Rising Tides Lift Only Boats That Can Pay for Maintenance, Research Time, 17/07/2018

So yes, the conception of prosperity as abundance has all those problems I talked about yesterday. Ultimately, the concept can’t escape the perennial problem in human history – the conflict of the powerful and powerless.

I'm wondering – Do they all have to wear the shirts?

Lords and peasants. Nouveau riche and factory boys. Oligarchs and Taskrabbits.

Society is always much more complex in all the dynamic processes and knit us all together, of course. But this question of distribution always comes up because of the disastrous results of extreme inequality. When so much of a civilization’s wealth is locked up and never returned to the market, there’s a mass slide into poverty.

When the bulk of a population slides into penury while a small elite become earthly gods from their extreme wealth, you have a potential revolution on your hands. Oligarchy’s survival mechanism is to bring all the counter-revolutionary powers of the state – both military and messaging – to bear.

The counter-revolutionary state is a fascist one, because its purpose is to suppress and deceive the desires of its people. That’s why such an important message in democratic organizing is “fight the real enemy.”

I was lecturing in my Business class today about how inadequate general measures of a country’s wealth – like Gross Domestic Product – are to understand how that economy actually functions. Pure aggregates of economic measurement collapse too many distinctions to make the world comprehensible. They measure nothing about how many people in that society are comfortable and who is not.

So what does the concept of prosperity as abundance show us? It does lead us, productively, to focus on the phenomenology of economic anxiety. Abundance is the image of the world’s perfection for the economically insecure.

It’s what you dream of as you weigh how much you can fill up your car today against how many groceries you can buy that week. Progressive political philosophy could use a few more phenomenological accounts of that state of consciousness.

More Than Mere Images, Composing, 11/07/2018

Over the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about different ways I’ve seen philosophical writers push themselves into more ambitious expressions. The results are beautiful and inspiring. The quality of the results are mixed, but that’s true of any attempt to overcome limits.

You’d be right to ask what limits I’m talking about, for a start. Well, these limits are based in the norms of academic writing, which tend to the self-destructive. Let me take a paragraph or six to explain how.

Academic training in the university sector tends to cause a lot of impostor syndrome. There are many causes for this, but I want to focus today on two causes.

One cause is that there’s no generally acceptable upper limit on how comprehensive a paper must be to appear credible. A writer must always prepare to face someone who calls their work inadequate because it doesn’t refer to a particular writer that critic is familiar with.

A powerful mystical experience can be had here, but only if you're
already open to it. If you aren't open to that phenomenological
communion, you might just see some potentially valuable
minerals that this damn National Parks act prevents you from
accessing, for the economic good of the people.
Image by Jorge Lascar via Flickr / Creative Commons

But research overproduction has made this impossible, especially combined with how long peer review takes. In the sometimes two years or longer between submission and publication, a study might become obsolete or out of date. If an article for a research journal was written in 2015, it won’t be able to include references to relevant stuff published in 2017, even though it didn’t come out until 2018.

So academic writers are brutally scrutinized by journal authorities through a process that makes their submissions irrelevant because publication takes so long.

Another, related cause, is how the training and publication peer review processes are so rigorous about the form of academic research writing. An essay must use a particularly narrow range of writing styles, tones, and ways of explaining ideas, if it’s going to pass the muster of a peer review process for a publication whose credits count toward tenure and job security.

Little to no experimentation is allowed, until you’re so deep into your career that you’ve likely lost your zeal for experimentation in writing at all.

So I have a lot of respect for writers like Jussi Parikka, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Jane Bennett, who base so much of their philosophical positions on imagery as a starting point. It’s a method that breaks with the dry prose style where bloodless argumentation and obsolete rationalist attitudes dominate.

Now the question is, like I said a few days ago – Can you open up the evocation of the image to find something philosophically experimental and innovative?

When I was researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of academically-written environmentalist philosophy that depended on the power of the image alone for the strength of their argument. I did read one author, Scott Aikin, who dismissed the style of this argument in an insightful, if cruel way – He called it seeing a big rock and having an experience.

The lands where the different nations of the Nishnaabeg lived before
they were driven from their lands by the violent dispossession of
Canadian and American state institutions.
Map by DarrenBaker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27884645

Thinking about this more mystical philosophical method now, I think the point was well-made, but without giving credit to a failed attempt to write philosophy differently than the academy typically trains you.

The naive environmentalist argument is that these experiences – farming, hiking, naturalistic observation, among others – is that there’s only one correct response to them in thought. But they made no argument as to why that one response is the correct one.

A few days ago, I started reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done. She produces a strong argument for why a reverent, respectful attitude to the ecological networks in which we live is the proper response to experiences of Indigenous ways of life.

That argument is rooted in the philosophical concept of grounded normativity, a central framework principle of many Indigenous North American philosophical traditions, particularly in her own culture, the Nishnaabeg of what is now called the Great Lakes region.

Simpson is building a remarkable philosophical edifice. It’s one of the most conceptually ambitious works I’ve come across in a long time. I don’t want to talk much more about this book right now, because I only just started reading it, and there’s already enough philosophical density to sustain centuries of commentary and uptake. It deserves such devotion.

As for Parikka, his reliance on images to express philosophical concepts is still vulnerable to the Aikin critique. More respectfully, it means that an image underdetermines its meaning. The Geology of Media does interesting things with media theory, and along with allied works like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, pushes against the tired restrictions of academic style. Reading Parikka, I want his next book to try even harder.

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept I: Living Earth, Composing, 28/06/2018

Jussi Parikka's book The Geology of Media is one of several books that have come out in the last decade exploring aspects of our global ecological crisis with an old image. The living Earth.

