Today’s Plan:
- A little history: Technoadherents and Technoskeptics
- A little ontology: Orality, Literacy, and Electracy
- Maira Kalman
- What Is/n’t The Kalman Project
A Little History: Technoadherent and Technoskeptics
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- . Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- . Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Douglas Adams
I’m starting a little bit in left field, I know. What does Kalman’s work have to do with the history of the philosophy of technology? Something, I promise. Bear with me a bit.
Working quick and dirty (in academic terms in sweeping generalizations), I want to sketch two historic attitudes toward technology. Here, “technology” simply refers to any invention that changes or augments our ability to do things in the world. Chances are good that you’ve heard me talk about Walter Ong and writing as a technology. If you haven’t, then you will pretty soon. But, for now, let’s just think about technology in general–technology as a tool that alters how we perceive or navigate our world.
So, two attitudes. I don’t want to call them technophile and technophobe. This isn’t about love or repulsion. Let me rather call them technofaithful and technoskeptic. Faithful and skeptical of what? Of whether technology will act as a force of liberation or domination. Does technology make us better, more capable, more efficient, or does it make us more artificial, pulling us away from a natural purity, simplicity, or organicism?
On the one had, there are those that see technology as tied to progression, both in a general “wow life is good” and a Marxist “wow, we can redistribute labor and wealth” sense. Not all technofaithfuls have to believe in both senses. But generally, these folks see technology as freeing humans from some forms of labor, opening time and space for different kinds of work/investments. Furthermore, these folks also see technology as allowing increasing communication, connection, and exposure, allowing us to be more democratic, productive, and ethical, i.e., the more we are exposed to difference (cultural, racial, etc), the better we come at handling the disequilibrium difference causes. Technology allows more free access to information. Technology allows more opportunities for invention, ingenuity, and development.
One the other hand, we’ve got folks like Heidegger who frame technology within a desire for efficiency (two reminders: Heidegger is a fucking Nazi; one cannot talk about 20th century philosophy without him. His meditations on how we experience time, and how our relation to time shapes the phenomenological state in which we encounter the world, is perhaps the greatest philosophical development of the 20th century.) Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” argues that increasing technological advances develop in us an unconscious dedication to see everything in the world as “standing reserve,” such that everything, every being (even and especially human being), comes to be “yet to be processed.” Nothing gets to be, to exist, to develop, to flourish, outside of this pressure to be useful, efficient. Technology, for Heidegger and the techno-skeptics that follow his critical tradition, is always already tied to ever increasing forms of homogeny and domination. In simplest language, technology means only efficiency, efficiency as a divine value over everything else (Robocop, ED-209, parts on back order for the next twenty years, who cares if it works). Rather than opening a more inclusive, public, democratic spaces, technology carves out more exclusionary, private, demogogic spaces (for purposes of this sentence, democratic are places where we encounter and negotiate difference, demagogic are places where we celebrate the same and/as we castigate difference). Rather than distributing wealth and capital, technology allows capital to be more centralized in the hands of the few.
So, two attitudes toward technology. I’ve dedicated more time to teh second only because I think it is the more complicated notion, not necessarily because I think it is the more correct one. What if parts of both are true? What if our existence with technology is always inhabited, permeated by faith and skepticism? What if our experience with technology is caught up between these two pole positions? A tension wire?
If you are wondering what this has to do with our class: video is a technology. What if technology both increases our access to our world and each other *and* demands ruthless efficiency?
What can we do? Can Kalman help us do something?
A Little Ontology: Orality, Literacy, and Electracy
Before I (probably don’t) explain what any of this has to do with Kalman we need to take another intellectual detour, to a body of scholarship often referred to as “media affordance theory” or “technology affordance theory” or just plain old “affordance theory.” A few names here: Walter Ong studied how the development in writing in ancient Greece transformed not only *how* the Greeks communicated, but also what they thought reality was (and their corresponding understanding of metaphysics–what/how exists in this world and world(s) beyond the pale of reality’s horizons), what they thought knowledge was, what they thought a human was, how they thought we should govern, and how they thought we should treat each other. The written word, then, influenced not only communication, but ontology, epistemology, subjectivity, politics, morality, and ethics.
Apparatus theory is the name Gregory Ulmer gave to the study of how different technologies (re)shape us. Much of this work traces back to Walter Ong. I teach Ong in a lot of my other classes and have a stock lecture on him. Ong argues that “writing is a technology that restructures thought.” That’s the name of the very useful essay he wrote near the end of his career that attempts to sum up decades of reading and theorizing. It is a useful essay. Let’s examine it quickly.
