for now McLuhan’s suggestion that each of the tetrad’s four parts themselves are eligible to a tetradic treatment ad infinitum – what could be called the “holographic” aspect of the ‘laws of media’ – and in relation to that the inherent ambiguity of McLuhan’s proposed figure-ground distribution.132 The distribution of figure and ground elements within each tetrad presumes some of the workings of a medium to remain hidden and some others to become manifest. Normal perception will only show us what the medium enhances and what it retrieves; these are its ‘content’ components, i.e., what lies clearly in sight. But in the background the obsolescence and reversal parts are at work as ‘form’: respectively, what we “lose” because of the medium, and what the medium may “turn into” when the right conditions are met.133 TECHNOLOGY: A ‘FAUSTIAN BARGAIN’

What this exactly entails can best be illustrated by a metaphor proposed by Neil Postman. Postman takes over much of McLuhan’s media analysis, albeit from a more critical, some might say moralist viewpoint. Just as the aforementioned 122

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philosophers of technology of today he challenges the sort of reasoning that assumes a “technology” to simply resolve a problem and no further questions asked. Technology in his view is always a ‘Faustian bargain’: […] Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. (Postman 1990)

In other words: every technology causes effects that we cannot control, and not always for the better. The question ‘What will technology do?’ is important, Postman says, but so is the question ‘What will technology undo?’ ‘Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.’ (1998) Technologies have destructive as well as constructive consequences. Elsewhere he illustrates this by way of the legend of King Thamus, which Plato relates in the Phaedrus. King Thamus introduced phonetic writing but thereby changed the whole Western world. Specifically, Postman indicates, technologies alter three things: our thinking, our symbols, and our form of community (1992b, 20). He thus in his way attempts to reveal the ground side of the tetrad. Whereas its figure side – enhancement and retrieval – gives us full disclosure on what we win by the medium, the ground aspects – obsolescence and reversal – hide from our eyes what we, first, lose by it, and second, in which way the medium’s dynamics and workings itself may soon be qualitatively changed. Those “losses” are integral parts of the medium. We cannot “lose” them, although we may not directly perceive them. According to Postman, this is a potentially dangerous situation; because we only see the “wins” we may become too celebratory about technology. We do not have to agree entirely with his rather grim evaluation. A ‘Faustian bargain’ may not necessarily have to be ‘Faustian,’ although it is a ‘bargain’ anyway. This means that what were at first destructive tendencies of a technology may turn out to be constructive possibilities in the right context and with help of the right actors just as well. The “losses” of obsolescence and reversal – actual and potential “loss,” respectively – may become “wins” for other groups than the ones favored at first by the figure aspects. In short: the idea of the ambivalence of technology appears to be foreshadowed by McLuhanist media theory. Instead of the word ‘bargain’ in the McLuhanist rhetoric, contemporary philosophy of technology

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would rather employ the term ‘trade-off’ (Feenberg 1999, 91ff.). But the underlying core, i.e., the idea of the contingency of technological designs, central to the latter, is already present, albeit rudimentarily, in the former.

5.3

Bias: The Blindness We Cannot See (nor Unsee)

Nevertheless as said a few times before, these “losses” – and thus also possibilities – stay obscured at first. Some work is needed to let them surface. Before we expand on the specific shapes that that work can take we need to briefly revisit the notion of “hiddenness” again. In Chapter 2 we discussed the concept of blindness in McLuhan’s work at considerable length. But we largely neglected its origins in a construct that has become a mainstay in all of the sciences and that has been particularly worked out with regard to media by one of McLuhan’s most important influences: Harold A. Innis. Namely: bias. BIAS

According to Innis (2007; 2008), writing in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, all communications media have a bias towards one or other societal organization. This means that media tend to incite or co-constitute certain constellations and exclude alternatives. And it appears that media biases largely come in pairs: Innis sees a distinction between ‘time-biased’ and ‘space-biased’ media. Societies depending mostly on one or the other show a very different face. Time-biased media – such as stone tablets, parchment, vellum, and oral communication – make for tribal societies, depending on hierarchy, tradition, and the preservation of memory. Space-biased media, by contrast – such as paper or modern media like radio and television – favor communication over long distances and constitute societies based on rationality, abstract thought, speed, and control over space. In Innis’ view it is particularly when these two sorts of media are balanced, as for example in Ancient Greece, that societies flourish. As we have already seen, McLuhan takes over this concept of media bias and its attending dichotomy between time-biased and space-biased but relocates it – or at least its origins and base – for the largest part within the realm of the human sensorium. The ultimate place of action for all biases for McLuhan becomes the elusive borderline between the environment and the senses. Yet it should be stressed that given the Thomist influences in McLuhan’s theory of perception, bias 124

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does not just concern our sense life plainly and simply. In the Thomist scheme cognition is always a form of perception and vice versa. To a certain extent every perceptual process is an act of understanding, and the other way around. Nonetheless notwithstanding the inextricability of perception and cognition it serves to distinguish – if only out of methodological considerations – between two aspects of bias in McLuhan’s version. The first has to do with the more “technical” reception of sense data. The second concerns the cognitive or “intellectual” processing of that data. TWO SIDES OF BIAS

In McLuhan’s perception theory the first form of perception – the “mere” receiving of data – is itself twofold. It involves, on the one hand, the reception of sensory stimuli and the corresponding but exclusively sensory response to them. The terms McLuhan himself begins to deploy in the report that eventually leads up to the publication of Understanding Media are ‘structural impact’ and ‘sensory closure’ (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 262, 286; Marchand 1998, 155). The interrelation between these two processes becomes particularly clear in this quote from ‘Education in the Electronic Age’: ‘When the sensory inputs are dim, the sensory response is correspondingly strong. […] As we grow older, we dim down the sensory responses and increase the sensory inputs […]’ (M. McLuhan 1972, 530). Closure134 is thus not necessarily a conscious process, on the contrary: ‘Perception or input is never the experience of “closure.” No matter which sense receives the data the other senses rally to complement it.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 186) There always exists a dialectical dynamic between “input” and “output,”135 where input so to speak begs the question and output or response provides the answer.136 Yet above and beyond this rather “technical” perception we may or may not have, on the other hand, “intellectual” processing: what we commonly call cognition. This covers a broad range of activities by which we try to make sense of the flood of sensory data received and by way of which we accord meaning to what we perceive: interpretation, reflection, analysis, … Nevertheless here too, we may not be conscious of the ‘mental sets’ that influence our thinking and interpreting. Hence: the ‘bias’ of media is not only constituted by purely sensory blindness but just as much by “intellectual” blindness. However as said, cognition and perception, in McLuhan’s basically Aquinasinfluenced view, cannot be distinguished but in theory. Moreover, cognition is really a part of perception. ‘Bias’ should be defined broadly, Joost van Loon 125

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suggests (2006, 162), taking a hint from Edward Comor (2003, 88), as the philosophical question formulated by James Ten Broeke and quoted by Innis in The Bias of Communication: ‘Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?’ (Innis 2008, xliii) Part of the ‘bias’ is in the ‘attending’ but another part of it is in the ‘why.’ Nevertheless it remains the case that the sensory part of our blindness is very much rooted in our organic, biological setup, and is thus almost impossible to get around or evade – we cannot “see” nor “unsee” it. In other words, the impact and closure dynamic stays inevitable: there will always be something we see and something we do not see. Only the cognitive part of our blindness, conversely, does offer a slight hope of being able to turn its wits against itself. In other words: we can only fight sensory bias by way of “intellectual” ‘understanding.’ WHAT LIES BEYOND PERCEPTION (NOTHING)

Nonetheless, before we finally turn to this process of ‘understanding,’ we should qualify. If McLuhan says ‘All people have “mental sets” or habits of perception that conceal the real game from their eyes […]’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 101), this does not signify that there should exist something beyond perception. “Nonperception” can only in the ideal instance be turned into perception and nothing else. It may be misleading if he writes: ‘We can have the meaning before the experience, but more often we have the experience without the meaning.’ (ibid., 142) This sounds as if ‘meaning’ hovers above and beyond ‘experience,’ i.e., perception. Yet ‘meaning’ is still ‘perception.’ All understanding takes place within perception, as McLuhan forcefully maintains in defending ‘percept’ over ‘concept.’137 However, the “third” term – of the aforementioned threesome perception, awareness, and understanding – enables us to turn non-awareness or unconsciousness, in itself a full-blown part of perception, into awareness or consciousness.

5.4

‘To the Blind, All Things Are Sudden’: Effects and Understanding

Let us briefly recapitulate. Technologies and media have an inherent ambivalence to them. We have towards technologies and media an inherent blindness. But it seems to be exactly to their ambivalence that we are first and foremost blind. We cannot “see” the “loss,” neither on the sensory level nor on the “intellectual” level. But according to McLuhan we can at least partly turn the latter against the former 126

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and against itself. We can sidetrack the illusion. THE POSSIBILITY OF UNDERSTANDING

In “ordinary” conditions we are blind to our environment, numb to the amputation of our senses – just like fish do not know of water.138 In our perceptual lives, we are all somnambulists (M. McLuhan 2002, 13, 113), under narcosis.139 Nevertheless, the situation is according to McLuhan not hopeless. There is a way to perceive unnoticed environments, to notice ‘ground,’ and that is the construction of ‘anti-environments.’140 Certain categories of people are especially good at this – artists, most eminently (M. McLuhan 1967; M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001b, 177; M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 30-31). It is their work – and his own – that eventually opens up a process of uncovering what McLuhan prefers to call ‘understanding,’ as we will immediately see. By defending such a position, it must be mentioned, McLuhan situates himself in a larger tradition of thinkers who are positioned on the frontier between modernist criticism and postmodernist indifference. On the one hand he satirizes the uniform rationality hailed by Enlightenment essentialism but nevertheless finds no other or greater essence to divert us to. Only the “messiness” of interrelation seems to remain. From this perspective, it is no surprise that for instance Gary Genosko and Douglas Kellner see many convergences between McLuhan’s and Baudrillard’s thought (Genosko 1999; Kellner 1989), as the latter is influenced by the former. On the other hand however, the uncovering of biases stays in itself an implicitly modernist endeavor. As Janine Marchessault points out, ‘McLuhan’s project to understand contemporary experience in terms of its mediations through technology […]’ fits in extremely well with the project of modernity of shifting from content to structure, i.e., of making the invisible visible (2005, 75).141 This makes McLuhan quite compatible, as some authors have shown, with several philosophical movements of the beginning of the twentieth century such as phenomenology142 and, most importantly in this regard, Critical Theory, that in themselves can be seen as transitory movements from modernity to ‘postmodernity,’ and that all in their way seek to pierce through the surface of illusion – be it ideology, perceptual superficiality, or inauthenticity – towards underlying workings. Judith Stamps describes the common denominator between the projects of McLuhan and critical theorists Adorno and Benjamin thus: ‘[…] they attempted to alleviate suffering by bringing its sources to light.’ (1995, 19) 127

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Paul Grosswiler notices many parallels between McLuhan and dialectical materialism, but highlights especially the notion of ideology. Althusser for example considers ideological images to be unconscious: ‘[…] they are lived as if they were the world itself.’ (Grosswiler 1998, 86)143 And what is more, finally, within the tradition of Critical Theory, several thinkers such as most notably Herbert Marcuse (2002) have just as McLuhan proposed art as an important “way out of” the blindness affecting us. WAKING FROM NARCOSIS: ARTISTS, SLEUTHS, AND AMBIGUITY

For it is artists – and perhaps especially poets – who are in McLuhan’s view in absolute pole position when it comes to uncovering ground.144 They have other, possibly better perceptual attitudes and capacities at their disposal than “normal” people. ‘Whereas the ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perceptions against the impact of new experience, the artist delights in this novelty and instinctively creates situations that both reveal it and compensate for it.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 238) In a general sense it is art and only art that can furnish anti-environments and thus reveal subliminal environmental effects. McLuhan sees his own work as embedded in this very project: it is thus essentially self-reflexive in the sense that it develops a reflection on its own status-as-artwork, i.e., it being a project of uncovering perceptual biases. Throughout his publications several types personify this project. First and foremost the sleuth or detective (M. McLuhan 1962, 277; M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 138; M. McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 1977, 173). The image of the sleuth harks back to McLuhan’s counsel to start from the effects of media and work back to their cause(s) from there, which we will discuss more elaborately in Chapter 8: an elementary procedure that every detective routinely deploys. The effect is always the situation at hand; the crime scene of a murder, for instance. By way of the search for clues the sleuth attempts to go from that situation to what caused it. ‘It is not possession of the solution, but the recognition of the problem itself that provides a resource and the answers.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 92) The detective, as an inherently ‘antisocial’ type – just like the artist – is thus aware of the ‘message’ of media and not only of the ‘content’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 88). Another image that McLuhan uses to describe the work of ‘probing,’ is the trial (M. McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 1977, 145-147): we should put media “on trial.” Strangely enough unlike in detective stories guilt cannot be so easily 128

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assigned, for all-too complex patterns arise: manufacturers, officials, sales people, dealers, operators, politicians, .... all interwoven in intricate networks. This complexity of reality challenges us, urges us to do our utmost best. Perhaps that is why another image that McLuhan proposes – but uses somewhat less often – for this adventurous ‘prober,’ is that of the hunter. He observes for instance in relation to a remark on the mostly critical reaction to his style: ‘All my ‘non-books’ are ways of teaching how to perceive the total environment in the way in which a hunter perceives his.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 267) The hunter seems to have the ability to keep the illusion in view and at the same time look past it. As is so often the case with McLuhanist concepts, the idea of ‘understanding,’ too, has itself an essential ambiguity to it. It is not always clear whether McLuhan sees ‘understanding,’ that can be reached by taking an artistic or detective-like stance, as either something that exceeds both ‘literate’ and ‘tribal’ modes or something pertaining exclusively to the ‘tribal’ mentality. On the one hand we need to arm ourselves against the subliminal effects of every environment, be it ‘literate’ or ‘tribal.’ ‘Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.’ (M. McLuhan, 1962, 32) A tribal society does not at all appear here like an environment in which everyone, through participation and ‘involvement’ in everyone and everything else, is enlightened with regard to the ‘form’ of that environment. The same goes moreover for the ‘global village’: in contrast with popular interpretations the ‘global village’ is anything but an idyllic place; it is filled with tension and primal aggression.145 Yet on the other hand ‘understanding,’ McLuhan appears to suggest, seems only possible within the frame of reference co-implicated by ‘electric technology’: only within a holistic, non-fragmented, ‘right-hemisphere’ world of auditorytactile awareness we are able to grasp the true ‘interplay’ of cause and effect (or simultaneity of cause and effect), of media and environments. The following quotes seem to hint at this: The dilemma of visual culture is already indicated in a growing sense of division between appearance and reality. (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 99) We have finally reached awareness of the unconscious itself as the major hidden resource, since we have learned the role of sleep and dreaming as “social work and purgation” in the psychotherapeutic age. (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 84) 129

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At slow rates of change the maladjusted person is a local “character.” At high speeds he is a neurotic menace. For the same reason, the artist occupies the ivory tower in a slowchanging society. He moves to the control tower in a rapidly changing world. (M. McLuhan 1970, 16)

These three citations all imply the historical givenness of a sea change. In a ‘literate,’ visually oriented world all sorts of things are separated from each other – appearance from reality; conscious from unconscious; art from society – that do not seem so easily identifiable anymore within a ‘tribal,’ auditory-tactile realm. THE MAELSTRÖM: A NOTE ON PARADOX

Moreover, there may not just be an essential ambiguity to the concept of ‘understanding,’ specifically in relation to the feasibility of attaining it; ‘understanding’ may also be inherently paradoxical. This can be best exemplified by way of the one image that McLuhan consistently uses to illustrate the idea through the length of his career, and that is Edgar Allan Poe’s sailor in A Descent into the Maelström (Poe 1975, 127-140). In the story a man relates how he survived a shipwreck in a whirlpool, whereas his two brothers died. Wikipedia furnishes a fine summary: Driven by “the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens,” their ship was caught in the vortex. One brother was pulled into the waves; the other was driven mad by the horror of the spectacle, and drowned as the ship was pulled under. At first the narrator only saw hideous terror in the spectacle. In a moment of revelation, he saw that the Maelström is a beautiful and awesome creation. Observing how objects around him were pulled into it, he deduced that “the larger the bodies, the more rapid their descent” and that spherical-shaped objects were pulled in the fastest. Unlike his brother, he abandoned ship and held on to a cylindrical barrel until he was saved several hours later. (‘A Descent into the Maelström’)

It is by accurate observation and analysis of the environment that the sailor is able to survive the whirlpool. For McLuhan this is a perfect metaphor for our daily existence in a world full of media and technologies. We are constantly in the grip of the vortex. It is only by the grace of our reasoning powers that we are able to get 130

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out of it. As Eric McLuhan comments: ‘If the vortex of effects arrives first then we can escape it, as Poe suggests in his parable of the maelstrom, only by formal, structural study of its action.’ (2005, 202) Blindness must be met by more devoted and structured seeing. Yet, given the utter importance of the Poe tale in McLuhan’s arsenal of probes and metaphors, one highly critical remark pops up. It is formulated by Daniel Czitrom: ‘Perhaps it is worth recalling that Poe’s sailor, although able to save himself by means of an extraordinary curiosity, was powerless to save his two brothers on the ship. He escaped his fate only after he gave up hope.’ (1982, 171) This suggests that ‘understanding’ is in itself ambivalent and paradoxical: in order to save, we must sacrifice. It seems not possible to “have our perceptual cake and eat it too,” to keep on observing keenly without losing hope, and without sacrificing our brothers (or sisters). Just as we cannot escape perception by fleeing into a non-perceptional domain, we cannot evade the “losing” by counteracting it through some form of pure “winning.” The blindness as well as the ambivalence are utterly fundamental, constitutional, and hence – alas – ineradicable and inexhaustible. ‘Ground’ in this way truly means grounded and grounding.146

5.5

Levels of Blindness and Ambivalence, Foci of Temporary Concern

As said, it is our intention in what follows to further and more closely investigate the dynamics of our relationship, our bond with technology. In doing so we will let the heuristic instruments that we have worked out up until now act as our guide. A brief prelude is in place. WYSINWYG AND WYWINWYG: LOVE’S TWO-SIDED DEFECT

Love, as we have seen, is built on a two-sided defect: it is blind, and it is intrinsically unpredictable and prone to injury. No matter the “reasons” for which we pursue it, these shortcomings abide. In seeking control we focus on “the work” and not on the tools or means with which we undertake to do that work – and for all our good intentions the work may fail or have perverse consequences. In wanting information and interaction we pay attention to the informational goods we want to acquire, or the social contact we strive to deploy, and not so much to the technologies with which we are involved – and still we may wind up with 131

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exactly the converse of what we were after. And in “fitting in” with ICT in an almost natural or automatic way, be it on the conceptual, perceptual, structural, social, or “magical” level, we tend to disregard the fact that we are dealing with technologies right away – and we may become “other” people altogether. No matter “what we get” from technologies, our perception of it is incomplete. No matter “what we want” from technologies, our expectations will be put to the test. Within computing discourse the phrase ‘WYSIWYG’ – ‘What You See Is What You Get’ – is well-known. It is meant to describe, mostly with regard to website construction software, a system in which the graphical rendering, e.g., of code, during editing completely corresponds with how the product will look when finished. Yet it seems that to our relationship with technology altogether different principles apply: rather, WYSINWYG and WYWINWYG – What You See Is Never What You Get and What You Want Is Never What You Get. As we have indicated in what came before, this double-sided lack is principally played out along two axes. It is on the one hand us who err in “incorrectly” perceiving media. But on the other hand media themselves hide to a certain extent from our view too. “Something in us” and “something in and of the medium” makes for the twofold defect. At the same time, this give-and-take takes place simultaneously at two levels: the “structural” (use) and the “historical” (context). “STRUCTURAL” AND “HISTORICAL” LEVELS: ANTHROPOLOGY, ONTOLOGY, AND CULTURE

At the “structural” or use level we can clearly see the loss and the blindness to be deeply rooted in our human condition as well as in the “structure” of technologies on a foundational plane. In other words, here the scrutiny of our bond with technology leads us to on the one hand a philosophical anthropology and on the other hand an ontology. Anthropologically, we can say that the lack and the technological blindness belong to our make-up “as humans.” With McLuhan this gap is to be situated in our ‘sensorium.’ Yet we have also seen how research on the ‘media equation’ points out that ‘[s]ocial responses to media, while powerful, are not obvious to the people who are being social.’ (Reeves and Nass 1996, 71) And cognitive science as elaborated by Andy Clark observes in relation to the use of extended-embodiment strategies: ‘Interestingly, human subjects are typically unaware of their own deployment of such strategies.’ (2008, 16) Ontologically, then, the lack and the blindness can be said to reside in the ‘things themselves.’ This is as much as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests: ‘[…] the 132

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ruse lies in the things themselves.’ (2004, 109) Things deceive us of their own accord. All things make out and co-determine their own revealing and concealment, but in that way connect directly to “us.” This ontological side of (technological) blindness is, as we have seen and will further see, detailedly elaborated by McLuhan and other authors such as Heidegger, Latour, and Graham Harman. Still, at what we have dubbed the “historical” level, the blindness and the loss take a form that could be best described by way of the simple – but unfortunately loaded – term “culture.” Culturally, the (technological) blindness belongs to our being-with-each-other – socially, politically, institutionally. According to McLuhan the ‘message’ of media give shape to our overall cultural constellation. The distinction that Don Ihde makes between ‘microperception’ and ‘macroperception’ can also be helpful here: microperception is sensorial perception, macroperception amounts to the cultural, hermeneutical perception (1990, 29). What we think is ‘naked perception’ often hides a secret relation to a macroperception (ibid., 42). THREE FOCI, TWO LEVELS

In what follows we will, based on the foregoing, proceed in two big steps and along three “roads” that are here for our purposes theoretically separated but “in reality” and practically tangled into each other. First, on the “structural” level, which we will treat of in Part I, all bonds with technology, all of our relationships with media, can be said to consist of anthropological as well as ontological aspects. Yet for reasons of analytical clarity we will endeavor to study each of these aspects apart. Where in the relationship can each of them be situated? This question, as already suggested, leads us to the discernment of three components, moments, locations, or foci147 of temporary concern – temporary because, as said, they are actually indiscernible – within each relationship: “us,” the lover of a technology, “them,” the beloved technology, and “it,” the love that constitutes the totality of the relationship. Here at the “structural” level, it is as if there is but “one” relationship and this relationship is frozen in time. The picture that we can paint of our bond here cannot be more than a snapshot of “one moment,” in which all is as it is. At the “historical” level, then, which forms the focus of Part II, these components or foci can be observed just as well but they take on a completely different shape there. Here, within “culture,” no longer the bond with technology 133

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is concerned as if this was just an abstract concept. At the “historical” level many “loves” interact, clash into each other, complete as well as damage each other. No longer an absolute time frame reigns here. Here change “takes place.” Whereas at the “structural” level the focus on the singular can procure merely an abstract grasp of a moment in time, the “historical” level enables a concrete view on the multifaceted battlefield of culture in which, essentially, “time passes.” It must be mentioned right away that these levels and foci are in the first instance methodological tools. They rather denote a discourse, a way of looking, a way of doing, an attitude, than “the way it is.” Of course at any given moment many relationships abide. The singularity of the “structural” level is to be seen as a tendency, an aim, an aspiration to have and to hold merely “one” situation, to keep things constant, to retain the status quo. At the same time the “historical” level in no way excludes the “moment” or any presence of “structural” relationships; it includes them. In the spirit of McLuhan: too much literal thinking in this regard could cause one to misread our purposes here. At the same time, the present heuristic dichotomies are as we will see meant to correct a perhaps all-too one-sided and confusing use of the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘time’ within the philosophy of media, starting with Innis’ famous aforementioned dichotomy. Space and time in our elaboration are present and interrelate on both levels. Not so much the balancing of those two dimensions is at stake in the successful “living” with media and technologies, as is often thought in specifically McLuhanist media theory, but the proportioning of the levels of “stasis” and “change,” of one and many. It is throughout and within these tensions that the loss and blindness – the concepts that will run as a thread through all that follows – must be existentially tackled. This issue will make out, at last, the theme of Part III.

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PART I: STRUCTURAL LEVEL — LOVE IN THE SINGULAR Where nothing is supposed or expected to ever change; or change is all and every time…

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6

Out of Ourselves: The Lover as the One Who Is Extended

‘They assume I’m for or against Gutenberg. Bunk! I think of technologies as highly identifiable objects made by our own bodies. They feel that technologies are strange, alien intruders from outer space.’ (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 280)

At stake in this chapter is the scrutiny of the “lover” component of the human-technology relationship at the singular or “structural” level. This means we will investigate “our” role in the bond that we have with technologies and media, as such and “as is,” so to speak, at one (or any) frozen moment in time. Immediately we will find nonetheless that the lover cannot be seen in isolation from the love and the beloved: in McLuhan’s scheme humans ‘extend’ themselves into technologies. We consequently delineate his extension theory, throughout several steps. First, we situate it in the larger historical context of which it forms a part and in which is assumed a continuity between the organic and the technological. Second, we outline what distinguishes McLuhan’s take on the extension idea from other, similar versions. Third, we elaborate more detailedly upon the dynamics of extension in McLuhan’s view. Fourth, we sketch the forms in which the extension idea has “survived” up until today and highlight one specific take on it that particularly resembles McLuhan’s, i.e., the ‘extended mind’ thesis. All of that brings us, at last and fifth, to a consideration of the definition of what a “human” is given the fact that we “naturally” extend ourselves into our environments – to round off with a brief reflection on the status of philosophical anthropology.

6.1

Us, Humans: Lovers of Technology

THE LOVER IN RELATION TO THE LOVE AND THE BELOVED

There is no love in the abstract. The lover co-shapes the love. He or she brings to the scene desires, needs, expectations, memories, images, habits – all either conscious or unconscious. Human love is different from “love” among other animals.148 Our definition of what humans are has a direct impact on our understanding of what it is for humans to love. So to specifically make sense of our love of technology we must first and foremost get to know ourselves better. But, 137

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there is no lover in the abstract either. Every lover stands in a relation towards a beloved. So who or what are “we” in relation to “technology”? It is not often expressly acknowledged in contemporary philosophy of technology, but the most common and at the same time most challenging way of dealing with this question is the concept of extension. One of the first modern philosophers of technology, the nineteenth century German Ernst Kapp, defines technologies as ‘organ projections’ (Organprojectionen) (1978) – for example the railroad as an externalization of the circulatory system, the telegraph of the nervous system, … Several theorists subsequently deliver versions of the technology-as-extension idea throughout the twentieth century, among them probably most famously McLuhan. Up until today the extension concept gets further used and developed, albeit in terms and contexts more fitting to the twenty-first century – as for example in the work of cognitive scientist Andy Clark and media ecologist Robert K. Logan. THE ‘FOURTH CONTINUITY’: ORGANIC VS. MECHANICAL

It is not obvious that the idea of technologies-as-extensions should help us in understanding who we are. Yet delineating “ourselves” from other “things,” or conversely finding out that where we thought a partition was in fact a union turns out to be, can definitely be of aid in the drawing of our image of self. Bruce Mazlish offers an analysis along these lines in The Fourth Discontinuity: The CoEvolution of Humans and Machines (1993). In modern times humankind has come to realize that it does not hold such an exclusive and special position as once thought. Man is not the center of the universe. He appears to be continuous and not discontinuous – terms Mazlish derives from Jerome Bruner – with certain parts of his surroundings. The first discontinuity is destroyed by Copernicus: man is continuous with the cosmos. The second by Darwin: man is continuous with animals. And the third, by Freud (as by the way acknowledged by the latter himself): man is continuous with his own unconscious. Now Mazlish sets out to shatter what he calls the fourth discontinuity: that between the organic and the mechanical. We realize, Mazlish says, how evolution is neatly interwoven with our use and development of tools. Moreover, we perceive that we can explain humans and machines by the same concepts, in the sense that machines are more like humans. So paradoxically, if we try to understand our relation to technology by way of trying to understand ourselves, we must again revert to this relation and attempt 138

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to grasp its nature. This seemingly logically impossible project is however completely in line with the sort of “boundary-crossing” we outlined in the Introduction – more precisely in this case the blurring of the boundary between technology and the human organism. In what follows we will sketch various uses of the extension concept, in order to arrive at a definition of “us.” We will do this on the basis of a few central characteristics of what we could call the generic “extension idea.” These are:  Technologies are extensions of human functions, body parts, or senses;  By way of technologies-as-extensions we reach out into the environment, but the environment also reaches into us;  This interrelation of man and technology implies different conceptions of man and of technology than the modernist ones;  The problems posed by this interrelation can be remediated by the interrelation itself. Especially of the first three aspects we will treat in this chapter; a discussion of the fourth characteristic we postpone to Chapter 17. First, we will offer a historical overview of extension concepts along with an introductory explanation of McLuhan’s take on them. Second, we deal explicitly with the latter’s extension theory and so elaborate specifically upon the second of the aforementioned points. Third, we will investigate contemporary formulations of the extension idea, particularly Andy Clark’s ‘extended mind’ framework. And fourth, we sketch the consequences for a view of “what a human is,” thus arriving eventually at a take on philosophical anthropology.

6.2

The Extension Idea: A Classic

The extension idea has a considerably long and wide history. McLuhan’s treatment of it is said – by himself or others – to have precursors in a vast amount of authors.149 The details of these specific theories and their similarities and dissimilarities to McLuhan’s will not concern us extensively here.150 It will suffice to point out some gross directions to ease the way into the extension concept outlined by McLuhan, and its more contemporary versions.

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EARLY ORIGINS

In fact the idea can be said to go back as far as Aristotle (cf. Lister et al. 2009, 90; Mitcham 1994, 176) who is probably one of the first to propose the idea that instruments and tools extend the human body and soul, just as the body is the instrument of the soul (‘the hand is the instrument of instruments’) (1907, 145). One of the first modern thinkers to propose the extension idea though, is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes most famously in his essay ‘Works and Days’ (included in Society and Solitude): ‘The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.’ (1876, 129) Ernst Kapp then, as mentioned, regards tools and technologies and in fact all cultural products as ‘organ projections’ (1978, 27ff.). Moreover, more than seventy years before McLuhan he analyzes, among other things, language and “the state” as extensions of our mind. Perhaps not coincidentally, Kapp as well as Emerson refer in passing to Aristotle’s idea that instruments originate in the human organism (Kapp 1978, 41; Emerson 1876, 129) That insight is worked out in full by Samuel Butler who sees – more than a century before Mazlish – a continuity between organisms and their environments, and specifically between humans and their technologies. In Luck, or Cunning? he phrases it this way: ‘It should be observed […] that the distinction between the organism and its surroundings – on which both systems are founded – is one that cannot be so universally drawn as we find it convenient to allege.’ (Butler 2004, Chapter VI) Specifically in Erewhon this idea is applied to an analysis of technologies as extensions of human parts: ‘[…] civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand […]’ (Butler 2002, 136). The spade literally lengthens the forearm; its iron plate reinforces the power of the hand.151 TWENTIETH-CENTURY VERSIONS

Henri Bergson, then, carries this exact same idea into the twentieth century: ‘The workman’s tool is the continuation of his arm.’ (1963, 309) He distinguishes between natural instruments brought forth by instinct, and constructed instruments made by intellect. The latter must be seen as ‘[…] an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended.’ (2007, 156) It is a two-way street: organs are natural instruments, instruments artificial organs – again, a foreshadowing of the ‘fourth continuity.’ McLuhan scholar Jim Curtis calls Bergson perhaps surprisingly ‘[…] the 140

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crucial twentieth-century theoretician of technology […]’ (1978, 65).152 It is probably no coincidence that he then goes on to sketch the extension concepts in Lewis Mumford, Jean Gebser, Ernst Cassirer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and at last McLuhan. Mumford, the best-known historian of technology, delineates technology as a reinforcement or extension of the human organism (Mumford 2010, 10; Curtis 1978, 75) and sees the medieval village as the ideal human community, the subsequent Renaissance as a one-sided, extreme focus on visual orientation, and the ‘electric technology’ finally as a possible return to the ‘equilibrium’ – a historical progression that McLuhan takes over to a substantial extent. Gebser defines a machine as an objectivation (Entäusserung), i.e., an externalization (Hinausstellung) or ‘in psychological terms’ a projection of human capacities (Gebser 1985, 132; Curtis 1978, 70-71). The projection makes these capacities and their structure visible and conscious; conversely this entails that technologies form a part of consciousness. Cassirer, then – who influences Gebser – also sees technologies as organic projections, but above all, according to Curtis, attempts to understand technology as a form of spiritual creativity not unlike myth, language, and art. ‘Never does the implement serve simply for the mastery of an outside world which can be regarded as finished, simply given “matter”; rather, it is through the use of the implement that the image, the spiritual, ideal form of this outside world, is created for man.’ (Cassirer 1955, 215; Curtis 1978, 69). Teilhard de Chardin subsequently takes it a step further in relating technological evolution immediately to the idea of the transcendent.153 Like all the aforementioned thinkers to greater or lesser degrees, and particularly influenced by Bergson, he detects no strict boundary between the organic and the technical. On the contrary, in Teilhard’s theory man and the ‘social phenomenon,’ i.e., the extension of the organic, together form one ‘elliptical’ system – which he calls a ‘general organism’ – in which the physical makes up one ‘focus’ and the technical another. ‘The whole of humanity can […] be compared to an ellipse in which a focus of technical organization is conjugated with a focus of psychological knowledge.’154 (Teilhard de Chardin 1963, 165) In both foci, Teilhard sees still much potential for growth; he observes how everywhere around us the psychical energy is growing in quantity, intensity, and quality (ibid., 166-167). In this evolution the technical ‘has a biological role,’ and Curtis comments that ‘[s]ince “technics has a biological role,” technology, as a making that moves from the many to the one, actually anticipates Omega, by extending and unifying mankind.’ (1978, 73)155 141

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MCLUHAN’S VERSION

At this point, ideally, we should turn our attention to McLuhan’s elaboration of the extension idea. As becomes clear from the above, McLuhan is certainly not the first to propose it, and as he works out his own version of it he writes himself into an already strong and widespread tradition. One could in this sense call the generic extension idea plainly commonplace – however that does not make it less valuable. According to W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan attributes the ‘discovery’ that media are extensions of human body parts or senses to the ‘Explorations’ seminar of the 1950s (1997a, 160), that McLuhan organizes together with Edmund Carpenter. In Laws of Media, he himself cites as influences Emerson, Karl Popper, Hans Hass, and Edward T. Hall (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 94-95).156 It is probably the latter who exercises the most direct influence on him.157 Hall develops in The Silent Language a linguistic approach of anthropology and cultural study in which language is not to be seen as exclusively verbal, but even for the most part as non-verbal: this is ‘the silent language.’ Within this language Hall distinguishes between ten different sorts of human activity, called ‘Primary Message Systems.’ One of them is tool use – ‘Exploitation (use of materials)’ – and here the extension idea is mentioned: ‘[…] all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body.’ (Hall 1959, 79) Hall’s take on the extension concept presages McLuhan’s eventual own linguistic definition of technologies-as-extensions.158 That ‘discovery’ however – namely, that all human artifacts have a linguistic structure – comes only later in his life (the early 1970s); the extension idea as such gains prominence in his work from the late 1950s onward. Traces of the it can already be found in The Mechanical Bride, as Alice Rae points out (Rae 2009). Specifically, McLuhan there talks of the blurring between the organic and the technological, in this case the ‘mechanical,’ by way of a reference to Norbert Wiener who is credited with subverting the ‘[…] dubious assumption that the organic is the opposite of the mechanical.’ ‘Professor Norbert Wiener, maker of mechanical brains, asserts that, since all organic characteristics can now be mechanically produced, the old rivalry between mechanism and vitalism is finished. After all, the Greek word “organic” meant “machine” to them.’ (M. McLuhan 2002, 34) And then, not surprisingly, a quote from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon follows. What is essential is that, as Rae remarks, the continuity between the organic 142

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and the technological (once again, the ‘fourth continuity’159) originates in the idea – shared also by, among others, Butler, Bergson, Teilhard, Mumford, and Hall – that technology is an evolutionary adaptation, i.e., a continuation of human evolution “with other means” than the biological.160 ‘If the technology is no more than an evolutionary adaptation, then there is no distinction to be found between an organ such as the eye and a technology such as the telescope.’ (Rae 2009) Clearly in 1951 this idea already lingers in McLuhan’s thinking, and it is to achieve full fruition in Understanding Media161, in which McLuhan provocatively radicalizes it in delineating humans as so to speak pollinators for technological growth. An insight epitomized, of course, in the infamous quote: ‘[…] like the bees in the plant world, men have always been the sex organs of the technological world.’ (2003, 295) This quote is often used in ridicule, but it is in fact extremely meaningful, as we will see, considering its embedment in the larger concept of the man-machine continuity.

6.3

The Specificity of McLuhan’s Extension Idea: Blindness and Ambivalence

Nevertheless, so far we have mainly seen how McLuhan simply “extends” the extension idea as it is developed and accepted throughout the 19th and 20th century. What makes McLuhan’s account by contrast idiomatic are on the one hand the metaphor he employs to make sense of the extension concept, and on the other hand the way in which he couples the concept to his theory of perception (which we discussed at length in Chapter 2). THE NARCISSUS METAPHOR

The metaphor, of course, is the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in the water, i.e., the extension of himself. In the exact same manner we fall in love with the extensions of ourselves in technologies. ‘[M]en at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.’ (M. McLuhan, 2003, 63) McLuhan stresses that the common interpretation of the Narcissus myth, implying that Narcissus recognizes the image in the water as a reflection of himself and thus actually falls in love with himself – the interpretation that has formed the basis for our contemporary use of the word “narcissism”162 – does not hit the mark. 143

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On the contrary: according to McLuhan, Narcissus stays completely unaware of the fact that the image is an extension of himself, just as we perceive technologies as foreign material (“things”) and remain oblivious of the fact that technologies really originate in us. This adds a most interesting twist to the classic extension idea that stays limited to a conception of heightened functionality: organ projections are “invented” to greaten our “efficiency.” McLuhan essentially holds on to this scheme163 – that is as said embedded within an ontological-evolutionary framework that abolishes the organic-technical divide – but imports “blindness” into it. We develop and make extensions of ourselves (media, technologies), but once made, they disappear from view, at least partly. NARCISSUS – NARCOSIS

But as we have seen, McLuhan’s idea of blindness hinges directly on his theory of perception. It thus comes as no surprise that he couples the extension concept tightly to perceptual experience. Practically he does this by combining it with insights from medical researchers Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas. Here the idea of ‘autoamputation’ comes to the fore. McLuhan finds in Selye’s and Jonas’ work the thought that all extensions are attempts of the organism to maintain equilibrium. ‘[T]he autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation.’ (2003, 63)164 The irritation or ‘irritant’ mostly consists of overstimulation. The body reacts by creating a ‘counter-irritant,’ i.e., an extension and corresponding autoamputation of a certain sense, body part, or function. Precisely how this mechanism works can best be illustrated by a longer quote, containing a very concrete example: [I]n the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or “amputation” of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception. (M. McLuhan, 2003, 64)

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This is exactly the numbness that Narcissus experiences in staring at his reflection, i.e., extension: narcosis. The blindness to the true origins of extensions – ourselves – roots in this narcosis165 induced by ‘autoamputation.’ The idea of ‘autoamputation,’ crucially, adds to the old extension idea a notion of “fatality.” Extensions do not only enhance our capacities, they also in a sense mortgage us. This attests to the essential ambivalence, already preliminarily described in the previous chapter, characteristic for every medium and technology.166 Technologies heal and hurt. MCLUHAN’S SUCCESSORS

It is probably these two McLuhanist peculiarities – blindness and numbness – that make his version of the extension idea quite sweeping. After him the extension concept very much lives on, but in slightly different forms. McLuhan’s extension theory anticipates the notions of ‘cyborg’ and of ‘posthumanism,’ as Joost van Loon and Bolter and Grusin point out (van Loon 2006, 168; Bolter and Grusin 2000, 77). Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Kellner observes, takes over McLuhan’s extension concept, but in inverted form: in his view humans internalize media and so become ‘[…] terminals within media systems – a new theoretical antihumanism that might amuse Louis Althusser.’ (1989, 137) Michael Heim then, in his influential work on the ‘metaphysics of Virtual Reality,’ sees the computer as nothing less than a ‘second skin or mental prosthesis’ (1994, 64), an idea very much in line with McLuhan’s work. Even in neuroscience, as already suggested in Chapter 4, a variation upon the extension theme is to be found. Norman Doidge, basing himself on data from neurological research but also influenced by McLuhan, sees electronic technology as an extension of our whole nervous system: ‘This extension is possible because our plastic nervous system can integrate itself with an electronic system.’ (2007, 311) But the most striking continuation of McLuhan’s thesis is perhaps locatable in cognitive science. The ‘extended mind’ idea worked out by Andy Clark owes a massive intellectual debt to McLuhan (Logan 2007, 225-226; MacDougall 2010).167 Simultaneously media ecologist and former McLuhan collaborator Robert K. Logan has elaborated a similar theory based on his study of the evolution of language and technologies. These newer theories will concern us more detailedly in the next to the following section.

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6.4

We Reach out into the Environment, the Environment Reaches into Us

Now that McLuhan’s extension theory has been historically situated – with predecessors in among others Emerson, Butler, Bergson, and Hall, and successors in the cyborg theorists, Robert K. Logan, and Andy Clark – we are sufficiently equipped to dive deeper into the theory itself. The term ‘environment,’ already partly elucidated in Chapter 2, will be of crucial significance here. As we have seen, McLuhan regards media as creating their very own environments. In fact all media are environments. This idea, we will find, relates essentially to McLuhan’s suggestion that ‘the user is the content’ of media. EXTENSION’S BASE: THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL – MEDIA AS ‘UTTERINGS’

The extension idea worked out by McLuhan and in fact many other extension theories see the human organism as foundational: ‘[…] the starting point is always the individual […]’ (Gordon 1997a, 204). This does not mean that technologies literally spring from individuals except in a trivial sense (people do indeed “make” technologies). The technological is born from “the” individual organism. But this organism in turn must not be seen as purely and exclusively biological. It includes the broad range of, so to speak, all things that humans do and are capable of. All human characteristics, capabilities, functions can be among the “body parts” possibly projected into external material. The human organism in this sense exceeds the individual body; and it is hard to tell where it begins and ends.168 McLuhan nevertheless puts it this strongly when he observes: ‘Extensions of man are the hominization of the world.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 34) And he eventually ends up analyzing this process of extending, i.e., of translating, in terms of ‘metaphor.’ ‘[A]ll human artefacts are extensions of man, outerings or utterings of the human body or psyche, private or corporate. That is to say, they are speech, and they are translations of us, the users, from one form into another form: metaphors.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 116) All media – and that means: all human-made artifacts – are metaphors or tetrads, i.e., fourfold structures of translation.169 And these artifacts-as-metaphors always draw their sources from the “generic” human organism described above. Rephrased in terms of McLuhan’s much beloved grammar-rhetoric-dialectic scheme, we can say that they have their etymology in the human body. Analyzing or understanding a tetrad in particular is an eminently grammatical endeavor170: 146

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[…] the perceptual patterns of the tetrad form belong properly to grammar […]. Our concern in this book is etymology and exegesis. The etymology of all human technologies is to be found in the body itself: they are, as it were, prosthetic devices, mutations, metaphors of the body or its parts. (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 34)

This idea has three considerable consequences. It means, first, that the “functionality” or workings of technologies and media should be investigated in the light of the capabilities or functions that they extend. As Logan comments, mechanical technologies extend our physical body; communicational media extend our psyche or nervous system (2000, 31). The computer he calls an extension, i.e., an empowerment, ‘[…] of human intelligence directed by human volition.’ (ibid., 165) Thus, it does matter in which body part or sense media originate, for their source determines their structure and hence their functioning.171 But second, and crucially, the circumstance of media being etymologically grounded in the human organism also entails that the human body preserves a certain priority.172 If the individual body, notwithstanding the aforementioned elusiveness of its boundaries, is the starting point, it is indispensable. Emerson already prefigures as much when he remarks: ‘Machines can only second, not supply, his unaided senses.’ (1876, 129)173 Conversely, third, if “we” are the originators of our very own media, and thus of our environments, this throws a very different light on the way we should act within, upon, and against those surroundings. An idea that is astutely expressed by Heinz von Foerster: ‘[…] if we view ourselves as the inventor and creator of our environment, something I strongly believe in, then the problem of adaptation is one that we don’t have to worry about at all. […] that means that we are always adapted […]’ (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 25). Seen in this light, everyday sights and experiences take on a wholly different value.174 MEDIA TALK BACK

Nevertheless, the empowerment offered by extensions has a flip side. As we translate ourselves into external materialities and thus reach out into the environment – become, actually, a full-blown part of that environment – we also open up the floodgates that otherwise (could) close off that environment from us; if there are ever such gates or borders. We reach into the environment, but the 147

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environment also reaches into us. In ‘The Electronic Age: The Age of Implosion,’ McLuhan puts it like this: ‘Having outered ourselves in new materials we have to behold ourselves anew. And we then become what we behold.’ (1997b, 28) John Culkin phrases it, in words that are often attributed to McLuhan himself, thus: ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. Since our tools are extension [sic] of our senses, they shape the way we experience reality.’ (1967, 38) So media enable a reciprocal transformative process between us and them.175 Importantly, and as already indicated in Chapter 2, within McLuhan’s realm of ideas, form176 is the working principle. As soon as “we” become ‘content,’ we wind up at the mercy of the ‘effects’ of the tool, medium, or technology. Norman Doidge comments that ‘McLuhan’s insight was that the communications media both extend our range and implode into us.’ First the extension, then the implosion (2007, 310). This means that as we extend our capacities into technologies – for instance our intellectual capacities into communication media – the latter will always ‘feedback’ to the former. Concretely, as we extend our brain into computers, computers change that brain.177 ‘All electronic devices rewire the brain. […] As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.’ (ibid., 311)178 And this power that media have over us – a power to change the way we perceive and act, to even change what we are – also has a non-negligible political aspect. For it can be used by power groups for good or for bad, as Richard Kostelanetz comments: ‘As extensions, the new media offer both possibility and threat; for while they lengthen man’s reach into his existence, they can also extend society’s reach into him, for both exploitation and control.’ (1969, 94) We will return to this issue extensively in Chapter 10. A BOUNDARY LINE? ‘THE USER IS THE CONTENT’

As already suggested, within this scheme it is not so easy anymore to determine where we end and where the environment starts, and vice versa. Yet according to McLuhan we can still make an approximation. Here an often neglected idea, or at least one whose implications are mostly not thought through, must be brought up, namely, McLuhan’s observation that ‘the user is the content.’ As we extend ourselves into a medium, we ourselves – the users – become the content of that medium. ‘[T]he user is the content and the utterer; technology, as extension/outering, is speech.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 118)179 The technology, or the medium, is the act of speech; we are what is spoken. (The technology, of course, not only speaks “about us,” it simultaneously speaks its 148

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‘message,’ i.e., its form.) This idea of McLuhan grows out of his study of the ideas of the New Criticism movement (Marchessault 2005, 17). The New Criticists react against the tradition of interpreting a literary work by way of references to for instance the author’s biography and the social-political contexts in which it was made, i.e., external circumstances. By contrast, so they argue, one should only take the formal characteristics of a work into account: the composition, style, rhythm, but also and not unimportantly, the expectations that the reader or viewer brings to it. Interpretation, in this perspective, takes place within a dialectic between work and viewer – in which the original intentions of the author or maker are of lesser relevance. McLuhan wholly adopts this stance: ‘The audience creates the author as much as the author creates the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.’ (1970, 134) And he subsequently starts out “reading” new media in the same manner. Logan explains: ‘Each reader or viewer brings his or her own experience to a medium and transforms the content according to his or her own need […]’ (2000, 56).180 Media “talk back” to us in exactly the way a literary work “talks” to us. They project their ‘form’ on us while we unwittingly and idiosyncratically fill in their ‘content’ with our desires, memories, fantasies, and what not. Human organisms and environments are thus intermixed, but it is possible to sketch a rough topology: we are content, they are form. BODIES: MCLUHAN AND EMBODIMENT

At any rate this suggests that the boundary line between bodies – in the broad sense outlined above – and technologies may lie elsewhere than assumed. In other words: this two-way traffic between our bodies and our technologies or environments holds huge implications for philosophical notions of ‘embodiment.’ Several authors have in this context suggested the similarity of McLuhan’s approach to phenomenology. Dennis Skocz sees McLuhan’s extension theory as parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodiment. The body extends into the world and vice versa, through media. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, ‘[t]he embodied being is a reaching out. The media extend that reaching out and therefore can properly be said to be extensions of our organs.’ (Skocz 2009, 15) By way of an apparent detour – technology – McLuhan in more or less overt terms stresses the centrality of embodiment, just like Merleau-Ponty does. Vivian Sobchack, also, in Carnal Thoughts, treats of 149

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‘embodiment – that is, the lived body as, at once, both an objective subject and a subjective object’ (2004, 15) and deals with how mediation influences our experience of it. Not only does the extension idea throw a different light on what technologies are, it also helps to clarify what bodies and embodiment are and thus what “we” are.181 The ‘organic continuity’ (Kuhns 1971, 136) makes for a still very much relevant version of philosophical anthropology, as we will see in the next to the following section. Surprisingly nevertheless, McLuhan himself takes a somewhat unexpected turn in treating of this topic. For one striking consequence of the ‘feedback’ of media upon us that he notices nowadays is a diminution of the importance of the ‘body.’ Whereas ‘[t]he most human thing about us is our technology […]’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 172), the newest technology, i.e. ‘electric technologies’ such as telephone and television, make us in fact lose our body, they disembody us. This is in the first instance an ontological phenomenon, and it is epitomized by McLuhan’s famous phrase ‘discarnate man.’ The idea hinges directly on the structural origin of technologies, namely, the human organism. ‘Today man has no physical body. He is translated into information, or an image.’ (ibid., 92) McLuhan observes that because we have extended our nervous system completely into electric technology, we by implication have lost our body. Put otherwise: we have here an outright case of technology “denying” its own origin. This indicates perhaps that McLuhan is more ‘dystopian’ or in any case classically ‘humanist’ – in the Enlightenment sense – than one would expect. Yet, theories of extended cognition and of distributed intelligence (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Hayles 1999) posit by contrast that we have not so much translated or transmitted something – our corporeal being – but extended it in the sense of expanding it. We have not lost our body, and the prospects are that we will not yet lose it for a considerable amount of time (unless we perhaps rush, suddenly and unexpectedly, headlong into the singularity). For now we have to account for our bodies if we want to know who “we” are. This brings us to our next section.

6.5

The Extension Idea Today

As we have seen, McLuhan presages the ‘cyborg’ idea. In order to sufficiently gauge the relevance of his extension theory today, we need to investigate that idea a little bit further. Specifically we will highlight one representative of it, whose 150

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position is crucial because it in itself offers a variation upon cyborg theory that is, as we will see, first, quite similar to McLuhan’s stance, and second, pertinent to our greater purposes: Andy Clark. CONTEMPORARY INCARNATIONS OF THE EXTENSION IDEA: CYBORG THEORY

McLuhan’s work in whole, as suggested in the previous chapter, can still be said to make for a hybrid of modernist and anti-modernist motives. He offers, in the words of Glenn Willmott, a ‘modernism in reverse.’182 A ‘postmodern’ attitude is already present in it but in largely embryonic form. Within cyborg discourse however, gaining prominence at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the ‘postmodern’ sensitivity gets fully deployed. And the ‘post’ part of that term is to be taken very literally. “Lately, we have become cyborgs,” could well be the admittedly simplified motto of many early, mostly feminist cyborg theorists like for instance Donna Haraway (1991, 149ff.). They suggest that a certain “sea change” seems to have occurred, mainly under the impulse of the development of digital technologies such as the computer, and now it becomes quite clear that the modernist-humanist era is definitely over. We are not autonomous, transcendental, preferably male subjects, but hybrid blends of flesh, mind, materials, values (possibly inscribed into our bodies), institutions, relations, and processes. More recent cyborg theory, however, tends to be more ambitious, or should one say: purposeful. Authors like for example Kevin Warwick (2004) and several representatives of the transhumanist movement still see the cyborgian “human” as tied to recent times, more specifically to stunning and promising developments within the famous ‘NBIC’ fourfold: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (Roco and Bainbridge 2003). But ironically, as Dennis Weiss skillfully shows, these new cyborg philosophers, although they undermine the modernist subject-object dichotomy, simply reinstate a fresh version of the modernist ideal of a “perfect” human. Albeit, then, a perfect blend of “formerly human” and “formerly technological” elements (Weiss 2009). Much cyborg theory is in that sense linked to a very specific conception of time and of technological evolution. McLuhan’s extension theory, interestingly, could be seen as taking up a contrasting position with regard to several strands of it. Whereas he still defends, as we have seen in the last section, the human body as “baseline” and so offers a version – however skewed – of Enlightenment humanism, much of early as well as recent cyborg theory has given up the notion 151

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of a fixed human corporeality altogether. And although he appears to propose a “revolutionary” time scheme just like the early and later cyborg theorists, it is in fact the other way around: his extension-centered ontology183 stresses continuity, not discontinuity. Man is an extending and extended being as such. Already speech for example is an extension of us, i.e., of the thinking process – and so language is to be called the ‘first technology.’ In this way he fits in well with and presages some recent takes on the cyborg idea that wholly reject the suggestion of a big sea change, and that correspondingly see a continuity in “human nature,” a concept that nevertheless should not be defined in the way we thought it should, i.e., in modernist terms. Joost van Loon comments: ‘If all media are extensions of human functions, than [sic], at least metaphorically speaking, we have always been cyborgs. […] The only new aspect of cyborgs in the information society is that human beings have become aware of their cyborgian nature.’ (2006, 169) The work of cognitive scientist Andy Clark, as illustrated by the title of one of his books – Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence – starts from this very insight. ANDY CLARK’S ‘NATURAL-BORN CYBORG’ THESIS

Clark’s central thesis holds that cognition, or the mind, does not simply reside inside the brain or the ‘skin bag,’ but extends into the environment, into our bodily functioning, and into the tools we use. Cognition is and stays embodied but the boundaries of our bodies are malleable: ‘[…] embodiment is essential but negotiable.’ (Clark 2003, 114) The famous example that Clark offers in the pioneering essay he writes together with David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998), is ‘Otto’s notebook.’ Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease but uses a notebook to help him memorize things. According to Clark and Chalmers, the notebook can be seen as a full part of Otto’s mind whenever he employs it. In this way every technology we use is a “piece of mind.” Elsewhere Clark mentions that young people in Finland, perhaps not coincidentally, call their mobile phones ‘kanny,’ meaning ‘extension of the hand’ (Clark 2003, 9). Brain, body, and world are interwoven.184 The brain ‘interfaces’ with external media (Clark 1997). This may not just be the case for cognitive and computational processes but also for the ‘self,’ when the relationship between user and artifact is sufficiently intimate and close. We are ‘hybrid entities’ (Clark 1997; Clark and Chalmers 1998). Just like McLuhan’s, Clark’s extension idea is formulated – albeit more 152

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explicitly – as an assault on the dominance of the modernist, Cartesian mind-body dualism, in which the ‘ego,’ the ‘res cogitans’ does all the thinking independently of matter and bodily involvement whatsoever. Clark, conversely, wants to replace the old model of mind as a logical reasoning device with the idea of the brain as controller for embodied activity. We do not have to discard all concepts of data storage and logical manipulation straightaway – for we naturally tend to think of our minds in that manner (1997, 30) – but these are at best secondary to the dynamics and response loops between brains, bodies, and environments (ibid., 12). ‘The Rational Deliberator turns out to be a well-camouflaged Adaptive Responder. Brain, body, world, and artifact are discovered locked together in the most complex of conspiracies. And mind and action are revealed in an intimate embrace.’ (ibid., 33) Now this is not a situation that has arisen throughout the last decades let alone centuries. We have always been “like that.” We have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs’: hybrids of brains, bodies, and technologies. However, our extensions do not necessarily take place through ‘wire-and-implant mergers’ (Clark 2003, 5) as the traditional cyborg image would have it, but may in the future even be mostly based on non-intrusive links with ‘transparent’ technologies.185 The terms that Clark employs to describe this state or process of extending are ‘scaffolding,’ ‘dovetailing,’ ‘offloading.’ Although the intensity and specific characteristics of dovetailing may change over time (cf. infra), the basic process has always been the same. ‘[P]rosthetics and telepresence are just walking sticks and shouting, cyberspace is just one more place to be.’ (ibid., 8)186 And such a stance is of course very much in line with the analysis that McLuhan suggests: man as the extending being. NO CORE, NO ESCAPE: EVEN OUR “NATURAL” CONSTITUTION IS CYBORGIAN

According to Clark however, we just have not adapted to that idea yet, for we have stuck to the belief that there houses something exceptional inside our ‘skin-bag.’ But in fact there are several reasons for dispelling this view. First, we are already surrounded by ‘nonpenetrative cyborg technology.’ Clark as said refers to the ‘transparent technologies’ thematized by Mark Weiser and Donald Norman.187 Transparent technologies are tools that are or become so well-fitted to our lives that we do not notice them anymore; they become ‘invisible-in-use’ (Clark 2003, 28). The opposite notion is ‘opaque technologies’ (ibid., 37), and the difference between the two amounts to our perceiving the former more as a part of ourselves 153

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(e.g., clock reading) than the latter (e.g., looking up a word in a paper dictionary). Second, our brains themselves function according to a cyborg or hybrid scheme. Only a fraction of our brain activity is conscious (ibid., 100), yet we would not restrict our sense of self to only that conscious activity. Likewise, as nonconscious cognitive mechanisms are similar to for example external software agents, we cannot limit our sense of who we are to only our brain processes or bodies, and so exclude the extension into prostheses.188 Another observation that Clark makes is that our brains depend largely on the outside environment to construct a model of our bodily whereabouts (‘Ramachandran’s principle’). Moreover, our brains are ‘opportunistic’ – for example, the visual brain focuses not so much on knowledge as on meta-knowledge, i.e., knowing how to acquire certain knowledge. And they profit themselves from the scaffolding mechanism, in essence by deploying speech and language as ‘intra-brain’ technologies, thereby enabling self-reflexive thinking (ibid., 78, 87)189 – in turn these self-reflexive cognitive processes make it possible to learn further techniques. Clark eventually expects the emergence of a world in which our technologies will start ‘dovetailing back,’ as for example in the case of the semantic web. In our terminology, we could then expect a world in which technologies start loving us back. This all makes for an image of cognition that does not distinguish between mind and “the rest,” but that sketches cognitive activity as tool-like an sich: ‘What we really need to reject, I suggest, is the seductive idea that all these various neural and nonneural tools need a kind of privileged user. Instead, it is just tools all the way down.’ (ibid., 136) In Supersizing the Mind, in which Clark dubs his theoretical stance ‘EXTENDED’ and the opposing view ‘BRAINBOUND,’ he puts it like this: ‘[…] my […] suspicion is that the differences between external-looping (putatively cognitive) processes and purely inner ones will be no greater than those between the inner ones themselves.’ (2008, 95) BUT, THE BODY RETAINS PRIORITY

Yet there is a limit, a restriction on the elasticity of this internal-external topology. The emphasis on a continuous time frame is not the only characteristic that Clark’s theory shares with McLuhan’s. Just as McLuhan keeps treating the individual organism as ‘starting point,’ Clark still sees in a highly similar way a ‘cognitive core’ that circles around the individual organism. Although our mind is organized in ‘heterogeneous ensembles,’ the biological organism continues to play an important role in their organization: ‘Individual cognizing […] is organism 154

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centered even if it is not organism bound.’ (Clark 2008, 123) Clark stresses the fact: ‘It is not part of the EXTENDED agenda to attempt to wash out all the differences between various internal and external contributions or to downplay or undervalue the potentially unique contribution of the cognitive core.’ (ibid., 108) What is important is complementarity: deploying the right strategies for the right purposes. External elements – like computers – may be “good” at other things, for example crunching large amounts of numbers, than “purely” mental reasoning processes such as abstract thinking. ‘In such cases, it is the very fact that these additional elements trade in modes of representation and processing that are different from those of the cognitive core that makes the hybrid organization worthwhile.’ (ibid., 107)190 This distinction may be seen as analogous to McLuhan’s remaining ‘humanism,’ however Clark’s more subtle outline of functional differences between organic and technological specificities makes for a much more pragmatical stance.191 As indicated in Chapter 4, if several functionalities within the brain are to be seen as extensions, of what then? Although there remains an “organical center,” its true origins become highly elusive. LANGUAGE: THE FIFTH CONTINUITY?

In that regard, nevertheless and finally, one more similarity with McLuhan can be located in Clark’s take on – the development and function of – language. Whereas McLuhan sees speech as the first technology, Clark calls language the ultimate artifact (1997, 218). As mentioned, Clark treats of speech and language as ‘intrabrain’ technologies that enable self-reflexive thinking. So he sees extensions being deployed just as much within our brain as “between” our brain and external tools. In ‘Beyond the Flesh: Some Lessons from a Mole Cricket,’ he analyzes language as a very special instance of what he terms ‘surrogate situations.’ A ‘surrogate situation’ is ‘[…] any kind of real-world structure that is used to stand in for, or take the place of, some aspect of some target situation.’ (2005, 236) Examples of surrogate situations are diagrams and models – but language is the most important and forceful form. ‘Words are both cheap stand-ins for gross behavioral outcomes, and the concrete objects that structure new spaces for basic forms of learning and reason.’ (ibid., 234) If McLuhan were alive now, he would perhaps heartily agree with this kind of formulation. Language is just as much a scaffolding mechanism as any other (external) technology; moreover, it structures perception and space, just as in 155

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McLuhan’s view in which all media entail a certain perceptional balance and structure of space (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, Chapter 1). Clark investigates language in a stunningly similar way, and even describes its functioning in quasi-McLuhanist terms: Linguistic labels, on this view, are tools for grouping and in this sense act much like real spatial reorganization […] Words and sentences […] may be potent real-world structures (material symbols), many of whose features and properties (arbitrary amodal nature, extreme compactness and abstraction, compositional structure, etc.) simply complement, without full replication, the contributions of basic biological cognition. (Clark 2008, 46, 55)

This may point to another – fifth? or in fact primary? – continuity, i.e., between the organic, the technological, and the linguistic. Human cognition spans those three domains, with language being in fact an “organic technology.” Logan investigates from a media-ecological standpoint the consequences of this idea (2000; 2004)192 and arrives independently at a theory of mind which is similar to Clark’s (Logan 2007) – as acknowledged by both (Logan 2007, 223ff.; Clark 2008, 236, 239). This rounds off an intellectual development that starts with among others Emerson and Butler – who posit the ‘organic continuity’ – peaks in McLuhan – who links this continuity to language – and finds a form fitting the 21st century with Clark – who embeds the aforementioned continuities within a model of mind.193 We will return more detailedly to the relatedness of technology and language in Chapter 9. For now we close off our analysis of the “lover” as the “stuff to be extended” with an indispensable but brief discussion of philosophical anthropology; the domain in which, pre-eminently, the definition of what “man” is has always been at stake.

6.6

What Is “Man”?

In sum, we set out to delineate the lover component of our bond with technology. From the start, we assumed that we would not be able to get this lover in view by bluntly isolating it from either its object of adoration or the relationship as such. And indeed: the organic and the technological cannot be distinguished. But we are 156

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still coming to grips with this idea as we are used to thinking within the subjectobject divide central to our Enlightenment heritage. For if we are not “ourselves,” who are we then? PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

As suggested, the extension idea and the corresponding ideas of technology-aspart-of-evolution and ‘organic continuity,’ even in their early 19th century forms, can be seen as revolts against this one principal modernist dichotomy in its different guises: between mind and body (or matter), subject and object, the social and the technical, culture and nature. And as said, McLuhan’s project, though modernist in its desire to get “behind the scenes,” to find true depths beneath a misleading surface is in this sense, and paradoxically, highly anti-modernist. Nonetheless, what do all these outlooks share? It appears that the history of the extension idea points in the direction of nothing less than a definition of “man.” This brings us back, unexpectedly, within the regions of an old-fashioned and slightly controversial, but lately somewhat revived (Weiss 2002b; Verbeek 2008b; Verbeek 2010; Verbeek 2011b) philosophical tradition, namely: philosophical anthropology. In the context of the philosophy of technology, it is especially Dennis Weiss who finds the time ripe for a rekindling of philosophical-anthropological fires, after the likes of linguistics, structuralism, and cognitive science have in past decades changed the face of philosophy and all but eliminated the possibility of anthropological reflection whatsoever: We have indeed witnessed the disintegration of anthropology and the disappearance of anthropological reflection. […] In the face of this imminent disintegration, I would like to issue a plea for stubbornness and obstinacy, a plea that philosophical anthropology be more stubborn, that it stubbornly stand obstinately in the way of this imminent new form of thought which Foucault and Derrida and the Ryle-Dennett tradition presage. (Weiss 1994, 4)

A philosophical anthropology must according to Weiss fulfill several tasks. It must, first, attest to the human being’s ‘openness to the world’ without reverting to the classic, modernist dichotomies (dualisms). And it must, second, be able to highlight what makes humans specifically human, and that is exactly their ‘world 157

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openness’: ‘World openness is meant to capture the peculiarly human characteristic of being existentially liberated from the vital and instinctual sphere of animals.’ (ibid., 7) This does not at all entail that “human nature” differs radically and qualitatively from “animal nature” – a claim already sufficiently refuted by among others Mary Midgley (2002). But philosophical anthropology, by putting the finger on what particularly belongs to human and not any other “nature,” can help us in defining ourselves, and in that way adequately positioning ourselves towards these – however not so radically – other “natures” that surround us. We could perhaps call this an ecological version of the old adage “know thyself.”194 THREE “STRUCTURAL” ASPECTS

Weiss, then, installs the groundwork for such a philosophical-anthropological framework by building on the ideas of some of the aforementioned “extension thinkers” and others. Max Scheler, he points out, depicts the human being as having the capacity to detach himself from the world and transform it, i.e., as exhibiting a ‘world openness.’ Helmuth Plessner stresses the human being’s ‘positionality’ as a defining mark. Martin Buber analyzes human nature in terms of ‘distance and relations.’ And Michael Landmann and Ernst Cassirer see the human being as a symbolic and cultural animal (Weiss 1994, 7ff.; Weiss 2002a). In the context of the above discussion, however, it is perhaps Arnold Gehlen’s work that can be of most aid. Gehlen sees the human being as essentially a deficient being (Mangelwesen); that is why we need tools and prostheses to help us cope (2003). Man is an undetermined creature – in the sense of “insufficiently defined” but also “incomplete” – that principally poses a problem for itself. Therefore he needs to act; action makes for his most prominent characteristic. Unlike most other species he is not ‘specialized’ and would therefore never survive in ‘natural’ conditions. ‘He compensates for this deficiency with his ability to work and his disposition toward action, that is, with his hands and intelligence; precisely for this reason, he stands erect, has circumspect vision, and a free use of his hands.’ (Gehlen 1988, 26) Because of this deficiency, the human being is ‘world open’ (Scheler): its survival is not dependent on a specific environment. We can in turn build on Weiss’ outline and the broader philosophicalanthropological tradition; the ideas of among others Gehlen hook up perfectly with McLuhan’s and Clark’s. But conversely, the latter could even significantly reinforce and complement the philosophical-anthropological discourse.195 The 158

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aforementioned similarities between on the one hand the ‘extended mind’ thesis of Clark and on the other hand McLuhan’s extension theory can guide the way to a rephrasing of philosophical anthropology in the light of our very “natural,” very organic involvement with technology, that also makes for a central focus in the work of Gehlen. Especially three ideas or characteristics should be central to such a framework:  Hybridity is a feature of “man” that exceeds any diversification into epochs and “has always been” part of “human nature” (temporal aspect);  Technology goes beyond the internal-external split; language is a technology or an extension that thus goes beyond the internal-external dichotomy (spatial aspect);  Notwithstanding our extending into the environment, “we” do not dissolve into thin air: the ‘individual organism,’ the ‘cognitive core’ stay primordial (subjective aspect). According to Clark, our ability to extend and expand ourselves (and our ‘selves’) by way of nonbiological means – culture, technology, education, artifacts – puts us apart from other animals, and makes us distinctively human. And we owe that capacity to the huge (neuro)plasticity of our brains and to the extended period of development that the human child goes through. The fact that we are simply not “ourselves” teaches us perhaps more about “human nature” than so much humanist ideals ever could. However, the given that we have gotten a little bit closer to defining ourselves should not lead us to disregard the vastly problematic nature of that definition. A longer quote from Neil Postman illustrates candidly what that means: Human nature may stay the same. But it is part of human nature to hate and kill, and it is part of human nature to love and protect. The question is, what part will be released and nurtured? What part will be suppressed and shriveled? And, of course, is there any connection between our obsession with our technology and our capacity for moral growth? This last question is what Rousseau, Shelley, Blake, Carlyle, and Huxley thought and wrote about. Do we? (Postman 2000)

The “human” is not an autonomous, self-sufficient subject – we ‘dovetail’ with the 159

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environment, ‘extend’ ourselves into media and technologies. Technology should hence be studied in relation to human capabilities. And what a “human” is should conversely be scrutinized in relation to technology. This means that our essence is at any time up for grabs. At the same time it is the ‘extending’ and the ‘dovetailing,’ from out of the center of some subjective ‘core,’ that stays constant. What is constant, thus, has shifted. But this does not forego the possibility that human nature may change. The extending may eventually make for a modification of the ‘core’ – just like our neurological setup has changed because of our use of tools and of language. On the “structural” plane however – if we freeze-frame the movie, and watch only the still image – we are what extends.

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7

The In-between:196 The Love as Constitutive-Transformative Process ‘When there are two, there is no certainty [...]’ (Bauman 2003, 19)

Our focus in this chapter concerns the “love” component of our relationship with technology, at the “structural” level. With McLuhan, this love takes the form of “mediation,” and his approach to mediation, we will see, is implied in his most famous probe: ‘the medium is the message.’ A hidden relational ontology underlies that aphorism, a framework in line with several other relational ontologies, themselves in turn reactions to the dominance of substantivist ontologies throughout the history of philosophy. We first outline the relationalontological principles underpinning McLuhan’s “mediation idea”; the analysis of his term ‘interplay’ takes central stage here. Then we situate McLuhan within the larger tradition of relational approaches by way of comparing his work to representatives of two of the most important relational perspectives offered throughout the 20th century: phenomenology (Heidegger) and cybernetics (Bateson). But even up until today McLuhan’s mediation idea retains relevancy, as will be demonstrated by comparing his outlook to that of postphenomenology and specifically the work of Don Ihde. We end with a brief reflection on how the idea of ‘interplay’ exactly captures the “structural moment” – the “as is” – of the relation or mediation component of the “bond.”

7.1

Love Itself: The Human-Technology Relation

THE LOVE IN RELATION TO THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

In the previous chapter we began by stating that there is no love in the abstract. Likewise there is no lover in the abstract either. The love constitutes the lovers. It defines them as lovers. The love needs the lovers to be as such, but it is still determinable and describable as “love” – a very particular process, event, relation – regardless of who or what exactly the lovers are. At the same time it cannot be said to exist independently from them. Or can it? Some spiritual movements, and in a sense orthodox Christianity too, would claim that we do not so much “make” love but “partake” in it, in a “love” outside of us or residing in a higher being. Does

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perhaps the same apply to our bond with technology? Could it be that despite our expectations of the contrary there exists first a relation, and only then entities – humans, technologies – that are related to each other? Could this then account for our bond with technology? This seems like a highly counterintuitive proposition; but in fact several theoretical elaborations delivered throughout the last century have pointed in this direction, to a greater or lesser degree. RELATION AND SUBSTANCE: MCLUHAN AND PHILOSOPHY’S HERITAGE

The issue hinges on a central distinction within – the history of – philosophy: that between substantivist and relational ontologies. The former sees the universe as fundamentally composed of substances or entities, that do enter into relations with one another, however these are secondary. The latter reverses this order of priority and stresses relations as primordial: substances do obviously exist, but they are constituted or co-constituted by their relations. McLuhan, as will become clear, jumps on the relational-ontological bandwagon. Admittedly, he does not explicitly dwell on it. But when he states – more inspired nonetheless by the New Criticism literary movement than by philosophical theories – that ‘the meaning of meaning is relationship’ (cf. infra), he points towards what is essentially to be seen as a relational ontology. And this background is already present, albeit in embryonic form, in his famous phrase ‘the medium is the message.’ In McLuhan’s universe, relation – the “love” – is mediation, and vice versa. Most peculiarly, nevertheless, it will appear that McLuhan particularly in the later part of his life starts to simultaneously hint at a substantivist ontology too – a point we will drive home in the following chapter by way of the work of ‘objectoriented’ philosopher Graham Harman. Both tendencies are to be found in his work, and as already suggested, together with his take on philosophical anthropology which was the topic of the previous chapter – man-as-source-fortechnology-as-extension-of-man – this makes him an excellent companion in the scrutiny of our bond with technology. It moreover typifies him as a relatively unique figure within philosophy’s heritage, as he proceeds to grapple constructively, be it more or less unconsciously, with one of the central tensions in it. RELATION, MEDIATION, ‘INTERPLAY’

However notwithstanding this “uniqueness,” just as in the case of the extension 162

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idea, McLuhan’s mediation idea can be situated within a tradition that begun before him and that still finds representatives to this day. The underlying ontological assumptions of his work have been likened, for one, to Heidegger’s thought. And McLuhan himself is for the relational part of his “ontology” particularly influenced by cybernetics. One of the main tenets of cybernetics holds that humans and machines form parts of a system in which ‘feedback’ and ‘feedforward’ relations reign. These notions, the first of which was already mentioned in the last chapter, together with other cybernetic terms such as ‘pattern’ and ‘context,’ become crucial in McLuhan’s framework – more concretely in the form of the concept of ‘interplay.’ Man and media, and media among each other, are interrelated though not connected, through ‘resonance.’ Today then, the ideas of the cyberneticists and of McLuhan find new formulations in the work of the postphenomenologists, who offer a phenomenological-hermeneutical analysis of human-technology relations. In what follows we will trace the crossings and intersections between and among these frameworks by outlining, just as in the previous chapter, four crucial statements, this time concerning what we call the generic “mediation idea”:    

‘The medium is the message’; ‘The meaning of meaning is relationship’; The mediation constitutes the mediators; The mediators constitute the mediation.

Again, we will treat of the first three points here, and postpone the fourth one more specifically to the next chapter. First, we endeavor to explain and analyze McLuhan’s notorious aphorism and elaborate upon the attending notion of ‘interplay.’ Second, we situate these concepts within the larger tradition of phenomenology and cybernetics, specifically relating McLuhan’s ideas to the work of Heidegger and Bateson, respectively. Third, we go on to sketch the ideas of postphenomenology, as contemporary instantiation of the mediation idea, and its parallels with McLuhan’s approach. In closing we summarize the above and briefly reflect upon how the mediation idea relates to the “structural” level under scrutiny in this part.

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7.2

Media and Mediation

In Chapter 2 we presented McLuhan as philosopher of media. His framework is epitomized in the famous phrase ‘the medium is the message.’ This may suggest an image of media as well-circumscribed “things” having specific “effects” – an image only partly justified.197 ‘The medium is the message,’ as we will show, hints in the first instance at the existence of networks of interlocking processes, hence, in essence, at a relational ontology. ‘THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE’

Much has been written and said about McLuhan’s illustrious phrase. ‘What power Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “The medium is the mesage [sic],” has for many people.’ (Forsdale 1981, 21) Still, one cannot disparage or even evade it if one endeavors to get at the core of McLuhan’s thought. The fact that a well-formulated aphorism becomes a cultural commonplace does not necessarily reduce its relevance or fruitfulness. As indicated in Chapter 2, we should try to read McLuhan in a ‘formal’ way and not so much focus on a supposed ‘content’ that in any case has already been amply ruminated. Like all forceful aphorisms, ‘the medium is the message’ does not come from nowhere and it finds ever new formulations. Gordon, for one, traces the phrase back to the work of Innis, Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and even Thomas Aquinas198 (1997a, 174). Armand Mattelart points out how in 1901, a few years before McLuhan’s birth, Charles Horton Cooley formulates, albeit more prosaically, a similar idea: ‘[…] we can understand nothing rightly unless we perceive the manner in which the revolution in communication has made a new world for us.’ (Cooley 1983, 65; Mattelart 1994, 31) And today Douglas Coupland somewhat subversively claims ‘the medium is the message’ to be ‘[…] a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world.’ (2010, 19)199 NARROW INTERPRETATIONS, REVISITED

But as with all powerful aphorisms, too, there has been a considerable amount of confusion surrounding the phrase. We already saw in Chapter 2 how some read it as an obstinate version of technological determinism, and others claim it to stand for an absolute neglect of content in favor of form. 164

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On the one hand, we observed how ‘the medium is the message’ seems to suggest a view in which media are entities primordially functioning as causes of effects. Thus: a substantivist outlook. In fact we will see that it should be situated within a relational context, in which mediation is the primary process.200 Of help is an indication of Lance Strate who equates ‘the medium is the message’ with other somewhat less known mottos of authors within communication studies: ‘culture is communication’ (Edward T. Hall) and ‘communication as culture’ (James W. Carey). And also Susanne ‘[…] Langer is essentially saying that the medium is the message.’ (Strate 2006, 58, 84) These analogies attest to the inextricable complexity of what we could call “medial causation.” A medium is to a certain extent its effects, as Mark Federman and Derrick de Kerckhove suggest: ‘The McLuhan Equation [i.e., ‘the medium is the message’] means that the change effected by a Medium is precisely equal to the Medium itself, and vice versa.’ (2003, 29)201 On the other hand, we found several critics denouncing McLuhan’s purported neglect of content in favor of form. Indeed, he suggests as much when he claims the “real” ‘message’ of media not to be their message as such, i.e., their content, but their mostly subliminal workings on their users, on society, and on each other, i.e., their form. However as proposed before, the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ itself is meant to serve as a counteracting probe, a means of driving away our monomaniacal focus on ‘figure’ – i.e., the content of the medium – and of, conversely, heightening awareness of the ‘ground.’ Moreover, the truth of the matter appears to be actually even more radical, as we already briefly suggested by way of a reference to Graeme Patterson (1990, 38). It is not just the case that McLuhan wants to give the unnoticed its right due. As soon as one starts to investigate the dynamics of form and content a little further, one in fact finds the notion of content completely dispelled. DYNAMICS OF FORM AND CONTENT: CLICHÉ AND ARCHETYPE

For the proposition that McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ probe does not automatically lead to technological determinism nor suggest the exclusion of content in favor of form, can be substantiated by this other tenet of McLuhan’s framework that says that every new medium takes an older medium for its content – literally. Television contains radio and movies; movies contain the novel; writing contains speech; speech contains thought… In this way McLuhan goes beyond the simple form-content dichotomy from which many of his detractors appear to start. All media interrelate through an essentially time-related “containment” 165

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scheme: older ones are “contained” in newer ones.202 It is at this spot that McLuhan works out his ‘cliché’-’archetype’ distinction. W. Terrence Gordon points out that the interplay of cliché and archetype can be equated to the interplay between figure and ground (1997a, 123). It is tempting to simply equate ‘archetype’ with ‘figure’ and ‘cliché’ with ‘ground,’ however McLuhan himself stays very vague on this point. At one time he defines cliché as an ‘unexamined assumption’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 3). And archetype is ‘an old ground seen as figure through a new ground’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 103-104). McLuhan never clearly defines ‘archetype,’ as Graeme Patterson comments; perhaps the concept contains some component derived from all the classic interpretations of archetype: Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Lauriat Lane (Patterson 1990, 118). And, Patterson adds, perhaps McLuhan keeps the term vague on purpose, to prevent it from turning into a ‘dead metaphor’ (ibid., 129).203 Essential is that cliché and archetype can “switch places”: Following McLuhan again, data perceived under certain circumstances as archetypal are perceived under other circumstances as clichéd. As with figure/ground relationships, these perceptions can reverse themselves, a relationship likened by McLuhan to the systole/diastole function of the heart. (Patterson 1990, 52)

Seen in this light it makes the most sense to regard cliché and archetype as synonyms of form and content, respectively. Generally, when a new medium appears, it does so as ‘new cliché,’ i.e., as form, but at the same time it takes an old, ‘cast-off’ cliché for its content, hence turning the latter into archetype. And the old cliché, become archetype, so acquires a special status. Whereas the ‘new’ medium stays invisible as form the ‘old’ medium and thus ‘new’ content becomes so to speak “holy,” to be sought after, ideal, indeed, archetypal. ‘McLuhan pointed out that the subsuming of prior media […] carries with it a celebration of prior content.’ (Levinson 1999b) At first, the presence of the old medium ‘as content’ clouds the effects of the new medium. Only in a later stadium it is possible to appropriate the new medium as content for a still newer medium. Bob Logan comments: ‘McLuhan understood that when a medium first appears, it exclusively uses the content of another medium for its content until its users have learned to exploit the new medium to develop new forms of expression.’ (2000, 175)204 But this essentially means that all content has a ‘formal’ structure and is 166

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therefore susceptible to media analysis, and all form has a ‘content’ aspect and is hence susceptible to change, modification, and creative reappropriation.205 These are two sides of the same coin. According to McLuhan, the singular focus on content is symptomatic for a ‘literate’ worldview that sees only ‘figure’ and no ‘ground’ (figure minus ground or F-G). The “real” situation is ‘interplay’ – the interaction of figure and ground (figure plus ground or F+G). And exactly the formal approach paradoxically enables a wholly different take on content analysis, cultural critique, and even philosophy of technology as such, as Francis Balle suggests: That great law [i.e., ‘the medium is the message’] […] according to which a new medium always feeds on the content of the old ones, eventually to replace them, allows the one who could be called the “philosopher of technology” to interpret, in a completely original manner, the explosion of contemporary forms of expression [...]206 (Balle 1972, 21)

By way of an analysis of form, thus, we can understand content better. However, the suggestion that “all is form” has even more substantial consequences. ‘INTERPLAY’: MEDIUM YIELDS TO MEDIATION

For ‘the medium is the message’ not only attests to the ubiquity of form, it also leads, as suggested, straight to a dissolution of the notion of media as enclosed, well-circumscribed cases, vats, or channels, i.e., as “things.” What the probe does, so to speak, is to “activate” the medium concept: medium yields to mediation, an event or a process, and not a thing or a product.207 Hence ‘the medium is the message’ forms the cornerstone of McLuhan’s nevertheless not explicitly elaborated relational ontology. Yet it is not so much the term “mediation” itself that takes central stage in this scheme but the already mentioned notion of ‘interplay.’ In order to sketch McLuhan’s implicit relational ontology, it is necessary to take a closer look at this term. To offer a genealogical survey of all the locations in which McLuhan makes mention of it would not be fruitful. The word ‘interplay’ is found at countless places in his work. But it does make sense to distinguish between different aspects of its meaning. First and foremost, ‘interplay’ signifies a universal condition which all media are in, with ‘media’ defined broadly as all human-made artifacts, including technologies, buildings, ideologies, ideas, et cetera. No medium ever 167

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stands alone. Interaction is a medium’s basal situation. And the one central way in which media interact with each other is through the form-content (or clichéarchetype) scheme, as discussed above. Second, ‘interplay’ denotes the interaction among ‘environments.’ Every medium or technology creates an environment, and these environments – which are in fact ‘media,’ since media are environments – interrelate in the same way as ‘media’: old environments become content for new environments.208 Third, ‘interplay’ stands for the dialectical dynamic between form and content or – in the later terminology – ground and figure. ‘The interplay between environmental and content factors, between old and new technologies, seems to obtain in all fields whatever.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 31) This again amounts to the same thing, grossly, since in the interaction of media one medium (or environment) always takes up the role of form whereas another medium (or environment) becomes content for it. These first three uses are convergent if not completely identical. Fourth and finally, however, in the context of McLuhan’s historical analysis, the term ‘interplay’ acquires a specific meaning, namely, as ‘synesthesia’ or the balanced interaction among all the senses (M. McLuhan 1962, 41, 65, 272), which is clearly meant as an “ideal” situation.209 Whereas ‘literate’ culture intensifies one sense, i.e., sight, and ‘tribal’ culture isolates and steps up the auditory-tactile mode, hopefully the neotribal culture brought on by electric technologies may furnish us again with a sense life that gives all the senses – and their ‘interplay,’ which McLuhan equates with touch, as we saw – their right due. TRANSFORMATION INSTEAD OF TRANSPORTATION

‘Interplay’ thus stands for on the one hand the ground situation of interrelatedness of, and on the other hand the process of interaction among media, environments, and form and content. Synonyms that McLuhan quite often employs are ‘interface’ and ‘translation.’ This is to account for the true “working power” that media harvest. Media are by nature transformative. ‘Natural interfaces are never neutral channels. THE MEDIUM IS ALWAYS A BARRIER.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 138) Another favorite way of McLuhan of putting this is by way of distinguishing between his own ideas and ‘other’ theories of media and of communication (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 505; M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 86ff.). The prototypical theory of communication which he mostly refers to is the 168

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Shannon-Weaver model, which he calls a theory of transportation: information is transferred from point A to point B through channel C, which causes noise, i.e., distortion to appear in the course of the process, that nonetheless essentially leaves the message intact. According to McLuhan, Shannon and Weaver ignore or at least do not really account for the noise; while his ‘the medium is the message’ primordially does: it offers a theory of transformation, i.e., translation. All sorts of things are changed in the process of communication, not in the least the medium itself, the communicator, and the receiver. The interface is ‘where the action is’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 77; M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 155). The latter sentence we could for our purposes rephrase as: the interface is where “the love” is. ‘Interplay’ and ‘interface’ may well be seen as synonyms for mediation as well as relation.210 In this way, ‘the medium is the message’ sums up McLuhan’s stance on the love component – at the “structural” level211 – of our “relationship triad.” And in this light212, McLuhan’s framework should not so much be treated of as a theory or philosophy of media, but as a theory or philosophy of mediation. This we will further attempt to buttress in the next section by way of situating McLuhan’s thought in a larger tradition again. And we will do this particularly on the basis of another one of McLuhan’s probes: ‘the meaning of meaning is relationship.’