I’ve come across different aspects of this in Tim Morton’s work, as well as others in his broadly-related crew of thinkers – Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, a few others falling under the name speculative realists.* A variety of creative – and in Bogost’s case, delightfully bizarre – fundamental pessimists about the future of humanity.

* They all went to the same conference in 2007 that had “speculative realism” in the title, and appeared in an essay collection with that phrase in the title.

I hope the insane billionaires of the world will be happy to invest the
massive fortunes they've squired away in building inter-planetary
mining infrastructure by the end of the century. Because that's when
we're going to run out of all the metals that make computers work.

I mean, the most thoroughly absurd stance in ecological philosophy in the 21st century is optimism. So the image of a brutalized, raging, vengeful Earth – whether radically alien or hauntingly personal – is a constant.

But there are other, more impish, perspectives as well. I remember reading Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter during research for my last big book. She built a curious outline of an ontology she called vital materialism – major components were a return to vitalist biological theories and a quirky extrapolation of metallurgy.

Another book that delivered on almost all its potential, but petered out a little. Still excellent, if not quite great – fascinating ideas that weren’t tied together quite as profoundly as they could have been.

Parikka himself offers another set of sources for this image of the living Earth – an important one for him is the history of geology. Geology is, in the simplest terms, the historical investigation of a planet’s own development and the essential nature of a planet, along with the techniques for doing all that well.

It’s a science that could work on any planet made mostly of rock, but Earth is where we’ve done the most studies so far. Works just as well for other planets, moons, and asteroids – but for now such studies are prohibitively expensive, and getting there is a bit of a commute.

Throughout his book, Parikka turns to media theory and art for the
tools to turn the image of the living Earth into a philosophical
concept you can act on (and through). There are many hitches with
this decision, but one of them is that there have been so many
such images that focussing on a single one requires so much
justification that you spend all your time on it and not the analysis.

A lot of the first people to study geology shared a general, kind of vague image that served as their very rough framework for understanding how Earth worked as a system. Scratch that – it was a framework to understand THAT Earth worked as a system. This was the living Earth – that the generation and dynamic fluxes of Earth’s processes were its life processes.

Not as an organism like us. No one seriously thought they’d find igneous analogous to kidneys or lungs. If you describe these early geologists that way, you’re just doing it to dismiss their ideas from relevance by making their interpretive frameworks sound too plainly ridiculous.

Here’s how they thought, in brief. Having dynamic internal processes that generate themselves – one powers the other, the other powers the first – is a necessary and sufficient condition for being alive. For being a life.

It didn’t imply anything ontologically or physically – it didn’t mean necessarily that a planet would have a geological circulation like an animal’s cardiovascular system. The implication was ethical – that the Earth deserved the respect that you’d accord any living thing.

For example, take my personal favourite utterly barmy image of the
living Earth in popular culture – Mogo! The Green Lantern that's a
sentient planet! Mogo is pretty much the only thing I like about
Green Lantern proper, mainly because of its core premise that our
hero is a narc.

That’s different from the other common idea about respecting the Earth – philosophers use words like alienation and sublimity. Because the Earth is so much more powerful than a person – storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, massive mountain chains, vast oceans, etc – we respect it because it dwarfs us. We respect Earth because we’re so insignificant compared to it and casually destroyable in the face of it.

A geologically-inspired philosophy for our current crisis can’t inspire respect for the Earth through fear. Our processes – the grotesque pollution of mining and e-waste, the overflowing dumps of nuclear waste – are enough to strike fear into the Earth. We no longer need to fear the Earth – we need to fear ourselves.

That begins from understanding Earth as something which we harm. Not something we wreck, the way an angry toddler wrecks a plastic toy or a train set. You wreck something, and all that matters is the money to replace it and the mess you made. Earth is something we harm, the way a psychotic toddler yanks a kitten’s tail or pulls her ears to hear it scream.

Harm is to inflict suffering. And we need to learn how to understand the Earth as something we can inflict suffering on. Not suffering like an animal – any more than the Earth has blood and breath. No – There is suffering. Earth suffers.

Nostalgia Feeding Fascist Dreams of Cackling Joy, Research Time, 21/06/2018

We’re in a fascist moment right now. I don’t have to tell you this. Not only is the United States government locking away families seeking asylum from war and violence, but the guards enjoy their jobs, there are already allegations of abuse in the children and infants’ detention camps, and there’s a pretty big minority who doesn’t care or believe any of this is going on.

Maybe they really do think that everyone ICE is arresting and throwing into prison camps are all thousands of MS-13 gang members who constantly stream into the country.

Very little about the Trump family is subtle. The Republican Party
apparatchiks like Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen may prefer to be
more slippery, cagey about what they're actually doing. They won't
say what they're doing. The Trump family is different. They tell you
what you say, but it's so ridiculous that you know it's a stupid excuse.

Maybe that’s just what they tell people who they suspect would be a little disturbed by their real thoughts. Maybe they’re genuinely happy that thousands of Central American Hispanic and Indigenous people are locked in prison camps, degraded, and beaten. Children and infants included.

Stare at that hatred. It’s a human desire. It is not monstrous. It is not somehow inhuman. It is ordinary.

Different trends of research examines the images that warp a personality to express such intense hatred against the ethnically different. Many of those research trends percolated through the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Jeremy Gilbert provided a damn good bibliography section for this end of my research.

An important set of fascist concepts is rooted in the appeal to stability. You could call it the desire for freedom from fear. Any change brings risk, and a major shift in the nature and makeup of your society is riskier than if little to nothing changed at all.* Fear is the most intuitive response to the notion that your world is growing riskier, more dangerous.

* This is, of course, not the actual nature of risk, which is way more complicated. The point isn’t about what risk is, but people’s intuitions about risk.

When our world feels more dangerous, we dream of peaceful times. If we associate our feelings of danger with the change happening all around us, we’ll idealize a time in our society before that change began. We’ll want to return to that state.

