Fearing for Our Lives / Reaped by Robot Scythes, Research Time, 27/06/2018

I told you I was switching gears. Quite literally to metal gears. Some of the analyses in Utopias will include some concepts from media theory, but the research discipline of media theory comes with some limitations.

In short form, it gets a bit idealist, ontologically speaking. Here’s what I mean. Mainstream media theory concentrates on the structure of media communications. You study the structures, conventions, and techniques of how media products are assembled.

Above: a metaphor.

So you come to think in terms of a multi-form semiotics – language, meaning, and how the structure of communication shapes language and meaning.

Quick illustration. You watch a video on someone’s phone. It’s shaky, clearly a phone held in the hand. Clear yet distant. The form of the video itself tells you what it is, displays its genuineness. Understanding the form helps you understand the message. Sounds familiar for some reason.

This is a pivotal aspect of media studies, theory, and the general means we use to understand our enormous ecology of communication. But we need to understand the literally ecological aspects of communication, and the geological too.

Information is conditioned by the physical media that carries it, but the process of manufacturing that media conditions the structure of our world. Some of the most destructive pollution generated in the mining sector is in the rare earth mines.

We dig complex minerals and intensively filter and treat them to separate all the different metals like yttrium, dysprosium, thulium, neodymium, and all the rest of the lanthanides. The result of those industrial mining procedures is rampant and horrifying pollution.

Above: a referent.

I picked up Jussi Parikka’s book The Geology of Media because I’d heard it was a solid continuation of many of the geological and ecological concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed. Damn right it was.

Semiotics – the study of meaning and how communication infrastructure conditions the information it carries – is vital to understanding contemporary media and globalized communication. But Parikka’s work is essential in understanding the brute physicality of our media – a hurricane of metals swirling into an assemblage of mines, factories electricity, and language that is simultaneously liberating and disastrous.

You can’t have contemporary media – computer and smartphone technology, including all the accessories as small and seemingly inconsequential as headphones – without these massive machines of metal extraction and manufacture.

The environmentalist movement makes a big deal about fossil fuel extraction, industry, burning, pollution, and impact on climate change. But quite often, activists will post their critical messages using smartphones and computers built with another horrifically destructive industrial process – lanthanide mining.

Is there any way out for us? I honestly don’t know.

If I want to start a blog post with Judas Priest lyrics, then I will. It’s the closest I have to an answer.

How We Extended the Earth Into Space, Research Time, 22/01/2015

They wanna see me on my satellite. Get it right. Here tonight.

I never read any McLuhan in the philosophy courses I took as a student, and I never taught any McLuhan in the philosophy courses I delivered as a tutorial leader. A major reason is disciplinary: he’s classified as a media theorist, so while he’s creating concepts, which is the essential philosophical activity, he isn’t identified as a philosopher and his books and ideas don’t enter the mainstream narrative in the university-based tradition of what philosophy properly is.

I think another reason why he isn’t included in most philosophy canons is that he’s fucking weird. Academic philosophy is typically taught as having a single form of writing: the argument. So while a text may create concepts, explore ideas, and touch on major philosophical themes, a university professor won’t call it philosophy unless it’s written as an argumentative essay.*

Then there were philosophers like Heraclitus, who were
sages writing epic poems like The Iliad, but about
metaphysics.

* Of course, there are exceptions within the canon. No university-based philosopher would deny that Plato’s dialogues and Spinoza’s Ethics are works of philosophy because they’re such undeniably huge figures in the Western tradition. But Plato’s surviving works are these strange mutations of the dramatic script. Dialogues contain arguments, yet usually end having undermined all the positive statements. Spinoza’s Ethics is often called an argument, but that’s just because philosophy’s institutionalized culture is really uncomfortable dealing with an experimental composition that adapted the form of a logical-mathematical proof to examine abstract metaphysical, ecological, and psychological concepts.

The fourth chapter of Laws of Media isn’t written like an essay. It doesn’t even have paragraphs. It’s written as a series of tetrad diagrams. See, there are four laws of media that the book is largely about. A given piece of human technology does four things simultaneously.

1) ENHANCES some phenomenon or mode of experience.

2) REVERSES the character of its enhanced characteristic when its intensity reaches an extreme.

3) RETRIEVES some abstract principle that’s latent in its enhancement.

4) OBSOLESCES some other phenomenon that used to be fairly widespread.

So I thought of talking about some examples of these four-sided frameworks of thinking and understanding. One of McLuhan’s tetrad diagrams describes what the satellite does. It reminds me a lot of the major ideas in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. 