7.3

‘The Meaning of Meaning Is Relationship’: Heidegger, Bateson

As mentioned at the start, in working out a (partly) process-based “ontology” McLuhan writes himself – just as with regard to the extension idea – into an ageold tradition and debate. And as we will see, it is no surprise that his “mediation idea” takes the specific shape it takes given the general intellectual-philosophical climate around the middle of the 20th century on the one hand, and McLuhan’s broad influences on the other hand. Of both we present an instantiation that is particularly relevant for our purposes, and proceed to trace its similarities with McLuhan’s mediation idea. THE EMERGENCE OF RELATIONAL ONTOLOGIES

For the largest part of Western philosophical history, substantivist ontologies have dominated the field. Atomism, worked out first by Democritus in the fifth and fourth century BC, epitomized in modern physics, and still very much present in 169

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science to this day, is one example. Especially from the twentieth century onwards relational ontologies gain prominence. Alfred North Whitehead (1978) for instance proposes one, as one of the first twentieth-century thinkers to do so. Also within the natural sciences themselves, from that time on a movement towards relational ontologies can be observed. Relativity and quantum physics for example challenge the notion that the universe simply consists of entities that relate to one another: there also exists a structure that defines the elements, a whole that constitutes the parts – be it the space-time continuum or the observational situation – and not just the other way around. The decline of substantivist ontologies can of course be directly connected to the “passing” of modernity. Most significant intellectual-philosophical movements of the 20th century could be interpreted as a move away from Enlightenment ideals and their underlying philosophical foundations. Phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructivism, but also cybernetics (and general systems theory), linguistic philosophy, and neopragmatism struggle to free themselves and us from the shackles of modernity, from the enduring legacy of modernist dichotomies. Most of them presuppose an idea of relation or process lying at the basis of their overall frameworks. Of all these approaches, McLuhan himself, in posing the predominance of relationship, is probably in the first instance most influenced by Whitehead (Dilworth 2004, 30; Marchessault 2005, 118) but perhaps even more by cybernetics in general, albeit in an indirect way. (Whitehead himself influences the cyberneticists.) The links between McLuhan’s thought and the work of the cyberneticists have only been superficially investigated213 but the parallels are clearly there214, even though McLuhan’s own interpretation of cyberneticist ideas may have been selective or mainly based on cybernetics’ more popular ideas (Pias 2008, 142-143). Conversely, more analogies have been drawn between McLuhan and another important representative of one of the above disciplines, namely, Heidegger215 – notwithstanding the fact that McLuhan ‘discovers’ phenomenology (as well as structuralism and linguistics) only later in life. In what follows, in order to further delineate McLuhan’s relational-ontological presuppositions, we briefly sketch the convergences between his mediation idea and, respectively, Heidegger’s thought, and, as a representative of the cybernetics movement, Gregory Bateson’s framework.216 We will find that, what for McLuhan is mediation, and for Heidegger relation, Bateson in turn calls ‘pattern’ or ‘context’ or ‘mind.’

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HEIDEGGER’S ‘RELATIONAL TOTALITY’

Michael Heim is one of the first to compare McLuhan’s theory of media to Heidegger’s philosophy. He concludes that both regard technology as ‘[…] an invisible backdrop within which the content or entities of the world appear […]’ (1994, 66), with the essential difference that McLuhan, being too celebratory about technology, negates its ill consequences, while Heidegger compensates for this alltoo utopian stance by way of pointing at the unavoidable trade-offs that technology imposes on us (ibid., 70).217 It is however Glenn Willmott who executes a deeper analysis of the convergences between McLuhan and Heidegger on an ontological plane. Willmott summarizes the gist of his argument and moreover a part of the aforementioned statements quite accurately when he says: ‘The medium is a category of relation, not merely an object, for consciousness.’ (1996, xv) McLuhan’s media analysis dovetails extremely well with Heidegger’s transcendental analysis in Being and Time, which sees all things – albeit from the standpoint of Dasein – as embedded within a ‘relational totality.’ What Heidegger calls ‘equipment,’218 says Willmott, is equivalent to what McLuhan signifies as ‘media.’ Just as equipment binds us to the ‘relational totality’ of ‘world,’ media are extensions of Dasein that cannot be separated from it. ‘Self and world cannot be kept absolutely distinct.’ (ibid., 187) This amounts, as we have seen, to a head-on attack of the modernist subject-object or organic-technical distinction that was discussed in the last chapter. “We” as autonomous subject give way to ‘environment.’ ‘For McLuhan as for Heidegger, what is significant is not the isolate technological object, but its formal value within the relational totality of ‘assignments’ and ‘references’ which define, in the intersubjective realm, the existence of a social world.’ (ibid., 187) This analogy strangely enough sketches McLuhan and Heidegger – probably much to Bruno Latour’s disdain – as early, though very early, predecessors of social constructivism. The two share, moreover, a common enemy. McLuhan’s nemesis is the narrow ‘literate’ viewpoint that isolates ‘figure’ from ‘ground’; Heidegger revolts against the whole tradition of Western metaphysics that understands existence in terms of substances, in other words, that explains being in terms of beings – things that are vorhanden. Metaphysics, as we already mentioned, has up until now mainly concerned itself with the ontic level and not quite with the ontological. Willmott contrasts the two parallel positions:

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To misunderstand the self as an isolate object – like the inkstand distinct from the room, like the metaphysical essence distinct from the existentia, like the figure distinct from the ground, or like the message distinct from the medium – is to misunderstand the relational totality which Heidegger names, as ‘existence,’ the only essential form of human being. (Willmott 1996, 187)

Yet, we must add, this is only one side of Heidegger’s as well as McLuhan’s framework. William Blattner distinguishes between ‘Heidegger the phenomenological architect’ who looks for the structure of the world and who sees ‘[…] the worldhood of the world as a relational scaffolding that is filled in each case, by the stuff of the world, this context[,]’ and ‘Heidegger the existential phenomenologist’ who ‘[…] wants to emphasize the texture of significance or importance in the contexts in which we operate.’ (2006, 62) In McLuhan a similar distinction can be discerned, or more precisely, a similar coupling between ontological-structural analysis and the existential search for meaning can be discovered219 – particularly illustrated by the aforementioned phrase ‘The “meaning of meaning” is relationship.’ If ‘the medium is the message’ furnishes the cornerstone of McLuhan’s relational ontology, it is perhaps ‘“the meaning of meaning” is relationship’ that offers the foundation. The phrase (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 3) is a riff on a book by I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden, representatives of the New Criticism movement that deeply influences McLuhan: The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1969). But with it, McLuhan exceeds the domain of literary analysis and semiotics, and hints at nothing less than the groundwork for an ontology. ‘The medium is the message’ urges us to consider formal structure and not just vorhanden content. But this is only possible because the (underlying) structure is there and at any moment defines our being-in-the-world. This is the significance of ‘the meaning of meaning’ in McLuhan’s sense. The meta-standpoint in fact sends us (back) to the groundwork. To recognize the ‘ground’ – in McLuhan’s as well in Heidegger’s sense – one must paradoxically climb up one step from ordinary perception towards a meta-perception – ‘understanding.’ In other words: get beyond the aforementioned technological blindness. The road to relational being “starts” from substance, “radicalizes” the perception of it, and “returns” then to the structure which makes it all possible in the first place. This is how we can 172

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“experience” the “yielding” from medium to mediation, of which mention was made above. In the next chapter nevertheless, we will find that beneath relation, in fact, substance once again returns. In closing, one crucial difference between McLuhan’s and Heidegger’s position should be signalized, and it harks back to the fourth aspect of the definition of ‘interplay’ that we have provided in the previous section. Whereas Heidegger sees modern technology as just another instance of Western metaphysics220, thus as a continuation of the ‘forgetfulness of being,’ the new ‘electric technology’ for McLuhan promises a closer relation to “relationality” than ever was possible before.221 Relationality is the true condition, “how it really is,” but this situation is veiled by ‘linear,’ ‘visual’ technologies. ‘[O]ur technologies [i.e., phonetic writing, books, the printing press] are by no means uniformly favourable to this organic function of interplay and of interdependence.’ (M. McLuhan 1962, 7)222 But do they only hide the relational situation or even change it so as to make it “less relational”? McLuhan explains further: The old hang-up about “form” and “content” had arisen under the regime of merely visual culture, where “content” had to be contained in something. With the figure-ground relation of Gestalt psychology, the “content” was continuously created in the gap between figure and ground. The new physics carried this relation even further, citing resonance as the very stuff of “hardware.” (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 95)

This does not so much answer the question: is the universe as we perceive it, i.e., as our media make us perceive it? To a certain extent, within McLuhan’s sensualist framework, it seems it is. ‘Literate’ technologies thus make the world ‘literate’; ‘electric’ media make it ‘electric.’ But in any case there exists in all instances – “structurally” – ‘interplay’; we briefly return to this issue at the end of this chapter. However it may be, depending on the perceptual model we appropriate we can penetrate to a lesser or greater degree to the core of ‘relational totality.’ Ontologically, mediation comes first. BATESON’S ‘CONTEXT’ AS ‘PATTERN’

Nonetheless, McLuhan does not initially formulate his “mediation idea” on the basis of Heideggerian phenomenology. He is more, though loosely, influenced by cybernetic principles. Although there is no clear indication that the two have ever 173

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met, or even read each other’s work223, when McLuhan says that ‘[t]he interface is where the action is’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 155) he perhaps derives this phrase from Gregory Bateson (or vice versa?), who uses the exact same formulation during his seminars at the Esalen Institute at the end of the 1970s (Charlton 2008, 38). In fact many analogies can be found between McLuhan’s relational framework and Bateson’s thought. With McLuhan the context224 is part of the setup of the medium. A medium arises essentially through its “mediation,” through the way it reaches out, makes an environment, even is an environment. Bateson in turn, according to Charlton, ‘[…] sees context as pattern. […] pattern is always dynamic […]’ (ibid., 77). What does he mean by this? Bateson is on the lookout for nothing less than the structure of the world, not unlike McLuhan who, as mentioned, wishes to read and interpret the ‘Book of the World’ as a grammarian. In Bateson’s case, as we saw, it is mental process that unifies the world. ‘[T]he immediate task of this book is to construct a picture of how the world is joined together in its mental aspects.’ (G. Bateson 2002, 18) And just as McLuhan, who proposes an ontology of ‘processes’ and not of ‘products’225, Bateson makes a plea against reification, albeit within a larger context. McLuhan is simply concerned with ‘human-made’ artifacts, Bateson studies the natural world and the pattern that connects everything to everything (‘a metapattern’), a pattern that essentially goes beyond the boundaries of “things,” i.e., organisms: […] the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose. (G. Bateson 2002, 12)

The world is first and foremost constructed as a relational network, not as a composite of substances. Charlton comments: ‘All these relational processes are present in the material world but must not be reified as concrete “things.”’ (2008, 66-67) And precisely these relational processes constitute mental activity.226 ‘Minds are the relational and dynamic interconnections between things and they are, though not material, equally real.’ (ibid., 43) So: the material world comes into being by relation, and relation is mind.227 Here an opening appears for an innovative coupling of McLuhan’s – rather anthropocentric – framework and Bateson’s organic – perhaps anthropomorphic? – model.228 174

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In any case the two can surely be said to share some central characteristics. Whereas McLuhan quips ‘The “meaning of meaning” is relationship,’ Bateson remarks that ‘[…] “context” is linked to another undefined notion called “meaning.”’ (2002, 14) In this way similar convergences could probably be detected between Bateson and Heidegger.229 However it may be, the context thus of McLuhan’s mediation idea itself can be said to be much larger than his own ‘the medium is the message.’ And this is only corroborated by the fact that mediation theory, up until today, keeps on being the focus of several theorists within the philosophy of technology – specifically, as we will see in the following section, of the postphenomenologists.

7.4

Postphenomenology: The Mediation Constitutes the Mediators

As said, we are engaged in outlining McLuhan’s implicit relational ontology, buried deep within his “mediation idea.” And we do this by situating him within the larger network of theories that take relation or mediation as central. To top off our investigation, just like in the previous chapter, we must draw analogies between McLuhan’s approach of the love component of our bond with technology on the one hand, and a contemporary analysis of that same “focus” on the other hand. THE PRIMORDIALITY OF MEDIATION

By now we have seen that one of the founding principles of every relational ontology is the primordiality of relation. The world does not first consist of entities that then enter into ‘accidental’ relations with each other. By contrast, relations – events, processes – constitute the entities, that can now of course no longer be seen as substances in the “substantivist” sense of the word. Bateson puts it this way: ‘[…] the relationship comes first; it precedes.’ (2002, 124) What we have called event, process, or relation, Bateson dubs ‘practice’: ‘There is thus a larger entity, call it A plus B, and that larger entity, in play, is achieving a process for which I suggest that the correct name is practice.’ (ibid., 130) In the previous two sections we have mostly been grappling with relationality or mediation as such. Current approaches of mediation focus more on how the process of mediation specifically occurs and what its characteristics are – all the while however keeping in view the aforementioned primordiality of mediation. As 175

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said, this principle states that the mediation constitutes what is mediated and what mediates (Verbeek 2011a). While this tenet is certainly implied in McLuhan’s work, it is truly made explicit in the contemporary discipline of ‘postphenomenology’ (henceforth PostPhen). Retrospectively one can now recognize McLuhan in a sense as one of its predecessors, although the main proponents of PostPhen, among them founder Don Ihde, do not extensively refer to him as a source.230 In Chapter 3 we sketched the main outlines of the postphenomenological approach; but we did not point at the similarities that it specifically exhibits with McLuhan’s thought. Yet since McLuhan’s ideas as well as the postphenomenological framework could benefit from a mutual rapprochement, a comparison between the two is in place – a comparison, we must stress, that is especially relevant with regard to the love component at the “structural” level. POSTPHEN AND MCLUHAN: PREMISES AND METHODOLOGIES

First of all, McLuhanist media theory and Ihde’s postphenomenology can be said to share crucial starting points. Both regard the use of technology as a non-neutral process. McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ probe finds a pendant in Ihde’s concept of ‘non-neutral acidity.’ Technologies do not determine, but they are not neutral either (Ihde 1993, 33). They ‘incline.’ Ihde speaks of ‘instrumental inclinations.’ Television for instance “asks for” drama (1993) – a point very much in line with McLuhan’s media analysis in general and assessment of TV in particular. And just as with McLuhan, Ihde’s investigation of technological inclinations is embedded in a study of sensorial perception, as also Lance Strate points out (2006, 78). Both seek to understand how our perceptions change within technical surroundings. Next, and in line with the previous point, McLuhan’s and Ihde’s methodologies coalesce as both ground their approach on a phenomenological base – acknowledged in Ihde’s case abundantly, in McLuhan’s case indirectly231 – and from there on proceed to analyze the cultural repercussions of and interactions among technologies. Ihde’s technology analysis, as we saw, starts out from our condition of being-in-the-world: there is no strict split between Dasein and the world.232 Upon this principle Ihde superposes a focus on technical materialities, our interaction with them, and our interpretation of them. McLuhan in turn, as we saw in Chapter 2, grounds his approach on an essentially sensualist base: our perception “defines” media and vice versa. 176

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POSTPHEN AND MCLUHAN: THE PLACE OF THE SENSES

In short, then, the two frameworks converge in their view on perception.233 Just as McLuhan zooms out from the perceptual level where technologies have effects on ‘sense ratios’ to the cultural level where the sensorial balances are played out on a much larger, namely, societal scale, Ihde, too, couples his ‘phenomenology of technics’ to a ‘cultural hermeneutics.’ Here the cultural interpretation, implementation, embedment, evolvement, and handling of technologies are at stake. We already mentioned how Ihde distinguishes between ‘microperception,’ i.e., sensorial perception, and ‘macroperception,’ i.e., cultural-hermeneutical perception.234 What we take to be ‘naked perception’ (microperception) is in fact in some or other way linked up, although often unnoticed, to aspects of macroperception (Ihde 1990, 42). Our sensorial perception is co-constituted by our cultural horizon. McLuhan also makes a (more implicit) distinction between the individual sense life and the larger “culture,” but he seems to start from the converse standpoint: our cultural horizon is perhaps more determined by the structure of our sense lives than vice versa. Yet for him too sensorial perception is influenced by cultural patterns; as is illustrated by the infamous literate-tribal distinction. What is more, with Ihde a similar move from ‘microperception’ – the individual level of human-technology “contact” – to ‘macroperception’ or “culture” can be found, as for example when he refers to the ‘visualism’ of the Renaissance (1990, 58, 77) or points out that reading helped to constitute visual perspective (1993, 84, 86) and that photography, more than being just a means of representation, teaches a specific way of looking (ibid., 48). POSTPHEN AND MCLUHAN: ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS

Overall, thus, it seems that McLuhan and Ihde share essential theoretical premises, both on the level of ‘phenomenological’ perception and ‘hermeneutic’ culture. But since their theoretical frameworks have crucial foundations in common, they eventually wind up with similar analytical concepts. Ihde’s twofold scheme of ‘amplification’ (or ‘magnification’ or ‘enhancement’) and ‘reduction’ – accompanying every technology – resembles McLuhan’s beloved definition of technology as enhancing (extending) but also obsolescing ‘something.’ Ihde, too, defines technologies as extensions (1979; 1993, 3)235 and dubs for instance technologies like the car ‘dramatic extensions of my own capacities’ (1990, 99). Interestingly, in his view it is the amplification component that brings 177

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forth the aforementioned fascination with technology236, whereas reduction brings on forgetfulness (ibid., 78). Next, McLuhan’s concept of ‘hybrid energy’ – the “energy” released when media environments violently interact237 – links up with Ihde’s aforementioned analysis of ‘technology transfers.’ Just as McLuhan demonstrates the impossibility of simple transportation and instead works out a theory of transformation, Ihde shows that technology transfers from one culture to another are almost never pure “copying” acts. Moreover, in assessing the characteristics of technologies throughout history both notice a “sea change,” a qualitative difference between mechanical-industrial technology and contemporary, ‘electric’ technology, although their eventual treatments differ notably. While McLuhan sees tribal culture as a culture centered on involvement, and the era of ‘electric technology’ as engaged with the “whole,” Ihde terms the tribal world a ‘monoculture,’ and analyzes the ‘pluriculture’ brought on by ‘imaging technologies’ as fragmented.238 Finally, within these networks of technological-cultural cross-pollination it is for McLuhan as well as for Ihde art that exhibits the greatest flexibility. Art, as we already suggested in Chapter 5, for McLuhan plays the role of ‘early warning system’ (2003, 16); it makes anti-environments that show us the true effects of corresponding media environments. Ihde, then, claims the arts to be faster in ‘acquisition’ (1990, 175), their influencing patterns being isomorphic with those of technology transfers. POSTPHEN’S “TWO-WAY STREET” VS. MCLUHAN’S “TRICKLE-THROUGH” THEORY

At last, both McLuhan’s and Ihde’s “ultimate aim” can be said to be a shared passion for understanding and perhaps controlling – particularly in McLuhan’s case – the inconspicuous meanderings of technological dynamics. For Ihde and the postphenomenologists mediation comes first, and it constitutes the mediators (Verbeek 2011a). Dealing with technology thus means getting a grip on mediation processes. McLuhan, as we have seen, shares this perspective insofar as he attempts to draw our attention to the relational processes that media are, instead of the entities or “things” we think they are. However, inasmuch as the similarities between these two perspectives are meaningful, the differences might also be significant and moreover fundamental. And these revolve first and foremost around the purported predetermined effects of technology. Whereas with Ihde the balance between the two levels of on the one 178

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hand the ‘phenomenology of technics’ and on the other hand the ‘cultural hermeneutics’ is more or less even, McLuhan emphasizes the “direction” from sense life to culture much more since he bases, as we have seen, his cultural critique on a sensualist groundwork. We called this McLuhan’s “trickle-through” theory. Cultural constellations are essentially rooted in sense ratios, and the former emerge gradually from the latter – it is not exactly a one-way street, but it is not quite a two-way street either. The postphenomenological framework offered by Ihde furnishes a more empirical approach on both levels. Its depictions of human-technology relations are much more diversified, demonstrated in practice, and empirically illustrated than McLuhan’s sketch of the man-machine relation. And it furnishes descriptions of technology-culture transfers that are far more articulate and articulated than McLuhan’s ‘hybrid energy’ concept could ever suggest. In this way, postphenomenology can substantially compensate for these shortcomings in McLuhan. Conversely, however, as we will later find in more detail239, McLuhan’s implicit but much broader “philosophy of media” can reinforce and widen PostPhen’s mainly technology-focused outlook by way of offering a reflection on media that goes beyond phenomenology as well as hermeneutics, to an existentialistontological viewpoint that in fact fully retrieves Heidegger’s relational ontology. In short, Ihde offers heuristic instruments to understand practical mediation. McLuhan gives us tools to make sense of mediation as such.

7.5

Myth: The Moment at Which All Is

Thus, we have endeavored to get the “relation” or “love” part of our relationship triad in view. This we did by way of an analysis of McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ probe and its underlying ontological foundations – a framework convergent with, as we have seen, Heidegger’s, Bateson’s, and that of postphenomenology. But we should not forget that this investigation is (to be) situated on the “structural” plane. The term “mediation as such” captures McLuhan’s analysis of that component quite well; ‘interplay’ is the basal condition of media. But how does it relate to our distinction between “structural” and “historical” levels? We must already briefly offer some hints here.240 179

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Media yield to mediation; they are not exclusively to be seen as wellcircumscribed “vats” or “things.” To a certain extent, media overflow into each other. Another great term that McLuhan employs to make sense of this “indivisibility” – and moreover a concept that is mostly negated in interpretations of his work – is myth. Myth is the conceptual counterpart of visual, linear literacy. It amounts to a way of disregarding figure and “getting to” ground: perceiving one thing through another one, seeing one environment in terms of another one. But most importantly, it stands for a radical break with linearity, in that it represents ‘all-at-onceness,’ more specifically the simultaneity of cause and effect. Precisely in the ‘electric age’ we are able to revert again to mythical awareness of our environment, and perceive cause and effect synchronously. McLuhan: ‘Cause and effect […] become simultaneous to human awareness, conferring once more a mythic dimension on consciousness. For myth is a mode of perceiving and stating causes and effects at the same time.’ (1997b, 21)241 Myth hands us a tool for coping with this new world of heightened speed and informational involvement: ‘When man is overwhelmed by information, he resorts to myth.’ (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 280)242 This essentially suggests that to the “correct” scrutiny of “the situation” a very specific conception of time (and space) is related. Conceiving of ‘interplay’ means, basically, dwelling in simultaneity, in the mythical “moment at which all is.” Surprisingly a similar outlook can be found with Heidegger, as Graham Harman points out: ‘Though Heidegger is misleadingly read as a critic of isolated nowpoints, he is actually their greatest champion – folding past and future into an ambiguous single instant rather than stretching them out along so-called ‘clock time’.’ (2009a, 102) There may thus be an essential conceptual connection between “relation” and the “now moment”: the love, i.e., mediation or relation, on the “structural” level is the love that is, at this moment, as is. ‘Interplay’ is a constant, that defines at any moment the interaction of “us” with media, and of media among each other. It makes for a structural underpinning of all our “relationships.”

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8

Fourfold Media: The Beloved as the Working ‘Core’ ‘[T]he tool isn’t “used” – it is.’ (Harman 2002, 20)

This chapter concludes our tour around the relationship triad with a visit to the “beloved object.” Whereas the investigation of McLuhan’s take on the love component of the bond led us in the previous chapter to the outlining of his relational ontology, here we find that McLuhan attends to “the object” too. His work, and its metaphysical foundations, can thus be said to harbor a “substantivist side” as well. Specifically the concept of ‘formal cause’ is at stake here, and we attempt to make sense of it by way of the ‘object-oriented philosophy’ worked out by Graham Harman. First we delineate the interrelated McLuhanist notions of metaphor and formal cause. These may not so much mark a ‘linguistic turn’ but rather an “objective turn” in McLuhan’s thinking. In order to demonstrate that point we introduce Harman’s theory. The second half of this chapter, then, is devoted to an – at least partial – analysis of McLuhan’s “substantivist media ontology” through Harman’s perspective. We will see how the latter enables us to broaden the scope of McLuhan’s ‘medium’ concept, “horizontally” as well as “vertically,” hence pointing us towards an unsuspected, hidden ‘core’ within the “beloved object.”

8.1

Objects of Affection

THE BELOVED IN RELATION TO THE LOVER AND THE LOVE

It is hard to find “the object.” It hides itself, always escapes all-too severe scrutiny. This counts for everyday relationship building as well as for metaphysics. Of course we live in the belief that we do nothing else than “finding the object.” Folk and pop songs, novels of all artistic eras, movies, and what not, are filled to the brim with elated praises of beloved objects. When we say ‘I love you,’ we assume inadvertently that this adored ‘you’ begs no further circumspection. It is as if the “loving” sufficiently helps to circumscribe the beloved object to the extent that no additional explanations, definitions, or doubts about the qualifications of the object are needed. (Indeed, if we ever doubt something, it is in the first instance 181

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the “love” and not so much the “object.” Would more love lives be less steeped in suffering if attention were turned to the substance instead of the process?) Yet psychoanalysis in the tradition of Freud, Jung, or Lacan has stressed the elusiveness of that strange ‘other,’ always fleeing our grasp. The object-as-loved is never, or at least never completely identical to the object-as-is. Archetypal images and desires taint the ‘other’ with distortion. Oedipal structures make the lover “fill in” the beloved, project expectations on him or her, attribute characteristics to the object that it simply does not possess as such – the other who always stays truly an ‘other.’ As it is in “life,” so it is in philosophy. The metaphysical object eludes us, has always eluded us. From its beginnings, Western philosophy has taken the shape of a grand project bent on piercing through the surface-of-appearance, to the real things. Objects have always had a sort of double-sidedness to them: they are what they seem and at the same time they are not – they seem to escape us, even if only because they are not consistent through time: they change, erode, rot, vanish. RELATION AND SUBSTANCE: MCLUHAN’S BLEND

This is the great riddle already posed but definitely not solved by Greek natural philosophy: how do being, nothing (non-being), and becoming relate to each other? We already indicated in the course of the previous chapter how philosophers have mostly tried to make sense of this “ontological ambivalence” by way of elaborating substantivist ontologies. The early champion of substantivist ontology – disregarding Democritus – must undoubtedly be Aristotle. He splits up the world in substances and accidents, all things being composites of both. Substance is the defining kernel, i.e., that what the thing is; accidents represent all the states that that thing may be in at any time, but that do not affect its being as such. In this scheme, substance accounts for stasis, accidents make for change. This basic distinction survives in philosophical(-theological) thinking until at least the Renaissance, when it begins to be slowly superseded by the atomism of modern natural science; which is, as we already suggested, essentially grounded in a substantivist ontology just as much. However as mentioned, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, and even within the natural sciences, a rebellion against substantivist views arises. Now processional or relational ontologies start to dominate the field. McLuhan, as we have abundantly seen, can be said to be part of this movement, as he works out a worldview in which mediation and not so much mediators (entities) take the 182

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forefront. Yet as suggested, paradoxically enough also the opposite movement can be found in his work. If this interpretation is correct, McLuhan’s framework should be seen as a strange hybrid – a blend – of a relational and a substantivist ontology. Although he appears to be sufficiently fashionable at the time in posing mediation and relation as grounding principles, simultaneously a rebellionagainst-the-rebellion can be discerned within exactly this relational scheme, for essentially, we will find, McLuhan sees media as escaping any contact with other media – while mediating. Some substance “somewhere” remains. Although it mediates, the medium in its ‘core’ (Graham Harman) is unattainable, untouchable, unreachable. It is elusive as such, just as much as the beloved object never comes wholly in view in the process of “loving” it. Yet crucially, the two “movements” belong together, even imply each other. It is only through relation that the substance can manifest itself; but there would not be any manifestation whatsoever without substance. THE RETURN OF SUBSTANTIVIST ONTOLOGY

That McLuhan mixes up, almost unnoticed, a relational with a substantivist view, should come as no surprise, being severely influenced by Aquinas. The latter furnishes the grand late-medieval interpretation of Aristotle’s work in the service of the Catholic faith. As we already saw, McLuhan largely builds on ThomistAristotelian sensualist epistemology in elaborating his idea of media-asextensions.243 But it seems that he also appropriates a part of its underlying ontological framework in the process, albeit mostly in the guise of a relational “cosmology.” The unusual mix that is the result of this ontological cross-breeding cannot be easily made sense of. Fortunately the work of contemporary philosophermetaphysician Graham Harman comes to our aid. Harman represents a philosophical reaction – that has recently come in full swing – against what he dubs the century-long ‘fashion’ for processional ontologies, in favor of an ‘objectoriented’ approach (2009b, 179, 223). Interestingly enough Harman does not seek to simply replace all relational models with a one-sided substantivist view – that would just make for a reincarnation of the old Aristotelian distinction, together with all the conceptual problems with which it is fraught. What Harman proposes, conversely, is an original blend of substantivist and relational components. This makes him a crucial ally in interpreting McLuhan’s philosophical-ontological groundwork, together with the fact that he has offered his own McLuhan 183

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interpretation in a few seminal texts. In what follows we will attempt to systematize the substantivist component of McLuhan’s ontology with the help of Harman’s own theory and reading of McLuhan. Essential in this respect is the number four. Harman’s theory fundamentally hinges on an innovative interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘fourfold.’ McLuhan’s “theory” eventually is “summarized” by himself and his son Eric in the form of the still enigmatic tetrad. We will ourselves try to make sense of both approaches – McLuhan’s and Harman’s – and the convergences between them, trough four steps:    

Formal cause as the seedbed of McLuhan’s substantivist ontology; Harman’s ‘fourfold’ metaphysics; Harman’s “horizontal broadening” of McLuhan; Harman’s “vertical broadening” of McLuhan.

First we grossly introduce the context in which McLuhan’s concept of ‘formal cause’ is worked out. Next, we sketch Harman’s ‘object-oriented metaphysics.’ The last two steps demonstrate how his framework helps to make sense of McLuhan’s substantivist side. In the process we investigate the several “parts” of the “media ontology” that ‘formal cause,’ and more specifically a broad interpretation of it based on Harman’s work implies: the ‘unattainable core,’ the ‘void,’ and the ‘effects.’ Especially the first two are of concern here in this chapter; the last one will be detailedly scrutinized in the next.

8.2

Steps toward Substance: Metaphor and Formal Cause

As suggested, it is the later work of McLuhan that is crucial in coming to grips with the substantivist aspect of his media theory. Whereas his more plainly mediatheorist work of the 1950s and 60s seems to betray nothing of its deeper-lying substantivist foundation, the older McLuhan, becoming more and more “philosophical,” retrieves once more his classical education and reframes his media theory in slightly more rigorous terms. We must grossly resketch, thus, what happens during the last decade of McLuhan’s life when he rephrases the whole of his thought in terms of the ‘laws of media’ or ‘tetrad.’

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MCLUHAN’S ‘LINGUISTIC TURN’: A TURN TOWARD SUBSTANCE?

With the tetrad McLuhan means to have found the ultimate probing tool for media effects, behavior, and evolution.244 The whole of his media theory is summarized and compressed into it. Even more so: as will become clear, the four ‘laws’ of which the tetrad consists outline what could be called a cultural cosmology, their goal being nothing less than the interpretation of the structure of human endeavor an sich, thereby crisscrossing several distinctions – that between the material and the ideological, that between the general and the specific, however not that between the “natural” and the “human” – and thus being completely in line with what we described in Chapter 2 as McLuhan’s “core business”: the reading of the ‘Book of the World.’ Nevertheless McLuhan needs several steps – not necessarily diachronically arrangeable – to arrive at the eventual formulation of these four ‘laws,’ and it is worthwhile to try to reconstruct them. While fine-tuning his media analysis at the beginning of the 1970s, he is heavily influenced by both his reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1974) and Giambattista Vico’s verum factum principle (1948). The first contains one of the first analyses of language as a formal system. The latter states that all that is true is made (by humans). These influences, together with the bundle of ideas already in place in Understanding Media and other publications, eventually debouch into the formulation of two crucial insights. First of all, while ‘media’ are already broadly defined in Understanding Media – including ‘media’ like cars, clocks, money, et cetera – by now McLuhan is explicitly saying that all human artifacts made by humans are media (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, ix), including not just material entities but also ideas, theories, organizations, et cetera. But that is not all. He moreover ‘discovers’ that all media are essentially linguistic in nature: ‘I was gradually forced to conclude that all human extensions are utterings or outerings of our own beings and are literally linguistic in character.’ (M. McLuhan 2005c, 289) But language for McLuhan is structurally ‘metaphoric.’ ‘All words, in every language, are metaphors.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 120) And crucially, all metaphors have a fourfold structure: as A is to B, C is to D (A:B, C:D). For example: “Time is a thief” means that time relates to our life as a thief relates to his victim. Thus, all human-made artifacts are media, that in turn are words, that in turn are metaphors, that in turn have a fourfold structure. Hence, all media are fourfolds, i.e., tetrads. Exactly the four components of the metaphor that each medium is, are 185

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described by the ‘laws of media,’ of which we will treat extensively in the following chapter.245 All media “act” according to a set of four laws: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. The word ‘tetrad,’ in this regard, is used in several ways: as a synonym for ‘medium,’ as a signifier for the set of four laws describing the workings of each medium, and as a descriptive term for the “method” of media analysis that McLuhan proposes, namely, the probe. Hence, in being at the same time the medium, its effects, and the main way in which to investigate them, the tetrad becomes a linguistic tool with which everything ‘nonnatural’ can be analyzed: Our new dictionary includes all human artefacts as human speech, be they hardware or software, physical or mental or aesthetic entities, arts or sciences. Such former distinctions have no scientific relevance. As utterances, our artefacts are submissible to rhetorical (poetic) investigation; as words, they are susceptible to grammatical investigation. (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 224)

It is important, particularly in relation to what follows, to stress that all of this is not meant metaphorically but literally. Not only can artifacts be analyzed as words, they are words. And vice versa: words are artifacts and thus media. ‘Just as all artifacts are words, all words and languages are artifacts; each of which manifests a four-part structure in the form of double-ends joined.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 7) McLuhan himself appears very enthusiastic about some of these ‘discoveries,’ specifically that of the linguistic structure of media-artifacts, what Gordon calls his ‘linguistic turn’ (1997a, 323). McLuhan even compares this find to James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, favoring his as in any case the “widest”: ‘Literally speaking, this breakthrough about the linguistic structure of all human artifacts is incomparably larger and deeper-going.’246 Nevertheless, McLuhan’s enthusiasm about the ‘laws’ stands in stark contrast with their eventual intellectual reception. The book Laws of Media is finished by Eric McLuhan and published eight years after Marshall McLuhan’s death; by then the McLuhan hausse of the hippie era has completely died down, and the publication receives little attention. But still today, after McLuhan is hailed as Wired’s patron saint and now that even the academic interest in his work is thoroughly rekindled, the ‘laws’ retain but a marginal position. Within McLuhan studies, little attention 186

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is given to it247, and nearly no deep-investigative literature on them is available.248 Many re-readings of McLuhan are limited to Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy. And although all of the ‘laws’ are already present – more or less in embryonic form – in those works, they do not quite reveal the systematic scope that the idea of the tetrad is supposed to proffer. Exactly the term ‘linguistic,’ however, may be what misleads or even repels most interpreters, who do not feel they should get bogged down again in the onesided intricacies of linguistic philosophy. Yet as we will endeavor to show, McLuhan’s ‘linguistic turn’ could and should in fact be read as an “objective turn.” For that purpose another one of McLuhan’s late-life notions needs to be scrutinized more closely. THE PARADOXES OF FORMAL CAUSE

For the tetrad is not the only late-life idea of McLuhan that is neglected. Another concept, central within his universe of ideas, that comes to full fruition in his later life and that is just as much and just as often disregarded in readings of his work as the ‘laws,’ is that of ‘formal cause’ – or, McLuhan’s idiosyncratic recovery of Aristotle’s four-cause theory. The fact that these two, ‘formal cause’ and ‘laws,’ are intimately intertwined, if not straightforwardly synonymous, does not make the disregard less unforgivable.249 The ‘laws’ attest to the workings, the dynamics of media. Formal cause signifies at least partly the same: it stands essentially for the formal characteristics that each medium exhibits. One could see it as simply a synonym for ‘form.’ It is thus in this regard not so much to be interpreted as truly a “cause” in the common sense of “cause and effect.”250 On the contrary, formal cause relates not so much to “cause” but to “effect.” Hence, McLuhan does not use the term formal cause in exactly the same way that Aristotle uses it, from whom the term of course hails (Patterson 1990, 135).251 McLuhan: ‘[…] I refer to formal cause not in the sense of classification of forms, but to their operation upon us and upon one another.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 317) Instead, formal cause, like form, serves to point us in the direction of something that is hidden. It can in that capacity be equated with another one of McLuhan’s central terms: ‘ground.’ ‘[T]he formal cause of something is the ground that gives rise to it […]’ (E. McLuhan 2005, 183).252 If we want to occupy ourselves with formal cause, we need to pay attention to ground253, or as McLuhan also likes to put it, to the interplay between figure and ground.254 The purported priority of 187

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formal cause, in other words, can be seen as an alternative formulation of the McLuhanist principle that the study of media demands involvement with their form and not so much their content: form is paradoxically at the same time the interplay between content and form. And form, ‘formal cause,’ is primordial, in being effect. This relates to one of the most confusing tenets of the McLuhanist “doctrine,” namely the idea that effect comes before cause255 – cause follows effect, effect is the ground on which causes can only begin to be played out – or at the very least cause and effect coincide, are synchronous (M. McLuhan 1997b, 21). For the (diachronic) succession of cause and effect with which we are so well acquainted, is an “invention” brought on by ‘visual’ culture and certainly not “the way it is” (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 87ff.). According to McLuhan the culture of literacy has all but eliminated formal cause from its considerations to the advantage of, especially, efficient causality. “Cause and effect” as we know it is rather an expression of ‘efficient causality.’256 And the latter is, in turn, intensified by visuality. He elucidates this by way of the concept of ‘logos’ – not surprisingly, given the ‘linguistic’ tendency of his later work. Logos is ‘the word.’ In that capacity, it must be read to stand for media workings as such, since media, as we have seen, are words. The word in itself thus represents a grasp of media effects. Those effects, as mentioned, “take place” through the ‘interplay’ of form and content. Literacy and visual culture, simply put, have separated the word-as-content from the word-asform in stepping up its ‘visual intensity.’ But ‘[p]rior to visual space, formal cause coincided with logos as a figure/ground concern with the thing, structurally inclusive of its whole pattern of side-effects on the ground of users.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 89)257 In actuality, the word is the thing. In other words, as we will see: taking a peek beyond the surface of words means inquiring into the nature of a thing’s “hidden reality.” FORMAL CAUSE AS EXPECTATIONAL HORIZON AND PORTAL INTO GROUND

How should we then precisely and most of all practically understand formal cause? Of help is an essential recent essay by Corey Anton on the issue (forthcoming). Anton argues that formal cause is that what makes a thing what it is: more specifically, it is that which makes “us” recognize the thing as the thing that it is.258 It is thus, in essence, something that concerns “us,” humans. Formal cause must be seen as the whole of all our “cultural” ‘expectations,’ the conceptual framework, so 188

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to speak, with which we interpret the world. ‘Already present in the background as the horizon of intelligibility, formal cause is a kind of residual after-effect that orients and patterns future associations; it emerges and persists in resonance with prior sensible forms.’ (ibid., 7) This suggestion is of aid in understanding the “illogical” reversal of cause and effect that formal cause stands for. Anton illustrates by way of an example in which he refers to Aristotle’s three other causes. A fork is made of, for example, steel (material cause); in order to make a fork, one needs to mold it (efficient cause); and the fork is conceived as a tool to eat with (final cause). But the formal cause of the fork is the most encompassing and fundamental cause for it defines it as fork, and this definition depends on a cultural horizon: That is, someone making the fork must know when it has been successfully made, and also people will need to recognize the now formed material as a fork. In those senses, the form of the fork, which comes from fulfilled expectations, is a cause of the actual fork in existence. (forthcoming, 5)

Nevertheless, what a fork “is” was there first, before the individual fork existed. At the same time, what it “is” cannot possibly be separated from the individual fork. Elsewhere Marshall and Eric McLuhan make sense of this paradoxicality by reverting to fundamental philosophical concepts: becoming and being. Becoming is the perceivable “result” of being – the figure that we “see,” sprouting from a deeper ground, i.e., being (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 59-91). Formal cause “contains” the “result” of being, i.e., becoming, as well as being “itself.” It comprises at the same time that figure and that ground – in terms of Anton’s illustration, respectively: the fork “itself,” or at least our perception of it, and that what makes us perceive the fork as fork. But the latter is veiled: ‘Formal cause concerns the ground as seedbed, as active process. Or if not exactly the ground then (much the same thing) the interval between figure and ground, so that the formal cause is also the conformal cause, as it were, and is the cause of the figure and its ground simultaneously […]’ (E. McLuhan 2005, 197). In sum: formal cause, as expectational horizon, as grasping of cause and effect, of thing and word in one, caps McLuhan’s lifelong project of piercing through to the “underside” of medial dynamics. Nonetheless, according to the McLuhans, the concept of formal cause has up until now never been sufficiently applied to the study of media. Yet it is utterly crucial, we could add, in that it envelops not only 189

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the ‘interplay,’ i.e., the relational component of the medial relationship, but also the hidden ground, i.e., the more substantivist aspect of the “bond.” If we expect “something” from media, logically we can assume there is somewhere from whence that “something” is to be expected, i.e., the ground. Logos leads us to an elusive place. And the story is complex. More precisely, we will find, within the elusive scheme suggested by ‘formal cause’ three “moments” or “locations”259 can be discerned: an unattainable ‘core’ as ‘ground,’ the ‘interplay’ between the two as ‘interval,’ and the ‘effects’ as – at least partly – ‘figure.’ In the remainder of this chapter we will specifically treat of the first two. But in order to fully make sense of those we must turn, as previously announced, to an “ally” in the form of Graham Harman, whose work we will now first briefly introduce.

8.3

Graham Harman: Object-Oriented Philosophy

As seen, McLuhan’s ‘laws’ have been rather neglected within the reception of his work. One significant exception is the American philosopher Graham Harman: in a delightful paper of only a little more than twenty pages long (2009a) he reinterprets the ‘laws of media’ from an historical-philosophical viewpoint, proposing that they could even form a fresh starting point for metaphysics in whole. How has Harman arrived at such a – consciously – provocative statement? As already suggested, the number four is the key to the story. Harman shows a keen intellectual interest in “all things fourfold,” since he develops a fourfold ontology himself, based on an unusual interpretation of Heidegger that starts from the tool analysis in Being and Time. HEIDEGGER’S TOOL ANALYSIS: A NOVEL INTERPRETATION

As we saw in Chapter 3, in the course of the tool analysis Heidegger introduces the distinction between on the one hand Vorhandenheit or presence-at-hand, the objectifying, reifying attitude towards beings that has dominated Western philosophy and is epitomized in the doings of modern science, and on the other hand Zuhandenheit or readiness-to-hand, the “actual” situation in which the objects surrounding us are not so much “placed before us,” but are embedded in a ‘relational totality’ (‘equipment’) that is always defined and interpreted in terms of “the work to be done” (taking shape as a ‘towards which’ and an ‘in order to’). One of the substantial twists that Harman adds in Tool-Being: Heidegger and 190

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the Metaphysics of Objects (2002) is the claim that instead of being just about the human use of tools and other materials, as the traditional interpretation wants it, the tool analysis according to him does not only form the cornerstone of Heidegger’s thought, it can also constitute if elaborated a bit further a completely new ontology and metaphysics. This is the task that Harman takes up on himself, and the defining sleight of hand occurs when he assigns the VorhandenheitZuhandenheit distinction no longer just to human-thing interactions, but to the interactions of all entities, including their interactions among each other. In other words, all things take part in readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. What does this mean? Harman calls readiness-to-hand ‘tool-being’ (Heidegger’s ‘equipment’): an invisible, dark, mysterious realm that forever stays concealed, beyond our grasp, be it practical or theoretical (ibid., 15ff.). Presence-at-hand, conversely, poses things ‘as such,’ i.e., revealed. Now, not only intentional human beings can experience things along one of these dimensions, as the classic Heidegger reading would have it. All objects interact with each other on either one of these two sides. The rock meets the air as present-to-hand and stays, by contrast, oblivious of its readiness-to-hand. But what is more: objects according to Harman do not only include material entities but immaterial things as well, like ideas (2002, 36; 2011a, 5) and words260. All objects exist on exactly the same ontological plane: the VorhandenheitZuhandenheit dynamic affects the carpenter-hammer interchange just as much as it does the theory-pupil exchange, the atom-atom reaction, or the fire-paper interaction. The fire meets the paper ‘as’ paper, but part of the latter remains hidden to the fire, as it remains hidden to all other things: its tool-being. And toolbeing, importantly, must certainly not be seen as a world-encompassing “force” or “domain” in which objects partake, for there are only individual objects per se (2011a, 5ff.). Instead each and every individual thing harbors an individual ‘real object.’ This ‘real object’ forms the cornerstone of Harman’s unique approach. REVERSING SUBSTANCE AND RELATION

Yet another strange thing is going on with this ‘tool-being.’ More traditional Heidegger interpretations propose the concept of ‘readiness-to-hand’ to stand for relationality, i.e., ‘equipment,’ the relational totality of which the tool is a part. The mode of presence-at-hand, conversely, reduces the tool-in-all-its-relationality to a simple substance. In this view the tool is defined first and foremost by the relations it is in – which would put Heidegger on the relational-ontological side, a reading 191

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that we ourselves have mainly deployed in the previous chapter, and that is very much supported by Heidegger’s overall critique of the Aristotelian substanceaccident scheme and of the Cartesian subject-object split. Nevertheless, Harman’s interpretation of the tool analysis deviates substantially from these other versions. In his view presence-at-hand must rather be equated with relation, and readiness-to-hand with substance. ‘[T]he hammer itself might easily be taken for something relational. But this is the central falsehood of mainstream Heidegger studies.’ (2009b, 141) For Harman, the hammer in itself is substance. Any – human or other – contact with it takes place within relation, and only within relation, i.e., presence-at-hand. Readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand are therefore not modes of “perception” or “practice” as more classic Heidegger interpretations would have it. ‘Though Heidegger’s tool analysis is usually glossed as ‘unconscious practice vs. conscious seeing’, this hollow interpretation must be replaced by a duel of ‘thing vs. relations’.’ (ibid., 142) Here is, Harman suggests, revealed the great secret that lies hidden beneath the surface of Heideggerian thought: a retrieval of, as we have called it, substantivist ontology. But in Harman’s version substance, what he calls ‘tool-being,’ is not seizable as a Platonic essence: it is, as already said, an enigmatic, subterranean, in every way subliminal realm that can never be perceived, and always escapes our grasp. For whatever gets in our grasp, immediately becomes present-at-hand. Tool-being, i.e., readiness-to-hand, ‘[...] never becomes present to practical action any more than it does to theoretical awareness.’ (Harman 2002, 1) The ‘real object’ eludes us. CROSSING DICHOTOMIES: A FOURFOLD ONTOLOGY

Nonetheless we can make an attempt at describing how that ‘real object’ interacts with other objects. In order to truly accurately do that Harman needs another conceptual tool. For a fourfold ontology requires two dichotomies that, combined, point to four possible states “the world” can be in. Hence, from Heidegger’s 1919 lecture course, Harman pours a second ontological distinction: that between ‘being something at all’ and ‘being something particular’ (2002, 80ff.). In other places, Harman pulls this second dichotomy from the work of Edmund Husserl, who distinguishes between a unified (intentional) sensual object and its plurality of traits (or qualities) (Harman 2011a, 20ff.). The sensual qualities of an object are given through experience. The unified sensual object is always 192

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encountered ‘through’ them. By way of ‘adumbrations’ (Abschattungen), more precisely by way of the subtraction of adumbrations (Harman 2011a, 24), i.e., the specific ‘profiles’ that we perceive of an object, we grasp the intentional-sensual object ‘as such.’ For example, when looking at a house we immediately grasp that it is a “house,” even though we only see one side of it at a time; if we start walking around it, the ‘profiles’ or sensual qualities change, but the house as such, as sensual object, remains the same. Figure 5. Harman’s fourfold: the structure of all things (adapted from Harman 2011a)

Combined, then, these two dichotomies – concealment vs. revealment; object vs. qualities – make up a fourfold representing the ontological structure of each and every thing (cf. Figure 5). All entities comprise a real object, a sensual object, real qualities, and sensual qualities. In this scheme, of course, the real object equates with ‘tool-being.’ Together, Harman claims almost by the way, these two dichotomies make up the elusive Geviert, so often a mystery for Heidegger interpreters: the fourfold of earth (concealed, something at all), gods (concealed, specific something), mortals (revealed, something at all), and sky (revealed, specific something) (Harman 2002, 203). The solution of the “mystery,” obviously, consists in not taking these terms 193

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(earth, mortals, et cetera) at face value, but to see them as states every object can be in, in its relation to other objects but also in its withdrawal from any relations with any other object. INDIRECT CONTACT ACROSS THE VOID

How do objects relate then? The ‘real object’ in fact escapes all relation, for whenever a tool-being becomes wrapped in relation – by way of perception for instance – it turns into a presence-at-hand. It is never approachable in its toolbeingness. The ‘real object’ constitutes an (individual) autonomous realm completely locked up in itself. So, Harman asks, how can anything interact at all? The answer is that actually no two ‘real objects’ can interact directly (and neither can two sensual objects), as they are embedded in a ‘vacuum,’ a ‘void’ across which, for some or other reason, in some or other way, some causation happens. ‘[W]e have the problem of nonrelating objects that somehow relate.’ (Harman 2005, 91) Harman at this point unsuspectedly turns to the Islamic theological discipline of occasionalism, that sees all entities – their substance as well as their accidents – as absolutely separated from each other: only the intervention of a God can make for the coupling of objects. In Harman’s view, however, not a transcendent power should be posited as responsible for every and all interactions. Objects do relate to each other, he proposes, but on an immanent plane – albeit not in a straightforward way: asymmetrically. This means that no two real objects can ever touch; but, for instance, a real object can interact with a sensual object and vice versa. Harman calls this, with a term hailing from occasionalism, ‘vicarious causation.’ ‘Since no causation between them [the aforementioned nonrelating objects] can be direct, it clearly can only be vicarious, taking place by means of some unspecified intermediary.’ (ibid., 91) This intermediary cannot be another object (or medium), because that would only shift the burden of explanation. ‘The term “vicarious cause” has been coined as a way of keeping our focus on how isolated substances might communicate, without dredging up any of the historic debates between theologians and skeptics.’ (ibid., 92) Although ‘vicarious causation’ remains fundamentally enigmatic, Harman has in the meantime outlined no less than ten possible ways in which objects, or the components of the fourfold structure that every object is, can interact with each other or with themselves (2011a, 95ff.). A discussion of the subtleties of this meticulous scheme would, unfortunately, exceed the bounds of the present work. 194

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It suffices for our purposes to conclude that every object holds in itself a ‘core’ (Harman 2005), unapproachable, unaccessible – because separated from all direct interaction by a ‘void.’ It is here, ideally, that we should turn our attention again to McLuhan’s implicit treatment of objects.

8.4

Harman’s “Horizontal Broadening” of McLuhan: Against Anthropocentrism

How can Harman’s approach help to make sense of McLuhan’s “media ontology”? To begin to fully gauge that question, we must first and foremost consult Harman’s own interpretation of McLuhan. As we have suggested, this is especially situated in one text: ‘The McLuhans and Metaphysics’ (2009a). Harman mostly concentrates on the tetrad; a discussion of that reading will be postponed to the next chapter, since it pertains to the “relationship triad” in whole. Here we focus mainly on the beloved object side. It appears, we will find, that viewing McLuhan through Harman’s lens brings on a substantial broadening of scope of what first seemed to be a theory limited to media as we know them, but in fact touches on all entities.261 The one great correction he would apply to McLuhan, and that he outlines most explicitly, is a broadening of scope of “horizontal” nature. MCLUHAN AS METAPHYSICIAN

Harman, along lines similar to our own approach, proposes to interpret McLuhan as a philosopher occupied with ontology in the widest sense. As already mentioned, he sees the McLuhans’ ‘laws’ as able to give new impetus to metaphysics. What is more, he surmises that the McLuhans’ boasting about their ‘laws’ – claiming them to be ‘the single biggest intellectual discovery’ – may actually be, in a certain sense, too modest (2009a, 100). For according to Harman the tetrad could, in analogy with his own theory, not just apply to human-made artifacts but to all objects, including natural entities, animals, and inanimate objects. Harman, just like the authors treated of in the previous chapter, spots numerous analogies between McLuhan and Heidegger. For instance, McLuhan’s critical stance towards visual culture can be likened to Heidegger’s critique of presence-at-hand (ibid., 104).262 The Vorhandenheit-Zuhandenheit distinction in Heidegger, as said, takes the shape of the figure-ground interplay in McLuhan. 195

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Then again, Harman suggests, at a certain level the McLuhans deserve even more credit than Heidegger for they are willfully prepared to concern themselves with specific things (media): the McLuhans see objects, Heidegger just sees – in the context of his philosophy of technology – ‘another homogeneous step towards hell, or perhaps towards heaven […]’ (ibid., 112). Phrased differently, in the context of a tetradic analysis of ‘phenomenology’ that Harman deploys and specifically relating to the tetrad part ‘reversal’: ‘[…] as a philosopher of technology, Heidegger has already been reversed: his disdain for specific technical artifacts is merrily outflanked by the McLuhans.’ (2007b, 194). With very concrete and fruitful consequences: ‘The tetrad increases our excitement about individual inventions from iPods to the Hillary Clinton campaign.’ (ibid., 195) MEDIA AS OBJECTS: ALL ENTITIES ARE MEDIA

Nonetheless, the appreciation is in the first instance grounded in criticism. As indicated before, Harman urges for a crucial modification to the Heideggerian distinction: the tool analysis accounts for all objects.263 And just as Heidegger exhibits an anthropocentric bias, McLuhan does so too, as we already saw preliminarily in Chapter 2. Harman, as said, sees a fundamental inconsistency in the McLuhans’ ontology: first they blame visual abstraction for neglecting ‘ground,’ but then they go on to make the human mind ‘[…] responsible for holistic resonance between things, whereas material things […] are blamed for the figural bias that had previously been described as the work of the biased human intelligence.’ (Harman 2009a, 107) As Eric McLuhan puts it: ‘[…] absent human agency or intellect there is no formal cause at all.’ (2005, 196) But this, Harman says, attests to a ‘people-centered bias.’ Moreover, the McLuhans hold that by extending our senses into outer materials, we lose the organic interplay, ‘resonance’ among them. According to Harman ‘[…] this cedes too much ground to the dull naturalistic view of inanimate objects […]’ (2009a, 110). The definition of ‘medium,’ in his view, should include all entities and not just human-made artifacts (ibid., 101). It should be broadened, in other words, “horizontally.” The key move in this regard is to see media as objects. Media do not just “mediate,” they are also entities, though obviously not so much in the “classic” substantivist sense. This means, crucially, that the McLuhans’ still-conserved dichotomy between the natural and the human vanishes just as well, and that the ‘laws’ can not just furnish a cultural cosmology, they form the groundwork of a proper ontology. In it, all things are media that interact with each other across the 196

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fourfold sketched above. Whatever distinctions we would like to make between atoms, neurons, laptops, wheelchairs, ideologies, and barbecues – they stand on the same footing in at least this respect: all are media susceptible to an analysis along the lines of the four ‘laws,’ but also of the four dimensions that Harman outlines on the basis of Heidegger’s work. The strict split between “natural” and “cultural” is loosened, as all things are what we will in the next chapter call “medial nodes” in a network that is made up of substance and relation. Which brings us, in the meanwhile, to our next and last section.

8.5

Harman’s “Vertical Broadening” of McLuhan: Superposing Relation with Substance

For even more parallels and convergences between Harman’s and McLuhan’s more or less suggested ontological frameworks can be pointed out – points of contact upon which Harman himself has, by contrast, elaborated merely implicitly. Broadly put, Harman’s perspective can also make for a “vertical” broadening of scope of McLuhan’s ‘medium’ definition: a deepening of its “profundity.” This we can specifically show by investigating Harman’s interpretation of Latour. Subsequently we will demonstrate how certain probes of McLuhan hint at an approach of the likes of Harman’s. HARMAN’S SUBSTANTIVIST AMENDMENT TO LATOUR

Let us recapitulate. According to Harman the main chasm in ontology is not to be found between humans and objects, but between objects’ ‘inner cores’ (substances) and their relations (accidents) (2002, 2). ‘[A]ll objects are mutually external.’ (Harman 2009b, 34) All objects harbor deep within themselves inaccessible kernels that can only communicate with each other through ‘translation.’ It comes as no surprise that Harman has also granted considerable attention to Latour’s work, for both share the same anti-anthropocentric zeal and a severe interest in how ‘forms’ relate. With Latour, the first takes the form of the already mentioned ‘principle of symmetry.’ Not only human subjects, as we saw, possess (potential) agency, also objects should be seen as being able to act. All should in that capacity be treated as ‘symmetrical.’ All take part in ‘translation.’ As Harman comments: ‘For modern philosophy, all the problems of translation occur at the single critical point where 197

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human meets world. But for Latour, translation is ubiquitous: any relation is a mediation […]’ (ibid., 77). Or put differently: ‘[…] not only human relations with a thing reduce it to presence-at-hand, but any relations at all.’ (ibid., 142) Harman suggests that with this perspective Latour lays the groundwork for a metaphysical setup very similar to his. He has high praise for Latour’s relational perspective, interpreting him as an ontologist and calling him without any hint of qualification the ‘prince of networks.’264 Indeed, in formulating an alternative for crude materialism Latour works out an ontology that principally hinges on the concept of ‘translation’ and ‘form.’265 By posing ‘form’ as primordial, Latour eliminates the “classic” substantivist gap between matter and form, thereby enabling a restoration of not only formal but also final cause, whereas the materialists have neglected these in favor of efficient and material cause: Of Aristotle’s famous four causes, only the efficient and material cause are retained, while the formal and final causes are dismissed as either illusory (final) or derivative (formal). More generally, relation is never treated as a problem by materialists, as it is by Latour. By showing that the relation between actors is always a form of translation, Latour begins to free philosophy from its fear of inanimate nature. (Harman 2009b, 109)

But this leads us straight to the one substantial critique on Latour’s approach that Harman formulates: the ‘freeing philosophy from the fear of inanimate nature’ is not followed through to its end by Latour. For in putting together an ontology based exclusively on networks, he forecloses the possibility of the existence of substance “beneath” or beyond relation. In other words: Latour does not go along with the other important change that Harman wants to make to Heidegger’s tool analysis – next to the antianthropocentric “turn” – namely, the buttressing of the ‘relational totality’ with ‘subterranean’ substance. According to Harman this is a liability in Latour’s framework, and he consequently endeavors to correct it in this regard. Harman remarks that, unlike a substance, ‘[…] an actant is not distinct from its qualities, […] [does] not differ from [its] accidents, […] [is] not different from [its] relations.’ (ibid., 17) Latour wants to keep only relation and discard substance altogether; this is impermissible to Harman. But it should not mean that, to mitigate the problem, we reinstate the subject-object split again: 198

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It may be (as I myself hold) that metaphysics demands a distinction between the inner reality of a thing and its relations with other entities. Yet it is not possible to side here with Latour’s opponents, who commit the obvious blunder of assigning reality and relation to two specific kinds of entities: the natural object and the human subject, respectively. (Harman 2009b, 75)

Harman’s solution is – seemingly – simple and consists, as we have seen, in the coupling and superposition of both relation and substance; thus, the “vertical” deepening, so to speak, of ontology. Above and beyond an object’s relations there is always “something more”: a ‘non-relational actuality.’ ‘[A]n actor is not identical with whatever it modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates, but always remains underdetermined by those effects.’ (ibid., 186-187) And he further remarks: ‘Unless the thing holds something in reserve behind its current relations, nothing would ever change.’ (ibid., 187) Substance lurks beneath the surface, stays needed as a subliminal ‘engine of change,’ feeding and fueling, so to speak, relational constellations with a sort of actualizing “energy.” Nevertheless and importantly, substance always stays hidden. ‘For substance is the ultimate underdog: if it exists, it will always remain obscured behind the networks that deploy it.’ (ibid., 49) Framed differently, with regard to our purposes, and by way of McLuhan’s usage of the terms: Latour favors becoming over being. But for Harman, beneath the relational becoming a substantivist being lurks. Exactly this being he equates with McLuhan’s ‘ground.’ (2009a, 106) As said, ‘formal cause’ must be seen as at least the effectual, perceptual manifestation of ground, i.e., being, but at the same time and slightly ambivalently, as the ‘interplay’ between figure and ground. Formal cause is thus the effect and at the same time the ground of the effect. But exactly a Harmanist interpretation suggests the effect to be brought on by a ground, hidden from view and barred from direct interaction, that furnishes the “energy” for change.266 Surprisingly, as to the existence of this ‘core’ and its attending ‘void’ there are more hints to be found in McLuhan’s work than Harman himself has demonstrated. MEDIA AS ‘INTERVALS’

As suggested at the start, three “moments” define McLuhan’s “media ontology”: substance as unperceivable ‘core’; relation as perceivable “results”; and in between both, a ‘void.’ With regard to the last, specifically, one of McLuhan’s oft-used 199

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notions is of crucial importance: ‘interval.’ The concept of ‘interval’ forms part of a string of related terms in McLuhan’s work: ‘interplay,’ ‘interface,’ ‘interval.’ All essentially pertain to the metaphysical groundwork McLuhan is attempting – either deliberately or unwittingly – to establish through his enduring protest against the monolithically visual, typographical culture of Western modernity. In order to counteract this visual dominance what we need is greater attention on and by way of hearing and touch. As seen, the notion of formal cause takes central stage in this regard. Whereas a visual, literate worldview poses concrete entities, lined up in a row, connected through a sequence of cause and effect – substances in the classic substantivist sense of the word – the ‘electric’ or neotribal sensibility discloses the “real situation”: the universe is not so much made up of things connected to each other – in fact the ideas of “connection” and “thing” are inventions of a literate mentality – but of forms interacting with each other across a gap. ‘Interplay’ denotes the interaction of forms – media, media environments. ‘Interface’ signifies more the point of “contact,” though not of connection, between media – the window, so to speak, that one medium offers on another.267 But ‘interval’ by contrast points to the gap between forms (percepts), be it figure or ground. However, whereas ‘interplay’ suggests a processional perspective, the concept of ‘interval’ and the way McLuhan employs it rather point in the direction of the sort of substantivist-Harmanist ontology that we have hitherto attempted to describe, and in which objects contain an internal core that essentially escapes the relations the object is in. Even though McLuhan works out a framework first and foremost based and focusing on mediation and relation, this relation is essentially grounded in discontinuity. ‘[N]othing in the material universe connects.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 49) If connection vanishes, what remains is a void: the ‘resonant interval’ that McLuhan illustrates by way of the wheel and the axle. Between the two there must necessarily be a gap lest the wheel would grind to a stop. ‘A gap is an interface, an area of ferment and change. The gap between wheel and axle can seize up when grit gets in. […] Gap creates an interface or friction, and metamorphosis.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 70, 112)268 The term ‘interval’ in McLuhan’s work, somewhat unfortunately, promises as much conceptual deliverance as confusion. What to think of an aphorism such as: ‘The resonant interval may be considered an invisible border between visual and acoustic space.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 4) Sense can be made of it, nevertheless, if one keeps in mind the scheme hinted at previously: ground = being 200

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= auditory-tactile; figure = becoming = visual (cf. Figure 6). ‘Visual space is a continuum. On the other hand (i.e., interval as explanation), acoustic space is a sphere without center or margin.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 110) The ‘resonant interval,’ then, as already suggested in the previous chapter, is ‘where the action is.’ ‘Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 97) Phenomenology, according to McLuhan, has had a hunch of the scope of the problem but has been unable to adequately solve it. Surprisingly, at this point, he presages in a sense Graham Harman’s unusual Heidegger interpretation when he remarks: ‘There is in Heidegger still no sense of interplay between figure and ground; the attention has just been shifted from one to the other without trying to take the new thing on its own terms.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 63) In other words, phenomenology simply negates figure in favor of ground, but still fails to peer into the depths, literally, of the void between figure and ground, namely, the interval. Again by way of the wheel-axle example: ‘Without ‘play,’ without that figure/ground interval, there is neither wheel nor axle. The space between the wheel and the axle, which defines both, is ‘where the action is’; and this space is both audile and tactile.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 77) But this McLuhanist ‘play’ looks a lot like Harman’s ‘vicarious causation.’ Harman notices the similarity, in linking up McLuhan’s ‘interface without contact’ between figure and ground with occasionalism’s ‘action at a distance’ (2009a, 119). MEDIA AS UNATTAINABLE-UNPERCEIVABLE ‘CORES’

Yet whereas Harman, starting from his Heidegger reading that suggests substance to remain inaccessible to all relation, is eventually forced to conclude that necessarily all objects must interact across a ‘void,’ with McLuhan we can make the reverse movement: since there is an ‘interval’ between ‘forms,’ something “of” this form must stay ungraspable. While the words ‘interplay’ and ‘interface,’ as we have seen, denote relation, ‘interval’ seems to refer more to – unreachable – substance. McLuhan indicates as much when he argues: ‘Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable.’ (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 302) Or: ‘As with any other ground, Being cannot be perceived directly; it has to be seen by side-effects.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 59) In other words: ground, as ‘tool-being,’ always stays hidden from immediate perception. Some ‘core’ is there, comparable to Harman’s ‘real object.’ 201

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Figure 6. Being vs. becoming in McLuhan (cf. M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988)

Being

Auditory-tactile Right hemisphere Software

Becoming

vs.

Visual Left hemisphere Hardware

Inner

Outer

Figure + ground

Figure - ground

Nevertheless, within the McLuhanist scheme, an inherent ambiguity remains, and the equation of the figure-ground opposition with the ZuhandenheitVorhandenheit distinction should be qualified. ‘Being,’ according to McLuhan, is auditory-tactile (cf., again, Figure 6). In this regard it does not at all escape all perception, only visual perception. As we saw in Chapter 2, in McLuhan’s sensualist epistemology getting behind perceptual and intellectual blindness does not mean receding into a nonperceptual domain: percept always retains predominance over concept. We cannot get beyond perception. ‘Understanding’ means perceiving but in a different and, most importantly, better way. This is corroborated by McLuhan’s reading of phenomenology. ‘Heidegger is using Husserl’s rubric that ‘the possible precedes the actual,’ which is to observe abstractly that ground comes before figure. He has not noted that the ground is formed as a mosaic, structured acoustically, nor that its structure is entirely due to its interface with figures.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 63) This attests to a seemingly unsolvable difficulty in unilaterally relating Harman’s “blend” to McLuhan’s formal cause.269 Is ground imperceivable or not? Harman seems to say “yes,” McLuhan “no.” Does Harman talk about a “layer” situated even deeper than McLuhan’s ground, namely, beyond all possible perception, even auditory-tactile? Or is McLuhan’s auditory-tactile ‘ground’ – or ‘figure+ground’ interplay – not at all as perceivable as he proposes or thinks? McLuhan indeed seems to attach to ‘the auditory-tactile’ an almost mystic force. A similar rhetoric is employed by Harman in describing ‘tool-being.’ 202

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At the same time the problem may also be “simply” analyzed as one of the many logical inconsistencies in McLuhan’s framework. Does McLuhan sometimes narrow the concept of ‘observation’ down to visual perception? Should this be the case, then the aforementioned statement takes on a wholly different flavor: ‘Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable.’ But it may also be that this quote is to be interpreted at face value, namely, equating ‘observation’ with ‘perception’ as such, and that – even beyond the auditory-tactile “surface,” so to speak, of ground – there is a “deeper” core, truly unreachable for our perception, or the “perception” of any other entity for that matter. Assuming that ground is just as “perceptional” as figure, and not imperceivable as Harman would have it, and that the ‘unobservable object’ hides even further, beneath that auditory-tactile ground, could we not claim that McLuhan – staying neatly within his sensualist framework – does not really care for this object, even though he remarks on its inaccessibility, its unobservability? In other words: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Wittgenstein)? Perhaps however it may not matter so much, for our purposes. Either ground is truly imperceivable, and then it can be flawlessly equated with Harmanist substance, or it may be said to “consist” itself of two “layers,” one being the ‘unobservable’ object, the other a perceivable, auditory-tactile surface. The first scenario points straightforwardly to an ontology as proposed by Harman. The second scenario does the same, but historicizes almost in a Heideggerian vein this ontological setup: in literate times we are quite unable to understand or notice the auditory-tactile nature of ground; but the newer times brought on by ‘electric technology’ may furnish us with the “right” sensitivity. However it may be, what is in any case important is that the medium – the thing – is not only relation, i.e., figure, and not only substance, i.e., ground, but a constellation of both. In this way the formal cause notion should be deployed: attention to it plainly equals an eye to “word+thing” interchanges, in which at all times something remains hidden. It is never about words alone, as it is never about things alone. And we simply cannot negate ground to the extent that it codetermines figure. Substance drives relation, provides it with, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically, “fresh material.” Something within the “beloved object,” with which we are not much acquainted, and that will probably escape our grasp forever, plays its very own part. Its ‘core’ works its way. The object, in a nonexhaustive, non-reducible sense, imposes itself upon us and our “love.”

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9

Medial Nodes: An Eye for Objects, a Mind for Mediation, a Heart for Humans

‘Even in what is called ‘love at first sight’ there must be a minimal instant in which we are in contact with the beloved before love takes effect.’ (Harman 2010a, 50)

This chapter serves to synthesize the previous three and forms the capstone of the current part, in which we have endeavored to scrutinize the bond with technology at the “structural” level, i.e., “as it is,” in the “moment,” at any given time. The components of the relationship triad have been outlined: us humans, the “lovers” of technology; mediation or relation, the “love”; and the “beloved” object or ‘core’ of substance. But overall, this framework, composed of various approaches within philosophy (of technology) with which we have sought to approach these parts, and that led us to the formulation of a McLuhanist-Harmanist “media ontology” in which all entities are media and vice versa, leaves us with a few conceptual problems relating to remaining tensions between McLuhan’s ‘media’ definition – epitomized in the ‘tetrad’ notion – and Harman’s metaphysics. In what follows we on the one hand seek to tackle these problems, and on the other hand get the “whole” of the relationship triad in view, by reframing the term ‘medium’ – more precisely by proposing an alternative wording: “medial node.” The term “medial node” serves to summarize and typify the “pan-medial ontology” that we have attempted to delineate; in it, all medial nodes are on equal ontological footing. However with one nuance: we still, for reasons of ethical, practical, and philosophical-anthropological importance, have to cling to a certain form of what we will call “subversive anthropocentrism.” This is further illustrated, at the end of this chapter, by linking up the concept of “medial node” to the heuristic tools – of blindness and ambivalence – specified in Part 0.

9.1

The Relationship Triad

A PAN-MEDIAL ONTOLOGY

We have endeavored to get our love of technology in view, by observing it through the prism of the relationship concept. Slowly it is now starting to appear that our very interaction with technologies is in fact “a love.” As soon as one realizes that in

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every way – structurally – our relation to technology truly makes for a relationship, our everyday intense attachment to all sorts of technologies, media, artifacts, and devices, does not at all come as a surprise. We are at all times wrapped up in countless constellations made up of three components: lover, love, beloved. Moreover, throughout the length of the previous three chapters, it has become clear that the notions of ‘media’ and technologies – the love of which we have tried to track down and dissect – are, as was already mentioned throughout the Introduction, in themselves malleable, stretchable, extendable. In fact the boundaries of their definitions can be stretched to such an extent that they cover all entities. This is what Graham Harman explicitly proposes: to define the term ‘medium’ in such a way that it encompasses all entities. Everything is a medium. Which would imply that the relationship that we have outlined on a structural level is the form that our interaction with things as such takes. We would then arrive at a “pan-medial ontology,” with every medium consisting of at least two entities and one relation between them. REDEFINING ‘MEDIUM’

However, further scrutiny of the consequences that this model entails is needed. The extended definition of ‘medium’ seems to go against the grain of other elements in McLuhan’s framework, or in any case – with regard to them – leads to logical inconsistencies. And it seems actually that the word ‘medium’ cannot do the job of tackling these problems. In the proposed view, every medium comprises a “relationship triad” and vice versa. We set out in the previous chapter to grasp “technology,” i.e., the beloved object, in itself – already extremely difficult to reach to start with – and seem to have wound up with a paradoxical outcome. There may be an “object” above and beyond the relations we have with it, but it may simply elude, by definition, our perceptual capacities. Yet whether we can perceive it (in an auditory-tactile manner?) or not, the substance, the inner kernel – even if this kernel shows itself only by way of relation – still has consequences, pulls the strings, seeps through to the perceptual domain, albeit in different form. As if it was the elusive graviton particle, forming and “mediating” at a subatomic level what we perceptually know to be the phenomenon of gravity, but frustratingly evading the monitors of our largest particle accelerators. 206

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In other words, it seems we looked for substance but only found relation. Phrased still differently, our investigation of the “object” led us straight back to the “love,” and from there again to ourselves, the “lovers.” Nevertheless, the ‘real object’ is still there in the background, working its way… waiting… This is the significance of especially the ‘tetrad’ notion – which we already preliminarily treated of in Chapter 5, and mentioned in the last chapter: it encapsulates all of these components. In order to follow up the consequences of a possible “pan-medial ontology,” and thus to synthesize the previous three chapters, we will need to revisit the tetrad concept. This we will specifically do by way of Harman’s reading of it. Then we will flesh out the possible outcomes that the application of the tetrad model to all entities, as proposed by the latter, might have. Notwithstanding his suggestion, detailedly discussed in the previous chapter, it will appear that difficulties remain. Not so much a solution to but rather a preemption of these problems will be sought, by way of reframing and reformulating, subsequently, the notion of ‘media’ in terms of “medial nodes” and, in a next step, by amending this notion with one – depending on preferences and targets more or less crucial – “addition of attitude.” Finally at the end of this chapter we will summarize and synthesize the aforementioned ideas in relation to the initial conceptual framework set up in Part 0.

9.2

The Tetrad: Media as Effects

In the last chapter, we merely focused on the “object” side of the triad, in Harman’s terms: the ‘real object.’ The concealed ‘core’ and the ‘void’ separating it from all other objects were at stake there. But the medium-object encompasses more than a core; it also plays out its ‘effects’ (upon us). The tetrad is meant to comprise all of these.270 And in that sense it is of course founded upon formal cause – if not straightforwardly synonymous to it. CONCEPT, METHOD, AND ‘MEDIUM’

As we already saw in Chapter 5, the tetrad consists of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. Every medium in its effects (its ‘message’)

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   

enhances something; makes something obsolete; retrieves something that was obsolesced before; reverses into its “opposite” when pushed to extremes.

Studying or analyzing a medium means asking how it relates to these four processes. This “method” can scantly be characterized as exact science, but it does offer a structural way of dealing with media ‘forms,’ their dynamics, and their evolution. W. Terrence Gordon comments: ‘The laws of media are not statements but questions that constitute a discovery procedure for inquiring into the operation of any medium and its effects upon other media […], upon the environment, upon individual users, and on users collectively, that is society as a whole.’ (2010, 141) The ‘laws’ seem, in this regard, not as “carved in stone” as for example the laws of physics (which are themselves not even truly “carved in stone” either). The tetrad is an exercise, a probe. Eric McLuhan clarifies: ‘A tetrad takes a fair bit of “tuning” […] to get it polished.’ (1998, 37) And furthermore: ‘The four parts of the tetrad provide just a starting point for investigation; they are not the end of the search but the beginning.’ (ibid., 41) In any case the term ‘tetrad’ appears to harbor more complexity than any superficial treatment can demonstrate. As to its precise definition, McLuhan typically leaves only fragmentary clues. It appears, as suggested in Chapter 8, that ‘tetrad’ is at the same time a concept, a method, and a synonym for ‘medium.’ This ambiguity fundamentally relates to McLuhan’s ‘linguistic turn’ – which we have found to be an “objective turn” just as much. As said, from the 1970s onwards, McLuhan is stating that every medium is a (fourfold) metaphor, is a word, is a tetrad, is a metaphor, and so on. Viewed from that perspective, once again, the paradoxicality somewhat loses its poisonous sting. For every word is probe, concept, and thing in one – at least within the rhetorical-grammatical universe in which McLuhan dwells: ‘[…] every artefact as a human utterance has its etymology in the body it extends, the tetrad forms an icon of the verbal nature of the artefact.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 229)271 As method, tetradic analysis stands for ‘process pattern recognition’; a tetrad being ‘[…] a device which does not detail technological change but only the distinctive features of innovation in human terms. It is more like an ideograph than a treatise.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 41) As word, the tetrad is to be approached linguistically: ‘The laws of media in tetrad form belong properly to 208

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rhetoric and grammar, not philosophy [i.e., dialectics or logic]. Our concern is etymology and exegesis. This is to place the modern study of technology and artefacts on a humanistic and linguistic basis for the first time.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 128) And as thing, the tetrad is the artefact, the medium itself. ‘In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not neutral or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.’ (ibid., 99) SYNCHRONIC-DIACHRONIC AMALGAM

Nevertheless, how do we concretely imagine the enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal? Harman’s reading will (again) guide the way. An example may first and foremost clarify things. The medium ‘cash money,’ for instance, enhances the speed of transactions; obsolesces barter; retrieves conspicuous consumption; reverses into credit (when pushed to its extremes). (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 173)

Enhancement is in fact a synonym for extension. An extension does not come from nowhere. According to Harman enhancement ‘[…] builds on existing strengths.’ (2009a, 109) It is a movement from potency to act.272 Contrary to expectations it does not bring something to the fore: rather it pushes something, i.e., itself, into the background. Harman gives the example of e-mail: ‘Though we all occasionally reflect on the status of electronic mail as a cultural medium, more often we simply fire messages back and forth, reacting to what someone sends us.’ (ibid., 111) Obsolescence, then, does the opposite: it pushes act back into potency.273 But here the figure-ground relation flips too: what is obsolesced actually becomes visible274, for it is no longer the environment we “live in” or as Harman puts it ‘the atmosphere we breathe’ (ibid., 113). Taking the e-mail example one step further one could say that electronic mail obsolesces handwritten and eventually even printed letters. Put in a related McLuhanist phraseology, obsolescence turns something into a ‘cast-off cliché.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 100) Retrieval, however, subsequently brings back something that was previously obsolesced. It turns ‘discarded cliché’ into ‘archetype.’ An archetype is defined by McLuhan as ‘an old ground seen as figure through a new ground.’ (ibid., 103-104) 209

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However confusing this terminology might be, it testifies to the complex relation between figure and ground within and around a medium. Again by way of the email example: the dominance of digital communication may make calligraphy a precious pastime or a treasured nostalgic treat. A retrieved cliché (old ground, new figure) does not come into full view as such, it is seen through the environment created by enhancement. Reversal, finally, is what Harman calls the ‘real engine of change.’ (2009a, 115) Due to ‘overheating’ a medium will at a certain moment flip into its ‘opposite.’ Harman illustrates: ‘Cellular phones flip into text-message devices, while the textbased Internet reverses into the online telephony of Skype.’ (ibid.) Not unimportantly, Harman points out that since fourfolds in general keep to a certain time frame – either synchronic or diachronic – the tetrad must also favor one or the other. According to him the McLuhans mainly suggest a synchronic time frame. At any given time something is enhanced, something obsolesced, and something retrieved. McLuhan indeed suggests as much when he remarks, specifically in relation to the already discussed concept of ‘myth’: ‘[…] the tetrad performs the function of myth in that it compresses past, present, and future into one through the power of simultaneity.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 9) Nevertheless, Harman continues, the diachronic aspect is still provided, namely by reversal: the process of ‘heating’ makes for change.275 ‘SOMETHING’

That said nevertheless, we are still left with the question: what exactly is the nature of that ‘something’ that is enhanced, obsolesced, retrieved or reversed into? Bizarrely, Graham Harman’s extensive treatment of Heidegger’s Geviert, as we have seen, just as much winds up with a ‘something.’ In analyzing the ‘mirror-play of the four’ Harman comes to the conclusion that the Heideggerian fourfold – a way of Heidegger to come to grips with ‘the thing’ – consists of two axes along which all objects find a place: ‘revealed’-’concealed’ and ‘something at all’’something specific.’ In how far can we just assimilate Harman’s fourfold with McLuhan’s tetrad? Can we just overlay one on top of the other? Harman does not carry out such a comparison explicitly, but it can be found between the lines of his ‘The McLuhans and Metaphysics.’ Like formal cause the tetrad is an all-involving tool for ‘probing’ the effects of media. But what are the ‘effects’? Eric McLuhan, in a summarizing move, says: ‘The deep structure or “definition” of a thing is to be found in the nature and 210

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interaction of the four simultaneous processes: amplification, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. Together they enact the verbal role of metaphor – logos.’ (2005, 196) Such an apparently unwieldy formulation could however quickly mask the suggestion that the ‘something’ that we are looking for may well prove to be hiding in plain sight, and to be simply another medium, another entity, another triad, again consisting of a ‘deep structure,’ i.e., a composite of figure and ground, ‘formal cause,’ ‘logos.’ But to make that clear, we may be in need of another way of speaking.

9.3

The Medial Node

Exactly the ‘something’ question can be tackled through the expansion of the ‘medium’ concept that Harman proposes, i.e., “horizontally” to all entities, and “vertically” within each entity toward the ‘void’ and ‘core’ harbored by it. ‘Medium’ in this sense, as we saw in the previous chapter, would just be a synonym for ‘object,’ encompassing – either in potentiality or actuality – the three “triad components” we have outlined. But this seemingly haphazard terminological leveling may be confusing. Therefore, in order to make sure that the meaning, structure, and functioning of the relationship triad are clear enough, we propose to deploy a new term: the “medial node.” ‘EVERYTHING COUNTS’: OVERLAYING MCLUHAN’S AND HARMAN’S FOURFOLDS

Let us recapitulate. Harman arrives at an ontology that fuses relation with substance again. All entities in the world – material and immaterial things – should be placed on one and the same ontological level. McLuhan, through his analysis of formal cause, comes out with a theory of media genesis that sees media hailing from the human organism and feedbacking back to it through mediation. In his view, conversely, the medium concept is to be limited to human-made things – although these can include immaterial entities just as well. When we superpose the two lines of thought and couple them to the theoretical approaches that we discussed in the previous chapters – ANT, postphenomenology, philosophical anthropology, et cetera – we arrive at a picture of a world with which we have been, up until now, not very acquainted. Such a world would comprise an ecology – neither natural nor cultural but a ‘media ecology,’ in the true sense of the word276 – in which ‘everything counts in large 211

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amounts.’277 Let us illustrate. In such a world, for instance, a walk on the beach is never just a walk on the beach. The rushing of the sea interacts directly with our camera taking a picture of it, and with the squawking sea gulls overhead, and with our car waiting, idly, in the parking lot. And with so many other things, too many to consciously perceive. A structure that combines idea and material – all is metaphor, all is medium. Lance Strate seems to be on the same track when he suggests that we could, via Einstein and Heisenberg, see even the physical universe as a medium (2006, 91). Figure 7. Harman’s vs. McLuhan’s fourfold

In – grossly – putting Harman’s and McLuhan’s fourfolds next to each other (cf. Figure 7), one finds that the two do not quite unilaterally overlap, but that they in any case dovetail nicely with each other. We saw Harman’s fourfold to be composed of two intersecting dichotomies. McLuhan’s tetrad, Harman points out, is just as much constituted by the crossing of two distinctions. One is, obviously, what we have called McLuhan’s central distinction: that between figure and ground, which concerns, Harman comments, the ‘morphology of an artefact.’ (2009a, 108). The second axe, conversely, has to do with what the McLuhans call metamorphosis: ‘Against all expectations, whatever is enhanced becomes ground, and whatever obsolesced becomes figure.’ (ibid., 108) This is interesting. Whereas Harman’s main focus seems to lie more with the structural-ontological “construction” of what an object is, McLuhan’s tetrad 212

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implies the difference between figure and ground or ‘revealed’ and ‘concealed’ to be utterly fluid. Of the tetrad’s second dichotomy, the two opposing terms cannot be so easily pinpointed, and perhaps with a reason, for it testifies to the unpredictability of the balance in the other distinction: figure and ground may flip; and above all, the split between both seems to remain eternally elusive, as Harman wonderfully illustrates by way of the e-mail example (cf. supra). Nevertheless in exactly the same spot, we may point out, Harman as well as McLuhan situate the ‘engine for change.’ With McLuhan: reversal. With Harman: the ‘real object.’ Both instigate change – through time – from beneath the surface of relation; from “out of the object,” whatever that object might be. THE MEDIAL NODE: DEFINITION AND APPLICATION

Yet this leads us to our next point. The implications of superposing or combining the two fourfolds are far-reaching. And they cannot be made sense of lightly. Can we for instance only say that “cars” are media – in the plural sense – or can we also safely allege that Bob’s or Emily’s car are a medium – in the singular sense? Certainly “Bob’s car” is not the smallest unit. And how do we account for proper names? Are Bob and Emily media? And what with words that refer not to a certain “thing” but to an abstraction, like “everything,” “nothing,” “the,” “with,” “justice,” et cetera? We quickly arrive in the midst of all the disputes that made linguistic philosophy – before it went, like all philosophical trends eventually, “out of fashion” – one of the less festive episodes in the history of philosophy. The word ‘object’ seems to put all the emphasis on substance – whereas ‘medium’ rather hints at an exclusively relational affair. All of the above has made clear that McLuhan’s ‘medium’ concept as well as Harman’s ‘object’ encapsulate both instances: substance and relation. We therefore suggest an alternative. If the debates cannot be settled by observation or examination why not change our conceptualization? Hence we propose to deploy a new concept: the “medial node.” A medial node can be defined as an assembly or an alliance or a constellation of a certain, mostly unspecified number of media, which in itself forms what we commonly know as “a thing.” The “medial” part attests to the fact that medial nodes consist of media, defined along the lines of McLuhan’s and Harman’s framework combined. The “node” part stresses the fact that although a medial node, when investigated more thoroughly, appears to be “nothing but” a collection of components, the specific form that the constellation of these components takes makes it exactly this medium and no other – in other words, the media that make 213

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up the medium “flock together” around a “center” that nevertheless would not exist without those very media. Seen from this perspective, “cars,” Emily’s car, Emily herself, and what (or who) not, are all medial nodes, consisting of medial nodes, hooked up in a network of medial nodes. The concept thus serves to summarize and condense several similar ideas present in the thought of McLuhan, Harman, and Latour278, and in doing so it means to reframe the notion of ‘medium’ – as well as ‘object’ – in terms of the relationship triad discussed in the previous three chapters. Every medial node is a relationship triad and vice versa; and a medial node encompasses or is constituted by relation as much as substance. At the same time, we may add, it serves to clarify ideas in McLuhan’s framework that are developed after he turns his attention to ‘media’: whereas the term and its “form,” so to speak, are already in place in his work from the late 1940s on, its conceptual elaboration or “content” gets totally reframed during the decades that follow. The term “medial node” captures several aspects of McLuhan’s eventual media theory better than ‘medium’: its ontological implications and difficulties, its elaboration of formal cause, and its ideas of ‘media ecology’ and ‘interplay.’ Moreover, it helps to explain the dynamics of formal cause in a straightforward manner: with a medial node, the “medial” stands for the effects in the McLuhanist sense, and the “node” for the ‘core’ of substance – taken together, they attest to what makes this constellation of components exactly this: the fact that these components compose themselves or are composed around this “node.” ‘Media’ in this sense cannot be strictly circumscribed or (conceptually) confined, neither upwards nor downwards: a medium functions within a greater whole, and it mostly consists of smaller parts that are in themselves media279 – or, in McLuhan’s words: the content of a medium is always another medium. Hence the notion of “medial node” accounts for the “frills” of a medium, and so counteracts the tendency – outlined in our Introduction – to frame media and technologies in terms of either all-encompassing systems or clearly circumscribed things: because a medial node is a “node,” it can be pinpointed and identified as “this,” but because it is “medial,” it is in essence not distinguishable from its relations to other medial nodes – at its “frills,” it becomes “other.” Finally, the concept also serves to settle – at least provisionally – linguistic and logical debates about instances, proper names, abstract notions, and the like: a medial node can encompass all. Bob’s car and Emily’s car are medial nodes in 214

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themselves, just like “the” car. It also means to exhaust epistemological debates: with a medial node, in the words of Alfred Korzybski, ‘the map is not the territory,’ and at the same time it is: the word is the thing, and the thing is the word – the dichotomy between material and ideational is dissolved, for the very definition, description, or outline of a medial node depends on the hermeneutical horizon currently in sway. However, no single word can completely grasp the reality it refers to. The same counts for the term “medial node.” With it, we risk to lose sight of one component of the relationship which up until now has been somewhat underexposed: the human, i.e., the “stuff-to-be-extended,” us. This thorny issue makes for the subject of the next section.