Make America Great Again.

That’s how nostalgia becomes the driving image of a fascist political movement. When you’re so motivated by a fear growing in the most important desires of your personality, you’ll condone whatever violence needed to make that dream come true.

He gives you permission to use his moronically stupid excuse so that
you have something to say when a less racist person talks to you at
a party. And you can, happily and relatively privately, sit back and
enjoy watching thousands of people you hate suffer and die.

If you fear a society where your ethnicity and cultural heritage will be a minority so much, you’ll be relieved those detention camps are booming. They’ll turn back the desperate civil war refugees by conclusively demonstrating that Central Americans will find no shelter here.

The imagery of nostalgia can turn to better purposes, of course. Nostalgic themes play an important role in the environmental movement. I find it naïve that people would think of a non-technological world as a Garden of Eden.** Simply false when you learn anything about the very turbulent history of Earth.

** As a cultural image of a peaceful, harmonious Nature before human corruption. Not some silly story about a naked couple living in the woods with a talking snake.

If you come from a culture and a community that’s treated ethnic minorities with terrible oppression for centuries, wouldn’t you fear becoming an ethnic minority? You’d associate being a cultural minority with oppression, unable to imagine people of different cultures and ethnicities living together peacefully.

When you’ve grown up hating by instinct, you have an instinctive feel for how terrible it is to be the object of that hatred. When you see yourself in danger of becoming that object, your survival instinct kicks in. Luckily, what you’ll do to survive supports your disgust at having to share space with them. You’ll be relieved that these disgusting creatures won’t come to find you so disgusting.

Reading Gilbert, he brings it back to neoliberalism. How all of this becomes a way to dupe people into supporting an oligarchic economic system. He’s not wrong. But let’s understand this aspect as well – an ethical phenomenology of the racist.

Getting Old and Feeling Surly, Research Time, 25/11/2017

Right now, I’m working on a short article for the Reply Collective. If I’m going to solicit contributors as Digital Editor, I may as well contribute some content myself. Especially since I’ve been a regular contributor since the place started up.

Recently, we published two articles that pick up a conversation which began last summer. I mean, there was a pretty big gap between instalments, but the conversation was pretty linear. It’s a discussion of John Searle’s theories of human rights.

John Searle's aggressive, unsubtle style of writing
turned out to be very influential throughout
analytic philosophy during the 1980s, and continues
to shape the approach of many philosophers in North
America. I consider that a damn shame, because
Searle first became prominent as one of the thinkers
bringing metaphysical and ontological issues back
into the analytic tradition.

I’m not going to link every single one individually, but you can start from the most recent two, by Gregory Lobo and J Angelo Corlett. You can also look through Raimo Tuomela’s recent piece, because the whole chain started from a review of his book Social Ontology, that SERRC published last year.

That’s what I love about this platform.

Anyway, there are some ideas in this debate that are good food for thought in my own research on utopian drives and concepts in contemporary ideologies. Now that I had the chance to engage with the exchange a little more closely, I could see some interesting convergences with my own work.

So this week, I’m drafting a more formally-written contribution to the discussion. And I’m going to sort out some of the ideas in it here.

Here’s what I latched onto in the discussion. The ideas and concepts floating around make for good elements in a non-reductive materialist conception of how human society works. Let me lay that out for you.

Materialist – Generally,* you don't think any supernatural substance or being is needed to explain things like life, consciousness, human intelligence, or the conditions of the universe’s existence (questions like, ‘What caused the beginning of the universe?’).

* And I’m talking extremely generally.

Non-reductive – You don’t think being a materialist about reality means you have to explain away some aspect of human experience, ability, spirituality, or identity.

As I looked into Searle's late-period social-political thinking, I saw what was in many ways kind of an inadequate system. A few years after Searle’s first book on this project, The Construction of Social Reality, Neil Gross wrote a pretty solid essay showing how wrong-headed the project was because of what it ignored.

I think Gross’ conclusion can apply to the later Searle material that focusses more directly on questions of human rights as well. It’s because Searle’s major creative philosophical works all fit together as a continuous development of a single grand theory.

The return of metaphysics to analytic philosophy had the potential
to create beautifully weird and creative ways of thinking and
writing in that tradition. Instead, such  fantastically strange thinkers
as Saul Kripke and David Lewis became outliers in an increasingly
stagnant stylistic field.

The concepts he developed during his first creative works carrying forward John Austin’s analyses of speech acts were a foundation for his arguments about the nature of mind and intentionality, how people direct their action in the world.

The decades he spent developing those theories laid a groundwork for his account of the social world as shaped by collective and shared intentions. The conception of shared intentions as the atoms of society became the basis for his theory of human rights.

Here are the problems I have with this, which Gross helped me put a finger on.

Problem one – Searle’s insularity. Remember, Searle developed all this theoretical machinery largely as building blocks from his own older work. He’d established his theoretical system, and like the old system-builders, he expanded those concepts and theories to apply to new areas, eventually to give an account of all human phenomena.

So he didn’t think he had an incentive to read the works of other authors as equals. In response to critics – well-versed in social and sociological theory – who said Searle’s ideas didn’t go much beyond what Emile Durkheim developed a century ago, Searle said that he didn’t really read much of Durkheim.

Why? Because what little he’d read of Durkheim convinced him that one of the founders of the entire discipline of sociology didn’t make much sense. No attempt to understand Durkheim’s very different intellectual world or priorities. No attempt to understand why he wrote the way he did. Because Durkheim didn’t write like a doctrinaire analytic philosopher, he didn’t make sense. That’s it.

Which brings me to problem two – Searle’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Searle is infamous for having convinced pretty much everyone in analytic philosophy that everything influenced by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or any other philosopher from continental Europe’s traditions is empty charlatanism.

