In December of 1970, Dick Cavett hosted a conversation with Al Hirt, Gayle Sayers, Truman Capote and Marshall McLuhan on his television show. It’s difficult to imagine the crosscurrents of this discussion happening on television today. McLuhan’s probes draw each of the guests into his orbit, and he demonstrates how each participates in the theme of his new book, From Cliche to Archetype.
The cyclops, the motorcycle cop…
McLuhan describes himself as an outsider in the course of his appearance on the show. One has to wonder how he broke all the way through to the medium of popular television entertainment. Howard Gossage and Tom Wolfe had something to do with it, but it’s McLuhan’s love of exploration through dialogue that really shines through. It’s perfect for television.
Once the earth was within the surround of the satellite, Planet Polluto was in need of the attention of the ecologist…
In a letter McLuhan wrote: “I am not a ‘culture critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” The jazz musician, the professional football player, the novelist, the comedian and the metaphysician find a common ground within the probes McLuhan unleashes.
This year we celebrate 100 years of Marshall McLuhan. In some ways, he remains an outsider. After all this time, we haven’t consumed, commoditized, or co-opted his thought— he’s as dangerous as ever.
It’s a phrase that fascinated using only three words. “Ecology without nature.” It’s the title of a book by Timothy Morton, and refers to the romantic notion of nature that infuses much of our ecological thinking. It’s nature as it appeared before the fall, before the apple was bitten by reality. Not nature as it was formed in the crucible of Darwin’s natural selection, but rather as the dream of a machine spinning along in perfect balance. Human beings, somehow standing on the outside, have upset that balance.
I’m reminded of poet Robert Haas’s story about Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Haas was organizing a benefit for some nature organization. He wanted Milosz to read and tried to play on what he thought was Milosz’s love of nature. Milosz starred blankly. “Nature? Nature terrifies me.” Confused Haas reels off a list of sunsets, forests, sparkling rivers, night skies and rolling hills. Milosz nodded. “Ah…you mean beauty. There’s a huge difference.”
For Morton, ecology must be thought through a democracy of objects. Humans, fish, plastic bags, trees, snow tires and bongos all live and work within the same flat ontology. At every scale, we’re all in this together, human being isn’t privileged, rather it is one being among many. Gary Snyder comes at the question from another direction. He engages in what he calls the practice of the wild. The poet tells us how nature calls nature:
“It would appear that the common conception of evolution is that of competing species running a sort of race through time on planet earth, all on the same running field, some dropping out, some flagging, some victoriously in front. If the background and foreground are reversed, and we look at it from the side of the ‘conditions’ and their creative possibilities, we can see these multitudes of interactions through hundreds of other eyes. We could say a food brings a form into existence. Huckleberries and salmon call for bears, the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon, and salmon call for seals and thus orcas. The Sperm Whale is sucked into existence by the pulsing, fluctuating pastures of squid, and the open niches of the Galapagos Islands sucked a diversity of bird forms and function out of one line of finch.”
Sometimes it takes a while before we can hear a poet speak. This may be the decade that we hear Gary Snyder.
Ripples on the Surface
by Gary Snyder
“Ripples on the surface of the water—
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the ripples caused by breezes”
A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture
Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, again—
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass—
The vast wild
the house, alone
The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house
Both forgotten.
It’s right on the crease that the thoughts began to emerge. Like standing on the corner of a city block and looking down one side and then the other. Seeing old friends from different times in your life, paths that never crossed—now connected by the happenstance of standing on this particular node in the grid-work of the metropolis. The term standing at this crossroads is ‘realism.’
The initial rehabilitation of the word, for me, came with the discovery of John Brockman’s Edge.org. Within this oasis, Brockman unleashed the congregations of the Third Culture and The Reality Club. These closed circles of the best and the brightest engage in a correspondence on topics at the edge of technology and science. In particular, Brockman was seeking to provide an escape from the swirl of ‘commentary on commentary’ that seemed to be gobbling up much of the intellectual world as it struggled to digest the marks and traces left by Jacques Derrida. Here, conversations could gain traction because the medium was the “real” and the language was the process of science. Even the artists and philosophers included within the circle had a certain scientific bent.
However, recently I’ve begun to feel that the conversations have drifted from scientific to the scientistic. Standing at the edge of scientific discovery is a heady experience. The swirl of the unknown is trapped in the scientist’s nets, sorted out into bits of data, classified and tested. Edge.org serves as a sort of cross-scientific discipline peer review process. The shaky ground of the barely known is given its best chance to gain traction through an unstinting faith in the real. At this far outpost, anything seems to be fair game for the process. Standing on the firm ground of the scientific real, the conversations begin to stray into explanations and reconstructions of morality, thinking, consciousness and religion. Edifices are not deconstructed, they are bulldozed and rebuilt on the terra firma of scientific reality.