9.4

The Word, Nature, and Human Construction

For notwithstanding our efforts in reframing the matter, the problem still returns, almost like a pestilent disease: what role must the human play in the purported scheme? Should we really call entities, in the creation or emergence of which humans were not in any sense involved, ‘media’?280 Even though Harman makes a plea to expand the notion281, some elements in the McLuhanist framework complicate this to a great extent. Let us, one last time, revisit McLuhan’s arguments on the case. FOR EVERY WORD A MEDIUM?

On the face of it, the McLuhans do not seem to offer much fundamental reasons for their limitation of the tetrad’s applicability, except practical ones. Eric McLuhan explains in a recent interview in the Figure/Ground Scholarly Interview Series by Laureano Ralon, replying nota bene to a question of the latter with regard to Harman’s proposal to broaden scope (“horizontally,” we may add): At first, we tried the tetrad on everything in sight. It did not take very long – a day or two – to realize that it was only applicable to human artefacts. It tells us nothing, for example, about spider webs, or beaver dams, or birds’ nests, and so on. And it is equally inapplicable to trees or hurricanes or mountains or plate tectonics or supernovas or comets or tidal bores. Animal artefacts produce no intelligible result, and 215

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natural “artefacts” or events likewise. But it applies to every single human artifact without exception, from the smallest to the largest, from the most recent to the most ancient. And it applies equally to tangible (hardware) artifacts as well as to software ones, including ideas, and styles in the arts, and scientific laws, and computer programs, etc. (Ralon 2010b)

The stance seems confusing. McLuhan’s ontology, as seen, assumes all things made by or derived from humans to essentially have the same statute as language – according to McLuhan the ‘first technology.’ By way of speech, as an extension of ‘pure thought,’ mankind reached out into its environment for the first time. Just as any other technology, it makes for a heightening of efficiency – in this case the efficiency of communication – but also for an “enlargement,” a (literal) reaching out, an environment itself. Technologies have in fact never shaken their family ties to that first medium, buried deep inside their formal structure. It is not just the case that technology structurally resembles language. Both are formally the same, down to the level of the smallest “meaningful units.” Every medium is a word; every word is a medium. And words as well as media have, as we have seen, a metaphorical-fourfold structure. However exorbitant this statement may appear, if only deployed as thought experiment, it harbors much ‘probing’ promise: what do we wind up with, what happens when we accept this equation as patent truth?282 All things for which humankind has pitched a word are media then, and hence have the same ontological weight. However, this means that if, for instance – extending the above example a bit more – a car is a medium, for “car” is a word, then we should also say that the nuts and bolts, the bodywork, the bumper, the steering wheel, the seats, et cetera of which it consists, are media. For we have words for all of them. And if the bodywork is made of for example an aluminum alloy, the latter’s molecules are media just as well, just as the atoms of which these molecules are made up. And all of these words – for the word is the thing and vice versa – would have a metaphorical structure and thus a fourfold scheme of operation. But McLuhan would not go that far. For atoms and molecules are not human-made, although the words for them are. How to make sense of this? We attempt to do so in three steps. HUMAN-MADE AND NATURAL: INTERPRETATION

First, we should be reminded that the McLuhans’ limiting of the medium concept 216

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to human-made artifacts roots in their analysis of formal cause. Formal cause is a strictly human phenomenon, for only humans can encounter the things in the world as the things that they are (the possibility of there being other species, including some species of hominids that have that capability too, notwithstanding). In other words: only humans develop linguistic concepts with which to approach and interpret the world.283 Only ‘man gave names to all the animals.’ The Bob Dylan song of that signature (1979) is in fact a beautiful case in point – an illustration of formal cause in action. One of the verses goes like the following: He saw an animal that liked to growl Big furry paws and he liked to howl Great big furry back and furry hair “Ah, think I’ll call it a bear”

What makes a bear a bear – to us, humans? It is a big animal, furry, has paws, likes to growl and howl. That is, put very simplistically, its formal cause, the eidos that defines it as bear, the form that makes us recognize it as bear. But the defining and the recognizing is up to “us.”284 Yet the story is more complex. For formal cause should not necessarily and as such be restrained to artifacts. Aristotle’s initial endeavor with the four-cause analysis is to account for change in things in general (1857, Book I, Chapter III). It may be that the commonly used illustrations of the four causes, dealing mostly with human-made artifacts like paintings or chalices, has caused some unnecessary confusion in this regard. But for Aristotle the causes are a matter of physis and of technè. Next to that, Harman’s interpretation, as we have seen, goes beyond the strictly hermeneutical realm: the fire approaches the paper ‘as’ paper – which should not necessarily be framed as an interpretive act, but certainly as a “meeting” or an encounter across the gap of presence-at-hand. HUMAN-MADE AND NATURAL: INTENTION

Nevertheless, second, beyond interpretation (or, the hermeneutical realm) there remains intention (or, the phenomenological realm). The demarcation between human-made and natural seems difficult to sustain as soon as one starts to inquire into the “nature” of what is human-made. Let us revisit the aforementioned car example. A car is irrefutably a human invention.285 A lot of the parts making up a

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car can also be safely designated as human-made: engine, gears, windows, not to forget all the tiny bolts, rods, and joints of which these systems in turn consist. But from the moment one descends to the level of molecules and atoms, the task of ascription becomes much harder. Whereas a plastic molecule is definitely constructed by humans, its atoms hail “from nature.” In contrast, an aluminium molecule can be found in “nature” as such. So they seem to be indisputably nonhuman-made. At the same time, one could argue that the collecting and composing of these “natural” elements into a device or system makes them human-made, makes them lose their natural character. The ‘ordering,’ to put it in Heideggerian terms (1977a), of beings into the technological system, negates to a certain extent their “true” being, and distorts, at least to us, their ontological statute. So where do we have to locate the thin line between human and natural? Where is that fierce frontier that the moderns were purportedly so keen on instating? McLuhan seems to conserve at the center of his media analysis a version of that subject-object split – in the form of the aforementioned “limited” media concept – but at the same time he hints at a dissolution of it in our culture due to the effects of electric technologies. And the tipping point he situates in 1957, at the launch of the Sputnik satellite, the first human-made object ever sent into space. Due to the presence of a human-made artifact – a medium – outside of the earth, it became possible for mankind to perceive the earth for the first time as a humanmade environment, in which we are all ‘actors’ and no longer ‘spectators.’ Before that, ‘[…] “Nature” was a figure abstracted from a ground of existence that was far from “natural.”’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt, 7) The ground spoken of here, is the ‘world of man’s artifacts,’ that up until then was considered neutral. At the ‘Sputnik moment,’ an anti-environment was created by way of which the takenfor-granted ground – the ‘media ecology’ – could be seen for what it really was, i.e., constructed. This had two consequences: first, the modern subject-object split lost its relevance; the planet appeared to be, in more contemporary terms, a grand cyborgian organism. But second, paradoxically, because it was realized that humans and nature are intertwined and that this assembly holds much potential danger (for either of both), the urge to protect a more or less elusive “nature” from the possible damages of human intention and intervention grew stronger. McLuhan points out how ‘the moment of Sputnik’ also meant the birth of the ecological movement (2005a, 4). However, the “nature” defended by (most) 218

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ecological ideology includes human nature. The principle, put simply, goes like this: as we destroy the earth’s riches, we are “doing ourselves in” just as much. Humans are as much a part of nature as any other organic or inorganic entity.286 Of course this makes the separation between human-made and natural, in the context of our attempt to define the concept of ‘medium,’ even harder to maintain. It seems like a trivial suggestion: if humans themselves are parts of nature, can any of their creations ever stop being natural? Just like the beaver builds a dam, and the bird a nest, our ‘human artifacts’ are a piece of nature, as Peter K. Fallon observes (2009, 47): ‘We are no less a part of nature, with all our plasma-screen TVs, and iPods, and iPhones, and Xboxes, and automobiles, […] than the brook trout.’ (ibid., 71) It is hence of no use to ask whether the atoms in a car are humanmade or natural. Both car and atoms are “natural.” “Human-made” only serves as a label to designate human intention; it cannot be treated of as an ontological category. A modified version of McLuhan’s ‘medium’ definition may thus read: “every natural entity involving any human intention.” Yet Harman’s proposal for an object-oriented ontology seems to go even further than this. It radically places atoms and car on a par. The tension remains; and it takes, once again, the reformulated ‘medium’ notion to make the two views co-habit. HUMAN-MADE AND NATURAL: EXTENSION

But what lies, third, beyond interpretation as well as intention? It is the great wide world of experience and agency we don’t know. How does a beaver “live through” the building of the dam? How does the table “feel” about the book lying on top of it? We don’t know. The only thing we can know – verum factum – is what comes “from us”: our extensions, that incorporate both our intention and interpretation. Language, eminently, is such a thing that “comes from us.” In this sense, indeed, media and technologies can be said to be strictly confined to the human domain. Does any other entity in the universe extend itself into its environment through media? Crows, for example, indulge in a behavior called ‘anting’ – a wonderful case of short-lived symbiosis, in which the crow lets ants briefly inhabit its body (taking an ‘ant bath’) in order to cleanse it from parasites (Marzluff and Angell 2005, 171). “Crow + ants” can truly be called a relationship triad. The crow extends itself through a form of mediation into the “object” that feedbacks upon it, causing an effect, more or less foreseen. But does the crow extend itself in a human way? We don’t know. For “we” are no crow.287 In this sense, and strictly in this sense, the extension concept is purely 219

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anthropogenetic.288 But just like all “medial nodes” the concept of ‘extension’ at its frills gets elusive and hard to distinguish from something else. This becomes clear when it appears that, on the interpretive and intentional levels, we must soon begin to reckon with all sorts of entities – dams, atoms – which escape our full hermeneutical-phenomenological grasp. Then we can merely say tautologically: extending is strictly human because it is human extending. And so we have not stopped living in a human-made environment from the moment we started to ‘extend’ ourselves; in language, but also within the compounds of our neurological setup, evolving toward higher levels of processing, as we saw by way of the work of Andy Clark in Chapter 6. If only practically, ethically, perhaps existentially, the “slightly anthropocentric” stance could and should have significance. This we argue in our following and next to last section.

9.5

Subversive Anthropocentrism

To summarize: we have chalked out the concept of “medial nodes.” Everything in our world is a medial node. This makes for a leveling of all entities ontologically. Yet it appears now we should make one proviso. The modification that we want to apply, however, is not one of structure – rather one of “attitude.” ANTHROPOCENTRIC, PRO-OBJECT, AND PRO-RELATION BIASES

We have arrived at the “medial node” notion by following and expanding on the lines of ontology running through the work of among others McLuhan, Harman, Latour, and postphenomenology. None of these may agree or have agreed with our elaboration of their insights combined. McLuhan would not see it fit to apply the concept to entities that are not human-made; Latour and representatives of the postphenomenology movement like Ihde or Verbeek would not agree with Harman’s reinstatement of substance which we almost integrally adopt; and Harman nor Latour nor postphenomenology’s proponents, finally, would probably concur about the “change of attitude” we are now about to propagate – which is all about reestablishing, to a certain degree, the “anthropocentric bias.” For in fleeing the dreaded anthropocentrism, are the chances not just as great that we start to overcompensate? Are we, as we “level ontologies” within the relationship triad, not disadvantaging the subject in favor of the object? For “we” are still what we are. It is still “us” who name. Can we ever escape the ‘hermeneutic 220

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circle’ (Heidegger) of which we are necessarily a part? The movement of ‘speculative realism,’ of which Harman is seen to be a representative (Harman 2010b), exactly endeavors to turn away from the decade-long tradition of hermeneutics and deconstruction (i.e., hermeneutics’ radicalization or even reversal), and instead addresses the focus to objects-as-they-are, in that manner reviving disciplines and views that have long fallen from grace: realism, occasionalism, …289 But every philosophical current, in essence a medium in itself, is a trade-off between ‘enhancement’ and ‘obsolescence’: something gained and something lost. With the ‘object-oriented’ approach we should be cautious about throwing out the baby with the bath water, and that is: the humanism – or at least a shine or a gradient of it – that drives, for one, McLuhan, and of which we will treat right away. The same argument counts for approaches that attempt to reinstate relation as most fundamental ontological category, in particular postphenomenology. In the postphenomenological tradition, as said in Chapter 7, mediation is seen as constitutive of entities, subjects, or objects – if these terms are even applicable (Verbeek 2011a). There is no such a thing as a loose “in-between” that is added – theoretically or practically – to entities: mediation makes its “poles.” In itself this view offers a highly necessary corrective to the “old,” modernist notions of autonomous subject and object. In this respect, we cannot say that there is something like “mediation as such” – for this would just objectify (or subjectify) relation. Nevertheless, here again, this should not stop us from looking into the effects of “technologies” on “humans,” what McLuhan simply calls ‘understanding media.’ Postphenomenology, too, eventually aims to analyze human-technologyworld relations, and although these terms are only theoretically distinguishable, in a certain sense they still serve to demonstrate on which side of the “old” dichotomies certain effects should for the most part be situated. To phrase this more strongly, and not strictly theoretically, a cochlear implant (technology) in a deaf person (human), can still be seen as the aggregate of “a human + a technology,” although the emerging ‘cyborg’ accounts for more than the sum of its parts (with all due respect to deaf people). If the implant suddenly fails, the bearer will notice that he or she – as cyborg – is no longer hearing properly anymore, but the cause of this discomfort will be quickly traced back to the implant, i.e., the technology itself. So, a breach happens – ontologically speaking – as fast as a mend. Interestingly, in an earlier work, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on 221

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Technology, Agency, and Design (2005), Verbeek argues in favor of this “human” perspective. In order to investigate the role that concrete and specific artifacts and devices play in our existence – ‘what things do’ – he synthesizes Latour’s framework with postphenomenology. He finds that the former contributes to the latter a theory of how human-technology relations come to fruition within larger networks; but the latter can correct and complement the former in the sense that postphenomenology offers a ‘situated perspective’ (ibid., 168) that enables the human experience to be elucidated more than Actor-Network theory is able to do by simply attending to ‘associations.’ So eventually the all-too stern focus on actors’ agency, which is Latour’s merit, is mitigated by a relocation of the perspective in the direction of the phenomenological experience; which leads Verbeek to the formulation of a ‘material hermeneutic.’ But a ‘hermeneutic’ always concerns “us.” Feenberg, in a similar vein, but more in relation to politics, sees it fit to compensate Latour’s ‘principle of symmetry’ with a ‘global social theory’ that partially retrieves modernity’s human-centeredness (2003, 89).290 Indeed, seen from our perspective there should be no objection to a two-tiered approach that sees mediation as primary to its ‘mediata’ ànd as secondary to them. Such an outlook definitely bears the mark of inconsistency, at least at face value. But there need not be a hierarchy between the two levels to neutralize this mutual exclusiveness. In fact we should not try to neutralize it at all. Taking our human being-in-the-world (which is itself, incidentally, no longer a modernist notion) as a starting point, will give us more clout in issues of ethical or practical importance. An (ontological) analysis that cannot differentiate between humans and cars, albeit vital and fruitful up to a certain point, might just be at a loss with respect to for instance the protecting of oneself from getting hit at a busy crossroad. At the risk of sounding conservative: there is always going to have to be a way of distinguishing between “us” and “the world,” however analytically. WHAT IS WRONG WITH SOME HUMANISM? MCLUHAN’S VERSION

Exactly such a distinguishing effort is at stake in McLuhan’s work, as we have seen: the human being represents a “value” to be guarded.291 Not in any way does McLuhan conceal his humanistic premises which are in themselves, as we previously pointed out, closely intertwined with the other central nodes in his thought, i.e., the concepts of blindness and ambivalence, the sensualist base, the reformulation of formal cause, et cetera. At some points he makes these premises explicit: 222

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In the sense that these media are extensions of ourselves – of man – then my interest in them is utterly humanistic. All these technologies and the mechanisms they create are profoundly human. What does one say to people who cannot see extensions of their own bodies and faculties, who find their environments invisible? They call these same environments alien, nonhuman and search for a “point of view.” This is simply the inability to observe ordinary data. Content analysis divorces them from reality. (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 294)

The humanism that McLuhan is defending is one that in essence needs defending. Interestingly however, it needs to be defended against itself. It is “its own worst enemy,” due to a perverse mechanism ingrained in its very own “ideology.” To further investigate how this mechanism works is useful. ‘The age of information remakes the world in our image. The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet; it is the second phase of the original creation.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 93) We remake the world in our own image. We extend ourselves, in every possible sense of the word. Nevertheless, through these extensions, it is our very organism as such that is threatened. Paradoxically, by imposing ourselves upon the world, it is exactly ourselves we risk to lose, due to the malicious effects of human-derived technology feedbacking on our organism. As William Kuhns points out: ‘[…] it may be that the age of anthropocentrism is ended. We can no longer separate ourselves from our environment – nor as Mumford and Ellul attempt – successfully oppose ourselves to it.’ (1971, 247) And at the same time, ‘[a]n organic continuity between man and his technologies is no guarantee of a prospective utopia […]’ (ibid., 248). Strangely enough we completely misperceive the ‘organic continuity’ (of which we detailedly treated in Chapter 6). This is probably because we either see the fusion as, so to speak, either “totally human” or “totally world-like.” On the one hand, the tendency to interpret everything as human-derived or essentially human-like292 roots in a – furthermore very “human” – predisposition to anthropomorphize, as Don Norman suggests: ‘We interpret everything we experience, much of it in human terms.’ (2004, 136) On the other hand, the extraordinary ability that we now have of “making realities” – physical or virtual – may lead us to see these new realities as independent domains that seem to have appeared “out of the blue,” or been there all along. In contemporary speech, dichotomies like “online-offline” or “virtual-real” can be seen as symptoms of this 223

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sort of perception. However, as Michael Heim warns: ‘We should not mistake the new digital reality for a neutral territory untouched by human intention.” (1994, 53) McLuhan’s version of humanism may serve as a warning against both misperceptions. Many things in the world hail from us, are like us, or are us, but the world always comes back to claim its rights. Of this tension exactly the notion of formal cause is meant to make sense. We name the thing, but the thing still harbors an unperceivable, unreachable reality – or, ‘the map is not the territory.’ (Korzybski) But that does not mean we should give up naming altogether, or resort instead to idealism.293 McLuhan’s humanism may appear simplistic at first sight, but in fact mitigates the tension between anthropocentrism and a radical anti-anthropocentrism.294 STEERING A MIDDLE COURSE; THE RELATIONSHIP TRIAD AS BEACON

As said, we have endeavored to make not a structural modification to the concept of the “medial node” but one of attitude. It serves to remind us of the given that every medial node is a three-part structure, although we may nowadays feel the urge to grant more dominance to or focus more attention on either relation (mediation) or substance (object). As we level all things ontologically, we risk to forget – out of some deeply anchored ontological guilt perhaps? – that the “medial nodes” that we ourselves are do not so much harbor, by themselves, a clearer perspective, but they offer the only perspective we have. In an everyday reality in which we are surrounded by and involved with myriad medial nodes this makes for a crucial, even vital realization. As Michael Heim observes: But human we remain. For us, significant language always depends on the felt context of our own limited experience. […] When we pay attention to the significance of something, we cannot proceed at the computer’s breakneck pace. We have to ponder, reflect, contemplate. (Heim 1994, 10)

In a world in which objects and mediation proliferate, we must practice our humanism, deploy some subversive anthropocentrism. Subversive, first, because anthropocentrism, throughout intellectual history, has acquired quite a bad reputation. It is linked theoretically with the so disdained Cartesian subject-object split, and practically with all the ills – ecological, societal, psychological, … – brought on by the industrial-capitalist complex. However at a certain level 224

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anthropocentrism is simply “our reality,” in every sense of the expression. Yet it is also subversive, second, because the sort of humanism we – with McLuhan – propagate has, conversely, not much to do with hubris. On the contrary. We would do best to remind ourselves constantly of our fragility, our fallibility. Ceteris paribus, as far as we can impose ourselves “on” relation and substance – from which we are never separate and distinct – we also bear the responsibility, in both an existentialist and an ecological sense, for their preservation and protection. This is the strange predicament we are in: we are “us” and at the same time we are “the world.” Nevertheless as suggested, the three components of the relationship triad need not be mutually inconsistent. They can be just as symbiotic as particle and wave theory in physics. For example, even though we are, at a certain moment in time, cyborgs with heart implants, we are still going to have to ask ourselves in the near future whether we want, as humans, however cyborg-like, to take up for instance far-reaching gene therapy. “What a human is” changes – we are what we are mediated by – but the fact that boundaries shift should not preclude negotiation whatsoever. Such negotiations are among the central topics of Verbeek’s work on a ‘nonhumanist’ ethics of technology (2008a). They also lie at the root of concerns shared by many theorists in many contemporary disciplines. Heinz von Foerster, for one, proposes to live by the credo: ‘[…] “Whatever I do will change the world.”’ (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 152) Derrick de Kerckhove puts it poetically in a gloss in his The Skin of Culture: ‘I am the Earth looking at itself’ (1997b, 216). And Luciano Floridi sketches the task in this manner: ‘The challenge is to reconcile our roles as informational organisms and agents within nature and as stewards of nature. […] The odd thing is that we are slowly coming to realize that we have such a hybrid nature.’ (2010, 121) Pulsating softly through and within these insights is a feeling that we cannot shake: the task is up to us. And the performance, of any task, requires the “right attitude.” There is, at last, something to be said for the simple, almost purely grammatical recognition of the fact that we cannot attest to our ‘cyborg’ nature without using the word “we” in a sentence. It is us speaking. Indeed, the world speaks through, in us. But that does not absolve us from our responsibility. If we wish to go on speaking and talking for a longer while, we may want to consider more intensely the – again, almost trivial – idea that within the medial nodes in which we take part “we” still live, and die. Change occurs. Our life ends. Our love 225

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ends. Which brings us to the final section of this chapter.

9.6

Love is Blind; Love Is Happiness Is Suffering

Our relationships with media – in other words: our relationships as such – take, at the deepest ontological level, the form of a medial node, that is however at any time “directed” towards “us.” In Part 0 we outlined two heuristics with which to approach our “bond with technology”: blindness and ambivalence. In concluding this chapter we briefly expound on how these two heuristics bear on the concept of the medial node. THE THREE-COMPONENT ELUSIVENESS

Within each of the three components of the relationship triad a certain amount and a specific aspect of ‘technological blindness’ prevails. As said, we do not wholly get in view “what we get” from technologies or media. In their morphology, in McLuhan’s terms, all medial nodes are double-sided: they harbor a visible and an invisible side. As “lover,” we remain unaware of the full scope of the extension growing out of us. We do not realize that what makes us lovers is, exactly, that we flow over, reach out. Our being lovers is defined precisely by the lack that we most unconsciously attempt to compensate for.295 The “love,” i.e., the relation between “us” and one or other “technology,” then, can be characterized by several degrees of obliviousness, as is amply demonstrated in the work of the postphenomenologists. Every act or event of mediation necessarily induces an amount of blindness – none is ever pure or untainted. Since everything is a medial node, pure mediation will be hard to come by; for example, even “unmediated” visual perception (e.g., without glasses, binoculars, or screens) is still mediated by the medial node that is our brain, and the medial nodes of neuronal circuits making up that brain, et cetera. And the “beloved,” at last, essentially hides itself, at least partly. Its ‘core’ remains unreachable, unperceivable, ungraspable. From out of its depths, it “works” its effects. We can only describe it as far as we “see” it. But perhaps we never completely grasp ‘formal cause’ – we can only attempt to understand it tentatively. Potential surprises still abound. THE THREE-COMPONENT DEFECT

Each component also showcases the ambivalence typical for our interaction with 226

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technology. As we have seen, this ambivalence roots in our expectations around or from technologies, i.e., “what we want” from them. We expect them to compensate for defects and “losses”; but at the same time they may cause new defects in the form of unforeseen side-effects. In other words, the capacity for metamorphosis, again in McLuhan’s words, of each medium roots it firmly in unpredictability. The “lover” extends itself out of lack or due to a lack, a defect that is in itself foundational and non-exhaustible. For instance, we use glasses when our eyesight flounders. But the “defect” need not concern a situation in which something at first worked flawless and has now become flawed. A perfectly smoothly functioning medial node like our feet – or ability to walk – may not need correcting, repairing, or remedying in itself, but still we choose to enhance it by way of bicycles or cars. Thus, the “defect” may not be a defect in itself, but is always relative to a possible “better.” Then, also with each mediation something is lost in itself, as already indicated. That loss may not simply concern our perception; in other words, it may not only determine the shape and the intensity of the “blindness” – although McLuhan would probably see the perceptual effects as primordial and so influencing everything else. ‘The medium is the message,’ in its mediation aspect, means that at all times, something is gained and something is lost. Nevertheless, mediation, the love, cannot be so easily separated from the beloved object (just as we can but in theory distinguish between the lover and the love). If any constellation of the four ‘laws’ constitutes the overall effect, it is rooted in the secret stirrings of the object’s inner core, “beneath the surface.” LOVE: A MEDIAL AFFAIR

And so our “bond with technology” is a medial affair. This love, blind and defected, is wholly made up of medial nodes. And vice versa. But although the blindness and the ambivalence can be located in each of the three components we have outlined, it should be noted that these phenomena or aspects always arise “as one.” They do not reside “in” the parts as such. In other words, the elusiveness and defectedness take place along the three components. Yet, as we try to make sense of how they come about, we soon realize that our analysis up until now has remained relatively… vague. We have focused on how the relationship triad functions in a “structural” manner. It takes shape as a medial node in which three components interact across a scheme of relation as well as substance, and are characterized and tainted by an essential elusiveness and 227

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ambivalence. However this has been up until now a merely abstract approach – we have gone about our business as if there was in the whole world but one medial node, one relationship triad. As if there was only love in the singular. In the ‘mythical’ all-at-onceness of the “one” love, we can seemingly abide safely and tell ourselves “it will be like this forever.” At the structural level it is but the (eternally) present organization we have to account for. In reality, however, countless loves coexist, crash into each other, form new wholes. As soon as multiplicity is reckoned in, change… becomes.

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PART II: HISTORICAL LEVEL — LOVE IN THE PLURAL Where change happens, or time takes place…

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10 Us in Things: The Lovers’ Fight in Technical Form – or, Material Ideology ‘A technological unconscious hides the interaction between reason and experience.’ (Feenberg 2010a, xviii)

In Part I, the three components of the relationship triad were studied in their “structural” shape. Now we turn to the “historical” level, at which the abstract formal structures of the singular bond are incorporated in concrete constellations consisting of multiple medial nodes. Once again we start with the “lover” component. At the “historical” level the concept of ‘extension,’ because it concerns a multiplicity of relationships, becomes tainted with power imbalances. The extension that is at the “structural” level merely ‘enhancement’ in McLuhan’s sense, takes the shape of “material ideology” here. This we will clarify by way of the ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ of Andrew Feenberg. Feenberg’s work can in an essential manner complement and complete McLuhan’s framework, which we endeavor to show by way of an overview of the existing general debate between (McLuhanist) media theory and ‘Critical’ approaches. Nevertheless, in order to “fit” Feenberg for McLuhan, one small modification needs to be applied to his theory that concerns the value of efficiency; this will be done, in turn, on the basis of the ideas of Michel de Certeau.

10.1 If We Are All Extended, Who Is Extended “Most”? THE JEALOUS LOVERS: WHO GETS WHAT?

We, as the ones relating to or loving technology, are more than ourselves. We are, in fact, technology. This is essentially, as we have seen, the idea of McLuhan’s take on the Narcissus myth. The lover peers into the depths of his reflection, mesmerized by the mirror image, of which he mistakenly beliefs it is “another.” The bias at work in this scheme, however, does not so much consist in the staring person being in love with himself; no, the true danger lurks in the fact that he loves something of which he does not realize that it originates in himself. The ‘somnambulist’ of which McLuhan talks, misinterprets the true character of technology this way. Chapter 6 saw the emergence of a philosophical anthropology rooted in this 231

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notion of ‘extension.’ All technologies and media are extensions of human body parts, senses, or capabilities – but this very idea in fact specifies, paradoxically, the form of what a “human” is. Technologies spring forth from the human organism, and the human organism offers the “extendable stuff.” The two define each other. Ergo: humans are those creatures that “put themselves out there.” We are all ‘natural-born’ Narcissuses.296 The purported split between “human beings” (subjects) on the one hand and technologies (objects) on the other hand counts for less than we supposed both within modernist discourse and common sense thought. As said, the lover extends into the beloved. Both are to a great extent indistinguishable. Yet up until now we have only considered the lover component from an abstract standpoint: as if there was in the whole world but “one” humantechnology relation, locked in time (and space).297 However that is not how it goes “in reality.” There, countless “lovers” vie with each other over who “gets” which object, in more than one sense of the word: who owns certain objects; who defines, shapes, and designs them; who controls them; who appropriates them; who understands their workings, including their hidden effects… In the real world, one person does not “get” as much as another. Imbalances abound. In the real world, there are not just human-technology relations, there are also power relations. Yet it would be a mistake to say that the latter have nothing to do whatsoever with the former. Certainly given recent developments within the philosophy of technology, of which we will treat more extensively in the course of this chapter – and which to a certain extent stretch back to Marx – the interrelatedness of humans, technologies, and power must and can no longer be disregarded. IDEOLOGY: EXTENSION IN THE PLURAL – COMPLETING MCLUHAN

In Chapter 2 we saw how McLuhan to a certain extent errs in this regard. As said, a few of the criticisms aimed at him have to do with his lack of concern for political matters in general and power imbalances in particular. In what follows we will further try to make sense of these criticisms – McLuhan’s technology notion is politically moot – which are in our view for a large part to the point. In fact we will attempt to show that the extension concept may simply be kept, but that it needs to be amended, supplemented by another, perhaps more elusive form of extension. For whereas McLuhan’s extension idea stays abstract, i.e., describes the formal way in which organic capabilities shapeshift into material technologies and media on, so to speak, the “micro-level” – referring to but “one,” i.e., the generic human 232

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organism out of which technology is born – we also need an account of what that extension means and produces on a “macro-level,” that is, reckoning with other values than for example ‘enhancement’ (of efficiency) and with a multiplicity of actors. It appears that only as soon as one transcends the level of the formally generic, one can start to notice the “extending” of other things too, albeit even in this case with great difficulty. Those “other things” are, in essence, power relations298; technology is not just a means to an end: surreptitiously it also serves to solidify power. But it cleverly appears as just means to an end; in that way technology is to a certain extent ideology in material form. Those are some of the lessons we can learn from the work of philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg. It is therefore to the latter’s work that we will in the present chapter mainly turn. We shall proceed in four large steps. In a first move we will sketch Feenberg’s ideas, particularly elaborating on the concept of rationality, a fundamental notion within his theoretical framework. Feenberg’s version is, as we will see, ideally suited to complement McLuhan’s relatively one-sided conception of it. What is more, it can be said to top off a whole tradition of critique on McLuhan’s thought that began long ago and that relates McLuhanist media theory in diverse ways to the ideas of Critical Theorists; in a second step, we will outline this debate. Third, we will see how Feenberg is able to deliver a crucially synthesizing outlook. However, it will appear that Feenberg’s concept of rationality needs itself some tweaking, as we shall attempt to demonstrate by way of the ideas of Michel de Certeau (a crucial influence on Feenberg himself). Fourth and finally, then, we couple these results back to the formally generic idea of extension we started off with, and investigate how the relation between the aforementioned micro- and macro-level should exactly be framed.

10.2 Andrew Feenberg: ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ Andrew Feenberg, as we already saw in Chapter 3, has delivered a crucial contribution to the philosophy of technology in offering a framework called ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ (CTT) (1991; 1995a; 1999; 2002)299 that enables one to study technologies in all their specificity and still be sufficiently critical about them. This he does by building on insights deriving from Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas, but also from more empirically oriented approaches such as 233

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STS and ANT. THE SEARCH FOR A MIDDLE ROAD

He thereby endeavors to find a middle road between what he calls ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘substantivist’300 approaches of technology. According to Feenberg these two major models have thus far dominated the philosophical reflection on technology. Instrumentalism sees technology as purely functional: technology serves a purpose, and hence obeys only one value, i.e., efficiency. From Heidegger, however, we have learnt that technology is more than a neutral “means-to”: it influences to a very large extent our being-in-the-world; in fact ‘technology’ forms, as such, the latest instance of Western metaphysics, however signifying a catastrophe for thinking. This in turn makes for a ‘substantivist’ stance: technology here stands for an autonomous, almost demonic force or substance. Feenberg refuses just as much to share this gloomy view and he instead reverts to the work of Herbert Marcuse, who develops a similar pessimistic argument in One-Dimensional Man (2002) but at least retains the hope for future redemption. According to Feenberg we need to hold on to such utopian hopes, however with less ‘essentialism,’ that is, the reducing of technological phenomena to one central principle – as also Habermas situates ‘technical rationality’ within an independent ‘system’ that more and more ‘colonizes’ our ‘lifeworld.’ To this essentialism Feenberg finds a much-needed antidote in approaches like STS and ANT, domains of study that since a few decades have been investigating science and technologies from an empirical standpoint. Their sociologically and philosophically inspired, though essentially field-study-oriented research shows how technologies are always the result of social construction, i.e., of controversies and debates between stakeholders. This last component, then, completes Feenberg’s framework. Only, these empirical studies lack the critical power that essentialist theories offer. It is therefore crucial to combine both in order to steer a middle course between on the one hand utopian, i.e., instrumentalist, and on the other hand dystopian, i.e., substantivist perspectives. How Feenberg manages to do this, can best be illustrated by scrutinizing or revisiting some of his key concepts. CONCEPTS IN CTT

Central is the notion of ‘underdetermination,’ to which we have already indirectly referred in sketching Feenberg’s criticism of instrumentalism: technology cannot 234

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adequately be understood by taking only its functional aspects into account; it is ‘underdetermined’ by the concept of ‘efficiency’ alone. Social and political values are integrated in the design301 of technologies as well.302 But we generally forget these once a technology receives its final form. We then leave the controversies behind us. Referring to Latour’s notion of ‘black box,’ we found, Feenberg calls this ‘closure.’ The ‘black box’ of technology closes303, and all we further do is use it. But as previously seen, the result of the social struggle remains contained in the design as if it was ‘cast in iron.’ Feenberg calls this the ‘technical code’: the technical form of a technology in which social values are embedded (2002, 20-21). Instrumentalism is thus not completely off the mark in posing efficiency as the main working principle: technologies seem to be only efficient, while we ignore or forget the ‘technological unconscious,’ namely, the whole of the social construction, power struggles, and controversies that once gave rise to the final design of a technology. Now exactly this situation grants the powers that be the possibility of deploying technologies to their advantage. For Feenberg essentially defines technologies as means of the elite to maintain power – instruments for the preservation of hegemony, however socially constructed: ‘Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many.’ (2006, 180) This he calls the preservation of ‘operational autonomy.’ But it is not the whole story. Social-constructivist theories have demonstrated that options remain for users, consumers, and interest groups to turn around the black-boxing process or at least help to steer or dislocate it. ‘Constructivism frees technology studies from the dogmatic assumption that efficiency and efficiency alone determines which of the various possible designs of an artifact will end up gaining general acceptance.’ (Feenberg and Bakardjieva 2004, 15) Technologies are inherently ambivalent, full of potentialities, ‘malleable,’ and individuals may within certain limits modify them. In opposition of the maintaining of hierarchy – the technical rationality playing to the benefit of the ruling classes – there remains a possible ‘subversive rationalization.’ Specifically by way of reappropriation, demanding design changes, or political action, the transformation of technologies “from below” is still possible. These three sorts of activity constitute what Feenberg terms ‘technical micropolitics’ (1995a; 1999; 2002) and he provides numerous examples of cases in which such a ‘democratization of technology’ has proven successful. The French Minitel telephone was introduced as a centralistic information tool, but users soon 235

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transformed it into a communication medium; AIDS patients in the 1980s claimed a right to participate in experimental treatments; environmental activists influenced the design of polluting technologies, et cetera. ‘INSTRUMENTALIZATION THEORY’

The idea of a “twofold” rationalization is made clearer by the other mode or way in which Feenberg develops his ideas, i.e., under the name of ‘instrumentalization theory’ (1999, 202ff.; 2002, 175ff.). ‘Instrumentalization’ refers to the manner in which technologies find their place in society. It harbors two opposing movements: primary instrumentalization or ‘functionalization’ and secondary instrumentalization or ‘realization.’ The first posits objects and subjects as elements of a technical system – mere “pawns,” so to speak, in the game of technical rationality. It consists of four moments: ‘decontextualization,’ ‘reduction,’ ‘autonomy,’ and ‘positioning.’ Secondary instrumentalization, conversely, signifies an integrating movement that assigns “existential” meaning again to the technical object and subject within specific contexts. Technologies here are incorporated in actual networks and applications, and “appropriated” by ordinary users. This secondary instrumentalization, too, has four parts: ‘systematization,’ ‘mediation,’ ‘vocation,’ and ‘initiative.’ Only the two movements combined – primary ànd secondary instrumentalization – furnish an adequate picture of technology: ‘The primary level simplifies objects for incorporation into a device while the secondary level integrates the simplified objects to a natural and social environment.’ (Feenberg 2006, 186) In a recent text Feenberg reformulates the instrumentalization theory in terms – hailing from Heidegger – of ‘deworlding’ and ‘disclosure,’ in response to criticisms claiming that the term ‘instrumentalization’ would suggest an instrumentalist interpretation (2003). While the primary instrumentalization has a ‘deworlding’ or “world-occlusive” effect – due to the exclusive focus on efficiency and technical capabilities – the secondary instrumentalization opens up worlds again, and specifically makes possible more diverse states of being-in-the-world. In a still more recent text he employs the notions of ‘reason’ and ‘experience,’ respectively (2010a). Technology by definition contains the two elements. DIALECTICS… OR NOT

In this way Critical Theory of Technology appears to be based on a typically dialectical duality of oppressors and oppressed, however with the difference that 236

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within CTT the oppressors retain the possibility to co-determine their plight by way of the modification of technology. Yet this is not, as Feenberg himself points out304, a completely accurate rendition of his thought. It is true that he is influenced to a great extent by Marxist theory, and the above sketch of his theory indeed suggests that he sees a Marxist-like tension between on the one hand hierarchical control of technology and on the other hand user initiatives; but he does not seek to retain this dialectical tension in its pure form. In other words, the combination of these two components is not a question of dialectical tension as such. Primary instrumentalization appears to correspond to the aforementioned ‘operational autonomy,’ i.e., the development of technical tools as means of power preservation (the “classic,” Weberian technical rationality). In contrast secondary instrumentalization seems to stand for the counteracting measures taken up by individuals or interest groups, thus, ‘democratic’ or ‘subversive rationalization’ (Feenberg 1995b), i.e., the disruption, in a sense, of technical rationality (which was of course never purely “technical” rationality, since that is just the “cover story” put up to conceal the ‘technological unconscious,’ namely the mix of technical, social, and political values and considerations that once gave to the technology its final form). But this is a simplification of Feenberg’s framework, in which the societal incorporation of technologies is to be seen as first and foremost structurally double-sided, and not necessarily politically.305 MCLUHAN’S VS. FEENBERG’S RATIONALITY

But how does Feenberg’s ideas of rationalization and instrumentalization relate to McLuhan’s notion of ‘enhancement,’ then? McLuhan and Feenberg have in common that they both, albeit in very different senses, conceive of a theory in which the concept of “rationality” stars. However with Feenberg it takes central stage, while in McLuhan it rather hides behind the scenes. The latter works out, as we saw in Chapter 6, the theory of media-asextensions, in which the enhancement or enforcement of human capabilities that media furnish make for a heightening of efficiency. The wheel causes us to move faster than our feet allow; the telescope makes us look farther than our eyes unaidedly can. When we become the victim of ailments – bad eyesight, for example – media such as glasses can help us regain our “natural” efficiency. One could thus easily say that McLuhan defends a definition of technology that sees it as an instance of classic, Weberian ‘technical rationality.’ 237

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The charge of instrumentalism – technology provides a means to an end and no further questions asked – would therefore not be far off were it not for McLuhan’s vehement critique of ‘efficient causality,’ which could be equated with ‘rationality,’ in this case306 the syllogistic reasoning of the ‘philosopher.’ ‘Rationality’ in this sense, although McLuhan honors the very concept through the posing of the extension idea, stands for the sequential, linear, ‘logical’ way of thinking (co-) produced by a monomaniacal focus on visuality. There is thus, in McLuhan’s version, as we have already amply seen, an inherent double-sidedness to rationality: each medium can be said to boost efficiency – at the same time this very heightening of efficiency harbors inherent biases. Strikingly, we know now, within Feenberg’s framework the concept of rationality exhibits a similar ambiguity. The two-sided conception of rationality that Feenberg elaborates, however, seems to divert considerably from McLuhan’s use of the concept. But does it really differ so much? With McLuhan technologies are extensions, i.e., enhancements of human potentialities; but at the same time they have effects that escape our conscious perception. Feenberg, as we elaborated more detailedly in Chapter 3, speaks of a ‘technological unconscious,’ namely, the social and political values that constitute the design of a specific technology, while practically that technology appears as exclusively serving functional purposes. They seem to agree on the common sense assumption that technology in everyday use is employed to “get something done,” whatever the further implications of that use may be. Those implications, in both McLuhan’s and Feenberg’s framework, concern the “outside” of a technology.307 However whereas McLuhan suggests this “outside” to be steered in an almost mysterious way “from inside” the technology – accusations of technological determinism essentially root in this suggestion – with Feenberg the “outside” “around” the technology that gets neglected in everyday use of course has also come from outside, namely, from the debates and controversies raging during the design phase before there was agreed on a final form. There does thus appear to exist a substantial schism between McLuhan’s and Feenberg’s notions of ‘rationality’ and ‘efficiency.’ But the upside is that, as suggested, Feenberg can complement McLuhan to the extent that through CTT we can fill in this mysterious “inside” that McLuhan presupposes, and that necessarily leads to allegations of technological determinism308: in this view, the ‘message’ of the medium or at least part of it, that McLuhan purportedly sees to be coming from the medium “itself” – its form – can be analyzed as ‘ideology,’ namely, the 238

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residue of power relations albeit in material form. Feenberg’s ‘technical code’ in this way would match with McLuhan’s ‘form.’ It is however essential to frame this discussion within a wider perspective. For since decades there has been going on a now and then quite heated debate between the broader traditions of on the one hand media theory and on the other hand Critical Theory, and it appears that they have always to a large extent lived at odds. In the next section we will sketch this debate, to then, in the section that follows, attempt to position within it our own McLuhan-Feenberg dialogue.

10.3 Media Theory and Critical Theory: A Many-Faced Discussion We endeavor to establish a conversation between McLuhan’s and Feenberg’s concepts of rationality and efficiency; but generally media theory – especially in its McLuhanist guise – and Critical Theory – or more broadly Marxist-inspired cultural theory – have crossed each other’s paths more than once. In fact their liaison goes some way back and it exhibits all the characteristics of a tense lovehate relationship. We can distinguish between four great strands of discussion. First, media theory has been proposed as a necessary accessory to Critical Theory (and to philosophy of technology as a field in whole309). Second, McLuhan’s work has been thoroughly criticized by authors within Critical and Marxist traditions. Third, and paradoxically, the same body of work has been interpreted as inherently dialectical in nature and hence in agreement with key ideas of Critical Theorists. This notwithstanding the fact that, fourth, McLuhan himself has blown hot and cold about Marxism and Marxist ideas. MEDIA THEORY’S CRITICISMS OF CRITICAL THEORY

First, several authors have pointed out ways in which media theory offers much required amendments to frameworks developed within the Critical tradition. Richard Coyne for one sees Critical Theory’s ‘elusiveness’ as one of its major vices. He enumerates four criticisms: the purported domination by one class of another, trickling down to mass culture, makes for an all too simple view of phenomena that are really much more complex; consequently, since domination is to a large extent elusive, emancipation from it cannot be straightforwardly proscribed or defined; moreover, the Critical position hides the fact that it harbors power relations itself; and finally, Critical thinking is a form of technological thinking 239

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itself since it deploys causal thinking, however without accounting for it (Coyne 1995, 73-74). Coyne subsequently makes a plea for a shift to a Foucauldian-hermeneutic media theory, that stresses power rather than domination, the ‘hermeneutical notion of distanciation’ rather than dialectic, and the investigation of the workings of community rather than causal thinking (ibid., 80). Joost Van Loon, then, launches a similar critique when he questions Critical Theory’s assumption that all technologies are means for domination and sees – McLuhanist – media theory as a crucial corrective, since it can analyze technologies as media not exclusively tied to political constellations: ‘It [this approach] allows us to analyse media technologies as having their own dynamic which is not necessarily conducive to the logic of capital and may, for example, enable forms of resistance that became marked expressions of class struggle.’ (2006, 168) These moves of pitting media theory against Critical Theory may perhaps be interpreted as a reclamation of land once lost to the more powerful army, namely, dialectical approaches that became much more “fashionable” during the 1980s than McLuhan’s enigmatic musings about media effects.310 CRITICAL THEORY’S CRITICISMS OF MEDIA THEORY

This leads us to the second point, which has already been a focus of attention in the previous sections and in Chapter 2. As soon as McLuhan starts to rise to fame in the 1960s thinkers from the leftist side almost immediately discard his ideas as essentially conservative, technologically determinist, and politically moot. But he is at the same time treated with as much suspicion by the right. This probably relates to the historical situation sketched by Marjorie Ferguson that in the eyes of the student revolutionary counter-culture McLuhan’s work stands side by side with Herbert Marcuse’s much more systematic, elaborated, and, most importantly, clearly Marxist-inspired political analysis – although there of course is a huge epistemological gap between the two accounts (2005, 22).311 Havers, for one, points to a logical slip, of which the authors who link up McLuhan’s thought to that of the great Critical theorist of counter-culture, are guilty: ‘In confusing McLuhan with Herbert Marcuse, they imply that the anticapitalist sentiments of McLuhan must suggest a leftist emancipatory orientation on his part. It does not occur to these authors that one can be anti-capitalist from the opposite side of the political spectrum.’ (2003, 515) For according to Havers, as we have seen, McLuhan’s work remains right-wing through and through. 240

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Thus it comes as no surprise that it has been the target of many leftist attacks. And the core of all Marxist-Critical critiques of McLuhan consists, as we already suggested, in the observation that McLuhan simply cannot account for the workings of ideology and domination and hence in general for the existence of political force fields.312 Raymond Williams (2003), Stuart Hall (Grossberg 1986), and James Carey (2005b) are among those within cultural studies who decry McLuhan for his apparent celebration of (mass) media. Guy Debord, as already mentioned, furnishes a sarcastic and bitter critique of McLuhan’s seeming approval of media, adding that McLuhan in later life eventually comes to his senses and turns towards a more gloomy rhetoric (2005). Douglas Kellner, then, specifically through a critique of Jean Baudrillard – according to Kellner Baudrillard ‘outMcLuhans’ McLuhan himself in that he uncritically adopts some of his ideas and radicalizes them – suggests a neo-Marxist dialectical approach to mitigate some of McLuhan’s shortcomings, among them strict formalism, media essentialism, and technological determinism (1989, 144). Andrew Feenberg himself, at last, cites McLuhan – albeit more in passing – as someone whose ‘[…] vision of electronic solidarity puts a pretty face on the corresponding nightmare of a one-dimensional society.’ (1995a, 136) READING MCLUHAN AS CRITICAL THEORIST

Third, however, and strangely enough, McLuhan has also been interpreted as a representative of dialectical or Marxist-like thinking. First and foremost perhaps in a pejorative sense. Arnold Rockman for instance draws analogies between McLuhan and Marx in depicting both as figures who typically start out from the margins – literally: the province – but gradually succeed in winning influence through prophetic but hardly logically founded statements (just like Jezus and Hitler, by the way). ‘The slogans and arguments of a prophet must appear to his contemporaries the height of absurdity and extremism.’ (2005, 142) Rockman furthermore describes McLuhan’s theory as Marxism minus the ideas of class consciousness and of the relation between man and means of production, and as Freudianism without the notion of the Super-Ego and its role in social control. ‘He [McLuhan] leaves only the relation of persons to their technology.’ (ibid., 150) Nevertheless he appreciates McLuhan’s style, for it at least does not attempt to give the illusion of objectivity. In a more positive vein other authors have pointed out substantial and possibly fruitful convergences between McLuhan’s work and dialectical approaches. 241

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Especially the previously mentioned work of media scholars Judith Stamps and Paul Grosswiler is of importance here (cf. also Theall 1975). Judith Stamps reads McLuhan as well as Harold Innis as critics of modernity comparable with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. ‘Innis and McLuhan present a highly concrete reading of critical theory.’ (1995, 40) What all these thinkers share according to her is dialectical method, seen as ‘[…] a dialogue that tries, by way of resolution, to overcome the distance between participants.’ (ibid., 12) Dialogue in this sense essentially stands for the recognition of margins (ibid., 15). Paul Grosswiler, too, seeks to ‘reclaim’ McLuhan for Critical Theory and suggests McLuhan’s work to offer a highly useful complement to it: ‘Stripped of mythology and reinforced in his dialectic and historical methodology, McLuhan offers a theory of media evolution and human intervention that Marxism has missed.’ (1998, 5) McLuhan thereby proceeds by way of ‘dialectics’ himself, but dialectics of media and their effects – being, Grosswiler adds, not technologically deterministic at all. However vice versa, Critical Theory makes up for defects in McLuhan’s framework: ‘Critical theorists could have helped McLuhan formulate a social theory in linking the mass media to cultural and social change.’ (ibid., 112) MCLUHAN’S READING OF CRITICAL THEORY

Which brings us to the fourth and last point. For notwithstanding possible parallels between McLuhan’s thought and dialectical approaches, McLuhan himself has always cherished a rather ambiguous standpoint on Marx and Marxism (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 72, 75, 77, 78; Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 402, 405). He sees Marx, like so many other thinkers, as falling victim to the linear-fragmented way of thinking implied by print culture. This stance leads to outrightly confusing statements such as: ‘Whereas Aristotle saw Nature as the ground against which appeared the gargoyle of usury, Marx saw the market as the ground from which stared the Gorgon of surplus value.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 72) At the same time McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride, as we saw, stands as a vehement indictment against consumer culture313 which could easily be mistaken for a defense of working class humbleness. In the picture of the world that the Bride paints, the individual of industrial consumer society, dazed and dazzled by an almost-tyrannical system of advertising mechanisms, does not seem to be much more than a cog in the machine:

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Our educational process is necessarily geared to eliminate all bone. The supple, well-adjusted man is the one who has learned to hop into the meat-grinder while humming a hitparade tune. Individual resistance to that process is labeled destructive and unco-operative. […] Why train men if there is only a market for robots? (M. McLuhan 2002, 128)314

All of this indeed suggests an idea of class difference to be implicitly present in McLuhan.315 The ‘folklore of industrial man’ of the book’s subtitle is definitely not being produced by the ‘folk’ of industrial society, but by the people in power. ‘Technology means constant social revolution.’ (ibid., 40) Also in later work McLuhan retains this suggestion – of higher powers being in control, steering the course of technology, the effects of which the “common man” can only slavishly undergo or of which he has only a vague understanding. ‘We have no reason to be grateful to those who haphazardly juggle the thresholds in the name of innovation.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 253) Or: ‘Is there the possibility of new freedom in the aesthetic response to the models of perception outered from us into our technology?’ (M. McLuhan 1997b, 22) Nevertheless, no matter in how far McLuhan takes it up for the guileless individual, one should also be reminded of Havers’ admonition that ‘[…] The Mechanical Bride must be read not in the light of the Frankfurt School, but in the context of the Southern suspicion of Northern capitalism.’ (2003, 515) MEDIA THEORY AND CRITICAL THEORY: WHERE THE BRIDGES ARE

In sum nevertheless, all of the above suggests, generally, that some communication between media theory and Critical Theory of Technology is possible. Media theory can remedy a few ailments of Critical Theory, and vice versa Critical Theory can tackle issues left unresolved by media theory – and this is probably due to the sharing by both of some common groundwork, be it dialectical (or dialogical) method or a critical stance towards media. But what does it mean for the McLuhan-Feenberg dialogue we have started? Critical Theory scorns media theory for dismissing economical and political determinations. The main argument hurled at Critical Theory by media theory states that not everything is necessarily power-related. It is our conviction that these general views all hinge on the concepts, central in Feenberg, of rationality and efficiency. Feenberg can offer a crucially synthesizing perspective on the matter, however with some modifications. Those are the topics of our next section. 243

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10.4 The Place of Efficiency: Fitting Feenberg for Media Theory Let us recapitulate. We started out noting how McLuhan’s extension idea functions mainly on the micro- or “structural” level. All media as such are extensions of capabilities belonging to the human organism as such; in other words, the generic medium springs from the generic human. But what happens when we investigate the macro- or “historical” level, at which not only many media but also crowds of people intermingle and interact – groups of individuals and not just generic human organisms? Could we not expect then that certain groups of people succeed in introducing, sustaining, and controlling the media and technologies of their choice and not any others, thereby exactly being able to affirm and “eternalize” their position of control? This is the point that Feenberg makes. We consecutively sketched the existing debate between on the one hand Critical Theory and on the other hand media theory in general and McLuhan in particular. From that debate an incongruity between the two approaches emerged. However both streams of theory seem also compatible to a certain extent – as proven by readings of McLuhan as “dialectical thinker” – they divert at least at this one instance: Critical Theory criticizes McLuhan’s lack of attention to power struggles; media theory, conversely, rebuts Critical Theory’s exaggerated focus on them. McLuhan himself remains relatively vague on the issue. So should we focus more or less on power relations? SYSTEM VS. LIFEWORLD: LOWERING THE BARS

The problem seems unsolvable were it not for the distinction we have made between “structural” and “historical” levels. At the abstract level, class struggles do not play. There just the medium-as-extension, as mirror image of human betterment – enhancement – reigns. Power battles can by definition only enter at the concrete level, at which many individuals “struggle for survival.” It would seem that media theorists tend to speak more about the (“structural”) micro-level, whereas Critical Theorists focus first and foremost on the (“historical”) macrolevel. At micro-level technologies “just” enhance. At macro-level they “enhance” too, but in the form of the ideological consolidation of power relations. The two, however – the generic extension idea and the notion of extension-as-ideology – can easily cohabitate when combined in an overall framework that encompasses both levels, as we endeavor to develop here. 244

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Yet we should not overlook this one inescapable fact, already briefly touched upon before: there really is no such thing as a distinction between abstract”structural” and concrete-”historical” levels except in theory.316 In “reality” there are only concrete humans and concrete media. Yet each of these at the same time exhibit a proper “form” – very much in McLuhan’s sense of ‘formal cause’ – making them either “human” (subject) or “medium” (object), delineations we could regard as abstract. “Abstract” and “concrete” are thus inextricably intertwined.317 Thus, even situating ‘enhancement’ on the micro-level and power struggles on the macro-level does not make for a significant gain, for both levels always coexist. What is more, they co-constitute each other. The abstract extensions deliver the material, i.e., the “stuff” with which societal groups can only concretely start to work, while those groups (co-)define, conversely, the form that extensions can take. The form of the technology “wheel” for example allows for just a selective range of possible societal shapes. But groups can, by contrast, make a conscious decision to disable the abstract coming-into-being of certain technologies within certain contexts – as for instance the Amish choose to incorporate the wheel (though restricted in use) but exclude digital technologies. Although the abstract enhancement that digital technology provides is a virtual possibility – a sudden turnaround in the value system of the Amish would perhaps be all that is needed for their communities to be flooded by it – it is not a real possibility. It is at this point that Feenberg’s outlook can bring solace. For exactly his instrumentalization model furnishes an account of how “abstract” and “concrete” come together in “real life.” With the implementation of each and every technology a double-edged movement of ‘technical’ and ‘subversive’ rationality steers its course through time and space. Technical rationality positions the object – and the subject – within the technical system; subversive rationality claims it back for the ‘lifeworld.’ But both dynamics are just like the abstract and concrete levels, respectively, inextricably intertwined. What Feenberg appears to do is take Habermas’ distinction between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld,’ as two separate spheres or domains of which the first more and more budges in on the latter – the former so to speak “harboring” technology, the latter “technology-free” – and bring it down to the level of “individual” technologies: every technology-in-use integrates systemic and lifeworld components or characteristics. This, as we have seen, does not automatically imply that a class struggle is fought out over and within every technology; the tension 245

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between primary and secondary instrumentalization is not necessarily a dialectical tension. It is only through instrumentalization as a whole – as a double-sided process – that ‘operational autonomy’ as such can take place (in other words and put simply: one should not equate it with primary instrumentalization). MCLUHAN’S ‘FORM,’ FEENBERG’S ‘TECHNICAL CODE’

In this way Feenberg succeeds in offering a synthesizing perspective on the aforementioned debate between media theory and Critical Theory. For in his outlook, sufficient attention to power struggles teams up with an adequate focus on ‘formal’ media (technology) characteristics. This “works” because in this view power struggles are not necessarily located within the secondary instrumentalization, but shift instead towards the interplay between both instrumentalization movements. One thus does not have to choose between either attending to media structures (abstract-”structural”) or power constellations (concrete-”historical”) for in fact both make for – merely analytically discernible – instances within a completely natural “unity” of these levels. This does not just mean that power relations in fact take shape through the interaction of primary and secondary instrumentalization; also what we have treated as the abstract characteristics of media – extension-as-enhancement – come into existence by way of this interplay. Thus, both the aspects of extensionas-enhancement (abstract) and of extension-as-ideology (concrete) actually emerge in reciprocal interaction. In between the poles of primary and secondary instrumentalization, of ‘deworlding’ and ‘disclosure,’ of ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ (Feenberg 2010a), media find their abstract “form” as well as their concrete ideological implementation. These two combined, constitute the actual McLuhanist ‘form,’ a concept which we should thus henceforth correct as follows: ‘form’ integrates ‘technical’ enforcement and ideological empowerment.318 And seen from this corrected perspective McLuhanist ‘form’ signifies exactly the same thing as Feenberg’s ‘technical code.’ However for this scheme to completely function, one modification within Feenberg’s framework may be needed. He adjusts the notion of ‘rationality’ to the extent that it not only incorporates ‘technical’ but also ‘subversive’ rationalization. He so makes possible a reframing of the concept of ‘rationality’ within McLuhan’s work, namely, not just as the imperative of fragmentation and uniformization ordered by ‘visual’ culture, but as a generic concept of extension, covering both “efficient,” abstract enhancement and “ideological,” concrete power consolidation. 246

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At the same time Feenberg still seems to exhibit the tendency to isolate the concept of efficiency to a large extent within the bounds of technical rationality, in posing efficiency as the latter’s main organizing value, in contrast to other ‘social’ values that belong more with ‘democratic rationalization.’ And this ‘value’ of efficiency mostly conflicts with “other,” ‘social’ values. ‘The only consensus value left in modern societies is efficiency, precisely the value we are attempting to bound so that other values may flourish.’ (Feenberg 2002, 9) Conversely, in attempting ‘democratic rationalization’ ‘[…] the intervention of interests does not necessarily reduce efficiency, but biases its achievement according to a broader social program […]’ (ibid., 21). A consistent thinking through of the consequences of the scheme sketched above would inevitably lead us to the conclusion that no one value can be posited on the side of either technical or subversive rationality. But at many times Feenberg seems to suggest that secondary instrumentalization stands for a sort of battle, out of social considerations, against the dominance of efficiency. Yet much everyday experience attests to the fact that matters cannot be framed in such dichotomous terms. To make this point clear we need to make a brief detour via the work of Michel de Certeau, whom Feenberg himself has been influenced by: we will see that in de Certeau’s framework it is perfectly possible for the efficient to be social, and for the social to be efficient. MICHEL DE CERTEAU: KEY IDEAS

In de Certeau’s work on culture and everyday life, the ordinary man takes central stage: ‘Everyman,’ ‘The Man Without Qualities,’ ‘the anonymous hero’ (1984).319 This ordinary man, in de Certeau’s account, does not spend his life just taking in the ‘products’ of culture; he is also a creator, and an unsuspected one at that: active where we expected him to be passive, clever where we expected him to be dumb or “just receiving.”320 Throughout many unsuspicious everyday activities, hitherto just uninterestedly catalogued under ‘popular culture’ – e.g., consuming, reading, walking, ... – he leaves his own “mark.” This idea de Certeau most famously works out by way of the distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’ (ibid., xixff.). A strategy is the ‘calculus of force relationships’ deployed by proprietary powers. A structure so to speak that is established “from on high” by hierarchical institutions or organizations. It articulates a place that can be defined as a ‘proper,’ from where relations with an exterior ‘other’ can be developed. Strategies rely heavily on visibility – the visibility of the ‘other’ – and they constitute victories of 247

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space over time. Political, economic and scientific rationality functions according to this scheme, says de Certeau. A tactic, on the other hand, can be defined as a subtle, countervailing action, marked by an absence of power and of a ‘proper place.’ The place in which a tactic operates belongs to someone else (namely, a proprietary power). There is, in contrast to the strategical situation, no borderline to be found that distinguishes an ‘other’ as a visible totality. Hence tactics do not rely on space for their actions but on time – seizing the right ‘occasion’ or ‘opportunity.’ Tactics, as ways of operating, belong to the ordinary man, to the users-consumers. In this scheme of things, the ‘oppressed’ are not simply the ‘oppressed.’ The weak ‘poach,’ as de Certeau terms it (ibid., xii), on the territory of the strong. Inside the framework installed by the powerful, while appearing to be ‘obedient,’ they pursue their own ends making use of the material on offer. For example, la perruque (‘the wig’) (ibid., 25-26) is the practice of a worker doing his ‘own’ work during office or factory hours, making use of tools and material owned by the company, disguising it as work for his employer. Here the concept of tactics is vividly illustrated: the worker does not own the workplace – a ‘proper’ owned by his boss or employer – but he seizes the right ‘opportunity’ to surreptitiously deflect the rules and work for himself or a social group he represents, thus transforming space into time. However, de Certeau emphasizes that this is not just whim: tactics have their own ‘operational logic.’ Now actually many everyday practices, according to de Certeau, are tactical in character: talking, reading, walking, shopping, cooking, ... (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998) Tactical logics can also be found in games, legends and ways of speaking (e.g., stylistic figures). In fact tactics amount to a rhetoric and a style themselves. Ways of operating ‘[...] are merely variants within a general semiotics of tactics.’ (de Certeau 1984, 39) EFFICIENCY AS SOCIAL VALUE: APPROACHING MCLUHAN

On de Certeau’s strategy-tactic distinction Feenberg has partly built his own primary-secondary instrumentalization scheme. Yet whereas with Feenberg one could easily be confused into thinking that efficiency belongs wholly on the ‘primary instrumentalization’ side, in de Certeau’s framework this trap door is safely closed off. A tactical operation can be just as much “efficient” as a strategical one.321 For if a tactic would not have its very own efficiency it could never be a tactic as such, hiding unnoticed inside the bounds of a ‘proper place.’ To be able to surreptitiously make photocopies for one’s hobby stamp collecters’ club at work 248

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one has to deploy a fair amount of efficiency. Also activities such as cooking, talking, gaming, and so on have exhibited since ages their own sorts of efficiency. But these are not efficiencies in the service of ‘proper’ power. What confuses the matter is the traditional interpretation of ‘technical rationality’ and its sedimentation in ideology. It is true that in the world of today we often “wait” for science to “tell us what to do.” Angus in this regard observes: ‘[I]n our present postmodern condition, there is no independently subsisting basis for public debate and evaluation that is not thoroughly permeated by specialist discourses.’ (2000b, 59) Take for example the recent debate about the purported damage brought on by microwaves emitted by wireless devices such as cellphones (and cellphone masts) and modems. Research indicates that the radiation produced by these technologies cause all sorts of ailments ranging from concentration disorders to cancers. But the results are heavily contested and discussed.322 In the meantime, of course, no consensus on the issue is reached. We seem to wait for a definitive confirmation from the scientific world before we can even begin to consider practical “measures.”323 Something similar has happened with cigarettes. Only about sixty years ago cigarettes were seen – and especially pictured and advertised – as harmless (even beneficial). Then a longer period followed in which indications became stronger and stronger that in fact the opposite was the case. Smokers then were often already looked upon with distrust and disgust, but they themselves, in legitimating what was more and more perceived as a “bad habit,” seemed to rely on the remaining ambiguity lurking beneath research results. Robert N. Proctor points out that by the 1950s evidence for the harmfulness of smoking was firmly in place. The industry reacted by raising a massive counter-campaign, hence consolidating the purported ambiguity (Proctor 2004). Since a few years however, it seems the true “revolution” has really come to pass. The evidence that smoking endangers health appears to have become (finally) “societally” incontournable; and in many countries across the world smoking is now banned by legislation, not only from public buildings but even from bars.324 One may say, with Proctor, that it has not been the establishment of scientific certainty that brought on this turn – for it had been “there” since decades – but some other “social” factors. Still, it is the widespread acceptance of that data that is at stake. No matter how deliberately misinformation is proceeded, it is still from science, from ‘technical rationality,’ that the answer is in the end expected. Exactly the same thing may happen (or not) with cellphones. There seems to 249

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be no way of giving health, i.e., “social” considerations their right due as long as these values are not grounded “efficiently.” But we have, in cultural studies for example, always regarded this turning towards science for advice with suspicion. Yet, what if this request is not so much grounded in the “non-social” dictate of technical rationality but rather in the “natural” “technical taintedness” of social coping? Seen from that perspective, the balancing of social values asks for efficiency, in this specific case the ‘technical-rational’ perspective of science.325 For, the other way around it is simple, as social constructivists have argued: matters of technical efficiency are socially established. It is therefore in any case problematic to differentiate between efficiency and “other,” “social” values. Why can social values themselves not be efficient, or the opposite? In this direction the fact of “inextricable intermingling” of primary and secondary instrumentalization eventually points: the dichotomy between ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ may be helpful in theory, but is irrelevant “in reality.” Do not all values integrate primary and secondary aspects? If Feenberg criticizes Habermas for retaining an all-too strict distinction between system and lifeworld, and instead “brings down” this dichotomy to the level of technologies themselves, he should be consistent and disband the strict separation at that level as well. Why can’t we counteract the efficiency of the marketeers and the manufacturers with our own efficiency-of-resistance? As much is pointed out, although from a different perspective, by Graeme Kirkpatrick, when he taxes Feenberg’s ‘narrow concept of efficiency.’ ‘[T]echnical reason […] is not inherently violent, unless you hold that any action is violent.’ (2008, 120) And he goes on to observe how the activities of hackers, open source programmers, and shareware producers are intensely based on technical reason (ibid., 155).326 Efficiency, thus, although it makes for a central value of the industrial-capitalist complex, should not be straightforwardly pitted against socalled “other” values, for it blends with those other values in exactly a nondialectical way. As Henry David Thoreau quips in ‘Life without Principle’: ‘An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office.’ (2004, 371-372) Efficiency as a value, just like so many other values, cross-cuts through these other values.327 In essence all values have the tendency of “tainting” each other – like chameleons taking on the colors of their surrounding environment. In other words: in ‘experience’ is ‘reason,’ and in ‘reason’ ‘experience.’ There may exist thus 250

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a form of efficiency which we could call “lived efficiency.” It is the sort of efficiency that is deployed almost naturally by most of us in everyday lifeworld contexts. THE DANGER OF STASIS

Surprisingly, this nuanced balancing of efficiency in relation to other values found in de Certeau, fits in well with McLuhan’s media concept. All media, according to McLuhan, no matter who controls them, enhance. “Efficiency” belongs to the nature of all media – as a defining characteristic. But this value – even if we wish to speak in purely dialectical terms – does not necessarily have to fall on the “oppressor” side; it can just as well be situated on the side of the “oppressed.” In this sense McLuhan’s dissolution of the split between producers and consumers foreshadows de Certeau’s strategy-tactic idea. In the ‘electric era,’ everyone becomes a consumer and producer of information and “culture” at the same time: ‘Popular and elite culture alike are consumer-oriented – based on a dichotomy of production and consumption which no longer obtains under electric conditions.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 490) This hints at de Certeau’s image of the ‘active,’ tactical consumer, and in fact some authors have drawn parallels in that sense. Gary Genosko pictures McLuhan as ‘cultural theorist’ who criticizes, just as authors like Stuart Hall, John Fiske and Richard Hoggart have done, the mechanistic communication model of Shannon and Weaver328, especially through the notion of ‘making do.’ The audience really does something with the messages it receives within the dominant hegemonic framework: ‘What McLuhan called strategies of individuals have been refigured by Michel De Certeau, amongst others, as tactical manoeuvres [sic] that apparatuses of repression tolerate.’ (Genosko 2005a, xxxv) Jim Morrison, too, rephrases de Certeau’s central notion cleverly in McLuhanist terms: there is no such thing as a completely ‘hot’ medium (2006, 180); all media require “filling in,” an active operation on the part of the user or receiver is in any way needed. In short: Feenberg’s dichotomy serves to complement McLuhan’s extension idea – and hence definition of media – on a micro-level by way of providing an account of the social and political aspects of that extension, namely, on a macrolevel. But, crucially, these two levels, the “structural” and the “historical,” are “one.” In this way, Feenberg’s approach can also top off the long-running discussion between media theory and Critical Theory by positioning the tension between on the one hand purely media-related characteristics, such as the 251

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enhancement of this or that capability, and on the other hand the powerconsolidating function of media, eminently taking shape through “material” ideology, at the level of media themselves – however, again and importantly, taking into account that media as such crisscross the two levels of micro- and macro-scale. But for this scheme to work, lastly, Feenberg’s notion of rationality needs to be amended so that it does not plainly identify technical rationality with the value of efficiency329, since efficiency belongs to both levels, and to extensionas-enhancement as well as extension-as-ideology.330 Paradoxically, however, this may lead us up a path that Feenberg has avidly tried to evade in combining elements from constructivist approaches with ideas from Critical Theory, for a purely empirical account of technology without an overarching political model misses critical power. But what if we “locate” power struggles in the dynamics between primary and secondary instrumentalization, and hence at the level of each medium, do we not then run an even greater the risk of creating political stasis, of winding up at a democratic dead end? If all media are the scenes of battle331, what can then really be changed? We will attempt to frame a brief answer to those questions in the concluding section of this chapter.

10.5 Democratization, Change, Revolution As we have seen, Feenberg’s work takes shape as an attempt to frame technology in terms of class struggle. But this attempt appears to be two-tiered: on the one hand Feenberg furnishes an account of how elites maintain ‘operational autonomy’ through the deployment of technologies; on the other hand his ‘instrumentalization theory’ provides an analysis of how technologies – at the level of technologies-in-use themselves – incorporate both elements of ‘functionalization’ (primary instrumentalization) and of ‘realization’ (secondary instrumentalization), namely, how they themselves always form combinations of ‘technical’ and ‘subversive’ components, however without necessarily leading to typically dialectical class tensions. FEENBERG’S AMBIVALENCE

Nevertheless, if need be, exactly because of this double-sided aspect of technology, users can challenge the design and use of technologies, and demand change. Individuals or interest groups can denounce the specific form that this or that 252

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extension-as-ideology takes. In McLuhan an almost similar “call for change” is launched. Media, as extensions of body parts or senses, ‘amputate’ and ‘numb’ those particular parts or senses – which makes us oblivious to their real effects. Through ‘understanding’ we should try to perceive the environments that media make. Yet we can state that McLuhan stays relatively vague on this point, notwithstanding the ubiquity of the term ‘understanding’ in his work and disregarding the furthermore slightly elusive theory of ‘anti-environments’ for now.332 Feenberg on the contrary delivers a specific program of ‘democratic rationalization,’ also called ‘technical micropolitics,’ and we have already elaborated upon some examples of it. In general it comes down to the extending of the reach of democracy and politics into the technical sphere – just as Feenberg, conversely, reframes the concept of technology in political terms. It is ‘[to] challenge the horizon of rationality under which technology is currently designed.’ (2010a, 28) Put otherwise: ‘[E]ven if no totalizing approach makes sense, the tensions in the industrial system can be grasped on a local basis from “within,” by individuals immediately engaged in technically mediated activities and able to actualize ambivalent potentialities suppressed by the prevailing technological rationality.’ (Feenberg 1999, 105) Yet, considering all of the above, it remains to be seen in how far such changes can really be achieved. For if we assume, as we have done, and as Feenberg himself suggests, that the ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ poles are not at all split up in a dialectical tension and are in fact “inextricably intertwined,” it becomes almost impossible to pit ‘experience’ against ‘reason.’ But this is exactly what the program of ‘democratic rationalization’ seems to propose. It presupposes that in every specific situation of technology use, values can be clearly discerned and distinguished. But as we have seen this is not at all the case. So within the ambivalence of technical-subversive rationality, another ambivalence harbors – and within the latter another one, and so on. Every value holds infinite “ambivalences.” But how does anything then ever change? In fact within de Certeau’s scheme ‘tactics’ can never pretend to be acts of revolution: ‘The actual order of things is precisely what “popular” tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it will change any time soon.’ (de Certeau 1984, 26) But it so happens that in everyday life – and in life as such – decisions are made over and above ambivalence, disregarding ambivalence, neglecting it, or plainly not seeing it. 253

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Things do happen. But the question remains: if all values are intertwined, how can any ‘democratic rationalization’ be more than merely contingent? It appears that we need to place technical rationality in opposition to subversive rationality for an invasion by the latter of the former to become possible. Yet then again, exactly this situation may also make for complete motionlessness, and for absolute stasis. In fact Feenberg suggests as much when he observes quite pessimistically: ‘There is little more reason today than in 1930 to believe that a civilization based on the current scientific-technical rationality and capitalist economics can solve the riddle of history.’ (2005, 138) Or: ‘[…] it is possible to reconcile technology and freedom, however, not within the framework of the currently dominant technical culture.’ (1995a, 2) And ‘[w]ith rare exceptions […] there are rather narrow limits to what can be done by isolated individuals acting on the market.’ (ibid., 5) In the end, it may be that, as Andy Clark fears, criticism of technology might be a luxury of the fortunate few (2003, 180). FEENBERG’S HOPE

At the same time nevertheless, Feenberg’s enthusiasm about new media such as the Internet contradicts this pessimism. ‘The “written world” of the Internet is indeed a place where humans and machines appear to be reconciled […]’ (Feenberg 2010a, 54). This optimism in turn goes against the grain of warnings such as those vented by Langdon Winner: ‘Dreams of instant liberation from centralized social control have accompanied virtually every important new technological system introduced during the past century and a half.’ (1986, 95-96) Whereas it actually appears, Winner remarks, that power groups succeed to keep control through the use of the computer – indeed, in other words: Feenberg’s idea of ‘operational autonomy.’ The ones who are able to get the most advantage out of new technologies, Winner continues, are those who already have wealth, social status, and an institutional position. ‘[N]o serious student of the question would give much credence to the idea that creating a universal grid work to spread electronic information is, by itself, a democratizing step.’ (ibid., 110)333 From a more philosophical-anthropological standpoint, Clark puts it this way: ‘Such extensions should not be thought of as rendering us in any way post-human; not because they are not deeply transformative but because we humans are naturally designed to be the subjects of just such repeated transformations!’ (2003, 142) 254

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So does everything stay the same all the time – and is hence no change possible – or are there turning points, watersheds where a qualitative change is introduced? It will remain to be seen in the following chapters, that deal respectively with the “love” and “beloved object” component on the “historical” or concrete level, how this tension between stasis and change can be framed.

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11 Mediation-of-Mediation: The “Loves” Multiplied – or, Medial Networks ‘When the interrelatedness of many things is made plain, then the mind is freed from any watchful fretting over any one of them.’ (M. McLuhan, quoted in Gordon, 1997a, 139)

Whereas in Chapter 7 it was the love, i.e., the human-medium relation, in abstracto that concerned us most, here we aim our spotlights at the world of networks in which “in reality” all of these relations are incorporated. To make sense of the complexity and ambiguity of the multiplicity of “loves” – “mediation-of-mediation” – we deploy another one of McLuhan’s central concepts: the ‘hot’-’cool’ dichotomy. The hot-cool distinction essentially roots in the “structural” level – since it relates to the technical way in which the singular medium dovetails with the individual organism’s perceptual setup – but interpreted as a continuum it can greatly help us to make sense of the myriad medial goings-on at the “historical” level. We first outline the ‘hot’-’cool’ concept, which of course is another guise of the “central dichotomy.” Then we investigate the time frame that McLuhan couples to it; and we will find that it is in itself double-sided. Next, we situate the “media time frame” that he delineates within the broader theoretical context of media history. Which will lead us finally to the embedding of the discussion in the wider context of Media Ecology. This will teach us that two main criticisms launched at McLuhan – technological determinism on the one hand and the posing of an unwarranted historical scheme on the other hand – are in fact mutually contradictory (although given our own double-layered approach they need not be).

11.1 Worlds of Mediation ALL THE LOVES – MEDIATION-OF-MEDIATION

All mediation is contextual. Just as much as the lover, i.e., the “human relating to technology,” can never exist in a social, economical, or political vacuum – since what is “human” in the human-technology relation exceeds merely individual organic-mental capabilities, and naturally flows over into the power-consolidating complex of ‘ideological’ terms, images, habits, creeds – there cannot be an isolated, unconnected relation standing apart from other relations, subjects, or objects.

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How much simpler would “love life” be if there were to exist such pure, untainted relationships? Not to be bothered by rules, regulations, restraints on the legal, economical, social, or even biological and neurological plane… Not to have to take into account “the others” – other relationships, actual or potential, real or virtual – or mind the ways of the world whatsoever… But, it does not work that way. In Chapter 7 we focused on mediation at the “structural” level. That is: the relation of love between the lover and the beloved. More precisely, the love between “us” and media or technologies. As seen, the work of McLuhan and of postphenomenology can greatly help us to make sense of the mediation or relation between these ‘mediators,’ which not so much “make” the mediation but are rather, conversely, constituted by it. Mediation is thus so to speak a stand-alone phenomenon – not in the sense that there can ever exist “a” mediation without mediators, but meaning more humbly that mediation deserves scrutiny as fullblown instance or component of the human-technology relation. However, now the time has come to rise above this micro-level – at which human-technology mediations can only be seen in abstracto – towards the “historical” or macro-level, where all relations are included in, grasped almost by a “world of mediation,” of interlocking networks existing above and beyond the abstract individual relation. Here too, the two levels – “structural” and “historical” – are neatly interwoven. Just like the conceptually abstract mediation constitutes its mediators, so does in turn the world of networks constitute the abstract, “pure” mediating relationship. (In other words: the macro-scale mediation “mediates” the micro-scale mediation.) FEENBERG’S ‘DRAWING HANDS’ PARADOX AND IHDE’S ‘CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS’

But what form does this mediation at the “historical” level precisely take? Once again we will attempt to frame an answer to this question by way of the work of McLuhan. It must be said beforehand, however, that this answer will be in no way clear-cut. If the abstract man-to-technology relationship is already fraught with ambivalences, the networks-of-networks within which all of these relationships house and hover complicate the matter even more. No single description, definition, or model will do the trick; the simplicity produced by the combination of forlorn words can never attest to the complexity harbored by mediation-ofmediation. In other words, again, ‘the map is not the territory’ (Korzybski). Andrew Feenberg sketches this complexity excellently, albeit in a slightly different context, in referring to M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands (Feenberg 2010a, 258

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xxiff.). The lithograph, displaying two hands drawing each other, is used by Feenberg to illustrate the paradoxical character of technology in general and the ninth of his ‘ten paradoxes’ – the ‘democratic paradox’ – in particular (2010b, 1314).334 With regard to technology, we are always remorselessly and inexhaustedly wrapped up in ‘strange loops’ of the sort that Douglas Hofstadter describes and that Escher’s Drawing Hands depicts: self-referential systems from which no escape is possible. That, in fact, Feenberg points out, makes for the one essential difference between Escher’s drawing and the real world. The Drawing Hands, as drawing, presupposes a god-like figure drawing the Drawing Hands, namely, Escher himself. This however is impossible in our world. ‘[I]n reality we are not gods. Human beings can act only on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical significance of embodiment and implies participation in a world of meanings and causal powers we do not control.’ (Feenberg 2010, xix) This ‘world of meanings and causal powers we do not control’ will concern us directly in what follows. As said, however, we will frame the problem mainly in terms of “mediation on the macro-level.” Postphenomenology was a major theoretical source for the study of mediation at the micro-level. It is also relevant to the analysis of mediation-ofmediation – situated mediation. As we mentioned, next to a ‘phenomenology of technics,’ which served us well in investigating the “abstract” human-technology bond, Ihde develops a second ‘program,’ namely a ‘cultural hermeneutics,’ in which technologies are studied in their cultural and social embeddedness (1990). Within their “situatedness,” all technologies are subject to a ‘structural’ ‘double ambiguity’: first, every technology can be placed in more than one use-context; and second, every ‘technological intention’ can be fulfilled by several different technologies. All embedding of technology in culture is ‘multistable’ (ibid.)335: the embedment could have taken other forms, and given changing circumstances it may take other forms in the future. This, as Ihde demonstrates, does not only make the ‘control of technology’ a very difficult and dubious matter. It also attests, again, to the fundamental spatial and temporal contingency characteristic of technology, in this case specifically relating to the macro-scale of networks-ofnetworks. In this chapter we will be specifically concerned with those spatial and temporal fluctuations exhibited by mediation-of-mediation. MEDIA ECOLOGY

Nevertheless, the one image that describes “mediation-of-mediation” perhaps best 259

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is that of ‘media ecology.’ Media Ecology – the field – is there to remind us that media never mediate alone. It could be seen as the ultimate theoretical discipline – if one can call it so – that gives networks-of-networks their right due: the singular, abstract medium must always be scrutinized in its interaction with other media. Together, all media form an ecology that can be in or out of balance just as much as any “natural” ecology. (And in fact as we already suggested in Chapter 9 and as we will further see, there should not be drawn a too sharp distinction between “media” and “natural” ecology at all.) Again we should be reminded of our accustomed inclination of framing technologies as mere “things” or “forces.” McLuhan remarks: ‘Up to the present, we have not been designing environments. We have been designing things to put into the environment.’ (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 300) Media Ecology urges us to shift our attention from medium to environment instead. Derrick de Kerckhove comments: ‘[…] the context, not only the medium, is the message…’ (1997b, 122) Now the interesting twist that Media Ecology adds to this shifted perspective is the complete blurring of the split between thing and context. The medium is its environment, as we saw in Chapter 7.336 In what follows we endeavor to dig deeper into the environmental character of media. Previously we found that media are processes and not necessarily or exclusively things; verbs describe them better than nouns. They cannot be contained within boundaries, neither practically nor theoretically. They debouch into the environment, make out that environment. But it makes a crucial difference as to what sort of environment is produced and installed by what sort of medium. We have arrived again at McLuhan’s “central distinction.” But this time we will especially focus on its ‘hot’-’cool’ guise. As suggested in Chapter 2, the hotcool distinction makes for one of McLuhan’s most provocative and criticized notions, and perhaps righteously so. Yet since it is so central to his thought, it must be taken into account. What is more, it may even prove to be more effective and useful than assumed. Again we will proceed in four steps. First, we sketch anew how McLuhan envisions the intertwining of medium and environment, deploying in the process the famous hot-cool dichotomy. Second, we investigate how he couples a – much debated – historical time frame to the latter. Third, we discuss more detailedly this time frame by comparing it to similar and different historical “media time frames” offered by other authors. It will be further seen then that, fourth, the hot-cool distinction can help us in making sense of the dynamics between stasis and 260

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change. However, whether one chooses to stress either the former or the latter has implications for the allocation of agency to “media-as-things.” Which will lead us then right into the next chapter.