Because those ideas, even though they were sometimes
written in very strange ways, turned out to be very
useful to the social sciences. It was almost as if the
hermeneutic and post/structuralist theories were
philosophies of the social sciences, waiting for the
social scientists to catch up a bit. Just a thought.

The obvious arrogance is in the conclusion that, because I don’t understand something, it’s nonsense. In his exchange with Jacques Derrida, they both talked past each other to epic intensities.

Searle was convinced that Derrida spoke nothing but nonsense. Derrida was convinced that Searle was an arrogant hypocrite who made no effort to understand the vulnerabilities and blindnesses of his own position and thought.

When I read Gross’ critique of Searle’s social theory, I understood how these two threads – his insularity in his own corpus, and his arrogant, dismissive attitude to ideas and styles he didn’t immediately understand – connected.

The ideas that were at the forefront of social theory for sociologists come from hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and philosophy of the intensive sciences. The schools of philosophy that Searle has aggressively dismissed as nonsense and fraud for literally decades.

By this late state in his career – when he had also become more untouchable than Harvey Weinstein for his sexual exploitation of young, female students – Searle had become incapable of the humility required to catch up on social theory. He would have likely seen what trends had influenced contemporary sociology and dismissed it all as nonsense without bothering to read any of it.

So he’s a fellow traveller in giving a materialist theory of human thought, society, and institutions. But his arrogance and self-certainty keeps Searle from having anything useful to say to anyone else.

I doubt he’d care. If they think differently from him, he’d likely say they were all simply wrong.

Is Alienation Inevitable or Escapable? Jamming, 05/11/2017

Alienation is a word with many different meanings. We use it – the ideas and images it evokes – to unpack a lot of fairly different concepts. That versatility makes the word very useful, but also very dangerous because it’s so easily misunderstood.

Here are a few examples.

What we take to be a hallucination, an illusion, is in fact the real.
What appears solid is a practical instinct that more careful
observation shows has very limited scope and application.
Real knowledge shows us that everything is connected,
interdependent, flows into each other, can sense each other.

When I brought Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to Palgrave a few years ago, one of the proposal reviewers kept talking about marxism. Now, I was using the word ‘alienation’ in an environmental philosophy context.

It’s a book on environmental ethics. But some folks, they see a word that has some deep marxist associations and they fly straight to marxism. The conversation with the reviewer turned out fine.

A lot of academics are surprised when I write back to journal and book line editors telling them their reviewers didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s surprisingly effective.

So what’s underneath all those different definitions of alienation – the orthodox marxist, the popular lefty, the environmentalist / ecological, and other philosophical approaches? Think about it this way – What’s the experience or the state of mind that all these technical conceptions of alienation describe different aspects of?

There’s a passage in The Human Condition that, as far as I can tell, nails this description. Arendt talks about the peculiarly modern chasm between the nature of the world and our experience of it.

The last few centuries of research institutions have discovered more about the universe than we’ve ever known before. We’re able to observe planets orbiting stars all over our galaxy. We’re investigating the smallest, most elusive particles in our universe.

We’ve developed such comprehensive knowledge of how life works on a molecular level. We’re on our way toward a similarly comprehensive knowledge of life ecologically. All of that builds our medical knowledge. We understand the processes and flows by which our planet holds itself together and pulls itself apart.

Confronted by the ALie Nation
The subjects and the citizens
See the material religions through trauma and numb
Nothing is related
All the things of the earth and in the sky
Have energy to be exploited
Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold
Into nothing is sacred, not even their self

And I’m being way too quick about these different venues of knowledge. Only listing them to blow your minds a little by reminding you of how powerful our knowledge has become.

We’re learned an enormous amount about the universe. But it’s put pretty much all our experience to the lie. When we walk on the Earth, it feels solid to us. But our ground floats on a globe of molten rock – liquid. Objects feel solid, but they’re composed mostly of empty space, kept separate by electromagnetic fields.

Really, it would be more accurate to describe reality as the interaction – integration, interpenetration – of fields instead of objects. That we’re a dynamic reality where everything is constantly in flux. Alienation rises in us because our reality feels different to us.

We experience solid bodies. We experience stability, not flux. Flux, change, dynamism all tends to disturb us. But that’s the way the world really is.

So we’re left with another example of the traditional distinction in Western philosophy. Really, it’s the distinction that defines Western philosophy – one problem running through the entire tradition. Appearance and reality.

That chasm is our fundamental alienation. Something that we’re supposed to or actually do experience as a harmony turns out to be a chaotic discord. The solidity of the world is an illusion. No, not an illusion – a lie that we tell ourselves and convince ourselves from our earliest experiences.

A lie into which we’re socialized from birth. Our knowledge that gives us so much power also shows that the harmony we felt with the world is utterly unreal. As Arendt quotes Werner Heisenberg, all we have are our instruments and ourselves.

Expecting the world to be one way, we discover that it’s totally different. The ways we understood the world – so common that it feels intuitive, that we raise our children instinctively to believe in the world this way – are actually nonsense. Our subjectivities schizz from the world.

How do you heal this wound in our knowledge and self-conception? It may be as easy and as difficult as throwing that false instinct away. Understand the world as energy, flux, flow, and interdependence, multiplicity without hierarchy or rank. See what you can become then.

Stretching Our Intentions Through Time, Research Time, 26/10/2017

Here’s an interesting argument that I found in The Human Condition. It’s another example of how Hannah Arendt’s thinking blends ontological and ethical matters in ways that work.

She describes a foundational aspect of our experience of time – how we develop our most visceral conceptions and feelings for the time beyond the present. This goes beyond just remembering and imagining. Both of those are acts carried out in the present.