The satellite enhances the planet Earth itself, extending it beyond its physical limits of the atmosphere that is capable of supporting macroscopic life. The Earth’s affects and communication from one part of it to another now extend into the stratosphere. This is actually one of the central concepts of my book: that you can’t understand the full range of a body’s possible powers and potentials if you take its boundary to be just the physical membrane of its discrete corpus. A human extends beyond its skin, and a planet extends beyond its atmosphere. A body is a field of affects, the proliferation in space and time of what it does beyond its membrane.

The abstract principle that this phenomenon of the satellite’s activity brings to the forefront is what McLuhan calls ecology. And so do I. This tetrad shows how bodies, in this case the Earth itself, can extend beyond their physical boundaries, and how important these extending, environmental affects are to its identity. I take the extension of bodies beyond their physical boundaries to integrate with each other to be the foundational principle of any ecologically-informed philosophy.

When the dynamics of satellite communication reverse themselves, we get what McLuhan calls an implosion of reflexivity. Signals travel around the Earth so fast that distance becomes practically immaterial. As far as communication goes, satellites can make the planet the size of a house.

However, satellites make nature obsolete. Well, I should say Nature, not nature. Because McLuhan’s diagram refers to Nature as the mythical concept of the wild Eden, the absolute Other to human civilization. There’s a dominating dynamic in environmental philosophy and environmentalist political activism that sees Man as essentially a technological, destructive, rationalistic force that’s in inevitable conflict with Nature and its creative, instinctual harmony. 

The first three chapters (of seven) in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity are an extended polemic about several aspects of this dualist view of humanity and nature. Ecological thinking makes this kind of dualism totally obsolete, in the literal sense. There’s no use thinking in terms of that romantic (and Romantic) dualism when you understand all of existence in terms of ecological relationships.

There can be nothing literally outside nature, like the dualism of Man/Nature (and Technology/Natural and Mordor/Shire and Earth/Eden and Discord/Harmony and Evil/Good), if everything that acts integrates with each other as our affects extend ourselves beyond our bodies. 

There are only natural processes that sustain themselves and natural processes that wreck themselves and drown in their own shit. Environmentalism as a political movement and a philosophy is social mobilization to push humanity to sustain itself instead of destroy itself and drag a lot of other creatures down with us.

All this is in just one brief tetrad diagram. And I hadn’t even read McLuhan before writing that book.

Metaphorical Words? II: Powerfully Arbitrary, Research Time, 21/01/2015

Continued from last post . . . When you get to Marshall McLuhan, you understand just how much Donald Davidson was mistaken. Because his argument that metaphors were meaningless depended on a conception of meaning in which each word had a precise meaning, fixed necessarily (though not necessarily sufficiently) by a precise referent. If a word did not refer properly, then its use obscured its meaning. If the use of a word obscures its meaning, then the word in that instance becomes meaningless.

McLuhan approaches the topic of metaphor from a completely different perspective. Davidson worked in fairly conservative Analytic philosophy, having accepted the principle that language is primarily transparent in meaning and practical in use. I’m simplifying an enormously complex tradition of the philosophy of language, of course. For Davidson, what a philosopher does with language is analyze and clarify concepts and meanings. 

But McLuhan came from the discipline of literary criticism, which was open to very different philosophical ideas about language than Analytic philosophy. He developed a theoretical approach to language as affects. I described this in an earlier post as words and utterances literally smacking you around, and I’m sticking to that image because my readers have told me it’s remarkably effective.

An old critique of Analytic philosophy that I’ve often heard in classes introducing the subject is that one of the most common conceptions of language in that tradition is too simple. Words and propositions have precise meanings that our ordinary language* obscures, and so logical analysis must make those meanings clear.

* I’m leaving aside the tradition of ordinary language philosophy whose key figures were the older Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. I’m referring to the paradigm analytic philosophy that developed as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Frank Ramsey developed symbolic logic, and as Russell and the younger Wittgenstein developed the techniques of the logical analysis of ordinary language. 

In our lives, the meanings, functions, and reference of our words are
determined through what we do with language and things. These actions
are contingent, and not necessary elements of words themselves.

McLuhan has an even simpler conception of language, but one that isn’t reductive in the sense that I described last post. He has a thoroughly materialist view of what language is (and I share this basic conception): language is an assemblage of mental and social operations, funny noises, and written marks. When I type the word ‘stone,’ the word is an arrangement of pixels on a screen and data on a hard drive. Printed, it’s a pattern of ink on a page. Spoken, it’s a pattern of air pressures. None of these are an actual stone that I can kick down the street as I walk.