11.2 The Hot-Cool Distinction How does McLuhan make sense of mediation-of-mediation? We will find that he does so by way of deploying the interrelating notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cool.’ Whereas the distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ essentially roots in the “structural” level, its true significance is to be situated on the “historical” level. But first we embed the terms in a wider context, that hinges on the aforementioned notion of ‘environment.’ MCLUHAN’S ‘ENVIRONMENT,’ REVISITED

With McLuhan, the nature of media co-determines the nature of societies. In other words: the macro-level is rooted in the micro-level. The predominance of literate media for example – a space-biased medium, in the words of Innis – will make for a society bent on control, uniformity, linearity, fragmentation, et cetera. As we already pointed out, this central tenet of McLuhanist media theory has famously led to allegations of technological determinism towards McLuhan, still vibrant to this day. And admittedly, McLuhan does not quite exonerate himself from the charges in remarking, for instance: ‘Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 497) But the story is more complicated. As much as the “structural” level sets the markers for the “historical” level, so does the macro-scale mediation-of-mediation steer and shape the program of micro-scale mediation. What is perceived to be plain technological determinism with McLuhan should be more correctly framed, as he does himself, in cybernetic terms of ‘feedback’ and ‘feedforward.’337 However even cybernetic vocabulary may not succeed in rendering the curious specificity of McLuhan’s media concept. As mentioned before, media and environments are to be seen as “one.” Exactly the idea of a reciprocal influence between a ‘medium’ on the one hand and culture on the other hand simply dilapidates once media are defined as environments. This identification – medium = environment – remains ambiguous in McLuhan, and at least confusingly if not 261

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inconsistently practiced. ‘One of the difficulties created by each new medium is that it is added to an existing situation. The old and new go to war, as it were, and the outcome is compromise.’ (M. McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 1977, 104) The first sentence in this quote suggests a real split between medium and ‘situation’; as if a medium-as-thing can simply be imported into an existing environment – yet the second phrase evens the playing field again and puts ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ side by side, suggesting that they both are equivalent opponents worthy of the same treatment. How can we come to grips with this? MEDIA AS BATTLEFIELDS

A way out of the conundrum is offered once again by the – by now almost selfevident – concept of paradox. As we have repeatedly seen, paradox in McLuhan serves as a heuristic instrument.338 The phrase “media are simultaneously mediaas-things and media-as-environments” seems fraught with paradoxicality, but exactly this tension may open up a fresh outlook on phenomena. The same goes for our superposition, in interpreting McLuhan’s philosophical foundations in Part I, of a philosophical anthropology, a relational ontology, and a substantivist ontology. Within the universal fourfold structure proposed at the end of that part, it makes sense to see media as at the same time “well-circumscribed things” and as processes projecting their effects to the highest and broadest levels of societal, political, economical, and cultural configurations. In fact it is perhaps the only way in which media and technologies can ever be seen to effectuate anything and be affected by anything else. For this may make out precisely one of the true innovations proffered by McLuhanist media theory: media environments are looked at as battlefields – scenes of intense conflict, chaotic front lines that advance and recede unpredictably, blood-soaked planes on which the mightiest relentlessly crush the weakest, but on which also, again paradoxically, as Feenberg may add in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘the victor belongs to the spoils’ (2010b, 14). There is no guaranteed outcome whatsoever. The central joint on which this idea hinges is the insight – already discussed in Chapter 7 – that media and technologies are transformative and not just additive, as Paul Levinson phrases it (1997, 172). ‘The least technology makes a new environment.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 40) Technologies “change things.”339 With McLuhan, all these changes happen first and foremost within and through perception, i.e., on the “structural” level. William Kuhns confirms as much when he indicates three meanings of the word ‘environment’ in McLuhan: 262

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first, the ordinary meaning, namely, the immediately perceptually given world; second, media; and third, most crucially and originally, the ‘sensorium’ that is influenced by media, the pattern of ‘sensory ratios’ seized and changed by media (1971, 190). All these meanings are interrelated and cannot be distinguished but in theory. It is exactly this multifaceted character of the McLuhanist media definition that accurately grasps the sweltering tensity in the midst of which media fights are at any time fought out. ECOLOGY: MEDIA THROUGH SPACE-TIME

Nevertheless, as we already indicated, things are more complex than that. Although all of media ‘interplay’ must eventually “pass through” individual perception – to be conceived of or even to happen at all – these media battles essentially “take place” in time and space. Here we enter the “historical” level. Literally, McLuhan hints at a historical340 evolution of media constantly in talking of ‘new’ and ‘old’ media and media environments. To provide one of many possible examples: ‘Every new service environment not only scraps its immediate predecessor but retrieves or evokes a much earlier form of human activity.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 64) In what follows we will detailedly investigate McLuhan’s proposed “media time frame.” We should however stress again that this does not in any way mean that our split between “structural” and “historical” overlaps with the distinction between spatial and temporal, respectively. The two categories of time and space are “played out” at both levels; let us not forget that the levels function as ‘probes,’ in McLuhan’s terms, rather than lifelike depictions of certain phenomena. In “reality” both levels coincide341; but we may not necessarily choose to keep both “in view” in equal measures. The framing of things in this way, may offer us an alternative to the all-too misleadingly strict dichotomy of “spatial” and “temporal” in media studies in general and Media Ecology in particular. At the “structural” level spatial as well as temporal conditions reign; but the spatial structure is frozen in time, in the “moment,” “as is” – which makes it abstract. The “historical” level introduces “change,” and hence multiplicity and concreteness, but it is not less concerned with spatial relations. As seen, McLuhan takes over Innis’ distinction between space-biased and time-biased media and appears to make a plea for the reintroduction and the reinforcement of the latter, albeit in a “neo,” namely neotribal form. But exactly the ‘electric technology’ promises a return to the mythical ‘all-at-once’ 263

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involvement with the ‘collective consciousness’; thus, the sublime experience of the “structural moment.” A mostly space-biased culture would then yield to a mostly time-biased one, or more precisely, one in which space and time are balanced again. Yet it is exactly with this move that we take issue. And we do this on the basis of McLuhan’s thought itself, for another aspect of it refutes the teleology at which we hinted in Chapter 2. One only has to take apart the theoretical concepts with which McLuhan tries to make sense of the temporal progression and reassemble them in a wholly different manner. Some commentators set us on our way. Marchessault suggests that McLuhan develops a spatial account of media interaction or mediation-of-mediation: ‘McLuhan conceptualized culture as ‘landscape’, as ‘environment’, as ‘ground’, as ‘galaxy’ – in short, as space.’ (2005, 28) But Richard Cavell (2003) even goes further in stating that ‘space’ constitutes the most important conceptual category in McLuhan’s work. However not space as we know it, and also not ‘space’ as Marchessault purports to find it in McLuhan. While Wyndham Lewis reacts against the temporal bias offered by Bergsonism (epitomized in terms like ‘timeflux’) by way of foregrounding space (as ‘arrest,’ i.e., ‘discontinuities of patterns juxtaposed in space’), and Innis (and Bergson) offers resistance to the spatial bias of modernism and modern science through an emphasis on time-flux, McLuhan transcends this dichotomy by posing something as ‘acoustic space’ that unifies the dimensions of space and time. Both temporal and spatial biases make for static positions; McLuhan’s ‘acoustic space’ offers, conversely, a dynamical perspective essentially related to other crucial terms in his work such as ‘speed-up.’342 Thus unlike Marchessault who sees McLuhan as an opponent of temporal bias plainly and simply, Cavell analyzes McLuhanist ‘space’ as an innovative category that – as is so often the case with McLuhan – blurs distinctions in an almost unbearably paradoxical way. It urges us to take the common sense meanings of “space” and “time” that we know so well, and plainly forget about them. Media interaction, thus, is, essentially, a spatial as well as a temporal problem. McLuhan often formulates his strongest concerns in terms of chaos and order; chaos being the subliminality of – possibly nefarious – media workings and our unconscious endorsement of them, and order obviously the counteracting perceptual and intellectual uncovering of biases, i.e., ‘understanding.’ But order and chaos can only “take place” in and through space and time. ‘We add service environment to service environment in a city, that is to say, junkyard, and we end up with the most savage sort of jungle environment that we could possibly 264

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conceive.’ (M. McLuhan and Watson 2011, 62) Luckily nevertheless he offers a tool with which to clean up the ‘jungle’ – if only analytically, and however controversial that tool may be. HOT VS. COOL: “STRUCTURALLY” AND “HISTORICALLY”

For according to McLuhan all media fall on either one or another side of a divide that is, as said, central to his framework: the ‘hot’-’cool’ dichotomy. What we need to do now is safeguard that tool’s relevance with regard to the “historical” level and scrap its implicit favoring of the “structural” level, i.e., its hidden teleology. At its core – indeed on the “structural” level – the hot-cool distinction is very much “simply” a technical affair. A hot medium is a medium that demands little involvement and participation whereas a cool one by contrast asks for much – truly in the sense of the literal filling in of perceptual data (M. McLuhan 2003, 39ff.). In that way the terms ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ can be identified with the more contemporary – albeit almost outdated – concepts of ‘high definition’ and ‘low definition,’ respectively.343 All has to do with the relative amount of data offered by the medium to the human senses.344 For instance, the book, radio, film, the lecture are all typically ‘hot’ media; they offer much data and hence require little filling in. On the contrary the telegraph, television, cartoons, and the seminar are ‘cool’: they demand participation in depth345, for the human sensorium – that is, the composite of perception and intellect – apparently has a natural inclination to complement the amount of received data until an optimal quota is reached. Our sense lives, so to speak, must be filled to the brim, as we already indicated in Chapter 4. But one crucial nuance needs to be applied. Exactly this qualification makes it possible to lift up the hot-cool distinction from the level of mere “structural”perceptual give-and-take towards the “historical” interaction of multiple networks-of-media. It has to be emphasized that McLuhan never frames these categories as absolute: the hot-cool “distinction” is at the same time a dichotomy and a continuum. Media may be ‘cool’ in comparison to certain other media but ‘hot’ in relation to still other ones. On a global scale media can be weighed against each other, and too much “hotness” at a certain place can be compensated by importing “coolness” from somewhere else. The worldwide battlefield of media should be seen as a climate that can be probed and steered by the right interferences; which brings McLuhan to admittedly provocative and possibly 265

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ethnocentric proposals such as the one to cool down the intense tribal fervor in South Africa by way of importing cooler media from the West (M. McLuhan 2003, 45). Notwithstanding those questionable suggestions nevertheless, the idea of the hot-and-cool balance as a continuum attests perfectly to the interrelation of multiple “abstract mediations.” Whereas “structurally,” i.e. “as is,” a medium gets to be either more ‘cool’ or more ‘hot’ – thus, depending on its purely data-related character – “historically” all of these degrees will interact with each other as if they were communicating vessels or high- and low-pressure areas. DROPPING TELEOLOGY; PRESERVING “HISTORICITY”

It appears thus that the hot-cool distinction can only be called a distinction “structurally.” “Historically” the concepts are anything but absolute. However, much confusion with regard to either the absolute or non-absolute character of the terms may have arisen due to McLuhan’s next step. For the “technical” character of media in circulation within a certain culture, i.e., their degree of hotness or coolness on the “structural” level, defines that whole culture, i.e., the multiplicity of events at the “historical” level. We have called this in what came before McLuhan’s “trickle-through” theory: the technical workings of the medium “trickle through” to all broader societal levels. And whereas hot media are typically (co-)determinative of literature culture, cool media incite tribal modes. As said, the hot-cool distinction serves as a placeholder for the literate-tribal or print-electric dichotomy and vice versa. At this level, indeed, mediation-ofmediation really “takes place.” And it is probably due to many of McLuhan’s statements on this purported split – let alone the historical revolutions coupled to it – that his ideas, back in the 1960s, have elicited so much vehement critique. The categories ‘oral,’ ‘literate,’ ‘electric,’ and ‘print’ are generously spilt throughout the bulk of his work, deployed for more or less rhetorical reasons, but always with a slight tinct of indiscriminateness. Specifically, as said, he seems to favor, albeit in an overly ambiguous way, the recent development of electric technologies returning us to a state of tribal involvement and coolness. McLuhan exhibits a veritable fascination with what he deems to be a new culture of wholeness. ‘Once more today, in the simultaneous awareness of the citizens of Echoland, nothing is irrelevant and nothing can be ignored.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 42) But at the same time this fresh all-inclusiveness harbors great dangers if we would fail to grasp its significance, or even the mere fact that “it is happening,” ‘[n]ow that the 266

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kids have gone completely medieval […]’ (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 400). As suggested, we choose to disregard the teleological inclinations in the hotcool distinction – or continuum – and hold on to its significance for the scrutiny of the “historical” level, and moreover of the “structural” level as well. For it should be sufficiently underscored that above and beyond McLuhan’s fascination with a sort of medial “end times,” the hot-cool distinction and its other guises function as conceptual instruments with which to understand, once again, media battles. These battles always have a “structural” as well as a “historical” aspect. In each and every societal setup literate and tribal components remain and reside next to each other, superposed, blending and blended, crashing into each other and affirming themselves from out of the deepest realms of their ‘hybrid energy.’346 ‘Hot’ and ‘cool’ are to be seen as basic classes, present in all societies, but crucially rooted in human – biological – nature.347 “Structurality” and “historicity” intermix; but there need not be some progression towards some specific end point. ‘GLOBAL VILLAGE’

This nevertheless does not mean that either hot or cool media cannot win out within certain constellations. That is precisely the meaning of the distinction: both are present, but not necessarily in equally strong ways, on the contrary. According to McLuhan we now move towards a ‘cooler’ world as electric media connect every distanced part of the globe: a ‘global village’ (1962, 21ff.). Coolness on a world scale, so to speak. But the concept is intensely susceptible to misinterpretations, with either dystopian or utopian predispositions. As Kuhns righteously points out, McLuhan’s ‘global village’ does not in any way represent a carefree utopia (1971, 195-197) as some suggest. Armand Mattelart for one proposes, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, to replace the term ‘global village’ with ‘global city’ because the latter better describes the ‘nervous, agitated, tense, and fragmented web of interdependent relations […]’ (Mattelart 1994, 134) which we are living in, while the word ‘global village’ paints a picture of a place of personal stability, interpersonal intimacy, shared values, and tradition. But it is exactly the former description that captures McLuhan’s concept of ‘global village’ best. Ien Ang, also, interprets the term rather monolithically: ‘[…] McLuhan’s ‘global village’, a world turned into a single community through the annihilation of space in time, represents nothing other than (the fantasy of) the universal culmination of capitalist modernity.’ (1994, 195) Whereas capitalist 267

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postmodernity according to Ang is a chaotic system, inherently bearing within itself uncertainty. Here again the proposed alternative grasps the meaning of McLuhan’s original probe better. On the other side of the spectrum however, there are the authors who typically overestimate the utopian promises implied by the concept. Sue Barnes for example remarks in relation to the ‘global village’: ‘Today, the Internet is the embodiment of this idea.’ (2000, 173) Interestingly, the idea of the ‘global village’ harbors McLuhan’s teleology, but at the same time it denies it. For although McLuhan has indeed himself given rise to confusion and misunderstanding in sketching an apparently straightforward historical sequence of “media environment evolution,” neither of these one-sided interpretations do justice to McLuhan’s ever present conceptual ambiguity. Yet in any case “things change.” Media battles are incorporated into a “media time frame” whether one attaches hopes of deliverance to that scheme or not. It is to McLuhan’s time frame or historical scheme that we now must turn.

11.3 Networks in Flux On the basis of the hot-cool distinction annex continuum, McLuhan offers a historical outline consisting of, as we will see, three or four big stages. In the previous section we have found that we can preserve the hot-cool probe while disregarding its implicit teleology and leaving its “trickle-through mechanism” for what it is. That means that the idea of “historical” change remains intact. Now we must investigate the specific time frame that McLuhan suggests. “HISTORICITY’S” BAD REPUTATION

We are probably not far off the mark in supposing that every philosophical model, and hence every thinker behind it, needs to take a position on matters of time, if only to ignore the issue altogether (a position nonetheless). The really enterprising philosopher, so it used to seem in former times, summons up all of his or her analytical and imaginative powers to cook up a meticulous historical scheme, mostly conceived as a progression of eras, preferably topped with the promise of one or other teleological terminus. In recent times, say the last half century, however, we have become extremely suspicious towards what one could call “time frame thinkers.”348 Especially teleology of course has fallen into disgrace, together with the notion that one or two special forces steer and drive forward history in 268

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whole. Is that maybe why we perceive Kant as humble and Hegel as pretentious? The problem is of course that as soon as one starts to outline epochal regions in mankind’s history, teleology and special forces seem to surreptitiously slip in. TWO TEMPORAL SCHEMES

McLuhan too, as we have by now repeatedly seen, falls into that trap.349 In any case he has quite rapidly become a victim of our by now almost commonsensical historical-philosophical cynicism, and perhaps rightfully so. Even if we make abstraction of any teleological tendencies there is a time frame to be detected in McLuhan’s thought: a historical analysis that is more or less accurate, more or less simplistic. In fact it lies blatantly on the surface. ‘First, the hunter, then the miner of the soil; next the mechanical industrialist. And now the information engineer.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 42) As such, it must be said, it is not a crime or a sin to indicate turning points in history, watersheds that herald a new period and close off another one. There simply exists such a thing as history, be it ‘told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’ (Shakespeare) or not. And if any other idiot longs to bring some order into that sound and fury, why not let him. As suggested, many great thinkers have “brought” such a sort of “order.” However what slightly complicates the matter with McLuhan – but also makes it more interesting – is that the order that McLuhan wants to bring to the history of media environments is itself twofold. In a sense there is but one “evolution,” only one world that changes. There is on a global – or universal? – scale only one way “things have gone.” This evolution has, as McLuhan puts it literally, an organic character, hinging directly on the nature of the human being that serves in turn as the main origin for technological development – thus, technology as extension. According to Bruce E. Gronbeck, this is McLuhan’s basic theorem: ‘The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution [literally!] because all technologies are extensions of our physical being […]’ (2006, 164). Out of our loins, so to speak, technology springs forth, and because it does so, technological change can in a sense be seen as biological; even though the “cultural” plane feedbacks on the structure of our organic-biological perception. At the same time however, within this one evolution McLuhan situates two different sort of time frames: an abstract and a concrete one.350

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RECURSIVE TIME FRAME: CLICHÉ AND ARCHETYPE

The abstract one we already discussed in the course of Chapter 7: the clichéarchetype interplay. As seen, cliché and archetype are within McLuhan’s framework slightly confusing terms. In essence they can themselves be defined as media – extensions, probes – evolving together, changing into one another in the course of time. Simply put one could say they are ways of looking, both being capable of turning into each other. Filters placed before our perception of the world; the one being transparent, the other opaque. While we are conscious of archetypes, we are not of clichés. In its “cliché stage” a medium acts as either new or old but in any case unperceived environment; in its “archetype stage” (if it ever reaches one) it functions as, so to speak, fully noticed landmark; archè and ideal in one. Cliché exercises its influence mostly through form – hidden to the untrained eye – whereas archetype serves as content, lying in broad daylight. What is essential is that cliché and archetype co-evolve and change into each other through time. According to McLuhan, as said, the content of every new medium is an older, ‘discarded’ one. Thus, archetype makes up the content of a cliché as form. Awareness (‘archetype’) will slowly turn into ‘cliché’ and vice versa (M. McLuhan 1970, 272). Patterson clarifies: ‘[…] clichés, of which one is unconscious, become archetypes when they rise to consciousness.’ (1990, 85) Eric McLuhan, too, puts it helpfully when he says: ‘One characteristic of all social processes is that they become manifest and conspicuous, for the first time, at the moment of their demise – as what was once ground becomes figure.’ (1998, 82) This accounts for the “structural” aspect of McLuhan’s – double-sided – time frame. At every moment the world consists of exactly this constellation of clichéarchetype relations. As we have seen, Graham Harman observes that McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’ provides first and foremost a synchronic outlook – offering a tool for analyzing media relations as they are at each given moment – with ‘reversal’ furnishing the diachronic ‘engine.’ In each and every stage of human development, there has always been a system of interplaying clichés and archetypes, however with both responding to each other through time. We could call this time frame recursive. LINEAR TIME FRAME: FROM TRIBAL TO LITERATE TO NEOTRIBAL

The other, more concrete time frame however shows a different face. Here wellcircumscribed epochs can be delineated. Famously, McLuhan distinguishes between three (or four, depending on interpretation351) great eras of media 270

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development. Nevertheless this three-phase scheme is founded upon his “central dichotomy” – literate-tribal – and upon the great rift between media and technologies mainly falling on either this or that side of the distinction. Throughout the first and by far longest epoch of human history, man lived in tribal mode, for the only communication technology available was speech. Hearing thus represented the most important sense. With the invention of phonetic writing a new era slowly dawned. The visual sense became more important. But truly literate times only started off in the Renaissance, as phonetic writing and visuality were then intensely “boosted” by the development of the movable type printing press. Nevertheless, with the introduction in the 19th century of ‘electric technologies’ such as electricity itself, the telegraph, and the telephone, and in the 20th century of television, the tables were turned again, and we have now entered a neotribal time, however at this moment hopefully better equipped to skillfully balance all the senses, visual and auditory. Depending on whether one sees the period from the invention of phonetic writing onwards until the 19th century as one or two epochs – in the latter case, the Gutenberg press forms the turning point between the two – one arrives at a threephase or four-phase progression. As already mentioned a few times, in working out this time frame McLuhan is heavily influenced by Harold Innis who makes a distinction between time-binding and space-binding media. Within this time frame itself a constant spatio-temporal tension broods. Every era stands for a certain spatial and temporal organization; at the same time in every phase a specific understanding of spatiality and temporality reigns. ‘For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role. […] We seek to hide in the tight bebop moment, as the tribesman hid in the squat spatial unit.’ (M. McLuhan 2002, 85) And recent times, as said, perhaps have made the matter even more interesting in that we now seem to be wrapped up “in the moment,” as also Eric McLuhan suggests: ‘[…] we live mythically, that is, in all times and spaces and cultures at once.’ (2010, 77) Through time and space man appropriates (and reappropriates) different perceptions of and sorts of relations to time and space (cf. supra). Nevertheless, the space-time matrix stands for only one of the ways in which McLuhan attempts to make sense of the evolution of mediation-of-mediation. Other ‘shifts’ include those from hardware to software, from product to process, from goals to roles, et cetera (M. McLuhan 1970, 5). Important to stress here though is that these are truly shifts – turnarounds, watersheds, “sea changes” – and notwithstanding the 271

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structural presence of literate as well as tribal components in each and every societal setup, we must very much speak of eras. Hence we could call this time frame linear. SYNCHRONIC-DIACHRONIC DYNAMICS

Of course both time frames – recursive and linear – are tightly interlocked. The linear time frame diachronically “spins” the synchronic relations-of-relations, as the spider weaves its web – a clearly structured constellation deriving from its very own organism – through time, each time. Although epochs can be outlined and although time proceeds, there always remains something from the past, since discarded cliché may at any time become archetype. The psychoanalytic reference is not far off; psychoanalysis assumes that nothing in our psychic lives ever completely disappears. The same goes, in a sense, for our “medial lives.” Older media become content for newer media (or wind up on the ‘middenheap of discarded clichés’ (M. McLuhan and Watson 2011, 53)). To give a specific and more contemporary example, hailing from Paul Levinson who analyzes the Internet as in fact containing many older media such as writing, speech, television, radio, et cetera: ‘[…] part of the “message” of the medium of the Internet is all or at least most media that have come before it, with writing ubiquitous in the driver’s seat.’ (1999a, 38)352 Still, notwithstanding this powerful combination of structural and literal elements within the historical evolution driven by the hot-cool dynamic there remains much to be clarified. The sleek technological determinism hidden beneath the surface of this scheme, even though we choose to neglect it, can unfortunately not be wholly negated, not even by the most benevolent reader. There may be nothing wrong with saying, as Neil Postman does, that ‘[…] every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development […]’ (2006, 24). And McLuhan is perhaps only waxing poetic when he observes that ‘[…] the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness […]’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 69) or that ‘[t]he aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology.’ (ibid., 7) But saying that ‘[t]he movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure […]’ (ibid., 24) seems a different ball game. Or what to think of: ‘The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and 272

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Agel 2001a, 8) In the latter quotations a unilinear effect of media on culture is suggested – an effect that could of course very well be there. But could we not with just as much assurance say, as David Edgerton does, that culture has conversely ‘ […] not lagged behind technology […],’ rather the other way around (Edgerton 2006, 212)? We will return to the problem in the last section of this chapter. As said, above and beyond the media determinism, McLuhan’s epochal categorization may make sense. Or put differently, the historical sketch that McLuhan offers, notwithstanding the criticism it has elicited, may unexpectedly point out some highly relevant ideas. This we first attempt to find out by widening the discussion to other authors, in the next section.

11.4 Epochs in the History of Media: Other Perspectives For the historical perspective – the time frame, nonetheless consisting of temporal as well as spatial aspects – within McLuhan’s conceptual universe has caught the attention of many malevolent and benevolent critics. What is interesting is that both actually may have a point in respectively detracting and defending McLuhan’s time frame. CONTROVERSIES ABOUT “ERA THINKING”

To start with the critiques. Some contend first and foremost that one should not call McLuhan’s ponderings on epochal turns “history,” but rather look upon them as a specific model with which to understand technological change as a determinant of societal change: ‘Neither Innis nor McLuhan describe history; rather, they offer a theory of history, or social change, based on technological changes in the communications media upon which society is progressively dependent.’ (T. L. McPhail and McPhail 1990, 58) Others however, see McLuhan’s time frame as much less innocent – not necessarily in the practical but rather in the generic sense: “innocent” as so to speak weight-free, i.e., containing no shrewdly hidden influences of less historically or academically acceptable sources. Quite some authors, as we already saw in Chapter 2, have drawn parallels between McLuhan’s time frame and Christian teleology. Still others have pointed out how McLuhan may be guilty of an ethnocentrism that only since the last few decades has become unfashionable, and that sees ‘primitivism’ through Western eyes (Benoist 1968). Or else he 273

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inadmissibly commits, as Daniel Czitrom puts it, to ‘[…] the glorification of neoprimitivism […]’ (1982, 172). These remarks all hinge essentially on the one central criticism aimed directly at the hot-cool distinction itself. Many authors, among them Kermode, Kalmar, Eco, and Heyer, have questioned McLuhan’s positing of a stark contrast between on the one hand an oral, tribal mode and on the other hand a visual, literate one. The distinction according to most of them makes sense and can be useful, but should definitely be relativized, and they furnish convincing examples to illustrate their claim. Kalmar for instance asserts that Eskimos do have a conception of space in contrast to McLuhan’s and Edmund Carpenter’s contention of the contrary (2005, 230). Umberto Eco, also, observes how the programming of a computer – a ‘tribal,’ ‘cool’ technology according to McLuhan – is very much a linear (‘hot’) affair, and he goes on to temper McLuhan’s all-too enthusiastic neotribal promise: why would different and distanced parts and peoples of the world be suddenly united or in any case ‘involved’ with each other due to the emergence of electronic media? ‘Audio-visual tribalism (McLuhan’s ‘global village’) is a humbug. Real communication, whether oral or written, ephemeral or permanent, is possible only between people who share a common culture […]’ (2005, 136). What is more, not only should one not expect communication to miraculously spring up between different and separated cultures, one can also not reasonably claim this intercultural dialogue to come from the effects of a certain technology. This is the point that Paul Heyer makes. He likens McLuhan’s ‘oral tradition’ to Lévi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, but the crucial difference between the two consists in Lévi-Strauss seeing bricolage as a fundamental aspect of our ‘generic mind’ that eventually gets restrained by more and more complex cultures, whereas McLuhan couples the oral mode to a specific sort of communication, namely, the spoken word. And at the same time ‘[…] McLuhan tends to overstress the acoustic and understress the visual orientation of nonliterate societies […]’ (Heyer 1988, 133). All these criticisms do attest to our claim that the space-time distinction in media study should preferably be replaced by something else, a dichotomy that goes beyond the concepts of space and time, or better: comprehensively includes both of them. Media cannot convincingly be categorized on a spectrum of senses or dimensions. All of these commentators seem to point in the same direction, namely a general critique of McLuhan’s ‘text-type determinism,’ borrowing a term 274

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from Larry Hickman (which he uses nevertheless in a slightly more specific sense) (2001, 119-122). This sort of determinism, in Hickman’s version, alleges that a text, once it is used, influences its reader in a way that escapes the latter’s control – it denies that we use different sorts of tools in different ways and can be seen in that way as a variation upon Platonism. According to Hickman texts are nothing more (but also nothing less) than ‘tools for enjoyment and use’ (ibid., 120). By ontologizing them, we embezzle what they could be; and we should in the first instance ask ourselves what texts can do for us and how they can solve problems. A similar critique can be aimed at McLuhan’s hot-cool dichotomy: perhaps oral and literate modes are just that. Perhaps there is something of orality and literacy in every medium. Our above reading of the dichotomy as continuum indeed suggests this. However, others have found relatively more food for thought in McLuhan’s time frame. Among the voices more sympathetic to McLuhan’s historical sketch Jim Morrison’s may be one of the noteworthiest. With regard to the aforementioned criticism of the stern dichotomy between oral and literate and the related, possibly unwarranted assumptions that, first, epistemologies can be classified into either linear-fragmented or simultaneous-holistic categories and, second, these epistemologies are directly influenced by the technologies we use (including “organic” technologies such as speech), Morrison remarks: Such an assumption that knowledge is a series of fragmented “disciplines” rather than a unitary whole serves to make McLuhan appear an oddball, even a crank and a “visionary,” simply because he chose to retrieve the core values of Western culture and discuss how they have been conditioned by our evolving technologies, particularly those that most directly affect the essence of what makes us human – language. In light of the intellectual traditions not only of the West but of all great cultures, it is we who are the oddballs in thinking that knowledge and experience can be subdivided and dissected without somehow once again being made whole. (Morrison 2006, 173)

In fact this points to, at the same time, an incongruity within most criticisms of McLuhan’s time frame and an inherent ambiguity within that time frame itself. Seen from a certain perspective, in dissecting literate-linear-fragmented culture and uncovering its visual bias in favor of a more holistic concept of knowledge and 275

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perception that evens out the senses better, it actually comes as a surprise that McLuhan eventually proposes a teleologically tinted historical-progressional scheme. But does he, actually, really? According to Marchessault, the burden of proof lies mostly with the critics, for they often do not understand that McLuhan’s periodization is cyclical, not linear, as it is methodologically inspired by the anonymous histories of Siegfried Giedion, Wyndham Lewis, Panofsky, Mumford, Innis, and Vico. She does admit however that it shows a teleological face, as it is ‘[…] infused by the conjunction of electricity and spirit […]’ (2005, xiv), thereby somehow undermining her own argument. Yet, the point should be stressed: the time frame exhibits at the same time linear and cyclical characteristics. Curtis draws a striking parallel with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: there one can find the same pattern of ‘explosion’ and ‘implosion’ – the split between the Apollonian and Dionysian since Socrates, and now the return of the Dionysian, respectively (1978, 88). However it may be, the seemingly inconsistent mix of linear and cyclical elements should not surprise us, since McLuhan’s beloved concept of ‘myth’ exactly grasps that: the capturing of all time in one instance – synchrony and diachrony in interplay. In that light, it seems logical that other, more or less friendly critics of McLuhan have attempted, as we have already extensively seen, to read him as a dialectical thinker. Richard Kostelanetz sees a four-phase scheme in McLuhan with the first two stages as thesis, the second as antithesis, and the fourth as synthesis; highly analogous to classic Marxism (1969, 88). Marchessault outrightly suggests him to be ‘[…] a dialectical and an historical thinker […]’ (2005, xvi), and Stamps eventually elaborates thoroughly on the potential parallels between McLuhan’s framework and the ideas of specifically Benjamin and Adorno (1995). James W. Carey, also, sees analogies between McLuhan and Walter Benjamin; the two of them, according to him, share a focus on the evolution of the ‘human sensorium,’ the belief that the shift from sound to sight constitutes the critical point in this evolution, and an attending idea of the loss of authentic experience, coupled to the ‘romantic’ hope for ‘reversal’ (2005c, 278-279).353 However as Paul Grosswiler probably rightfully points out, what dissociates McLuhan’s time frame from those of for instance the Frankfurt School, typically ridden with doom (except for maybe, as Andrew Feenberg suggests, Marcuse’s), is that his at least offers some hope: ‘The unremitting gloom is in stark contrast to McLuhan’s retribalization. The electronic media of Horkheimer and Adorno do not revive the 276

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mythology of the old barbarism, but seem to extend the domination of nature that was the goal of the enlightenment, only in nightmare fashion.’ (1998, 127) MCLUHANIST “ERA THINKING”

Be that how it may – whether McLuhan’s time frame is too linear, too cyclical, too teleological, too unempirical, or too deterministic – the fact that there is so much confusion about McLuhan’s scheme of historical progression may indicate that a new perspective on it is needed. With our double-layered approach we endeavor to grasp it more accurately. And there is nothing wrong with saying that at the “historical” level, things at times change – substantially. As mentioned before, one does not have to be an ardent teleologian to profess and admit that there are turnarounds in history, however socially, narratively, politically constructed they may be. These are the historical beacons we get acquainted with through history classes in high school – the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press, Columbus’ discovery of America, et cetera – and that, if only that, serve as orientation points to help us make sense of our past and our origins.354 And serious and respected historically educated scholars like Harold Innis (2007), Eric Havelock (1963), and Elisabeth Eisenstein (1983) have taken this project one step further by linking up these watersheds and the intermittent periods with the parallel evolution of media environments.355 However, there may be much truth in Paul Heyer’s suggestion that the most deterministic of them all is McLuhan: ‘[…] unlike McLuhan (1962), whose landmark study, The Gutenberg Galaxy, argues that beginning in the 15th century print brings into being almost everything we associate with modernity – nationalism, individualism, the scientific method, and a visual orientation in our cultural logic – Innis sees print as extending these elements.’ (2006, 152) The fact remains that change happens, and that that change stretches out from the individual level to societal plane and vice versa, touching the world but just as much tainting our worldview. And McLuhan is certainly not the first to propose an idea of how that change proceeds.356 RECENT “ERA THINKING”: THE DIGITAL

In fact in recent times, McLuhan-like “epoch thinking” has not abated. On the contrary, it has intensified, more precisely in relation to the ‘computer revolution,’ seen as the dawning of an era in which information is processed, qualitatively and 277

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quantitatively, in a whole new manner than before (Hobart and Schiffman 1998). The digital technologies of computers – Robert K. Logan’s ‘fifth language’ – and especially the Internet – the ‘sixth language’ (2000) – are seen to have really heralded new times, hence making for a truly “special case.” Sandy Stone talks of the ‘virtual age,’ following the mechanical age, and involving a trend towards evergreater individuality, interiority, and textuality (1995, 17-20) – an analysis very much in opposition to McLuhan’s, but nevertheless linked up to a particular time frame. And even within the computer revolution itself there may be turnarounds: Sherry Turkle for one detects a cultural shift from a ‘modern aesthetic’ focused on calculation to a ‘postmodern aesthetic’ centering around simulation (1995; 2005). One of the most daring perspectives on the recent “change of times,” however, must be Luciano Floridi’s, the founder of the domain known as ‘philosophy of information’ (2002; 2010; 2011). Floridi analyzes the ‘information revolution’ as the fourth stage in a process of redefining humanity’s nature and place in the universe. After the Copernican, the Darwinian, and the Freudian revolution – making us realize that we are not the center of the universe, that we do not diverge from other animals as much as we thought, and that we are even far from transparent to ourselves, respectively – ‘[w]e are now slowly accepting the idea that we might not be dramatically different from other informational entities and agents and smart, engineered artifacts […]’ (Floridi 2008, 95). We are living in the ‘Infosphere’ now. Floridi calls it the Turing revolution: it appears at this time that we are fairly continuous with other informational ‘agents,’ being informational agents ourselves, and these relations with and mediations by way of ICT will only increase in the future. That is why Floridi suspects ‘[…] that the future challenge will be to develop a philosophy of the Infosphere, where this is understood as synonymous with Being/Nature, which does not privilege the natural or untouched, but treats as authentic and genuine all forms of existence and behaviour, even those based on artificial, synthetic or engineered artifacts.’ (ibid.) As always, and just as in McLuhan’s time, next to these voices of joy there are also many voices of concern to be heard357, who perceive a sea change just as much but do not at all expect much good from it. We will leave aside the moral judgements and ethical considerations for now. What matters here is the concept of the “turnaround,” of the watershed itself. Therefore the main question we need to address in the closing section of this chapter has to do with exactly the general choice for either “epoch thinking” or “continuity thinking.”

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11.5 The Rift: Determinism and “Era Thinking” In this chapter we have endeavored to dissect mediation on a “historical” level, i.e., mediation-of-mediation, as McLuhan understands it. Concepts such as ‘environment’ have been reinvestigated and newly introduced terms such as ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ have been thoroughly scrutinized. The hot-cool distinction basically originates in the “structural” level; on the “historical” plane its continuum-like characteristics should conversely be stressed. There, media clashes and battles always “take place,” through space and time.358 Mediation-of-mediation can be seen as a constellation of media interacting with each other along a spectrum of “temperature” having ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ as its extremes. Media ‘hot up’ and ‘cool off’; they hot each other up and cool each other off. The “historical” mediation-ofmediation, then, takes the form of a succession of hot-cool balances, but this development itself can be seen “structurally,” i.e., synchronically – as the abstract interplay of cliché and archetype, what we have called the recursive time frame – as well as “historically” – in the form of the sequence of three or four great eras in the history of media environments, which we have dubbed McLuhan’s linear time frame. Nevertheless a problem still remains, and it concerns the tension between exactly the synchronic and diachronic. A CHANGE COMING ON: MEDIA ECOLOGY’S CALLING

As already suggested at the beginning of this chapter, ‘media ecology’ is probably the term that grasps the scheme of McLuhanist time frames best. As with “classic,” “natural” ecology, media ecologies are composed of entities relating to each other through space and time. Both dimensions taken together determine whether a given ecological system is “balanced” or not. As within natural ecology, an evened-out media ecology presupposes a fair ratio of the constituting components. In McLuhan’s terms and seen from our necessarily biased, anthropocentric standpoint: the ‘sensorium,’ in which all of the senses play an equally important role. McLuhan’s almost exclusive talk of senses may be too narrow to provide the basis for a truly practical media-ecological account; beyond but also through and with our senses we act and need to act – therefore ‘media ecologies’ should also be approached from an existential viewpoint; that will be the project of Part III. In any case the “human” constitution and the “world” of media relate directly: the “good life” – if we dare to employ this heavily loaded term (Brey, Briggle, and 279

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Spence forthcoming) – presumes a good balance of different sorts of media in a given ecological system. Of course “naturally,” unfortunately, the balance in any ecology is bound to grow crooked (certainly when humans are involved). Within our media-filled society we need human intervention, that is, we only have human intervention at our disposal, to remediate the imbalances. ‘Media ecology’ presupposes participation, since we are ourselves media, bringing forth media. We cannot choose to withdraw, for in the game we always already are. This is the idea behind the “subversive anthropocentrism” we sketched in Chapter 9. All of these issues of ‘media ecology’ have occupied the attending, relatively novel theoretical discipline of Media Ecology for a while now. Many different approaches, theories, and authors can be said to fall under Media Ecology’s heading – in fact the discipline conceives of itself as purposefully eclectic in that way (Forsdale 1981; Strate 2006; Lum 2006). A central focal point of the mediaecological “project” as such, however, must definitely be the aforementioned scanning of the boundaries between on the one hand human intervention and on the other hand, so to speak, “world imposition,” or as Paul Ryan puts it inventively, ‘[…] the problem of how to maintain congruence between our intentions and our extensions.’ (1974, 50) Ryan then goes on to link up McLuhan’s ideas with cybernetics; as we already saw in Chapter 7, this coupling should come as no surprise and may even make for an ideal match. McLuhanist media ecology and cybernetic systems thinking share a crucial idea of feedback-feedforward dynamics, of which the human organism forms a full part – as Derrick de Kerckhove puts it beautifully: ‘[…] the environment itself is breathed in […]’ (1997b, 178). But humans are also an active part of it, and this brings on responsibilities – as Eric McLuhan points out: ‘“Media ecology” […] meant that we might, for example, intervene in the ecological balance to adjust environmental pressure […]’ (2010, 84).359 WHERE DOES CHANGE COME FROM? THE PARADOX OF ‘MEDIA ECOLOGY’

But exactly the framing of media-environmental problems in terms of ‘ecology’ – in fact the very use of the word ‘ecology’ – possibly generates a foundational inconsistency within the concept of ‘media ecology’ itself. For the term ‘ecology’ presupposes continuity: can one talk of one and the same ecology given that that ecology changes radically over time? Is a certain ecology still the same ecology after a “sea change”? Or does there, after the sea change, remain “enough of” the ecology as it was before, to be able to speak of the same ecology – just as a man 280

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remains a man even after he has lost an arm or a leg? How much proverbial arms or legs must a man have ‘before you can call him a man’? In other words, what is the relation between change and stasis within each and every ecology – which eventually leads up to the question: what defines an ecology, what makes for its identity? All of the aforesaid can be seen to lead up to the conceptualization of this problem, for it is directly coupled to the notions of “mediation-of-mediation,” time, and space. At the end of the last section we pointed to the surprising fact that although the linear time frame has elicited among other things the most criticism within McLuhan studies and beyond, theorists have not stopped developing similar linear-temporal sequences, typically consisting of two elements: epochs and their appurtenant turning points, i.e., “revolutions.” The ‘computer’ or ‘digital revolution’ being only the most recent one in a relatively long row. Also within contemporary ‘Media Ecology,’ quite a few authors engage one or another time frame – mostly including something like the ‘digital revolution’ as its latest watershed. Paul Levinson for one calls the ‘digital world’ ‘something very new under the sun’ (1997, 147). Don Ihde360 speaks in many places of the quantitative and qualitative difference between technologies of today and of former times: ‘Our praxes have irreversibly changed.’ (1990, 63) Several of these discourses, typically, circle around the well-known notion of ‘cyberspace.’ Michael Heim for instance avers that ‘[t]he computer doesn’t merely place another tool at your fingertips. It builds a whole new environment, an information environment in which the mind breathes a different atmosphere.’ (1994, 13) Richard Cavell likens McLuhan’s concept of ‘acoustic space’ to cyberspace (2003, 224). And Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. posits a ‘post-typographic culture’ (1986, x). All of these analyses assert the existence of a qualitative difference between “now” and “before,” or between digital technologies and mechanical technologies – a difference not unlike the one that McLuhan sees between ‘electric’ and ‘print’ technologies. This is a difficult point. For to claim that a turning point is really there, somehow implies that certain technologies can differ inherently and essentially from other ones. One has to start from the premise that certain technologies make for certain effects and not any other – in other words, the technologicaldeterminist idea – eventually to arrive at the conclusion that exactly this new technology brings into the world exactly this new culture. In short, the two aforementioned main forms of criticism aimed towards McLuhan – namely, 281

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“technological determinism” and “linear-teleological time frame” – are mutually exclusive. One cannot be anti-deterministic and anti-historical at the same time. If we want to see turning points, we need to be determinists. If we want to be antideterministic, we need to dispose of “epoch thinking” altogether. A nondeterminist stance implies, automatically, “continuity thinking.” For if no one particular medium stands for no particular effect, does it in fact matter what time we are in? A sea change is taking place all the time, then. Each and every instance is its own change – just as at every moment a specific constellation and reciprocal relation of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ elements can be found in the world. Thus: if we start from the structural interpretation of the hot-cool distinction (and by the way also the recursive aspect of the time frame), nothing “ever really” changes – for change is ubiquitous and eternally now. If we reason from the historical interpretation, conversely, time unfolds itself along stages that have relatively clear start and end points, but then we have to assume that there is a “power” in technologies, in things themselves that brings on these transformations. An ecology, thus, must either remain the same forever, and this would make any change and hence the whole concept of mediation impossible, or it must change, and if it changes, it cannot be the same ecology anymore. Therefore we apparently in a certain sense cannot speak of something as ‘media ecology’ whatsoever. It is the same old philosophical problem of identity, all over again, but now specifically repeated in the context of a “media philosophy,” i.e., relating to media environments… Is it really so? Do we have to make a choice between “all stays the same” (that is, change takes place every instance) and “everything changes” (that is, change stretches itself through time as durée)? Does there really exist a rift – central to the concept of ‘media ecology’ and the discipline of Media Ecology – between posing on the one hand qualitative and on the other hand quantitative differences between technological-medial constellations? Even more substantially: if so, do we really need to make a choice? Why not simply superpose, as we intend to do, the “structural” and the “historical” vertically, and the three components of the relationship triad horizontally? And then perhaps on the “historical” plane, at stake in this very part, we can safely assume media or technologies – in their “beloved object” component – to have some acting power or agency. Exactly this makes for the topic of the next chapter.

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12 Politics in Things: Conspiracies of the Beloved – or, Things’ Hidden Agenda ‘[…] McLuhan’s tetrad treats media-technologies as actors.’ (van Loon 2006, 164)

Once again we have arrived at the beloved object component of our bond with technology – this time however at the “historical” level, where countless objects “work their way.” We endeavor here to take media and technologies, in all their multiplicity, “on their own terms,” and thus ask along the lines of the substantivist ontology outlined in Chapter 8: do medial things harbor inner forces that, taken together, account for certain determining potencies or tendencies of and within the constellation of media? Several authors have suggested viewpoints in that fashion. We first delineate Latour’s theory of agency-in-networks that sees ‘hybrids’ and ‘non-humans’ in ‘collectives’ as able to act just as much as humans, and McLuhan’s notion of ‘hybrid energy’ that presupposes a force unleashed when media collide. Both frameworks, as they expand the boundaries of agency to all entities, lead up to a reformulation of the concept of ‘politics,’ that we critically discuss. The ‘object-oriented’ notion of politics requires us humans to deal – through time – with the meanderings and workings of media-as-such. An idea that we buttress with an elaboration of broader approaches of technological evolution – such as those of Paul Levinson and Kevin Kelly – that all see media and technologies as having to a certain extent “their own will,” a given that requires us to constantly engage into a conversation of ‘remediation’ with them. This will bring us finally to a reconsideration of the problem of change with which we closed off the previous chapter – a problem that will not so much be solved but rather put in a different light on the basis of the three-component-twolevel approach that we have sought to work out.

12.1 Things Conspiring to Make It Happen THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE BELOVED

The thing is never on its own. Just like visions of a solitary human, sole survivor forlorn in a deserted post-apocalyptic world, belong to science-fiction stories alone; just like the hypothetical situation of there existing just one, unique relationship finds a home only in spiritual or romantic musings – so does the imagined situation of a universe consisting of one and only one object go against 283

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the grain of common sense and even of the most daring, elusive metaphysics. Greek and Roman philosophy nevertheless have laid down various proposals pointing in that direction. All of these pose in one form or another ‘the one’ as grounding principle (archè): ‘all is one,’ meaning that all things in the world consist of one and the same “material” or essence; or ‘the one’ as godly force from which emanate all more inferior creatures in order of the amount in which they partake in this ‘one’ (Plotinus). Yet even though all of these schemes suggest the workings of a universal principle, none of them would imply there to be just one “object” – as we can still clearly perceive, discern, and name humans, buildings, feelings, nations, et cetera. The beloved in this aspect differs in no way from the other two components of the relationship triad. Humans-as-extended-beings – lovers – always come in groups. Even a Thoreau needs to return to the city in order to manage his affairs now and then. And relationships – loves – are by necessity multiplicitous. Romeo and Juliet in a sense pay for this fact, i.e., that in each social setting there are several possibly conflicting alliances to be concerned about, with their lives. So it is with things. We may wish or imagine or mistakenly perceive at times that there is but one object – a phenomenon not uncommon with passionate couples-in-love, and probably not all that harmful either. Love in a sense depends on that sort of narrowing of perception: ‘Everywhere I look, I see your eyes,’ Mick Jagger heartbreakingly sings in Angie (1973). An at least temporary monomaniacal focus on a single object may be something the relationship triad asks for.361 But eventually this idea of there being only “one in the whole wide world” may make us lose sight of the multiplicity of the beloved: the fact that this wide world, filled to the brim with objects interacting, more or less independent of our powers, plainly and simply “happens.” This chapter attempts to come closer to that happening – if that is ever possible: to the crazy and hazy interchange of things conspiring to make “it” happen. THINGS TALK: FORCES FROM WITHIN

McLuhan again seems to have been on the trail of this brooding, ungraspable thing-to-thing interaction. The notion in his work most helpful to tackle these issues, as we will try to show, is that of ‘hybrid energy,’ pitted however cursorily in Understanding Media. This term suggests two things. First, media (objects) harbor an inner force, more or less independent from their interaction with other things. Second, when things do interact, something particular happens: a new entity 284

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comes into the world, not wholly this thing, but also not wholly that one – a hybrid being. As we already saw, in recent decades the word ‘hybrid’ has gained importance in philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies alike.362 The ‘hybrid’ concept is offered as an alternative to the modernist subject-object split. “We” are not autonomous “in-dividuals,” well-circumscribed conscious entities observing, grasping, and controlling well-circumscribed unconscious entities. “We,” quite literally, flow over – into objects, institutions, other bodies, other “ones.” This especially was the case at the “structural” level: we, and all things around us, are medial nodes – all of us form relationship triads. In investigating, now, the object component at the “historical” level, it is worthwhile to return to the ‘hybrid’ notion by way of a detour through McLuhan’s deployment of it. As so many of McLuhan’s probes, it is in a certain sense but a further extension and elaboration of his ‘the medium is the message’ concept. The ‘message’ of a medium is its effects, its “workings,” what it does. In order for things to do or cause something to happen – seen from a physicist perspective – they need to hold a certain amount of energy. Nothing in the universe ever comes about without the investment of energy. One of McLuhan’s masterstrokes has been to see media as central “players” in the global, human project of negentropy. Media are in a certain sense “animated.” They make things happen and so become meaningful allies in our never-weakening assault on entropy.363 The “aninimity” of technology364, i.e., the idea of media harboring energy and thus a power to transform things (in contrast to the image of media as neutral containers or means of transportation), constitutes a central theme in McLuhan’s work. But how precisely to make sense of the ‘hybrid’ part of the ‘hybrid energy’ concept? We can by turning to, first, another ‘hybrid’ concept developed in recent decades, however in a different context, by Bruno Latour, and second, the work of Paul Levinson, who has taken McLuhan’s hint of ‘hybrid energy’ to heart and developed it into a full-blown theory of media interaction and evolution (although without comprehensively belaboring the term itself). It will become clear that both perspectives complement each other. Latour’s ‘actant’ notion can be instrumental in understanding and complementing McLuhan’s definition of media. Both McLuhan and Latour see things as having acting potential apart from their functional employment by humans. Things “talk.”365 The medium proffers its message. Technologies, quite literally in Latour’s Aramis: The Love of Technology, have a voice of their own. In 285

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Latour this leads to a very special definition of ‘politics,’ as we will shortly see. Levinson’s ‘anthropotropic theory,’ then, provides an account of how these ‘politics’ play out over time. The shortcomings of one set of media get ‘remediated’ by another, all for the purpose of mimicking “natural,” face-to-face human communication. This makes, throughout history, for different eras in which specific stages (or constellations of “stages”) of these media evolutions hold or have held sway. For our discussion here at the “historical” level this is crucial. We proceed in four big steps. First we sketch McLuhan’s and Latour’s ‘hybrid’ notions. Second, we critically investigate Latour’s concept of thing-centered, thing-related politics. Third, we outline Levinson’s theory of media dynamics and embed it in the wider tradition of theories on technological evolution. Fourth and finally, we attempt a better understanding of the elusive “conspiracy of things,” by way of superposing Latour’s and McLuhan’s concepts of time, and thus, essentially, of change.

12.2 Things Matter: The Larger Scale and ‘Hybrid Energy’ There is more than one “beloved object,” and multiple of these objects taken together have their very own “way.” Because things are manifold and not singlefold they have workings that differ literally quite “substantially” from the workings of the object in isolation. (Once more, the latter is an abstraction that can only exist in our imagination.) That things are multiple and have an impact on a larger scale seems like a truism. Within the bounds of our relationship triad, however, it pays to scrutinize this impact more closely. McLuhan and Latour have within different contexts focused on the larger-scale interaction of ‘media’ and “things.” On how things in their frantic manifoldness constitute from out of their very “thingness” – which is to a certain extent primordial, coming even “before” our dealings with them and the networks of relations they are in – constellations of things irrespective of all human intention and relation.366 In what follows we treat of Latour’s ‘hybrid’ concept and McLuhan’s notion of ‘hybrid energy,’ respectively. Surprisingly however, we will find that it is much less easier than expected to get “behind” relation or mediation to the object “itself” on the basis of Latour’s and McLuhan’s work. Things in their view do indeed act, but – as suggested in Chapter 8 – we can only perceive the “results” of those acts, not so much their “source.” 286

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LATOUR: HYBRIDS (IN NETWORKS)

As seen, Latour is one of the founders of Actor-Network Theory, but he himself prefers the term ‘sociology of associations’ (Latour 2005b). Already within this preference perhaps a sort of relational bias lingers. The term ‘Actor-Network Theory’ seems to grant instead more importance to some or other acting power in actors themselves above and beyond the associations they are in. Let us once again take a closer look at both components: actors and networks. First and foremost, actors. For ANT, actors are in no sense the traditional acting subjects as we know them, posited in opposition of, or in relation to nonacting objects. Entities have always encompassed aspects of ‘Society’ as well as ‘Nature,’ and these entities have continued, in all their hybridity, to multiply themselves (‘proliferation’). In practice almost everything and everyone can be seen as possessing hybrid qualities: everything... is an actor or ‘actant’ (Latour 1988, 153ff.). But these actors seem hardly well-circumscribed. Beneath the surface of ‘purification,’ one finds no neatly delineated entities but only an inextricable tangle of association and interrelation. In short: networks. Latour puts it clearly: ‘When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage [...]’ (1993, 129). The notion of ‘network’ can do the work our old ‘modern,’ dichotomizing reasoning could not: give credit to all the ‘quasi-objects’ (or hybrids), connections, and configurations that make up technologies but also ‘collectives.’ So in fact whereas everything is an actor, these actors do not really exist – the networks are the “real” entities. And that also only in a relative sense: networks are no ‘essences’ as such. Comparison between them is only possible on the ground of size – what Latour calls ‘sizeable differences’ (ibid., 106ff.) – for one cannot hold them up to the light of either ‘Nature’ or ‘Society.’ This does not mean, however, that networks are simply some residue that remains when we have cut out all metaphysics. They are not the pure ‘immanence’ that remains when we strike out ‘transcendence.’ Instead Latour proposes to scrap the term ‘immanence.’ For delegation, translation, mediation is transcendence, is the passage, the movement. Latour uses the word ‘pass’ – in the sense of pass in a ball game. And these passes, transcendences, have always been there, in the process of mediation. They are the world itself. Only, what has been abolished is the notion of a fixed entity “working” its power from out of itself. Notwithstanding the granting of agency to all things, ‘substance’ no longer is seen as having any influence of a significant kind. What stays is a constellation of 287

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‘forms’ interlocking, interacting with each other. And one simply cannot go beyond ‘form.’ As Harman comments: ‘no matter how far we go, there are always forms […]’ (2009b, 30). It is thus not the case that within the ‘black box’367 a different sort of reality resides or hides. As Harman, again, remarks: ‘We do not gain access to reality by subtracting the layers of distorting perception added to the world, but only by increasing the number of mediators […]’ (ibid., 77). We do not ‘open up’ black boxes by uncovering something but by broadening the view – by turning around, so to speak, the forgetting. The actors themselves pre-eminently give us the possibility of doing so, as long as we are prepared to grant them importance. The ‘sociologist of associations’ – in contrast with the ‘sociologist of the social’ – does so by ‘following the actors’ (or actants) and by trying to amass as much data as possible. Which is tiresome. Latour observes sardonically: ‘Social scientists will fall asleep long before actors stop deluging them with data.’ (2005b, 47) All is data, he says; and this is a version of epistemology that Harman calls realism, of the good sort (2009b). The black box is not really ‘black.’ What is hidden from us is actually lying there in plain sight. This leads us to a not unexpected formulation of a proviso. Should not Latour, given all this, have been the star of the previous chapter – the man who Harman affectively dubs the ‘prince of networks’? But it is exactly Harman who, as we saw, complements Latour’s relational framework with a reappraisal for substances. We choose to read Latour somewhat going against the grain of his own intention, and partly through Harman’s eyes. As Latour levels the playing field and grants all entities agency, Harman buttresses this widening-of-scope – in line with his own theory, as we have found in Part I at the “structural” level – with a focus on forces “beneath the surface” of mediation. Here at the “historical” level, we ask: are there wholes or constellations of actants that elude relation and networks whatsoever? Surprisingly, we are faced with the same difficulty in getting “behind” relation with McLuhan. MCLUHAN’S ‘HYBRID ENERGY’

McLuhan’s notion of ‘hybrid energy’ carries a flavor that is subtly different from Latour’s ‘hybrid’ concept. Not unlike many others of his probes it is worked out only superficially in his work, although it provides the title for one of the chapters in the first part of Understanding Media: ‘Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ (2003, 71ff.). With the onset of ‘neotribality’ due to the emergence of 288

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‘electric technology,’ the monopoly of linear-literary culture is breached. But the effects of these electronic media are in no way inscribed on a blank slate; they arrive into a world dominated by other media, altogether essentially different in “nature.” The sometimes fierce contact between these distinct sorts of media makes for clashes that can be felt on many different planes and in many different fields. Wherever technologies, media, modes of perception collide there is released ‘hybrid energy,’ out of which in turn new creations can arise. ‘[C]ulture that is engaged in translating itself from one radical mode such as the auditory, into another mode like the visual, is bound to be in a creative ferment, as was classical Greece or the Renaissance.’ (M. McLuhan 1962, 72) Here too it would seem that the idea of ‘hybrid energy’ should be situated more within the relation component of our relationship triad. What assures us that ‘hybrid energy’ actually attests to a phenomenon taking place on the side of beloved objects? Once again, no straightforward and convincing argument can be given; for all notions in McLuhan’s ideational framework are intertwined. But the term ‘energy’ may put us on the right track. ‘Energy’ suggests a power withing the things themselves relatively independent of human or even relational intervention. In Chapter 8 we discussed the hidden ‘core’ of objects – on the singular level. The notion ‘hybrid energy’ can help to make sense of how – on the plural level – hidden forces within singular objects may come together in order to create something totally new, i.e., a hybrid. This relates in essence to McLuhan’s idea of ‘control.’ ‘Controlling’ – or as one would say in more contemporary speak: modifying – technologies does not entail a purely human-spiritual intervention into a purely technological materiality. Instead it presupposes the introduction of other technologies; a process that Paul Levinson, as we will see, terms ‘remediation.’ ‘Technologies begin as antienvironments, as controls, and then become environmental, needing the endless spawning of new anti-environments as controls.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 30) At a certain level, technologies can only be conversed with through and by technologies. This suggests a form of contact that is relational – it is a coming together of entities – but that, paradoxically, at the same time steers clear from any involvement with the other two components of the triad, namely, the human lover and the relation of love. And in any case, as said in Chapter 8, we can only ever come into contact with substance by way of relation. Just as Latour endeavors to uncover the work of ‘purification’ and to halt the 289

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proliferation of hybrids ‘under the table,’ McLuhan seeks to stop the ‘juggernaut’ (M. McLuhan 2005c, 102) from rolling over us by way of showing its hidden workings. Both assume no essences lingering beyond appearance, mediation, or relation – Latour finds only ‘mediators’ and no substances; with McLuhan all cognition is perception and vice versa – but in Latour as well as in McLuhan this cutting out of all forms of archè is compensated by a broadening of the concept of agency to all things. And where there is agency, surely this agency must come from somewhere? Unfortunately it is very hard to find out from where precisely. But we may be able to trace where it goes to.

12.3 Politics in Things: ‘Energy’ or Power? Latour’s Actor-Network constellations and McLuhan’s hybrid-energetical clashes appear to line up to a considerable extent. But do these interactions of hybrids in networks “just” happen and no further questions asked? No, with both Latour and McLuhan, as we will see, these more ontological considerations naturally flow over into a reframing of the “traditional” notion of politics. As the autonomy of the modern subject in both frameworks is eroded, “politics” can no longer be said to be an exclusively human affair. The classic outlook on politics presupposed a more or less unilateral “grip on things” – and on humans-as-things – by persons, groups, communities. If things and objects are suddenly seen as possessing acting power too, this scheme can no longer be sustained. Politics, as we soon realize then, are also “in things.” THE ‘PARLIAMENT OF THINGS’

‘A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways we haven’t yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth […]’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 22), McLuhan writes in 1967. Statements like these foreshadow in a sense Latour’s notion of the ‘parliament of things’ (1993, 142ff.). Obviously McLuhan is commenting here upon the role of media in elections and electoral debates: politicians who can play the ‘cool’ medium of television to their advantage, like John F. Kennedy, stand a greater chance of achieving victory than their much ‘hotter’ opponents, like Nixon. But the quote also hints at a more general consciousness of the broadening of the realm of politics – outside of the domain of human discourse, into the planes of media, technologies, and things. 290

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Of course for both Latour and McLuhan the “politicalness” of things roots in their being translations, and hence has essentially human origins. We already saw how Latour illustrates the translation or shifting out of moral responsibility to material things by way of the example of the automated door-closer. The doorcloser takes on the task once carried out by a human. McLuhan would perhaps say that the door-closer makes for an extension of the janitor’s sensory-motor capabilities within a specific context of uniform-linear organization of public or private space that requires for the regulation of energy consumption according to maximini standards (the greatest results by way of the least effort). In both cases the constellation of media making up a specific society is an instantiation of that society’s ideology. In this way, once again, obviously, the “object” component of which we are treating here is naturally and inextricably intertwined with the “subject” and relation sides that we investigated in the previous chapters. However, although things’ agency derives in one way or another from us humans, once they are “out there” – as was already suggested in Chapter 8, where we discussed the “power” of objects at the singular level – they start to live a life of their own; they escape our complete grip. This is paradoxical and goes against the grain of all our inbred instrumentalist presumptions: how could an object that we ourselves have “put there” turn against us, cause unforeseen consequences? Still, as most of us have experienced, for instance a computer programmed by humans to perform sets of clearly defined tasks, may surprise us with unsuspected quirks and crashes. Mostly these events are seen as defects, errors, or ascribed to “bugs” – which is actually an interesting usage of terms: we cannot seem to be brought to believe that the strange unsuspecting glitch should in any way be the “responsibility” of the machine (or of the constellation of medial components that make up the machine), so we feel the need to point the finger at an illusory, metaphorical, but at least minimally conscious being, short-circuiting the furthermore “perfect” circuits. But let us try to turn these assumptions on their head: what if it is the constellation of things that actually makes for the event itself? As much is implied by Latour as well as by McLuhan, for, as we have seen, in both we find the clear conviction that hybridization, the acting force acquired by “things themselves together,” asks for a certain degree of control and prediction (we will shortly find a similar dynamic in Levinson). It is not enough, in Latour’s terms, to uncover ‘purification,’ the ‘upper half’ of the modern Constitution. We also have to aim our arrows towards the ‘lower’ part: ‘proliferation.’ As long as the work of purification served as cover-up, the moderns could unconcernedly 291

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continue the mixing, making and multiplying of quasi-objects ‘under the table.’ (Latour 1993, 142) This ‘clandestinity’ should be fought, according to Latour, and McLuhan shares his concern, although with a bit more drama: ‘We may be drowning.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 115) The subliminal and numbing effects of our technological extensions bring on a danger (and that danger may even be greater in a ‘tribal’ society). Both Latour and McLuhan eventually settle on some kind of “slow growth” scenario: ‘This slowing down, this moderation, this regulation, is what we expect from our morality.’ (Latour 1993, 142) We need to ‘[...] replace the clandestine proliferation of hybrids by their regulated and commonly-agreed-upon production.’ (ibid.) Likewise McLuhan cautions us to ‘[...] think things out before we put them out.’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 73) That should buy us time to assess their influences, for ‘[w]hen you live in a world to which you have not adapted, or had time to adapt, you “grow up absurd.”’ (M. McLuhan and Watson 2011, 163) These warnings, in Latour’s as well as in McLuhan’s case, although more articulated in the former than in the latter, principally lead up to and at the same time are derived from a reformulation of the definition of agency, but thus also essentially of political action. Both make pleas so as not to forget about “things.” With McLuhan: the workings of technologies and media. In Latour: what is ‘in the middle,’ the networks, hybrids, ‘the Middle Kingdom.’ (1993, 48) In both cases we are right in the domain of politics. As long as we are oblivious of technologies’ ‘form,’ we stay completely at the mercy of those who happen to be in power: ‘Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with “content” [...]’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 77). And according to Latour, by combining ‘Nature’ and ‘Society,’ technology and “political representation,” the moderns have been able to outsmart the public and to overpower the people (1993, 110). So power dwells in combination. Politics are not just where the Constitution or media content tell us they are: they are in all the hybrids we are encircled by, all the networks we form a part of, the media we make use of. Hence Latour’s notions of the ‘parliament of things’ and ‘object-oriented democracy.’ Politics should not just be located in government buildings or in politicians; these are only ‘half’ of it: ‘The other half lies in the issues themselves, in the matters that matter [...]’ (Latour 2005a, 16). That is the ‘res’ in the term ‘res publica.’ By giving objects their right due, we can, so to speak, smuggle politics in again through the backdoor. This idea has far-reaching consequences. Whereas a certain sort of political 292

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cynicism would see us rather dumbfounded or even paralyzed in front of an assumedly closed-off domain of politicians quarreling amongst themselves – the unreachable ‘spectacle’ of politics – the ‘parliament of things’ notion conversely assumes us to be engaged in politics every day and everywhere; only we have not noticed it. But ‘[i]n the middle, where nothing is supposed to be happening, there is almost everything.’ (Latour 1993, 123) This ‘middle,’ in fact, is all of reality, as Graham Harman comments: ‘For Latour all reality is political […]’ (2009b, 89). Instead of focusing, to put it in McLuhan’s terms, on the ‘content’ of the political spectacle, we should become more aware of the ‘form’ of politics – and this form is to be detected as good as everywhere. Nonetheless, although McLuhan’s and Latour’s warnings sound similar, one still needs to discriminate between the two positions. McLuhan seems to consider technology and media as threatening forces that ‘beset mankind’ (M. McLuhan 2003, 89-90) and that should be exhaustively understood before they are unleashed upon the public. Latour also dreads a certain form of “unconsciousness,” but the danger must not in the first instance be sought with technologies themselves, on the contrary: ‘Ecce homo: delegated, mediated, distributed, mandated, uttered. Where does the threat come from? From those who seek to reduce it to an essence [...]’ (1993, 138). This leads to quite complex issues of power and determination. BUT WHERE DOES POWER GO?

In sum: McLuhan and Latour share the notion of agency in things – and this agency has an essential political aspect. But the concept of things “having politics” in fact goes back to Langdon Winner (1986), and more generally to the tradition of philosophy of technology, and it is interesting to see how Latour develops an approach that differs only slightly but significantly from similar frameworks. The difference must be sought with the notion of “power.” Winner’s most famous example of “politics in artifacts” are of course the New York underpasses: bridges constructed by architect Robert Moses in such a way as to permit only automobiles to pass under them, and no buses – thus excluding poorer, i.e., black people from taking the main road to the mundane beaches of Long Island. This would be an example of what Andrew Feenberg calls ‘formal bias’: the bias here resides not in beliefs or value systems – as is the case with ‘substantive bias’ – but in the formal characteristics of the technology. The technology may work perfectly by itself, in a technical sense. Yet, notwithstanding its apparent neutrality, some bias is either built into its design (‘constitutive’ 293

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formal bias) or may emerge when the technology gets embedded in a certain context (‘implementation’ formal bias). In practice the technology still serves to guard and consolidate the power of some dominant class or group. It remains power that is in one way or another “instantiated” in the design and form of the technology (Feenberg 2002, 81-82; Feenberg 2010a, 69, 163-164). Latour by contrast chooses not to deploy “power” as central explanans. Power only furnishes a non-exclusive explanation for the agency of things. ‘[P]ower, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation.’ (Latour 2005b, 64) This seems at first sight to be a modification of the argument presented previously, but in fact is not. Put simply: “politics are in things,” but the constellation of things is, conversely, not determined by politics alone. ‘Politics […] is only one way of composing the collective; it cannot provide the general pattern for a sociology of associations.’ (ibid., 171) The pure fact of there being networks – associations – of actants does not make them political per se. “Politics” should indeed be defined as including artifacts; but artifacts can in turn not be exclusively explained as “political.” One should always start with the ‘assemblages,’ and moreover ask what the ‘assemblies’ formed by them are. That is how Latour describes the political project of ANT; ‘[t]his is where politics again enters the scene if we care to define it as the intuition that associations are not enough, that they should also be composed in order to design one common world.’ (ibid., 259) But Latour’s notion of politics has received notable criticism, especially from Feenberg. The debate between Feenberg and Latour circles around a subtle but crucial nuance. It is particularly with ANT’s ‘principle of symmetry’368 – the idea that agency belongs to “objects” as much as to “subjects,” and hence the dissolution of the strict subject-object split – that Feenberg takes issue. ‘In particular, the symmetry of humans and nonhumans blocks access to the central insight of modernity theory, the extension of technical control from nature to humans themselves.’ (2003, 89) According to Feenberg, because Latour scraps asymmetry – and thus what we could call the human standpoint – he makes an overarching social program impossible. And we need a ‘global social theory’ to help us modify technologies in such a way as to accommodate the needs of suppressed social groups. Latour, says Feenberg, does try to reinsert a social principle in the networks in Politics of Nature (2004), namely, in the form of democratic debate. And he thereby expels transcendent objects not only from theory, but also from practice. However to achieve that, Feenberg alleges, common 294

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sense would have to become Latourian, something Latour thinks is doable, but that Feenberg sees as highly unlikely (Feenberg 2003, 90-91). We still need a model of ‘civilizational change.’ Rephrased in terms of the work at hand: we still require some amount of “subversive anthropocentrism” to superpose onto the mere constellational, thingly, “dumb” forces. MCLUHAN’S “DETERMINISM”: A RECOGNITION OF THE INNER FORCE OF THINGS?

Nevertheless, the “dumb” forces are there, notwithstanding Latour’s refusal to explain them by way of the concept of power, which can only “come about” when there are humans on the scene. So in the end the discussion, in essence, does come down to an ontological issue again, i.e., the precise location of the borderline between our agency and objects’ or technologies’ agency. It so happens that in McLuhan’s work and its reception, as we have repeatedly found, exactly this matter has become an infamous theme. We repeatedly dealt with the criticism of technological determinism throughout Chapters 2 and 11. Are we now, in comparing McLuhan’s theory of technological agency with that of Latour, making a technological determinist out of the latter? Latour’s crafty rhetorical antics in books like Aramis (1996) – in which he lets ‘Aramis,’ the Parisian metro system that never was, itself talk – serve mainly to underpin his principal critique of the ‘sociology of the social.’ Technologies are socially constructed, but that does not account for everything; or at least we should not try to reduce everything to ‘the social.’ Yet there may indeed be some “inner force in things” that need not be mystic or metaphysical but that has an impact on how events occur. Seen from this perspective, Latour is as much a technological determinist as McLuhan is supposed to be. Only, if McLuhan is ever a technological determinist – he probably is – than he is still much more than that too. His determinism may serve as a recognition of the “inner forces within things” that when things interact, get together, collide – as they always do – make for an interplay in which we, the human observer or user, could never discern clearly which part is taken up by which component of the relationship triad. Graeme Kirkpatrick summarizes it astutely when saying: ‘[…] the way technologies mesh with social power always involves this kind of interplay of social construction on one side and the independent causal powers of artefacts on the other.’ (2008, 4) The people who criticize others for being technological determinists, seem overly sure about where the impact of the “inner forces of things” starts and ends. The technological determinists +, as we may call them, on 295

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the contrary suspect an inner force – a liability, an unpredictability to be reckoned with at any time – but do not feel in any way capable, at least in praxis, of detaching this brooding activity on the part of the beloved objects themselves, from either the lover or the love component. All is a blur. All is relationship (and not just relation).

12.4 Media Evolution: Out of the Kernel, a New World Is Born Still, the need for the delineation of borders remains, if “only” in everyday practical and ethical life. Where do we have to locate the boundary between human and technological intentionality? In what follows we propose another outlook that may be of help in making clear “who gets what”: the theory of media evolution. McLuhan, as we saw in Chapter 8, works out the tetrad to make sense of the way in which media and technologies behave, develop, and play out their effects within societal contexts. Former McLuhan student Paul Levinson has reframed this theory of media dynamics in evolutionary terms – thus writing himself into a much older tradition that sees technological development as a substitute for natural-human evolution.369 The ‘hybrid energy’ of which McLuhan in this perspective speaks, erupts and streams along lines akin to evolutionary patterns (an idea that he himself already hints at, as we saw). We will first treat of Levinson’s theory and then investigate briefly several other, similar approaches. LEVINSON’S ANTHROPOTROPIC THEORY

As said, Paul Levinson takes over most of McLuhan’s framework – including his extension theory – and converts it into an evolution theory of media: media evolve, quite literally, according to a scheme of Darwinian selection. Just as in natural evolution, a ‘maximized initial generation’ (Levinson 1997, 76) of species precedes selection. Only here not the environment functions as selector; humans do. According to Levinson every medium goes through a three stage development; he sketches the process in his dissertation thesis Human Replay (1987). In stage 1, communication proceeds in a non-technological way (face-to-face) and does not surpass the direct environment and the reaches of memory (space and time). In other words, communication here is ‘unmediated.’ Stage 2 rings in the use of a medium that transcends these boundaries, but with distortion of information as a consequence (e.g., black and white television). In stage 3 at last this ‘trade-off’ is 296

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‘remediated’ by restoring the communication of Stage 2 with ‘elements of real life’ of Stage 1 (e.g., color television), ‘[...] allowing us to have the cake of our extensions and eat it too.’ (ibid., 12) In short: with the development of every medium we ultimately attempt to replicate conditions of face-to-face communication while transgressing the boundaries of time and space. Hence the ‘replay’ of Levinson’s dissertation title: media ‘replay’ human communication and perception. He calls his framework the ‘anthropotropic theory’: media “hold” an inherent tendency towards the replication of “natural” human communication. The best ‘fit’ is achieved by media that extend our capabilities and at the same time accomplish this ‘replay,’ hence achieving enhancement and retrieval of ‘biological communication.’ (Levinson 1999a, 52) ‘[A] medium’s survival quotient is directly proportional to its approximation of the pre-technological, human communication environment.’ (Levinson 1987, 229) But, media need to accomplish this in a way that does not corrupt other elements of pre-technological communication (ibid., 23). This explicitly formulated “end goal” of media development may be somewhat narrowly framed, as we will see, but in any case Levinson’s natural-historical account enables him, paradoxically, to criticize all-too-deterministic critics of new media. Levinson alleges that dystopian media critics often aim their arrows at the Stage 2 form of a medium. He calls this the ‘Ellulian fallacy’: ‘[...] assessing all of technology by its infancy [...]’ (ibid., 98). Indeed, as in natural evolution, unintended consequences come along during media growth, but what these critics systematically underestimate is the power of ‘remedial media’ to resolve those problems (Levinson 1997, 6ff.). Nonetheless, it should be stressed, this work of remediation370 is a constant one – no pure, untainted paradise is in sight.371 It appears that we are forever doomed to alternate between the three aforementioned stages. Except, of course, that we are not doomed. Crucially, that what makes Levinson’s theory of technological evolution interesting for our purposes here, namely, the investigation of the “inner forces” of things at the “historical” level, is not so much that it suggests media, as said, to have “inherent” tendencies. For those tendencies – towards natural communication, for instance – only come about through human choice; the tendencies are thus more to be situated within humanity. Rather what is important in this regard is that the scheme proposed by Levinson suggests – negatively, so to speak – a force within things, more surreptitious and harder to trace, but still undeniably there, because it requires “us” humans to engage into a dialogue with 297

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those very media we have “put out there.” If no force whatsoever would be present in them we would not have to converse with them at all. It is because they have an agency of their own that we need to deal with them. They have a way of their own; and time and again imposing “our way on them” often urges us to apply loads of energy – as is well-known, the work of ‘remediation’ is never done.372 And as we will immediately see, even stronger positions on this issue than Levinson’s have been voiced. TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION: OTHER VIEWS

For, as mentioned, Levinson’s ‘anthropotropic theory’ can be situated within a broader tradition that was already discussed in Chapter 6, and that sees technological development as continuous with human evolution. The basic premise held by representatives of this tradition is that with the occurrence of homo sapiens sapiens, human evolution through biology largely came to a standstill and was instead from that moment on achieved by way of technology (E. McLuhan 1998, 3). The idea is particularly epically illustrated by a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the hominid leader, after finding out how to use an animal bone as a weapon, kills the competing tribe’s leader, and then triumphantly throws the bone into the air. The bone changes, in midsequence, into an orbital satellite – hinting at the long but overall straight line of development that stretches from mankind’s first and robust tool use to the design of the most hi-tech aerospace technology.373 Of course the idea of technology-as-evolution does not presuppose a complete stasis of the human genome since 10.000 years or more. But on a broad scale, no revolutionary change has taken place since then, and “we” are still the same species. Technological development, on the contrary, has since progressed by logarithmic steps. Levinson’s notion of media evolution in its own right attempts to make sense of this explosive growth, although his theory has received criticism. Bolter and Grusin in Remediation, for example, characterize it as teleological and only progressive, whereas in their view older media can just as well refashion newer ones (2000, 59n.) – a point that Levinson in our opinion would not try to refute. Paul A. Taylor, also, in a book review of Levinson’s Digital McLuhan, avers that ‘[Levinson’s] claim that rationality is purposefully enhanced by digital communication is unsubstantiated and at odds with McLuhan’s […] assertions that rather than enhancing conventional rationality, electronic media impel us to create new technology-driven forms of it.’ (2005, 80) 298

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Yet similar positions to Levinson’s have been put forward in recent years. Over and against Taylor’s critique one could posit Andy Clark’s assertion that technological products are under a ‘cultural-evolutionary pressure’ to fit with physical and cognitive needs of humans (2003, 39). Unlike Levinson, however, Clark makes the qualification that one should discern between on the one hand tasks at which human brains are good and technologies like computers are bad – for example pattern matching, simple associations, perceptual processing, using sensory data to control body movement, reasoning about location in space – and on the other hand skills in which technologies, like computers, are proficient but in which humans mostly fail – for instance, storing and recalling a lot of data. Humans are, as Clark puts it, ‘Good at Frisbee, Bad at Logic.’ (ibid., 75) This means that technology does not so much ‘replay’ the “human condition,” as Levinson suggests. Technologies, says Clark, do not necessarily have to replicate or imitate face-to-face interaction; they expand, rather than reproduce (ibid., 109110) ‘The idea would be to allow the technologies to provide for the kinds of interactions and interventions for which they are best suited, rather than to force them to (badly) replicate our original forms of action and experience.’ (ibid., 109) Clark gives the examples of written language and e-mail. Another approach in line with Levinson’s and the broader tradition of technology-as-evolution, but nevertheless offering some more nuance and conceptual diversity, is offered by Bob Logan. ‘The dominant technologies of a culture, whether they are informational, mechanical, or economic, are interrelated and follow a similar pattern of evolution, reinforcing each other until a new level of technological innovation or breakthrough arises and new social patterns emerge.’ (2000, 86-87) Yet each new development emerges as the result of a complex ‘interplay’ of cognitive-conceptual tools, physical technologies, and social-economical factors (ibid., 124). ‘Cognitive tools and physical technology are two resources at the disposal of human innovators and the needs or demands of society are often the motivating force. Necessity is the mother of invention, yet invention does not occur in a vacuum.’ (ibid., 125) It is especially the addition of socio-economical aspects that makes for a crucial corrective to Levinson’s mostly organism-centered outlook. The most comprehensive and also most recent theory of technology-asevolution can however be found with Kevin Kelly. Kelly, in his What Technology Wants (2011), also starts from the premise that the development of technology is evolutionary in nature and that human biological evolution came to an end when 299

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technological evolution began. But he goes a couple of steps further. Kelly sees technology as in all respects similar to life. This is also the reason why he dubs a new term for it: the ‘technium.’ And he makes the central point that although the technium stems from us humans, it now is beginning to have an existence and an autonomy partly independent from our control. It is ‘[…] maturing into its own thing.’ (ibid., 12) Interestingly, Kelly’s technium encompasses not only technologies as we commonly know them, but in fact comprises all products of “culture.” This makes his definition dovetail well with the description of media offered by the McLuhans in Laws of Media. What all these products, made by humans, have in common for Kelly is that they consist, in essence, of ideas and information. Just as the McLuhans include ideational structures as well as machines in their concept of media, the technium incorporates literature, music, poetry, et cetera as well as material devices. What is more, Kelly calls the technium an ‘extension of natural life.’ It is, says Kelly in a reference to McLuhan, our ‘extended body’: ‘[…] the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.’ (ibid., 11) But, as said, since recently this system is starting to have a life of its own. It is even becoming, Kelly suggests, the ‘seventh kingdom of life.’ This entails that we should treat it as life. ‘The technium is now as great a force in our world as nature, and our response to the technium should be similar to our response to nature.’ (ibid., 17) In this context Kelly proposes a way of doing akin to Levinson’s notion of ‘remediation.’ All problems that the technium as life form poses, can only be countered by way of the technium itself. Walking away from it is not an option anymore. ‘If all technology – every last knife and spear – were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.’ (ibid., 37) Hating technology, Kelly remarks, comes down to self-hatred. At the same time we should realize that we are dealing with an autonomous life form. And the evolutionary process in which that life form is involved, Kelly subversively claims over and against most orthodox interpretations of natural evolution, has a certain direction. The direction is ‘what technology wants.’ ‘This direction introduces inevitabilities into the shape of life. These nonmystical tendencies are woven into the fabric of technology as well, which means certain aspects of the technium are also inevitable.’ (ibid., 103) And what does technology want? The same as life. It has recently been discovered, Kelly avers, that life evolves towards a certain set of recurring patterns. 300

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‘The technium will tend toward certain macroforms, even if you rerun the tape of time.’ (ibid., 181) Kelly calls this ‘exotropy,’ i.e., the reverse of entropy. It is a progression towards more efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, and specialization. In general, technology is about furnishing ‘chances’ – opportunities. Yet the difference between the evolution of the technium and natural selection is that in the case of technology, adaptation is not unconscious. We as humans can intervene in the process by way of political action and decision-making; Levinson would say that we humans fulfill the role of selectors. ‘At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules.’ (ibid., 187) Together with ‘the gravity of the past,’ these three factors – ‘what technology wants,’ the legacy of technological history, and ‘society’s collective free will’ – determine the technium’s evolution. A topology not unlike our distinction between the three components of the relationship triad at the “historical” level. Interestingly, and finally, we should remark upon a significant parallel between Kelly’s and McLuhan’s ideas of technological dynamics. For Kelly’s sketch of the characteristics of ‘what technology wants’ appears to exhibit striking similarities to the specifics of McLuhan’s tetradic framework. Kelly sees three main differences between biological evolution and the evolution of the technium. First, the latter does not necessarily progress vertically; there may also be ‘horizontal transfer.’ This corresponds with McLuhan’s notion of ‘retrieval.’ Second, within the evolution of the technium, there are revolutions: a pendant of McLuhan’s ‘reversal’ concept. And third, species do not go extinct within the technium. Again a parallel in McLuhan can be found, namely, in the ‘obsolescence’ aspect of the tetrad: within media dynamics, no form ever “goes extinct,” it just becomes obsolesced, to be retrieved later by other forms. The only missing quadrant of the tetrad, ‘enhancement,’ can be found in Kelly’s aforementioned definition of the technium, as the ‘enhancement’ of chances and opportunities. So, it seems that Kelly’s approach has a lot in common with Levinson’s as well as McLuhan’s theories. His book offers an intriguing retrieval, in itself, of some central ideas starring in McLuhan’s conceptual universe. Slightly unlike McLuhan, however, Kelly leaves us, in the end, with an uncompromisingly hopeful message, very much in line with Levinson’s optimism: This is what the technium is. The technium is the accumulation of stuff, of lore, of practices, of traditions, and of choices that

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allow an individual human to generate and participate in a greater number of ideas. […] While we amass possibilities, we do so because the very cosmos itself is on a similar expansion. (Kelly 2011, 351) WORKING WITH AND AGAINST TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION: MCLUHAN’S ENVIRONMENT/ANTI-ENVIRONMENT DYNAMIC

A strange feeling comes over us. Does all of this perhaps point in the direction of a possible “coming into fashion” again of technological determinism? Once more, it is time to revisit a concept of McLuhan that we already spoke of. One in fact that immediately links up with the technological determinism notion. As we have seen, according to McLuhan, the best way to unveil the hidden effects of a media environment is constructing an ‘anti-environment.’ Especially artists do this. The ‘proper function of the arts,’ says McLuhan, is ‘the clarification of sensibility’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 78). Art can serve as a ‘Distant Early Warning (DEW) system.’ But not only art fulfills this function; humor (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 92), and all other sorts of media produced by a culture, like clothing (M. McLuhan 1970, 300), can do it too. For ‘anti-environments’ are just as much formed by media as ‘environments.’ Once again, the posing of a need for counteraction presupposes things to have some power of their own that we do not wholly control and against which we have no other choice than to “react,” as if these things were other persons. Art in McLuhan’s thought is “our” answer to the monsters of Frankenstein we have put “out there.” Yet what distinguishes McLuhan’s from other (similar) stances374, is another one of his notions of which we will treat more extensively in Chapter 17: ‘speedup.’ The general speed-up in our culture complicates the work of the arts. Instantaneous communication exacts, so to speak, instant reactions. ‘When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency.’ (M. McLuhan and Watson 2011, 79) In the ‘electric age’ the planet itself – and this is probably one of the most subversive and intriguing of McLuhan’s probes – has transformed from an environment into a ‘probe,’ thus, an anti-environment. The planet itself has become content (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 251-252). In other words, the content becomes the environmental (ibid., 248). It thus becomes necessary to program the environment ‘like a work of art.’ ‘Art is ceasing to be a special kind of object to be inserted in a special kind of space.’ (ibid., 29) We go back to tribal conditions: in a tribal society all activities and events are “art,” “artistic.” One of 302

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McLuhan’s favorite quips is: ‘The Balinese, who have no word for art, say, “We do everything as well as possible.”’ (ibid., 243) Interestingly, in some places McLuhan even proposes to ‘[…] program the whole environment like a double helix’ (1970, 312). This lines up perfectly with the aforesaid. If technology can be seen as the placeholder for human evolution, the creation of technological ‘anti-environments’ could serve as a sort of medial “genetic engineering.” Importantly, not all and everything is allowed in this process of modification. Certainly not since we are living in an age that is speeding up at explosive (i.e., implosive) rates. In an era of immense speed-up, what we may need, as has already been suggested in comparing McLuhan’s and Latour’s idea of “medial” politics, is a slowing down: While the arts as radar feedback provide a dynamic and changing corporate image, their purpose may be not to enable us to change but rather to maintain an even course toward permanent goals, even amidst the most disrupting innovations. We have already discovered the futility of changing our goals as often as we change our technologies. (M. McLuhan 2003, 16)

Paradoxically, the counterforce of a possible “slowing down” will have to be implemented and executed, guerilla style, in a supremely fast manner. ‘Psychically, art is valuable only when new.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 46) That is why the ‘Cave art’ of Madison Avenue is up until now the most innovative educational art form of the 20th century (ibid., 48). When we call on the arts to play along in the media game, all the while attempting to impose upon it different rules, we are in fact in the midst of the – paradoxical – self-reflexive dialogue of existence itself. We will return to this issue in Chapter 17.