Remembering refers to the past and imagining can refer to the future, but these acts don’t connect our intentions and worldly activity beyond the present. These acts remain in the present – they don’t extend our action beyond the moment.

So we aren’t really experiencing the past and the future, only calling possibilities and memories before our thoughts. We can experience the past and the future, but it takes a much more intense act than speculation.

When I was partying in my early 20s, I had a
friend who, at the height of his drunkenness,
would scream, "I can see through time!"

Experiencing time beyond the hazy boundaries of the moment is a matter of physical reach there, spreading ourselves four-dimensionally.

Forgiveness and promising. These are the acts by which we physically reach into the past and future – essentially moral and social acts.

Forgiveness is to free someone from the consequences of a past act. It erases that old action from your relationship with that person. An action whose direct intention reaches into the past and changes it.

It may just be in the context of this one relationship between a few people, but it’s still changing the past – nullifying an event, deadening its consequences.

Promising is, parallel to forgiveness, the act of changing the future. Now, the future doesn’t yet exist – it literally hasn’t happened yet* – so you aren’t changing some pre-existing future.

* Please do not bring general relativity or any of the implied conceptions of time – block time, timeless time – into this conversation. I’m just talking about the human experience of time in the flow of our movement.

No, you're changing what would be into what can be. A promise is a reach into the future to create it – an act of manipulating existence into a particular shape. Our intentions in our promises push our actions forward in time as the promise becomes a goal, an attractor for our action.

These actions are possible only through social relationships – building bonds of trust, reliability, and obligation. Communities are constituted here.

But the constitution of communities and friendships are bound up with the extension of our experience beyond the present moment and into a smeared duration of practical awareness. Building our social bonds requires stretching our intentionality into the past the future – extending our presence from the present into a long stretch of time.

Self-conscious creatures become social through stretching their intentionality along entirely new vectors. Promising and forgiving makes us four-dimensional creatures. These acts make us more than timely – becoming temporal.

Entertaining the Possibility of an Actual Film, Composing, 12/01/2017

It actually will just be a short one tonight. Most of my creative activity today was revisiting the treatment pitch I wrote for a You Were My Friend film. I’m pursuing some leads right now that I hope will lead to some help with the production, so that I can raise enough money in the next year to get it produced.

I mean, I’ll probably end up being a producer myself. I’m already the writer. And I’ll probably be the director. I at first didn’t feel totally comfortable with that, but a talk with my friend Aisha – a professional documentary filmmaker – convinced me that it’s probably for the best.

I know the story best. I know the characters best behind it. I know what I want to say to the actors to make this my way.

And I learned a lot from working so closely with Mel, my director on the theatrical version, about how to guide actors.

One of my favourite stories about cameras comes from Werner Herzog,
telling the story of how he got his first camera. He was working in a
storage warehouse that included a lot of filmmaking equipment. He
saw a perfectly good camera that no one ever rented out, so he stole
it himself. He used that camera on just about every film he made for
nearly 20 years. Including some of his masterpieces.

I figure now that I’ll probably need only a crew of eight people. Myself, a co-producer with more experience in filmmaking logistics, a cinematographer, an editor, a sound recorder, a lighting and grip person, a set designer, and a production assistant to do continuity and take care of all the little crap.

18 actors. Eight bit parts of one or two scenes and a few lines, eight supporting roles who appear in three or four scenes, and the two leads Vicki and Madison. And I want to cast actresses who are actually the same ages as the characters – 19-20 and mid-20s. A few extras for restaurant scenes, and an indoor club scene.

The story has changed quite a lot, of course. Even just from the first draft of this script to the current one. In the original draft of the film, the sequences were very episodic. The episodes weren’t just about different phases in their relationship – in the film’s narrative, they also revolved around flashbacks.

Each sequence was its own story where we saw a part of the story unfold, intercut with scenes depicting the conditions bringing it about. For example, a comic conversation over Madison having bought an expensive coffee maker is interrupted by the full story of how and why she bought it in the first place. It reveals that she knows more than she says.

As I think about it, I realize that I was actually writing that part of the script more like it was a novel. There, you meditate with the amusement, can easily slip in a detail from the past, then let the rest of the scene play out with its more dramatic implications over the funny content.

But that only works because you take more time to read a sequence in a novel than you do to watch events unfold on a screen. In cinema, the tonal shift moves too quickly – it’s too abrupt.

So I made the sequence a straight chronological line. Madison discovers an event that makes her depressed,* and in an act of indifferent whimsy buys this machine. Now the whole conversation between she and Vicki about it is coloured with tragic implications. But you still laugh at the funny dialogue. It’s a twisty tension.

* I don’t spoil my own work. At least not that much.

I’m grateful to my former collaborator on this project Samantha for recommending this change. Going back to the scene as I update my treatment pitch, I better understand the structural reason why, how it’s rooted in the experience of watching cinema itself.

Every experience of writing, every thoughtful criticism from a friend, makes you a better artist. Now all I need is a budget commitment and a crew.

Doom Prophets III: A West in Crisis, A History Boy, 22/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . In his brief list of the prophets of modernity’s self-destruction, Antonio Negri includes Martin Heidegger. The reason is quite obvious, and there are several. 

One of those is that Heidegger was probably the most profound theorist of nationalism. Or rather, he was the most profound nationalist philosopher in the Western tradition. 

Now, I haven't read his Black Notebooks yet. I don’t know when I will, or even if I’ll ever bother. I never wanted to become a Heidegger scholar – I feel almost sick when I surround myself with his ideas for long enough. 

His thinking carries a constant weight of angst, loneliness, and surrender to fate. He makes you carry the same. 

The Black Forest in Germany, home of the German soul.