A metaphor is a word that is used to signify something other than what it is. The surf was a loving companion that would break you on a whim.** We use words to refer to lots of things in the world other than words themselves. The paradigm works of Analytic philosophy consider reference to objects in the world an essential component of meaningful words or propositions. But the act of reference itself transforms a word into a metaphor.

** I just finished reading a chapter of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice that takes place in a small community of obsessive, mystically-minded surfers. It ends with an acid trip vision of the protagonist’s mysterious ex-girlfriend on a Triad-connected yacht in the south Pacific. It’s a wonderful book.

The constructions that we usually call metaphors are just unusual enough for us to notice this. Most of our word use has become so habitual that we don’t readily perceive that our words, as sounds and marks, don’t have any necessary connection to their referents. There’s nothing inherently right about me saying ‘tree’ any more than there’s anything inherently wrong in Pierre saying ‘arbre.’ ‘Hello’ has no more necessary connection to the act of greeting someone than ‘Ni Hao.’ 

Our complex language systems developed contingently over many thousands of years from the first grumbling vocalizations. The functions our words achieve define them. Language works when we all use the best words to achieve what we want.

If there were necessary connections between words and their objects, then there would be no major differences between languages. We would perceive an object and know precisely what sounds to make when we refer to it. The words themselves would be extensions of the things into our thoughts.

There are traditions of thought that hold there to be necessary correspondences of words and things, but they aren’t exactly held in high esteem by conservative circles of Analytic philosophy of language. I’m referring to the mystical language concepts that anthropologists discovered in several indigenous cultures. McLuhan discusses an Inuit who, when asked why his word for ‘stone’ is what it is, said that the word ‘stone’ is an extension of all stones in the world. If it was not, then how could it refer to them?

Embedded Critical Thought III: Entangling Our Knowledge and Critique, 15/01/2015

Continued from last post . . . Marshall McLuhan’s work was revolutionary because, at least in part, of how he studied the media in terms of its affectivity. This is literally how the physicality of the medium itself engaged us as consumers. Particular forms of media required corresponding specific activity on the consumer’s part. How we have to engage physically with a medium of information transmission conditions is a separate issue from how we can engage mentally with its content. 

The problem of engaging with media through an acoustic epistemic space is that it enraptures us. The McLuhans’ central example in these first sections of Laws of Media is the poetic recitation. Recitation is how ancient Greeks learned their culture’s history, the founding myths of their nations, and the most profound ontological insights of their philosophical mysticism.

Alphabetic writing is the gateway to abstraction in thinking, to detachment from the flow of spoken and sung words. This is the transition from worshipful reflection on the spoken words of sages to the quiet, thoughtful meditation on the written words of philosophers.* Public performance is replaced by private reading. Not entirely at once, of course, but the transition begins with the adoption of alphabetic writing. Then the first great artists of the silent written art emerge. We can read the dialogues of Plato, brilliant enough compositions that they are. The dialogues of Aristotle are lost, and we are left only with his dry, meticulous lecture notes. 

* Socrates, as fits his nature, is an aberration. His philosophizing was an oral practice, but he demanded that his audience be his partners, accosting people on the street and asking them profound questions about the nature of justice, truth, piety, etc. Think of him as the first person (at least in our familiar story of ancient Greek philosophy, if not its messier truth) to push abstract thought into public life. Reactions were so hostile because his medium, speech and sound, assaulted people with his words instead of seducing them, as words do when they're sung, as well as on pages and screens.

The Socrates most of us know is a creature of pure myth.

McLuhan calls the abstract, detached engagement with the world an epistemically visual character. The world is laid before you in your thinking as a field from which you’re distant, a step back. The trajectory of its development leads to what Thomas Nagel called the view from nowhere, the God’s eye view of the world.

The problem with this is that we’re not gods. The notion of total objectivity in human knowledge is a lie. We can map partial perspectives and views in context, always improving how we understand their relations to each other. A metallurgist can’t really think the same way a physicist does, and certainly not how a historian of literature or a medical doctor would. 

But we can understand how each of these knowledge disciplines approach the world, find their areas of overlap, or at least relate the ideas and guiding notions of each to the other. There is no overarching theory of everything, as the cliché goes. Knowledge is multifaceted. Our ability to abstract and theorize helps us investigate and systematize all the subjects, facts, and ideas in our different knowledge disciplines. The objectivity of knowledge required to build these disciplines and practices is an important advantage to the visual mode of experience and thought.