12.5 Evolution vs. Structure: Substances Making for Change Throughout this chapter we have sought to come to grips with the “beloved” component of the relationship triad at the “historical” level, at which many beloved objects – media, technologies – arrive on, star on, and again exit the scene. By way of outlining Latour’s notion of agency, present in all entities, and McLuhan’s concept of ‘hybrid energy,’ unleashed whenever medial “modes” clash, we endeavored to track the trail of objects’ “inner force.” Media have a way of their 303

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own; and as we humans feel the need to “converse” with them, to ‘remediate’ them we acknowledge, though mostly implicitly, their agency. Then, by elaborating upon several frameworks of medial-technological evolution – among them Levinson’s and Kelly’s – we have seen how we are forced to engage with media’s forces through time. This, at last, enables us now to return to the issue that closed off the previous chapter: that of change. LATOURIAN CHANGE VS. MCLUHANIST CHANGE

Here eventually we seem to find a difference between McLuhan’s and Latour’s perspectives. Although both are in the business of restoring to hybrids their due rights, beneath this common cause a difference in historical outlook is lurking. While McLuhan opposes visual and auditory-tactile epochs, Latour succinctly pronounces that ‘we have never been modern.’ The ‘Modern Constitution’ has always had ‘two irons in the fire’: claiming pure and simple entities on the surface while letting hybrids proliferate below it. In that way the moderns have clung to a historical perspective that stresses historical turns, breaches and revolutions, while all along letting networks grow and hybrids multiply continuously (Latour 1993, 69). Latour instead endeavors to develop a wholly different view on time, not based, like the modernist time frame, on the absolute notions of progress and breach. ‘Time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities.’ (ibid., 74) The moderns have “invented” a temporal structure and applied that to a situation in which the interaction of actants and networks in fact at any moment makes its own time. ‘Modern temporality is the result of a retraining imposed on entities which would pertain to all sorts of times and possess all sorts of ontological statuses without this harsh disciplining.’ (ibid., 72) Actually networks, collectives, “we” take care of “time making,” which Latour illustrates with a quote from Péguy: ‘[...] ‘we are exchangers and brewers of time’ [...]’ (ibid., 75). ‘It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting.’ (ibid., 76) In this view, there can be no talk of breaches, watersheds, turns, or revolutions. At any given moment, the whole past is recreated. ‘The past remains, […] and even returns.’ (ibid., 69) 
 Nevertheless, if the moderns tend to think in terms of ‘[...] progress and decadence [...]’ (ibid., 72), ironically this is exactly the stage upon which McLuhan sets his ‘hybrid energy.’ What is more, McLuhan sees a correlation between ‘the electric age’ and our renewed concern with totality, involvement and interplay in 304

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culture, science and art – as exemplified in quantum physics and cubism. ‘Electric technology’ not only changed environments and sense equilibria, but also ‘opened our eyes’ as such for the auditory-tactile. Thus, whereas Latour uncovers a rupture between theory and “reality,” for McLuhan these two are more or less organically interwoven. In a McLuhanist sense, what Latour appears to be saying is: “we have always been tribal.” Indeed, ‘[w]e have always remained pre-Socratic, preCartesian, pre-Kantian, pre-Nietzschean.’ (ibid., 67) Still, Latour also hints at a recent change of times: nowadays the work of purification cannot keep up with the work of proliferation anymore; too much hybrids are being made, and networks have grown to the size of the globe (ibid., 73-74). This amounts to a quantitative rather than a qualitative change. And in a more recent text Latour seems to suggest something more: ‘Strangely enough, we have changed time so completely that we have shifted from the time of Time [i.e., the revolutionary outlook of the moderns] to the time of Simultaneity.’ (2005a, 40) However all in all, this point of view is not incoherent with his general perspective on time – since exactly this constellation of networks in which we nowadays live makes for the fact that we perceive a ‘shift’ and interpret it as such… Still, in the end the two perspectives – Latour’s and McLuhan’s – do not so much differ as they first appear to do. For both the ‘collectives,’ the medial constellations, “make” the times. But we ourselves are full-blown parts of those constellations. Within the modernist subject-object split, it becomes untenable to maintain that breaches, revolutions, watersheds, “sea changes” have taken place; for the real medial activity then seems to go on and go ahead with or without our “subjective” involvement whatsoever. As soon as one realizes that “we” as well as the media “surrounding” us form inseparable components of relationship triads, the allocation of time control, so to speak, becomes much harder: who or what “makes the times”? We all do. And moreover there is no escaping of responsibility, in the existential as well as ethical sense, possible anymore. But at least we are allowed to unburdenedly talk of change. For at the “historical” level, change is simply and wholly ours – too. THE CONSPIRACY OF THE BELOVED: CAN THINGS CAUSE?

Yet, at the end of the day, the question remains: can things, from within themselves, cause? Or should we still see humans as the sole guardians of agency? Henry J. Perkinson, who develops a theory of Darwinian media evolution similar to Levinson’s, puts its starkly: ‘Media have no agency. They neither determine nor 305

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cause cultural change. Human beings are the agents of cultural progress.’ (1995, xii) Ian Angus, too, although seeing certain purposeful dynamics in media development, would rather deny media any “inner force”: ‘Why is it that a medium’s use continually changes in a manner that takes it closer to itself, not further, but has no teleology (the earlier is not improved by the later form)? The supplement unsettles the presumption of a self-sufficient inside, or origin, that is characteristic of metaphysics.’ (2005, 12) All of the aforesaid nevertheless suggests otherwise – however without lulling us into technological determinism pur sang. We want to be technological determinists +. We do need some anthropocentrism; but at the same time we do well in superposing it with a focus on relation and substance as well. There is a great chance we may never be able to satisfactorily attest to the inner forces or substances of things, for only their effects – relation, mediation – we can experience. But any outlook that sees media as merely deriving from humans, and no further questions asked, would in fact represent the same stance as that taken by the overly projecting lover who seeks and finds himself in all others, and in no way is capable of taking them on any other but his own terms. As in any relationship, although we will perhaps never be able to perceive the beloved object “as it is” and still have to try to approach that person in all his or her specificity, our bond with technology would just as much benefit from, perhaps even expects some of the same reverence towards the “object” – the substance or force it harbors – that we do not immediately perceive, and that we perhaps will never be able to perceive. Luckily, there are substantial attempts. Verbeek’s postphenomenological theory of the ‘materiality of things’ (2005), for instance, as we have suggested, goes a long way in recognizing things on their own terms – all the while rememorating our very own ‘situatedness.’ But we should be reminded of the broadness of the medium definition that we have worked out in Part I: media and technologies include not only material but also immaterial “things.” What this entails we will attempt to outline in the closing chapter of this part.

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13 A Pan-Medial Cosmology ‘Time is a brilliant invention that prevents everything from happening simultaneously.’375 (von Hirschhausen 2009, 343)

This chapter synthesizes the three previous ones and so concludes Part II, in which we have endeavored to analyze our bond with technology at the “historical” level. We start to investigate here how “structural” and “historical” levels interact and are related to each other, a task we will continue more extensively and from an existential viewpoint throughout Part III. Our main entry point is methodological: by way of the triadic-two-layered approach that we have attempted to develop up until now we seek to complete the theoretical framework already formed by theories in PhilTech such as the Critical Theory of Technology and postphenomenology with McLuhanist media theory. In our intentionally broad approach, all relationship triads form part of a “pan-medial cosmology” in which all things are media, but in which these must at the same time be seen as instantiations of ideological discourse, that initially hail “from us” but eventually start to “work their way” across “worlds of mediation.” What this means will be illustrated with an everyday example which we call “the Mailman Problem.” At last then, we link up the two levels and three components to our two heuristics of blindness and ambivalence, described in Part 0, again and so pave the way for the more experimental analysis of the “structural”-”historical” dynamic to be worked out in the following part.

13.1 ‘A Tale Told by an Idiot…’: “Structural” vs. “Historical” AT THE FRILLS OF TERMS – A WORK OF INCLUSION INSTEAD OF EXCLUSION

It is one thing to scrutinize “the” love of technology – get it in view in an abstract manner, as if there was but one. But it is a wholly other thing to come to grips with the multiplicity of this world and realize that there are many loves vying with each other for preponderance – many potentially beloved objects craving for the attention, involvement, and commitment of many lovers. The former we attempted to do in the previous part. The last three chapters have been devoted to the latter task. This two-layered approach has been worked out in order to represent and reproduce insofar as possible – perhaps it is not possible at all – the elusive and 307

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many-sided dynamics that make up all systems of organisms and things. That entails covering the spectra that run from the social to the natural; and from the ideational to the material. It also means inquiring into what happens at the level of the individual as well as of society – in our specific case: accounting for technologies as seemingly well-defined “things” as well as for media-asenvironments. Both parts of the aforementioned opposite pairs, it has appeared since long, are something of an illusion. Really there are no such things as individuals (or mediaas-things) or societies (or media-as-environments). And the contraposition of the social and the natural is merely a façade upheld by modernity, as Latour argues.376 Both terms of those oppositions overflow into each other. At their frills, they become indistinguishable. Yet notwithstanding these concepts’ flaws, which have been amply demonstrated by several philosophical schools from phenomenology to neopragmatism, they perhaps still make for the best tools that we have at our disposal in philosophy, however one needs to deploy them in such a way that their ambiguity and fleetingness are exposed as much as possible. Integrating them in a comprehensive multilayered structure of which none of the components can ever be fully reduced to another – including rather than excluding; and so in fact following the indications that McLuhan almost in passing gives – constitutes our attempt at doing so. THE INTERPLAY OF “STRUCTURAL” AND “HISTORICAL” LEVELS

As said, in the previous part the “structural” composition of our bond with technology was at stake. We arrived at a notion that sought to synthesize the several ways in which the lover extends into the beloved, the love comes about through and by way of the filters of mediation, and the beloved object reaches out and back into the lover: the medial node. Yet this was “merely” an abstract sketch. As can be attested to by simple everyday observation: of lovers, loves, and beloved objects there exist in reality many, in multiple guises, through time and space. But this does not mean that in order to get this multiplicity in view we can just take the medial node concept and multiply it times x, and no further questions asked. The medial node is no well-circumscribed entity, fixed and locatable in space at any given time. It is a shifting assemblage of relation and substance. That we have wielded in the current part exactly the same three-component setup as in the previous part is not coincidental. At the level of the multiple, many lovers 308

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interact through many forms of love with many beloved objects – in ways that are, as we have seen, far from straightforward and impossible to capture in and by even the most inclusive conceptual system. Over and over again, ‘the map is not the territory.’ Medial nodes come as they come; they do not await our descriptions and systematizations of them. Nevertheless, there is one task left to face in this chapter and that is to explain how the two levels interact, or in McLuhan’s terms, ‘interplay.’ Paradoxically, this is possible by pointing at the differences between the medial node “in the singular” and the medial node “in the plural.” Or more precisely, the differences between on the one hand the conceptual framing of the structural characteristics of the “love of,” and on the other hand the scrutiny and understanding of the effects of manyloves-in-interaction, for which we can find no better word than ‘politics.’ Within the PhilTech tradition the former has been attempted mostly by approaches building on phenomenological traditions – like Ihde’s and Verbeek’s. The latter has particularly been a focus of theories that are more inspired by several streams in political and Critical philosophy – for instance, Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology. In what follows the running debate between these two frameworks will serve as an entry into the discussion of how the “structural” and the “historical” levels dovetail with each other. At the same time we will also, again, pick up the thread that was temporarily laid down in the last chapter of the previous part, and that concerns our two heuristics of blindness and ambivalence. All these elements combined make for a picture of a “pan-medial cosmology” – a pandemonium of medial nodes, stretching itself out in time and space, truly ‘a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury.’ Only, the idiot is nowhere in sight. Or more precisely, all of “us” – including entities – are the idiots.

13.2 The PostPhen-CTT-Media Theory Complex As we indicated in the Introduction and have mentioned repeatedly since then, the reign of unilateral philosophies of technology that typically analyze technology as either a specific thing or an all-encompassing system, is slowly coming to an end – as more nuanced viewpoints have begun to seep even into common sense. As said, particularly two of the most significant streams in contemporary PhilTech, namely, CTT and PostPhen, deserve credit for this evolution: they have 309

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heightened discursive complexity to a considerable extent. As we will see, these two approaches complement each other finely, as they mutually remedy each other’s defects. However, even their combination still leaves open gaps. THE NEED FOR A POSTPHEN-CTT-MEDIA THEORY COMPLEX

In Chapter 10 we discussed the ways in which media theory links up with CTT. In Chapter 7 we investigated how McLuhan’s framework relates to Ihde’s and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology.’ We now have to go one step further and aggregate all three domains. For it is exactly in and through the – methodological – interplay between these three fields that the – conceptual –interplay between the “structural” and “historical” levels that we have outlined will become clear. We do not in any way want to allege that PostPhen exclusively focuses on the “structural,” and CTT only considers the “historical” level. As seen in the discussion of Ihde’s ‘cultural hermeneutics,’377 postphenomenology has something to tell us about the “historical” plane. And Critical Theory deals with, for instance, issues of philosophical anthropology, that are located on the “structural” plane. But the disagreements between the two streams of theory may be suggestive of a more general tendency to divorce structure from change. Within current PhilTech, the two domains or levels, so it seems, are more often than not seen in relative isolation – as if one is always required to choose between the two premises of either “it has always been like that,” or “things change in a revolutionary manner now and then.”378 Media theory in a McLuhanist vein can furnish an ontology, a philosophical anthropology, and a theory of media change that together complete the framework consisting of PostPhen and CTT, and such an “add-on” would serve to give the ‘interplay’ between stasis and change its right due. THE POSTPHEN-CTT DEBATE: HOW MEDIA THEORY CAN JOIN IN

But what existing framework would this sort of media theory be added “on to”? During the last few years a friendly debate has been waged between representatives of PostPhen and CTT. Whereas the Critical Theory of Technology, according to postphenomenologists, fails to see the interwovenness of man and technology, and is still founded on inherently modernist principles (Ihde and Selinger 2003, 8), the latter in turn are viewed by the former as furnishing a framework lacking in moral and political relevance (Feenberg 2009b). The discussion clearly indicates deficiencies in both theories, that can be partly mitigated through mutual critique and adaptation. But an even more fruitful approach may be to retain the two 310

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frameworks, not tear them down, and instead add a third component in order to compensate for their shortages. Postphenomenology, notwithstanding its phenomenological and hermeneutical foundations, threatens to neglect its very own base, i.e., the condition of technology and society being first and foremost human endeavors, by posing the primordiality of mediation over mediators. Against but most of all next to its – however relevant and needed – anti-anthropocentric tendency, a deliberately anthropogenetic concept of technology should be placed: technology as “originating” in humans, i.e., as extension. Media theory along the lines suggested by McLuhan, as we saw in Chapter 6, can provide for such an account. Paradoxically at the same time it can also compensate for postphenomenology’s all-too limited focus on ‘lived’ experience379, in inquiring into the beloved object’s “inner forces,” while simultaneously evading a restriction of the ‘medium’ notion to merely material things: all things – ideational and material – can form relationship triads with “us.” Postphenomenology does offer a substantial account of mediation in its “relationship aspects,” but media theory grants just a little bit more “power to reach out” to the lover and object components alike. In this way it makes for a model that, notwithstanding its subversive-anthropocentric theory of technogenesis, fits in quite well with and moreover can clarify PostPhen’s potential treatment of the stasis-change dynamic. And media theory can serve as a substantial complement to Critical Theory of Technology, as we demonstrated in Chapter 10, in reframing the efficiency concept in Feenberg’s theory. In leveling down the “quasi-dialectical” tension to individual entities, media theory raises the stakes already set in place by Feenberg. Moreover, the – McLuhanist – framework we have up until now attempted to elaborate offers gateways into much more practical programs with which to tackle the strategies of hegemony. How all of this can come about – what the PostPhenCTT-Media Theory complex can do – we will try to outline in the remainder of this chapter.

13.3 The Ubiquity of Ideology We have said it many times before: there is no love in the abstract. There are only loves. Then again the “structure” of the abstract love is present and functional in any and all of the many concrete loves. How does this interaction work? For some 311

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reason – as is so often the case – the whole appears to be more than the sum of the parts. The world comes about through the ‘interplay’ of space and time, or more precisely, “structure” and “history”: a constellation of medial nodes, themselves consisting of the components we have extensively identified. But because of their multiplicity they become something more. WORDS ARE MEDIA ARE WORDS ARE IDEOLOGICAL INSTRUMENTS

In the framework we have outlined building on McLuhan’s media definition, all medial nodes are ‘utterings,’ ‘outerings.’ And all things – material as well as ideational – are medial nodes. This does not mean that all things are just words. It means that the manner in which we humans encounter things – namely, in language, thus, through ‘formal cause’ – constitute them as the media that they are. In things’ meeting with “us,” they have, exhibit, or acquire the metaphorical, fourfold characteristics that makes them media, that makes them words, that makes them media. But those observations concerned the “structural” level. At the “historical” level we have seen that as soon as one considers the multiplicity of medial nodes, one has to concede that the utterings and outerings that all media are, taken together, bring about imbalances. These imbalances, we found, have essentially to do with power. Working from Feenberg’s definition of technology, we amended McLuhan’s media concept in order to eventually arrive at a framework that sees media as instruments deployed by the elite in order to consolidate its power – in other words, instantiations of the reigning ideology. When one superposes the singular with the plural ‘medium’ definition, then, one winds up with a view of a world that has as its central law: all things are media are ideological instruments. Every medial node here appears to be in one way or another a bigger or smaller part of the multifarious ideological compound that envelops, figuratively and literally, our universe. And then constellations of medial nodes go on to “work their way,” to eventually create the setups of mediation-ofmediation that characterize all times and places. RECOGNIZING IDEOLOGY WHEN ONE SEES IT

This has a few crucial consequences. First of all it means that the use of a word – any word – is never neutral. Talking and writing are just as much technological endeavors as for instance R&D, industrial production, and the bringing to market of devices. (Meaning also that theoretical research is in itself technological, and 312

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thus ideological.380) But since our use of words directly influences the way in which the things to which those words refer are used, it also means that no single “thing” is immediately or inherently exonerated of ideological “contamination.” All things, from the crops we grow in our backyard to the handkerchief we keep in our pocket to the computer we use to type up this text, have been tainted with a pinch of power for hegemonical flavor. This opens up a scope for critical scrutiny that up until now has been unseen both in the philosophy of technology and in media theory. Even CTT limits itself mostly to a more commonsensical demarcation of the domain of technology. This perhaps has the consequence that, although Feenberg’s model represents an excellent tool for critically investigating the social embedment of technologies, when it comes to specifically demonstrating how individuals or interest groups can steer technology and thus attempt ‘subversive rationalization,’ Feenberg remains relatively vague. He does provide comprehensive examples of instances in which individuals or groups succeed in suiting certain technologies more to their needs; we already mentioned the cases of the Minitel and of experimental AIDS treatments. However all these successful actions can only be retrospectively characterized as a success. Much therefore depends on the examples one chooses. For “current” problems, over which the controversy is still raging fiercely, CTT cannot so easily provide a ready-made solution.381 This seems to contradict Feenberg’s observation that while the ‘black box’ of technology is not closed all is still possible. The technology can still take on any possible form; until the black box closes, the battle between stakeholders keeps raging on. Only, nothing assures us of the fact that the secondary instrumentalization – ‘democratic rationalization’ – is adequately procured. It appears very difficult to turn ‘technical micropolitics’ into an actual political program. This may have something to do with widespread cultural apathy, that makes us think ‘let someone else take care of it,’ as Langdon Winner has suggested, already some time ago: ‘The prevailing sentiments are those of apathy and dissociation. It is only when things go wrong that we begin to question the underlying organizational structures and then only briefly.’ (1986, 95) But it may also be related to the almost imperceptible but extremely ordinary, everyday fact that controversies are not recognized as such. “THE MAILMAN PROBLEM”: AN ILLUSTRATION

We could call this – in a very rural atmosphere – the Mailman Problem. For 313

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several years in Belgium the postal services (formerly De Post, now bpost), have asked citizens to install mailboxes that meet certain logistical conditions: they should be large enough and be positioned on the edge of the sidewalk.382 And one may ask: why not? It increases the efficiency of the mail services but also the customers’ comfort: one must not open the door anymore in case a package is too large to fit the slot of those old-fashioned, much smaller mailboxes that are often secured into the wall of the house. Everything therefore appears to benefit not only the ‘operational autonomy’ (as we have seen, the ability of a power center to proceed with activities, all the while consolidating that power) of the postal services, but also the customers’ interests. Yet on a more global plan this increase in efficiency also means a reduction in the number of social contacts, namely between citizens and the mailman. For some elderly people the mailman represents one of the last beacons of contact with the social world. Are we then that well-off from a “world-disclosing”383 perspective? Yet nobody here seems to ask questions – no sign of controversy whatsoever. Until of course the management of the postal services announces that a portion of the mailman personnel will be replaced by cheaper “delivery men.” Has then the growing invisibility of the traditional mailman – a side effect, or in Feenberg’s terms ‘formal bias,’ of standardized mailboxes – paved the way for real personnel liquidations? For now, Feenberg’s theory offers few tools for addressing subliminal controversies such as these. It is this gap that media theory can help to fill. EVERYTHING IS IDEOLOGY – STAY ALERT

For the framework that we have constructed takes all entities – ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ – to be instantiations of one or other part of ideology. As said, this makes for a spectrum of analyzability with which neither PhilTech nor media theory have been very well acquainted, although there have been some hints, voiced by several authors, at a similar extension of the hegemonical-technological realm into domains that we have up until now not easily affiliated with issues of power or class struggle. R. Murray Schafer for instance – in his theory of sound that builds on ideas of among others McLuhan – lucidly links volume of sound to societal dominance. In each society one or another group holds control over the ‘Sacred Noise’: ‘To have the Sacred Noise in any society is to have the license to make the loudest noise without censure.’ (2005, 69) Traditionally this ‘Sacred Noise’ belonged to the 314

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church; since a few decades the church has been experiencing stern competition from amongst others the automobile, the airline industry, the police, and the pop music industry. ‘Wherever noise is granted immunity from human intervention, there will be found a seat of power.’ (ibid., 60)384 In their infamous Nudge, then, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein investigate the possibility of steering consumer and user behavior in non-policing and nondisciplining ways, by designing everyday artifacts and materials so that they incorporate unperceivable incentives, “winks,” ‘nudges’ forcing people in the “right” direction. The doctrine that underlies their plea is called ‘libertarian paternalism’ and crucially, they aver, it can be embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike. Moreover, it would make for a vast administrative simplification. ‘If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest.’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2009, 15) The idea that such seemingly unharmful things such as sound and everyday artifacts can “contain” power – a power that exceeds the bounds of the classical seats of authority such as government, church hierarchy, company boards, et cetera, and that can be controlled by certain groups but just as well neglected by others – already goes a long way in the direction of the perspective that we want to take and that sees all nameable things as medial nodes, invested with ideological leverage, and intertwined with each other in intricate networks of reciprocal influence. But how can we take it even further and tackle something like the “Mailman Problem” from it? If all things in the universe must be viewed on an ontological plane as media, the Mailman Problem emerges as a constellation or an assemblage, so to speak, of smaller and bigger medial nodes interacting with, impinging on, and bouncing off each other. Mailmen (or women), letters, mailboxes, the postal services’ management, sidewalks, stamps, time schedules, bicycles, computers, mail sorting systems, alarm clocks, heavy headwinds, money, packages and letters, publicity folders, even angry dogs… All make up a part of this strange hybrid system that we have called a “Problem,” but of which we cannot so easily say where it begins and ends, once we really start considering its boundaries. This image definitely makes for a complication – in the style of those favored by philosophers of technology, who naturally need to “complicate.” Yet it also suggests a crudity and a simplification unforgivable to most people. Is a bicycle not something else than a human? Does a dog not differ radically and 315

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uncompromisingly from a sidewalk? Even on the ontological level we must ask: does an ontology in which nothing differs substantially from anything else really make sense? The solution lies in turning to a key distinction within McLuhan’s epistemology that we already extensively investigated in Part 0: that between what we consciously perceive and what not. On the one hand, as we saw, this is to be interpreted literally: some data necessarily escape our senses – visual or other. On the other hand the visible-invisible opposition should be read as the placeholder for a distinction between intellectual apprehension and its counterpart: intellectual ‘numbness’ or ‘somnambulism.’ Importantly however, McLuhan’s epistemological groundwork should not, as we also already pointed out, be seen on its own: it serves as a springboard to a perhaps even greater project, i.e., the uncovering of perceptual biases, ‘understanding.’ Thorough study of media, as said, should imply looking for their hidden ‘ground.’ (cf. Gordon 1997a, 309) It is in this respect that it links up well with dialectical approaches, as we found in discussing the historical debate between media theory and Critical Theory in Chapter 10. Eventually one of the principal counsels suggested by the theoretical complex we have endeavored to set up, reads: stay alert. Everything can harbor a hidden side, especially those things and ideas that do not in any way appear to even have such a hidden side.385 This implies taxing even the things dearest to our hearts. In present times, for instance, one of the ideas of the highest repute is ‘green.’ Of all concepts that have any influence on our society nowadays the ‘ecological’ idea must certainly be one pure and free of any associations with any sort of blame or guilt. But as several authors have pointed out, the ‘green’ idea is if not gets eventually incorporated into the dominant ideology just as well. Langdon Winner remarks already in the 1980s: […] in some respects, the ecological model presents a mirror image of advanced industrial society. […] Nature will justify anything. […] It is comforting to assume that nature has somehow been enlisted on our side. But we are not entitled to that assumption. (Winner 1986, 136-137)

Even the term ‘environment’ – so omnipresent in this work, too – is biased, says Winner, since in reality it mostly serves to signify how we are surrounded by the ‘environment’ in the way a general is surrounded by the landscape he has just conquered (ibid., 123). Chet Bowers, also, observes how the ‘ecological’ idea has 316

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become one of the ‘root metaphors’ of our society (2010).386 Nonetheless we do mostly not pay attention to the multifacetedness, the multiple meanings of these ideas and choose only to employ one significance. The ‘green’ idea is regarded as an untainted, worthy societal and social ideal, seemingly in contrast with the interests of the powers that be. But simultaneously those powers exploit the exact same idea – precisely in order to pursue those interests. And this often brings about the paradoxical situation in which one and the same term refers, illogically, to opposing tendencies. In plain language: if anyone nowadays wants to sell a car, it is recommended that he or she market it as ‘green.’ It does not matter that the further consequences of purchasing it go against the grain of that very idea (i.e., of ‘green’) – e.g., the car will exhaust a certain amount of toxic fumes, or in any case use up energy that has to come from somewhere – the mere application of the label has served perfectly to justify the production and buy. EVERYTHING IS IDEOLOGY – EMBRACE IT

However, the sheer comprehensiveness of the framework at hand could lead us, eventually, also to despair: if everything is ideology, how to ever escape it? The answer seems to be: we cannot. Can we then ever still enjoy things? For as most people in the affluent West know, the pleasure of partaking in for instance consumption are manifold. As McLuhan remarks half-sarcastically, halfadmiringly: ‘To use a brand of car, drink, smoke or food that is nationally advertised gives a man the feeling that he belongs to something bigger than himself.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 535) Do we have to deny ourselves all our indulging into… anything? No, because we cannot. As much as we cannot stop using language387, we cannot stop using media – and of course media are a language, and vice versa. But what to do then? As soon as we attempt to see all of our surroundings as structures of media, we are immediately encouraged to dramatically heighten our level of alertness. The “technological” does not just reside in technologies, but in systems and networks far exceeding “mere” technologies. This in fact seems like a strange retrieval of the one-sided definitions of technology furnished by what we called classic philosophers of technology. Only here complexity has not been reduced, but intensified. Technology is not an all-determining “force” here; in fact it is no “force” at all. It is the language that the world speaks. We are not at loss in this conversation; we can join in. In the view of McLuhan, as we saw, this “joining 317

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in” could be as far-reaching as ‘programming’ our environment ‘like a double helix’ (1970, 312) or like a work of art (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 252). He also speaks of ‘thermostatic control’ in this regard (ibid., 253).388 These sorts of statements only sound frightening if one imagines them coming from a dictator; and here lies an obvious danger. That is, crucially, where we need the corrective offered by CTT’s idea of ‘democratic rationalization.’ Control or the possibility of control should be in the hands of us all. This is probably the point at which the outlined media theory and CTT at last meet. But we should undertake this project of attention-paying, of controlling perhaps and of programming, with some joy. Attempt to embrace things in all their taintedness, like an adolescent embraces the parent to which no purified, awe-filled relationship is possible anymore. Be, as McLuhan proposes, ‘lighthearted,’ and not ‘grim.’389 Why would it not be possible to passionately love “the other” and be an autonomous person “ourselves” at one and the same time? “THE MAILMAN PROBLEM,” REVISITED

Let us then, in closing this section, revisit our Mailman Problem one more time. The “pan-medial cosmology” sketched here may offer us a better way of approaching it. It is in cases like these that technological blindness of the sort we have described is played out to the fullest extent. But “blindness” should not be exclusively coupled to well-circumscribed technologies, devices, systems, institutions, or arrangements. In the case of the Mailman Problem, the “blindness” is spread throughout a network that does not seem to start or end anywhere. We cannot assign guilt to any one medium or technology for the “world-occluding” effects that take place as a result of the new mailbox policies. There are power constellations – constituted among others by the management of the mail services – but the way in which these powers regain and consolidate their ‘operational autonomy’ is so intricate, complex, shrewd even, that it is hard to locate any one spot at which the values are, as Feenberg puts it, ‘cast in iron.’ The change happens surreptitiously, and retreats into a ‘technological unconscious,’ but this unconscious does not reside in any one design – more in a “project,” so to speak. All this perhaps opens up a possibility to modify, or better: broaden Feenberg’s concept of the ‘technical code.’ Not that this notion can in his framework so easily be ascribed to “one” device or system. The definition of “technology” he offers390 stays sufficiently vague – and that is no criticism – as to accommodate for, exactly, technologies that elude the form of “mere” devices or things. This is an asset. But 318

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as said, all depends on which examples one picks. The example of the Minitel clearly talks about a machine, or a network of machines, connected through cables, stations, providers, and what not. The case of the AIDS patients takes experimental treatment as its focal point, and this also is a well-definable domain of technical arrangements and practices. But in the Mailman Problem, we do not have the possibility to point at one or another definable or describable “thing.” The problem is in itself elusive. Where is the ‘technical code’? Not in the mailbox, not in the management’s policies, not in the decision of the unsuspecting civilian to just go along with the “new efficiency”… It is nowhere and everywhere. The technical code is the problem itself: the network of media, of “medial interaction” of which the net effect stays unperceived.

13.4 Two Heuristics, Three Components, Two Levels Let us recapitulate, once again. We have painted a picture of a “pan-medial cosmology,” consisting of nothing but medial nodes, made up of multiples of three components, that work their way across two levels: the “structural” – at which only “one moment in time” can be considered, and the “perspective” is narrow – and the “historical” – which stretches out over the seas of time and space, and at which change “takes place.” Yet we should now, just like we did when we outlined the medial node notion, further explore how all of this bears on our two heuristics – blindness and ambivalence – and how sense can be made of the ‘interplay’ of all these phenomena. BLINDNESS, AMBIVALENCE, AND THE “STRUCTURAL”-“HISTORICAL” INTERPLAY

At the end of Chapter 9 we briefly tied up the medial node concept to the heuristics of blindness and ambivalence. In each of, in between, and across the components of the abstract, “structurally”-looked-at medial node, a grounding elusiveness and defectedness reigns. We realize now that that was only part of the story. In reality each of the three components of the medial node – and thus every medial node as such – shows two faces. “Structurally” there is blindness and ambivalence in the way the elements of the medial node dovetail with each other, flow over into each other, and are apparently bent on never quite being reducible to each other. But once we superpose the “historical” level on the structural one, the blindness and ambivalence take on altogether different and greater 319

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proportions. The “structural” level appears like an abstraction, and we have repeatedly discussed it in terms that hint at such a view. As if we could only live at the “historical” level, and the “structural” plane is just a trick of the mind. The “historical” level then would be the “real deal”; the “structural” just the “story we tell” – a dichotomy similar to Latour’s distinction between ‘proliferation’ and ‘purification,’ respectively. However, we have to adjust that image. As suggested so often before, we only have language at our disposal to seize reality. Language functions on the basis of formal cause. Formal cause makes us understand things as they are – but does not in any way assure us of a grasp of their full reality. It discloses but not fully. Our concepts of “structural” and “historical,” then, are merely linguistic tools with which to ‘grasp and let go,’ in the words of McLuhan – they account for a way of looking at the world, a discourse, an attitude, a filter even, but not for an exhaustive outline of how things are. Crucially, it appears that we can favor one perspective over the other; we can choose – consciously but mostly unconsciously – to look at things either “structurally” or “historically.” In fact we do. And the choice that we make determines our general cultural “setup.” If we opt for a “structural” view, the world becomes a terrain on which medial nodes relate to each other one-on-one. Consequences seem negligible, since the “one mythical moment” is “all that there is.” Due to this ‘all-at-onceness,’ things appear as wrapped up in relations that can be controlled and programmed. This view is essentially “horizontal.” Conversely, the “historical” perspective projects things and events along a sequence. The sequence becomes possible because the multiplicity of medial nodes is considered here. As soon as there are more than one, “history” can start to “take place.” But it also means that consequences have to be taken into account. No simple “tweaking” can ever happen, for “everything touches everything,” directly or indirectly. This perspective can be called “vertical” – surprisingly perhaps. Although it accounts for networks of things – that obviously spread out “horizontally” too – it particularly does so by way of the notion of change. The “structural” stability of the “one moment” becomes impossible to maintain as soon as “other players” are supplied and counted in. As can again be seen in the above, we have attempted to carefully evade the use of any language specifically relating to spatiality or temporality. It may appear that the distinction we make between “structural” and “historical” levels parallels dichotomies present in the thought of many of the authors we have up until now 320

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discussed. And indeed, it much resembles McLuhan’s differentiation between visual and auditory-tactile modes, Innis’ distinction between space-biased and time-biased media, Strate’s further elaboration of these categories in relation to Alfred Korzybski’s dichotomy between space-binding and time-binding activity (2011b, 65ff.), Heidegger’s divide between presence-at-hand and readiness-tohand as ways in which being is revealed, de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactic, Bateson’s distinguishing between ‘conscious purpose’ and ‘ecological awareness,’ and Ihde’s dual program of a ‘phenomenology of technics’ and a ‘cultural hermeneutics.’ But the two-layered framework that we have constructed can only be partly overlaid with these dichotomies. We have chosen either to take over certain aspects of either side of them and discard others, or to mix up and scatter some characteristics across the levels. In particular we wish to loosen the all-too fixed and linear bond between the aforementioned distinctions and the categories of time and space, where the first part of those distinctions usually connects to the concept of space, and the second part to that of time. Often those connections seem to charge “space” and “time” with duties (put mildly) and misdemeanors (put less mildly) for which neither can sensibly be held accountable. And if “space” and “time” are not the usual suspects, then certainly one or other perceptual mode is – as in McLuhan’s case. These dichotomies in fact do seem to hit the mark, however, in so far as they have something to do with on the one hand our “natural” inclination to focus and on the other hand our equally “natural” ability to let our attention drift. It is probably no coincidence that in situations in which we are idle, sitting still, letting our thoughts run their course, we are sometimes said to be “wasting time.” But the fact of the matter is that we are “losing space” just as well. Focusing “structurally” as well as zooming out “historically” are projects that both involve a relation to time and space. As was clearly suggested before, although the “structural” level seems to deal with space and the “historical” one with time, both are enveloped in spatial and temporal dimensions. On the “structural” plane the principal temporal situation is stasis – and the main spatial condition two-dimensionality (or horizontality). The “historical” plane, then, has as its defining temporal characteristic change – and is in a spatial sense all about three-dimensionality (or verticality). But of course, as ever, these are just probing attempts at “getting a grip.” In any case we seem to be able to choose which of the two “filters” we place 321

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before our eyes. The fuller scope of how the differences between choosing either one of both worldviews unfold – on an existential plane – will be investigated throughout the next and last part. Above and beyond that task of giving shape to a life project, however, it may be clear that the “ideal” situation may probably be to get both views “in view” at one and the same “time.” Such a bi-focal perspective is what the aforementioned authors mostly encourage just as well. However, many of them simultaneously suggest that it may simply be impossible to do so: whenever one of both filters is employed the other recedes into the background, as we have extensively seen in Chapter 3: the ‘transparency of use’ and the ‘transparency of context’ are mutually contradictory. The two “views” constitute each other’s blindness and defect. There is simply no silver bullet available. In the last chapter of the next part, too, we will further look into this issue. BEING IS PERCEIVING: BRAIN HALVES CORROBORATION

So we are always – whether we like it or not – in the midst of the interplay between the “structural” and the “historical” discourse. We may give preference to one over the other, but even the choice against either implies the neglected view as backdrop for the other. Yet our choice shapes the world. McLuhan’s main dichotomy, as said, particularly centers on perceptual modalities: ‘visual’ vs. ‘auditory-tactile.’ But once one starts to use the terms ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ instead, more room for maneuver becomes available. And in fact once that is done and the all-too strict link with the senses is thus loosened, McLuhan’s main dichotomy, in hindsight, does nowadays not appear as foolish as once thought. For even its wildest and most scorned formulation or version, i.e., the already briefly mentioned distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right brain hemisphere,’ is now at least partly corroborated by neuroscience. The “structural” and “historical” views that we have outlined need not necessarily coincide with the left and right hemisphere, respectively. But there appear to be large overall differences between worldviews typical for Western people and those that typify Eastern people. Richard E. Nisbett in his The Geography of Thought sketches these differences extensively, based on his psychological empirical research. Western people have a cognitive setup – correlating with social structures – that differs substantially from that of Eastern people. We list some of the dichotomies that he proposes, of which the terms characterize the Western/Greek and the East/Chinese worldview, respectively:

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Agency vs. harmony Forms/essences vs. concreteness The object/categories vs. ‘resonance’/holism/relationships Stasis vs. change/return Object/thing vs. substance/matter Actor vs. context [with relation to causal attribution] “Why?” vs. “how?” Nouns vs. verbs Logic vs. experience Either/or (contradiction) vs. both/and (‘dialectical’) (Nisbett 2005)

Obviously, these oppositions overlap only partly with our “structural”-”historical” dichotomy. But they serve to show that these different worldviews may crisscross throughout the different sensorial modalities and through fundamental categories like space and time, and thus constitute, perhaps, categories of their own. At the same time they also demonstrate the mutual complementarity of the two views.391 It would seem that a combination of both would certainly make for an enrichment and not an impoverishment of the conceptual toolbox with which we orient ourselves in the world. None of both may “tell it like it is” as such.392 Nevertheless, Nisbett avers: ‘Easterners are almost surely closer to the truth than Westerners in their belief that the world is a highly complicated place and Westerners are undoubtedly often far too simple-minded in their explicit models of the world. Easterners’ failure to be surprised as often as they should may be a small price to pay for their greater attunement to a range of possible causal factors.’ (ibid., 134) Does this account for our distinction between the “structural” and “historical” level too? At the “structural” level, all stays the same, and a sudden change is hard to swallow. At the “historical” level, by contrast, one is at every moment more prepared for modifying circumstances, because change is simply the basic reality there. But conversely, the exclusively “historically” attuned mindset may not be able to accomplish the logical and constructive feats of which “structural man” is capable. While Western people, says Nisbett, expect a certain development to continue in the same direction, Asian people expect the course of events to change direction any time soon (ibid., 103). To put it in McLuhanist terms: if one can separate form from content, one becomes able to make media; but if one cannot conjoin form and content

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afterwards, one will remain unable to understand media. Along these lines many have criticized Western man’s unstoppable, unquenchable industrial-imperialist drive, and they have also traced his doings back to underlying cognitive constellations. Bateson for instance: ‘Indeed, occidental man’s repeated discovery of instances and inability to perceive the underlying principle demonstrate the rigidity of his epistemology.’ (2002, 98)393 Nisbett also quotes Mushakoji Kinhide, who points out that Western people have a style called ‘erabi’ (meaning active, agentic), which is ‘[…] grounded in the belief that “man can freely manipulate his environment for his own purposes. […]”’ (Nesbitt 2005, 75). Japanese people, on the contrary, cultivate the ‘awase’ style (harmonious, fitting in), which ‘[…] “rejects the idea that man can manipulate the environment and assumes instead that he adjusts himself to it.”’ (ibid., 76) In other words: if one thinks purely “structurally,” one destroys. If one thinks exclusively “historically,” one is destroyed – sometimes maybe even by Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason.’ Once again, this makes for a retrieval of the ApollonianDionysian distinction. Apollonian drives make us reach out and conquer. Dionysian desires, conversely, help us to be “reached in,” to give ourselves over to a greater whole. But above and beyond the dichotomy we are constituted by both sorts of endeavors. In pursuing a blend of the two – “structural” and “historical” – we can perhaps mitigate the evils on either side. As we already indicated in Chapter 4, this dynamic is mirrored in our common sense “reasons” for using media and technologies (and consequently in the three components making up the triad). We deploy and employ them for reasons of “control” and “contact,” but underlying these respectively outward and inward “movements” is a deeper “fit” with technology. It is in the context of this “fit” that we should grapple with the tensions between “structural” and “historical” relationship-building. NOT EVERYTHING COUNTS IN LARGE AMOUNTS

And that is a project involving decision-making of the sort that can hardly be called “fully informed.” In Chapter 9 we outlined a pan-medial ontology, in which ‘everything counts in large amounts.’ In the current chapter this pan-medial ontology has been enriched with an extra dimension, i.e., “change,” and we have arrived now at a pan-medial cosmology, that seeks to account for the dynamics of medial-nodes-in-interplay through time and space. Yet here, not everything seems to ‘count in large amounts.’ On the contrary, some things appear to have great influence and others small. Or is that a misleading way of putting it? 324

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Chaos theory has since long argued that the smallest causes may have the biggest effects. The slap of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazon may “lead” to a landslide on the Mongolian Plains. The striking of one chord in a recording studio on Abbey Road may steer the life course of thousands, eventually leading up to one person committing an act of revolutionary importance. To minds attuned to ‘conscious purpose,’ it came as a shock that many small individual acts like the usage of aerosols for deodorants and other purposes, could together make for a total effect of pure devastation on the earth’s atmosphere. It is hardly possible to understand these kind of chains of unforeseen effects at just the “structural” level, where everything indeed ‘counts in large amounts,’ but the consequences of that counting cannot be accounted for. At the “historical” level, consequences become perceivable, but for exactly that reason, we soon realize that in fact not all things cause “as much.” Events easily fall off the radar of purposefulness. But how far the boundaries of detection extend, stays up for grabs. How will we know that this specific person, Jane, washing her hands, will prevent the massive outbreak of one or other epidemic? We know fairly for certain that many people washing their hands generally lowers the chance of epidemics spreading. But to track back the web of cause and effects, in order to eventually arrive at the crucial medial node that once constituted the “tipping point,” is nearly impossible. The recent EHEC epidemic in Northern Europe may serve as a case in point (‘German Tests Link Bean Sprouts to Deadly E. coli’ 2011). It took several weeks and some serious vegetal collateral damage – like innocent cucumbers – to locate the place at which the bacteria had entered the food chain. With the emergence and mainstream introduction of monitoring and biomonitoring technologies (Singer 2011) we may be getting closer to a total attestation of consequences – the registration, storage, and analysis of all processes by way of computer power. We may find then, perhaps, precisely how the imbalances between forceful and less forceful “influences” are at any given time implemented into the “way of things.” Although that is very unlikely. But still, if one imagines that such a full knowledge would be attainable, what would that mean to us? Our thinking a specific thought – “fluffy cloud in the shape of a crane” – may not have a too large effect on world events. The tears shedded by the clown behind the curtains may not make the circus stop. In other words: not all medial nodes have workings of crucial, change-inducing importance. Yet we may feel quite safe on this side of the relevant-irrelevant watershed. Over and against the urge we may feel to “write 325

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history,” “turn the tides,” “make it happen,” we may cherish non-intrusive irrelevance, and wallow in our condition of “universal banality.” And observed before the immense backdrop of a presumably infinite universe, what do even our human victories and losses mean? One only has to shift contexts (levels of abstraction, or in Bateson’s term, ‘logical types’394), and all “history” again recedes into “structure.”

13.5 A Pan-Medial Cosmology: Finding Our Way The “pan-medial cosmology,” thus, consists of medial nodes of which the components originate in either “human” or “natural” material – this distinction being merely theoretically possible – but to which we “structurally” relate as “the stuff to be extended,” and “historically” as “the ones involved at any time in one or other ideological structure.” As Latour puts it masterfully: No one has ever heard of a collective that did not mobilize heaven and earth in its composition, along with bodies and souls, property and law, gods and ancestors, powers and beliefs, beasts and fictional beings. ... Such is the ancient anthropological matrix, the one we have never abandoned. (Latour 1993, 107)

We have attempted to amend this perspective by integrating and reworking it into the overall framework we have set up. As suggested throughout the Introduction, none of the aforesaid can be called original or new in any sense. With our proposal to superpose the two levels (again), and in so doing to complement the PostPhenCTT complex with McLuhanist media theory, we do not claim to make a revolutionary statement. As Peter Sloterdijk remarks: ‘The novelty of the new originates […] in the unfolding of the known into larger, lighter, more pronounced surfaces. Therefore it can never be innovative in absolute terms, it is always a continuation of what is cognitively present by other means.’395 (2009, 1819) Nevertheless whereas the “structural” level in our view seems to be the newest in terms of chronological order, the “historical” level has appeared as outfashioned since a fair amount of time. Most streams in the philosophy of the last decades have eschewed to make “historical” claims for fear of falling into the old 326

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eschatological trap or being perceived as ‘Grand Narratives’ (Lyotard). Perhaps, also, faced with all the horrors at the “historical” level, we chose to tuck ourselves nicely in at the “structural” level. No need to face the facts there. Even in pop culture, the (re)discovery of “structure” has made for a central theme since half a century, illustrated richly by titles such as Groundhog Day (1993) or Always Crashing in the Same Car (1977). Once the historical level is re-added, the “mythical moment” of “pure happening” is complemented by the burden of making a choice. In between cruciality and banality, we are still faced with the task of finding our bearings, in global politics as well as in everyday life. Especially the latter context will make for the main scene on which our next part is played.

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PART III: EXISTENTIAL LEVEL — LIVED LOVE Where ambivalences are to be straddled, without a full picture in view…

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14 Into Ourselves: Is Narcissus a Narcissist by Design? ‘Want to know where you fit in so you can be outstanding? Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced?’ (M. McLuhan 2002, 46)

In the previous two parts we have attempted to sketch the outlines of our bond with technologies on two levels: the “structural” and the “historical.” In the current part – that is somewhat more experimental in nature as well as in style – we inquire into how these two levels are lived through, related to, and combined in “everyday life.” We do however keep to the same three-component structure as in the last two chapters, and thus start in this chapter with the investigation of the lover component on the “existential” plane. How does the lover, i.e., the one extending him- or herself into media, relate to, define, or identify him- or herself? The concept of ‘identity,’ although so often philosophically reflected upon, plays a central role here, but will be approached from a quite specific viewpoint, namely, McLuhan’s Narcissus metaphor. How is the self-descriptive project of the ‘extended’ person, that plays out on the “historical” plane, related to the “structural” phenomenon of extension? In order to answer that question, we investigate how technologies and media of today according to the literature at hand make for certain identities and corresponding identity “crises.” An alternative view on the matter is eventually worked out, by way of our proposed “structural”-”historical” dichotomy.

14.1 Who Are We? / Know Thyself DEFINING OURSELVES IN RELATION TO TECHNOLOGY

In each and every relationship the lover faces the ardent and constant task of selfdefinition. Not only does he need to ask himself “Who am I in relation to the other?” He also seems to be doomed to grapple with the question “Who am I apart from the other, or: who or what would I be apart from the other?” In exactly the same sense we as users-of-technology – but also as the-stuff-to-be-extended, as that from which our very technologies spring – are at all times forced to deal with the issue of our identity, both apart from and in relation to technologies or media. 331

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This comes down to nothing less than an existential project, to be undertaken on a day-to-day basis. For, it is one thing to sketch the “structural” characteristics of the relationship triad and locate ourselves in it at the right spot, i.e., as the lover who extends himself into a medium – as we did in Chapter 6. It is a second thing to outline the “historical” aspects of that triad and paint the bigger picture of that extension: the constellation of power (im)balances and the ideological edifice that at the same time props and consolidates it – as we attempted in Chapter 10. But it is an altogether different thing for anyone to stand in the midst of the dynamics between these two levels and having to mitigate, without much expertise or guidance, the tensions naturally arising between “structurally” and “historically” biased sensitivities. Here a need surfaces for directives that can be practically applied in the context of everyday life projects. As we mostly disregard technologies’ impact on or importance in our lives – a general situation investigated in Chapter 3 – we may often not consciously notice or realize that the issue of our identity is linked up immediately with technology. That link roots in the fact that technologies simply define and shape our ‘ground,’ our being-in-the-world – as we have observed so many times before. Before we even reflexively ponder our identity, technology has already co-formed the framework within which such reflexivity is ever possible; certainly in our days. As Andrew Feenberg observes: ‘Understanding of the world and identity go hand in hand. Both are fluid in modern societies, and both are intertwined with technology.’ (Feenberg 2010a, xix) McLuhan eminently presages the interrelatedness of technology and identity. Somewhat surprisingly, however, his most fruitful insights on the concept of identity may not have to be situated in the locations at which he literally speaks of ‘identity,’ as we will shortly see. Greater promise with regard to the tackling of the question: “who are we as such and in relation to technology?” is offered by his interpretation and application of the Narcissus myth. Of course, once again, the “as such” and the “in relation to” are two modalities one cannot so easily keep apart. The two categories of questions… interrelate – just as the lover’s identity-assuch and identity-in-relation-to interlock. The pour-soi dovetails directly with the pour-l’autre. Of this interrelation McLuhan’s Narcissus metaphor, we will see, can help to make sense.

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THE CONTEMPORARY TASK OF IDENTITY-BUILDING

As is well-known, the questions as to who or what we are, as such and in relation to others – human beings, objects, media, technologies, … – can make us writhe with existential growing pains; pains that perhaps stay on for a whole life. At the same time they are questions no one ever seems able to forego. They will not let us go – urging us, incessantly, to frame answers to them, although provisional ones. The question “who are we?” forever finds a companion in the imperative not only literally carved in stone atop the Delphic oracle but figuratively carved into our more or less conscious perspective-on-things: “know thyself.” So many different strands of literature in recent years have pointed out that this task has especially taken on much weight in the last century. By now the ‘postmodern’ analysis seems to belong to our collective cultural background. It shows how several factors have complicated our identity-building: the crumbling of traditional authorities such as the church, the nation state, and the social order of the local village; the emergence of the affluent society and the neocapitalist market providing for a growing amount of consumer goods (at least in the West); and the rise of information and communication technologies that have gradually connected the most remote parts of the world, hence skewing traditional boundaries of time and space. All of these elements have problematized what was once “no problem.” What were once fixed, practically unquestioned identities have now become swirling projects of construction: ardent labors to be faced by almost all inhabitants of capitalist-consumerist societies. As suggested, McLuhan is, albeit sideways, already on the trail of these connections – not unlike the Critical Theorists around the same period and even earlier. But we will endeavor to get to the heart of the matter by way of a not so obvious entry point. Specifically we wish to inquire into the potential connection between McLuhan’s use of the Narcissus metaphor and the – more or less welldefined – “narcissist” identity type; a link that has up until now scarcely been factually addressed. Does being a ‘Narcissus’ also make us a “narcissist”? Or put more broadly: what repercussions does the ‘extension’ dynamic have on our selfdescription? How does the aforementioned sketch of the lover – on the “structural” as well as the “historical” level – dovetail with how that lover sees himor herself? Again we proceed stepwise. First, we outline McLuhan’s – relatively thin – notion of ‘identity’ and describe how he sees the interaction between technology, identity-making, and the “narcissist” personality type. Second, we start to ask what 333

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sorts of identities technologies of today then “make”; therefore we first need to investigate what makes these media different from former ones. Hence, we delineate two central traits that they exhibit specifically in relation to their users, i.e., “objectification” and “construction.” Exactly these traits, we will find, enable the project of identity-building. Nevertheless, third, several strands of theory see these very media as in fact co-constitutive of our current “identity crises.” Interestingly, the different depictions of these crises can be seen as mutually contradictory. We will thus try, fourth, to clarify things by approaching the issue from another angle. The same body of literature has offered several versions of what is nowadays seen to be the dominant personality type; we sketch the ‘narcissist,’ ‘liquid,’ ‘relational,’ and ‘autistic’ personality type. Fifth, then, a synthesis is attempted by recoupling the above to the “generic” McLuhanist Narcissus – i.e., extension – concept, and to our heuristic dichotomy between “structural” and “historical” levels.

14.2 Technology and Identity: A Natural Bond As we have elaborately seen, with McLuhan, the definition of ‘medium’ hinges on the Narcissus metaphor. Nevertheless, although he does employ the notion of ‘identity’ here and there, no immediate connection is made between the Narcissus myth as he utilizes it on the one hand, and the psychological or “cultural” condition of “narcissism” on the other hand. Let us sketch how he sees the correlations between extension, identity, and narcissism as psychological-cultural “attitude.” NATURAL-BORN ‘NARCISSUSES’

In a certain sense, according to McLuhan, we are all “narcissists.” As said, he explains technogenesis and our general “technological condition” by way of the Narcissus myth. Narcissus, a vain young man, condemned to fall in love with his mirror image that he mistakenly assumes to be “another,” eventually tumbles over into the water and drowns. Just so, technologies originate in the human organism – they are, as has been said many times before, extensions of senses, body parts, capabilities, even attitudes, … – but we faultily perceive them to be realities independent from us. We thereby negate the subliminal effects that they feedback to the very organism(s) they sprang from, and are hence also doomed to finally 334

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“drown” in the environments they set out, like the brothers of Poe’s sailor. Unless once again, ‘understanding’ saves us from our “narcissistic” ‘somnambulism.’ This “narcissism” however should, with McLuhan, not be read plainly in terms of identity or of selfhood. It is a “structural” modality pertaining to our “nature” as such (of course only in as far as this “nature” principally, ontologically relates to the world). All talk of issues of identity with McLuhan should be situated on the larger plane of “historical” meanderings. There indeed the notion of ‘identity’ can be found treated of, although rather superficially. McLuhan deploys it mostly in a defective manner, as “something lost.” ‘Loss’ of identity can be seen as a side-effect of ‘speed-up’; periods of fast change bring people out of balance. Paradoxically, in McLuhan’s view negation of identity becomes the positive cause of a phenomenon in itself not so positive: war. Wherever identity is lost or threatened, he says, war becomes the only viable option. All wars can be traced back in one way or another to identitylessness. Thus, war in fact directly correlates with technological conditions, since the loss of identity is brought on by speed-up, in itself an effect of overall technological development. War, then, makes for the furthering of that same technological development, and the cycle begins anew. In short: our “structural” “narcissism,” i.e., the fact of our being extended into technologies that we do not recognize as anthropogenic, defines our “historically” given sense of ‘identity,’ which consequently defines our “structural narcissism” again. IDENTITY AS RESULTANT OF TECHNOLOGY

Our “structural narcissism,” thus, cannot be said to coincide with what we nowadays commonly call the narcissistic personality type. But identity is intertwined with technology nevertheless. Narcissism as a personality type or as a cultural phenomenon must thus necessarily find its grounding in a specific historical constellation of medial relationships (triads). Actually all personality types or cultural phenomena do. Indeed, although McLuhan’s literal employment of the term ‘identity’ mostly stays limited to the regions delineated above, the whole of his work hints at an evolution of our sense of identity and selfhood through time. Changing identities in this way should be probed as the resultants of changing technologies and vice versa. We already sketched this evolution in Chapter 11. Whereas in a tribal-auditory culture the “self” is still communal or integrated-incorporated within the whole of the society, the emergence of literate-visual culture signifies the birth of the self as 335

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‘individual’ (M. McLuhan 1962). In fact one cannot really speak of “selves” in the context of tribal communities, for the “self” is very much an “invention” of the phonetic mindset. Hence, for instance, privacy only becomes a problem in an individualistic culture. Also, narcissism as we generally define it can only exist, it seems, in an environment in which one can love and admire “oneself” as a person who in any case differs from any other. Nowadays, however, according to McLuhan who, as we saw, at this point adds to an otherwise relatively convincing historical scheme his great provocative teleological hope, a tribal sensitivity is returning due to the unifying and communalizing powers of ‘electric technologies.’ From ‘angelism’ we now go to ‘robotism,’ which makes us ‘[…] capable of instant adjustment to any social situation without guilt […]’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 70). There cannot be a neotribal personality as such, since the project of “self-definition” in all tribal societies is by implication performed communally. The neotribal thus spells the end of individualism as we know it. But the question remains: does it also make for the end of narcissism as we know it? To make sense of the issue, we need to investigate what media of today specifically “do.”

14.3 New Media: Seeing Is Constructing Within the McLuhanist framework, thus, all technologies and media help to give shape to the concepts of identity reigning in a specific culture. Then what sorts of identities do media of today, i.e., digital media, co-shape? In order to frame an answer to that question it is necessary to ask: what makes these media structurally and formally different from former ones? What features are especially characteristic for contemporary digital media? To this question there probably exists an array of many possible answers. With regard to our purposes here, however, we highlight two main characteristics, which in fact especially typify digital media by appearing combined and almost inextricably intertwined in them. They are what we call “objectification” and “construction.” SEEING OURSELVES, SHOWING OURSELVES: OBJECTIFYING TECHNOLOGIES

In order to see a picture of themselves our great-great-grandparents needed to find a mirror, gather up for a one-time photo shoot at special occasions, or pay a professional painter a good amount of money to draw a portrait of them. 336

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Resolution or pixel rate were no issues back then. Nowadays almost everyone in the (affluent) West can afford and owns a digital photo camera, either integrated in a mobile phone or not. Pictures are everywhere, and are taken everywhere. And social media enable us to “share” them with others. Up to the 20th century, technology did not furnish us with the possibility of seeing ourselves let alone showing ourselves to such an intense degree. The means to “objectify” ourselves – extend ourselves into an “objectified” ànd “objective” image of ourselves – were scarce. Those available were not very “objective.” A sketch for example is more of an interpretation than a photograph. And they were certainly not “objectifying.” A mirror for instance offers a high resolution image, but does not leave an enduring trace. Today “self-objectifying” technologies – photographs, video, digital storage, broadband, et cetera – are ubiquitous. But the need to see and show ourselves has maybe always existed. Why can looking at oneself in the mirror be so fascinating? We should immediately remark that objectifying does not necessarily and exclusively mean visual objectifying – podcasting for example may just as much be seen as objectifying – but the visual has certainly gotten an edge over other modalities. Even to the extent that sound nowadays – its creation as well as its consumption – is often visualized.396 McLuhan already remarks upon this: ‘Because sound is usually ground for sighted experience, we ignore most of it as irrelevant, and apply visual values to all situations.’ (M. McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 1977, 13) Here again arises the question whether our penchant for visuality is something “human” or something “Western.” Myron Krueger, one of the early pioneers of Virtual Reality, suggests as much as the first: ‘It is as if evolution had prepared us for seeing ourselves on television screens combined with computer images.’ (Myron Krueger 2008) McLuhan can mostly be read as a proponent of the latter standpoint: it is Western society that has become specifically visually oriented, in contrast to more ‘tribal’ societies still dominated by auditory-tactile interactions. Within Media Ecology, nevertheless, strains of both arguments are often intermixed. James Carey appears in the first instance to read McLuhan as a representative of the first, i.e., “structurally” oriented viewpoint. In an essay in which he draws parallels between the work of McLuhan and that of Walter Benjamin, he argues that both thinkers share a focus on the evolution of the ‘human sensorium,’ coupled to the conviction that the critical point in this evolution is the transition from sound to sight (2005c, 278-279). And he points out that this places them in a tradition to which also belong John Dewey, Innis, 337

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Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Hans-Georg Gadamer – all theorists who treat visuality as a central problem or attempt to understand modern society by way of the metaphor of the visual (ibid., 279). But then Carey goes on to sketch the main characteristics of visually oriented societies; an analysis situated, conversely, more within the “historical” context. Three social practices, he says, tend to dominate them: the technological enhancement of sight; the development of theoretical and epistemological practices that nourish and enforce this technological enhancement; and the construction of social relations around visuality (ibid., 279-280). Several thinkers, we may add – among them some of the ones Carey mentions – have elaborated upon aspects of each of these practices. Don Ihde, first, offers an intricate analysis, from a phenomenological-hermeneutical perspective, of technologies that enhance sight (1993, 43ff.; 1998, 90ff.; 2002, 60ff.; 2009, 45ff.). He dubs as ‘image technologies’ the wide spectrum of – not exclusively IC – technologies that render a visual image of some or other phenomenon, including medical and scientific instruments, e.g., EEG, spectrometers, … According to Ihde these sorts of technologies, rooting in early science and Renaissance visualism, differ qualitatively from former technologies. Taken together they have made for the ‘compound eye’ that typifies postmodern ‘pluriculture’ (Ihde 1990, 174, 219). The second point has been further developed by amongst others Foucault, and several theorists in the Media Ecology tradition. Foucault famously analyzes subjectivity from the vantage point of ‘objectification’ (1995). We are not autonomous subjects as modern ideology thought us to be: we instead become ‘subjects’ by literally being subjected to the gaze of the other, and this in the specific form of myriad disciplinary practices grounded on a principle of controlling-by-observing – ranging from “everyday” information gathering by medical and other institutions to surveillance technologies to the prison system. Mass media are in this regard another form of disciplining that makes us wholly ‘objectified’ ‘subjects.’ Carey comments: ‘As with relations in the city, the mass media are forms of life and they place the same high value on the observation of phenomena rather than interaction with them, though here the phenomena are, of course, other people.’ (2005c, 280) Media ecologists such as Neil Postman and Peter K. Fallon, the latter building on the work of the former, have developed, as we already mentioned, a harsh critique of exactly this preponderance of our culture for the image – or, in Fallon’s terms, ‘representational thought’ – to the disadvantage of the word – or ‘propositional thought.’397 338

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Finally, the second point naturally flows over into the third. The whole of social life in modern societies is organized around visuality. Even the system of modern democracy and its core concept of ‘accountability,’ as Yaron Ezrahi demonstrates, is based on the metaphor of sight (1995). Premodern societies cultivated the ‘celebratory gaze,’ more precisely, at the spectacle of politics. By contrast modern societies are centered on the ‘attestive gaze,’ that asks for the ‘technicalization’ of governmental actions so that they can be observed. However these technicalizations by necessity mostly deliver interpretations of political actions; they lead to what Ezrahi calls ‘democratic fictions of the real.’ ‘Modern mass-printed and electronic media, employing in part variants of the techniques of virtual witnessing devised and used by experimental scientists, have become a principal means for the production and diffusion of certified fictions of the politically real.’ (Ezrahi 1995, 168) The story thus comes full circle: technologies, epistemologies, and social practices work together to form a constellation bent on the enforcement of the visual; all of these are interlocked. Whether evolutionarily evolved or culturally grown, our present inclination toward – visually – objectifying technologies should come as no surprise. Our enchantment with ‘the power of the icon’ (Levinson) goes way back. Nowadays the icons take the form of digital images that can be shot, processed, and transferred by almost anyone at almost any time. “Icons” should not be seen here exclusively as ‘icons’ on the ‘desktop’ of one’s operating system. All of our interaction with digital media happens by way of images that are to a certain extent “iconic.” And when we put ourselves “out there” on social media profiles, we in a way “iconize” ourselves.398 Perhaps this iconization essentially consists in the distancing of ourselves from ourselves; as one principal feature of every icon implies the object depicted in the icon to be “out of reach” in every possible sense. With objectifying technologies we not only extend abilities and senses, we extend an image-asprojected-identity. But unlike for instance the religious icon, our everyday digital icons remain at least to a certain extent in “our” power. The ‘power of the icon,’ again in Levinson’s terms, thus becomes truly “ours.” As Susan Sontag remarks about photography: ‘[…] it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’ (1979, 14-15) It is as if, with digital (social) media, we extend ourselves into symbolic forms that unlike those offered by mass media can be proposed, worked out, and at least partly controlled by us – like a king sees his own image on coins; the coins of a remunerative system of which he himself is just as much a part as any of his subjects. This last point may serve as an ideal transition to the 339

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second main characteristic of contemporary digital media, namely, “construction.” FINDING OURSELVES: IDENTITY-CONSTRUCTING TECHNOLOGIES

For in order to properly define digital media, one needs to superpose onto their objectifying traits their “constructionist” characteristics. The presence of the latter is in fact what distinguishes “new” from “older” media that mostly only exhibit the former. What we call digital media are what Paul Levinson terms ‘new new media’ (2009): media that enable more or less full user participation, in contrast to “merely” ‘new media,’ i.e., mass media, that literally “broadcast” a professionally produced message from ‘one to many.’ ‘New new media’ on the contrary function on a ‘many to many’ basis.399 This enables people who would have formerly been just users to become producers – as McLuhan already foresees in the 1960s. The explosive force with which social media that are built around ‘usergenerated content’ have burst upon the scene demonstrates – if nothing else – the intense pleasure that we may experience when indulging into the activity of production. On a formal level, what video and photo sharing sites seem to instantiate is the sheer joy of extending oneself “out there,” creatively and often communally, no matter how modest one’s contribution may be. Take for instance the phenomenon of ‘lip dub,’ whereby a group of people, usually college students or employees of a company, get together to film, in one take, an alternative video clip to an existing pop song, each person lip-synching a small piece of the lyrics.400 It is no wonder that this sort of constructive activity by way of technology gets integrated at one point or another in the closed circuit of identity-making. Sherry Turkle, as already indicated in Chapter 4, has been one of the early researchers to investigate the new ways in which computers and related technologies enable us to make sense of our identity, in publications like The Second Self and Life on the Screen (2005; 1995, 26). In fact computers, and especially applications like virtual worlds, make it possible to strengthen the plural sense of the term “identity”: identities. Digital environments let us experiment with multiple, “other” identities, without having to give up our “older” one(s). They provide ‘moratoria,’ Turkle suggests (1995, 204), deploying a term of Erik Erikson, in which more is allowed than in the physical world. At the same time what is acquired and learnt under the guise of one identity – for instance our blond, big-breasted virtual avatar – can serve us with another – for example in relation to our “real life” attitude towards sexism. ‘Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to understand its 340

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artifices.’ (ibid., 263) In the end, actually, this pandemonium of possible identities becomes our very identity, our ‘identity as multiplicity’ (ibid., 260). It goes to show that this opening up of possibilities for identity-constructing may be – or become – a blessing and a curse in one. In other words the great challenge of our ‘postmodern condition’ (Lyotard) takes on “technological forms” just as well. In fact it may well be that these technological forms have co-shaped that condition, as perhaps McLuhan would have suggested if he would have still been alive to see the postmodernist discourse come into being during the 1980s. If Gianni Vattimo remarks, following Nietzsche, that ‘the true world has in the end become a fable’ (Vattimo 1992, 25), and that this is partly a consequence of the emergence of (mass) media, the task of handling the ‘multiplicity of ‘fablings’’ becomes increasingly a personal one in the age of both self-objectifying and constructionist digital media. In a sense shockingly, this multiplicity can bring home to us a sense of identity “crisis.” Which makes for the topic of our next section.

14.4 New Media: Identities in Crisis In our current “technological condition” we have more media at hand than ever to help shape our “selves.” But at the same time, we have never wrestled more with the issue of our identity than today. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of objectifyingconstructionist technologies, it appears that we still, paradoxically, do not know who we are. In recent times more than one author has traced our general “identity crisis” back to these very media. But it may just as well be that the stunning rise of “identity technologies” in fact originates in our identitylessness, roots in our rootlessness. In any case, as the massive amount of publications on the topic demonstrates, the feeling of crisis appears to be just as ubiquitous as the use of the technologies. And taken in whole, the specific evaluation of the crisis seems just as paradoxical as the condition of crisis itself. How have our “selves” changed? Three contradictory answers have been given to that question, and we briefly outline them in what follows: no self, less self, and more self. THE ‘UNPERSON’

As mentioned, McLuhan sees the modern “self” – the “self” we take for granted – as a produce of the cultural constellation that came into being with the spread of 341

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visually oriented technologies such as phonetic writing and movable type printing. The individual as we know it did not exist in tribal contexts; the idea of an individual person – after all, as everything, “just” an idea – is historically of fairly recent date. The introduction of electric technology, then, reverses this development: it is accompanied by a relinquishment of individuality as such. Individuality can only abide in an environment grounded in linearity, fragmentation, and visual perspective. When electronic media make for a speed-up towards instantaneity, “selves” vanish; people become ‘unpersons’ instead. ‘The UNPERSON is the inevitable result of improved communication.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 269) Identity is lost. And the ‘global village’ brought about by instant electronic communication does not necessarily or automatically create a new, flexible, “cosmopolitan” identity, as McLuhan is often read to suggest. ‘Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 44)401 As already said, according to McLuhan identity loss instigates violence and war. It may not be physical violence; slang for instance is merely verbal violence, but hence just as much a search for identity (ibid., 288). In any case all war and violence constitute moments or periods of education (ibid., 40). The process of education – media education – corresponds with the project of building an identity. It remains, so it seems for McLuhan, an open question as to what sort of identity can precisely be regained in this way. LESS “SELF”: FROM INDIVIDUAL TO RELATIONAL IDENTITY

Other authors have attempted to describe more specifically and comprehensively the major changes that have taken place in our identities in recent times, basing themselves on McLuhan to a greater or lesser degree. Their approaches can largely be subdivided into two categories. Authors in the first category generally start from the assumption, already implicit in McLuhan, that communications media make us “lose” “self.” From a concept of individual identity, typical for literate culture, we have evolved to a notion of identity that is essentially communal, relational, or distributed: from much “self” to less “self.” Kenneth Gergen proposes the ideas of the ‘relational’ (2009) and the ‘saturated’ self (1991). Our identity cannot be said any longer to be constituted around a core of individual values, opinions, and views. Instead we furnish ourselves a self that, due to the interaction by way of communications and other media, easily and naturally overflows into others’ selves – our main mode of being is ‘relational.’ 342

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Moreover, from almost endless possibilities we can pick and sort myriad components to fill ourselves up – we become ‘saturated.’ This is paradoxical; we lose a sense of individual self but gain at the same time collective parts. Henry Rosemont, as Charles Ess points out, forwards a similar viewpoint in contrasting the ‘peach-pit’ self with the ‘onion’ self (Ess 2009, 214ff.). Wellman and Haythornthwaite speak of the ‘networked individual’ (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002, 32). Ess himself has coined the term ‘smeared-out self’ (2010). All these approaches offer a perspective that in essence waxes optimistic and hopeful. The fact that we lose a part of our modern, all-too individualistic sense of identity is seen as a useful and necessary corrective to the ills brought on by Enlightenment ideals. For did the hyper-individuality instigated and propagated by capitalism and neocapitalism not lead to poverty, hunger, and ecological disaster? Our new ‘relational’ selves may make us more aware of the “other,” for we are that other. Nevertheless, the new sorts of identity also clearly harbor dangers, as some point out. Feenberg reminds us of Marc Guillaume’s deployment of the notion of ‘spectrality,’ to hint at the anonymity that these new identity forms can bring about (Feenberg 2010a, 98). The possibilities to build our identities, offered by new media, can just as well alienate us. MORE “SELF”: FROM COMMUNAL TO NARCISSISTIC IDENTITY

But the general concepts of “self” and “identity” are highly malleable, and this is proven by the fact that a second category of approaches to our “new” identity can be found that actually suggest the outright opposite view. Here it is proposed that new media provide us with more “self.” David Zweig, in his theory of ‘observational reality’ (2010; Zweig), elaborates the idea that the more we experience the world by way of media, the higher our ‘self-awareness’ becomes. Nowadays in a world in which events are at all times registered and recorded by the most diverse applications and devices, like mobile phones and smartphones, we often seem to opt for an ‘observational’ rather than an ‘experiential’ stance. As has also been suggested above, this is a quite recent phenomenon, Zweig points out. For the largest part of history the only “mode” available was the experiential one. Only in recent times, the observational mode has particularly taken on force. We now often prefer to observe rather than to experience, according to Zweig. This makes us, eventually, look at ourselves from a third person perspective, which intensely heightens the awareness we have of 343

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“ourselves.” This is paradoxical, too. The more we “see” ourselves by way of media, the more we are ‘depersonalized’ by them. And this alienates us just as well. It is this sort of approach that seems to line up best with the “common sense” narcissist personality type of which we spoke at the beginning. But have we now lost or gained “self”? Above and beyond the aforementioned general takes on our recent identity “crises,” several personality types have been sketched recently, in an attempt to delineate the type most dominant in present times. In the next section we seek to list them.

14.5 Four Personality Types Let us recapitulate. We ask how we relate to ourselves as “lovers,” as the “stuff that is extended,” the stuff that of its own nature engages into relation. If we extend ourselves into the object we so much love, does this mean we indulge into some kind of self-love? In other words, does the Narcissus narcosis make us narcissists? The story is sufficiently complicated. As we have seen, any process of extension – thus, all technology development and use as such – has non-trivial implications for the way we construct our identities. But digital media of today moreover seem to enable us to pursue our identity-constructing activities in more conscious and idiosyncratic ways. At the same time they make us literally objectify ourselves: they are not just extensions of abilities or senses in the McLuhanist sense; they also offer free-standing, “objective” images of ourselves – outside of ourselves. Nevertheless recently, several crises in our identity formation, correlated or at least coinciding with the rise of these technologies, have been detected. We have sketched the most seminal – and mutually opposing – accounts of the “crisis” in the preceding section. Next to and notwithstanding these conceptualizations of the “crisis,” however, the current literature has also offered descriptions of what the dominant identity type of today looks like. In what follows we will briefly describe four main “personality types” that recent research has particularly tried to put the finger on. Remarkably, McLuhan has presaged or remarked upon all of them in one way or another. As we will afterwards see, these personality types dovetail in a specific manner with the approaches to the “crisis” we have delineated above.

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THE ‘NARCISSIST’ IDENTITY

Freud (2001), as one of the first, describes narcissism as a pathological condition402 – typified by among other aspects an exaggerated self-image, feelings of grandeur, and intense self-involvement. It is famously elevated to a cultural phenomenon in 1979 by Christopher Lasch with the publication of his widely read The Culture of Narcissism (1991). In this book Lasch characterizes narcissism as the core of the current American identity.403 McLuhan, as said, does not himself literally draw parallels between his Narcissus metaphor and narcissism as a culturally dominating worldview. However in The Mechanical Bride, he does see narcissism as a central aspect of the ‘folklore of industrial man.’ The ‘perennial adolescence’ in which his favorite stooge Dagwood is trapped, externalizes itself as a paradoxical and necessarily desperate search for uniqueness. Sarcastically McLuhan asks: ‘Would Dagwood be free if he had the same job and the same thoughts, and earned a million a year? […] Does “freedom” mean the right to be and do exactly as everybody else?’ (2002, 117) The narcissism and self-involvement that, eventually, are outcomes of the individualism accompanying the mechanical age, leads to a logically impossible task: ‘Conformity is an intense form of individualism. The more intense the competition, the more individuals you have, the more people resemble each other.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 470)404 For McLuhan, narcissism as cultural condition seems to be related to a specific category of – Narcissus-like – extensions, namely, ‘literate’ technologies. But, as Lasch suggests, the individualism “instigated” by those technologies may not perfectly coincide with the narcissism that has eventually grown out of it. ‘For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.’ (Lasch 1991, 10) In other words: narcissism is not necessarily synonymous with individualism. THE ‘LIQUID’ IDENTITY

Another form of identity being currently in swing is, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the ‘liquid’ identity (2005; 2003; 2007b). It is in fact characterized, again paradoxically, by the absence of any fixed, enduring “identity.” Many individuals nowadays, living in a neocapitalist, market-driven world dominated by consumerism, are forced into the never-ending project of always redefining themselves, says Bauman. ‘Identities, just like consumer goods, are to be appropriated and possessed, but only in order to be consumed, and so to 345

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disappear again.’ (Bauman 1998, 29) As said, this undermines the very concept of identity, which suggests more of a constancy of sorts, through time. ‘Perhaps it would be more to the point to speak of self-identity in the plural: the life-itinerary of most individuals is likely to be strewn with discarded and lost identities.’ (ibid., 28) The work of identity-constructing is essentially consumerist, and consumption is, conversely, naturally etched on identity-making and -seeking. McLuhan, also, in The Mechanical Bride, already has an inkling of the ‘liquidity’ of identities that Bauman describes: Unrest is present no matter what may be the present house, car, job. Living is done in terms of a future which cannot be seen rather than in terms of present human or material possibilities. And it is not so much that the future is thought of as better but as different. It is not a human future but only the shadow of next year’s models. (M. McLuhan 2002, 112)

Elsewhere, he speaks of ‘[t]he individual as a montage of loosely assembled parts.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, McLuhan) This nonetheless could just as much make for an accurate description of the following identity type. THE ‘RELATIONAL’ IDENTITY

For yet another sort of dominant “identity form,” already mentioned above, is sketched by Kenneth Gergen: the ‘relational identity’ (2009). Following McLuhan, who sees ‘electric technology’ as enabling more communal-tribal – in contrast to individual – modes of being, Gergen paints a picture of a world in which the ‘essentialist self’ is eroded or dismantled in favor of identities that are ‘relational.’ Just like McLuhan he traces back this erosion to technological evolutions, more precisely the spread of information and communications media: ‘With the profusion of technologies specifically designed to increase the presence of others […] we obliterate the conditions necessary for sustaining belief in the obdurate interior.’ (Gergen 1996, 128) These technologies open up countless alternative identities to us, which makes it very hard to cling to one and only one self-image. We become instead ‘saturated’ (Gergen 1991). ‘In every way, we become increasingly engaged in a world with others – a socially saturated world […]’ (Gergen 1996, 132). Importantly, Gergen, like McLuhan, does not see this development as a loss but conversely as holding much promise. A relational self is not an empty self; on the contrary, we may one 346

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day reach the ‘relational sublime.’ And that day may not even be far off. ‘I believe the relational sublime hovers close to consciousness as we click into the vast network of the computer bulletin board and add our entry to the unending conversation.’ (ibid., 139) THE ‘AUTISTIC’ IDENTITY

One final identity form, then, and one of fairly more recent fashion, can be called ‘autistic.’ Like the other “identity sketches,” this one is just as much fraught with paradoxicality. Jim Curtis, in Culture as Polyphony, draws parallels between literate, ‘linear’ thought and the condition of autism: ‘As we know, the lack of awareness of others, the obsessively literal thought, and inability to comprehend wholes, which characterize the autistic child, represent extreme forms of literate or linear thought.’ (1978, 169) Conversely, Small and Vorgan in iBrain suggest instead more convergences between autistic traits and digital media (2009, 71-74). A more meticulous reflection upon autism as a cultural condition comes from Lance Strate. Strate distinguishes between on the one hand the figure of Narcissus, typifying literacy and characterized by ‘too much self,’ and on the other hand Echo, “mascot” of orality, who, conversely, has ‘too little self.’ The situation brought on by electronic media is sketched best not by Narcissus, nor by Echo, but by Nemesis, the god who revenges Echo by ‘[…] extending and thereby amputating Narcissus.’ (Strate 2006, 110) In other words, the culture of electronic media oscillates between narcissism and ‘echolalia.’ Autism, according to Strate, is a manifestation of a similar mix, but on the individual level. ‘[A]utism, meditation, and mental illness all have echolalic qualities. At the same time, autistics may appear to be all self and no other […]’ (ibid., 122). The balanced self, according to Strate, finds a middle road in between those two extremes. These four personality types are each said to have become dominant in recent times. But which of them tells the “true” story? It would seem that only one type can earn dominance. What is striking, however, is that upon reflection, all of the above personality types in fact blend into each other. Within our ‘relational,’ ‘saturated’ identities, we forever feel the need to shed our skin and take on a new one, which makes us ‘liquid.’ Narcissism and autism appear then as practical “solutions” to the quandary that this liquidity presents to us: narcissism the stepping-up of self-involvement “outward,” autism the cultivation of selfinvolvement “inward.” The culturally dominant identity may thus not be any one of these four, but a hybrid of all. So how can we then make sense of the 347

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aforementioned difference between the “structural” Narcissus phenomenon and the reigning identity of today? We may do so by “changing perspective.”

14.6 Narcissism by Design Once again: certain media and technologies make for certain forms of identities (and vice versa). Qualitative changes within our medial constellations of recent have accompanied “crises” arisen in relation to our identity-building, a “task” in fact even originating in those changes; it appears we have “lost” and “gained” “self” at the same time. This is corroborated by the given that the purportedly dominant identity types seem to flow over into each other. Do all these blurred boundaries make for the fact that we cannot so easily draw the link between the “structural” Narcissus-as-extension phenomenon and the “historical” condition or attitude of cultural-psychological narcissism? Again it seems we may have to approach the issue from a different angle. IDENTITY AND THE TWO-LEVEL RELATIONSHIP TRIAD

For within this scheme the main dichotomy appears not to be situated between individualism and relationality, as is often suggested, among others by McLuhan. The emergence of ‘electric’ technologies does not wholly do away with our literate ‘point of view.’ In fact most digital media of today are themselves perfect blends of ‘tribal’ and ‘literate’ components (Levinson 1999a, 44ff.) – e.g., social media, chat services, even photo sharing websites. But what is more: the correlations between on the one hand ‘literate’ media and individualism and on the other hand ‘electric’ media and ‘relationality’ may not be as strict and straightforward as McLuhan would have it. At the same time, McLuhan’s point seems to hold to a certain degree. For whereas ‘electric’ technologies did not bring us tribal communality, this may have something to do with their “objectifying” characteristics – objectification being in the first instance visual. Seen from this perspective, it thus comes as no surprise that we wind up with strange blends of relational and individual identities. This also means that we should find another heuristic instrument, another dichotomy than the one between ‘self’ and ‘networked,’ to help us make sense of the way in which contemporary media influence our identity-constructing work. Reverting to the distinction between the “structural” and the “historical” level 348

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that we have sketched throughout the previous two parts can bring solace. Instead of distinguishing between individual and relational, between ‘self’ and ‘networked,’ we should see these aspects as components co-present in all human-technology relationships. All medial nodes are at all times simultaneously “self” and “other.” The distinction should not be sought “horizontally,” but “vertically.” What seems to particularly typify identity construction through and within current media environments, we propose, is the tendency to limit its main discourse to the “structural” level, disregarding the “historical” level altogether. In fact the literature already cited above in part, points in this direction. Christopher Lasch marks as one of the crucial characteristics of narcissism its inability to grapple with ‘historical time.’ The sense of historical time has ‘waned.’ ‘To live for the moment is the prevailing passion […]’ (Lasch 1991, 5). Not unexpectedly this leads to a neglect of political issues in any sense whatsoever – for politics “take place” on the “historical” plane. The ideals proposed by narcissism elevate the present to an absolute, and this poses dangers. ‘Harmless in themselves, these pursuits, elevated to a program and wrapped in the rhetoric of authenticity and awareness, signify a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past.’ (ibid., 4-5) Derksen illustrates this with regard to corporate decision-making. He refers to managers who feel the need to make changes in their companies, over and over again. ‘People with an emphasis on narcissism almost automatically have an interest for change and renewal […]’405 (2009, 146). As much is confirmed by Bauman: ‘In the inherited hierarchy of recognized values, the consumerist syndrome has degraded duration and elevated transience. It lifts the value of novelty above that of lastingness.’ (2007a, 85) Change and renewal, precisely, are also what drives the ‘liquid’ personality. But this does not in any way mean that the liquid identity – or the ‘narcissist’ identity for that matter – operates at the “historical” level. It lives, conversely, in an “eternal now” – a present that needs to stay present – a feat that can only be accomplished by eliciting constant change. And change as a constant constitutes the “mythical moment” that McLuhan is so fond of alluding to, especially in the context of the ‘tribal’ mode – along which lines Gergen consecutively works out his idea of the ‘relational’ identity. The autistic personality, finally – seen here as a “cultural” figure, not as an individual suffering from a certain “condition” – lives within this mythical moment just as much, but deals with the task of “obeying structure” in a completely opposite manner: by denying change and, ardently and obsessively, holding on to stasis. No “personalities” could differ more from each 349

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other, so it seems, than the liquid and the autistic. The liquid identity consciously seeks for the eternal change that the autistic one eternally (and perhaps just as consciously) negates. But in essence the two sorts of identities share their core: the abolishment of “historical” sensitivity in favor of a singular focus on “structure.” IS NARCISSUS A NARCISSIST?