So, no, I never wanted to become a Heidegger scholar – I had other priorities as a thinker and writer than burying myself in his shrines. But the Black Notebooks would seem to be the most blatant statements of Heidegger’s nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, the other works like his Introduction to Metaphysics from the same period – when Hitler ruled Germany – express similar ideas with a terrible profundity.

They're part of how he engages with the end of modernity, the end of the West’s cultural certainty in itself and its military conquest of Europe and the world. Heidegger saw the catastrophe of the First World War as the highest intensity yet of a trend that began in ancient Greece and dominated the entire Western mind-set since Plato.

Technology, the technological approach to the world. Philosophically, ethically, speaking – the technological approach looks at the world primarily as a resource. It’s something to be used for our own ends. 

Instead of letting the world be and living within it, we chew up the world in the violence of consumption and turn it into fuel, into resources for projects that express our own hubris. 

Martin Heidegger where he felt most authentic.

Part of what Heidegger wanted to do with his philosophy was to push humanity back toward this approach to life of letting-be. This is why he’s had such a following among environmentalists, because of his hostility to the idea that the world is our resource.

But Heidegger also had some very terrifying ideas about how people thought in an everyday sense. An individual couldn’t achieve this enlightened letting-be attitude on his own. Only a culture, a people, could achieve it. 

People had to be conditioned into encountering the world this way from infancy onward. By the time we were adults, age had calcified us too much to genuinely change the mode of our whole existence. Only a whole people could produce an ethic.

This is where the racist terror of Heidegger’s philosophy unfolds. Only a scant few cultures were capable of pushing against the world-as-resource technological mind-set. Those cultures not only had to have a language whose concepts depicted being most authentically. 

They also had to be connected to a land that pushed back against their efforts, but in such a way that they still felt at home, that their land was a happy place where they could thrive. German people had the right language, and the right environment in the Black Forest. 

A culture’s connection to its land had to be suitably profound, deep and continuous enough that it could only be the product of centuries of environmental acculturation. The culture literally grew around the land, and in constant feedback with it. 

Cultures who didn’t have these deep connections couldn’t fully actualize themselves as humans. Cultures who had been forced into nomadism for centuries became so disconnected from the divine presence of its land that they weren’t even complete humans. They weren’t even complete humans.

Edmund Husserl, philosophical inventor.

You know. Like the Jews in Europe. 

And now it becomes absolutely terrifying. 

Phenomenology, the philosophical discipline of thought whose goal was to experience and describe the world and its objects in the purest terms, was Heidegger’s method to connect with being as it was in the immediate sphere of his life. Its methods let him focus on the ideas and actions he wanted to explore. 

And that’s where the philosopher I added to the list comes from Edmund Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, and Heidegger’s mentor. Husserl was also Jewish, blacklisted by the German state generally and Heidegger specifically in the last years of his life.

All Husserl’s books in his phenomenology period were subtitled introductions to phenomenology. He kept trying to perfect the method, always taking different routes and contexts to explain it. The last attempt was cultural in The Crisis of the European Sciences, written in 1936.

In that book, Husserl took the phenomenological method from the tool of an individual thinker to the tool of a culture to understand its own place in the world and history. With that method, he developed the concept of the life-world.

Life-world is what we really experience in cultural existence – the constantly fluctuating web of interacting individuals, all building each other’s personalities. He opposed this vision to the theoretical attitude toward the world, where the environment only mattered as far as you could quantify, measure, and control it. 

That theoretical attitude had long been the dominant way Western thinkers engaged with the world. It was a mistake because it made our world feel dead, or never alive to begin with. Still, having to leave this theoretical attitude behind, knowing that it was growing bankrupt, left the West in crisis. What would replace it?

Husserl didn’t know. Heidegger hoped for a return to an older way of existence, that you could resurrect it with enough effort and luck. Even if at the end of the day, only a god could save us. 

The real answer is tougher. You’d have to create it. . . . To be Continued

To Live as the Cosmos, Doctor Who: Heaven Sent, Reviews, 29/11/2015

Sartre wrote, through the mouths of his characters, a detail that people always forget when they misunderstand him, that hell is other people. Well, Doctor Who demonstrated the opposite this week. If hell is anything, it’s isolation.

No, it’s worse than that. But you’ll need some 

SPOILERS

because the solution to the mystery of what the mysterious castle of Heaven Sent is, reveals probably the most terrifying concept that Steven Moffat’s ever come up with.

The Doctor arrives in a teleportation chamber, seemingly for the first time. It’s right after Clara’s death in Face the Raven. He’s pursued by a creeping, unstoppable monster. It says nothing, and is only a spectre of death, drawn from his first nightmare, relentlessly tracking him. 

He knows that if it touches him, it will kill him. So he runs, figuring out the mechanics of the clockwork castle he’s in. He figures out how to manipulate confrontations with the creature to rearrange the castle and give him more time. 

He figures out the mystery of the place one step at a time, and reaches the last, inescapable dead end: a 25 foot thick wall harder than diamond that he’ll have to punch through to escape.

But he’ll only get a few punches in before the creature catches up with him. Just a few punches to slowly chip away at this harder-than-rock wall. All the time, he’s terrified of death. And when we finally see it, it’s horrifying. 

He can only get a few punches in at a time, the impact almost shattering his hand. After all the effort of investigating the trap, all the fear and terror of fleeing this unstoppable murder machine, he’s still lost. He achieves no more victory than a raindrop’s erosion against a cliff.

The Doctor dies. He loses. It’s his worst nightmare, that all his effort, ingenuity, and fear adds up to nothing. Just another undignified death, burned almost beyond recognition and climbing back through the stairs of the castle to the teleportation chamber.

Where he starts again, from the same spot, as if he’d just arrived from the end of Face the Raven. With none of the knowledge he’d accumulated from the last time. The Doctor disintegrates his body to recreate himself from the memory banks of the transporter.