The McLuhans examine the new media of the 20th century in terms of its return to the acoustic character that defines most of our transmission-based audio-visual media. We now encounter phone calls and radio broadcasts, movies and television, all unfolding before us through voice. The television is a recitation, spilling out word by word and sound by sound. Although we haven’t exactly stopped reading, the new media is shifting the character of our experiences.

So they consider seriously the possibility that our senses of individuality and subjectivity will begin to melt away as our media takes on a more acoustic character. But even if I grant them (which I’m hesitant to do) the notion that abstraction itself is a Greek invention, a by-product of alphabetic thinking, the growing immediacy of our media experiences won’t return us to the Greek model.

The power to abstract your thinking doesn’t go away once it’s been developed. Marshall McLuhan’s originality lay in how he analyzed the media for its physical affects, literally how language, sounds, and images hit us as a function of the physical possible movements of their media. But thought plays an equal role in our experience of media. Content runs parallel to affect, but content itself is still an affect. It’s just cognitive rather than visceral.

An image that I feel inspired David Cronenberg's Brian O'Blivion.

Here’s where the lesson for professional communicators appears, days after I first teased it. How we understand our media products and how media affect us viscerally and cognitively is now part of those affects and experiences. McLuhan’s own role as a media educator helps open acoustically experienced media to abstract analysis simply by having written educational books about the media. We absorb those ideas, and they become part of the mental frameworks for our experience of all media.

So there will always be some kernel of truth to McLuhan’s analysis. People will be more disposed to believe a charismatic speech or performance in front of them or on video than they will to read an email or argument to convince them of the same thing. The spoken word will always have the power to enrapture, and the written word will always permit the reader to stand in critical detachment.

But I feel as though McLuhan has partially invalidated some of his own conclusions by having been such a popular and effective media educator. We can bring the habits of thinking that we learn in an abstract perspective to understand what engaging media that unfolds verbally and viscerally in real time does to us. 

Becoming self-conscious of our consciousnesses, which McLuhan in considerable part has taught our civilization to do, disrupts us from falling into the easy habits of passive rapture. Communicators must write to the form of their media, and write for an audience of potential media critics. That’s what we all are now.

Embedded Critical Thought II: You Become a Mere Spectator, Research Time, 14/01/2015

Continued from last post . . . Philosophy romanticizes ancient Greek civilization. Anyone who’s been exposed to the discipline on a casual basis has seen this in some form. Myself, I’ve seen the romantic attitude toward the life of Socrates as a role model for philosophy, I’ve seen Plato described as having defined the core, eternal problems of the discipline. I’ve also read a good chunk of Heidegger, who considered the pre-Socratic ancient Greek sages as the paradigm philosophers. 

I find the McLuhans’ engagement with Greek culture and modes of experience more enlightening than a lot of what I’ve read in philosophy proper* because they’re critical of its shortcomings while also aware of its advantages. Their particular focus is on ancient Greek culture before the development of alphabetic writing, a form of abstraction in linguistic thought that they analyze as having begun a process of abstraction in how Western cultures approached knowledge.

My old philosophy department at McMaster taught a
communications course, but it was the ethics of
communications, discussing truthfulness, lying, privacy
rights, and the one-per-week discussion of general ethical
theories over the first five weeks. Not one hint of actual
ontological philosophy of communications media itself.

* I say philosophy proper because, even though McLuhan is widely regarded as a philosopher, especially in public discussion of his work, I was never actually taught his work in a philosophy department. This was the case for all the departments where I was a student, and any department that hosted a philosophy conference. The only academic conference I ever attended in my time as a university worker that dealt with McLuhan at all was the International Conference on the Book 2012. It was an interdisciplinary conference, with a hefty dose of media history and theory, that changed its location every year. The 2012 conference happened at University of Toronto, and in honour of its host, a couple of keynotes discussed the work of its favourite son. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at any of the research concentrations of its philosophy professors.

Alphabetic writing and its accompanying abstraction in thought was, in McLuhan’s account, the genesis of true self-consciousness. Its abstraction detached you from the visceral qualities of your encounters with language. I should say, linguistic affects; literally how spoken and written words smacked you around in the course of your daily life, and how the changing character of those constant smacks transformed how you thought about yourself.