So we return to our initial question. How is the Narcissus phenomenon correlated with the narcissistic cultural identity? We can say now with more conviction that it is “historically” related, not “structurally.” In this specific time segment, at the “historical” level, we may have the tendency to act out “narcissistically,” because we disregard exactly the fact that “this” is “just” a moment in time. We only “see” “structure.” This makes us narcissistic, liquid, autistic, relational. But where does this sudden monomaniacal focus on structure and corresponding neglect of historicity stem from? Why should the aforementioned personality types thrive now? Perhaps because we have only recently “discovered” “structure,” i.e., the fact that we are “technological beings”? And perhaps, after all, we owe this discovery, as McLuhan suggests, to the simultaneity offered by electronic communication media. Which, on top of that, enable to us to “see” and “construct” ourselves to a considerable degree. If this is true, the way in which we define and describe ourselves is tied up immediately to the speed of our medial environments – an insight that is of course already suggested by McLuhan, and consequently picked up by the larger tradition of philosophy of communication, as illustrated by the references above. Nonetheless, from our perspective of a love relationship with technologies, we can see the narcissistic inclination moreover as the pursuit of some sort of “romantic ideal”: an attempt to exalt the situation “as is,” to affirm oneself as the “one being extended.” If one considers the ubiquitous use of social – objectifying-constructionist – media nowadays, one may truly become convinced that this hint is not wholly pulled out of thin air. In any case, what is forgotten through the ‘extending’ is the very ‘extending’ itself: the intermediating act of ‘extension’ that, as we have seen, has its very own blindness and ambivalence. Some aspects of formerly dominant identity concepts will be lost forever. Our perspectives have been changed and they cannot be unchanged. As much is surmised by Derksen (2009) who offers an interesting take on the issue. He avers that in fact it may be the case that nowadays we may not be narcissistic enough. That does not constitute a plea for narcissism on his part; he sufficiently critiques the most harmful effects of a narcissistic culture. But he 350

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points out that in order to fit and survive in a society that is deeply narcissistically oriented, one needs to be as narcissistic as the reigning culture requires. This does not mean one has to be blindly narcissistic. A good amount of self-reflexivity has to be applied in order to counteract the most remarkable vices of narcissism. Heinz von Foerster remarks: ‘So what is this ominous “I”? I believe that it is the reflection of the reflection of the reflection ad infinitum. The “I” can be understood as the eigenvalue of the infinite reflection about oneself.’ (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 93) We will return to this issue in the concluding chapter of this part. This, at last, makes for a very McLuhanist call. McLuhan often remarks that in an environment defined by ‘electric’ media, one stays very much out of place as long as one keeps thinking in a ‘literate’ way and does not take on the ‘all-at-once’ sensibility deployed and provided by the current environment. With a small modification the same idea may apply to his Narcissus metaphor itself. As we have seen, McLuhan chooses to employ the interpretation of the Narcissus myth that assumes that Narcissus does in fact not recognize himself in the mirror image, but truly falls in love with “another.” Today perhaps an extra layer should be added to this interpretation. We as ‘Narcissuses’ do not recognize our “being extended,” but we do notice, within the circle set out by that very extension – i.e., our media environments – ourselves, namely, as content of new media. Narcissus, in this way, is only half-blind; and this version of the tale actually reconciles the two existing interpretations. At the same time it corresponds with McLuhan’s aforementioned idea that ‘the user is the content.’ The “crises,” then, may come from our difficulty in separating the “seeing” from the “being” – an issue upon which we already detailedly and repeatedly touched in previous chapters. It does not come as a big surprise that when we only see “half” of our environment, our projects of identity-building suffer from that illness just as much: we perceive content but not form. This harbors more or less obvious dangers to which many authors, a few of which we have cited, alert us. Zygmunt Bauman for one sees, in connection to the use of digital and virtual media, the emergence of what he calls ‘carnival identities,’ identities to be looked at but not necessarily to be worked on: ‘The wondrous advantage of the virtual life space over the ‘offline’ one(s) consists in the possibility to get the identity recognized without actually practising it.’ (2007a, 114) Once again, McLuhan is already on the same track when he sees identity-constructing, just as theorybuilding and ‘understanding,’ as projects to be undertaken actively, and with a 351

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consciousness of the fundamental “lack” underpinning the endeavor: “Identity is making, not matching. Struggle, not goal.” (1970, 70) Which means: being a ‘Narcissus’ – even in its narcissist guise – requires work. That work, obviously, can never be executed in isolation. Its contextual setting radically co-defines it. That context forms the topic of our next chapter.

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15 In between Fixity and Adaptation: Home Is Where the Brain Wires ‘I was an oak / Now I’m a willow / Now I can bend’ (Buffy Sainte-Marie, Until It’s Time for You to Go)

As the focus of the previous chapter was the lover of media, here, following the threecomponent structure, the love itself is again at stake – but now seen through the prism of our “structural”-”historical” dichotomy. How is relation, on and in between the two levels, “related to” on a day-to-day basis? We seek to make sense of that question by way of a special interpretation of the concept of “home” and through a final revisiting of the possible parallels between McLuhan’s and Heidegger’s work. Surprisingly, both their – more or less articulated – ideas on the notion of “home” can be sustained and complemented by recent insights from neuroscience. Taken together, all of this leads us to a broadening and reformulation of the concept of “home,” as a dynamic between the unfamiliar and the familiar, between stasis and change, and hence between the “structural” and the “historical.”

15.1 Can You Relate? At Home with Media Just as our projects of self-identification require work, “love” does not just “happen.” It needs to be kept, nourished, and repaired. To find advice on how to make a relationship with a spouse or a friend work we might turn to glossy magazines, self-help websites, or a relational therapist. But who or what do we consult when we want to improve our relation to media? Several approaches to ‘media literacy’ have in recent years offered guidelines for coping with “classic” communication media. But they may be of lesser relevance with regard to the broadened ‘medium’ notion that McLuhan proposes.406 How do we go about partaking in the countless loves in which we are enveloped anyway? How do we, on an everyday basis, conciliate the “structural” with the “historical” level through and within our making and forsaking of medial relationships? To make sense of those questions we need to revisit, once more, the ‘environment’ concept of McLuhan that took central stage in Chapters 7 and 11. 353

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As ‘media environments’ make for the relational component of our relationship triad – characterized especially, as we have seen, by ‘interplay’ on the “structural” and by the ‘hot’-’cool’ interaction on the “historical” level – we need to further investigate how we concretely come to grips with relation-making in the multiple environmental contexts of which we form part. Once again, common sense will lend us an initial helping hand. Our relating to our environment, no matter how common or uncommon it appears to us, always seems to implicitly emerge from a certain ‘ground’ of familiarity: “home.” We can be either “at home” or “not at home,” but the “home ground” is always there, somewhere, even if it may only consist of a memory bursting with heartache. Through all of our interactions with the world, the ‘ground’ of “home” in one way or another is woven. Only so often that ground gets articulated, like in the track Breathe (Reprise) off of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album (1973): ‘Home, home again / I like to be here when I can / When I come home cold and tired / It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire.’ These lines seize quite well the meaning we commonly ascribe to the word “home.” Home is a place. A place of relief and rest, of safety from harm. Somewhere we endeavor to return to over and over again: an existential baseline. But “home,” as we will attempt to demonstrate, may just as well be more than that. Perhaps we may take the idea of “home” and all its attending common sense and spatial facets, and lift it up one level of abstraction; pointing out, at the same time, its links to temporal considerations, existential implications, and – most importantly for our purposes here – technological structures. An in this sense broadened “home” concept could, conversely, throw a wholly new light on our interaction with technologies and media as such, throughout the tension between “structural” and “historical” planes. In what follows we attempt to fundamentally rework the notion of “home” in the light of everyday technology and media use, and this by way of recombining central ideas in McLuhan, Heidegger, and – surprisingly maybe – neuroscience. “Home,” it will turn out, appears to be very much “where the brain wires” – an environmental-dialectical dynamic that mitigates between the known and the strange. First, we briefly review the existing analyses of the notion of “home” in relation to media. Second, we turn to Heidegger’s fundamental concept of ‘dwelling’ and related terms. Third, then, we further strengthen the ties between Heidegger and McLuhan, already scrutinized in Chapter 7, by way of a comparison of their 354

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respective “home”-related notions. Fourth, we “update” these ideas by coupling them to recent research in neuroscience. And fifth, in a synthesizing movement, we reformulate the notion of “home” starting from the aforementioned reinterpretations, and couple it back to the questions we started with: how do we “relate”; how do we become, conceptually but just as much literally, “at home” with media?

15.2 Home: More Than a Place in Which to Warm One’s Bones Beside the Fire For the longest stretch of human history, “home” has been something spatially or physically bound – if not a house than certainly a land. But with the ‘Information Age’ we seem to have acquired the capability of furnishing a “place of our own” that is not quite “there.” This is attested to by much recent research on digital environments such as virtual worlds. Several authors, among them Markham (1998) and Turkle (1995), have reported how visitors of these virtual ‘communities’ – already a qualitative term – often describe these “places” as “home.” Moreover, from the dawn of mainstream digital media use, technical lingo has been interspersed with spatial and social metaphors: ‘domain,’ ‘home page,’ ‘website,’ ‘cyberspace’ (the term famously coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984)). “HOME,” THE PHYSICAL, AND THE VIRTUAL

Yet obviously, between “real space” and “virtual space” many discontinuities remain. Whereas Roger Waters in the aforementioned Pink Floyd song is able to warm his bones and thus indulge in a very physical, very haptic experience, the guileless avatar next to the virtual hearth does not feel warmth nor rejuvenation. A computer on the North Pole – hypothetically working, wired, and hooked up with some digital fireplace – will not save one from a freezing death. At the same time, a virtual fire will also not scorch our skin when we come too close or leave us with burning wounds if we accidentally fall into it. The virtual offers a form of security that exceeds “mere” physical safety, as always, in ambivalent ways. Nevertheless, the observation that the applicability of the concept of “home” to philosophical analyses of technology can never be wholly exhaustive perhaps points to an essential problem. As already suggested, deployment of the concept 355

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has been rather limited up until now: almost always exclusively linked to neighboring concepts such as “space,” “place,”407 and “hearth”; and used solely in the context of specific media or technologies, such as ‘cyberspace.’ Dennis Weiss provides, throughout several papers, an excellent overview of the situation, indicating an inherent tension within the “home” discourses on ICT. On the one hand, telecommunications media are generally seen as disrupting our traditional or habitual ‘sense of place,’ our idea of the ‘order of things,’ or our feeling of “belonging” (as demonstrated in the works of among others Joshua Meyrowitz, David Bolter, Kenneth Gergen, and Frederic Jameson – and deplored by critics like Neil Postman, Sven Birkerts, and Mark Slouka). On the other hand, (new) media are also said to offer possibilities of finding anew our bearings in the world, of constituting fresh forms of community and cooperation (by more optimistic theorists such as Howard Rheingold, Nicholas Negroponte, or William Mitchell). But: how could the very media co-constitutive of our modern ‘homelessness’ make for a new home? Weiss, not surprisingly408, offers to mitigate this tension by way of a novel take on philosophical anthropology, that sees ‘[…] the complex interplay of technology, the human condition, and our sense of place […]’ (Weiss unpublished paper ‘Homelessness in the High Tech Age’) and that has in fact always treated of ‘homelessness’ as a core element of the human condition. Mankind has never actually had a ‘natural place,’ so it can neither lose or regain it. We can only ‘seize’ a place (by ‘giving meaning to space,’ as Robert McDermott suggests). In this sense, ‘virtual world’ technologies pre-eminently point out to us our ‘placelessness’: ‘Our virtual worlds demonstrate the constitutedness of the world.’ (Weiss unpublished paper ‘Cyberspace as Home’) They do provide us with a sense of place, but not on the premises that most authors have assumed. BROADENING THE “HOME” NOTION

In the remainder of this chapter we wish to extend this analysis somewhat further. First of all, why should the application of the “home” concept be limited to ICT let alone virtual worlds? Weiss already points in the direction of such a kind of broadening, in his proposed return to philosophical anthropology. Moreover, why should the idea of “home” necessarily and exclusively be related to concepts of place and space? It is not our intention to develop a “home” concept devoid of spatial aspects whatsoever – no matter how tempting that would be: philosophers have always struggled with the concept of space and its elusive paradoxicality 356

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(maybe even more after Einstein). As many times before, we instead suggest to “change perspective.” Our proposed “structural”-”historical” dichotomy may again be of help. As said, it does not evade but includes spatial and temporal aspects. At the same time it is not based on them. When held up to the light of our dichotomy, “home” may encompass much more than a place in which to ‘warm the bones beside the fire,’ as David Gilmour soothingly sings. It may be the making of the fire and all of our habits in doing that – a dialectical dynamic between change and stasis, the new and the old, and the unfamiliar and the familiar. To begin to make sense of these premonitions, we need to turn, once again, to Heidegger.

15.3 Heidegger: Home as Nearness to Being We can safely say that no thinker has probably attributed, in a certain sense, more importance to the “home” concept than Heidegger.409 That is, if we at least are prepared to leave hold of many common sense connotations the term carries. At the same time such a throw-away maneuver would itself have to be qualified, for Heidegger’s use of the “home” notion does retain some crucial features of its ordinary meaning. BEING AND DWELLING

This seems complex. On the one hand, Heidegger – always on the lookout for the ‘meaning’ of ‘being’ – goes as far as to equate being with ‘dwelling.’ It seems that if one would not stretch the usual significance of the term “dwelling,” this statement would not much transcend the level of triviality. On the other hand, exactly the reimportation of aspects of, shall we say, the “former” (“bucolic”) way of “dwelling” and “homemaking” into the description and the grasp of being is exactly what is at stake in Heidegger’s thought. A constellation of related terms needs to be sketched out in order to place Heidegger’s “home” concept in its right context and to link it up with the notion of technology. Such a sketch can be by necessity only fragmentary given the enormous breadth of Heidegger’s work and the tremendous amount of terms he employs. For our purposes a brief – however incomplete – review of interconnected notions such as ‘language’ (Sprache), ‘closeness’ (or ‘nearness,’ Nähe), Heimat, Geheimnis, unheimlich, and Bodenständigkeit must suffice. As 357

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already suggested, ‘being’ makes out Heidegger’s main concern. It is being that he, throughout the length of his work, endeavors to hunt down, first attempting to access it through Dasein and its temporal structure, in the end reverting to a humble (or resigned?) ‘waiting’ – being can only be ‘awaited.’ In between those two stages many placeholders for the word ‘being’ are proposed, or at least the ‘meaning’ of ‘being’ is approached as closely as possible by way of seemingly metaphorical circumscriptions. An often ridiculed phrase from the Letter on “Humanism” reads, for instance: ‘Language is the house of being.’ (1998, 239) Yet the expression, however absurd to common sense, points to an essential connection between being, language, and “home.” THE NEAREST AND THE FARTHEST

Before we can attempt to make sense of that connection, we need to elaborate on Heidegger’s evaluation of the state of metaphysics. Heidegger, as we saw in Chapter 3, “historicizes” being: being, so he argues, has been ‘revealed’ in different ways through history, i.e., the history of philosophy. A crucial stage came after the Greeks: whereas Greek thought had been able to at least partly grasp being, thereafter being was ‘forgotten.’ And this situation has remained up to this day: the history of Western metaphysics is the history of the ‘forgetting of being’ (1962) and vice versa. Heidegger, consequently, situates his definition of technology as ‘Enframing’ right in the midst of these ontological considerations. Technology (at least modern technology) is the latest and perhaps the most ‘dangerous’ instance of Western metaphysics, a mode of revealing of being which he, as said, calls ‘Enframing’ (1977a). Technology is ‘dangerous’ in the sense that if we let this situation get out of hand, we will soon “lose” something important – something we have already lost to a considerable extent, actually. This relates to central though not often belabored notions in Heidegger’s work, already present as early as in Being and Time: remoteness and closeness (1962, 138ff.). Nowadays we appear to disregard or to “jump over” what is ‘closest’ or nearest to us in favor of what is farther away. This is to be interpreted in both a concrete-literal and an abstract-ontological way. Literally, we neglect our most immediate surroundings – the farmer’s field, the country path – and almost exclusively attend to the “news” coming to us from beyond those surroundings, even from the other side of the world. Communications media such as radio and television help us make this leap; they bring closer what is far away – Entfernung or ‘deseverance’ – but this removal of 358

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distance does not automatically result in closeness. On the contrary and more fundamentally: by disregarding what is truly “near” we lose contact with being. For: ‘Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from the human being.’ (1998, 252) Technology, exactly, threatens to sever our bond with the “nearest” for good, in both literal and ontological ways. In ‘Gelassenheit’ (translated as ‘Memorial Address’) Heidegger develops this thought to the fullest, and it is also here that the link with the concept of “home” is made most explicitly. Man is the thinking being, Heidegger commences. But nowadays people everywhere flee “true” thinking, that is, ‘meditative’ (besinnlich) thinking. They do think, but it is mainly the calculative thinking characteristic for ‘Enframing.’ To Heidegger this thinking about thinking naturally flows over into a contemplation about dwelling. He asks: ‘Does man still dwell calmly between heaven and earth?’ (1966, 48) Then he remarks that many German people today are ‘driven from their homeland’ (Heimatvertriebenen). Partly in desperation they turn to radio and television, media that present to their listeners and viewers a world that is not really a world. However that what media show one is closer to him than the meadows around his garden, the heavens above his land, the cycle of day and night, the morals of the village, ‘[…] closer […] than the tradition of his native world.’ (ibid., 48) What Heidegger calls the ‘autochthony’ (Bodenständigkeit) of people – simply the rootedness in the ‘ground’ of the home town – is deeply threatened. And this loss originates in nothing less than the ‘spirit of the age.’ The world today – reigned by ‘Enframing’ – appears as mere object. RELEASEMENT AND OPENNESS

So the notion of Heimat in Heidegger is directly, almost abstractly, connected to considerations of nearness and farness, and the thinking related to these categories. Heidegger stresses in the Letter on “Humanism” that Heimat should not be interpreted in a nationalistic or patriotic but in a being-historical way.410 All the peoples of the world, including the German, are joined in this world-historical coming-into-being, in a ‘historical dwelling,’ that precisely consists in the attention to what is near: ‘The homeland [Heimat] of this historical dwelling is nearness to being.’ (1998, 258) But in fact all the peoples of the world are more and more in the grip of ‘homelessness’: ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world [Weltschicksal].’ (ibid., 258) It is not that people are literally homeless; because we have forgotten being, we are ‘homeless.’ For, as we have already mentioned, being is dwelling. We are in as far as we dwell, and vice versa 359

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(Heidegger 2001a, 145). Dwelling amounts to, exactly, ‘[…] a staying [Aufenthalt] with things.’ (ibid., 149) And the only way to abide with things, as Heidegger also argues in ‘The Thing’ – where the question ‘what is nearness?’ takes central stage too – is to take part in the Geviert, the ‘fourfold’ of humans, mortals, earth, and sky (2001b). But what can be done to counteract the technological dominance? Does it suffice to think in the right way? As Heidegger emphasizes many times, thinking always takes place through language. ‘All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary.’ (1977a, 3) Here we have the link between being and language, that is thus immediately related to Heimat as well. But simply thinking may not do. As Heidegger somewhat gloomily notes in ‘The Turning’ (1977c), the thinking required to rebut the dominant technological thinking does not seem to be completely at our mercy. We cannot ourselves “grab” being, exhaust it by our very own reasoning capabilities – for would that not just be an extension of the ‘ordering’ by modern technology that seizes everything and all for purposes of use and control? Mere human organization cannot gain control over the age (1966, 52). No, in a sense, we will have to wait for being to show us its goodwill, to give us an ‘insight into that which is’ (1977c, 46ff.). Luckily, man is the waiting being; he awaits the being of being, all the while guarding it in thinking. And then follow Heidegger’s famous references to Hölderlin’s poem: ‘But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.’ (1977b, 28; 1977c, 42) However, is there really nothing to do in the meantime then? It appears we are not completely at loss. In ‘Gelassenheit,’ Heidegger mentions that the actual ‘uncanny’ – das unheimliche, the condition of not being “at home” – does not consist in the fact that the world becomes more and more technical, but that mankind is not prepared for this change. And then he asks if we cannot find a new ‘ground and foundation’ (Grund und Boden) (1966, 55). The way to achieve this is by turning to what is nearest to us – but not in turning our backs on the technical world. ‘There is no demonry of technology […],’ Heidegger stresses (1977a, 28).411 But there exists, famously, an alternative way of dealing with it, and it consists of two parts. The first is ‘releasement toward things’ (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen). ‘Releasement’ means saying “yes” and “no” to technology at the same time. Just letting it be – allowing it in our life but not letting it control us. The second is ‘openness to the mystery’ (Offenheit für das Geheimnis). That means the ‘mystery’ that lies hidden beneath technology, i.e., its secret meaning. And what may this 360

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secret be? Perhaps exactly that technology can furnish us with a new ‘ground.’ ‘Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] […]’ (1966, 55). Those two, nevertheless, cannot be automatically obtained. We need ‘courageous thinking.’ Thus, Heidegger’s “home” concept, ridden with ambivalences, incites us to turn away, at least partly, from media that offer only Entfernung and no true nearness – not the nearness, at least, of for instance the farmer’s land – but at the same time it tells us to accept technology and abide with it – what is more, even expect from it a new return to a ‘ground.’ A strange blend of novelty and nostalgia. Quite the same dynamic between hope and caution, we have already seen, is to be found with McLuhan. In the following section, we superpose his view with Heidegger’s – hence picking up where we left off in Chapter 7.

15.4 The Unfamiliar Familiar, the Unperceived Perceived McLuhan, it must be said, does not work out an explicit notion of “home” but he has developed several concepts that, taken together, can intensely clarify and redefine it: among them ‘environment’ and ‘understanding.’ In his view, as we have seen, we are at all times in the midst of shifting environmental constellations – that in the first instance have an effect on the way we experience those very environments – and it is our challenge to find our bearings in the constant flux of ‘old,’ i.e., familiar, and ‘new,’ i.e., unperceived, environments. As we will immediately find, many parallels and perhaps surprising ones can be drawn between these ideas and Heidegger’s notion of “home.” As will then become clear in the next section, contemporary ideas coming from an unexpected corner, i.e., neurological research, seem to sustain to a certain extent both frameworks. But first, both Heidegger’s and McLuhan’s “home” notions need to be complicated a little further – for they both carry within themselves an ambiguity. A SORT OF HOMECOMING

With Heidegger being and being-in-the-world take place through the installing of a “home” – not only in the literal sense, but also and mostly in the ontological sense of attending to what is ‘closest.’ It is the whole tradition of Western metaphysics that we are up against in this mission, for ‘dwelling’ in the vicinity of ‘things’ goes against the grain of the ‘forgetting of being’ that this tradition up until 361

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today – in its latest guise as ‘technology’ – has been propagating. Abiding near what is closest to us counteracts the forgetting of being (Safranski 1999, 157). The retrieving of being is a sort of ‘homecoming,’ as Jeff Malpas points out. But this “home” that we find back is not the trustworthy familiar stable or shack that we once left behind and now see again, however slightly touched by wear and tear, but in essence the same as all that time ago. No, as Malpas further comments, ‘[…] such a homecoming is not a simple return to the familiar, but a turning back to that which is both closest to us and also furthest away, to that which is both familiar and yet also essentially “uncanny” (unheimlich).’ (2006, 149) The nearest in no sense consists of a pure familiarity. Since we are so used to “jumping over” it and reverting instead to the farther away, the true “home” cannot be fully known to us. We are unacquainted with it. Malpas specifically draws this link in a consideration of language: unheimlich is translated as ‘uncanny’; ‘uncanny’ means that which lies beyond our ‘ken,’ i.e., our knowledge (ibid., 374n.) – thus, the unfamiliar. Whereas the ‘homelessness’ brought on by the forgetting of being seems paradoxically familiar to us, the ‘homecoming’ offered by a possible ‘turn,’ conversely, is in fact itself doubled into a familiar and unfamiliar aspect.412 This sort of dynamic we could call typically Heideggerian. It is already present in Being and Time, although in another version, namely as the difference between ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’ ‘understanding of being.’ Dasein – human being – has being-in-the-world as its basic state. But in the first instance it holds an everyday, inauthentic understanding, before it can arrive at an authentic understanding of being. It is in the ‘They.’ Nevertheless, this everyday understanding of the ‘They’ makes for an understanding all the same, constituted by discourse and interpretation, and characterized by ‘idle talk, ‘ ‘curiosity, ‘ and ‘ambiguity.’ What is more, ‘[i]n it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed.’ (1962, 213) We need to pass through inauthenticity to get to authenticity. This is the ‘thrownness’-’project’ dynamic: we are thrown (geworfen) in the ‘They,’ but can “de-throw” ourselves, make a project (Entwurf) out of our existence. So we repeat the question: what can be practically done? We need to recover, ‘convalesce,’ as Heidegger puts it in a text on Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra,’ who is ‘The Convalescent.’ ‘Convalesce’ means ‘to return home,’ heal ourselves from homesickness: ‘The convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he can say to himself who he is.’ (1985, 65) This ‘homecoming’ essentially relates to the recognition of finitude – not everything can be calculated, ordered, controlled. As 362

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Andrew Feenberg comments: ‘[…] they [different versions of recovery] do promise a reconnection with meaning and limit, a recognition of finitude, and a homecoming of sorts in the midst of modern homelessness.’ (2005, 44) At the same time paradoxically this homecoming is rooted in an openness to something “more” beneath vorhanden appearance.413 Crucially, we need some help for that from being itself. ‘Releasement’ requires, as Richard Rojcewicz remarks, ‘[…] that Being look at us intently, unveil its face to us. It requires that Being show itself in beings or, otherwise put, that beings become transparent and not, as they are for calculative thinking, opaque.’ (2006, 223) And importantly, what is unveiled to us in this sense – the ‘nearest’ – is at once familiar and unfamiliar. FINDING OUR FOOTING

McLuhan in turn suggests a conception of “home” that just as much proves to be more complex than it at first sight appears. In a sense, McLuhan’s inhabitant of every world order – be it the ‘visual’ or ‘auditory-tactile’ culture – falls victim to a form of unconsciousness that makes him in a way feel at home, but not “really.” At times, as we saw in the previous chapter, McLuhan employs the notional pair of ‘angelism’ and ‘robotism’ to describe the state of unconsciousness lived through in visual and acoustic modes, respectively (M. McLuhan and Powers, 1989). Without ‘understanding’ of our ‘new’ environment, either way we are ‘numbed.’ But angels as well as robots feel carelessly “at home” at all times and in all places. In McLuhan’s eyes, they are misled. But there is hope. As Harold Rosenberg clarifies: ‘Understanding Media is a concrete testimonial […] to the belief that man is certain to find his footing in the new world he is in the process of creating.’ (2005, 119) But whatever world we live in, we need to engage into the exercise of ‘finding our footing.’ All appearance of a “home” in the environment that we heedlessly and subliminally accept can only be a faint reflection of a “truer” “home” promised by ‘understanding.’ The perceived harbors an unperceived aspect. Nothing, apparently, could sound more Heideggerian. At all times we are ‘thrown’ into our current environment, in the ‘They’ that is always already ‘there.’ But our ‘understanding’ of this environment is incomplete; with Heidegger, ‘inauthentic’; with McLuhan, wrapped up in the images and concepts of yesteryear. In both cases, the “tradition” – in this sense: that what is delivered to us from the past – determines how we look at the world. But this tradition appears as that which is familiar to us, in an everyday sense. Yet at the same time it is ‘uncanny’ (“unknown”) to the extent that it keeps us far away from “home,” i.e., a 363

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consciousness of what steers us, of what and who we are, what our environment makes of us. Nevertheless this “true” “home” itself, once ‘unveiled,’ will by necessity show a janus face consisting of at once familiarity and unfamiliarity as well. Just as with Heidegger, this more abstract notion of “home” in McLuhan takes up aspects of the common sense meaning of “home” too. This is clear from McLuhan’s musings on gatherers, hunters, and nomads. In the ‘electric age,’ according to McLuhan, man becomes a nomad again (what Eric McLuhan calls ‘nomadification’ (2010, 78)): ‘We have become […] once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. […] Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.’ (M. McLuhan 1997a, 124-125)414 Only, we have not yet adapted our thinking to the new situation. In other words: our cognitive notion of “home” has not realigned itself with the new cultural mode of “home.” Again, here, we see an essential ambiguity in the “home” concept: however we may be at home in a practical, experiential sense, we still are ‘homeless’ on a more fundamental – ontological – level, and particularly in the context of the contemporary cultural-technological constellation. Likewise Heidegger’s Dasein appears perfectly at home with technology, but in fact does not at all do what would be the best for it to do, given the current form of the ‘revealing of being.’ And once again, what would be the good thing to do? Heidegger says: Gelassenheit zu den Dingen and Offenheit für das Geheimnis. McLuhan warns ominously: ‘Man cannot trust himself with his own artifacts.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 71) As early as in The Mechanical Bride he makes a plea for a more distanced engagement with media and technology. At the same time ‘[t]he future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 55)415 We need to keep – in Heideggerian terms – a certain openness to the ‘mystery’ or secret of technology, and in McLuhan’s version that is its form, its ‘message.’ Against the dominance of content – ‘thrownness’; that what is already ‘there’ – we must pose an attention to form. Practically we can do this by way of the construction of an ‘anti-environment’ that exposes form, but that also helps us in controlling and changing our environment. And this could very well be read as a variation upon the Heideggerian self-defining act of taking responsibility for one’s own existence. This constantly shifting dynamic between Geworfenheit and Entwurf, herein is situated, however ambivalently, “home.” 364

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Nevertheless, Heidegger’s as well as McLuhan’s concrete solutions stay relatively vague. How to find a new way of revealing? There is no clear-cut answer, and it certainly does not wholly depend on “us.” Heidegger leaves us with just the hope – in Hölderlin’s words – that ‘[...] where danger is, grows / The saving power also.’ McLuhan, then, expects from artists and other (literally) ‘marginal’ figures the proposal and creation of ‘anti-environments,’ but it seems that the recipe or construction plans for them are nowhere available except in the capriciousness of artistic imagination. How are we ever to go from our defected, in-subliminalitydrenched “home” to a fuller, more conscious “home”?

15.5 Home: Our Current Brain Structure – the World Phrased differently: how will we turn the familiarity that threatens us – ‘Enframing,’ the unnoticed workings of media upon us – into a familiarity that harbors and shelters us – a new mode of revealing, ‘understanding’? Although it may appear as a far-fetched analogy, recent research in neuroscience can offer a viewpoint that at the same time clarifies Heidegger’s and McLuhan’s interpretations of ‘homecoming,’ and transforms them into a truly practical program for, shall we say, everyday “home making”. CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD: HEIDEGGER, MCLUHAN, NEUROSCIENCE

Apart from Heidegger’s (especially post-’turn’) emphasis on the role of being itself in its revealing, McLuhan as well as Heidegger see “home” as a task, a project in essence to be undertaken by human beings in conversation with their environment. In this dialectic interchange, humans and environments – Heidegger’s ‘relational totality’ – co-constitute each other: there is never such a thing as a completely isolated human or an environment devoid of human perception or intervention. (The “environment” of, say, Mars would perhaps qualify as such – but still, would there have existed something like a planet named ‘Mars’ if humans would not have been around to discover it? Does a falling tree in an abandoned forest make a noise?) At all times, says McLuhan, man is kneaded by his environment, while this very environment is man-made (for environments are made by media that, as extensions, originate in the human organism). In Heidegger’s terms: Dasein is always being-in-the-world. Neuroscience, in recent years, has rephrased this human-world dynamic in 365

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terms of neuronal wiring. The brain can be said to act as a hub between human and environment. Upon its circuitry the environment constantly leaves its impress; at the same time our current constellation of neuronal circuitry determines at every moment how we act on the world. Bruce Wexler (2006) describes this reciprocal influence in terms of ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ Which particular patterns are formed by neuronal connections depends on sensory stimulation (either or not hailing from social interaction): what was external – the ‘environment’ – becomes internal – brain structure. The human organism always strives for consonance between environmental conditions and neuronal circuitry: Wexler calls this a ‘neurobiological imperative’ (ibid., 5). If any incongruences between the external and the internal situation arise, this results in stress and dysfunction; conversely, congruence makes for pleasure. During the first part of life, the internal structure is very flexible; it “takes in” the environment and literally identifies itself with it. From adolescence onwards this flexibility declines, and more and more the environment or at least our perception of it needs to be changed in order for the identification, the ‘internal-external consonance,’ (ibid.) to succeed. The older we get, the harder it becomes to adapt ourselves. McLuhan points to the same phenomenon in suggesting that children – and by extension persons who have retained some child-like naiveness within themselves, like artists – have much less trouble in noticing new media environments than adults, illustrating this by way of the tale of the emperor’s new clothes (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 88). But whereas children from a neurological standpoint have no other choice than to be “impressed,” while adults have nearly lost this capability, the latter have the advantage of being able to act upon the environment in order to change it, where the child can only witlessly receive the influence of the surroundings. Being an adult has an upside too. The quote mentioned at the end of the last section can clarify McLuhan’s stance on this developmental-psychological issue: ‘The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.’ Where are we supposed to get these qualities in order to reposition ourselves towards ‘the machine’? Quite simple: in different stages of our “natural” development we have already possessed them. While the child is still lighthearted but “dumb” – in the sense that it can only powerlessly “receive” – the adult has lost this lightheartedness but has gained “intelligence” – the power to act upon his external surroundings. The adult knows how to technically change things – but has lost the frivolousness coupled to the realization that change is überhaupt 366

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possible. It may be a matter of retaining this intelligence while at the same time winning back the lightheartedness. In this way both the external and internal “environment” become transformable. In Heideggerian terms, the possible becomes again higher than the actual (1962, 63). YE SHALL BE CHANGED: NEUROPLASTICITY

This renewed promise of possibility matches the neuroscientific notion of ‘neuroplasticity’ or ‘brain plasticity.’416 Although after childhood our brains become much less flexible, they can still be changed. Brains are dynamic, ‘plastic’ structures, open to constant adaptation – a process that can be steered through conscious (cognitive) activities. ‘The plastic brain is perpetually altered by every encounter, every interaction.’ (Doidge 2007, 209) This is demonstrated by cases of astonishing physical recovery after crippling accidents, but neuroplasticity can just as well, as Norman Doidge points out, be of help in the treatment of psychological disorders or serve us in every day life, as we will shortly see in more detail.417 Doidge delineates the two main laws of neuroplasticity: ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’418 and ‘use it or lose it.’ The first law means that the more we perform a specific activity, cognitive or not, the more the neurons corresponding to that activity will ‘fire,’ i.e., transmit an electrical signal; and the more neurons fire within a certain circuit, the more that circuit will ‘wire,’ i.e., the stronger it will get. The second law stands for exactly the opposite process: the less we use specific neuronal circuits – the less we carry out a certain activity – the more the accompanying nerve cells will die.419 Obviously, this is the age-old learningunlearning dialectic: “practice makes perfect,” but when practice slackens our skills wither. It seems like a common sense observation, however neuroscience now delivers empirical evidence for the fact that perhaps the scope of what is possibly (re)learnt is much larger than we expected. In this regard it is now becoming clear that to keep our brains in condition, not so much practice, i.e., repetition needs to be propagated, but rather contact with new environments. Practice strengthens existing circuits; learning new things makes for ‘neurogenesis’: the creation of new brain cells. This point, and the ‘Play-Doh aspect’420 of brain activity as such, is vividly illustrated by the “neuroplastic” treatment of OCD patients, as administered by Jeffrey Schwartz (J. M. Schwartz and Begley 2003) and Norman Doidge. Doidge suggests somewhat provocatively that in fact Freud could be seen as a forerunner of neuroplastic theory: ‘Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its 367

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neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes.’ (2007, 221) And he refers to Susan Vaughan who argues that the ‘talking cure’ works by way of ‘talking to neurons’ (ibid.). However not in all cases a deep-analytic ‘talking’ therapy makes for the most suitable or successful approach. With regard to the treatment of persons suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, for instance, it is now assumed that going into the details of their specific compulsions in the course of a long-running analysis is less effective than “simply” applying neuroplastic exercises. Patients are instructed to distance themselves from the content of their compulsive thoughts or behavior in order to focus instead on their form, i.e., the fact that they are compulsory. This is possible, practically, by refocusing on positive, preferably pleasurable activities as soon as one realizes that the compulsive behavior or thinking manifests itself. For example instead of indulging into compulsive cleaning, one can take a walk, play some favorite music… It appears that after a few weeks of careful and disciplined exercise – the time it approximately takes for brain circuits to (re)wire – most patients experience a significant improvement in their condition. Focus on form instead of on content undermines the demonic force of precisely that form.421 THE NEUROPLASTIC MCLUHAN

Nothing, apparently, could sound more McLuhanist. According to McLuhan we always perceive the ‘new’ environment in terms of the ‘old.’ From the standpoint of neuroscience, this means we always approach an environment from our own current brain structure (in fact we cannot do anything else). That current brain structure represents at any time the ‘old’ environment, and as our perception of the new environment becomes tainted by our assumptions and learned habits, it can never be “pure.” In fact as we saw in Chapter 13, McLuhan himself already has a premonition of this “brain-situatedness” of the tension between ‘old’ and ‘new.’ He phrases this tension also in terms of ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ and of ‘left’ and ‘right brain hemisphere.’ In all human perception the figure, i.e., that to which conscious attention is paid, takes the forefront, while the surrounding ground stays subliminal. But according to McLuhan, basing himself loosely on empirical evidence from early neuroscience available at his time, it is only one half of our brain that makes us focus monomaniacally on ‘figure’; the other half offers an alternative “way of looking.” Whereas our left brain hemisphere – the ‘literate’ half, so to speak – specializes in noticing figure and neglecting ground, the more holistic, ‘tribal’ right hemisphere enables us to grasp ground (or more precisely the 368

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‘interplay’ between figure and ground). Once again we should be reminded of the given that overall for McLuhan the pairs ‘figure-ground’ and ‘left-right’ serve as placeholders for the pair of ‘content-form.’ Humans have a tendency to focus on content and disregard form, i.e., the subliminal effects media have upon us – thus, upon our neuronal structure. Admittedly McLuhan’s use of those dichotomies should to a certain extent be qualified. The strict functional separation between left and right brain hemisphere is already questioned in McLuhan’s time, and certainly finds little defenders today (although there do exist functional differences between the brain halves, as among others V.S. Ramachandran points out; cf. infra). It is moreover not always so that we only see content and disregard form422, or that we do not notice the ‘new’ but only the ‘old.’ In fact in the case of technologies and media the new is often the most remarked upon, discussed, applauded, or feared. Yet one parallel stands, and this may be the most important one: what is confirmed the most – the familiar – will make for the exclusion of other perspectives – the unfamiliar. Yet the familiar in itself harbors unknown features. Although we are, obviously, familiar with the familiar, a part of it eludes us; and we may well call that part, in a McLuhanist vein, its ‘form.’ Wexler illustrates this by observing that familiarity, or our ‘preferences,’ drive subliminal perception and decision-making. What we encounter most we like best. For instance, research has shown that we prefer the letters in our own name over other ones (2006, 158). We also prefer, in reading a paper, the words that appear most in it, even though we may not know what they mean (ibid.). Although the familiar may “feel” straightforwardly familiar to us, we are completely unaware of its unconscious power and the way it steers our perception, decisions, and actions. Familiarity has something ‘uncanny’ to it.423 The counteractions to be undertaken against the dominance of the subliminality of the familiar, as the OCD example has shown, can in a way stay as subliminal as the dominance itself. Our “neurosis” consists, dramatically put, in the unconscious sway that new media environments have on us (McLuhan) or in the calculative thinking imposed by the all-enfolding ‘Enframing’ (Heidegger). But we should not try to deal with the content of our neurosis – technology itself, the new environment itself. This would only make for a confirmation and thus strengthening of the old circuits, networks, situation. What we need is a countermassage of ‘form.’ Not strengthening the existing neuronal constellation by repeating our actions, but building up new networks by indulging in other activities or ways of thinking, albeit in a structured, disciplined manner. This 369

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“therapy” consists in letting go, in deviating from the beaten track – but consciously, controlledly, disciplinedly. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit in this sense means: being able to let go. The ‘openness to the mystery’ then stands for the concentrated attention given to this “letting go.” This should make for a crafty encounter, if ever possible, with the new – but the new in itself, not the new seen through old eyes. Are we then still at “home”? In the next section we attempt to synthesize all of the above in relation to what has been our main concern: the analysis of technology from the perspective of, exactly, the “home” concept.

15.6 Home and Technology: The Discipline of Letting Go424 We have come a long way from the traditional concept of “home,” epitomized in the lines from Pink Floyd’s Breathe (Reprise) that we cited at the beginning of this chapter. Linking up three seemingly unrelated theoretical domains we have attempted to reformulate the notion of “home” fundamentally. Heidegger’s business is with ontology. His antidote to modern ‘homelessness’ consists in turning to what is near – to its familiarity and unfamiliarity alike. McLuhan, working within media theory, wants to unveil ‘media environments,’ the unconscious effects that media have upon our (sense) lives. He tries to do this by creating ‘anti-environments’ that make us aware of the unfamiliar in the familiar and vice versa. Neuroscience, then, investigates brain-world interactions and demonstrates that behavioral, cognitive, and perceptual actions reinforce themselves by repetition, through the strengthening of neuronal circuits. However, this dynamic can be turned around or modified by conscious focus on alternatives – so to speak, by an unfamiliarization of the familiar. HOMEMAKING: A BI-DICHOTOMOUS UNDERTAKING

All these views emphasize – again in a very modernist vein – a turning away from the “current situation” towards one that is unqualifiedly better: the making conscious of something that was unconscious, the making present of something that was absent although hovering in the background. They stress the shifting of perspective, the changing, so to speak, of the perceptual-cognitive guards. Seen in this light, “home” appears no longer as a concept merely bound to place or space. It is a fundamental way of interacting through, with and within environments, that resonates throughout the breadth of our existence, and that centers around the 370

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dynamic between ‘old’ and ‘new,’ between stasis and change, between familiar and unfamiliar – also manifested in the basic functioning of our brains: the wiring and pruning of brain cells and circuits. “Home” in this sense is to be framed as a dialectic between fixity and adaptation. More precisely it stands for an arranging project that starts out from the known and the existing, to eventually transmogrify that current configuration – either by familiarizing the unfamiliar, or by unfamiliarizing the familiar; and this with regard to either the internal or the external environment. We thus wind up with a fourfold structure, consisting of two axes: “familiar-unfamiliar” (or “old-new”) and “internal-external” (or “brainworld”). Along these axes change (adaptation) and stasis (fixity) “take place” (and “time”). As should be clear from the above, none of these dichotomies should of course be seen as strict: the new is in the old and vice versa; the brain is constituted by the world, and the other way around. (Moreover, change and stasis presuppose each other on a fundamental and practical level: “historical” change needs “surrounding” “structural” stasis and vice versa – otherwise neither of both would ever stand out as such.) This dialectic has a broad scope: it covers the whole of human life. Employed more specifically however – and not unlike Heidegger and McLuhan envision it – it can aid us in coming to terms with the way we use and practically embed technologies and media. In this context, it helps if we keep in mind some of the connotations coupled to the traditional “home” concept. If for Heidegger technology may offer a new Bodenständigkeit and for McLuhan media may make for environments to which we are not completely and unwittingly surrendered and in which we feel a little more “at home,” then technologies must be seen as full-fledged components in “making a home.” Everyday observation lends much sense to this hypothesis. Tony Schwartz already in 1981 remarks that thanks to media ‘[t]he traveler is lonesome no more.’ (1981, 45) Nowadays we find no trouble in recognizing an everyday truth in this statement when we see thousands of commuters fumbling their cellphones, mp3 players or PDAs. The most remote places in the world now seem less (life-)threatening since we at all times can stay hooked up to satellites hovering above our heads.425 With some imagination, the thousands of satellites circling the earth feel like a warm blanket – a sort of hightech ‘transitional object’ (D.W. Winnicott) – covering the whole globe. But we must be careful in applying temporal caesura: travel – in the widest significance of the word – has always been conducted under technological conditions: from footwear to hotels, from maps to compasses to GPS, all movements of humans 371

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through space and time have been accompanied by some more or less primitive technology. Only, we have always commonsensically defined “home” as technologically constructed or performed – and not the other way around: technology analyzed as “homemaking.” PAST AS PROBE: THE ‘REAR-VIEW MIRROR’

Technology, in this sense, comes down to the (re-)creation of the conditions of and at “home,” abroad. It is an ongoing struggle with our external as well as our internal environment, as said, along the familiar-unfamiliar axis. These four dimensions should at all times be kept in mind whenever we attempt to analyze technology or specific technologies. A useful heuristic developed by McLuhan in this regard is called the ‘rear-view mirror.’ It attests to the observation that, as Gianni Vattimo puts it, albeit in a different context, ‘[…] progress is in a sense nostalgic by nature […]’ (1992, 42). At all times humans, and probably many other species, attempt to retain the status quo (a term not necessarily to be interpreted in the political sense here), for every change in a currently safe and satisfying environment may well produce a threat. William James, from an early psychological perspective, already speaks of ‘neophobia’426, the almost instinctive fear that humans exhibit toward the new (2008, 250).427 Psychologically and biologically we have some interest in keeping things as they are, in being “conservative.” Perhaps it is on these general observations that McLuhan builds when he works out his ‘rear-view mirror’ concept428, which presumes, as we have already seen, that at every moment we perceive a new environment in terms of the old. More precisely, we see ‘[…] the old environment in the mirror of the new one while ignoring the new one.’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001b, 18) As if we, metaphorically, drive a car, look through the rear-view mirror, and notice only what lies behind, without paying attention to the “car environment” itself, let alone to what lies ahead. Hence quite literal expressions like ‘horseless carriage’: phrasing the present in terms of the past. ‘Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 496) The premise implied by this idea of course is that there always exists a lag between the coming into existence of an environment and our awareness of it. The ‘rear-view mirror’ notion finds a very practical pendant within archaeological anthropology in the concept of the ‘skeuomorph.’ N. Katherine Hayles defines this concept thus: a skeuomorph is ‘[…] a design feature that is no 372

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longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time.’ (1999, 17) Common examples include the sound of an opening and closing shutter played by digital cameras; fake wooden printing on plastic or press board kitchen furniture; digital images of buttons, dials, or sliders on computer screens, … In some cases these features, mostly decorative, serve to conserve a tinct of the prestige adhered to older materials, like for example metal, leather, or wood. But in most instances skeuomorphs root in a desire to retain something of the old in the conception of the new, as to not confront users with an appliance or item that “does not look like anything we know.” Hayles comments: ‘Skeuomorphs visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication.’ (ibid.) They are meant to make the transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar a bit smoother, and in this way remind of McLuhan’s caution, framed however more generally and dramatically: ‘Our typical response to a disrupting new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 499) It appears that we humans are ourselves “skeuomorphic.” All of our interactions with the environment play out across the familiar-unfamiliar dynamic – within that dynamic the main tendency is to keep the ‘internal-external consonance’ intact. Some research now seems to suggest socioneurological evidence for phenomena similar to McLuhan’s ‘rear-view mirror’ (Wexler 2006, 47; Ramachandran and Blakeslee 2005, 134ff.). It may even be so, as V.S. Ramachandran shows, that McLuhan was right after all in locating the ‘somnambulism,’ typical for the ‘literate’ worldview in which the ‘rear-view mirror’ phenomenon reigns most, in the left brain hemisphere. Current research indicates that the left hemisphere, “conformist” by nature, tends to conserve the status quo, whereas the right is able to see ‘paradigm shifts,’ being sensitive to perturbation (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 2005, 134, 141). But McLuhan seems to have also been right in another sense. In times like ours, when the pace of media development and the tempo of media content itself become faster, our “conformist” part has trouble in keeping up with our “progressive” part. On the one hand humans naturally need sensory stimulation – even if there is at the time no functional need for information – lest they become anxious and depressed (Wexler 2006, 63). On the other hand, as Doidge points out, media of today – music videos, video games, websites, … – ‘[…] unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased 373

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appetite for high-speed transitions in those media.’ (2007, 309) This has something to do with the ‘orientation response,’ an ancient reflex, famously described by Pavlov, that gets triggered when a sudden change in our environment arises. Now contemporary media bring us in a state of continuous ‘orientation response’ (ibid., 309-310).429 FINALLY, BACK TO RELEASEMENT?

In the light of this situation of “different speeds” – media perform at a faster pace than humans can reasonably process – many authors have proposed various scenarios of media abstinence. Much of these approaches hinge on the distinction between digital media such as the Internet and cellphones on the one hand, and “traditional” media such as books and newspapers on the other hand. Often they circle around the notions of attention and concentration: the former sort of media make us lose a form of attention that was most naturally coupled to the latter. Books allow for a longer, sustained reasoning process, whereas digital media fragment our attention, making it eventually harder to focus for longer than a short time. In other words, most famously written by Nicholas Carr, ‘Google makes us stupid’ (2008). Carr (2010) bases his argument on neuroplasticity: the more we come in contact with certain media, the more the corresponding neuronal circuits will fire and wire. Susan Greenfield (2004), too, and on the same grounds, makes a plea for a more cautious (or modest) media use, just like the authors of iBrain do (Small and Vorgan, 2009). All these views in essence come down to a defense of the old against the new – a conservational attempt. Peter K. Fallon, a scholar in the tradition of Neil Postman (2006), who more than twenty years ago already makes essentially the same point, although not grounded in neuroscientific evidence, phrases it perhaps in the strongest way when he admonishes us to ‘[…] resist the temptations of a new mode of culture, and cling, as tightly as possible, to the old.’ (2009, 201) We can see now that these “media diet” approaches are – notwithstanding their inherent value – contemporary rehearsals of Heidegger’s and McLuhan’s warnings, seen from the “home” perspective developed above. Within the fourfold environmental dynamic of internal-external-familiar-unfamiliar relations, things can be lost and gained. We are not wholly conscious of what exactly; therefore some caution is required. But at the same time we also time and again bump into a barrier, a “natural” frontier that we cannot wish away. In Heidegger’s case this is being, revealing or concealing itself regardless of humans’ will.430 In McLuhan it is 374

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the “baseline” constituted by the human organism, that offers the source for all technologies but may be threatened or not by the auto-amputations brought on by them. In the same way, the human brain is now regarded as a plastic, but not an elastic structure (Doidge 2007, 209): transformable, but not endlessly. Thousands of years of evolution have made our brains the way they are; we need to account for this “given” and attune our very media to it. In other words: although we have the “power” to change, neuroplasticity should also not be overrated. A limit exists. It is in this way that “homemaking,” as a disciplined form of letting go, should be framed as a dialectic between exactly those two terms. The letting go offers us hope for change; discipline imposes limits to that possible change. This formula of “the discipline of letting go” attests to the fact that within the aforementioned fourfold, adaptation and fixity have an openness as well as a limit to them. It remains to be seen how far the borders between openness and limit can be reciprocally stretched. HOMEMAKING AS RELATIONAL MERGING OF “STRUCTURE” AND “HISTORY”

Let us conclude with a few crucial remarks. As mentioned at the start, the proposed widening of the notion of “home,” although it may seem that way, is by no means a plea for “spacelessness,” as for example presented by certain discourses on virtual media or approaches within the broad domain of transhumanism. “Space” and “place” should stay dear to our hearts. First of all, they remain very useful categories with which to investigate the contemporary use of technologies.431 Furthermore, there harbors a deeper psychological-sociological danger in such pleas, as Paul Levinson shows in Real Space: whereas communication without transport (thus “spaceless”) has the advantage of being safer, communication without a physical context can lead to wrong perceptions (2003, 16); in other words, we need to keep the ‘talking’ and the ‘walking’ together (ibid., 15ff.). Moreover, on a more existential but also political plane, “losing place” may cause us, in a more or less Heideggerian vein, to become “rootless,” or ‘liquid,’ in the words of Zygmunt Bauman. Connected to our digital technologies, we ourselves become the ‘sole stable point in the universe of moving objects’ (Bauman 2003, 59) – but in reality, politics and social issues are still to be dealt with locally (ibid., 98ff.). The “homemaking” project we have treated of must always necessarily and literally “take place.” In this sense, “home” is still a place in which to ‘warm one’s bones beside the fire.’ In the same way, “homemaking” proceeds through and in time. McLuhan sees 375

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in the ‘electric technologies’ a return to ‘tribal’ instantaneity and simultaneity, in contrast with the linear time frame that accompanies a ‘literate’ worldview. But as much as digital media do not abolish place, they do not by themselves make for a mythical all-at-onceness as McLuhan suggests or even hopes (at least not yet). Our “intercourse” with media, up until now, unfortunately – or fortunately – remains a task to be taken up through time, even if we refuse to adopt a typically modernist linear time frame. The placeless ‘liquid’ consumer that Bauman describes matches with the timeless, ever-present pleasure-seeker of contemporary neohedonistic pop culture. Time appears to be an eternal “now” to “enjoy” and nothing more – an observation already presaged by Neil Postman (2006, 99ff.).432 Over and against that we could pose a concept of “homemaking time” (or “learning time”) that at any time shuffles between limit and possibility – and never leaps from one to the other. In other words: upon the “structural” attitude should be superposed the “historical” one. However, even if place and time still count for something, we should keep in mind that the relations between both are perhaps tightening. Speeds are becoming higher and higher at all levels of human endeavor: communication, transport, education, the economy, … This, McLuhan suggests, may problematize the notion of the ‘rear-view mirror,’ and thus our very concept of “home” as familiarunfamiliar dynamic: ‘What is happening at the present time is that changes are occurring so rapidly that the rearview mirror does not work anymore – at jet speeds, rearview mirrors are not very useful.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, viii) If change is constant and ubiquitous, the dichotomy between familiar and unfamiliar will be thoroughly loosened. As we move steadily “towards” the “structure” level, we may acquire a not so helpful inclination to disregard the “historical.” As the speed with which we communicate, consume, and produce is steeply increasing, the “wait” in between unfamiliarity and familiarity – for everything that is known was once strange – might eventually become unbearable. We may then expect an all-familiar world. Nonetheless we do not mean to stir emotions of gloom or panic. The metaphors we have built upon – Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and McLuhan’s ‘understanding’ concepts – do seem to carry a slightly demonic overtone, as they appear to paint a picture of half-witless humans pitted against their own creations (either or not originating in being or the human organism). It is better – in line with the general approach of this work – to frame the “homemaking” dynamic playing out along the internal-external and familiar-unfamiliar axes in terms of 376

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“love.” In an intimate relationship, Gelassenheit does not seem to make for a very fruitful strategy; and ‘understanding’ is at every time blurred by emotion. Gelassenheit and ‘understanding’ appear to imply that at a certain level a pure and clear distance is possible. Love does not allow for any such thing. It makes for a project at all times to be undertaken within the project itself. And within that project, the “other” can unpredictably impinge on us. How we may “deal” with the beloved object is the theme of our next chapter.

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16 Living the Object: Collectors by Design ‘Life marches on, while collectors trail behind, carrying a shovel and a sack.’ (King 2008, 145)

The last chapter dealt with the love component of the relationship triad on the existential level. Here finally the beloved object must be revisited and investigated in that same light. How do we cope with “the object” in everyday life? Again, we propose to deploy a central metaphor by way of which to frame the issue, i.e., “collecting” – an image at which McLuhan in fact already hints. We will find collecting to be essentially a broad, all-encompassing way of dealing with objects, rooted moreover in our human condition. But does collecting stay the same if the objects gathered are no longer physical, but digital or virtual? Through a both general and specific comparison we will find that “traditional” collecting and digital “collecting” are indeed “structurally” the same, but there may have arisen a tendency in recent times and due to technological ‘speed-up’ towards immediacy and instantaneity characterizing all contemporary “collecting” activities. Again, thus, the beloved object comes to us via the fundamental tension between the “structural” and “historical” levels.

16.1 The Beloved Object and the Collecting Paradigm COPING/COUPLING WITH THE OBJECT

The last component of the relationship triad we need to treat of is also the most elusive. As we extensively saw in Chapters 8 and 12, the beloved object escapes us. Truly a strange phenomenon when one considers the ease and familiarity with which we engage with objects in everyday life. It seems like the lover and the love, by contrast, are much harder to track in our daily doings, whereas in theoretical considerations they come in sight much sooner. With the object – and our “love” for it – it is the converse: taken for granted in practice, hard to come by in theory. Perhaps this amounts to yet another instance of Heidegger’s insight that we neglect what is closest to us and instead “jump over” it towards that what is farther away. Nevertheless we do – in some miraculous way – cope and couple with “the object.” But how should we frame our everyday dealings with objects from the 379

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proposed perspective of our bond with technology? Again, as in the previous chapters, we choose to deploy one central metaphor through which we will view and study the object component of the triad on the existential level. That metaphor is collecting – again first and foremost in the common sense meaning of the term. Collecting can be seen as form, instantiation, or performance of our love of the object. But it also serves to grasp the way in which we mitigate the tensions between the “structural” and “historical” levels in our day-to-day dealings with objects. Whereas on the singular plane McLuhan’s ‘formal cause’ took central stage, and on the multiple level the dynamical interactions of media among themselves were at stake, here we focus on how these two viewpoints combine and come together in the taking, making, and grooming of the object in the context of our “loving” relationship. “Collecting” in this sense is to be seen as ‘formal cause,’ multiplied, in action. THE ‘DIGITAL AGE’ SEEN THROUGH THE PRISM OF COLLECTING ACTIVITIES

The collecting metaphor, nonetheless, is not chosen at random. In fact McLuhan himself already hints at it in several places, among others in a phrase quoted in the previous chapter: ‘We have become […] once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. […] Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.’ (1997a, 124-125) Or: ‘In the age of information man the foodgatherer returns as man the factfinder.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 33) Such statements are of course related to McLuhan’s historical time frame: as we return to tribal conditions we naturally become hunter-gatherers again – but collectors now first and foremost of informational instead of nutritional goods. They are also related to McLuhan’s observation that to the emergence of ‘electric technology’ an evolution from ‘hardware’ to ‘software’ is coupled. We trade now more in ideas than in machines – and education (‘culture’) becomes ‘our business’ (1970). Such insights foreshadow contemporary approaches of ‘digital ontology’ in which the digital or ‘virtual’ “object” is either investigated in all its specificity as essentially different from the physical one (Allison et al. 2005; Ekbia 2009) or conversely seen as on a par with it (Zhai 1998). But what if we here focus less on the object of attention and instead more on what is precisely done with it? What if we highlight the gathering instead of the information? Then we may see that today, in the age of digital media, we indulge in collecting-like activities continuously: browsing, clicking, sharing, uploading, 380

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downloading, … Disregarding technical considerations – involvement with keyboards, mouse pads, WiFi networks, … – and making abstraction from specific interfaces or websites we may interact with, what do we perceive? We gaze then upon a myriad mass of images, words, sounds, shards of conversation, more or less neatly arranged in more or less prefab patterns, actively structured and consciously unleashed upon a world of onlookers – most of them being just as active – or simply upon ourselves. We grasp, take together, order and observe. We play around with “things,” however information-like, moving them about, amassing them, discarding them. Could we then not fruitfully apply a collector’s point of view on the user of digital media?433 At least one collector himself hints at this possibility, detecting a decline in collecting activities among the young people of today. Yet although they are less attracted to “traditional” collecting, namely of “real,” touchable objects, ‘[m]uch of their collecting [...] has gone into Facebook or the iPod, all the platforms for compiling countless (digital) objects, carefully arranged in categories and containers just like any collection.’ (King 2008, 151) These collections seem as much gathered, arranged, labored on and looked at as one’s average stamp collection. Yet do they also not fundamentally differ from “traditional” collections, in that they are made up of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ objects? And as our technologies and hence culture ‘speed up’ towards simultaneity – the instantaneity of the digitally delivered good – are we not inclined to emphasize the “structural” aspects of any and all ‘gatherings’ of things? In order to try to make sense of these issues we turn – once again slightly experimentally – to several writings on “traditional” collecting. Our approach will thus by necessity be somewhat eclectic, for collecting practices have been studied from various viewpoints: philosophical, psychological, social-economical, and anthropological-historical. First we attempt to delineate collecting as such. Then we investigate its possible meanings by furnishing a concise overview of the theories on the underlying causes of and reasons for “traditional” collecting that have been proposed. Here we already ask how collecting an sich may specifically relate to our “structural”-”historical” pair. Next, we apply these findings to digital media, first and foremost by coupling the aforementioned explanations to digital entities and online activities, and by providing some concrete illustrations. Then we investigate in detail if there is a difference between online or digital “collecting” and “traditional” collecting, all the while once more revisiting the dichotomy between “structural” and “historical.” Collecting, it will turn out, in whatever 381

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form, is a heartfelt attempt at “living the object,” deployed by all of us on, through, and in between these different planes.

16.2 What Is Collecting? That we can indeed employ the collecting concept as leading metaphor is in the first instance and to a certain degree confirmed by its very evasiveness. For defining the collecting process exactly seems impossible. We briefly sketch some central descriptions that have been suggested, and then proceed to outline five crucial characteristics shared by all collecting endeavors. AN UBIQUITOUS EVERYDAY LIFE PRACTICE

We all can, in a common sense way, imagine what collecting is. But digging deeper one discovers a variety that complicates all simple delineation. As many authors have analyzed the phenomenon, so varied are the definitions. We list a couple of them:  ‘the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences’ (Belk 1995, 67);  ‘the selecting, gathering, and keeping of objects of subjective value’ (Muensterberger 1994, 4);  ‘x times (going there + taking + bringing back)’; ‘bringing together and beholding’434 (Sommer 2002, 8). The diversity of these definitions is reflected in the answers to the questions as to what can be collected and who collects. What can be collected? Collected things can be objects but also experiences, for example relating to travels or relationships; some people “collect” sexual partners (Belk 1995, 66). But even scientific and educational disciplines can be said to be in the “business” of collecting, namely the collecting of experience, knowledge, and facts. The student gathers knowledge, Walter Benjamin remarks (1983, 278). In the end we even collect ourselves, Manfred Sommer suggests, not only in the sense of ‘regaining ourselves’ or ‘focusing’ but also ‘in time’ (2002, 124-126). And who collects? According to Susan M. Pearce about one-third of the North 382

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American population collects something (1995, vii). But it seems that many more people in some way or another pursue collecting-like activities. Paul Martin claims that nearly everyone engages in what he calls ‘unconscious collecting,’ i.e., the storing of things in for example Tupperware boxes (1999, 53-54). In a faint sense, everyone is a collector. As William Davies King observes: ‘Experience makes for story, and stories pile up in memory.’ (2008, 161) Such a broad description corresponds, perhaps surprisingly, with Heidegger’s philosophical deployment of the term ‘gathering’ (Sammeln). In his view, all things in fact ‘gather’ the ‘fourfold’ of earth, sky, mortals, and gods (2001b). Sammeln, in this way, equates with the Greek krisis: the bringing of something within its boundaries (Van den Bossche 1995, 107). COLLECTING AS “WAY OF DOING”: SELECTING, ORDERING, LOOKING, ACCUMULATING, CONSTRUCTING

Collecting practices can thus be defined either very specifically – i.e., rigidly – or very generally – i.e., vaguely. For our purposes neither way will be quite constructive. Therefore we attempt to list some formal traits every collection or collector exhibits: actions every collector, however idiosyncratically, engages in. We distinguish between selecting, ordering, looking, accumulating, and constructing. First, selection lies at the heart of collecting (Pearce 1995, 23): not just picking out objects, but also assigning certain values to them and investing them with meaning. This relates to search: finding or trying to find. Thus Walter Benjamin describes collectors as people with a precise tactical instinct (1983, 274; 1999, 64). A collector must indulge in the hunt. At the same time, bringing together one’s collection can also simply imply waiting (Stewart 1993, 166; King 2008, 28). However it may be, selecting an object for collection mostly means lifting it out of the sphere of everyday functionality. According to Jean Baudrillard every object has two potential purposes: being used and being possessed. When an object is detached from its practical function – become subjective, abstract, ‘pure possession’ – it can be included in a collection (2005b, 91-92). Benjamin draws a similar distinction: collected objects belong to the realm of Vollständigkeit, opposed to that of the functional (1983, 271). Second, selecting finds its counterpart in ordering: arranging, organizing, structuring. First of all in space. Russell W. Belk defines a collection as a ‘set of things,’ comparing it to a photo album (1995, 66, 152) in which we intendedly sort 383

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pictures according to a self-produced scheme. Not so much the objects themselves as the relations among them, i.e., the order one imposes on the objects, may then constitute the collection, Susan Stewart observes (1993, 155). Form matters more than content (Pearce 1995, 279). Yet the designated order of a collection may stand in a paradoxical relation to perceived disorder. Benjamin asks: ‘[...] what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?’ (1999, 62) Indeed, an outsider observing a collection could recognize none of the order the collector puts or sees in it. To the “neutral” eye only chaos appears. Above and beyond their spatial organization, collections also have a temporal aspect to them. According to Stewart collections are structured not only through space but through time as well. Chronologically, she says, collectors superimpose personal time over social time, autobiography over history, thereby creating ‘a fiction of the individual life.’ (1993, 155) Third, most collections are to be seen and admired. Naturally the collector him- or herself takes precedence over further possible audiences. ‘[E]very collector has a hungry eye [...]’ (Muensterberger 1994, 235). As just mentioned, collected objects escape the sphere of usefulness. Instead the collector ‘[...] studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate,’ Benjamin explains emphatically (1999, 62). Likewise, Stewart describes the collection as ‘[...] the total aestheticization of use value.’ (1993, 151) According to Sommer, then, the collecting process originates in ‘[...] the desire for the lasting presence of all wonderful things, the seeing of which makes us happy.’435 (2002, 12) Fourth, and tritely put, collectors always want “more.” They gather, and keep. ‘What has been brought together in a collection, must stay put.’436 (Sommer 2002, 213) From there on collections mostly grow continually. ‘One cannot but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed, [...]’ Baudrillard asks (2005b, 99). Yet “growth” can also be qualitative. As Belk observes, some collectors focus rather on ‘upgrading’ their collection than on expanding them (1995, 66). Expanding collectors accumulate literally, updating collectors keep the size of their collection (possibly even consisting of just one piece) constant, replacing and discarding an object when they find a better specimen. Fifth, one last feature summons up the first four, but should be mentioned to complete our sketch. Collecting may appear to some as a witless, mechanical pastime. Yet it entails much more than mere selecting, ordering, looking, and accumulating. ‘[C]ollecting is an act of production as well as consumption.’ (Belk 1995, 55) It is to be regarded as an act of creation, of construction in its own right. 384

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King compares collecting to artistic practice (2008, 126). ‘Collections are not merely owned, they are performed,’ he says (ibid., 43). According to Susan M. Pearce, the collector structures his or her collection by way of metaphors that he or she chooses consciously: for example the idea that things of similar shape or color belong together (1995, 183). Essential to this structuring is the giving of names; it attests to the fact that collecting constructs and not only copies the material world. In sum, and as we have suggested, an exact definition of collecting seems hard to come by. We therefore propose to “define” collecting as a “way of doing” that can be situated and exteriorized in many different contexts, with many different people and objects, and in various forms, but always exhibiting all of the above five traits: selecting, ordering, looking, accumulating, and constructing. This gives us ample room to apply the collecting model to the most diverse digital and online practices, while still preserving enough theoretical relevance to make sense of these practices as “collecting processes.” But before we attempt to do that, we need to inquire into the meaning of collecting.

16.3 Why Do We Collect? Many of the quoted theorists have tried to explain collecting or at least to understand it better. And just as an exact definition of collecting can scarcely be found, we must not expect only one “explanation” for it. In what follows we outline several explicative models, ranging from the psychological over the philosophical and anthropological to the social-economical, that try to unravel the reasons for or motives of collecting. We will immediately find that the furnished reasons dovetail smoothly with our proposed relationship-focused framework, as they can be seen as instantiations of our “love” of the “object,” our involvement with the “structural moment,” and our multiplicitous dealings with the passing of “historical” time, respectively. OBJECTIFIED LOVE

Perhaps not coincidentally, a first strand of explanations of the collecting phenomenon is framed in terms of passion and emotion. For Walter Benjamin for example, collecting is a passion, fraught with memory (1999, 61-62). According to Baudrillard, collected objects lifted out of the sphere of use value enter the 385

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‘passionate abstractness of possession.’ (2005b, 92) Belk avers that collecting is a highly engaging, passionate form of consumption (1995, 66). And also Pearce and Martin describe the collecting process as both emotionally involving and psychically energizing (Pearce 1995, 221; Martin 1999, 46). More specifically, collecting can be said to resemble infatuation and ‘romantic love.’ Werner Muensterberger identifies attachment to one’s collection with the over-evaluation observed among young lovers (1994, 230). Belk: ‘Perhaps the best analogy for this kind of behavior is [...] romantic love.’ (1995, 148) Yet we have observed it many times before: as being in love can bring the greatest happiness, it can also cause the most dreadful pain. ‘[P]assion involves suffering, and collecting is no exception.’ (ibid., 149) Mostly this suffering specifically takes the form of guilt. Feelings of guilt can arise out of the “economic” activity of purchasing – spending money on “non-useful” items purely for individual reasons. But they can just as well originate in the narcissistic urges and pride a collector experiences, as Muensterberg suggests (Muensterberger 1994, 53). Nonetheless, to this kind of “love of the object” there may be a darker side. Some theorists have analyzed the collecting process – mainly relying on psychoanalytical concepts – as a turning away from human relationships. Baudrillard (2005b, 91-114) for one links collecting to sexuality. He sees collecting as a regression, as a fleeing back beyond genital sexuality. “Real,” human relationships are threatening. Collected objects on the contrary harbor a safe, conflict-free haven, because they are sexless. Yet although collecting is a regressive, infantile act, it at least prevents one from further regression into total delusion (ibid., 114). Muensterberger (1994) develops an analogous but distinct line of thought. According to him, the urge to collect originates in a – mostly unconscious – memory of a loss, deprivation or vulnerability, and a consequential desire for substitution. Collected objects fulfill the same purpose as ‘transitional objects’437 for young children. A blanket or a toy for example substitutes for the mother object and thus compensates for its absence, ‘[...] evidently aiding the illusion not only of being protected but also, quite literally, in touch.’ (ibid., 253) As such, the collector collects substitutes for the primary mother object (ibid., 44). But more than with Baudrillard, this practice definitely has an upside: as a coping mechanism, an effort to re-stabilize the ego, and a means of countering loss, collecting is ‘[...] by no means an unhealthy ego defense.’ (ibid., 252) Still, collections can also substitute for humans in a fully “positive” way, it seems, namely when one “makes” human beings out of them. We 386

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anthropomorphize objects, ‘[...] so that a person-thing relationship becomes a person-person relationship.’ (Belk 1995, 76) King puts it poetically: ‘Possessing a new object feels like learning something or meeting someone, and there is happiness in that.’ (2008, 42) Sometimes collectors even have the feeling they are “rescuing” the items they acquire (Benjamin 1999, 65-66). All in all, the sentiment of love for the collected object may be genuine, but – as all love, to a certain extent – partly misguided. A GRASPING OF THE MOMENT

Collecting has thus, in essence, something to do with “love.” But as several approaches by theorists in various disciplines suggest, it is also concerned with the salvaging of something that “stays,” something enduring; a fight against vanishment, decay, and change. Hence, rephrased in the terms of this work: an attempt at preserving and guarding “structure.” According to Benjamin, what propels a collector to go find and seize new objects every time is the deep desire ‘[t]o renew the old world [...]’ (1999, 63). That attempt can become far-reaching and devout; it may start dominating the whole worldview of the concerned person. In fact, Paul Martin suggests that the collector’s creation can ‘[...] in its extremity become a reality.’ (1999, 35) But there is more. A good many of theorists point out how collecting practices verge on the magical and sacred. William Davies King, for one, considers the collector a throwback to times when objects were seen as animated (2008, 32). Martin notes how ‘[t]he collection is the realization of dream-time.’ (1999, 19) Benjamin similarly remarks that the collector experiences ‘a piece of dream life,’ where everything flows and all perception concerns us (1983, 272). From a more historical viewpoint, Belk detects a gradual evolution of the form of ‘the sacred’ in Western society: ‘[...] from religion to non-commercial objects of art and nature to commercial branded objects [...]’ (1995, 21). He claims that we cannot understand the meaning of our possessions as long as we do not try to capture their magic. In fact, he avers, the term ‘true collector’ is the secular equivalent of ‘true believer.’ Stewart, also, observes the work of the consumer to be ‘a labor of total magic.’ (1993, 164) Susan M. Pearce (1995) investigates the relation between collected objects and magic a little deeper. Collecting goes way back, in fact, to the hoards and graves of our ancestors. Objects have always had a sacred power, constituting a bond between our world and the realm of the dead or the gods. Purchasing or acquiring 387

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an item retains the magic that objects used to contain in former times. Likewise, Benjamin sketches the collecting process as an attempt to fix objects inside a Bannkreis, a magic circle; the collection becomes a ‘magical encyclopedia’ and the collector a sort of fortuneteller or Schicksaldeuter, who, when looking at his objects, appears to gaze through them, into their distance (1983, 274-275; 1991, 389; 1999, 62). Interestingly, not only does collecting hinge on a sort of involvement with the magical, mythical “structural moment,” we can also say that it roots in our human “nature,” thus connecting it immediately to the philosophical-anthropological reflection that we developed in Chapter 6. As said, Pearce traces back collecting to its ancient origins. Yet not only did we keep our magical relation with objects alive; we – in her account, Europeans438 – also have a history that has made us especially attentive to the material world, furnishing us with a ‘mindset materially attuned.’ According to Pearce this originates in the oath-ordeal-distinction so crucial to our ancestors, that led us in turn to strong notions of individualism and individual rights, a sharp dichotomy between man and outward things, the perceiving of objects in emotional and sacred terms, and at last the concepts of romantic love and the free choice of marital partners, all pushing us to a life concentrated on the acquisition of material objects. For material objects are seen to be having a transforming power: they bring about profit, prestige, social authority, emotional power, knowledge, and, as mentioned, they establish a bridge between this and ‘the other’ world. Thus, we have always lived close to our objects, in more than one sense – the roots of our materialist attitude do not simply reside in capitalist consumerism, rather, consumer society accentuates our relation with objects instead of causing it, as Martin suggests (1999, 48). We have always tried to understand our world through material substance, as the workings of science and industry demonstrate. Every collection, too, follows that tradition of looking at our social and material surroundings with a calculating eye, and so (re)asserting ourselves. What is more, Pearce’s study shows that collecting attitudes elude the boundaries of class and gender: in the world of collecting, we all react to objects in the same way – though each with an idiosyncratic twist. It appears that we collect as a way of life: collections are not in us, we are in them, as also Benjamin remarks (1999, 69)439. We live with, in, and by them. Moreover, and finally, the ‘extending’ so typical for our human-technology relationships on the “structural” level finds a pendant in collecting too. According 388

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to Russell W. Belk our possessions, and specifically our collections, can be looked upon as parts of an ‘extended self’ (1988; 1995). What is more, we genuinely experience them as part and parcel of our selves. How strong this attachment can be we abruptly notice when we fall victim to a fire or theft. Collected objects furnish us with the possibility of enlarging our sense of self, but in a constructive way: ‘[...] unlike arms and legs, the choice and assembly of objects to form a collection is ostensibly a self-expressive creative act that tells us something about the collector.’ (Belk 1995, 89) Collections say things about us we would not dare to say aloud. And, importantly and consequently, the desire to complete a collection matches the wish to complete oneself. A DEALING WITH CHANGE

Yet collecting does not only stand for an attempt to grasp “structure,” it amounts to an engagement with changing circumstances and multiplicity just as much. As Philipp Blom remarks, collecting is ‘[…] a philosophical project, [...] an attempt to make sense of the multiplicity and chaos of the world […]’ (2004, 45). This means that it comes down, essentially, to a grappling with the dynamics between past and future. First of all, our collections help us to remember; they are a ‘memory standing outside the self’ (Stewart 1993, 133). According to Benjamin collecting is a form of practical remembrance (1983, 271). Not only does a collector recall the context of the acquisition of an object, he says, his “memory” includes the details surrounding the item as well: former ownership, place of origin, category, ... All this “past” comes together in the collector’s collection. Pearce sees a collection as a product of an individual life and as a means to structure that life. Moreover, collections, or more specifically acquisitions, can serve as rites of passage (1995, 235-236). Remembrance, when cultivated, can take the form of nostalgia. Souvenirs can establish contact with a past time, ‘[...] and at the social as well as the philosophical level this is of great significance to modern people for whom a feeling of rootlessness becomes increasingly oppressive [...]’ (Pearce 1995, 244). Paul Martin agrees, mentioning nostalgia as a defense mechanism against the growing insecurity of a market-ruled, “spectacle-driven” society that gains speed everyday (1999, 96). By contrast, collecting can also help to establish a future. By force of its creative character, it can open up unforeseen possibilities: ‘Collecting, it appears, is not just a time one can pass through, it is also, in itself, a pass which time can open out.’ 389

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(Pearce 1995, 239) Through collecting one can discover, decide, and change course. On a more metaphysical plane, collecting can be seen as an “opening up” of the future. Stewart, unlike Pearce, opposes the collected object to the souvenir. Whereas the souvenir is an attempt to revive the past, of focusing on the past, the collection is all about forgetting, and putting the past in the service of the collection. Comparing the collection to Noah’s Ark, she says: ‘The world of the ark is a world not of nostalgia but of anticipation.’ (1993, 152) For Benjamin, likewise, the acquiring of a book by a book collector constitutes the rebirth of that book. It brings about, as suggested, a renewal of the world (1999, 63). All of these efforts, crucially, have a narrative aspect to them. Paul Martin stresses the story-telling capacity of objects and collected items (1999, 2). Mieke Bal identifies collecting with a story, ‘[...] and everyone needs to tell it.’ (1994, 103) Pearce explains how collections are ‘[...] essentially a narrative of experience [...]’ (1995, 412). And King once again puts it succinctly when he says: ‘To collect is to write a life.’ (2008, 38) That means collecting contains an aspect of fabricating and fantasizing too. As Stewart notes, the narrative is not about the object but about the owner. ‘[T]he economy of collecting is a fantastic one [...]’ (1993, 158). Through our collections we not only remember what really happened, we also experience, “relive” what could have happened but has not. BALANCING STASIS AND CHANGE

In short, depending on what aspects of collecting one stresses – either its “structural” or “historical” side – one gets a slightly different picture. But clearly all collecting endeavors in some way or another and to a certain extent harbor, at their core, a struggle with the tension between stasis and change. According to Baudrillard, objects give us the possibility of “controlling” time, i.e., denying it in a sense. ‘[T]he organization of the collection itself replaces time.’ (2005b, 102) More precisely: by collecting we try to counter the irreversibility of time. The endless ‘series’ of the collection, and the fact that it is never finished, creates cyclical time and so replaces the irreversible time that rushes from birth to death. ‘[I]f the function of dreams is to ensure the continuity of sleep, that of objects [...] is to ensure the continuity of life.’ (ibid., 105) In more practical and everyday terms, this may simply mean that a collection lives on even after its collector has died. Thus it can just as well be a sort of “insurance” against dying – “I will survive in the form of...” – or at least a way of coming to terms with one’s own death (Pearce 1995, 248-250). But in any case it amounts to a safeguarding of 390

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“structure” against the likes of “history.” Still another perspective is possible. From a social-economical viewpoint collecting can be analyzed as an act of subversion, not unlike Feenberg’s ‘subversive rationalization’: an attempt to reject the world of accepted material values (Pearce 1995, 188-189). In a world filled with commodities that constantly pushes us to go through the cycle of first consuming and then discarding, a “conservative” effort like collecting can help to make a statement. Paul Martin (1999) specifically examines collecting as a ‘societal coping mechanism,’ as a search for security and identity in an increasingly fluid, changing and vaguely defined society. Martin traces the upsurge of recent – end of the 1990s – popular collecting back to the growing instability of labor-related and social contexts during the last decades of the twentieth century. Russell W. Belk, by contrast, places the practice of collecting straight in the middle of consumerist society. Not only did collecting come to full fruition together with industrialist, modern capitalist society, ‘[...] collecting is the essence of materialism.’ (1995, viii) It not just copies the characteristics of consumerism, it radicalizes them too. ‘[C]ollecting is consumption writ large.’ (ibid., 1) That is not to say that it represents a dumb acquiescence of capitalism. ‘The heroic collector is also engaged in a struggle against conspicuous waste.’ (ibid., 150) Thus: as much as collectors rebel, they also imitate and even “practice” market-related skills. All of these may not just be, as they would appear at first sight, attempts to emphasize “structure” to the disadvantage of “history.” On the contrary, they may constitute little acts of rebellion against the tendency toward “structure” hidden beneath the surface of contemporary ideological constellations; a project of consciously engaging with “historical” multiplicity. We will return to this issue further on. First, however, we need to investigate more closely how digital media of today can be understood from the perspective of the collecting paradigm that we have now sketched.