The climactic montage makes it clear. He does it all again. Step by step. Exactly as before. The fall into the sea where the castle rests, the chases through the corridors, timing how far away he can get from the plodding spectre of death. Those few pathetic punches against a cliff face. Death.

And again.

The version Heaven Sent spends itself with takes place 6000 years after the Doctor arrives. Eventually, he repeats this exact sequence of events – the terror, the puzzle, death – for another 7000 years. 12,000 years. 1,000,000 years. 400,000,000 years. 2-billion years. 

He repeats the events of Heaven Sent, probably only a few days of his own life, over and over again for 2-billion years. 

At one point, the Doctor thinks about the castle’s nature as a prison for himself, a personal hell. Nothing wrong with that, he thinks, “Hell’s just Heaven for bad people.” Then he asks himself, “How long will I have to stay here?”

This is what I love about Moffat more than Russell T Davies. When Davies wanted to apply a sense of scale to the Doctor’s travels, he’d talk about the huge swaths of time we’ve covered in an episode. “We’re in the year 500,000!” “We’ve gone to the year five-billion!” “We’re at the end of the universe! 100-trillion years in the future!”

All these are huge numbers, but they’re just numbers. Declarations.

Moffat has written a story that displays for you the visceral experience of actually living through 2-billion years of time. You see a full story that, as you watch the montage of that slow wearing impact, its narrative gives you a sense of each repetition’s lived duration.

Once you feel the grit of that experience in watching the hour of Heaven Sent, you have something more than a superficial conception of just how much time an astronomical figure like 2-billion years really is. 

Our sense of lived time that we follow through a story gives us a sense of time’s accumulation, and we can conceive astronomical quantities as more than just empty words. 

And it’s the Doctor’s experience. He’s the only speaking role in the episode. It’s his story and his alone. He can actually think and act on the scale on which a Time Lord can think. 

People have tried to communicate the Doctor’s alien, inhuman nature in different ways throughout the show. Sometimes, it’s with a morality that’s often callous, letting some tragedy or great evil happen for a cosmological scale judgment that it will all turn out for the best.

Sometimes, the Doctor is just written as an ass, emotionally oblivious to how others think. “He thinks like an alien, so he doesn’t know how to relate to people.” Even Moffat has written the Doctor this way, with Peter Capaldi’s callousness and Matt Smith’s comic self-absorption. 

No, Moffat has just pushed himself farther into the truly alien than he’s ever gone as a writer of Doctor Who. Here’s how alien the Doctor is.

The Doctor has one confession left, and the creature is after his confession. If he gives it when he’s still in the castle and under the creature’s power, there’ll be no reason to keep him alive anymore. So he has to get away without giving the last of the information it wants. 

To get that last bit of information, the castle will let the Doctor run through the process again. And he gets that must closer to escape each time. One more raindrop on Mount Everest. 

On his own, he thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to live through Heaven Sent enough times to wear the Himalayas down to a prairie plain by smacking it with his fist. Just so he’ll be able to break out.

That is the time scale at which the Doctor operates as a practical individual. He even plans his quip to unfold over 2-billion years of repetitions.

The end of Heaven Sent leads into the season finale and the return of Gallifrey. After the pinnacle of this episode, adventuring with the Time Lords and Maisie Williams again will be a bit of a comedown.

But maybe that’s the real underlying theme of this season, exploring what it means to live on a cosmic scale of duration. Ashildir explores this in one way, and haunts the Doctor through the season, a spectre of how to break immortality badly.

This episode shows, more than any direct confrontation between the two, how their immortality differs.

Ashildir drifts from job to job, life to life. Viking storyteller, nurse, soldier, landowner, highwayman, watcher of the Doctor for a while, then administrator of a refugee camp. She drifts, she gets bored, restless, and forgets. She forgets her past, her motivation, her purpose.

The Doctor is able to maintain a sense of purpose and dedication through the repetitive wearing of 2-billion years. A purpose so powerful that he'll experience his actual death every few days for 2-billion years. Because eventually one of him will wear down the Himalayas. If he keeps losing for that long, he'll win.

Thinking and living on a cosmic scale, and capable of maintaining dedication the entire time. That's the ethical power of the character.

And Write in the New Style, Composing, 05/10/2015

You know, I never really liked Jacques Derrida’s stuff for the longest time. I still have a lot of issues with his presumptions, his starting points, and definitely his writing style. But I think my biggest issue with him was the way people talked about him and his ideas.

Imagine you’re a writer whose job it is to come up with new ideas and explain them relatively sensibly. That's writing philosophy. It’s a style of writing that requires you to push a little bit at the limits of what your language can do. That's why philosophy is sometimes written in such weird, inaccessible ways.

I hope what I do in my books, my philosophy essays, and on this blog is explain some very strange ideas in increasingly accessible ways. I’m not sure that I always succeed. 

But the best part about having a writing blog like this is that you can be experimental, try new things, some folks will enjoy it or not, and there’ll be another set of ideas in a day or two. The lead time on trying out new things is shorter than it's ever been before. 

So as long as you get the proper style of a blog down (casual, if slightly nerdy conversation), you can spin around as many trippy ideas as you want. It ends up making your language more accessible, less needlessly technical, a little more seductive, and more clear. 

I tried to do this in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. And I aim for Utopias to be even better at this style of philosophy. I’d like to write philosophy in a style about as accessible as a nerdy listicle, but with the conceptual rigour of the classics of the tradition.

Sometimes, I think people find
Derrida's writing so difficult to
understand, because they first
approach it presuming that it's
going to be difficult and
confusing. Because I always
have the ego when I'm reading
that, of course, I'll understand
this book decently, I can
overcome difficult parts better.
At least, I think I can.