While I find a lot of useful concepts and ideas in Laws of Media, their discussion of alphabetic abstraction as the literal foundation of self-consciousness has a little too much essentialism for my liking. Let me put it this way: they explain this idea, in chapter two of the book, through a contrast of Western modes of subjective experience with Asian ones. 

Yeah, it sounds a little racist. Now, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (the McLuhans are Torontonians, after all, which is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, even in the 1980s when Eric McLuhan finished this book), interpreting their discussion of this as referring to the streak of individualism in Western morality and conscious self-conceptions that isn’t really present in East Asian moralities.**

So about Ge'ez script, you guys?

** They make no mention of individualism in African or indigenous American moralities and self-conceptions. The cultures of those continents have a variety of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, pictographs, hieroglyphs, or no writing at all. And there doesn’t seem to be any analysis of any individualism that arises in Indian culture, which has used a popular alphabetic writing system for centuries. This is on top of the absence of Hebrew culture as the true origin of alphabetic writing in the Mediterranean.

But they actually write that Chinese people aren’t truly conscious of themselves as individuals, and that the Taiwan government’s state-administered mass adoption of an alphabetic shorthand script in the 1980s would transform their entire subjectivities within a couple of generations.

I work with a very different conception of the foundation of subjectivity in Ecology, Ethics, and The Future of Humanity, which is the autopoietic system generated from metabolic chemical reactions. It’s the simplest form of a physical membrane demarcating an inside and an outside, minimal physical discreteness. Being physically discrete and moving in the world as such a body is a more primal form of individuality than the McLuhans consider here. So as a physical phenomenon, individuality is fundamental to organic life.

So while McLuhan doesn’t always sound as if he’s talking about epistemic concepts, how we understand what we are, that’s what he’s talking about. Otherwise, he wouldn’t really make sense.*** Because there are epistemic advantages to our individualistic attitudes and the abstraction of our alphabetic thought processes. 

*** I sometimes think that this is why the more petty and dogmatic analytic philosophers I’ve encountered genuinely believe that Continental philosophy is nonsense and charlatanism. They presume that a discussion about knowledge which wouldn’t make sense if it were about reality is actually about reality.

The recitation media of the ancient Greek world required such constant attention as part of its engagement that you put so much effort into memorizing the words in real time and lose all your objectivity. You aren’t really able to judge or critique what’s told through recitation. 

This is why Plato’s vision of reason banned poets from the rational society. This is the kind of poetry he was talking about, epic recitation that sucked its audience in so deeply that it destroyed any ability to question or critique. The distance that abstract thought affords lets us question and investigate our cultural chroniclers. The McLuhans and I differ on whether electronic real-time media degrades our objectivity in the same way. To be continued. . . .

Embedded Critical Thought I: Entangling Experience Blinds You, Research Time, 13/01/2015

I find reading McLuhan (father and/or son) fascinating because of why some, on the face of it, pretty weird ideas are quite important for understanding how to be effective professional communicators. It’s going to take a few posts to get there, but hang on to the story. 

Laws of Media spends a lot of the first chapter contrasting ancient Greek* ways of engaging with the world and articulating thought in speech, song, and writing with the functionally equivalent activities in the Enlightenment and Victorian era. I say Victorian era because the mode of thinking that McLuhan calls the visual mode of conceiving of your experience began slipping from its dominance in the West in the early 20th century.

Western culture has made a romantic idol out of ancient
Greek culture ever since the Romans, and we've since
added Roman culture to our historical pantheon.

* Remember what I wrote a few posts ago about McLuhan’s concentration on ancient Greece as the site of many of the epistemic revolutions that built the visual-themed engagement with the world. A lot of what McLuhan credits ancient Greek culture with inventing was actually an innovation of Hebrew culture. Ancient Greece has been fetishized and romanticized in Western culture for centuries. The light of its undeserved worship not only obscures the contributions of other cultures, but also obscures the messier reality of what ancient Greek culture and life was really like.

The McLuhans call experiences where you interact with your communicators in real-time dialogue or performance acoustic. Their prime example is the recitation of epic and philosophical/theological poetry. The spectators entirely enrapture themselves to the performance so they can memorize the words. 

The visual mode of experience conceives of all of space laid out before you simultaneously, but direct interaction is usually extremely limited. We don't need to involve ourselves so deeply in our experience of the work that we memorize it because the communication will preserve itself beyond our individual experience of it. This is the mode of painting, but most importantly for McLuhan’s analysis, the written word. Dante and Dickens are before us in their works right now as they were in their own time. 