One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego-gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best way of understanding – if not in the present but any minute now because of Moore’s law – of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. It’s as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.
And it’s here that faith in the scientistic ground begins to develop fissures. A signal event for me was the appropriation of the word ‘ontology‘ by the practitioners of the semantic web. The word is taken up and used in a nostalgic sense, as though plucked from a dead and long-ago superseded form of thought. The history of the word is bulldozed and its meaning reconstructed within the project of creating a query-able web of structured data.
It was the word ontology that linked me back to realism. And here we are back at the crease, looking down the other side of the block. It’s here that the fast charging world of Speculative Realism enters the fray. The scientistic thinkers on the Edge have begun to notice a certain mushiness of the ground as they reach out to gain traction in some new territories. Indeed, some may stop and ask how the ground could be mushy in some spots, but not in others?
The brand Speculative Realism was founded in April of 2007, at a conference at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The primary players were Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. While not a cohesive school of thought, these philosophers have certain common concerns, in particular ideas about realism and a critique of correlationism. The branch of the tree of particular interest to me contains the group exploring Object-Oriented Ontology, which includes Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant among others.
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.
My formal introduction to the literature was through Graham Harman’s book Prince of Networks, Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. But to get a sense of the pace of thought, you need only look to the blog posts, tweets, YouTube posts, uStream broadcasts of conferences and OpenAccess publications the group seems to produce on a daily basis. The recent compendium of essays, The Speculative Turn, is available in book form through the usual channels, or as a free PDF download. The first day it was made available as download, the publisher’s web servers were overwhelmed by the demand. The velocity of these philosophical works, and the progress of thought, seems to be directly attributable to its dissemination through the capillaries of the Network.
In working with ontology, these thinkers have given the ground on which scientists—and the rest of us (objects included) stand, quite a bit of thought. This is not an extension of the swirl of commentaries on commentaries, but rather a move toward realism. And it’s when you arrive at this point that the border erected around the scientistic thought and conversations of the Edge.org begins to lose its luster. There are clearly questions of foundation that go begging within its walls. At the beginning of such a conversation, the ground they’ve taken for granted may seem to fall away and leave them suspended in air, but as they continue, a new ground will emerge. And the conversation will be fascinating.
As the Network continues the process of condensing into discreet clouds, different environmental capabilities emerge and borderlines are drawn between the kingdoms. Sovereignty takes the form of providing a scalable computing infrastructure on which immigrants can homestead. The cloud kingdom must reliably provide arable land, keep the borders between the lands of neighbors and protect the cloud from external invaders. Clouds are not democracies, the Prince is not an elected position— his domain is seized and created out of the aether of the Network.
We seem to be entering the Hobbesian era of the Network, we seek the protection and benefits offered by the Sovereign clouds. As the hinterlands begin to fill up with brigands and pirates, safe transport cannot be guaranteed on the open roads of the Network. Within the borders of the cloud’s sovereign territory, the administrative privileges of the Prince allow for the removal of elements that may disturb the established order.
Once a kingdom has been firmly established, it begins to gather around it the accoutrement of culture. It engages a court architect, scientist, composer, scribe, and jester. It’s through the work of these artisans that the legacy of the kingdom will live in the hearts and minds of its subjects.
In a classical kingdom, the border is defined as the perimeter of the physical lands of the kingdom. As the size of the kingdom grows, the border becomes more difficult to defend. The recent incident with a leak of digital data puts the dilemma of the modern Prince into stark relief. As every node within the cloud potentially stands at the border, the allegiance of the sovereign’s subjects becomes an issue of the greatest importance.
Real-time computing enables the cloud kingdom to offer a privately public message stream that narrates the current state of the kingdom. The subjects of the kingdom tell the kingdom how it is in the present moment through permanent marks in a messaging system. This information is used to the benefit of the kingdom and its subjects. The real-time message stream also creates the possibility of a real-time streaming leak. The admonition to not put into an email any comments that you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing printed in your morning newspaper, will put a damper on the value of a real-time conversation.
Some would contend that the border cannot be defended, and that only a form of absolutely public transparency is suitable for use within a Network-connected digital medium. This would imply that any broader, more expressive form of speech must occur outside of the digital context. To counter this, the Prince must argue that, within his cloud, the power of his security measures will guarantee the border and the private communications of his subjects.