Sometimes, like this weekend on an inter-city train, I’m reading a book by Derrida. And I think about this eventual goal of mine for writing philosophy. It gets frustrating.

When I was a student, I knew a few professors who studied the books Derrida wrote in his Spectres of Marx period, from the 1980s until his death. One of the ideas he explored was a conception of the messianic – thinking about the world as though it were leading up to a profound transformation into a new framework that would be paradise compared to the way things are now.

The idea’s pretty common. Derrida took the term from the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions where profound transformations of reality are central to the belief system. The appearances of God to humans in Judaism, the incarnation of God as human in Christianity, and the revelation of God’s final word in Islam. 

And from a secular perspective, you can hear it from transhumanist discussion and any cyberpunkish talk of The Singularity, following Ray Kurzweil. 

Derrida talks about experiencing time in your life as if existence were moving toward a time-to-come. And I heard a lot of people use this phrase without really being able to explain it to me. They’d just say that it wasn’t the future, but a time-to-come. 

I remember being 22 years old and completely turned off Derrida because people would talk about his ideas this way, unable to explain even in a simple sense what was actually going on. 

Now that I’ve started reading some of the books where he uses this term, I can say that I actually found it pretty simple to understand. Maybe I'm deluding myself, thinking that I can easily understand a writer famous for being difficult and obscure out of a bizarre fit of egomania. 

Maybe, because I haven’t had access to university library paywalls in years, I haven’t had my reading confidence broken by contending with a deluge of poorly written academic journal articles on the same subject. But it seems pretty clear to me.

Time to come. It means you don’t really think of a clear distinction between present and future as such. Ironic for a perspective that expects a radical transformation of reality in the future.

But not really. Because you live your life in constant anticipation of the messianic moment when the world is transformed. So the present becomes this rush toward a magic point. Call it a singularity if you want. The real distinction in time isn't between then, now, and later. It’s between the time leading up to the transformation, and after it.

When you live and understand your life in terms of anticipating that transformation, that's time-to-come. I don’t think anyone ever explained this to me, but that's what I read in the book this afternoon.

The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence I: Questions, Composing, 22/07/2015

In the early days of Adam Writes Everything, when I was still very uncertain what precisely this blog was going to be, especially its content and tone, I wrote a couple of posts under a category called “Triangulation.” They were essentially comparisons of different thinkers and ideas.

Eventually, I decided not to write these anymore, because they didn’t actually seem very fertile for developing ideas. And they didn't seem all that engaging for readers. These are the two questions that I ask myself about whatever I post here. 1) Will writing a post push a vague idea in a creative direction or otherwise help me figure out something that puzzles me? 2) Would someone actually enjoy reading it?

Those early posts just plunked two coincidentally similar ideas next to each other. Sometimes, two or more writers discussed the same topic, and sometimes, one writer actually influenced the other and I wanted to think about how. But coincidences don’t really make good philosophy.

The influence of Marinetti's Tactilist art appears in a
decadent and depraved American Hollywood film.

Here’s an example. I noticed an odd coincidence reading an old Marinetti essay the other night. He was discussing the framework of a new approach to art that he called Tactilism. It was artwork that you were supposed to experience not by looking at it or listening to it, but by rubbing your hands over it. They were panels whose material was designed to the smallest detail to provoke a particular tactile sensation.

Marinetti described how he first thought of this idea when he was a soldier in the Great War, serving in the battles against Austria. He was stumbling through a trench in total darkness trying to find a place to sleep, his hand passing over dirt, metal, clothing, flesh. He realized that this was a whole new way of seeing the world, through touch. 

We hardly ever think about just how detailed our tactile sensations can be. So he developed a form of art that would emphasize tactility, let us develop our hands to higher capacities of perceptivity than we typically do.

As Marinetti thought about what touch actually was, he came to understand it as the fundamental sense. All other perceptions – visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioception, and so on – were derived from the basic nature of touch. All perception is detection of objects around us and moving through them. Touch and avoidance of touch.

It occurred to me that Marinetti’s insight, which he developed in the context of his artwork, was fundamentally the same as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s when, in the last years of his life, he developed a philosophy of perception that saw touch and physical contact as foundational to all experience. 

Merleau-Ponty was working in the sub-discipline of phenomenology, particularly the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Merleau’s work during and shortly after the Second World War built on and expanded many of Husserl’s ideas, rooting them in a scientific context as research on brain injuries* discovered the complexity and depth of perception’s interdependence with neural architecture. 

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of opportunities
to study the effects of shrapnel head injuries on
human perception.

* The Second World War, particularly its flying shrapnel, produced many examples of traumatic brain injuries that were quite valuable for the growth of humanity's knowledge, even as their sufferers struggled to return to a worthwhile life.

I remember one professor I had as an undergraduate, who thought Merleau did little beyond expanding Husserl’s yet-unpublished papers. Merleau's mid-career work often ran into the same fundamental problem that Husserl did: how to get out of the subjective perspective. 

Merleau overcame this through a simple shift in focus from analyzing vision as essential perception, to touch. From there, he developed the conception of the subject not as a viewer, but as a field constantly interacting with other fields and bodies around her. This concept of the subject as a field of affects integrated in a huge complex of overlapping fields is the lynchpin for the conception of the subject at the heart of my ecological philosophy writing.**

** I’m in the process of booking my in-person and virtual speaking tour to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So more details coming to a campus near you.

Marinetti mentions this concept of the subject as a field as a logical derivation from his own reflections on the perceptual primacy of touch and tactility. He arrived at this profound, revolutionary philosophical concept through thinking about art. 

Here, we have two solitary figures with no actual historical relationship where Marinetti could have influenced Merleau philosophically at all. We only have their coincidental development of the same concept. Why bother thinking about it at all? 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 . . .