Media that mimic simultaneity in dialogue and communication arose in the 20th century, and it began transforming our encounters with the world around us again, training us to think in new ways. As the McLuhans present it, this new acoustic media atmosphere is very much like the old ways of thinking. 

Modern media present us dialogue that flows along with our experience: spoken words. Performance. McLuhan presents the nature of this performance in the immediacy of our interaction. He’s analyzing the world we experience as pure visceral affect, so he discusses the audio-visual unfolding of media like film and television as their sounds and sights actually hit you. He concentrates on the immediacy of experience with cinematic and television media, in which it’s the same character as ancient Greek recitation and theatrical media.

But there’s more to the nature of cinematic and television media itself than their immediate experience. This is where media analysis gets a little meta, because our understanding of the media we experience shapes our immediate experience of the media. Sounds trippy, but I’ll explain.

An audience experiences live theatre and poetic recitation** in real time, from performers in their vicinity, the performance moving with the same pace as the flow of time. An audience experiences a book entirely in the abstract, with all its action a product of the imagination. Its speed is however fast the reader can read, and its author is, as far as experience goes, infinitely distant.

** Well, for the Greeks, it’s poetic recitation. We experience this sort of media today as poetry slams. If only Plato could come to our time and see the low social stature to which poetic recitation has fallen, just as often referred to as a punchline as an art form. Of course, Plato would also be appalled at every other aspect of modern life. So, you win a couple . . . 

When cinema first spread popularly,
people identified so deeply with its
celebrities that, in Valentino's case, they
flew into mass hysteria on his premature
death. It was as though thousands
identified with him so rapturously
because they couldn't detach from the
visceral reality of his presence on the
screen.

But recording and broadcasting cinema and television preserves the infinite distance of the creators, while unfolding itself for the audience in real time. In the immediate experience of the medium itself, this distinction doesn’t appear. McLuhan is able to bracket how we’re thinking about our media products as we consume them simply by defining his problem as one of visceral experience.

Yet we never experience art purely viscerally. We’re always thinking about what we experience as we experience it. I have a friend who is a major fan of silent film, and she’s even doing a research project on it for a cultural/media studies program. She live-tweets her experience of watching that era’s films for her work. 

One of the very touching elements in her feed is her reflection on the immense distance (usually a grave’s length) between her and the people in her films. These thoughts aren’t part of her immediate, visceral experience interacting with the medium, but they’re inextricable from her experience of the film and the emotional and cognitive affects it has on her. 

Our own self-consciousness, our understanding of media, is now a part of our experience of media itself. The next few posts will explore this idea further, how popular knowledge of the structure of media actually changes how the public experiences media and the world. To be continued . . .  

Boundless ≠ Infinite, Research Time, 08/01/2015

The other day, I discussed only one kind of abstraction that Marshall and Eric McLuhan explore in the first sections of Laws of Media. The second kind of abstraction regards our experience of space, and the epistemic effects of Euclidean and Pythagorean geometry. These are the concepts that I would say are the most trippy so far in their analysis of how thought became abstract.

When I first read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western

Philosophy, his accounts of ancient Greek thought

continually discussed their moral injunction, apparently

an influence of Pythagoras, against eating beans. I don't

know why they hated beans so much, or why Russell

would make such a big deal over it.

“Trippy. Hm. Is that a technical term?”

Yes, actually, it is. 

The son and father describe how people experienced and thought about space before Euclid as acoustic. The primary objects in the world were physical things flying around us, and space was the product of these interactions. Remember, however, that these concepts of space were explained in philosophical poetry, performed testimonials of logos itself that speaker and audience memorized in the act of recitation and listening. There were no mathematics to accompany these concepts. 

Euclid and Pythagoras changed all this when they started constructing geometric figures and investigating their properties on paper. They conceived what MuLuhan calls the visual model of experiencing space, where figures stand in focus on a featureless ground that extends infinitely in all directions. Space exists as infinite extension that is the theatre on which objects appear.

This concept of infinite extension was very different from what amounts to the previous equivalent conception, that of boundlessness. The sages of recitation understood the world as ultimately finite, but having no boundaries. It used to be easily understood, but we've lived with the concept of space as infinitely extended for so long that now boundlessness is hard to get our heads around.

Boundless finitude goes like this. Travel in your spaceship as far away from everything else as you possibly can. Literally everything else in the entire universe is behind you. You’ve only travelled a finite distance, but your position now constitutes the most distant point in the universe. Now throw a baseball in front of you. 

