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Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Brooklyn, with Occasional Musings
From Boston I came down on the train to New York. I’m staying in Brooklyn for a few days at the Institute For the Future of the Book. That is, Bob Stein has been kind enough to put me up as a houseguest. He’s less armored in person. On Friday I’m in LA for an Institute seminar, where I will be very glad to meet, in particular, PZ “on the internet no one knows you’re a giant squid” Myers.
Naturally, the Institute has a blog. Through them a few days ago I found out about ELO, which is sponsoring what looks to be a worthy call for works:
The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.
Well, GOOD.
As I was saying, on Friday there will be a seminar and right now the Institute has PZ and Juan Cole and a couple other attendees circulating a survey. But I think it’s maybe not perfectly tailored for groupblogs, so I’ll just make this an open thread about ‘how’d you end up at the Valve?’-type stuff. Plus let me ask one targeted tech question of my own devising.
How could the design of blogs, whose content is not properly lashed to the Ixion wheel of the newscycle, be changed to reflect that fact? When Prometheus stole the power of blogging from the gods, they punished him by dooming his posts to be eaten up after 24 hours, only to grow anew.
Archives are underused at present. It would be nice to devise some mode of presentation - some form of tagging or aggregation of old material perhaps from many sources - that would get more use. Or perhaps our species is mad and simply won’t read anything that wasn’t written in the last 48 hours, no matter how timeless the topic. Suggestions?
Speaking of the mystery of mediation and time, I met Thomas de Zengotita yesterday at an Institute lunch. And he waxed eloquent about the difficulties of focus in such a voraciously digitized age. I confessed to suffering a touch of ADD, and Bob Stein suggested there must be a way of ‘tithing the church of the Big Idea’, even as we distract ourselves every which way.
Zengotita teaches at Dalton and NYU, writes for Harpers and blogs for the HuffPo. He’s got a new book out: Mediated
Here’s a review of the book. Here’s another. Here’s a third. And here’s an excerpt. And here’s one I’m making myself:
One of the most popular public-service-type TV shows of the 1950’s was You Are There (for reenactments of historical events). The name sounds hokey now, because we take it for granted, but that was the original miracle of tele-vision. That’s what blew the mind when it all began. Everyone became a participant/eyewitness to events on the world stage, past and present. And that’s why people spontaneously told their stories about the Kennedy assassination, no matter where they were physically when it happened. They swaw and heard it all unfold, not just on TV, of course - all the media were contributing, through every sensory channel - but TV was central, and Walter Cronkite was at the center of the center, and it was indeed as if you were there. Reams of coverage, endless coverage, amazing coverage - in a way more compelling than if you had been there physically, because virtually you were there from so many different perspectives. You weren’t in one spot, the way you would have been if you were physically there, squashed behind a fat lady, looking in your purse for your sunglasses when the shots went off - you thought they were fireworks at first, until you heard the screaming. No, not like that: you were not there in one humble and limited spot; you were everywhere there, because that amazing coverage puts you everywhere there, and more or less simultaneously, to boot.
You had a sort of God’s eye view.
This is a form of flattery so pervasive, so fundamental to the very nature of representation, that it has escaped notice, though it ultimately accounts for the much-remarked narcissism of our age. The flattered self is a mediated self, and the alchemy of mediation, the osmotic process through which reality and representation fuse, gets carried into our psyches by the irresistable flattery that goes with being incessantly addressed.
They say that the architecture and the landscaping at Versailles were originally designed to provide His Highness with various commanding vantage points, positions that made it seem as if the whole world were spread out before him, naked to the gaze.
That’s peanuts compared to what mediation makes possible for all of us today.
At the most general conceptual level, mediation means dealing with reality through something else. Marshall McLuhan, Godfather of Media Studies, though of mechanical tools as media because, as artifacts that come between us and the given, they were “extensions of man,” and so could be said to “mediate” in a certain sense. But this isn’t an academic treatise. In this book, mediation refers to arts and artifacts that represent, that communicate - but also, and especially, to their effects on the way that we experience the world, and ourselves in it. (p. 6-7)
So that’s the thesis: the present - and recent past - is exceptional, on account of accelerating ‘mediation’, increased ‘flattery of address’.
The counter-thesis:
Some people refuse to accept the fact that reality is becoming indistinguishable from representation in a qualitatively new way. They find permanent refuge in the belief that nothing is new under the sun. They already understand what they need to understand in order to understand everything else. These same people tend to think it’s deep to talk about historical pendulums swinging back and forth. Anyway, they never fail to reumind us at some point, in that special perhaps-I’m-missing-something tone, as if reluctant to spoil the speculative fun, that there have always been representations and choices and etc., etc., and isn’t what’s going on now just more of the same? (p. 16-7)
So what do you think: to what degree is there something new under the sun?
These two passages in isolation don’t establish that there’s anything here that’s not in McLuhan, I realize. But keep reading and you’ll find there is. And I reassure the reader that the author is aware of the writings of phenomenologists, postmodernists and other academically well-known thinkers, who have had a few things to say on the subject, for better or worse. Zengotita is not reinventing the post-Kantian wheel.