16.4 From Hardware to Software: “Digital Collecting” We have analyzed collecting as a way of dealing with the object. But the “world of objects” nowadays appears to have become much richer; it now also includes masses and masses of virtual or digital entities, “things” that are, as we saw in Chapters 8, 9, and 13, medial nodes just as much. Do our digital or online 391

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activities resemble the collector’s “way of doing”? To demonstrate that they do, we first discuss the five aforementioned characteristics in relation to digital media generally. Then we briefly list by way of illustration a few of the main categories of online activity, linking the same traits to each again but more specifically and concisely. We will consequently notice that most online “collections” vary on an axis of knowingness with which the user indulges in a “collecting” practice. Finally then, we attempt to apply the explanations of the meaning of collecting delineated above to our involvement with digital media, finding that they fit in quite well with analyses of digital practices furnished by current research. ONLINE/DIGITAL PRACTICES AS FORMS OF COLLECTING

Many “things” we use, work with, play with, and handle today, are immaterial. McLuhan already sees, as we have mentioned, in the 1960s, the era of ‘electric technology’ to be characterized by a move from ‘hardware’ to ‘software.’ As Marchessault comments: ‘McLuhan sought to ‘probe’ the dematerialization of culture that defines the electric period […]’ (2005, 72). Is it the ‘speed-up’ of technologies (and technological development) that brings forth the shift from matter to information? Or does that shift conversely make for the ‘speed-up’? However it may be, we now constantly deal, in our digital practices, with immaterial goods, traveling at the speed of light. These activities on closer inspection appear to stunningly resemble collecting practices. Broadly speaking most if not all of our digital doings consist of selecting: “locating” and “clicking.” Mostly, as in “traditional” collecting, some kind of search – e.g., a Google search or skimming a web page – precedes this selection. Likewise, the “search” can take the form of “waiting,” although waiting times during Internet use are nowadays reduced to a minimum thanks to high-speed connections – exactly, due to ‘speed-up.’ The wait now appears to be more for other people to react (answer a mail, post a comment, ...), or for appropriate situations to arise (the putting online of certain content) – much, actually, like in “traditional” collecting. And, surely, often these “quests” and expectancies do serve a non-functional goal (obviously with the exception of strictly business-related communication or activities). Also organizing and ordering can be detected everywhere in our online “worlds.” Contact lists, personal profiles, mailboxes, … are just as much constructed through time and space as classic collections – although “space” is a complex concept with regard to digital realities (just as it appeared to be in relation 392

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to the “home” notion); we will return to this issue in the following section. Yet we necessarily find ourselves in “places” as soon as we start “browsing,” looking for something – we know where to look – or sending something to someone. Online structures (e.g., Facebook profiles) are of course partly self-designed, partly imposed “from above.” But so are photo albums, ready-made stamp albums, cupboards and jars, in which still sufficient freedom for individual expression reigns. Then, looking. Obviously much online material “attracts the eye.” We have come a long way since the purely textual interfaces of the first personal computers. More than ever, not only equipment is “made to impress,” software and websites too are designed accordingly. “We,” the users, ourselves have a hand in that as well. Deliberately though often unconsciously we filter the “material” we put online – e.g., on our personal profiles – according to aesthetic principles, showing only what we want to show. Online life is, literally, in the eye of the beholder. In a very general sense then, accumulating seems a very crucial dynamic in digital media. The Web, for instance, in an almost trivial-quantitative way, grows bigger every second. But also our online profiles, photo collections, and mailboxes never quite reach a finishing point. Yet at the same time we substitute – i.e., overwrite – much information too: we change profile pictures, erase MP3s to replace them with others, or delete mails to keep our inboxes relevant. Thus we not only expand but also upgrade. (Also, every piece of hard- or software calls for an update now and then.) Finally, that construction is part and parcel of our online activities sounds like a trite suggestion. So much has the Internet been hailed as an emancipating tool, turning passive consumers into active producers, as for example ‘user-generated content’ exemplifies. Our online lives consist of countless creative, constructive activities, even if those activities limit themselves to the choosing, picking, and “posting” of other people’s creations (e.g., posting YouTube videos on Facebook profiles) – exactly as collectors often do. Thus, digital practices clearly exhibit, broadly seen, the five characteristics typical for collecting.440 So far the general outlook. In order to make our argument somewhat more specific, we now list several classes of online activities and point out how our five collecting traits apply to them. A FEW ILLUSTRATIONS

First and foremost: social media. The use of Social Networking Sites (SNS) has 393

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risen dramatically during the last couple of years.441 SNS profiles can very well be depicted as interactive collections. Users bring together all sorts of data – personal information, affiliations, pictures and video, links to favorite movies, music, and books – and structure these in a more or less prefab spatial pattern, i.e., the layout of the profile (which some sites grant more room to modify than others). In time they thereby also constitute, one could say, ‘a fiction of the individual life’ (Stewart 1993, 155), as research on digital identities has suggested. Obviously, profiles are meant and made to be watched, by ourselves and our ‘friends,’ but even by complete strangers, depending on privacy settings. ‘Friends’ or contacts, then, also get ordered and organized in categories, by alphabet, by importance – and they just as well wind up in the accumulating dynamic that characterizes SNS profiles: a profile is never “finished”; not even the amount of contacts ever stays constant. In sum, SNS can be characterized as collective, constructive collecting efforts, displaying all of the above traits. Then, online storage services. Although many online music and image services are conceived as SNS – such as Last.fm and Flickr – they deserve a special mention, because they resemble “traditional” collections quite directly. Photo sites like Picasaweb and Photobucket, video sites like YouTube, peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent, or web hosting companies such as RapidShare very much take the place that was once monolithically occupied by photo albums and record and VHS collections, but now with greater transferability and shareability. Although some of these sites do not offer the communication and profiling capacities of SNS, by and far the same observations hold here. Yet more than with SNS – mostly centered on personal profiles – these services tend to constitute “worldwide” data collections, growing exorbitantly every minute due to the possibility of adding ‘user-generated content.’ What about blogging? Although, here too, blogging and microblogging (e.g., Twitter) are components or even crucial aspects of many SNS, we must mention them apart. For blogging and maintaining a website are akin to collecting in the broad sense that writing in general and diary writing specifically have always been forms of collecting. Walter Benjamin for instance remarks that the foremost way of acquiring books is to write them oneself (1999, 63). Conversely, as we saw, William Davies King avers that ‘[t]o collect is to write a life.’ (2008, 38) Next, although we might not always consciously perceive it, mailboxes make for full-blown databases of our communicative and social lives. They often offer a retrospective archive of what one has said and done at this or that time, to a 394

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greater or lesser degree ordered (folder tree structures, filters, rules, et cetera), but always easily searchable and manageable. Thus they constitute a collection mostly without the user or mailer deliberately striving for it. This is an important observation to which we return immediately. Also, however less obvious as “collecting” practice, virtual worlds – such as MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) – do fit the scheme we have outlined: one can select and sculpture one’s personage, structure and organize a private space, expand one’s boundaries – literally and figuratively – and store all these parameters into the database of the website proprietor. In so far as it is possible to collect experiences, the severely controllable environments of online worlds surely count as collections of ‘second lives.’ And as Paul Martin reminded us, such a construction can ‘[...] in its extremity become a reality.’ (1999, 35) Even more elusive online practices exhibit collecting-like aspects. The individual user practice of bookmarking – browser “favorites,” for example – does not ask for much elaboration. But lately online variants of bookmarking have surfaced that fully employ the sharing power of Social Networking: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, … These websites make it possible to rate, vote for, categorize, or comment on (the content of) other sites. They are based on the concept of ‘crowdsourcing’ – the outsourcing of a task to a large group of people, usually through the Internet, thus gathering a lot of small efforts to make for a big result. In a general way these sorts of information-assembling applications stand for a more “human” approach to Web search that takes into account content and meaning of information. Search engines such as Google, by contrast, have been performing searches up until now based purely on formal rules, “automatically,” i.e., by way of search bots that crawl the Internet, however also to literally collect, select, and then arrange data according to a ranking algorithm. We return to this in the paragraph about the ‘Semantic Web.’ What is interesting is that these more or less automatic, more or less conscious mechanisms lead up to, again, a “worldwide” collection of collections, generated and called upon in an instant. E-commerce, then – be it firsthand or secondhand – establishes a form of online “collecting” just as well. Obviously each store, hardware or software, can be seen as an accumulation of goods; but that does not necessarily make it a collection. What brings e-stores nearer to collections are the interactive techniques they employ to exploit customers’ online actions and behavior, in order to enrich their visible content and commercial strategy. Take for example the purchase advice offered by Amazon.com: ‘More Items to Consider,’ ‘Related to Items 395

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You’ve Viewed,’ ‘Inspired by Your Browsing History,’ all based on the items one has looked at; ‘Customers Who Viewed This Item also Looked at,’ ‘Customers with Similar Searches Purchased,’ based on other people’s actions. What is more, customers get the opportunity to deliberately rate products or write reviews about them. A store thereby becomes more than simply a store, namely, a publicly – willingly or not – organized arsenal of information and offerings. Here we must again call into mind Baudrillard’s and Benjamin’s conviction that the collected object escapes the purely functional sphere: user input – though it can, as we will shortly see, be criticized as a commercial abuse of free consumer labor – links up countless “lived experiences” with commodities, personalizing and decommodifying the latter in a sense. The emerging developments around the ‘Semantic Web,’ finally, take this sort of collecting paradigm a step further. Semantic Web applications not only store and transfer information but also endeavor to specify its meaning, i.e., semantics. Such applications would be in a way “self-understanding,” and this should enable hardware and software agents to better handle Web content. The structural manipulation of information in accordance with its meaning, formerly left mainly to human users in the case of bookmarking or e-shopping, would thus be dealt with by intelligent, “interpreting” algorithms. They would combine the high efficiency of automatization, exemplified by search bots, with meaningful data handling and structuring. The “collecting” process thereby becomes largely unconscious to the Web user. Which immediately brings us to the next point. As we have seen, online practices exhibit to a fairly great extent each of the five aforesaid traits of collecting. But additionally we have detected an axis or spectrum on which these practices can be situated: the relative knowingness with which users “collect,” that is, consciously select, order, look or make available for looking, accumulate, and construct. Sometimes the computer code just takes over these tasks. Thus, from SNS as highly personally structured “collections” to the Semantic Web as a “self-collecting” digital organism, the degree in which we consciously and willingly “collect” varies. The ‘speed-up’ that McLuhan analyzes, thus, may also make for the fact that our “collections” are more and more “out of our hands.” And indeed, it is probably no coincidence that he sees electric technology developing towards a ‘collective consciousness,’ placed outside the bounds of the biological organism. Such an idea of a “collective collection” is very much in line with Clark’s suggestion that the world acts as ‘external memory’ (2008, 104) and with de Kerckhove’s depiction of the TV as ‘[…] a kind of active collective memory […]’ 396

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and the computer as a collective mind (1997b, 52-53).442 Perhaps it may be so that as we ‘extend’ ourselves more and more, even our dealings with “the object” are ‘extended’ just as much? EXPLANATIONS OF COLLECTING PRACTICES VS. THE STUDY OF TECHNOLOGY

However that may be, perhaps the existential significance of the collecting practice – whether mainly digitally or physically centered – may still be expected to stay the same. In the previous section we discussed the main explanations for collecting practices that theorists have furnished. In what follows, at last, we focus on the implications that these could entail for the comprehension of online practices, by briefly pointing out some analogies between these explanations and existing research on ICT and technology, of which much has been mentioned before. In how far do these motivations of and reasons for collecting behavior resemble analyses already supplied in the general domain of the study of technology, and where do lacunae appear? There seems to be much concurrence between the two; yet the collecting paradigm may give us the opportunity to broach the subject in a more comprehensive manner. We shortly elaborate on the aforementioned explanations in the same order as before. First, collecting as a sort of love or loving. We certainly invest our digital lives with intense emotion too. Browsing SNS profiles for example can be a passionate, highly involving activity. Donald Norman, for one, has made a plea for considering emotion an important – if not the most important – factor in the use of technologies and, by consequence, in technological design (2004). Can passion, love, and infatuation shed light on our online behavior, and how? Here a whole field for further research seems to lie open – which the current work seeks to begin filling. Just as much, online “collections” may substitute for humans, either negatively or positively. There has been some concern that online video games, virtual worlds, and even SNS make people turn away from “real” social contact, especially in the case of so-called “problematic computer use” or the already mentioned ‘Internet Addiction’ (Block 2008). However, these online “places” have also been said to possess their very own social potentialities and to offer safe havens for interactions that would otherwise be nearly impossible, just as collections could harbor us from the conflict-ridden complexity of sociality (Turkle 1995; Schroeder and Axelsson 2006). And in relation to anthropomorphization of online “collections” we can refer again to research on the ‘media equation,’ that holds that 397

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people treat computers as social actors (Reeves and Nass 1996; Nass, Steuer, and Tauber 1994). Don Ihde at last, as we have seen, in investigating humantechnology relations, has suggested that in ‘alterity relations’ we interact with technology as if it was an ‘other’ (1990, 97-108). Second, collecting as the safeguarding of the “structural moment.” Are we, first and foremost with regard to magic, enchanted about our digital objects too? Hard to demonstrate practically, but as we have seen oftentimes, McLuhan claims ‘electric technology’ to be a return to the conditions of the ancient or primitive tribe: simultaneity, instantaneity, involvement, auditory-tactile ways of interacting. ‘The young today live mythically and in depth.’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 100) Surely instant contact through our mails, SMSes, and online profiles retains much of the mythical flavor of magic wands, totems, and sorcery; and as we search through Google’s pages, we cannot but be stunned by this ‘magical encyclopedia’ (Benjamin) that delivers us all we ask for in just the blink of an eye. It would be interesting to fully expand this theme of “electronic magic” into the general study of myth, archetype, and sacredness. And does our ‘materially attuned mindset’ also explain our digital “collecting,” notwithstanding the immaterial character of the latter? Contrarily, as we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, within information science, there has been research relating to the “thingness” of digital entities, for instance on the general character of digital objects (Ekbia 2009) or on identifying them (Allison et al. 2005). Provocatively, Philip Zhai (1998) even claims the virtual to be as real as “reality,” with no ontological difference between the two. The statute of the “digital thing,” undoubtedly, will keep on instigating future research. The explanatory strand of collecting as ‘extended self,’ then, has already received enough attention in what came before. Do we regard our online “collections” as parts of ourselves? Do they extend our selves? As we saw in Chapter 6, from Ernst Kapp’s Grundlinien (1978), over McLuhan’s concern with media as narcotic enhancements, to recent work on embodied cognition and distributed intelligence (Hayles 1999; Clark 1997, 2003), all define technologies in one way or another as extensions of human body parts, capacities, or senses. These theories however do not detailedly work out the extension idea with regard to “self,” and they do not examine online activities, or only marginally. Sherry Turkle, by contrast, analyzes computers and computer-related practices (such as participating in MUDs and chatting) as full parts of our social and psychological lives, and online identities as ‘second selves’ (1995, 2005) – yet without employing 398

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the concept of extension. The collecting paradigm could furnish us with an overall framework to combine extension theories with the study of digital identities. Third, and finally, collecting as a dealing with “history” and change. Are not online practices as diverse as the bookmarking of our daily occupations on Social Networking Sites, the preservation of ancient manuscripts by scanning them into computers, or the massive Google digital library project all attempting at, or resulting in the exteriorizing of our memories? In fact, applied scientific research has more than once proposed technological remembrance as a main goal for ICT development. From Vannevar Bush’s ‘Memex’ (1945) to David Gelernter’s ‘Mirror Worlds’ (1991) to Gordon Bell’s ‘MyLifeBits’ (Bell and Gemmell 2007), several authors have outlined an ideal of technological remembering. Recently, however, there has been a growing debate over the degree to which “eternal” remembrance should be cherished as a virtue (Bell and Gemmell 2009) or a vice (MayerSchönberger 2009) of digital technologies. The philosophical implications of these issues have only begun to be investigated.443 And just as we try to manage (and preserve) the past through digital “collections,” do we not also attempt to ascertain the future? As digitalization projects proliferate we try to tackle destruction, erosion, and neglect – for information to be preserved for future generations. On an individual level, ‘digital immortality’ is no utopian ambition. Already, SNS profiles “outlive” their owners; sometimes relatives of the deceased will keep on posting messages to the profile to keep the memory of their loved ones alive, or to help themselves in their mourning process (North 2007). Web services such as www.legacy.com, www.forevernetwork.com, or www.famento.com offer the possibility of storing and sharing ‘life stories’ and other data, thereby creating a digital memory of oneself or someone else, that would live on even after the person concerned has died. Bell and Gemmell foresee – with the help of artificial intelligence – the development of digital avatars that minutely simulate, for instance, one’s speech patterns; reversely, one could imagine talking to an avatar of one’s greatgrandfather (2009, 151ff.). On the whole, however, these are quite recent phenomena, and they should be more thoroughly studied.444 They nevertheless seamlessly link up to the narrative approach. Collectors tell a story through their collections. Does this also account for digital “collections”? Narrative theory has been applied to communication per se (Fisher 1987). But also some of the “ways of doing” we observed to be far exceeding communication alone, have lately been connected to narrative concepts, e.g., virtual reality (M.-L. 399

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Ryan 2001; Balet, Subsol, and Torguet 2003). It goes to show that what counts here as “narrative” not only consists of textual information but also and even more so of visual expression and interaction. Finally, then, does online activity exhibit the same curious mix of antihierarchical and “co-hierarchical,” i.e., consuming behavior as collecting practices? It certainly seems so: digital technologies furnish us with utilities to undermine capitalist hierarchy and consumerist society, but at the same time commercial enterprises and market economy logic still dominate them. On the one hand, what Paul Levinson calls ‘new new media’ (2009), i.e., many-to-many media – blogs, video sites, SNS – provide minority groups with the possibility of voicing their demands or disagreement, sometimes by simply constructing a Facebook page. On the other hand, digital media still thrive on commerce, sometimes without users even noticing it. Take eBay: at face value an empowering tool that brings commerce, in the form of ancient barter, back “to the people,” but behind the scenes a company that makes profit out of the free labor done by its millions of users (showing their products, answering questions, packaging and sending, ...) (Lillie 2006). In sum, many convergences are to be found between explanations of “traditional” collecting and of online or digital “collecting.” Yet, exactly the collecting metaphor may deliver us the means with which to judge whether a certain change has not occurred or is occurring with the onset of the mainstream use of digital media.

16.5 Digital vs. Traditional Collecting: The Effects of ‘Speed-Up’ Let us briefly recapitulate. We listed some explanations and motivations for “traditional” collecting. We then found that we could constructively apply these to online “collecting.” Nevertheless, one thing seems to stand in the way of an all-too easy analogy. In “traditional” collecting we gather material things – things that can be touched – whereas in the digital realm, born out of ‘speed-up,’ objects stay, by necessity, “virtual.” In this section we elaborate briefly on three issues related to the materiality, or immateriality of collected objects: can one really collect “untouchable,” i.e., virtual goods? What is then left of the “hunt,” once so crucial to “traditional” collecting? And at last, in how far does this immateriality touch on the social aspect of online “collecting”? 400

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CAN ONE COLLECT “UNTOUCHABLE” GOODS?

All “traditionally” collected things – coins, stamps, statuettes, books, … – seem to have at least one feature in common: they can be touched and handled; they take up “real” space; they are solid. This “touchability” undoubtedly plays a significant role in much collecting. Manfred Sommer describes the collecting practice as ‘[...] move by foot, grasp by hands.’445 (2002, 209) Moreover, the feeling, caressing, fumbling, arranging of one’s collected items can provide for great pleasure. Also the touching of objects may elicit or contribute to the magical powers expected from them (Stewart 1993, 139). According to Paul Martin, recent popular collecting could be partly a reaction to the digital revolution. ‘The never-never land of cyberspace provides a digital alternative environment for the individual while collecting offers a tactile one.’ (1999, 32) Whereas the digital lets us play with different identities, collecting is a means to re-conquer a lost identity, or one of the past, he says. While the information age demands us to renew our identities all the time, thereby unrooting us, objects are. They give us shelter in the safety of the past. Collecting, thus, forms a way of speaking of ourselves in the third person, according to Martin. Yet there are reasons, first, not to regard “touchability” as an essential characteristic of collecting and, second, not to analyze digital technology as the archenemy of fixed or past identities. First, even in “traditional” collecting touching the object doesn’t need to be a priority. A record collection, for example, obviously takes up space, and consists of specific objects – particular pressings, special or first releases, signed sleeves, ... But although its collector may not buy the albums mainly to listen to them, the music itself surely accounts for much of the attraction. Quite the same goes for collections of, for instance, figurines or plates, that are not so much meant to be touched as to be seen. Here another quality than tactility takes the fore. Moreover, a status of “untouchability” can just as well suggest magical forces at play. Why would an untouchable collection be less “real”? And in any case a “medial node” can incorporate material as well as immaterial things. Second, counterposing digital technology to tactile objects, with the first enhancing multiple identities and the latter keeping us grounded in a stable context, seems to be less and less reasonable these days. Disregarding identity theft and abuse, “Web 2.0” – the Web of social networking, blogging, and usergenerated content – invites us more and more to “reveal ourselves,” to show 401

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ourselves “as we are,” and to maybe take on multiple identities but in a way not remarkably different from what we do in “real” social life, where we are also never “one” person. The anonymity of early mainstream Internet has largely given way to a desire of defining ourselves completely. Notwithstanding these qualifications, however, it goes to show that the general phenomenon of ‘speed-up’ has made for a form of collecting that appears to differ qualitatively from our “traditional” dealings with physical objects. WHAT IS LEFT OF THE “HUNT” IN DIGITAL “COLLECTING”?

Another issue, closely related to the previous one, touches on a component of collecting Walter Benjamin enthusiastically describes: the hunt. The ‘thrill of the hunt’ can make collecting worthwhile, and it adds to a sense of success and accomplishment (Belk 1995, 92-93). The hunt in a sense relates to magic too: ‘Finding something feels like a miracle, confirmation that the world is providential.’ (King 2008, 112) Susan M. Pearce (1995), again, keys out the historical roots of our hunting instinct. According to her the hunt of the collector originates in the oath-ordeal scheme forming the base of our worldview, with ordeal – the challenge to be faced and overcome – eventually taking the shape of quest, of hunt. Hunting has an essentially spatial aspect to it. Yet how do we go about moving digitally? In virtual world Second Life, an avatar (the user’s visual representation) can move “by foot,” or by transportation means such as cars or helicopters, but it can also simply be “teleported” to wherever in the online world. If we “collect” online, surely the hunt must be much less thrilling. Then again, maybe our ordeals have been displaced to the level of “profiling.” Not only profiling ourselves – in the case of “exhibiting” ourselves on social networking sites – but also, and maybe more, the profiling, scanning, and testing of information: “is this real,” “do I need to know anything more about it,” “do I have the right version,” “will this work”? The installing of software, or the arranging of a web page for example can challenge us, trivially but noticeably, too. Perhaps the immense amount of FAQ pages, forums, and support sites on the Web testifies to a new, postmodern sort of hunt: the quest to “get this thing working.” Certainly we still have a lot of work to do to get our online “collections” going. Moreover, we should keep in mind that troubles, difficulties, obstacles, and barriers have a meaning of their own: they must be battled, crossed, defeated. Nonetheless, does there not seem to reign at least an expectation of immediacy? 402

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Intensive use of digital media may accustom us to instant speeds, and make us expect in the end nothing less from other domains of life. Again here, ‘speed-up’ may lead to an overall stressing of the “structural moment.” COLLECTING TOGETHER, COLLECTING EACH OTHER

The third and last point then. Collecting has “immaterialized.” Yet how does this affect the collector’s relation with “the others”? Collecting used to be largely a solitary activity. Belk characterizes collecting as mostly an individual enterprise; it is a socially sanctioned form of ‘selfish indulgence’ (1995, 72). Pearce describes the collected object as a gift from the collector to him- or herself (1995, 369). Collecting has something undoubtedly individualistic about it. Then again, “the others” always surround us. Although we are ‘egocentric,’ others are too, and we are aware of that (Sommer 2002, 187). What is more, as even Baudrillard alleges, collecting can stretch out into “culture” and partly elude the pure relation between collector and collection. The search for a desired item can make a collector reach out to friends, competitors, or strangers for help (2005b, 113). According to Pearce, collectors are not necessarily “loners,” as folk psychologies sometimes depict them. Research has shown that their relationship patterns largely concur with national standards (1995, 226). Some of them visit collectors’ clubs regularly, although they tend to have ambivalent relations with their co-collectors, because of competition (ibid., 231). Nevertheless these communities sharpen collectors’ social capacities. ‘Collectors are, as a rule, remarkably good at connecting or networking,’ King claims (2008, 77). So collectors are never really alone. This surely qualifies online “collecting” too, and even more. “Collecting digitally,” we easily connect with other people, our “co-collectors.” Just as in a club, they help us out during our quests, searches, and tasks, or they provide an audience. Does the Web resemble a giant collectors’ club? The aforementioned ‘crowdsourcing,’ for example, looks a lot like collector’s club activity. A lot of people doing a lot of small jobs – gathering data, tagging images, correcting texts – add up to a body of work, knowledge or information that never could have been assembled by one person, just as the collector’s club’s total expertise exceeds the sum of the individual experiences of the members. Yet have we not crossed a border? The collected object is always something brought in “from outside,” made “ours.” As Pearce puts it: ‘[t]he material available for collection comes to us from the Other, essentially different and distant, but we will turn it into sensible Sameness by interpreting it in the light of understood 403

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parameters.’ (1995, 311) Only, ‘the Other,’ now, might just as well be literally “an other,” namely another person. Through our ‘friends’ list on social networking sites and our contact databases on our mobile phones for example we collect other humans too – not in a bodily or physical sense, obviously, but certainly in a possessive sense: there it is, black on white, “these are my friends,” and by extension, “this is me.” But is this a new, let alone a bad thing? King, once again, observes poetically: ‘We are born wanting to be had and held, born collectible, and with a little luck we never stop being prized possessions.’ (2008, 74) And as we have seen, collecting can resemble infatuation. In love one longs to possess his or her love object, but also to be possessed, to be an object. Even in “real” life, we collect each other. Why would it be any different online? Yet here again we should be wary of an all-too fast leveling of qualities; and be aware of the effects of ‘speed-up.’ Digital media of today – especially SNS – provide us with the possibility to really and exclusively experience human relationships in the “structural moment.” Already Aristotle sees the passing of time as an essential component of friendship. The proverbial ‘quantity of salt’ must be eaten among friends (2004, 206), he says, before the friendship is truly consolidated. With “online friends,” no spoonful and no salt whatsoever are consumed; the friction and conflict-riddenness of physical proximity – which presumes an engaged dealing with distance and change – is totally evaded. We appear to be “with each other” “only now.”446 In sum, we have seen that first, the “untouchability” of digital objects, second, the modification of the “hunt” online, and third, the social dynamics of digital “collecting” do not necessarily stand in the way of applying explanatory models of “traditional” collecting on online practices – but they do perhaps point in the direction of qualitative differences between the two. We thus reach the end of this chapter, and our conclusion.

16.6 Collecting as Way of Coping with the Tensions between Simplicity and Multiplicity We have endeavored to make sense of our dealings with the beloved object on the existential plane. As was to be expected these consist, in essence, and once again – just as was the case with the lover and love components – in a fervent coping with the tensions between the “structural” and the “historical” levels. By way of the 404

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collecting metaphor we have attempted to get this struggle in view. An investigation of the collecting practice and of the differences between “traditional” collecting and online or digital “collecting” has revealed a glimmer of the full scope of convergence and divergence between both. FORMAL CAUSE IN ACTION

With regard to the convergences, “collecting” stands for a way of handling “the object,” either physical or digital. As suggested, and in line with our investigations in Chapters 8 and 12, it may be seen as ‘formal cause’ in action – the sorting of the multiplicitous ‘as-structures’ surrounding us, in everyday life. A way of grasping, but only to a certain extent, the unperceivable objects that forever keep escaping us. In this sense collecting, in whatever guise, is essentially a frustrating business – but exactly this frustration defines it. We cannot “get to” the object – in its elusive core – but to collect is to still attempt it. It is to honor and hail the power of objects – singular or multiple – by recognizing their inexhaustibility. For precisely the collecting process is inexhaustible, and in its inexhaustibility ineffable. From this perspective, physical and digital “collecting” do not substantially differ. In fact it becomes clear that more than being just functional, communicative, or informational means, our digital objects and tools furnish us with ways of building ourselves an identity, remembering our pasts, anticipating our futures, positioning ourselves towards others, and reacting against the establishment – and thus, of doing politics. They provide us with meaningful pastimes, sometimes verging on the magical, as our (Western) worldview presumably has always been centered on things. The collecting paradigm not only offers explanations in line with contemporary technology and media study, but also gives us a comprehensive approach with which to understand online practices as a whole, as “online culture.” If “collecting” is what we do online, then this behavior surpasses mere communication, mere networking, mere functionality. Just as “traditional” collecting, then, online “collecting” establishes a life project. Nevertheless, there may be two ways of “collecting” in the broad, existential sense we have outlined. Here a divergence might be detected. The instantaneous speeds that ‘electric technology’ provides us with, may make for a qualitatively different form of “formal cause in action.” Although digital activities – mailing, surfing, listening, watching, searching, bookmarking, ... – resemble collecting practices “structurally,” since both share the characteristics of selecting, ordering, looking, accumulating, and constructing, and moreover have interchangeable 405

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meanings, they may also harbor a tendency to exactly and paradoxically emphasize that “structure,” and to correspondingly disregard the battle with “history,” i.e., with multiplicity and change. It is here that some of McLuhan’s phrases, like the following, become significant: ‘One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries.’ (M. McLuhan 1970, 24)447 Exactly the gradual shift that we have detected towards the making unconscious, thanks to digital technologies, of “collecting processes” in general, makes this statement, retrospectively, quite accurate. As said, ‘speed-up’ may also mean: no longer or not so much “in our control.” But apart from the privacy issues – which entail and link up to such a wide-ranging discussion that we cannot possibly treat of it within the bounds of this work – the ‘flip’ that is occurring or has occurred may have deep-reaching consequences for everyone of us, existentially. The silhouettes of these issues we can preliminarily sketch by way of a final and brief reflection on what we call the “culture of collecting.” A “COLLECTING CULTURE” STUCK TO THE “ETERNAL NOW”?

For, focusing out, we must ask whether the collecting habit has not spread from physical objects to the digital realm and finally to “culture” in general: do we not live in an age of collecting? Our culture maybe longs to select, order, watch, accumulate? An ongoing “catalogization” and categorizing sprouts an array of compilations, book collections, “Tops 999 of the 90s,” expositions, festivals, not to forget the ever-growing libraries of music, videos and TV series available at stores. Did digital technology, and its attending acceleration, spur this “completionist” drift?448 What is certain, digital technologies gave us great availability of or at least easier access to all sorts of cultural products.449 And as a collector’s career usually starts by noticing the similarity between a couple of objects, stimulating the search for more alike items, we culture consumers perhaps feel the need to complete too, faced with “so much.” McLuhan, in Culture Is Our Business, proposes this to be the one certainty in all things cultural: ‘the more there were, the fewer there are’ (1970, 6). The phrase attests to the observation that all advertising artifacts become, in a later stadium, collector’s items – and of course this relates to the cliché-archetype dynamic too. In an age in which so many things – physical or digital – overwhelm us, the need to gather all of them within our own magical 406

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Bannkreis may become obsessive and monomaniacal. Perhaps we should not indulge blindly into our need to complete? Let loose sometimes, discard. Find ourselves as merely one medial node in a network that can hardly be overseen. We are all living the object – and we are all collectors by design. But we should not necessarily be “structural” collectors by default. ‘Life marches on, while collectors trail behind, carrying a shovel and a sack,’ William Davies King observes (2008, 145). Maybe we should not carry our shovel and sack with us all the time.

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17 Living through the Stasis-Change Dynamic: Learning-as-Dialogue ‘Thinking opens up the time horizon wherever the daily tendency toward objectivization makes relationships and situations freeze in a false timelessness.’ (Safranski 1999, 217) ‘Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.’ (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 142)

This chapter serves to conclude, at once, the current part and this work. We first summarize what came before. Then we attempt to frame in a general way what was treated of more specifically in the previous chapter: how to strike a balance between the outlined components and levels, to cope with the blindness and ambivalence infecting them, and to counteract the disregard for “historical” aspects in favor of an emphasis on “structural” “seeing” – in the assumption that all things are medial nodes? To begin with, we revisit the McLuhanist notion of ‘speed-up.’ Then we propose an approach of conversation-as-learning, that we delineate by way of the work of Richard Rorty and Bateson. In a Rortian vein, then, two illustrative cases are sketched that exemplify several facets of the argument. We close off this chapter, and this work, with some final reflections on the “position” in and from which such a conversation is to take place… and time.

17.1 The Relationship Triad: A Matter of Tempo We have tracked the love of technology throughout the thinnest appearances of common sense, the deepest layers of ontology, the widest planes of politics, and at last, the most elusive projects of everyday living. Trough whimsical cycles of dreaming and waking we have chased the trail of the foci making up the “bond.” It is now finally time to take stock and assess where our travels have brought us. COMPONENTS AND LEVELS: STRIKING A BALANCE – A SUMMARY

Our aim has been to analyze the use of media and technologies from the 409

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perspective of not just our relation to but our relationship with them. To this end we have employed the work of Marshall McLuhan, reading him as a philosopher of media, and at the same time endeavoring to synthesize his approach with that of contemporary philosophers of technology – hence constituting a crucial link, largely missing up to this point, between the media-ecological universe and the realm of PhilTech. Both disciplines have in their own way sought to mitigate the all-too strict dichotomy between technophilia and technophobia. But this tension persists, in theory as well as in practice; in order to break the pattern, we have proposed to frame the issue in terms of a bond that goes beyond mere matters of for instance efficiency or ideology and instead incorporates all of these, by way of the technique of superposition. In the process we have deployed a few guiding heuristics. The corresponding notions of blindness and ambivalence have served us well in building bridges between the two aforementioned domains, that both share a concern with these two phenomena. Whereas the former – blindness – attests to the dream that the use of technology at its best represents, the latter – ambivalence – comes about as an at least temporary waking up from that dream. In the dream, something always disappears from view; that “something” is exactly the ambivalence. And conversely, most “of” the dream must give way to being awake: the turning around of blindness consists in becoming conscious of ambivalence. This we determined preliminarily throughout Part 0. Whereas technological blindness can take the form of either “use” or “context” – each mode characterized by a certain configuration of transparency and opacity – the possible “reasons for love” we have outlined fall into three categories: “control,” “contact,” and our “natural fit” with media – all tainted by a grounding ambivalence. Where exactly the blindness and the ambivalence “take place” appears impossible to pinpoint; they “happen” across all of these planes and foci, and so we were set on our way to scrutinize these further. We subsequently dubbed the use level “structural,” and the context layer “historical.” Both planes are, as said, not so much depictions of how things are but rather representations of attitudes – ways of looking. “Structure” stands for the one “mythical moment” in which all “is as it is”; “history” envelops all of these moments as they morph and slide into one another. And we distinguished between three foci or components of the “bond,” i.e., the lover, the love, and the beloved object. The three components were then scrutinized at both levels (Parts I and II), and at last – in the current part (III) – from the perspective of the 410

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interchange between the two. Eventually, also, notwithstanding the fact that we started out from relatively common sense concepts of “media” and “technologies” – even though we already surmised in our Introduction that the purported boundaries of these notions would soon be transgressed – we discovered, in following the directions handed out by Graham Harman, that media in fact potentially encompass all entities, material as well as immaterial, real as well as imaginary. We so identified the true scope of the relationship triad: “structurally” it describes a pan-medial ontology, “historically” it points at a pan-medial cosmology. All things – with the proviso of our very own situatedness, a stance which we have called “subversive anthropocentrism – are medial nodes that may be seen to exist, interact, and clash on both planes; the former an abstract rendition of a singular state of threecomponent interrelatedness, the latter a concrete image of countless tri-focal structures enveloped in a meta-interaction of sorts. And we have found how in each focus and across the foci, a struggle between one and many, between stasis and change is played out. “Structurally,” we have seen, the lover manifests itself as the “stuff to be extended” – McLuhan’s ‘extension’ being a fundamental aspect of our human condition. “The human” wants to assert itself, compensate for its defects, heighten its powers. Nonetheless “historically,” this singular lover becomes engrossed in multiplex constellations, and here extension takes the form of power imbalances, the ideological workings veiled in the forms that technologies take; this we demonstrated by way of the work of Andrew Feenberg. At the “existential” level, then, the lover is faced with the ardent task of self-definition; we have investigated how the “structural” extension co-determines identity-building projects in the contemporary “historical” setting, and found “self-objectification,” in essence a turning towards “structure,” central to those endeavors. The love, in turn, at the “structural” level manifests itself first and foremost as relation or mediation. This relation can be identified with the subliminal and possibly harmful effects instigated by media and media environments, media in fact being their environments – an idea we drove home by way of an analysis of McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ probe and several key ideas in (post)phenomenology. On the “historical” plane, in the reign of multiplicity, this mediation takes the shape of mediation-of-mediation, the various (global) setups of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ balances making for historical epochs and watersheds as we commonly know them. But in everyday “existential” coping, we have seen, the 411

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tension between the two can be traced to the junctions of familiar and unfamiliar environments, and of fixity and adaptation, which we have tried to make sense of through the notion of “home,” to be interpreted as an undertaking nowadays apparently straining under the pressure of ever shorter renewal cycles. The beloved object, at last, “structurally” eludes us “by nature,” as we showed by way of Harman’s work. An imperceptible substantive ‘core’ works its way across a ‘void’; each medial node holds something back behind and beneath its relations, something that makes for unpredictable change. And so “historically,” the multiple elusive substances get together to make for media dynamics, evolutionary in character – as demonstrated by way of, among others, Levinson – that should therefore be fully included in what we term to be politics, as Latour proposes. “Existentially,” then, we struggle to make sense of the object, in all its multiplicity, by way of “collecting,” an activity more diverse and all-encompassing than its ordinary definition lets on, as it is undergirded by a passionate attempt at fusing the two said levels – and one that is today, like the existential projects within the other foci, grappling with the reality of ‘speed-up’ just as much. CONVERSATION AS DEALING WITH THE GIVEN

As said before, this has been a work of superposition, of inclusion rather than exclusion. Exactly with the posing of distinctions and of categories – like the above – we risk to surreptitiously import expulsive mechanisms again. We should stress, once more, that none of the aforementioned levels and components can be said to exist “as such,” i.e., apart from each other. Yet in some or other way, we are at all times challenged at reconciling them, at mitigating their typical tensions. Although the lover extends itself via the mediating relation of love into the beloved object (and perhaps vice versa?), the task of giving every component its right due seems to remain utterly important in the business of medial “love making.” Unlike Narcissus, we need to recognize what comes “from us” and what “from the other.” And although the “structural” and “historical” levels are only analytically distinguishable, they still are, as we showed in Chapter 3, and paradoxically enough, mutually exclusive. This, exactly, may be the reason for the severe difficulty we experience in blending them. These two views or “attitudes,” each other’s perfect opposite, together form the overstrung oxymoron that is at base level our medial existence. And still, throughout the previous three chapters, we have detected traces of what might be a recent change in the pattern: ‘speed-up.’ We need to finally pay 412

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full scrutiny to this notion, crucial in McLuhan’s work. For what is the way to stand inside ever-accelerating chaos? In other words: how to ever find the right tempo, the right “rhythm”? As all things, ideas, and activities are medial nodes, the coping itself must also be a medium. Could we call it, for lack of a better word, philosophy? McLuhan is on the lookout for such a “way of dealing,” but would not term it that way. Nevertheless, as we hinted in the Introduction, and have demonstrated along the way, philosophy is in fact philosophy of technology, is philosophy of media. But if philosophy is a medium, what makes it so different from other medial nodes? In other, very practical terms: how can philosophy retain its relevance in a world filled to the brim with attention-seeking and resource-devouring media? In what follows we will argue, along McLuhan’s lines, that philosophy is a mediumamong-other-media that however differs from those other media to the extent that this particular “philosophy” medium is more able than others to problematize itself, to pose itself as a problem. It is a dual process of perception and conception, inherently constructed as self-reflexive.450 Again we must not underestimate context. Philosophy-as-medium is never isolated (and if it would be isolated, it would not exist). Within the framework sketched in what came before, our (cultural) universe appears as a realm in which – literally metaphorically – all things collide constantly, but where none of those crashes ever comes wholly in view. It can be seen as philosophy’s task to mingle with its colleague-media – for what else could it do? – with nevertheless a little more self-awareness or awareness of the sort of process it is involved in. Much sense can be made of this self-reflexive dynamic by way of the concept of conversation. In a way, all things-as-media are forever engaged in “conversations” with other things-as-media. Seen from this perspective philosophy emerges as (only) one conversational partner among many possible others. Now the prime thinker of conversation is neopragmatist Richard Rorty, and if transformed slightly, his views can be perfectly applied to the issue at hand. It is conversation that eminently characterizes the “philosophy medium,” as the medial node that enables us to deal, to a certain extent, with the “given” of blindness and ambivalence, and of “structure” and “history.” We proceed, one last time, in four steps. First, we revisit the notion of ‘speedup,’ with “our protagonist” McLuhan in particular and as a cultural “phenomenon” in general. Second, we briefly delve into the work of Rorty in order to sketch what we call our “conversationalist existentialism.”451 The Rortian 413

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conversation has at its core two central characteristics: selectivity and selfreflexivity, aspects shared, as we will see, by the ‘learning’ concept in Bateson. Third, we suggest by way of two rather playful illustrations how all of this concerns our medial “coping.” And fourth, we wrap up this chapter with some final reflections on tempo.

17.2 A Contemporary Complication: Speed-Up In Chapter 3 we already found a fascination with speed among the “reasons for love” (under “control”). But the preceding chapters have made it clear that McLuhan’s suggestion that technology and hence culture is accelerating may have greater significance than that. We reconsider the notion of ‘speed-up’ here, and investigate how it specifically relates to the “structure”-“history” ‘interplay.’ THE CONCEPT OF SPEED-UP: RUNNING TO STAND STILL

Paul Virilio has famously coined the term ‘dromology,’ as the science or logic or study of speed (2007). But it is McLuhan who, somewhat earlier, sees ‘speed-up’ as central to our current cultural constellation.452 Bob Hanke comments that ‘McLuhan developed speed as a tool for media and cultural analysis.’ (2005, 127) And he further avers that his ‘[…] critique of media […] probed […] the shift from the experience of time to the experience of speed.’ (ibid., 124) But it is not just speed that concerns McLuhan: the increasing of speed is what appears to stir him the most. Already in The Mechanical Bride he observes: ‘Accelerated change and planned obsolescence constitute the basic principle of an industrial power-economy built on applied science.’ (2002, 128) As with all endeavors of technology, acceleration is in an evaluative sense twofold. On the one hand we crave for it; McLuhan talks about ‘passionate acceleration’ (ibid., 34). On the other hand we have no choice but to undergo its more corrupting side-effects: ‘The more acceleration, the more helpless.’ (ibid., 75) It is often overlooked that exactly ‘speed-up’ provides the connecting link between the two poles of McLuhan’s “central dichotomy.” Trivially put, communications media have become, throughout history, faster and faster. This is less a gradual ascent than a stuttering progression defined by watershed moments instigated by certain innovations like phonetic writing, the movable type printing press, television, the computer, the Internet, … On this evolution McLuhan’s 414

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distinction between ‘literate’ and ‘tribal’ is based. But it is acceleration – the ‘hotting up’ of visual technologies – that makes literacy once more reverse into tribalism – into ‘coolness.’ Speed increases and increases… until it finally cedes ground to the “one moment” of ‘all-at-onceness’ and tribal involvement. In this sense the opposites of visual and auditory-tactile are very much two sides of the same coin. Like our “structural”-“historical” distinction they cannot be separated from one another, and still they exclude one another. Certainly the ‘speed-up’ is to a large extent grounded in technical advancements. Gordon E. Moore in 1965 famously predicts that the number of transistors that can be put on an integrated circuit will double every two years (1965). But we should not disregard McLuhan’s hints with regard to the expectational aspect of speed. In the above quote, he mentions ‘accelerated change’ right next to ‘planned obsolescence.’ The hard-won technical advance in speed must – mostly for remunerative reasons? – be counterbalanced by deliberately accelerated renewal cycles. Obsolescence must indeed by planned, as in the case of consumer electronics – like computers, printers, audio players, et cetera – deliberately designed to last only a limited amount time; although that remains an open secret of industry. And so ‘speed-up’ is not merely a “structural,” technical given, but a “historical,” cultural phenomenon just as much. THE CULTURE OF INSTANTANEITY (AND ITS CRITIQUE)

‘Speed-up’ is thus “given” (“fatal”) and it is “wanted” (‘passionate’). But strangely enough, in the process, what we seem to want is to completely and radically revert to what is given. We have observed many times before, and especially in the previous three chapters, how “history” is appearing to give way to “structure.” We seem to long to discard the “historical” level itself, in favor of the “structural” plateau. Now we can see more clearly that this may be due to a tendency at the “historical” level itself, co-provoked by technological acceleration. Tony Schwartz notes: ‘Electronic media have reset our clocks to read now.’ (1981, 129) In his novel-like “biography” of McLuhan, Douglas Coupland helpfully remarks upon this issue. With regard to McLuhan’s students at the University of Wisconsin, he observes: ‘To Marshall, they lived in a perpetual present and saw nothing wrong with that.’ (2010, 74) And then he further reflects upon the ‘feel’ of time: ‘[…] time not only seems to be moving more quickly, but is beginning to feel funny, too. There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort.’ (ibid., 13) To eventually aver that ’[t]ime speeds up and then it begins to shrink.’ (ibid., 15) 415

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McLuhan not only perceives this trend453, he moreover – notwithstanding his apparent enthusiasm for neotribalism – launches a critique on this new culture of instantaneity. And he thereby, as Hanke comments, ‘[…] joins the long-standing vogue for deploring the hurried life.’ (2005, 129) That vogue has included among others Nietzsche and James Truslow Adams, Hanke goes on – without even mentioning Heidegger and, one of McLuhan’s great influences, Wyndham Lewis (Lewis 1993).454 Whereas electronic media enable instant communication, McLuhan argues, ‘[…] man was not designed to live at the speed of light.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 97) It is very much a question of incompatibility between the human setup and its extensions: ‘Conflict occurs, not because of human inefficiency, but technology moving at incompatible speeds.’ (ibid., 93) We cannot seem to keep up with our own creations. After McLuhan it is Neil Postman who most avidly picks up the ‘Now’ critique: ‘[…] the world is atomized. There is only a present and it need not be part of any story that can be told.’ (2006, 74) He illustrates his point by referring to newscasts and television shows, in which a quick succession of short items is required, the new topic often announced by way of the sentence: ‘Now… this.’ ‘[T]he phrase, if that’s what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything.’ (ibid., 99) Nowadays Zygmunt Bauman continues this line of criticism in delineating and harshly critiquing, as we already saw, the ‘liquid’ consumer society. ‘A consumer society is a society of credit cards, not saving books. It is a ‘now’ society. A wanting society, not a waiting society.’ (1998, 31) And foreshadowing our next section, he observes: ‘Consuming life cannot be other than a life of rapid learning, but it also needs to be a life of swift forgetting.’ (2007a, 96) It is just as much an issue of incompatibility, although Bauman unlike McLuhan does not explicitly draw the link with technology: in a liquid society we are constantly faced with the – urgent – task of ‘[k]eeping up speed.’ And that task, ‘[…] once an exhilarating adventure, turns into an exhausting chore. Most importantly, that nasty uncertainty and that vexing confusion, supposed to be chased away thanks to speed, refuse to go.’ (Bauman 2003, xiii) We ask, once again: what is there to do then? Already repeatedly we have touched upon the main weapon McLuhan proposes to deploy against overwhelming ‘speed-up’: the construction of anti-environments. And as we also saw (e.g., in Chapters 5 and 12), in times of intense acceleration, this work 416

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acquires particular characteristics. ‘Under electric conditions the content tends […] toward becoming environmental itself.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, 248) Conversely, the planet itself turns from environment into a ‘probe,’ i.e., an antienvironment (ibid., 251-252). This implies that the world should be dealt with as a work of art (M. McLuhan and Watson 2011, 166). We have become like the ‘Balinese.’455 Yet what does this practically mean? In the preceding chapters we have already offered some hints; we must now in a more general manner tend to the central mechanisms harbored by those indications.

17.3 Conversationalist Existentialism Thus, acceleration furnishes a “given” that exhibits technical (“structural”) as well as cultural (“historical”) characteristics. As it is to that extent “wanted,” we cannot so easily get around it. Again the notional pair of ambivalence and blindness plays up; the blindness stands in the way of perceiving the ambivalence. And so we also do not notice how we unwittingly, in a vain attempt at the dissolution of ambivalence, desire to “fall back” from “history” towards “structure.” Nevertheless, as demonstrated throughout Part 0, a third dichotomy comes to the rescue, epitomized in McLuhan’s craved-for ‘understanding’: that between awareness and unawareness. As mentioned, the prime way, we propose, in which to frame these tri-dichotomous dynamics and moreover to clarify the notion of anti-environments in an everyday context is the concept of conversation, or more precisely, of philosophy-as-conversation. We demonstrate our point by way of insights in Rorty and Bateson. RORTY’S CONVERSATION

In Rorty’s work, “conversation” takes central stage in several senses. We can distinguish between an epistemological, an existential, and a methodological meaning, and these are all intertwined. First, the epistemological meaning. This is worked out in the first part of Rorty’s career, specifically in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), in which he formulates a critique on ‘Philosophy’ (with a capital “P”) that always seeks essences, as ‘mirrors of Nature.’ In opposition to it Rorty poses, with a phrase of Michael Oakeshott, ‘the Conversation of Mankind’ (ibid., 389ff.): the gaining and transmitting of knowledge resembles more a conversation than some or other ‘method.’ None of the participants in the 417

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conversation has an ‘overriding claim’ on authority. Rorty prefers to speak of ‘edification’ and ‘Bildung’ rather than of ‘knowledge.’ ‘Epistemology’ as such should be given up in favor of hermeneutics. Instead of looking for a central, transcendent principle, we should try to describe ourselves and others. And that is, second, the existential meaning, which is fully deployed in Contingeny, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). Here Rorty introduces a new protagonist called the ‘ironist.’456 Irony is the ultimate answer to all ‘essentialist’ cravings, and it is closely coupled with the concept of ‘vocabulary’: according to Rorty everyone deals with his reality through a ‘final vocabulary’ that guides one’s beliefs, actions, and worldview. An ironist is someone who has ‘[...] radical and continuing doubts [...]’ about his final vocabulary because he ‘[...] has been impressed by other vocabularies [...]’; he moreover realizes that he cannot resolve these doubts by way of notions formulated in his own vocabulary; and he lastly does not take this final vocabulary to be any closer to reality than that of others (ibid., 73). Thus, an ironist is not just concerned with ‘redescribing himself,’ he furthermore can never be certain about this redescription. However, through the first and second definitions of the conversation concept runs, like a thread, the third, methodological meaning. Philosophy itself, according to Rorty, should take the form of a conversation (as his very own philosophy does). Since looking for ‘essences’ is not deemed a worthwhile project anymore in either an epistemological or an existential sense, philosophy-as-aproject must also give up on the search for founding principles. What stays is itself a conversation between vocabularies, worldviews, and perspectives which may not be commensurable but can definitely be outplayed against each other. We do not have the means to settle the matter for once and for all so the only option left is to keep talking. ‘To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately.’ (1980, 378) In answering Hilary Putnam, who scorns him for being a relativist, Rorty says: ‘there is only the dialogue’ (Rorty 1991, 27). This dialogue has two crucial features. First of all, it is meant to be selfreflexive. As seen, the ironist continually (re)describes himself in terms of which he can never be too sure. The same counts for philosophy-as-a-project-ofredescription. We can go along in incorporating concepts, views, vocabularies without limits, rules, or ends – if we only turn our gazes upon ourselves and 418

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become aware of this very process. In an essential passage Rorty remarks: ‘If we want self-justification through conversation with the dead thinkers about our current problems, then we are free to indulge in as much of it as we like, as long as we realize that we are doing so.’ (1998, 254) It is exactly in conversing and moreover realizing that we are doing so, that we become aware of both our inherent epistemological and existential shortcomings. And that constitutes the second characteristic of this “meta-conversation”: its selectiveness. Whereas according to Rorty ‘[a]nti-pragmatists follow Plato in striving for an escape from conversation to something atemporal which lies in the background of all possible conversations[,]’ (1982, 174) we pragmatists are stuck with always provisional dialogues, never complete, never finished. We are forever confronted with the ‘power of strangeness’ (1980, 360) that challenges us to confront other, incommensurable vocabularies: we must meet and talk to one another.457 That also means: being open to other vocabularies, disciplines or frameworks – literature, physics, music, film, … All can be woven into the patchwork of our ever-changing philosophical self-description. As long as we realize we are doing so. BATESON’S LOGICAL TYPES

A surprisingly related argument, as we will see, can be found in Bateson, more specifically in his notion of ‘logical types,’ which directly links up to his thoughts on learning. According to Bateson learning is essentially concerned with the discernment of logical types, a term hailing from mathematics and logic that he applies to matters of social interaction. In line with a general tendency in cybernetics (Wiener 1954, 61), he defines learning very broadly as the turn towards self-reflexiveness of or by systems. The more self-reflexivity, the higher the logical type. More specifically, he distinguishes between four forms of learning. ‘Zero learning,’ to begin with, is the lowest form: it concerns ‘[…] the simple receipt of information from an external event, in such a way that a similar event at a later (and appropriate) time will convey the same information […]’ (G. Bateson 2000, 284). Bateson provides the example of “learning” ‘[…] from the factory whistle that it is twelve o’ clock.’ (ibid.) Learning I, then, can be defined as any change in Learning 0, in other words: it occurs whenever a person responds differently to the same stimulus at a later than at an earlier time. Learning I thereby presupposes ‘repeatable context,’ and the Pavlov experiments are perhaps the most famous 419

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example. Learning II, in turn, by Bateson also called ‘deutero-leurning’ or ‘learning to learn,’ can only come about when there is a change in the procedure of Learning I (i.e., the learning itself). It attests to a realization of the conditions of Learning I; an expectancy of a certain context. In the case of Pavlov’s dog: when the dog would at a later moment act upon the situation as though it was an instrumental context (ibid., 294), we can say that Learning II has taken place. It would mean that the dog can easily repeat the learning of the first level in another context. Interestingly, Bateson points out that this form of learning lies at the root of what in everyday experience is perceived to be a person’s “character” (ibid., 297-298): introvert, extravert, active, passive, optimistic, … Character in this sense is nothing else than acquired habits repeated in different contextual setups. And he observes that in psychoanalysis it finds a pendant in the phenomenon of ‘transference’458, and that it originates, unconsciously, in infancy. Bateson stresses that Learning II becomes self-validating, and therefore is extremely difficult to eradicate. At this level double binds (ibid., 206ff.) arise. They occur when a person is faced with contradictory premises, ‘contraries’ that cannot be resolved at the level of Learning II itself (the same happens, by the way, at the lower levels). Here Learning III steps in, which is ‘[…] likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings.’ (ibid., 301)459 It is all about the ‘contexts of contexts’460 (ibid., 304), and if anywhere it is to be found mostly in the domains of psychotherapy (as the resolution of the aforesaid transference) and religion (as for instance in the case of conversion experiences). To every form of learning a certain logical type – a degree of abstraction – corresponds. Climbing up the ladder of learning means resolving the contradictions arising at every level by approaching them at a higher level of abstraction.461 ‘If […] we accept the overall notion that all learning […] is in some degree stochastic (i.e., contains components of “trial and error”), it follows that an ordering of the processes of learning can be built upon an hierarchic classification of the types of error which are to be corrected in the various learning processes.’ (ibid., 287) And almost sideways, finally, Bateson suggests that there also is a form of learning that exceeds the hierarchical ladder: learning about the relation between the levels. It is – once again – art, eminently, that occupies itself with such a way of learning (ibid., 308).

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MEDIAL NODES, CONVERSATION, AND LEARNING: SELECTIVITY AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY

Taking together Rorty’s ‘conversation’ and Bateson’s ‘learning’ notions, then, one arrives at a picture of what “conversationalist existentialism” could look like. With Rorty we can define the project of philosophy – a medial node bent on ‘understanding’ – as a conversation that is aware of itself. With Bateson we recognize how exactly this process of climbing up the ladder of abstractness – learning – works. Both frameworks have ingrained in them concepts of selectiveness and self-reflexivity, the latter being, in both cases, a way of coping with the former – but not exhausting it. In that way they both propose ways of dealing with the “given,” but not necessarily by just “wanting” it, rather by contextualizing the given, framing it in more abstract terms. Rorty suggests the self-aware conversation as way of living, a manner in which the ‘power of strangeness’ coming at us from other vocabularies can be incorporated and at the same time left intact. Bateson sees learning as a continuation of genetic development, so to speak, “by other means.” Both processes are similar in nature, i.e., ‘stochastic’ (G. Bateson 2002, 140). Nonetheless, where genetic determination ends, learning begins. ‘The broad history of the evolution of learning seems to have been a slow pushing back of genetic determinism to levels of higher logical type.’ (G. Bateson 2000, 307) In other words, by way of learning we can go to lengths where genetic change could not take us (or certainly not right away). But, we should add, not unimportantly, that considered from the standpoint of Learning III, Learning II should just as much be seen as the “given.” There is, in sum, at all levels a “given” to be reckoned with. And so we can now start to make a bit more sense of the “reverting” from “history” towards “structure.” At best, the “structural” “love making” comes down to an endeavor to be situated on the conversational level, or on the level of ‘Learning II’ (or lower). The ‘context of contexts’ is only revealed at a higher level, i.e., that of the “meta-conversation,” at which the ideological constellations, the mediation-of-mediation, and the multifarious object dynamics of our “love lives” are accounted for: the “historical” plane. It should thus come as no surprise that we, in general, in “culture,” tend to “drift” towards “structure.” For it is, with Bateson, very much in our nature to solidify and eternalize learning at one level, all the while closing off the entrances to the higher ones. We tend to keep on talking, keep on conversing, delighting in it so much that the form of the dialogue itself is never considered. In terms proposed in Chapter 3: the situation of “use” comes so 421

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naturally and smoothly to us that “context” hardly ever becomes a concern.462 And one can easily imagine the situation to even worsen at increasing speeds. When medial change accelerates, the tempo of the “conversation” gets higher; contexts shift more quickly. And as is well-known, keeping up an extremely fast conversation is in itself such an engaging, energy-consuming endeavor that a reflection upon that conversation becomes all but impossible. When contexts change constantly and at breakneck speeds, one is more tempted to merely adapt to every new situation “in time,” rather than to lift oneself up one level higher, to the level of ‘context of contexts.’ Reverting to “structure” then becomes simply… unavoidable. Yet as R.W. Emerson proposes: ‘In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.’ (1979, 138) Bauman employs this phrase as the motto to the introduction of his Liquid Life (2005), and goes on to qualify our so heartfelt need for speed, making a plea instead for a life less focused on the new and on renewal. We should ask however in how far escape from ‘speed-up’ is as such possible – as it forms, indeed, the “given.” Perhaps a more fruitful way out of the conundrum is offered by simultaneously climbing up the ladder of learning. By moving ourselves “vertically,” instead of just slowing down “horizontally” (cf. Chapter 12), we expand our possibilities. Philosophy-as-medial-node, as we will shortly see, is meant to help. But we first buttress our argument by way of two illustrations – themselves conversational efforts in the style of Rorty.

17.4 Sedimented Speed: Two Tales For if ‘speed-up’ has become more and more our reality, and artists are, as McLuhan avers, expected to construct anti-environments that aid us in understanding what is happening, then surely we should find in artistic enterprise instances or expressions of the above analysis. And indeed, we now briefly discuss two cases – one “practical,” another rather “theoretical” – in which strands of our argument are vividly embodied. MAIL ART: AN INSTANCE OF MCLUHANIST ART

First, from the underbelly of societal functionality and even of the artistic world itself comes a phenomenon called ‘Mail Art.’463 Guy Bleus, one of the representatives and practitioners of the elusive art form, calls it a ‘communicative 422

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art phenomenon’464 (1994). It is a worldwide alternative movement in which – mostly visual – art is being sent through the international postal system. Artists, on their own initiative, send out prints, collages, ornate envelops and stamps, or other artifacts (possibly also involving sound and music) to any correspondent across the globe. As simple as the idea sounds, so refined is the underlying philosophy. And Bleus, surprisingly, states: ‘When media guru Marshall McLuhan in 1964 writes down the by now well-known phrase ‘the medium is the message,’ no one can surmise that it will become the recurring adage of a planetary art movement, namely, Mail Art.’ (ibid., 19) Mail Art is a form of art that explores, with a ‘collective consciousness,’ the possibilities of an ‘artistic ‘global village’’ (ibid., 28). The emergence of what is called the ‘Network’ – of Mail Artists around the world – and not so much the individual “artworks,” is what centrally defines it. Yet the field has been bursting with apparent contradictions. On the one hand, Bleus avers, ‘Mail Art is process art.’ (ibid., 71) The process has the upper hand over the products. ‘The action is always underway.’ (ibid., 91) At the same time, Bleus says paradoxically: ‘In principle the mail artist is more important than the networking, the artifacts or the Network.’ (ibid.) Also, instead of finding meaning in the sending or receiving, ‘[t]he meaning of a mail art instrument or work is determined or modified by the use of a communication system.’ (ibid.) We are reminded here, we should add, of McLuhan’s ‘the meaning of meaning is relationship.’ Simultaneously, while reveling in the plain utilization of a technical system – of a network of medial nodes – Mail Art taxes and satirizes the network and all of its components by frustrating its purported functionality. The fascination, or the object of fascination, Bleus remarks, coincides with the organization, i.e., the ‘Network’: form and content concur. Shimmering within these contours we find back our tri-dichotomous scheme. The tension between subject, relation, and object, or more generally between relation and substance, is incarnated in the exploration of the bounds between the (creation of the) artifacts, their handling and shipment, and their receipt. No clear line can be drawn between these three “components” – at the same time, sure enough, the sender extends him- or herself into a relational network, and onto an aimed-at object, and the consequences of those actions are essentially unforeseeable. Also, whereas the very activity of “art mailing” is grounded in the “structural” employment of an expectedly efficient infrastructure, the organization of the art form – crucial to the definition of the form itself – presupposes a fluency, a know-how, a familiarity with the “historical” goings-on; and it formulates at the 423

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same time a reflection upon both levels, in the process reversing the ratios of transparency and opacity (the ‘Network’ becomes opaque, the sent artifacts transparent, or vice versa).465 In this peculiar ‘Conversation of Mankind,’ the conversational partners are very much aware of the fact that they are conversing, and this awareness ‘feedbacks’ upon the conversation as such. ASIMOV’S ‘ETERNITY’… AND ITS ‘END’

Yet, from the realm of science fiction we pour another tale that, in contrast to the Mail Art example, illustrates not so much the conceptual infrastructure we have outlined, but rather the “cultural” aspect of ‘speed-up,’ or put differently: our tendency to emphasize “structure” and disregard or even negate “history,” i.e., to take on a “structure-oriented” attitude. Isaac Asimov’s somewhat lesser-known novel The End of Eternity (2000), first published in 1955, paints a picture of an all-“structural” world. It tells the story of ‘technician’ Andrew Harlan, who is recruited by ‘Eternity,’ a parallel realm of sorts outside of time. Eternity was erected in the 27th century, based on the pioneering work of a Vikkor Mallansohn on ‘temporal fields’ in the 24th century. It is ruled by a male elite that can travel ‘upwhen’ and ‘downwhen’ and access reality at any point in time, but lives itself in an “eternal now.” Eternity endeavors to control the whole of reality – taking place in time – by way of ‘Reality Changes.’ Those are small modifications calculated and designed by ‘Computers’ – the highest social class in Eternity – and applied by ‘Technicians’ at the right time and place in reality. As the altered events run their course, the changes eventually make for the desired effect. In this way the Eternals, without humankind knowing it, attempt to steer history with the aim of keeping the sum of human happiness as high as possible “at all times.” In this way they systematically eradicate among others the ideas of nuclear power and space travel whenever these threaten to resurface, for notwithstanding the massive technological advances these inventions can bring – so goes Eternity’s rationale – they are also accompanied by the most terrible human suffering. Nevertheless, the Eternals do not have control over all of time. They cannot apply changes beyond the point in the past at which Eternity was installed, and they cannot access reality between the 70.000th and 150.000th century – what they call the ‘Hidden Centuries’ – and after that point, the earth is deserted from all humans. In this setting Andrew Harlan emerges, and the most curious love story unwinds. Harlan is a brilliant Technician, keeping to austere morals in trying to 424

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fulfill his duty as an Eternal – for in Eternity emotion is much frowned upon, as it contradicts with the program of pursuing the greater good, even if that entails giving up current constellations of reality. But one day a Computer with whom he has become at odds, sets him up, and imports a woman, Noÿs Lambent, from reality (women are now and then deployed for administrative tasks) in the hopes of forcing Harlan into disloyalty. And indeed, both eventually fall head over heels in love with each other. While they make love, Harlan, in a flash of insight, comes to realize a certain truth about Eternity. He finds out that he is a crucial element in a plan to save Eternity from its own doom, for its inventor, Vikkor Mallansohn, actually appears to be a young man – Brinsley Sheridan Cooper – recruited from the 78th century, who is meant to be sent back to the 24th, in order to then lay the scientific foundations for the establishment of Eternity. Its existence thus wholly depends on the correct implementation of this time loop; and Harlan is solicited, within this plan, to teach Cooper ‘primitive history,’ one of Harlan’s specialties, and knowledge required for Cooper to get around in the 24th century. But Harlan, intoxicated with love for Noÿs, upsets the plan by taking the woman into Eternity illegally, and eventually, out of fear of losing her, sabotages the process of sending Cooper back. The story harbors much more complexity than we can possibly represent here, but for our purposes the symbolic value is of relevance. By way of a typical “cog in the machine” narrative, Asimov describes a quasi-dialectic power imbalance – of the sort we outlined in Chapter 10 – between rulers, i.e., the Computers of Eternity, and ruled, i.e., the lower classes of Eternity and especially the ‘Timers’ who remain utterly unaware of the steering mechanisms deployed by the Eternals “behind the scenes.” The Eternals, much succeeding in their goals – themselves the end result of a long succession of scientific and technological advances; i.e., ‘speedup’ – have created a form of pure stasis within history; just to evade general (not individual) risk, pain, and danger. Harlan, although on the surface stern and dutiful, stands out amongst his peers by a sensitivity to the inevitability characterizing the ‘primitive’ centuries, exemplified in his study of the – literary and other – works that remain from those times: Occasionally he would lose himself in a world where life was life and death, death; where a man made his decisions irrevocably; where evil could not be prevented, nor good promoted, and the Battle of Waterloo, having been lost, was really lost for good and all. There was even a scrap of poetry he treasured which 425

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stated that a moving finger once written could never be lured back to unwrite. And then it was difficult, almost a shock, to return his thoughts to Eternity, and to a universe where Reality was something flexible and evanescent, something men such as himself could hold in the palms of their hands and shake into better shape. (Asimov 2000, 20)

And then Harlan meets beautiful Noÿs, and time gradually becomes “an option.” It is striking that the concepts of love, of the progression of time, and of defectedness are introduced almost in one breath. Facing an impending Reality Change that might radically change Noÿs’ personality (or even let her vanish from reality altogether), Harlan considers: The new Noÿs might, conceivably, be better in some ways, but he knew one thing very definitely. He wanted this Noÿs here, the one he saw at this moment, the one of this Reality. If she had faults, he wanted those faults, too. (Asimov 2000, 67)

Over and against Eternity’s drive to safeguard the ‘mythical’ “moment” in which flaws are thought to be extinguished – and yet they still keep popping up – suddenly stands, paradoxically, Harlan’s desire to hold on to this person, even though this particular person may change over time and moreover appear in the process to be imperfect. Here is an illustration – of heartbreaking beauty – of the “structural”-“historical” dichotomy, and the appurtenant drift from “history” toward “structure.” Eternity, more than some fantastic realm or place, in itself stands for the attitude of preserving “structure” and negating “history.” And that project is sedimented in power structures of which the powerless can only dream to ever even grasp the outlines. Yet at the same time the whole system is selfvalidating and self-consolidating, just like Bateson’s ‘Learning II’ serves to merely adapt the same constellation of learned habits to different contexts. In Eternity’s case, of course, the various contexts of reality are, by contrast, adapted to some overarching scheme, but the net effect stays the same: from context to context – from one version of reality to the other – all and every glimpse of the ‘metapattern’ (G. Bateson 2002, 10) is blocked from consideration. At the same time, the story is also an exemplification of the implicit infeasibility of the monomaniacal “structural” focus. For on the one hand, the

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“structural moment” enforced by Eternity is itself ridden with imperfection, as all “structural moments” must be, and as we abundantly saw throughout Part I: ‘[…] even the most detailed possible Computations could never eliminate all uncertainty, all random effects.’ (Asimov 2000, 53) On the other hand, the tale colorfully points out how “history” just goes on in the meantime. In the book it eventually makes for the dissolution of Eternity. For it turns out, in the final scene, when Harlan and Noÿs have arrived in the 20th century by way of a special sort of time machine, that Noÿs is in fact sent by the people living in the ‘Hidden Centuries,’ in a plot to destroy Eternity. These people discovered what Eternity is really about, and came to the realization that if Eternity would continue its work of banning all purportedly risky inventions, humanity would not be able to eventually escape Earth in order to explore the infinity of the cosmos with the aim of finding new places to live (or it would in any case be too late). And without space travel and the likes humanity would die a starving death. Harlan, at first infuriated at Noÿs, and wanting to kill her, for the fact that initially she was strategically sent to seduce him and get him to cooperate with the plan, in the end, convinced by her plea – and her sincere love – decides to go along and destroy Eternity. The time machine vanishes into thin air, and the closing lines of the book read: With that disappearance, he knew, even as Noÿs moved slowly into his arms, came the end, the final end of Eternity. – And the beginning of Infinity. (Asimov 2000, 189)

Opposite from the exclusive “structural” attitude – the elusive hope for the retainment of some pure, perfect “one moment” – stands the project of engaging into relationships, through “historical” time and space, full of trials and tribulations, but with the perhaps even richer hope of truly defeating failure, momentarily. ‘Eternity’ is “just” an idea, ‘Infinity’ constitutes our reality.

17.5 Learning-in-Conversation: Finding a Tempo Let us, one last time, recapitulate. We have summarized our results up until now. We have revisited the notion of ‘speed-up,’ that appeared to be central in the previous chapters of this part. We have then gone on to sketch in a more general 427

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vein our proposed way of coping – only implicitly indicated in what came before – with the “given” of ‘speed-up’ and with the project of medial “love making” as such. That way of dealing we have framed as “philosophy,” a medial node that sees itself as a conversational project meant to be fundamentally selective and selfreflexive, and concerned with ‘learning’ on multiple levels of abstraction. Two illustrative cases were then discussed that exemplify the above. We now reach the end of this chapter and of this work, and make some final evaluations in relation to the role of the philosophy medium, the inherently paradoxical position that it willy-nilly occupies, and at last, “what to do when all else fails”… SELECTIVITY AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY VS. BLINDNESS AND AMBIVALENCE

One final time we ask: how to cope in a world in which all things, including philosophy itself, are medial nodes belligerently clashing into one another, chafing, wounding, and complementing each other, but in which all these media and their interactions, on the “structural” as well as the “historical” plane, to a certain extent withdraw from our sensorial and intellectual perception, and in which all medial constellations are subject to a grounding ambivalence – “it can go both ways”? There is no clearcut solution, no silver bullet. The project of medial “love making” must be engaged into, just like any relationship beyond romantic idealization requires a fair amount of work. We may only hope for philosophy, or whatever one wants to call this “attitude,” to be a characteristic medium-amongmedia in the sense that it brings to the battle field a considerable amount of selfreflexivity coupled to a recognition of selectivity. Philosophizing in this sense may mean: co-constructing a medium that excels in conversing lucidly, that cannot do away with the violence but that can perhaps mitigate the harm by way of the understanding of the conversation’s dynamics. Philosophy’s task – McLuhan’s ‘understanding’ – may simply be perceived as: playing along, without however being fully determined by the rules of the game; hence following the paradoxical advice, voiced in Chapter 13, of “staying alert to” and at the same time “embracing” the given that all medial nodes are tainted with ideology. Seen as a medium among all the other media philosophy may find its greatest strength in the widening of perceptual fields, broadly understood, and in broadening the tolerance for shortcoming as such. In this way, it naturally is philosophy of technology. This widening, this incorporating, this enduring call to ‘learn,’ the weaving of 428

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all sorts of vocabularies into our own ‘final vocabulary’ – that is in fact never final – must not be regarded as easy or superficial. As all conversations harbor inherent rules and agreements that get installed and take form once the conversation starts, the philosophical dialogue must be each time reinvented along the lines of local and contextual force fields. If this would not be mandatory, the mandates of selfimposed self-reflexivity and accepted selectivity would not stand for much. In this sense, McLuhan may cause sufficient confusion by his own deployment of the ‘learning’ notion as a constant calling, in a world of instantaneous communication and involvement. ‘In the global village of continuous learning and of total participation in the human dialogue, the problem of settlement is to extend consciousness itself and to maximize the opportunities of learning.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 41) Logan phrases it like this: ‘In an environment where change […] is pervasive, there is no such thing as job security […]’; what we need, instead, is lifelong learning (2000, 294). This could suggest that learning merely needs to be a sort of “tagging along” in medial “rush hour” at the required speed – which of course would represent only part of the story. What McLuhan may have meant is, with a term from Bateson, ‘learning to learn,’ or even more precisely, ‘Learning III.’ For if learning limits itself to the level of the conversation alone – to the level of ‘Learning II’ – the level of “history,” unconsidered, simply goes on to consolidating itself through “structure,” as it is prone to do. We may indeed find that we need to adjust our tempo, even slow down, as already suggested in Chapter 12 by way of McLuhan and Latour. Yet at the same time, and this must be stressed, our plea to give the “historical” level its right due, does not mean that, conversely, the “structural” plane should be disregarded altogether, in favor of some constant meta-hovering above the “as is.” As said, there is great enjoyment and benefit lying in wait for the one who is merely wrapped up in the conversation, in “going along” at the right speed. That person will feel as if he or she is “on top of things.” And why not? Once again, we should embrace too. Only the striking of a certain balance – as if between the rhythm and the melody – will set us on our way of finding the right tempo. THREE CONCLUDING PARADOXES: WE NEEDED CHANGE TO SEE STASIS; THE ILLNESS IS THE CURE; THE PROCESS ITSELF MATTERS

With regard to that, three paradoxes, at last, arise. First, all of this may imply that – whether we like it or not – “the stars have to be in position” for such a selfreflexive, selective dialogue-of-learning to even take place. At the beginning of 429

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Chapter 6, in discussing the extension idea, we suggested that ‘the problems posed by this interrelation [i.e., of human organisms and their environment] can be remediated by the interrelation itself,’ and we postponed a treatment of this indication to the present chapter. At this time, indeed, we are better armed to deal with this issue. For as we extensively saw, there is a paradoxical mix of diachronic and synchronic dynamics to be found in McLuhan’s thought. Paradoxical, because for some reason diachronic change – our arrival in the world of electric involvement – has made us more aware of our synchronic “state,” i.e., of our being extended beings. Joost van Loon could not have put it more aptly, when he speaks about an ‘[…] evolutional rupture; the externalisation of our own neurological system by electronic media has enabled us to become at once reflexive and reflective on our media-extended being.’ (2006, 169) We needed a change to see the stasis. Bruno Latour, though from a different standpoint, develops a similar argument in suggesting that ‘[…] information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. Not because they subvert the old concrete ‘humane’ society, turning us into formal cyborgs or ‘post human’ ghosts, but for exactly the opposite reason: they make visible what was before only present virtually.’ (2005b, 207) And so it may come to be, second, that exactly the blindness and ambivalence we are attempting to counter with selectivity and self-reflexivity, give rise to them. We are harassed by medial nodes but we can constitute medial nodes in return. In other words, what this suggests is that although medial “love making” eternally and severely challenges us, possible answers to those challenges are offered by that very same endeavor. Our weakness is that we have to extend, our strength is that we can extend. Richard Cavell in relation to McLuhan points out that ‘[t]he ‘Narcissus narcosis’ was at once the psychopathology of mediated culture and its (potential) remediation – the recognition that technology was not other but an extension of ourselves in one vast environmental body […]’ (2003, 226). If technology is a piece of ourselves, and we are a piece of technology – the problem – this very fact may open up perspectives towards remediation – a solution. This idea, namely, that the cure lies hidden in or coincides with the illness, is already present with the Greeks, as Graham Harman, following Derrida, remarks: the ‘pharmakon’ points to, at the same time, the disease and the cure (2009a, 105). Our “interwovenness” with technology brings us danger, but at the same time promises deliverance – not from the interrelatedness itself, but from the numbing effect it has on us. This sounds, of course, very similar to Heidegger’s famous quotation of 430

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Hölderlin’s verse, mentioned in Chapter 15. And this is illustrated by yet another and third paradoxicality upon which we already touched in Chapter 5, namely, that the uncovering of ‘ideology,’ the making visible of what was invisible, does not lead us to another truth – although we could in a McLuhanist vein speak of “true” observation, ‘understanding,’ or perception. It is the process itself that matters. “Perceiving otherwise” already constitutes (part of) the solution. In other words, the problem cannot be differentiated from the solution. Just “seeing how it is” sets us on the path to relief. Also, Heidegger’s shift, very much worth pursuing, from ‘fallenness’ (or ‘inauthenticity’) to ‘authenticity’ (1962) refers to the same sort of dynamic as the “jump” from ‘blindness’ to ‘understanding’ that McLuhan envisages. Interestingly enough, the same recipe can nowadays be found in several approaches situated within the domain of self-help culture. Timothy Gallwey’s ‘Inner Game’ theory for instance advises us to turn off our ‘judging’ ‘Self 1’ in favor of our ‘creative’ ‘Self 2.’ This we can accomplish especially by observing what is happening in the immediate environment (2000). Simply observing, not judging – a very McLuhanist advice. The same encouragement can be detected in approaches of ‘Mindfulness’ that have become very popular recently. ‘Mindfulness’ is described as a non-judgemental, mild, open attention to the inner and outer environment (Maex 2008).466 Also a parallel can be drawn between the diminution of ‘doing’ in favor of ‘being’ propagated in ‘Mindfulness,’ and Heidegger’s plea to forsake involvement with ‘beings,’ i.e., inauthenticity, in favor of a touchdown with ‘being,’ namely, authenticity. In any case what matters is that quasi-automatic urges to act – on our more or less moral ideas, needs, and principles – is postponed; instead a punctual, open-minded observation of the surroundings is demanded. The conversational existentialist holds on to such an openness just as much. SOMETHING TO HOLD ON TO: THE WORLD

And so in the end, “when all else fails,” what we preferably should do is… turn to the world. “The world” may offer the hope that Asimov is after. If we cannot find the right tempo in the endeavors of ‘extending’ ourselves, of “homemaking,” and of “collecting” – in the broad senses outlined above – then the world may, like a trustworthy conductor, be able to show us the beat. Bateson puts it beautifully: ‘To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his “self” will take on a sort of irrelevance. The 431

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concept of “self” will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience.’ (2000, 304)467 Although “we,” subversively anthropocentric as we are, need to face the tasks set for us, from all what came before we can deduce that “we” are not alone in this. All medial nodes take part in “bonds,” in an “Amor Technologiae” requiring the utmost effort to maintain, organize, and nurture. All medial nodes go through hazy cycles of dreaming and waking. We would better start, in the words of Clark, ‘dovetailing back’ to them in turn, without trying to evade the unpredictability of impending change, however also without forgetting to delight in the “moment,” and breathing in the singularity as well as the multiplicity of our surroundings, these universes bound by technological determinism + that endlessly and infinitely surprise us.

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Chapter 18: Concluding Remarks on Love

18 Concluding Remarks on Love ‘Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.’ (G. Bateson 2002, 24)

18.1 One Last Look in the Rear-View Mirror Looking back to where we came from, and finding ourselves where we are now, we notice our object of attention to have become more and more elusive along the way. We started out looking for technology. Have we lost track of it? Where is technology? And we intended to scrutinize it through the prism of the “love” metaphor – but where has all the love gone? Just as this text is a medial node in itself and as every medium’s form “prepossesses” almost in a literal sense its content, we cannot but look back in the rear-view mirror of this work and find that already multiple tiny balances have slightly shifted. Perhaps we should, taking a hint from the last chapter, not worry about these indistinctnesses, and on the contrary let them lead us onto new places. Upon reflection, technology and media bleed into “us,” other artifacts, knowledge, the social, politics, even into “nature.” And love merges with all aspects of our existence, from everyday doings to scientific endeavors. In this respect all theoretical ponderings do become, at base level, tautological. The question “why do we love technology?” – why do devices, applications, tools proliferate at such a breathtaking pace, why do we develop non-stop? – may be answered by the simple attestation: “because we can.” A flavor of this redundancy is already conveyed by McLuhan’s reference to the so-called ‘Lapp’s Law’: ‘If it can be done, it’s got to be done.’ (2005a, 19) Seen from this perspective a sort of “natural,” almost automatic impulse leads us from imagining to doing, from possibility to actuality. Maybe it is “just” this pleasure in the challenging of boundaries, this playful pact with power – physical or otherwise – that makes us do the things we do… Kevin Kelly, in discussing several (severe) critiques of technology, eventually observes: I’ve been to many places in the world, the poorest and the richest spots, the oldest and the newest cities, the fastest and the 435

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slowest cultures, and it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter will upgrade to a car, and those with a car dream of a plane. (Kelly 2011, 78)

And so technology and love blend into one another. Both are the realization… of realization. Disregarding all possible problems and all pain, “Amor Technologiae” may just be our cosmic environment. Because we can.

18.2 Love as Technology Reversing the perspective, then, of course we are bound to ask: in how far is not love technological, medial? If “Amor Technologiae” is our ground, then is this love not completely and wholly an “amor technologicus”? Is love not a “technological” undertaking in itself? This should open up intriguing alleyways for future philosophical investigation. One starting point perhaps could be Niklas Luhmann’s analysis of love as a medium among other ‘media of communication,’ defined rather broadly – however not quite as broadly as we have sought to frame media here – as ways of making sense of the world, ‘[…] mechanisms […] in interpersonal intercourse through which both selection and motivation occur.’ (2010, 6) And then we may expect love, like every medium named above, to have a “structural” and “historical” side as well. The “structural” falling-in-love – enchanting, mesmerizing, numbing – must be counterposed to a “historical” work-of-love – labor-intensive, potentially painful, essentially frustrating, but in itself and through its ‘interplay’ with the “structural” level rewarding in a good old-fashioned way. And so perhaps many love lives would fare well if they would be self-reflexively framed in terms of medial projects. To overly romantic souls this may sound sacrilegious. But romanticism can, at the end of the day, only survive by deploying an utter disregard of “structural”-“historical” interchanges, a blindness to blindness, and a non-ambivalent attitude toward ambivalence.

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18.3 ‘Both Sides, Now’: A Final Self-Reflexive Moment In the end, nevertheless, we should keep reminding ourselves that the recognition of blindness and ambivalence does never preclude that blindness and ambivalence. And even realizing this will not result in some net gain. Heinz von Foerster puts it sharply: ‘The fact that we do not see that we do not see does not mean that we now see.’ (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 112) The above analysis should, in this light, be regarded as merely but essentially tentative. If we cling too tight to hardwon half-truths, stop ‘grasping and letting go,’ all entrance into any “metaconversation” will be blocked. We would do well in recalling, humbly, the lines of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now (1969): I’ve looked at love from both sides now From give and take, and still somehow It’s love’s illusions I recall I really don’t know love at all

So it is with this work. A medium in itself. A love. Prone to failure.

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APPENDIX — AMOR TECHNOLOGIAE: SCHEMATIC CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Appendix

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Notes 1

Ross A. Eaman, already in 1987, describes these different strands of theory in terms of ‘technophiles’ and ‘technophobes’ (1987, 145ff.). 2 On its website (‘Statistics’), as of October 2012. 3 As of March 2011 (Wikipedia: ‘Qzone’). 4 For an elaborate analysis of mid-twentieth-century dystopian cinema, cf. Feenberg 1995a. 5 For introductions to the field, cf. Mitcham 1994; Ferré 1995; Higgs, Light, and Strong 2000; Achterhuis 2001a; Dusek 2006; Pitt 2011. Readers containing seminal texts defining the discipline, are provided by Mitcham and Mackey (1972), Scharff and Dusek (2003), and Kaplan (2009). 6 The term is said to carry slightly different flavors in North-America and Europe (Wikipedia: ‘Media Ecology’). Whereas the European variant (Fuller 2005; Parikka 2010) stresses the interrelatedness of media in systems, the North-American version revolves more around the McLuhanist notion of ‘environment.’ We will be concerned mostly with the latter tradition; although, because of our approach, we will soon find most remaining differences in nuance largely dissipated. For introductions to the field of (North-American) Media Ecology, cf. Strate 2004; Strate 2006; Lum 2006; Anton 2011. 7 We must immediately put in perspective our distinction between PhilTech furnishing the ambivalence concept and Media Ecology offering the idea of blindness. Representatives of the two disciplines, as will become clear throughout Part 0, have in fact elaborated upon both notions. However, largely, PhilTech’s analysis of ambivalence, or in Don Ihde’s terms ‘multistability,’ may be said to be the subtlest, and media theory’s formulation of the formcontent dichotomy can certainly be seen as the most poignant. 8 Whereas the factory machines from the days of yore did not concern many people in their daily doings outside of work hours, today most of us deal with technology – usually ICT – nearly constantly. 9 Such reciprocity would make for an intriguing continuation and extension of the current study. For why would it not be possible for technology to “love” us (back), proverbially or otherwise, and perhaps in equal amounts? Unfortunately we cannot treat of this question, which is a whole issue in itself, within the bounds of this work, due to limitations of space and scope. 10 For another approach of technology based on Dewey’s work, independent from Hickman and focused more on technology as aesthetic, ethical, and functional experience, cf. McCarthy and Wright 2004. 11 Influential works like for instance M. McLuhan 2003; Feenberg 2002; Ihde 1990; Van den Bossche 1995; Verbeek 2005; Harman 2002; Latour 1993; et cetera… 12 We merely wish to isolate a few tendencies in McLuhan’s overall intellectual and popular reception, and do not target one or another author. Excellent introductory volumes on McLuhan’s work can be found within what could be called the “second wave” of that reception,

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starting in the 1990s – monographs (Marchessault 2005; Gordon 2010; Stevenson 1995, 114-143; Genosko 1998, 154-182; Theall 2001; Grampp 2011) as well as collections of papers (Sanderson and Macdonald 1989; Moss and Morra 2004; Strate and Wachtel 2005; Grosswiler 2010), and at least two special issues, in the Journal of Communication (volume 31, issue 3, 1981) and the Canadian Journal of Communication (volume 14, issue 4, 1989) More playful introductions are offered in Gordon 1997b; Gordon, Hamaji, and Albert 2007. The tenor of the “first wave” of the McLuhan reception, mostly to be situated in the 1960s and 70s, is generally rather critical: cf. Crosby and Bond 1968; Rosenthal 1969; Finkelstein 1968; Miller 1971; Theall 1971. More biographical takes are available in Marchand 1998; Nevitt and McLuhan 1994; Gordon 1997a; Benedetti and DeHart 1997. Seminal anthologies of papers by McLuhan himself are furnished from the mid-nineties on by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (1997), Michel A. Moos (M. McLuhan 1997c), and Gary Genosko (2005a; 2005b; 2005c). Among the works that seek to apply McLuhan’s ideas to contemporary (digital) media are Levinson 1999a; Horrocks 2000; Logan 2010. With the centenary year of McLuhan’s birth – 2011 – the enthusiasm for his work has grown explosively, culminating in several academic conferences around the world, and the first issue of the International Journal of McLuhan Studies. 13 At several locations in this work we will employ the words “horizontal” and “vertical,” terms in each case meant more as provisional heuristic indications than as full-blown philosophical concepts – hence the use of double quotation marks – with “horizontal” denoting a certain “breadth” and “vertical” standing for some form of “depth.” 14 Our translation. 15 Our translation. Original emphasis; as are all emphases in quotes henceforth. Also, throughout this work, all quotation marks within quotes are original. 16 Dated July 31, 1974. 17 This amounts, according to van Loon, to a theoretical landslide, for the analysis of mediaas-technologies loosens the all-too tight bond between media study and political science: media cannot be solely understood as instruments of political power; they are also ‘agents’ of cultural and social processes, a fact that only a ‘phenomenological’ analysis of media ‘as such,’ in the style of McLuhan, can make sense of. For a more extensive treatment of the tensions between these two overall approaches, cf. Chapter 10. 18 We will draw closer parallels between McLuhan’s framework and neuroscience in Chapter 15. 19 McLuhan’s literary criticism is vast in itself (McNamara 1969), but for reasons of relevance we choose to largely disregard it here in favor of his more media-focused work. 20 Cf. Lanham 1993, 202-204. 21 Over the years McLuhan will have quite some collaborators. We choose here not to specifically refer to his co-writers in quoting, for reasons of clarity and smoothness of text flow. One must keep in mind that some books are co-productions. 22 Still, she adds, although this view is inspired by the Pentecost, the book that McLuhan is trying to decode is grounded in this world (Fitzgerald 2001, 152).

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23 We deploy these terms here in passing, but they will in fact become, as suggested in the Introduction, two of the cornerstones of our main approach, developed throughout Parts I, II, and III. 24 There are multiple ways into his work, but just as in a net, no matter at which point one starts, one will eventually be able to run through the whole of the construction. 25 Those main forces are twofold: mechanization and demasculinization – hence the title of the book. Combined, these two processes sign the death sentence of the autonomous, critical, and work-devoted male. One may disagree with McLuhan’s specific elaboration and analysis of the cultural ailments of the times. 26 For an explanation of the ‘mosaic approach,’ cf. M. McLuhan 1962, 41-42. The term ‘probe’ is relatively omnipresent in especially McLuhan’s later work, but for a comprehensive compilation of ‘probes’ as such, cf. M. McLuhan and Carson 2003. 27 Paradox is a true conceptual instrument in McLuhan’s work, and we will often find his thoughts to exhibit deeply paradoxical aspects. But to him paradox is an asset, not a liability. ‘Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem.’ ‘Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.’ (2003, 330-331) 28 And in this regard, it is of course McLuhan himself who may have been at least partly responsible for the “limiting maneuvers” we have outlined above. But we will see further on that a “broad” interpretation of McLuhan is, in fact, perfectly compatible with the characterization of McLuhan as media theorist. Cf. Chapters 8 and 9, and the following footnote. 29 McLuhan at this point already utilizes the term ‘medium’ in a broad sense – including “classic” communications media like newspapers, radio, television, et cetera, but also things we would perhaps not ordinarily call media, like cars, money, games, and weapons. Later, in the posthumously published Laws of Media, as we already mentioned in the Introduction, Marshall and Eric McLuhan will define media as ‘all human-made artifacts,’ a definition that we will investigate extensively in Chapters 8 and 9. 30 McLuhan explains this process in terms of dynamics between ‘irritants’ and ‘counterirritants.’ For a detailed discussion, cf. Chapter 6. 31 We will inquire more into McLuhan’s employment of the Narcissus myth in Chapters 6 and 14. 32 This is as much as Graham Harman suggests, when he praises McLuhan for a dedication to specific things – machines, devices, artifacts, … – that philosophy has simply lacked during most of its history (2009a). Cf. Chapter 8. 33 As W. Terrence Gordon comments, ‘[…] McLuhan is always interested in how our perceptions relate to each other […]’ (1997a, 237). 34 As is for example the case in most people in the literate West (the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’), where, according to McLuhan, sight holds preponderance over the other senses that are in turn played down. 35 For a thorough overview of the tradition of perception research, cf. Kuhns 1971, 123-132. 36 Our translation.