That's what the boundless finite universe is. It's a bunch of stuff scattered around. There’s no limit to that finitude beyond which you can’t go, as if there was a magic fence around the universe. You’re not throwing that baseball into anything. You’re just throwing it farther away from everything else. The size of the universe is just the distance between stuff and there's no principle that sets any limit on how distant stuff can be from each other.

This is actually really hard to conceive today, because as a culture we’re so accustomed to thinking about the universe as a plane of space, the end of which is literally no-space. If you can throw the baseball, you must be able to throw it into something. This idea that there had to be something that underlay the existence and relationships among objects was weird and difficult to understand in Euclid’s day. His ideas were so innovative that they literally made no sense without long periods of complex study.

Of course, Einstein’s revolution in physics has thrown the Euclidean conception of space into the pile of obsolete ontology. Yet we’ve been thinking according to Euclidean presumptions for so long (or so says the McLuhans) that returning to a conception of space that makes it a function of relative distance from the image of a theatre prior to the objects that appear in it is just as difficult as it was to leave that conception behind in the first place 2500 years ago.

I’m not sure where their conceptual story of how we understand space ends, because I’ve been spending most of my philosophical time editing the manuscript of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So I had to put Laws of Media down for a while. Only so many hours in the day.

Abstract From the Sound to the Paper, Research Time, 06/01/2015

Marshall McLuhan's career as an
intellectual celebrity is fascinating. I may
pick up Douglas Coupland's book about
him, as it's highly recommended.

Eric and Marshall McLuhan focus a lot of the first chapter in Laws of Media on the importance of abstraction as a form of thinking that transforms how we conceive of and experience the world after we become habituated to it. 

They discuss two kinds of abstraction. The abstraction of alphabetic script is closely attached to the concept of logos as the speech act that makes what is said true that I discussed yesterday. McLuhan understands the alphabet as the first analysis of spoken language that broke from representing its vocal character. 

Western scripts had been syllabaries before the innovations of Greek script, according to McLuhan’s historical analysis,* each character representing a syllable. So there were many characters (usually based on pictographs and hieroglyphs of objects where the syllable was prominent in its name), each of which had a direct relation to a verbal sound.

* This historical analysis utterly sidesteps the fact that the Greek innovations in separating syllabic written characters into vowels and consonants was long pre-dated by Hebrew writing. And several Hebrew letter forms directly influenced the Greek.** I think that for the rest of this post, I’ll remind you in brackets that Hebrew did the same thing after I mention what McLuhan identifies as an innovation in Greek script.

** I bought a book several years ago at a conference, Alpha Beta by John Man, that provides a detailed history of both Mediterranean and Asian scripts.

McLuhan calls attention to an innovation in Greek (and Hebrew) script that also occasioned in innovation in the most intricate conceptual connective tissue of the Mediterranean mind, the breakdown of syllabic letters into vowels and consonants. The consonant especially is a paradigm-shifting innovation because vowels had already been added to several of the region’s syllabic scripts. They fit the voice-centric model of syllabic scripts well; vowels are a kind of pure vocalization.***

*** I admit that I have very little technical knowledge of linguistics and I’m being completely amateurish in my description of the qualities of the various sounds of language.

But consonants can’t really be pronounced at all. They require abstracting from the sound of a word or syllable to a component that can only be understood in writing. Far from returning to voice-centric writing, McLuhan considers the technical linguistic term of the phoneme a further abstraction than the consonant-vowel alphabets because it isolates individual sounds of languages with a specialized technical alphabet.

As I wrote this post, I thought of writing a book about
Derrida's intellectual influence from Heidegger: an Anti-
Semitic would-be sage whose greatest successor was a
Sephardic Jewish master of abstraction. A story of
philosophical gravity transformed into a nerdy joy. I
probably won't have the time or dedication until I'm
extremely old.

It reminds me of another common bugbear that is often made a whipping boy by philosophers hostile to European thought. But in this case, I actually think there’s much productive to learn through reading him. Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (and Speech and Phenomena, but I won’t speak to that book because I haven’t actually read it) discusses how an experience of language that centres on voice and speaking privileges tactility and presence, while a language that requires its script for fundamental understanding prioritizes abstraction.

I always read an undertone of judgment in this transition from a voice to script centricity in Mediterranean languages when I’ve gone through Of Grammatology, as if moving away from the primacy of voice cost us a wonderful element of immediacy and presence in our relationship with our language, words, and expression. Of course, that contrasts with the major themes of Derrida’s early work, his multifaceted critique of presence as it occurs throughout Western metaphysics and life. 