One thing I’m appreciating is Zengotita’s sensitivity to Nietzschean themes I spent the semester teaching. His final chapter is Jedermensch ein Ubermensch (we went over that with Theory’s Empire). It’s been, like, two months since I quoted “Schopenhauer as Educator". So here goes:
There are three images of man which our modern age has set up one after the other and which will no doubt long inspire mortals to a transfiguration of their own lives: they are the man of Rousseau, the man of Goethe and finally the man of Schopenhauer. Of these, the first image possesses the greatest fire and is sure of producing the greatest popular effect; the second is intended only for the few, for contemplative natures in the grand style, and is misunderstood by the crowd. The third demands contemplation only by the most active men; only they can regard it without harm to themselves, for it debilitates the contemplative and frightens away the crowd. From the first there has proceeded a force which has promoted violent revolutions and continues to do so; for in every socialist earthquake and upheaval it has always been the man of Rousseau who, like Typhon under Etna, is the cause of the commotion. Oppressed and half-crushed by arrogant upper classes and merciless wealth, ruined by priests and bad education and rendered contemptible to himself by ludicrous customs, man cries in his distress to “holy nature” and suddenly feels that it is as distant from him as any Epicurean god. His prayers do not reach it, so deeply is he sunk in the chaos of unnaturalness. Scornfully he throws from him all the gaudy finery which only a short time before had seemed to him to constitute his essential humanity, his arts and sciences, the advantages of a refined life; he beats with his fists against the walls in whose shadow he has so degenerated, and demands light, sun, forest and mountain. And when he cries: “Only nature is good, only the natural is human,” he despises himself and longs to go beyond himself: a mood in which the soul is ready for fearful decisions but which also calls up from its depths what is noblest and rarest in it.
The man of Goethe is no such threatening power, indeed in a certain sense he is the corrective and sedative for precisely those dangerous excitations of which the man of Rousseau is the victim. In his youth Goethe was himself a devotee of the gospel of nature with his whole loving heart; his Faust was the highest and boldest reproduction of the man of Rousseau, at any rate so far as concerns his ravenous hunger for life, his discontent and longing, his traffic with the demons of the heart. But then see what eventuates from this great bank of clouds—certainly not lightning! And it is in precisely this that there is revealed the new image of man, Goethean man. One would think that Faust would be led through a life everywhere afflicted and oppressed as an insatiable rebel and liberator, as the power that denies out of goodness, as the actual religious and demonic genius of subversion, in contrast to his altogether undemonic companion, though he cannot get rid of this companion and has to employ and at the same time despise his skeptical malice and denial—as is the tragic fate of every rebel and liberator. But one is mistaken if one expects anything of that kind; the man of Goethe here turns away from the man of Rousseau; for he hates all violence, all sudden transition—but that means: all action; and thus the world-liberator becomes as it were only a world-traveler. All the realms of life and nature, all the past, all the arts, mythologies and sciences, see the insatiable spectator fly past them, the deepest desires are aroused and satisfied, even Helen does not detain him for long—and then there must come the moment for which his mocking companion is lying in wait. At some suitable spot on earth his flight comes to an end, his wings fall off, Mephistopheles is at hand. When the German ceases to be Faust there is no greater danger than that he will become a philistine and go to the Devil—heavenly powers alone can save him from it. The man of Goethe is, as I have said, the contemplative man in the grand style, who can avoid languishing away on earth only by bringing together for his nourishment everything great and memorable that has ever existed or still exists and thus lives, even though his life may be a living from one desire to the next; he is not the man of action: on the contrary, if he does ever become a member of any part of the existing order established by the men of action one can be sure that no good will come of it—Goethe’s own enthusiastic participation in the world of the theater is a case in point—and, above all, that no “order” will be overthrown. The Goethean man is a preservative and conciliatory power—but with the danger, already mentioned, that he may degenerate to a philistine, just as the man of Rousseau can easily become a Catilinist. If the former had a little more muscle-power and natural wildness, all his virtues would be greater. Goethe seems to have realized where the danger and weakness of his type of man lay, and he indicates it in the words of Jarno to Wilhelm Meister: “You are vexed and bitter, that is very good; if only you would get really angry for once it would be even better.” [In Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre (1795-6), Book 8.]
Thus, to speak frankly: it is necessary for us to get really angry for once in order that things shall get better. And to encourage us to that we have the Schopenhauerean image of man. The Schopenhauerean man voluntarily takes upon himself the suffering involved in being truthful, and this suffering serves to destroy his own willfulness and to prepare that complete overturning and conversion of his being, which it is the real meaning of life to lead up to. The utterance or truth seems to other men a discharge of malice, for they regard the conservation of their inadequacies and humbug as a human duty and think that anyone who disrupts their child’s play in this way must be wicked. They are tempted to cry to such a man what Faust said to Mephistopheles: “So to the eternal active and creative power you oppose the cold hand of the Devil” [In Faust, Part I Scene 3]; and he who would live according to Schopenhauer would probably seem more like a Mephistopheles than a Faust—seem, that is, to purblind modern eyes, which always see in denial the mark of evil. But there is a kind of denying and destroying that is the discharge of that mighty longing for sanctification and salvation and as the first philosophical teacher of which Schopenhauer came among us desanctified and truly secularized men. All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.
Comments
I want to reassure you that when we do meet, I will be keeping my tentacles discreetly tucked into my pants. You’ll think I’m very ordinary.
Aw, nuts.