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37 Although he stays ambivalent on this point. It seems that McLuhan’s “endorsement” of ‘electric’ media is often not so much a celebration of those media themselves, but rather a welcoming of the purportedly more balanced ‘sense ratios’ accompanying them. 38 As we have already pointed out, in McLuhan’s world paradox is an asset, not a liability. 39 Paul Levinson, nevertheless, points out that there is a critique of ‘rationality’ – in the sense of logic or dialectic – in McLuhan, but goes on to argue that his criticism of ‘logical’ rationality is itself based on rationality and can only be understood through rationality, and that hence his claimed ‘irrationality’ is self-defeating (Levinson 1981). 40 Again, admittedly, a confusing and seemingly inconsistent use of terms. 41 According to Marchessault, McLuhan puts an emphasis on aesthetic and human perception in contrast to Innis (2005, 94). James W. Carey phrases it like this: ‘Whereas Innis sees communication technology principally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought.’ (2005a, 200) Cf. also Section 2.5.4. 42 Furthermore, it should be added that the mysteries of human perception and cognition are in no way exhaustively solved and revealed by empirical science. ‘In truth, we really don’t know how the brain translates patterns of nerve activity into conscious experience, be it pain, pleasure or color.’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 2005, 51) 43 An endeavor shared by phenomenology. ‘[F]orm and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004, 96-97) Balle comments: ‘The formula “the medium is the message” invites us to reconsider our mental habits and even to fight them.’ (1972, 9) 44 Cf. also Burnett and Marshall 2003, 16ff. 45 We will later see how all these forms, entities, things can and should be seen as media in themselves. Cf. Chapter 9. 46 We will find that the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ suggests, simultaneously, a “substantivist” view, in which media are entities primordially functioning as ‘causes’ of ‘effects,’ and a “relational” view, in which “mediation” is the primary process. Cf. Chapters 7, 8, and 9. 47 This is, moreover, a position not so far from Don Ihde’s concepts of ‘non-neutrality’ and ‘inclination’ of technologies (1990). Cf. Chapter 7. 48 For an extensive treatment of what we call McLuhan’s “time frame,” cf. Chapter 11. 49 Cf. Eric McLuhan’s introduction to The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, a volume of papers by his father on the theme of media and religion (M. McLuhan 1999, ixff.). 50 Which does not in any way mean that these ideas are not interesting or worthy of scrutiny, as demonstrated amongst others in the works of de Kerckhove (1997a), Lévy (1999), and Rheingold (2002) – but it is our conviction that a project of ‘understanding media’ as the curing of blindness, i.e., the uncovering of biases, stays perfectly feasible without an attending historicalteleological promise. Although some version of “secular hope” may be needed. Cf. Chapter 17. 51 Cf. Chapter 7. 52 To which we will return more extensively in Chapter 5. 53 For an overall discussion of the historical kinship and dialogue between media theory and

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Critical Theory, cf. Chapter 10. 54 In exactly this way, we will see, McLuhan furnishes an intrepid gateway into philosophical anthropology – that can in turn provide a firm basis for a philosophy of technology. Cf. Chapter 6. 55 This redrawing will be our aim, generally, in Part II and specifically in Chapter 12. 56 John O’Neill, for example, observes suggestively with regard to one of McLuhan’s main probes, ‘the global village’: ‘The global village is an artifact of the multinational corporations – like tourism it goes round the world by missing most of the world.’ (2005, 223) 57 We acknowledge that one may not necessarily see this aspect of McLuhan’s work as an ‘ailment.’ Nevertheless, as we will find in Part II, even if one deliberately chooses to take a conservative stance, the mere idea of the “medial” status quo appears conceptually incompatible with the theory of media evolution that McLuhan proposes. 58 Cf. also Lanham 1993, 201. 59 As in the story of the dancing centipede who, upon being asked to show how she is able to dance so amazingly, starts to think about what it is that she does, and henceforth cannot dance anymore. Perhaps the same goes, as we will see, for our hundreds or so technological “pedes.” 60 In contrast to “what we want” from it, which will be extensively discussed in the next chapter. 61 The semiotic ambiguity is deliberate here. 62 Parts of this chapter already appeared, in a different form, in Van Den Eede 2010b. 63 For a more detailed overview, cf. Van Den Eede 2010b. Studies on ambient and persuasive technologies form a notable exception (Fogg 2003; Verbeek and Slob 2006) – although here the focus, rather than on invisibility as such, lies more on these technologies’ “effectiveness” due to their being invisible. 64 The intricate network of relations between science and technology makes for a vast problematic in itself, that cannot possibly be treated of extendedly within the limits of this work. Some strands of the debate have become particularly significant in recent decades. For one, it has been long assumed that technology “came forth” from science, but in fact they share a common ancestry; cf. Ihde 1991. Another assumption, being now critically assessed, is the societal tendency to turn to science for the solution of problems of “technological” order, like for instance ecological hazards. Cf. Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009, and, from an altogether different perspective, M. C. Bateson 2005, 315-316. For a more elaborate treatment of the notion of selfreflexivity, albeit more on the “existential” plane, cf. Chapter 17. 65 We treat of the concept of ‘speed-up,’ specifically with McLuhan, also in Chapter 17. 66 A case in point is the research of Robert Kraut and his colleagues, who pitch the term “Internet Paradox” in 1998 to summarize their findings, i.e.: a medium that is extensively used for communication actually helps to decrease social involvement and psychological well-being (Kraut et al. 1998). Yet in 2002 in a follow-up study they find the negative effects dissipated, and observe that participants even experience positive effects from Internet use on their social lives (Kraut et al. 2002). The Web and Web technology evolved, in the meantime, towards media that

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dovetail much more with our sociality. 67 Traditional ‘tools,’ nevertheless, return here as bona fide counterparts to the devastating power of industrial technology: the wooden bridge vs. the hydroelectric plant in the Rhine, et cetera (Heidegger 1977b). 68 Just like Heidegger does not directly discuss technology in Being and Time, he also does not employ the terms “transparency” or “transparent” in direct relation to tools or technologies. The words can, however, be found at several places in Being and Time, implying much broader concepts. Here and there Heidegger specifies ‘transparency’ (Durchsichtigkeit) as a methodological requirement for his analysis (1962, 133, 273, 350-351). Elsewhere he uses the phrase within the analysis to make sense of the interpretive state of being-in-the-world that characterizes Dasein. Once explicitly defined, ‘transparency’ stands for ‘[t]he sight which is related primarily and on the whole to existence [...]’ or, otherwise, ‘‘knowledge of the Self.’’ (ibid., 186) This ‘sight’ (Sicht) signifies the understanding Dasein holds of the basic condition of its existence, namely, being-in-the-world. In fact Dasein is this understanding, that unfolds into the ‘circumspection [Umsicht] of concern,’ the ‘considerateness [Rücksicht] of solicitude,’ and the ‘sight which is directed upon Being as such [Sicht auf das Sein als solches].’ Heidegger’s explicit tool analysis must be situated in the first category, i.e., Umsicht. Thus: ‘transparency,’ literally, for Heidegger has a more general scope than mere contact with technology or tools. The concept of technology transparency that we will locate in Heidegger’s thought has not been framed by himself in those specific terms. 69 Graham Harman describes as Heidegger’s ‘single great thought’: ‘being is not presence.’ (2007a, 163) 70 Safranski points out that presence-at-hand immediately links up with spatiality. ‘That which is present-at-hand is what is spatialized.’ (1999, 164) In general Heidegger’s thought can be said to form an enduring resistance against the more or less disguised posing of space (as grounding principle) and a corresponding defense of the more process-related idea of Ereignis (ibid., 165). Although, as we will see, Harman develops an altogether different interpretation. 71 In line with the remarks made above, it also entails a crucial consequence for research itself: when trying to focus on mediating technologies and treating them as a “subject” we in fact lose sight of the essential condition of their use. “True” use in its context escapes theoretical handling. As Safranski remarks: ‘Science is the cultured and methodical form of the everyday self-objectivization of Dasein.’ (1999, 151) 72 However, we should not see this as a simple flip. When a tool loses its readiness-to-hand, it does not automatically become present-at-hand. As William Blattner points out, ‘[…] unreadiness-to-hand is a “deficient mode” of readiness-to-hand, not a mode of presence-athand.’ (2006, 58) Presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand are experiential states. A mere “availability” or, conversely, “defect” in the world does not necessarily induce either of both. It is in the first instance Dasein that experiences these modes, however obviously not independently of ‘world.’ Only recently, strangely enough, the Vorhandenheit-Zuhandenheit distinction has been tested empirically, in the context of digital media, and moreover with successful results

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(Dotov, Nie, and Chemero 2010). 73 For purposes of argument, we disregard Heidegger’s post-’turn’ period here, in which he attempts to let being speak “for itself,” and not so much through the spokesperson of Dasein. 74 We will see, throughout Chapters 8 and 9, that Graham Harman goes even further in arguing that all entities take part in the Zuhandenheit-Vorhandenheit distinction. 75 In fact Charlton remarks: ‘His [Bateson’s] understanding of the process of perception is basically phenomenological.’ (2008, 44) 76 If every theory needs a natural “enemy,” a concept or idea one vehemently battles against, ‘conscious purpose’ would surely make for Bateson’s. 77 Charlton comments: ‘He came to see “conscious purpose” as aberrant mind, a kind of madness. Bateson believed that we have lost the use of our wider, deeper, more-than-conscious minds. We have lost some forms of wisdom that the other animals still have.’ (2008, 5) 78 And in each case, Mary Catherine Bateson goes on to observe, certain power struggles surface and predominate that, interestingly, have a two-way character: ‘[…] domination has built into it a systematic blindness on the part of the dominator to dependence upon the object of exploitation.’ (2005, xiii) We will discuss power balances more elaborately on the basis of the work of Andrew Feenberg in Chapter 10. 79 Although we are, as also Heinz von Foerster observes, ‘[…] blind to our own blindness. […] The fact that we do not see that we do not see does not mean that we now see.’ (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, 112) Cf. also the first quote of Bateson above (G. Bateson 2002, 29). 80 The authors treated of above have not made the literal notion of technology transparency a focal point of their theories – we had to situate an analogous concept within their work. Don Ihde, by contrast, has. 81 A case in point and a plea against cyborg utopianism at the same time is Ihde’s personal account of his heart surgery in the text ‘Aging: I Don’t Want to Be a Cyborg’ (2008, 31-42). 82 For example, via our cellphones we reach out to other people; but our cellphones themselves possess an intentionality towards antennas or microwave radiation... 83 Graham Harman comments in his book on Latour, Prince of Networks: ‘In a sense, all human activity aims to create black boxes.’ (2009b, 37) 84 For an extensive elaboration of this idea, cf. Verbeek 2006b; Verbeek 2011c. 85 And that is a political calling. For ‘politics’ are not just where we thought them to be – on the ‘Society’ side – they dwell in all the hybrids and networks, i.e., in things (1993; 2004; 2005a). Cf. Chapter 12 for more on this issue. 86 Elsewhere, Feenberg likens his ‘technical code’ to Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ (2010a, 37). As we have seen, also McLuhan’s notion of ‘environment’ exhibits similarities to the ‘paradigm’ concept. For a more elaborate treatment of the ‘technical code’ concept and its analogies to McLuhan’s ‘medium’ notion in particular and of Feenberg’s work in general, cf. Chapter 10. 87 For a more elaborate treatment of the differences between Feenberg’s and Latour’s views on politics, cf. Chapter 12. 88 Although particularly Latour would protest to this characterization (Latour 1999, 9).

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89 He repeatedly aligns his own work with that of the phenomenologists although with sufficient residual critique towards them: ‘Since the phenomenologists have taken an increasing interest in language, they have also begun to pay more attention to the hidden ground in all structures, as witness Lévi-Strauss. Without knowing it, they are phasing themselves out of the Hegelian tradition.’ (quoted in Gordon 1997a, 318) At the same time, according to McLuhan, they are still too much wrapped up in a literate frame of mind – a criticism of phenomenology in fact similar to David Abram’s: ‘The tradition of phenomenology, it would seem, has been striving to recover such an experience [i.e., a more direct awareness of being beyond strictly spatial or temporal categories] from within literate awareness itself – straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born.’ (Abram 1996, 206) For more on McLuhan and phenomenology, cf. Chapter 6, Section 6.4.4. 90 Cf. Chapter 5. 91 These categories, it should be stressed, and as we will see more clearly later on, are everything but absolute. By framing them we do not at all imply that authors situated on the one side completely disregard the other one. This third axis serves mainly as an analytic-heuristic instrument. 92 Yet literally “in effect” also inextricably intertwined. Cf. Chapter 17. 93 This we experienced ourselves many times, in discussing the present research with colleagues and friends. As soon as we had more or less made clear what we are after, most persons looked about with such stunned recognition as if to say: “is that not obvious? I will tell you why!” And indeed, many of the “reasons for love” we have heard mentioned make much sense. A lot of them will be elaborated albeit in more theoretical form further on in this chapter. 94 We will get back to the concept of efficiency in Chapter 10. 95 And in any case to every ‘enhancement’ an ‘obsolescence’ corresponds. Cf. the following chapter. 96 Cf. Wiktionary (‘fascination’). 97 Cf. Introduction. 98 For a pithy reflection on the Apollonian-Dionysian pair from a media-ecological standpoint (and specifically with regard to the work of Camille Paglia), cf. Strate 2006. 99 The split of course “happened” when subject and object were segregated. 100 But cf. Chapter 10. 101 For a more elaborate treatment of the concept of speed, specifically in relation to the setup of the present work, cf. Chapter 17. 102 Tony Schwartz in turn adjusts Boorstin’s argument, relocating it again within the “efficiency-as-universal” discourse: it is true that before telephones, radios, and cars were invented, people did not have a need for them, but they did have a desire for better communication, more access to entertainment, and faster transport (T. Schwartz 1981, 66). 103 For an extremely well-balanced analysis of the Amish’ use of technology, cf. Kelly 2011. 104 We will elaborate on McLuhan’s theory of extension in Chapter 6. 105 More on the work of Andy Clark, too, can be found in Chapter 6.

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106

This confusion should be cleared up throughout the four chapters of Part I. Cf. Chapter 6. In any case some, like William Blattner, choose to see fantasies of disembodiment for what they are: just fantasies (Blattner 2006, 64). 108 Once again, the issue cannot be treated of comprehensively here, but we offer a brief review of some of the questions central to our purposes. For more on technology- and mediarelated power issues, cf. Part II and specifically Chapters 11 and 13. 109 A potential of ICT also scrutinized, and wholeheartedly defended, by Shirky (2008) and Tapscott (2008). 110 A whole debate about the role of social media in these political protests has been going on since: were they ‘Twitter Revolutions’ or not? For a balanced piece on the Iranian case, cf. Keller 2010. An analysis of the Tunisian and Egyptian situations can be found in Pollock 2011. 111 The limited scope of this work does not allow us to delve very deeply here into the ‘philosophy of information’ developed by among others but most importantly Luciano Floridi (2011; 2010) who sees information as the fabric that holds together our (contemporary) world. Cf. also Borgmann 1999; Gleick 2011; Logan forthcoming. 112 For an extensive treatment of this theory, cf. Chapter 12. 113 A viewpoint not completely inassimilable, surprisingly, with Levinson’s, who actually discovers an evolutionary pattern in the development of information and communication technologies, but accords to humans instead of to “the environment” the role of “selectors.” In this scenario a gap may still remain between the human biological setup itself and the technologies that “sprang” from it. Cf., again, Chapter 12. 114 Turkle’s latest work qualifies this earlier, more optimistic stance (2009; 2011). 115 ‘[H]ave we indulged ourselves […] with new toys, new games, new amusements, new entertainments, and used the very technologies with which we indulge our whims […] to shield us from the consequences of our egoistic self-indulgence?’ (Fallon 2009, 13) 116 The same goes for e-mail checking. 117 We will return to the concept of ‘neuroplasticity’ in Chapter 15. 118 It is not a coincidence that our categories of “control” and “contact” show a resemblance to Wiener’s terms of ‘control and communication.’ Yet we seek to expand the meaning of these terms that stay in his elaboration relatively limited to the “structural,” cybernetic functioning of systems as such, much more toward matters of social, political, and existential importance. 119 Our translation. 120 Derksen specifically points to the potential dangers for education (2009, 158-162). 121 Cf. also Lee Worth Bailey’s The Enchantments of Technology, that points out that beneath the so-called disenchantment brought about by science and technology, a deeper enchantment akin to fantasy, myth, and fascination lingers (2005). Paul Levinson, in ‘An Easter Theory of Technology,’ suggests that the emergence of technology could be traced back to the Christian ‘taste for miracles.’ ‘Whatever the origins, whether in cosmic truth or religious politics, I’d suggest that the emphasis on Christ’s physical transcendence of death gave the Western world an affinity for physical transformations – the 107

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stock and soul of technology – lacking or outrightly opposed by other religions.’ (1992, 69) 122 Analysts from Gartner, Inc. have coined the term ‘hype cycle’ to make sense of the different stages in the adoption of technologies. Every cycle incorporates, among others, a period of inflated expectations, immediately followed by one of disillusionment. For our purposes here especially the first is of relevance. Cf. Fenn and Raskino 2008. 123 It is mostly a group phenomenon, since the craved-for technologies are produced on a large scale, although the specific relationship can be said to be entered into individually. We particularly treat of the latter form of relationship (“structural”) in Part I, and of the former (“historical”) in Part II. 124 Cf. Rogers 2003, 219ff. 125 As for that, Reeves and Nass suggest that ‘[c]laims about amplified responses to new media are often exaggerated.’ (1996, 252) 126 The term “hype” is significant here. A hype is defined by Wiktionary (‘hype’) as ‘promotion, propaganda; especially, exaggerated claims.’ In the same way the person falling in love with another exaggerates the qualities of that other, projects an ideal – either or not based as in classic Freudian psychoanalysis on images and experiences of the original mother object – onto the beloved person. 127 Heidegger, quite visionarily, already speaks of ‘curiosity’ in 1927 (1962, 214ff.): the constant craving for the seeing and meeting of new things, a procedure or activity not unlike that of operant conditioning (Stamps 1995, 156). 128 For a recent volume investigating the multifarious relations between media and drugs, cf. MacDougall 2012. 129 Rejection must in a crucial sense be seen as a derivative of, and in any case in close connection with the craze, since it is mostly the infatuation with new technologies that makes us discard old ones. 130 Very practical demonstrations can be found with Tenner 1996; Tenner 2003. Also many excellent illustrations of the ambivalence of technology have been furnished within the fields of SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) and the wider Science and Technology Studies (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Bijker and Law 1992). One acutely relevant example is Hård and Jamison’s study Hubris and Hybrids (2005), that seeks to investigate the interrelation of our hubris in matters of technology and science and its main contemporary externalization, namely, the proliferation of hybrids (Latour; cf. Chapters 3 and 12). 131 An extensive discussion of the tetrad and the ‘laws’ can be found in Chapter 9. 132 Cf. Chapter 9. 133 According to McLuhan these conditions include a medium’s ‘overheating’ – a term relating to his ‘hot’-’cool’ distinction. Cf. Chapter 11. 134 Cf. Chapter 3, Section 3.5.1. 135 As already suggested in our discussion of Bross’ analysis of McLuhan’s “sensualism,” McLuhan can very well be interpreted within a cyberneticist framework; we return to this topic in Chapter 7.

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136 Eric McLuhan sees an analogy between his father’s ‘structural impact’-’sensory closure’ pair and Adolf von Hildebrand’s differentiation between ‘perceptual form’ and ‘actual form.’ (2005, 184) 137 Cf. Chapter 2. 138 McLuhan, in Culture Is Our Business: ‘Fish don’t know water exists till beached.’ (1970, 191) 139 A situation that will apparently only worsen over time: ‘[…] mankind is approaching that state of dreaming wide awake.’ (M. McLuhan and Stearn 1967, 279) 140 For more on this notion cf. Chapter 12. 141 At the same time Marchessault observes by way of the extension theory: ‘[…] McLuhan would refuse the nature/culture divide.’ (2005, 74) 142 For a more detailed discussion of analogies between McLuhan and the larger project of phenomenology, cf. Chapter 3 and in particular Chapter 6. 143 For an extensive treatment of the parallels between McLuhanist media theory and the broad tradition of Critical Theory, cf. Chapter 10. 144 In the history of thought the arts have often been seen as having salvational effects and the power to correct the wrongs of a given culture. Derrick de Kerckhove puts it like this: ‘The main role of the artist or the designer in the context of unlimited power and access is to probe history, natural and social – to cull guidelines from mankind’s more successful experiments in living.’ (1997b, 167) Such special expectations from art are explicit in the work of continental thinkers like among others Marcuse and Heidegger but also in certain strands of cybernetics. Glenn Willmott for instance remarks with regard to Heidegger and McLuhan: ‘[…] for McLuhan, as for Heidegger, the revelation of being, a proper consciousness of existence, belongs foremost to the work of art.’ (1996, 188) Gregory Bateson, too, claims art – but also humor, poetry, and interestingly, schizophrenic symptoms – to be a part of a spectrum of ‘syndroms’ he dubs ‘transcontextual.’ People with a sensitivity for this ‘transcontextuality’ perceive “more”: ‘[…] for them there is always or often a “double take.” A falling leaf, the greeting of a friend, or a “primrose by the river’s brim” is not “just that and nothing more.”’ (2000, 272) 145 Cf. Chapter 11. 146 Several accounts of an original “lack” have been offered in the tradition of philosophical anthropology; cf. Chapter 6, Section 6.6.2. Bernard Stiegler nowadays speaks of a défaut originaire, constitutive of our technological endeavors. His philosophy of technology, that builds on – among others – Simondon’s notion of individuation, analyzes technology as a form of memory originally tied to the human condition, and it in fact appears to strikingly resemble McLuhan’s framework in many places. A possible comparison between Stiegler’s and McLuhan’s views could revolve around their – to a lesser or greater extent – shared notions of ‘environment,’ the continuity between organic and technological evolution, the time-constitutive workings of technology, the analysis of language as medium (and environment), and the aforementioned concept of the original ‘de-fault’ (Stiegler 1998). Unfortunately however, due to constraints of scope such a comparison cannot concern us here. For an extensive reading of Stiegler in the

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context of especially the German tradition of philosophy of technology (in Dutch), cf. Pieter Lemmens’ PhD dissertation (2008). 147 This employment of terms is partly inspired by a similar word use by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1963). Cf. also Chapter 6. 148 Although some would question a too strict boundary between these two; cf. infra. 149 To wit: R.W. Emerson (Kostelanetz 1969; Meyrowitz 1985, 342n.; M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 94-95; O’Keefe 1995, 168), Karl Marx (Lister et al. 2009, 91), Ernst Kapp (Mitcham 1994, 24; Lister et al. 2009, 91-92), Samuel Butler (Meyrowitz 1985, 342n.), Henri Bergson (Benoist 1968, 3; Balle 1972, 43; Curtis 1978; Meyrowitz 1985, 342n.; Lister et al. 2009, 92), Sigmund Freud (Meyrowitz 1985, 342n.), Ernst Cassirer (Curtis 1978), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (ibid.), Wyndham Lewis (Gordon 1997a, 120-121), Jean Gebser (Curtis 1978), Arnold Gehlen (Rieger 2008), I.A. Richards (Marchessault 2005, 7), Lewis Mumford (Curtis 1978; Meyrowitz 1985, 342n.; Marchessault 2005, 7), Karl Popper (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 94-95), Edward T. Hall (Molinaro, McLuhan, and Toye 1987, 285; M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 94-95; Marchessault 2005, 7), Hans Hass (M. McLuhan and McLuhan, 1988, 94-95), and in a certain sense even Giambattista Vico: cf. Zingrone 2005. Specifically, Vico points out that most of the expressions of a language come about as metaphors of the body. The work of Vico will be of significant influence on the later McLuhan (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988). 150 More comprehensive comparisons between McLuhan’s concept of extension and that of some of his forerunners can be found in Rieger 2008 and especially in Lister et al. 2009, 90ff., Curtis 1978, Rae 2009, and in Sprenger 2011. Lister et al. treat of Aristotle, Marx, Kapp, and Bergson as predecessors of McLuhan. Jim Curtis draws parallels between McLuhan and Kapp, Bergson, Cassirer, Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin, and Mumford. He sees all of them as offering a counterweight to what he calls the linear paradigm, that typically analyzes technology within either a utopian (‘praise’) or a dystopian (‘attack’) framework. The aforementioned theorists share crucial characteristics in that they think holistically, see technology as necessarily implying change, and investigate the effects of technologies on their makers and users (Curtis 1978, 61-62). But perhaps the most complete genealogical account of the extension concept in McLuhan’s work is delivered by Alice Rae in an online article (2009). 151 It should be added that these statements are made in the context of a discussion between two men about the fate of machines in Erewhon. The first fears the possibility of our technologies superseding and overpowering us (a typically dystopian idea). The other defends the machines and their enhancing power. Only one risk according to the latter lurks, and that is the chance of technologies equalizing men’s capacities and hence eliminating the competition so vital for progress (a typically liberal-utopian idea). It is within the latter speaker’s discourse that Butler works out the extension idea. Ironically, the first speaker wins the debate, and it is decided that all inventions in Erewhon – of the preceding 271 years – must be destroyed. Although the Erewhonians eventually choose to deny the extending force of technology, Butler’s analysis of technologies-as-extension – of 1872 – is still very much relevant today:

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Man has now many extra-corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-book. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then be seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair: if he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a coachman. (Butler 2002, 137)

Butler, surreptitiously and shrewdly, elaborates upon the social-political implications of this sort of technology use – highly visionary at the time, if one considers, for instance, the transhumanist debate today. 152 It seems hard to agree with Curtis on this point. Nevertheless, the interesting question may be: why not? Curtis puts forward, among others, this reason: ‘I believe that [...] Bergson has given the first serious attempt to interpret politics and international relations in a paradigmatic, suprapersonal way by relating them to technological change.’ (1978, 68). But then, why Bergson and not Heidegger, Ellul, or... McLuhan? 153 ‘Teilhard de Chardin made the first serious attempt to relate technological change to man’s experience of the transcendent. He thus wished to do for modern man what Cassirer had done for nonliterate peoples in Mythical Thought.’ (Curtis 1978, 71) 154 Our translation. 155 Cf. also Chapter 4, Section 4.5.5. 156 In other places McLuhan mentions Teilhard de Chardin and Joyce. For an extensive genealogy of McLuhan’s influences with regard to the extension idea – quoted or not – cf. Rae 2009. Cf. also Curtis 1978, 83. 157 Cf. Rae 2009. 158 Cf. Chapter 8. 159 William Kuhns calls it the principle of ‘organic continuity,’ and sees Innis and McLuhan as pioneers of a concept of ‘environment’ that is not based on the influence that that environment exercises on humans, but on the organic continuity of it with humans (1971, 136). Paul Levinson in this context quotes Buckminster Fuller, who calls technology a ‘[...] a functional equivalent of human biological systems [...]’ and speaks about the ‘[...] equation of flesh-andblood with steel-and-wire [...]’ (1987, 48). 160 For more on this idea, cf. Chapter 12. 161 Cf. also M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 53, 116, 143. 162 Cf. Chapter 14. 163 For instance: ‘As extensions of our bodies, tools and technologies give us new leverage and new intensity of perception and action.’ (M. McLuhan and Parker, 1970, 38) 164 McLuhan here smartly retrieves the ancient ‘sensorium’ idea in contemporary medical theories. 165 Mark Federman and Derrick de Kerckhove observe, albeit specifically in relation to management, that the anesthetic effect of ‘narcosis’ should not so much be likened to surgical

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narcosis, but rather to catatonia or hypnosis, i.e., states in which the subject is still amenable to suggestion (2003, 50). 166 An idea later picked up and developed within postphenomenology as the dynamic between amplification and reduction, as we will see in the next chapter. 167 Cf. also Trybulec 2011. 168 This is corroborated by a text by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, published in 2007, titled ‘The Missing Media Laws’: Eric remarks here that in the original manuscript of Laws of Media a distinction is made, eventually to be left off in the published version, between ‘laws’ applying to either the ‘private’ or the ‘corporate body.’ ‘We used it to indicate whether the topic was an extension of the body private or public.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 2007, 197) Once again this seems to suggest an inherent paradoxicality in McLuhan’s thought, for the ‘body public’ could in a certain sense be seen as an extension in itself. Indirectly this would lead us to the question whether the body is not a medium in itself. For an elaboration of that idea, cf. Van Den Eede 2011b. 169 For a more extensive discussion of the tetrad, cf., again, Chapter 9. 170 This idea of ‘understanding of media grammars’ as such is already present in McLuhan’s thinking as early as 1960 when an anthology of the Explorations journal is (originally) published (M. McLuhan and Carpenter 1970, Introduction). 171 We should be cautious, though, not to relapse into old mind-body dualisms. Cf. Chapter 9. 172 Paul Levinson remarks that the ‘phantom captain’ of the ‘self’ stays the coordinating force (1987, 47). Cf. also Section 6.5.4. 173 In this regard, Pierre Lévy criticizes McLuhan’s extension theory for not grasping the specificity of the ‘technical phenomenon’: ‘One can give one’s cousins flints. One can produce thousands of bifaces. But one cannot multiply one’s nails or lend them to one’s neighbor. More than an extension of the body, a tool is a virtualization of the action.’ (1998, 73; our translation) So technologies are something else than “just” extensions – they are ‘virtualizations’ of human capacities. Notwithstanding the fruitfulness and importance of the virtualization concept, this interpretation seems a bit off the mark. Lévy seems to imply here that an extension is simply a sort of “copy,” whereas the McLuhanist extension theory clearly rejects that idea: every extension is a transformation and not just a duplication. McLuhan’s extension idea comes closer, perhaps, to the virtualization concept than Lévy would like to admit. 174 By of way of illustration, one should for instance consider people on the train, engrossed in newspapers, crossword puzzles, novels, or the music played on their mp3 players – giving the impression of being closed in on themselves. In the context of the extension theory, however, we should view them instead as “enlarged” complexes – and their activities as expansions, not as closures. It is exactly the person who is not “naked” or “unextended” that cannot be spoken to, that is unapproachable, unanswerable. Enlarging ourselves materially, empowers us also in a social sense. 175 Sandy Stone – an author in the ‘cyborg’ tradition – relates in this regard her early crush on

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radio technology: ‘Hooked on technology. I could take a couple of coils of wire and a hunk of galena and send a whole part of myself out into the ether. An extension of my will, of my instrumentality... that’s a prosthesis, all right.’ (1995, 3) She then goes on to observe, just like McLuhan, that we do not only extend ourselves into our technologies, they also extend into us (ibid., 5). 176 Or ‘formal cause’; cf. Chapter 8. 177 A whole field of inquiry and an attending debate around this very idea has been spurred into existence only recently by Nicholas Carr’s famous article in The Atlantic, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ (2008). 178 This illustration alone can help to make sense of what, according to Gordon, McLuhan sees as the ‘[…] inadvisability of a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological […]’ (1997a, 204). Also according to Jim Morrison, McLuhan treats of the mind as an implicit part of the body (2006, 176). Cf. Section 4.5 of Chapter 4. 179 Cf. also: ‘It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt, 1972, 90) 180 Gordon puts it similarly: ‘The user is always the content of any medium. He creates the meaning by gradually discovering the potential of the medium of which he is the content.’ (1997a, 177) Cf. also ibid., 178, 184, 217. 181 As we have seen at the beginning, this is also the basic assumption of this chapter. 182 Willmott explains: His media formalism is continuous with the formalist aims of traditional aesthetic modernism, except that this modernism is, in McLuhan’s hands, reversed from an alienated form of aesthetic experience into the totalizing form of cultural experience which grounds it. Modernism in reverse reinvents modernism as a symptom of modernity subject to its own undoing and retracing, and according to its own aesthetic principles – thus pushed to the postmodern limits of a self-deconstructing textual event […] (Willmott 1996, 206-207) 183

However not his “cultural” analysis; cf. Chapter 5 and specifically Part II. Clark is, not surprisingly, influenced by Heideggerian phenomenology (Clark 1997). 185 Cf. infra. 186 For a contrasting position, cf. Van den Bossche 2011. 187 Cf. Chapter 3. 188 An idea to a certain extent also to be found in Bateson. Cf. Chapter 3. 189 Compare to H. Schmidt 1954. 190 Conversely and perhaps surprisingly, Clark also distinguishes between EXTENDED and the ‘merely prosthetic use of nonbiological props and aids’ (2008, 99). Thus, not all extensions are part of EXTENDED. This seems a digression from the McLuhanist scheme, in which the extension concept is so broad that in fact all ‘human-made’ artifacts – including things, ideas, institutions – extend us. 184

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191 Logan can be said to express this idea by way of his equation, specifically inspired by McLuhan: ‘mind = brain + language.’ Language extends the brain. (2007, 63) 192 In fact in his view, just as with McLuhan, language is a technology and every technology is a language. 193 And up until today the debate about the extension concept rages on: cf. Kiran and Verbeek 2010; Heersmink 2011. 194 Cf. also Chapter 14. 195 Notwithstanding Weiss’ own critical stance towards Clark’s ‘natural-born cyborg’ thesis – he sees it as too oblivious of social, political, and gender-related construction (Weiss unpublished paper ‘(De)Naturalizing the Cyborg: Science Meets (Feminist) Sci Fi’) – and Jean-Marie Benoist’s sarcastic depiction of McLuhan’s extension theory as ‘this is what McLuhan calls anthropology […]’ (1968, 4). 196 We owe this exact phrasing to Gert Goeminne, who in January 2009 organized a workshop with Don Ihde in Ghent titled ‘Opening up the In-between: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Science, Technology and Social Change.’ 197 There is a “thing” side to the medium; cf. Chapter 8. 198 Gordon sees parallels between ‘the medium is the message’ and Aquinas’ principle of instrumentality as the ‘unmoved mover’: media change people’s perception without being modified themselves (1997a, 174). An interpretation that is in our view problematic. Media undergo change just as much as “people,” which is illustrated richly by the ‘laws of media,’ as we will see. Instead of an instrumental relation, we propose, one should rather speak of interaction. 199 Cf. also the previous chapter. 200 This, once again, does not mean that there is no substantivist side to McLuhan. But it does not necessarily have to be located within the ‘medium is the message’ probe alone. Cf. Chapter 8. 201 See, for other explanations and explorations of the ‘medium is the message’ probe: Kostelanetz 1969, 89-90; Littlejohn 1989, 256; Logan 2000; Federman 2004; Thießen 2007. 202 The use of the term “containment” here should not be confused with McLuhan’s criticism of ‘visual space’ as ‘container’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 22ff.). 203 McLuhan is strongly influenced by Jung, yet Jung’s concept of archetype, as a form forever buried in the collective unconscious, does not quite fit McLuhan’s cliché-archetype pattern, since an archetype buried so deep could never become a cliché (Patterson 1990, 130). 204 For other helpful explanations of the ‘the content of a new medium is an older medium’ probe, cf. Berland 1992 and S. B. Gibson and Oviedo 2000. Berland draws an analogy with the hardware-software distinction: ‘McLuhan (1964) contends that each new medium adopts the “content” of its predecessor and thereby disguises its real historical efficacy. Another way of putting this is that cultural hardware precedes the software that will constitute its content.’ (1992, 43) She further adds as illustrations (old) television sets and vinyl: ‘Like their myths of origin, these now carry the traces of the obsolete which, as McLuhan observed, separate the older media and turn their language into art, reinvested with aura and newly desirable as content for the newer technologies, which exactly in this way remain invisible to us in terms of their real or

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potential meaning, their social physiognomy, their “historical efficacy.”’ (ibid., 46) Gibson and Oviedo, then, offer another analogy, however somehow questionable, namely with economics: ‘Agreeing, in essence, with McLuhan, who argued that the content of each new medium is the medium that came before, network economists basically that [sic] the economy is now the content of the new medium of the global information infrastructure (the Net).’ (2000, 313) 205 Angus remarks in this regard that ‘[...] there is no intrinsic content of the medium as such at all.’ (2000b, 23) But all the while there is no ‘outside’ of media of communication either (ibid., 37). 206 Our translation. 207 Along these lines Lance Strate proposes: ‘[G]oing beyond the media-as-environments point of view, I want to suggest that McLuhan’s approach can best be understood when we employ the verb form of mediating.’ (2011b, 60-61) In our view, however, mediation and environment emerge together. 208 Although McLuhan sometimes employs the term ‘environmental’ to describe the formal aspects of media or environments, as the next quote illustrates. 209 Is ‘synesthesia’ McLuhan’s very own “to be sought after” archetype? 210 But especially with regard to the term ‘interface,’ cf. Chapters 8 and 9. 211 Cf. the last section of this chapter. 212 But, once again, only in this light, as we will find in the next chapter. 213 Donald Theall relates that McLuhan reads Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1950 (2001, 30), and adds that he rejects at that time Wiener’s mathematical theory of communication, but is very much impressed by his understanding of the social role of communication, especially elaborated in his The Human Use of Human Beings, a work that McLuhan here and there quotes. Fred Turner comments: ‘The dual interest in a cybernetic understanding of, on the one hand, communication media and, on the other hand, tribal forms of social organization, that McLuhan developed in the early 1950s, became a central element of his media theories in the early 1960s and a major influence on the contemporary art world.’ (2008, 113; our translation) Others suggest that McLuhan’s introduction to cybernetics happens through his reading of Human Use (Pias 2008, 144). But even if cybernetics’ direct influence on McLuhan is debated, several analogies between the two can be drawn. For an overview of McLuhanist concepts that are deducible to popular cyberneticist ideas, cf. Pias 2008, 142-143. McLuhan analyzes the famous Pavlov experiment along the same lines as Gregory Bateson (M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001b, 70-71; G. Bateson 2002, 110-112). And Bross, as we already saw, suggests to interpret McLuhan’s perception theory from a cyberneticist standpoint (1992, 102). Cf. also Bexte 2008, 335-336. 214 For a systematic comparative analysis of McLuhan and systems theory, cf. Strate 2011b, 53ff. Strate argues that McLuhan develops his ideas in the same period as when general systems theory and cybernetics are worked out, and the latent congruencies between the two are then picked up by among others Joshua Meyrowitz (Meyrowitz 1985). 215 Phenomenology as such, of course, goes back to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

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Hegel, who already hints at a relational ontology, at least in Herbert Marcuse’s interpretation, as Andrew Feenberg points out: ‘Essence is relatedness and the development that proceeds out of relatedness.’ (2005, 61) 216 For another comparison between McLuhan and Bateson, however more oriented towards media theory, cf. Angus 2000b, 42ff. For a comprehensive situating of Bateson’s thought within Media Ecology, cf. Anton 2011; Strate 2006, 60-61; Strate 2011b, 61-63, 132-136. 217 An interpretation of McLuhan which is at least questionable if not completely wrong. Heim, however, does hit the nail on the head when he points out that McLuhan, inspired by Walter Ong, develops an ‘interactive epistemology’ that treats of knowledge as it arises in relation to tools and to other persons (Heim, 1994, 68). Derrick de Kerckhove hints at more or less the same idea when he writes, in reference to the Japanese concept of ‘ma,’ i.e., ‘space-time,’ how ‘[...] man-machine interactions [...] fill the so-called objective world with thick networks of activities. This is the psychotechnological ma [...]’ (1997b, 166-167). 218 Cf. Chapter 3. 219 Glenn Willmott sees the Heideggerian Ent-fernung, which is an existential phenomenon partly brought on by the appearance of media such as radio, as parallel to the ‘tribal’ closeness of the ‘global village’ that McLuhan depicts, coming into existence in concord with the ‘electric technology’ (1996, 188). 220 It should be observed, however, that Heidegger’s definition is more in line with mechanical-industrial technology than with ICT. Cf. Van den Bossche 2003, 40. 221 In Chapter 5 we touched upon this ambiguity with regard to ‘understanding,’ which is exactly the “seeing” of mediation (cf. Section 5.4.2). 222 Misleading may be a part of McLuhan’s reading of King Lear in The Gutenberg Galaxy. When Shakespeare writes ‘‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, / All just supply and all relation [...]’ (quoted in M. McLuhan 1962, 258), this could be seen as a coupling of “relation” to the Gutenberg era, whereas ‘visual’ technologies in fact cover up “relationality.” But ‘relation’ here should rather be interpreted as referring to the uniform, linear sequencing and fragmentation of all domains of life heralded by modernity and, according to McLuhan, brilliantly foreseen by Shakespeare. 223 Although Theall avers that McLuhan ‘certainly read’ Bateson’s work (2001, 61). Conversely, Mary Catherine Bateson (personal communication, June 11, 2010) as well as Peter Harries-Jones (personal communication, November 9, 2011) have no absolute knowledge of Bateson ever having read McLuhan. 224 Latour observes sardonically with regard to the word ‘context’: ‘[…] there is nothing wrong any more with using the word ‘contexts’.’ (2005b, 191) 225 Typically, content-focused media analysis stands for a one-sided involvement with ‘products,’ formal ‘understanding’ means engagement with multifarious ‘processes.’ 226 McLuhan remarks, on a related note, about relativity: ‘In this approach objects make their own space and are not contained in any space. Consciousness itself would be a relation among objects or experiences.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 41)

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227 Charlton points out that Bateson is a monist: ‘[…] ultimately, all is one.’ (2008, 39) Here, again, an interesting parallel can be found with McLuhan, who according to Curtis must be seen as a holist: ‘Holistic concepts logically lead one to think of the world as a unit, and of electrical technology as its binding force.’ (1978, 79) Cf. also Theall 1975, 23. Notwithstanding the potentially complex relation between monism and holism, clearly McLuhan and Bateson, from an ontological perspective, are on the same track. 228 A coupling that, unfortunately, cannot be detailedly elaborated upon here. 229 Again, a task that, alas, cannot be completed within the bounds of the current work. 230 Ihde quotes him in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (2007, 6, 227), but in a recent online interview by Laureano Ralon he terms McLuhan ‘[…] interesting, popular, but ultimately somewhat superficial.’ (Ralon 2010a) 231 Cf. Chapters 2, 5, and 6. 232 Cf. Chapter 3. 233 Although they diverge too, as we will immediately see in Section 7.4.5. 234 Cf. Chapter 5. 235 Moreover, just like McLuhan (and Clark and Logan), Ihde sees writing as technological: ‘Writing is a technologically embedded form of language.’ (1990, 81) Cf. also Mitcham 1994, 188189. 236 Cf. Chapter 4. 237 Cf., for more on ‘hybrid energy,’ Chapter 12. 238 Cf. Chapter 11. 239 Cf. Chapter 13. 240 Cf., for more, Chapter 17. 241 Cf. also M. McLuhan 1997d. 242 It may also be related to the already mentioned concept of synesthesia, which McLuhan derives from E.H. Gombrich (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 5). 243 Cf. Chapter 2. 244 It is in the first instance formulated by McLuhan as an attempt to update Understanding Media and to lend some scientific rigor to his ideas (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, vii–viii). Nonetheless it remains highly debatable whether he succeeds in the latter task. 245 For an introductory reading, cf. Chapter 5. 246 Letter to Barbara Rowes, April 29, 1976, quoted in Gordon 1997a, 224. 247 Most authors limit themselves to either a disavowal – McLuhan’s tetrad should not be taken too seriously; cf. for example Stamps 1995, 142ff. – or an elusive promise of relevance – the tetrad can form a starting point for a wholly new approach to media; cf. for instance Grosswiler 1998, 82. For an overview of the reviews of Laws of Media, cf. Guardiani 1991. 248 Although that is slowly changing. More and more theorists are making sincere attempts at application of the tetrad to specific problems. Ed Tywoniak, for one, is launching a project (starting Spring 2012) in which a tetradic analysis of technology in Aboriginal culture will be tried (Tywoniak 2010). Media ecologist Robert MacDougall also avidly employs the tetrad, to the

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extent that in a recent volume edited by him, every paper incorporates a tetrad on a phenomenon investigated in the concerned text (MacDougall 2012; MacDougall 2005). And the ‘McLuhan’s Philosophy of Media – Centennial Conference / Contact Forum’ held in Brussels, October 2011, had a session on the ‘Laws of Media,’ involving presentations by Read Mercer Schuchardt (2011), Robert K. Blechman (2011), and Marco Adria (2011). 249 This, too, is now changing, mostly due to the publication of Media and Formal Cause (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 2011) by Eric McLuhan, a collection of papers on the theme by himself and his father. 250 In fact in some locations McLuhan hints at the recent obsolescence of the term ‘cause’ altogether: ‘[…] it has been the consensus of modern science and philosophy that we have now shifted from “cause” to “configuration” in all fields of study and analysis.’ (M. McLuhan 1962, 252) 251 Lance Strate, in his introduction to Media and Formal Cause: ‘In this sense, Eric McLuhan presents us with a decidedly non-Aristotelian (in the Korzybskian sense) Aristotle, an Aristotle that is consistent with general semantics.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 2011, x) 252 Cf. also M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 89; M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 79. 253 For example, the ground, i.e., the formal cause, of a poem is the audience (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 79). Of course here again we can see the influence of New Criticism literary analysis. 254 Although the McLuhans stay ambivalent on this point. Eric McLuhan for instance also defines ‘ground’ as the ‘formal cause’ of ‘figure’ in each sense (1998, 79). 255 Cf. the chapter ‘Causality in the Electric World’ by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt in M. McLuhan and McLuhan 2011, 27-58. 256 Harman explains it thus: formal causation ‘[…] encompasses all of a thing’s aspects at once […]’ (2009a, 105); efficient causation ‘[…] emphasizes a sequence of one discrete figure following another.’ (ibid., 105). Formal causation is auditory-tactile, and it seems to be the ‘natural’ state of space, for it is not made by any technology. A remark by Lance Strate in Media and Formal Cause is also helpful. He argues that by media ecologists (and biologists, by the way) the term ‘causation’ is never used in a strictly determinist sense but rather as a ‘[…] form of shorthand […] used to represent much more complex processes. That complexity can be better represented by the concept of formal cause, rather than cause-and-effect (otherwise known as efficient cause); formal cause is the causality of emergent properties […]’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 2011, x). 257 Cf. also: ‘Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.’ (M. McLuhan and Carson 2003, 489) 258 In an earlier version of the manuscript, Anton draws the parallel between formal cause and Heidegger’s ‘as-structure.’ 259 The confusion between temporal and spatial concepts is deliberate here. 260 Personal communication, October 28, 2011. 261 Some qualifications notwithstanding, as we will see in Chapter 9.

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262 This is also suggested to a certain extent by Glenn Willmott’s comparison of McLuhan’s and Heidegger’s frameworks (1996, 180ff.). Cf. Chapter 7. 263 This implies, according to Harman, that Heidegger’s ‘as-structure’ reigns between all objects, and is not just a human phenomenon (Harman 2002, 222). Linking this up with Corey Anton’s suggestion to liken formal cause to the as-structure, this would mean that formal cause becomes an issue for all entities. For an extended discussion of the as-structure with Harman, cf. 2002, 68ff. 264 Latour, for his part, though generally sympathetic towards Harman’s appropriation of his ideas, blows rather hot and cold about its purported relevance. Cf. Latour, Harman, and Erdélyi 2011, 41ff. 265 Surprisingly comparable, we must add, to McLuhan’s. For a closer comparison of McLuhan’s and Latour’s frameworks, cf. Chapter 12. 266 The notion of “energy” will serve us well in our investigation of the “beloved object” at the “historical” level, where we discuss McLuhan’s concept of ‘hybrid energy.’ 267 The sense in which nowadays the word is used – e.g., as in “computer interface” – is not that far removed from the way in which McLuhan seems to deploy it. 268 Rust for instance would be one way of modifying the ‘interval’ in such a way that the functioning of this particular medium – for instance a car, a wheelbarrow – would be essentially mortgaged. This would not mean that there is no longer an interval. Rather the interval would shift from the wheel-axle axis to the relation between the user and the now “broken” vehicle – a situation Heidegger has, as we have seen, described as ‘conspicuousness’ – and to the call, from the latter to the former, to remediate the problem. 269 It also does not help to simply revert to a “classic” Heidegger interpretation, as Glenn Willmott does in defining ‘existentia’ as the ‘ground of mere being’ which is present-at-hand, and ‘existence’ with the ‘form of human concern’ which is ready-to-hand (1996, 186). If one has to choose, McLuhan’s ‘ground’ in any case fits better with Zuhandenheit than with Vorhandenheit, which in turn definitely shares more characteristics with ‘figure.’ 270 In Harman’s words, sounding quite McLuhanist: ‘[…] the dramatic interplay of object and network […]’ (2010a, 4). 271 Cf. Chapter 6. 272 Harman’s discussion of the tetrad is significantly more complex than we represent it here. He explicitly dwells on what we have previously called the “holographic” aspect of the tetrad: each one of the quadrants is in itself analyzable in a tetradic way. More precisely, thus, in its very own ‘enhancement’ quadrant, enhancement means a move from potency to act (Harman 2009a, 109). For our purposes here we deem it unnecessary to detailedly focus on this “tetrad-of-thetetrad.” 273 Again, in its ‘enhancement’ quadrant (Harman 2009a, 113). 274 This may be confusing, since McLuhan himself sees obsolescence as a ground aspect. Nevertheless, we should not forget that McLuhan himself essentially works with a three-stage scheme, that includes the ‘new’ medium, the ‘old’ medium, and the ‘older’ medium. A new

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medium obsolesces an old medium, but takes an older medium for its content. For instance, one could modify Harman’s example in this way: e-mail – together with the computer – makes the typewriter obsolescent, but retrieves calligraphy. One may or may not agree with this scheme of succession. 275 In this way reversal is the only tetrad quadrant suitable as bridge to the “historical level” discussed in Part II. 276 Up until today, the term ‘media ecology’ – even within the context of the already broadranging activities of circles related to the Media Ecology Association – denotes more an involvement with “classic” communications media than with the sort of everything-as-medium thinking we attempt to grasp here. Nota bene: a first version of this phrase contained the typo ‘in the true sense of the world,’ which would hold true just as much. 277 This line hails from the Depeche Mode track Everything Counts (1983). 278 For a more elaborate discussion of Latour’s framework, cf. Chapters 3 and 12. 279 At this moment the biggest medium to be found in the universe could be said to be the universe itself, and the smallest media: quarks? 280 Up until now strands of this debate are recognizable in the Media Ecology literature, more specifically in the work of Anton (forthcoming) and Strate (2006; 2011b), who would agree and disagree, respectively, with the McLuhans’ decision to deny ‘natural’ things the status of ‘medium.’ The latter, however, deeply influenced by general semantics and systems theory, mostly only stresses McLuhan’s “relational” side, thus arriving at a perspective along the lines of the one we sketched in Chapter 7 (cf. Section 7.2.4). 281 Nonetheless, recently he has qualified this stance, however without, for now, further elaborating on it (personal communication, October 28, 2011). 282 A way of theorizing that Harman calls ‘hyperbolic’ (2009b, 120-121). 283 In Eric McLuhan’s words: ‘[T]hey [the ‘laws of media’] reveal nothing about animal products, such as webs or dams or nests, except perhaps thereby confirming the ancient observation that it is chiefly speech that makes us human and distinct from the rest of creation.’ (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, x) 284 Perhaps the simplest and best trick to get at a good description of a thing’s formal cause is: explain what a thing “is” to a small child. 285 No one, at least not according to existing reports, has ever seen a baboon drive one. 286 Cf. also Marc Van den Bossche (1998), who reads ecological awareness as something that arises in the first instance out of our very corporeality. Timothy Morton, then, wanting to reconstitute ecological ideology by scrapping its central concept of ‘Nature’ (2007) and by (re)framing ‘the ecological thought’ as a radical ‘thinking of interconnectedness’ (2010, 7), seems to be on the same track when he argues how ‘[e]cology is a matter of human experience.’ (ibid., 12) He also observes (without reference to McLuhan): ‘Seeing the Earth from space is the beginning of ecological thinking. The first aeronauts, balloon pilots, immediately saw Earth as an alien world.’ (ibid., 14) Latour, from another perspective – namely, the redefinition of the field of political ecology by way of concepts in ANT – endeavors to make the ‘nature’ notion redundant

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as well (2004). 287 Even though David Abram prods us to ‘become animal’ (2010). 288 Interestingly, Levi R. Bryant and Ian Bogost are working on a book in which they also wish to expand McLuhan’s ‘medium’ definition on the basis of, among others, Graham Harman’s work, but their proposal is to reform the tetrad as a pentad, adding another sort of ‘extension’ as fifth component. This ‘extension,’ in their view, should be seen as a relation that can come about between any and all entities (Bogost 2011). So far their project appears to be very much convergent with the current undertaking, which proposes to fuse the tetrad and Harman’s fourfold into the concept of the “medial node”; however, the following section adds a crucial twist. Also, a strange, partial reversal of the present argument can be found in Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010), that seeks to investigate (social) media from the perspective of insect forms of social organization. Here media are redefined, so to speak, from the viewpoint of (other) animals – a viewpoint that can itself only be human-made, as all “our” knowledge of insects should be seen (at least to a certain extent) as a construct of “us.” 289 ‘Speculative Realism’ gathers the most diverse perspectives, but all are united in a reaction to what is seen to be one of the central tenets of nearly all philosophy since Kant: ‘correlationism,’ a term coined by Quentin Meillassoux. ‘By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.’ (Meillassoux 2008, 5) Correlationism takes up a sort of middle position between realism and idealism, in that it neither posits the existence of a world outside of the mind nor claims the world to exist wholly inside of the mind, but assumes instead a primary link – correlation – between the world and the human, who is always already immersed in the world. Unlike some other speculative realists, among them Harman, who reject correlationism altogether, Meillassoux wants to retain it, but radicalize it “from the inside,” towards ‘strong correlationism.’ For an introduction to Meillassoux’s work, cf. Harman 2011b. For an excellent and critical overview of the speculative-realist field, cf. the edited volume Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011. 290 Cf. Chapter 12, Section 12.3.2. 291 For another assessment of McLuhan’s ‘technological humanism,’ cf. Kroker 1984, 52ff. 292 A tendency of which McLuhan himself is perhaps guilty. 293 The activity of naming is never isolated, non-committal, or exhaustible. McLuhan suggests as much when he writes, in a riff on Joyce: ‘[T]he name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.’ (2003, 49) In themselves “medial nodes,” naming and labelling function as technologies by way of which we ‘grasp and let go’ of our environment. Gordon illustrates this splendidly: ‘Think of an infant letting go of its mother’s breast and saying “ma.”’ (Gordon, Hamaji, and Albert 2007, 16) 294 In this way it lines up well with Larry Hickman’s pragmatist epistemology, that sees “nature” as a social artifact, just as well as “the individual” and “society” are – these are all ‘tools

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to be used.’ (2001, 57) 295 Obviously a very Platonist idea. Cf. also Chapter 4. 296 Though not necessarily narcissists; cf. Chapter 14. 297 The “one” in this sentence should not be interpreted literally, rather generically, so to speak. Of course at any given time there is a constellation of countless “loves.” The idea is that at the “structural” level, this constellation – within discourse – is perceived as constant, or more precisely expected, desired to stay constant. A condition that is obviously, “most of the times,” not viable. One could thus say that the “historical” level represents the “real” situation, however, we should be reminded of the suggestion, in Chapter 5, that the levels are more to be seen as – attitudinal – “views,” as “perspectives,” rather than as representations, although of course multiplicity matches ever more with “reality” than singularity does. However it may be, as “views,” in “reality,” both can be present simultaneously. 298 At the same time, paradoxically, it is the extending on the singular level that makes the power relations on the multiple level. 299 For critical assessments of Feenberg’s work, cf. Veak 2006; Veak 2000; Achterhuis 2001b; Larry A. Hickman 2007, 79-91. 300 Once again, we should stress that this term with Feenberg carries another meaning than the one we deployed in Chapters 8 and 9. 301 ‘Design,’ here, should certainly not be interpreted in the ordinary, namely, “decorative” sense, but as the complete “form” – including “technical,” normative, aesthetic, and other aspects – that a technology takes. It would thus be misleading to compare this notion of design with the one that Derrick de Kerckhove employs in saying: ‘In a very large sense, design plays a metaphorical role, translating functional benefits into sensory and cognitive modalities.’ Design according to de Kerckhove is ‘[…] an echo of technology.’ (1997b, 154) Feenberg’s notion of ‘design’ in this way dovetails even better with McLuhan’s idea of ‘form’ than de Kerckhove’s definition does. As said, ‘design’ with Feenberg covers more than just sensory and cognitive qualities – it stands for “the whole” of the technology. 302 An idea already proposed by Langdon Winner: ‘If we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of technology shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire of some to have dominion over others even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and some violation of the normal standard of trying to get more from less.’ (1986, 24) 303 Barry Commoner, at a conference organized by Gregory Bateson in 1968, phrases this idea albeit with a different emphasis as follows: ‘[…] perhaps the most serious consequence of modern science and technology is that it is serving as a way of blocking the development of value judgments.’ (M. C. Bateson 2005, 96) 304 Personal communication, March 25, 2011. 305 Nevertheless, in some places Feenberg does seem to suggest a stern dialectical tension of the sort we have sketched, for example in Questioning Technology, where he talks of the enduring

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‘class difference’ between technological ‘masters’ who set out the main lines of technological development – ‘planners’ – and ‘ordinary people’ who just encounter technology in their lifeworld. ‘Thus what essentialism conceived as an ontological split between technology and meaning, I conceive as a terrain of struggle between different types of actors differently engaged with technology and meaning.’ (1999, xiii) 306 Compare Chapter 2, Section 2.4.1. 307 Cf. the notion of ‘transparency of context’ in Chapter 3. In using a certain technology something “around” and not “in” the technology needs to become invisible or transparent. With McLuhan this is the ‘message’ of the medium. With Feenberg it is the social history of the device or technique. 308 An idea very much suggested by Angus, who remarks, with regard to McLuhan: ‘It is not a technological determinism, […] because the reversal of a medium’s effect is not an internal consequence of the technology, but a consequence of the relation of the technology to the cultural environment as a whole (constituted by translations between a plurality of media).’ (2000b, 109) 309 Karl Leidlmair distinguishes, not wholly unlike Feenberg, between the ‘thesis of autonomy’ and the ‘thesis of heteronomy’ – respectively, essentialist and constructivist standpoints – as the two large strands within the philosophy of technology, and proposes media theory as a middle position (1999). 310 Not quite a media-theorist critique of dialectical approaches, but perhaps a forerunner – albeit a sarcastic one – of the rehabilitation of McLuhan’s ideas in the service of a less purely dialectical but still sufficiently ‘Critical’ media theory, could be Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’ (1974). Enzensberger interprets McLuhan’s thought as demonstrating that ‘new media’ can be used as repression instruments, but that they can also harbor emancipatory potentials and subversive powers – first of all because they dissolve the hierarchy between sender and receiver (or producer and consumer). According to Enzensberger, Marxists – with the exception of Walter Benjamin – have up until now understood nothing of media on a theoretical plane nor have they succeeded in using them properly. And whereas to Enzensberger McLuhan is a ‘charlatan’ who completely neglects the economical base, exhibits idealistic tendencies, and belittles class struggle, still his phrase ‘the medium is the message’ deserves more credit, for it imparts more than its author himself realizes. ‘It reveals in the most accurate way the tautological nature of the mystique of the media. […] It tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has nothing more to say.’ (ibid., 118-119) An analysis that to a certain extent foreshadows or mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s eventual “McLuhanist” take on media – as ‘simulacres’ – of which we will shortly treat. 311 For a comparative analysis of McLuhan and Marcuse, cf. Marabini 1973. 312 A stance in fact heartily appropriated by himself in his refusal to ‘judge.’ Cf. Chapter 2. 313 For a detailed comparison of McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, see Marchessault, 2005, 48ff. Cf. also Chapter 2.

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314 As said in Chapter 2, we leave the gender bias, overtly present in The Mechanical Bride, for what it is here. 315 Notwithstanding, as seen, Enzensberger’s allegation of the contrary. 316 Actually we could honestly ask ourselves if it really is there in theory either. 317 In fact the word “intertwined” still does not hit the mark because it seems to suppose two separate “things” tied up together. 318 Convergent with our comparison is Angus’ analysis – building on Critical Theory as well as McLuhan – of media as ‘primal scenes’ (2000b), that do not so much represent realities existing outside of language but constitute or construct these as cultural-social-historical complexes. ‘Primal scenes’ concern first and foremost the ‘materiality’ of media; but this materiality should certainly not be interpreted as plain physicality. It should be seen as ‘form’ in McLuhan’s sense, as Angus opposes his materiality-oriented approach to the content-oriented approach proposed by “classic” views of communication like the transportation model by Shannon and Weaver (2000a, 135-136), and treats of media – thus tying up the ‘discourse approach’ in social theory with McLuhan’s media-as-metaphors concept – as ‘enunciations’ (2000b). Cf. also Brummett and Duncan 1992. 319 Although he immediately stresses that his work is not preoccupied with subjects, rather with ‘modes of operation or schemata of action’ (de Certeau 1984, xi). 320 The preamble for this idea is to be found in de Certeau’s earlier work Culture in the Plural (1997). 321 With de Certeau, however, a similar confusion would be possible if one would equate “efficient” outright with ‘strategical.’ Yet this is, in our view, not the way in which Feenberg employs the term ‘efficient.’ Feenberg tends to use – however without detailedly elaborating upon it – a definition of ‘efficiency’ more akin to common sense, i.e., that what is needed to realize a certain end in the fastest, most cost-effective, easiest way. For example: ‘Thus in this case the decision about what kind of technology to employ could not be made on the basis of efficiency for two reasons: First, because efficiency is relative to some known purpose. If the purpose is in question, efficiencies cannot be compared. And second, because efficiency is not relevant to questions of national unity.’ (2010a, 41) With de Certeau, both strategical and tactical actors can be efficient in this way, namely, being able to fluently pick out the “best” means to their ends. 322 For a fairly comprehensive overview of the debate, cf. the Wikipedia page on ‘Mobile phone radiation and health.’ It may be a case in point that the ‘Discussion’ tab mentions that ‘[t]he subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute.’ (‘Mobile Phone Radiation and Health’) 323 Wiebe Bijker and colleagues analyze these ambiguities under the banner of the notion of the ‘paradox of scientific authority’ (Bijker, Bal, and Hendriks 2009). 324 Have scientists then only been “sure” during the last couple of years? No, the common widespread acceptance of the proposition “smoking is bad” only truly came into being at the moment when, for myriad reasons, all the “stars were in position”: political, cultural,

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commercial, et cetera. 325 Feenberg however seems to suggest as much when he states: ‘Those threatened by technology must control technology. This idea is much more difficult to grasp. It defies the short-term logic of both the market and the electoral system. It requires a new common sense informed by scientific knowledge of nature and health.’ (2006, 207) 326 Cf. also Kirkpatrick 2004. 327 Going even further, Angus argues that the supposition of there being “values” ‘[...] is itself a consequence of instrumental reason: the very idea of a value involves the wresting of an abstracted end from its practical context and the conception of this practical context as devoid of substantive meaning.’ (2000b, 61) 328 Cf. Chapter 7. 329 We should add that Feenberg himself in many places suggests the account of “efficiency” that we endeavor to elaborate here. For instance: I agree with Habermas that modern societies are dominated by ever more powerful organizations legitimated by their technical effectiveness. But this outcome cannot be understood as the triumph of a disembodied “technical rationality”; rather, it is the way in which specific social groups gain control of society through their leading role in technical organization. The problem is thus to reconstruct the dialectic of enlightenment inside a theory of the social instead of substituting the one for the other. (Feenberg 1995a, 81)

Or: ‘Rationality in the most abstract sense is neither a neutral means nor is it specifically Western; like linguistic structure, it is a dimension of behavior and artifacts in every culture.’ (ibid., 222) However we are convinced that the “double-sidedness” of efficiency needs to be more systematically belabored, hence the proposal of our notion of “lived efficiency,” to be placed right next to a “technical efficiency.” 330 The “secret” of course, and once again, consists in seeing these two layers as only theoretically distinguishable, and not practically. 331 For a more extensive elaboration of the concept of “media battles,” cf. Chapter 11. 332 Cf. Chapter 12. 333 Cf. also Chapter 4, Section 4.3.3. 334 ‘The public is constituted by the technologies that bind it together, but, in turn, it transforms the technologies that constitute it.’ (Feenberg 2010b, 15) 335 Cf. also our discussion of ‘technology transfers’ in Chapter 4. 336 In this way de Kerckhove’s comment – lest it be interpreted as the claim that there can ever exist a medium independently of its context – should be qualified as follows: “the mediumas-context, not only the medium-as-thing, is the message.” 337 Cf. Chapter 7. 338 It does, since recently, also in the work of Andrew Feenberg (cf. supra).

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339 We repeat, according to Neil Postman largely three things: our thinking, our symbols, and our community (1992b, 20). In other words: as good as “everything.” Cf. Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2. 340 “Historical” meant here in a more common sense than the one we are deploying throughout this part. 341 In the words of Ian Angus who, as mentioned, works out a discursive theory of media: ‘[…] the plurality of discursive forms constitutes a world, or a culture, that is disclosed in historical epochs. Each epoch is an instituting of a certain relation between discursive forms.’ (2000b, 10-11) Angus, too, seeks to surpass the simple dichotomy between space and time. History is only correctly understood as ‘change in continuity and continuity in change’ (2000b, 31):

Instead of counterposing time to space, or vice versa, I suggest that the underlying issue may instead be the contrast between a mathematical, quantitative conception of space (or time) and the social constitution of traversal that allows the movements of goods and signs in some directions at the expense of their movements in others.’ (Angus 2000b, 32) 342

Cf. Chapter 17. Almost outdated, because there seem to be less and less low definition media around – ‘lofi’ becoming now more and more an artistic choice than a technical necessity, as it was once before, in more predominantly analog times. At the same time ‘lofi’ can only start to “exist” as soon as there is any ‘hifi’ around. 344 Kenneth Boulding specifies that with the hot-cool distinction McLuhan tries to squeeze three dimensions into one: involvement (‘demandingness’), range, and density (1967, 61-63). Kostelanetz also notices three dimensions compiled into the dichotomy, albeit different ones: ‘[…] the character of a communications instrument, the quality of the sensory experience it communicates, and its interaction with human response.’ (1969, 90) 345 Bruce E. Gronbeck draws a more contemporary parallel: ‘The distinction between presentational and interactive media being offered today echoes McLuhan’s (1964) distinction between hot (presentational) and cool (participatory) media.’ (2006, 360n.) 346 Cf. Chapter 12. 347 This point is corroborated by an even more subversive element in McLuhan’s later thought: the split-brain hypothesis, which McLuhan picks up from Robert K. Logan (personal communication, July 18, 2011; Fitzgerald 2001, 159). The human brain consists of two halves; research in McLuhan’s time seems to suggest a strong functional differentiation between the two cerebral hemispheres, a differentiation that is by now qualified but still holds, at least to a certain extent (cf. Chapter 13, Section 13.4.2). McLuhan, nevertheless appears to be wanting to elevate the results from split-brain research straight to the status of empirical evidence for his own theory. ‘Left brain’ thus equals ‘visual’ and ‘figure,’ ‘right brain’ ‘acoustic’ and ‘ground.’ (M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 24, 57, 68) 348 As Gregory Bateson quips, with William Blake: ‘Mad men see outlines and therefore they 343

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draw them.’ (2000, 27) 349 Whether inspired, with regard to the teleological part, by his Catholic faith or not. 350 At any time one should keep in mind that the proposed “time frames” of McLuhan, as suggested above, do not account for a purely “temporal” progression – there is always, in every “era,” a “spatial” organization involved too. 351 And on interpreter. These authors, for example, distinguish between three periods, more or less along the lines of McLuhan: T. L. McPhail and McPhail 1990, 67-68; Postman 1992b; Coyne 1995; Morin 2005, 207. Others see four: Kuhns 1971, 179; Heyer 1988, 132; Châtelet 2005, 204-205. Logan qualifies in recognizing three and at the same time four epochs (2000, 34-36). 352 Cf. also Chapter 2, Section 12.4.2. 353 In another text Carey compares McLuhan’s stance on the delivering power of electricity to similar ideas in Kropotkin and Mumford (2005b, 40). Richard Coyne, also, criticizes what he characterizes as the romanticist underpinnings of McLuhan’s framework (1999). 354 By itself already an implicitly impossible task, not just because one cannot possibly account for all events, but also because the past is, essentially, gone. 355 For an application of media-ecological “era thinking” to the issues of ethics and law, cf. Anton 2010a. 356 And he will certainly not be the last. 357 Cf. Introduction, Section 1.2.1. 358 But we should – again and again – repeat that “space” and “time” are not at all absent from the “structural” level. 359 A media-ecological task or mission which is perhaps best, although fragmentarily, formulated by Gregory Bateson – as recently some authors have tried to show (Charlton 2008; Bowers et al. 2011). 360 Not a self-proclaimed media-ecologist but surely an author whose work fits well within the corpus of media-ecological reading lists – as his performance at a keynote speaker at the 2010 Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association demonstrates. Cf. also Strate 2006. 361 Perhaps also with regard to the technology craze we outlined in Chapter 4? 362 Cf. Chapter 6. 363 Cf. Chapter 4, Section 4.5.3. 364 This term was proposed to us by Robert C. Scharff (personal communication, June 3, 2009). 365 This phrasing, too, was suggested by Robert Scharff (personal communication, June 3, 2009). 366 The amount of citation marks in this sentence may certainly serve as a reminder of the complexity borne out by the issues at hand. 367 Cf. Chapter 3. 368 Cf. Chapter 3. 369 For an overview of that tradition, cf. Chapter 6. 370 The field of communication studies harbors many helpful illustrations of this process. For

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a practical analysis of how specifically the television medium is changing throughout the years, cf. amongst others Bauwens, Pierson, and Geerts 2011. 371 Although within Levinson’s framework a certain idea of gradual progression lingers: the latest technologies are always representatives of further stages. The Internet for instance makes for a retrieval of dialogue (1999a, 84). An idea also voiced, although from another perspective, by Feenberg, who sees the Internet as a return to the normal pattern of human communication, where roles of speaker and interlocutor switch: ‘This is in fact the first successful technical mediation of small group activity.’ (2009a, 79) Cf. also Levinson 1990. 372 As we saw in Chapter 2, with regard to McLuhan’s purported technological determinism, Levinson frames this stance as ‘soft determinism.’ 373 And at the same time, obviously, at the violence that has accompanied that development. 374 Cf. Chapter 5. 375 Our translation. 376 ‘History is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well.’ (Latour 1993, 82) 377 Cf. Chapters 4 and 11. 378 Cf. the last section of Chapter 11. 379 Which forms in itself, as we found in Chapter 9, a reaction to Latour’s ‘outside’ perspective that mostly focuses on the ‘association’ between mediators and not so much on the (‘situational’) experience and interpretation of users; for this we need an ‘inside’ viewpoint (Verbeek 2005). 380 Cf. Chapter 3. 381 Although, we must add, such a ready-made solution should not be expected from any framework. And Feenberg himself cannot in any case be accused of political apathy. Cf. Feenberg and Freedman’s When Poetry Ruled the Streets, in which they reconstruct the intricate events of May 1968 and their own involvement in them (2001). 382 The guidelines (in Dutch) can be found in ‘U wilt uw post goed ontvangen?’ They were also laid down in the ministerial decree of April 20, 2007 (‘Ministerieel besluit houdende reglementering van de particuliere brievenbussen’). 383 Cf. Chapter 10. 384 Schafer’s suggestion makes much sense if one considers how nowadays, by contrast, churches are sometimes pressed to turn off their bells at night. It seems that if we would still accept clerical power, no issues about intrusive volumes would ever arise. 385 This seems, admittedly, like a very Freudian idea: in the therapeutical situation, the topics about which the analysand exhibits the most ‘resistance,’ must surely be central to the pathology. 386 Cf. also Kirkpatrick 2008, 8-9. 387 For an interesting pop-cultural reflection on what a world without language would look like, cf. the episode ‘Hush’ (1999) in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One morning the inhabitants of Sunnydale wake up to find their voices gone, “stolen” by a sinister group of ghouls called ‘The Gentlemen,’ who in this way are able to remove people’s hearts without

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anyone else being alerted by their screams. At the same time protagonists Buffy and Riley, after a previous unsuccessful attempt impeded by awkward conversation, are able to kiss each other for the first time now, unhindered by talking. A beautiful illustration of the blindness and ambivalence surrounding and characterizing technology: as soon as the medium “speech” is taken away, people are exposed to all sorts of ills – but at the same time the sudden, mass laryngitis reveals what the medium had previously impeded. Before, the ‘enhancement’ as well as the ‘obsolescence’ were taken for granted. 388 Cf. also the previous chapter, Sections 12.2.2 and 12.4.3. 389 For a fuller treatment of the concerned quote, cf. Chapter 15. This may not just mean that we remain critical towards the obvious but also, conversely, that we are open to the non-obvious. Seen from a “cultural” viewpoint this may signify: taxing the “canon” and, by contrast, trying to learn something from everything that does not belong to it. For example, TV series like the aforementioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although by cultural-elitist standards probably to be categorized as “trash,” can perfectly aid us in our self-reflexive, existential dialogue (cf. Chapter 17). This point is remarkably attested to by the existence of an academic field of research known as ‘Buffy studies’ and by scholars who turn to Buffy for illustrations of their cultural and philosophical investigations (Weiss 2007). 390 Cf. Introduction. 391 As Doidge, by way of the work of Bruce Miller, observes in connection to the left-right brain distinction: when the left hemisphere fails, the right can deploy its full potential (Doidge 2007, 280). 392 Ramachandran, again, makes a plea to strive for ‘[…] the right blend of East and West […]’ in medicine (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 2005, 225). Interestingly, Nisbett sees the social attitudes and values of Europeans as taking a middle position between East-Asians and AngloAmericans; which has led, in his view, to philosophical disciplines combining aspects of both views like phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism (2005, 85). 393 Not even theory can stay untainted by the dominant view. Nisbett remarks sarcastically: ‘The two Western vices of separation of form and content and the insistence on logical approaches often operate together to produce a lot of academic nonsense.’ (2005, 205) 394 Cf. Chapter 17. 395 Our translation. 396 As for instance in the case of contemporary digital music production tools larded with visual displays. For a phenomenological account of the tensions between sound and vision, cf. Ihde 2007. 397 An alternative voice is offered by Lance Strate who refers to the work of Oliver Sacks. Sacks, according to Strate, reacts against the reigning dominance of abstract thinking and instead makes a plea for the concrete, the latter being more elementary: visual and nonverbal perception are, on a neurological level, more fundamental than language in the attribution of meaning (Strate 2006, 117-118).

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398 Many young mothers’ profile pictures on social media, perhaps with regard to the history of ideas not coincidentally, eerily remind us of the Virgin and Child. 399 Of course many digital media are still ‘one to many,’ like for instance digital television or cable services. But we will probably see many of these ‘one to many’ devices and applications merge with ‘many to many’ interfaces, as is for instance happening with the gradual merging of, in Levinson’s terms, ‘new media’ like Amazon with ‘new new media’ like Facebook. 400 For one of the most impressive examples, cf. the ‘Grand Rapids LipDub,’ filmed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with 5.000 people, and Lance Strate’s blog post on it: Strate 2011a. 401 For a discussion of the concept of ‘national identity,’ partially based on McLuhan’s work, cf. Adria 2010. 402 But at the same time as a “natural” component of our libidinal setup. Freud makes the distinction between ‘primary’ (“normal”) and ‘secondary’ (pathological) narcissism. 403 Andrew Keen remarks in relation to contemporary digital (social) media: ‘And broadcast ourselves we do, with all the shameless self-admiration of the mythical Narcissus.’ (2008, 7) 404 Compare Derksen 2009, 152. 405 Our translation. 406 As in fact Eric McLuhan alleges; cf. Chapter 4, Section 4.6.2. 407 The literature on the twin notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ – the latter often understood as some or other actively constituted form of the former – is, to say the least, massive. Cf. the online portal ‘Research on Place & Space’ for a comprehensive overview of research areas and references. For a recent analysis of how digital media help us with the ‘tuning of place,’ cf. Coyne 2010. 408 Cf. Chapter 6. 409 As Jeff Malpas comments: ‘Homecoming, as with homelessness, is not a theme that appears only in Heidegger’s reading of poetry, but is a central element in all his thinking.’ (2006, 308) 410 Cf. also Malpas 2006, 207 and Rojcewicz 2006, 222. 411 Cf. also Feenberg 2005, 40. 412 And yes, even the most ordinary experience of returning to our own trustworthy “stables and shacks” after travel illustrates this ambiguity: although we return to the familiar, that familiar in the meantime seems to have taken on something estranging too. We know that physically the house did not change significantly. Haven’t we ourselves changed the most then? Still the feeling remains that it is “the world” that alienates us, not us who have alienated ourselves from it. 413 This attitude, Graham Harman explains, comes down to what Heidegger means by ‘formal indication’ (according to the latter ‘the hidden meaning of phenomenology’): ‘Instead of listing all the adjectives that describe a cactus, or informing us of the obvious fact that the cactus “is,” formal indication is a kind of knowledge that hints at some deeper reality of the cactus without ever claiming to exhaust it.’ (2007a, 27) It is congruent with ‘meditative’ or ‘commemorative thinking’ (ibid., 135). 414 Cf. the next chapter.

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415

Cf. Chapter 13. The notion starts to evolve from the 1960s onwards, under the influence of the work of amongst others Paul Bach-y-Rita, Michael Merzenich, and Jon Kaas. For accessible introductions to the theme, cf. Doidge 2007 and Begley 2009. For a more technical overview, cf. the volume Toward a Theory of Neuroplasticity (Shaw and McEachern 2001). 417 For a recent volume that investigates the link between neuroplasticity and rehabilitation, cf. Neuroplasticity and Rehabilitation (Raskin 2011). 418 According to Doidge, this idea is first proposed by Sigmund Freud, fully articulated by Donald O. Hebb, and phrased in these words by Carla Shatz (Doidge 2007, 63). 419 This principle hinges on the fact that the brain still has to deal with limited resources notwithstanding the vast number of its possible neuronal connections (which purportedly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe) (Doidge 2007, 59ff.). Cf. infra. 420 An expression we derive from Douglas Coupland, who, in a book on McLuhan, remarks upon the latter’s familiarity with the ‘[…] Play-Doh aspect of words, their mutability and their ability to morph and change texture on the tongue.’ (2010, 43) 421 This may be the reason why the computer program ELIZA, written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s and designed to be a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, may indeed have worked therapeutically: the confessional form of the dialogue as such, regardless of the precise content of the conversion, initiatiates a “healing” process. Cf. also Chapter 17. 422 Wexler points out that there are two ways in which our internal structure can influence perception: ‘form over content,’ and ‘content over form’ (2006, 148ff.). 423 Indeed in this way “our current brain structure,” just as the current technological ‘environment,’ represents nothing less than the reigning ideological constellations (cf. Chapter 10). This parallel is brilliantly outlined and further elaborated by Catherine Malabou in What Should We Do with Our Brain? Malabou there shows how the notion of neuroplasticity itself is already incorporated by ideology, more precisely in the form of the latently capitalist concept (and culture) of ‘flexibility’ (Malabou 2008). Our very analysis of brain and environment plasticity should thus in itself, and self-reflexively, be subjected to ideology critique just as much. 424 This formulation owes much to the work of Marc Van den Bossche in the philosophy of sports (2005; 2010), who describes doing sports as a ‘letting go,’ but in a disciplined way. In fact this sort of two-tiered “activity” applies to many domains in life, as we will shortly see. (Not in the least to making and playing music for instance.) 425 For an enthusiastic evaluation of this situation, cf. Paul Levinson (2004). 426 We thank Wim Van Moer for pointing out this parallel. 427 James is also said to have formulated an early version of the neuroplasticity idea (2007, 105). 428 The concept is ubiquitous in McLuhan’s work: M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001a, 100; M. McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001b, 18; M. McLuhan and Parker 1968, xxiii; M. McLuhan and Parker 1970, 22; M. McLuhan 1970, 167-178; M. McLuhan and Watson 2011; M. McLuhan and 416

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Nevitt 1972, 11; M. McLuhan and Powers 1989, 149; M. McLuhan 2005c, 86. 429 Cf. Chapter 4. 430 Malpas comments: ‘The question of solitude, and of finitude, is a question concerning how it is possible for us to find ourselves “at home” (zu Hause) in the world.’ (2006, 190-191) 431 Cf. for instance the work of Stacey Irwin, who demonstrates this for the case of design software (2010). 432 Cf. Chapter 17. 433 Parts of this chapter already appeared, in a different form, in Van Den Eede 2010c. 434 Our translation. 435 Our translation. 436 Our translation. 437 Cf. the previous chapter. 438 We should be careful, nonetheless, in assigning one or other specific culture the privilege of possessing the blueprint of “human nature,” hence our systematic use of double quotation marks when the term “nature” is concerned. 439 Although he tends to mention the opposite in Benjamin 1983, 273. 440 With regard to our discussion in Chapter 14 we can now see that the “self-objectifying,” “constructing” technologies very much constitute ways of collecting ourselves. Cf. also Section 16.5.3. 441 As of October 2009, Wikipedia lists 164 of them (‘List of Social Networking Websites’), with Facebook and Qzone as undisputed toppers. 442 Another point we should make is that the sort of digital “collections” that we have talked about need not necessarily be online. In fact the list of contacts on our mobile phones or PDAs, the music on our mp3 players (as William Davies King already suggests), the data on our hard disks, are all forms of digital albeit offline “collecting.” Only they are less shareable than their online variants. 443 For a preliminary analysis, cf. Van Den Eede 2011a. 444 And also the very paradoxical situation that exactly these “historical” endeavors serve to strengthen the “structural moment” – as for instance in the case of the institution of some “virtual immortality” – should be further scrutinized. Cf. the next section. 445 Our translation. 446 For an overview of the philosophical literature on friendship and an evaluation of the notion in relation to contemporary digital environments, cf. Verstrynge 2010. 447 It is to be mentioned that Eric McLuhan, in more recent publications, seems to prefer the ‘hunter’ metaphor exactly in disfavor of the ‘gatherer’ image: ‘[…] we are realigning our culture from the mode of gatherer to that of hunter […]’ (2010, 78). The reason for this, he says, is that today everything is already immediately available around us (i.e., due to digital technologies we can find most information in the blink of an eye; personal communication, November 9, 2011). Compare Anton: ‘[W]here everything is always already available, there is no longer any need for synchronization [i.e., the organized effort of getting people or things together at one moment in

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time (and at a certain place)]: at this speed, we are already there.’ (2009, 83) However, both the ‘gatherer’ and the ‘hunter’ metaphor, as depictions of the general state of mind in contemporary culture, are qualified by current research in cognitive science and neuroscience. Andy Clark, for one, argues against evolutionary psychology, that sketches our minds as hunter-gatherer minds, stating that our minds are much more agile and flexible (2003, 141). Richard Nisbett, then, from an empirical point of view, observes hunter-gatherers to be just as ‘field dependent’ as people in industrial societies (2005, 43). Our aim, however, is to deploy the collecting metaphor merely as a way of making sense of our elusive dealings with just as elusive “beloved objects.” 448 Henry J. Perkinson, in this regard, suggests that the computer, by quantifying all (possible) risks and conveying them through statistics, has made us extremely conscious of all the dangers that threaten our health, safety, and well-being, and has thereby made us ‘risk-aversive’ (1996). 449 More abstractly, McLuhan remarks: ‘What has happened with electric speed-up is that the now contains all pasts whatever, including the most primal and primitive modes.’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 84) And: ‘It is all pasts and all futures in an eternal present.’ (ibid., 90) Cf. the following chapter. 450 Once more, McLuhan himself takes this very logical step in performing a tetradic analysis of the tetrad itself (M. McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 224). 451 For a preliminary elaboration of this perspective, particularly in relation to Social Networking Sites, cf. Van Den Eede 2010a. 452 For the parallels between McLuhan and Virilio, cf. Hanke 2005. Hanke suggests that ‘Virilio may be more indebted to McLuhan than he recognises.’ (ibid., 124) 453 He states, remarkably visionarily: ‘At instant speeds, the world market, invoked by industrial activities, becomes a software service, yielding only software images and satisfactions.’ (2003, 464) 454 Cf. and compare Gleick 2000. 455 Cf. Chapter 12. 456 Sven Grampp proposes to read McLuhan as a Rortian ironist (2011, 217-218). 457 McLuhan characterizes dialogue as ‘[…] a process of creating the new […]’ (M. McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 22). 458 Elsewhere he remarks about transference: ‘It is a universal characteristic of all interaction between persons because, after all, the shape of what happened between you and me yesterday carries over to shape how we respond to each other today.’ (G. Bateson 2002, 13) 459 Bateson suggests the existence of a ‘Learning IV,’ but adds that it ‘[…] probably does not occur in any adult living organism on this earth.’ (2000, 293) 460 Charlton comments that it concerns ‘[…] the deep recognition of wide relationship […]’ (2008, 58). 461 ‘As William Blake noted, long ago, “Without Contraries is no progression.”’ (G. Bateson 2000, 303)

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462 We have called the “structural” level “abstract” and the “historical” level “concrete.” It should be noted that the meaning of the term ‘abstract’ as deployed here by way of Bateson differs from those earlier uses, that merely served to render the respective narrowness or broadness of scope connected to the “attitudes” both levels represent. In other words: to ‘understand’ the “concrete” level better, one needs higher degrees of Batesonian ‘abstraction.’ For at the “structural” level ‘conscious purpose’ rules, whereas it is awareness of the ‘cybernetic nature of self and the world,’ demanding higher levels of abstraction, that opens up the gates to the “historical” plane (cf. Chapter 3). 463 A thank you goes out to Marc Van den Bossche for pointing it out to us. 464 Our translation; the same counts for all citations from Bleus 1994 henceforth. 465 That Mail Art is not just an archetypal-nostalgic trip is proven by the fact that in recent years the phenomenon has largely migrated to the World Wide Web. Although within the movement some ambivalence remains with regard to electronic communications (the title of Bleus’ book partly reads ‘A Dialogue between the Mailman and his Electronic Shadow’), the art form has clearly “adapted” itself to the current – clichéd – environment, hence continuing its vigorous tiptoeing along the “structural”-“historical” threshold. 466 Somewhat different, thus, from Gallwey’s practice, who tries to shut out a part of the inner environment – ‘Self 1’ – by way of a detour through the external environment. 467 This also implies, as Corey Anton proposes, abandoning the mostly consumerisminspired ‘culture of authenticity’ and instead cultivating an existential heroism in the face of ambiguity and mortality. Cf. Anton 2001 and especially Anton 2010b. Others advocate new forms of wisdom, mostly in opposition to “mere” knowledge, conform with the technological contexts we live in (Puech 2008; E. H. Spence 2011).

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Author’s Affiliations

iMinds-SMIT – Studies on Media, Information & Telecommunication Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels (BE) http://smit.vub.ac.be/ Centre for Ethics and Humanism Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels (BE) http://www.ethu.be/