But what impresses me about how McLuhan describes these serious phase transitions, they allow no romanticism in their discussions of either the voice or the script focus in our encounters with language. Often, philosophical discussions of such categorical epistemic shifts grieve for the old model as a lost authenticity or innocence that can never be restored. 

Martin Heidegger certainly talked that way about human life and thought before the advent of abstraction. I find McLuhan quite commendable in simply describing the shift in cultural character so neutrally, as if he is simply describing different ways of encountering the world, each with its benefits and drawbacks. In fact, I think that’s exactly what he’s doing. Excellent.

More True Than Truth, Research Time, 05/01/2015

I decided at the end of last semester at Sheridan College’s Communications post-grad program, that boning up on some media theory would help build my abilities in my new field. The program is very good at teaching the details and techniques of communications in today’s media environment, but I still see some gaps in exploring the details of why those techniques are effective and probing the limits of their effectiveness. 

So I whipped out a book from my shelf that I had ordered a year or so ago, with a vague feeling that I’d need it eventually: The Laws of Media by Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric (although Eric’s role as a ghostwriter for his father, and the book’s publication well after the elder McLuhan’s death is a sign that its author is mostly Eric). 

How we conceive of the world changes
the world itself.

The book starts with very foundational investigations that explore how our cultural presuppositions about the nature of space and expression condition how we experience and think. The central topic in these sections is exploring the differences between how the ancient Greeks conceived of and experienced the world, and how we do. It’s particularly interesting to me, as someone who’s studied a lot of Western philosophy over the last decade and change. 

In my time working as a philosophy teacher, I developed a lot of gripes about the way philosophy was typically taught in universities. Most of my gripes applied to the introductory levels. These should be the most important courses in an entire program, because it’s the first opportunity to sink your disciplinary hooks into new students and attract majors from among the general crowd. 

But because none of the students were all that practiced in reading, discussing, and writing about philosophy (as you’d expect of an introductory class), the material was often simplified to such a degree that it became either boring, irrelevant, or nonsensical. What especially bugged me was the simple way that intro courses typically handled ancient Greek thought.

It wasn’t that the central questions of philosophy, broadly conceived (What is God? What is the good? What is the nature of being?) are all that different. But there are radical differences in the presuppositions and the approaches that we and the ancient Greeks take to those questions. One that has particular relevance for the philosophical issues inherent to a Communications program is the ancient Greek conception of truth and what it means to speak truth.

The key term is logos. McLuhan describes the full connotations of this word for the ancient Greek mind, and it’s a fascinating concept. Forget its contemporary meaning as the root of our words for logic and the scientific disciplines (the various -ologies). 

Someone who speaks logos is literally speaking being. He isn’t just making a claim that he supposes is true, or makes a claim as part of advocating its truth. He isn’t pronouncing his own authority on what is true. To speak logos is literally to become a conduit that expresses existence itself. Logos is a speech act that makes what you say true. 

We don’t really have a concept for this anymore. The closest analogy I can think of in my fairly immediate reaction is the concept of prophecy in Jewish and Muslim theology. Their central presupposition is that prophecy doesn’t happen anymore, and that it was pretty rare to begin with, there being only a handful of genuine prophets over several thousand years. 

I've met many Analytic philosophers
who dismiss all European philosophy
because they consider Heidegger an
obscurantist. But he really did write in
a purposely obscure way, because he
wanted to restore philosophy to be a
discipline of sages, as it was in
ancient Greece.

But sages were everywhere in ancient Greece, and the ones we remember today, we call the pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus, and many others. We’re often taught their philosophies as if they were advancing arguments and giving reasons, but this doesn’t accurately reflect how they and their society thought of their work.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were the first to conceive of philosophy, the vocation of devotion to wisdom, as making claims, giving reasons for them, and developing techniques to move from one reason to another and ground a reason as such. Martin Heidegger called this the beginning of true philosophy’s decline precisely because it departed from the vocation of sages.

Parmenides writes:
Χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ' ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι, “Chré to legein te noein t’éon emmenai esti gar einai.” It needs must be that what can be spoken of and thought of is. Legein, in its infinitive form logos, is the speech that, in the act of speaking it, must be. 

Philosopher-sages (remember, the original model of philosophy that predates Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the typical Big Three) wrote no arguments, only poems and verses. Their texts were of the same form as epic poetry, performative recitations that expressed the nature of being, which were intended to be memorized in the immediacy of listening itself.

The original model of a philosopher was a prophet of nature.