In the essay, Ong traces out a few dozen effects that literacy has on human consciousness. Most of these things can be summarized as a few criteria:
Literacy emphasizes the abstract. Words are divorced from reality. Words target elements of a holistically experienced reality and parcel them.
Literacy individualizes. When I speak to you as a class, you are a group. When I ask you to read something on the screen, you become individuals. Writing is, most often, a solitary activity. Reading, after, say, 2nd grade, is almost entirely an individual activity (note that I increasingly think this is wrong and college classes should read challenging texts together because something viral and kinetic and awesome happens when you do. And you should totally read books out loud to the people you love). Side notes. Writing and reading are far more individualistic than speech.
Literacy emphasizes logos. [Sigh, I hate talking about rhetoric as ethos, pathos, and logos, but here goes]
When I was writing my dissertation a decade ago, I was one of many scholars prompted by Ong’s work to think about how the Internet might change metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, etc. I was thinking particularly of Wikipedia, and argued that we would move away from singularity, autonomy, permanence, and certainty and toward plurality, interactivity, transience, and risk/ambiguity. I like Marshal McLuhan and Gregory Ulmer and Elizabeth Eisenstein and others, was interested in how technology was reshaping the way we are–all those things I list above. If I was a techno-optimist, it was because I believe that, as humans, we have to learn to dwell with difference. By nature, we are animals interested only in our self-defense. By “society” or “technology” we learn to repress this natural allergy to difference. I hoped that new media technologies, which can so radically connect us, could aid in this process.
My operating hypothesis is that video amplifies pathos (I’m stealing this from Marshall McLuhan, that video is more immediate than print; Ulmer has a whole thing on “flash reason,” putting the enthymeme in meme). And, in rhetorical theory, “pathos” *can* open us to hospitality (it can also open us to rage and violence). In general use, the terms affect, emotion, and mood tend to be interchangeable. But in psychology–and by extension across the humanities–affect is different from emotion. Emotion is something that I know I feel. I can articulate it. I am consciously aware of it. For instance, I am sad.
Affect is different, however. It points to how “I” feel before I know how I feel. It is the feeling emanating through my body and influencing my consciousness. Affect affects how I exist in the world at a given time. This notion of affect I am developing resonates with Heidegger’s phenomenology–that our experience of our own being occurs within the bounds of a particular, but often inarticulable, mood. Here’s Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy: that mood, something that flows across and through all being (existence) undecideably shifts how we perceive reality. There is no getting outside of ourselves to a realm of pure knowledge, we always know from within a feeling. To dismiss feeling (pathos) in favor of logos (knowledge, truth)–the entire Western intellectual project from Plato to Kant to the atomic bomb–was a fool’s errand.
In Rhetoric, studies of affect explore how places and spaces can subtly influence our moods. Thomas Rickert refers to this as attending to ambience: how space influences affect/feelings and thus structures or influences our experiences. One might be familiar with the derive of Situationalist International from the 1950’s and 1960’s. This semester I am interested in you exploring the subjective, affective experience of a place. The nature of this exploration can vary greatly depending on the place you explore. For instance, a few years ago I visited the African American museum in Atlanta, and it was clear that the place was designed to provoke an incredible affective and pathetic (unconscious and conscious) emotional experience. Other places might provoke a strong affective experience even thought they were not consciously designed to do so.
Stunning Lack of Transition
Suffice to say, the methods we use to think and communicate shape everything we think and communicate. If you think communication is a signifier reaching the ear of another person, then you are likely to think the world in terms of what is immediately present, to see/appreciate the totality of a moment, to judge things in real time. If you think communication as a lone reader deciphering a signifier on a page, then you are likely to think the world (as signifier) in relation to a “distant” (transcendent) signified–whether that signified is a Platonic Ideal, or a Christian God, or an Enlightenment Reason.
Affordance theory came to the fore in the mid-20th century, as theorists from a wide variety of disciplines began to understand that our technological means of communication were changing, growing, incredibly fast. At first, folks thought of radio, telephones, even television as a continuation of literacy. But then, of course we understood them otherwise (Marshall McLuhan’s work is central here). By the time I wrote my dissertation in the early aughts, theorists were speculating about the internet–if, as Ong had demonstrated–writing so radically transformed human experience and culture, what would this new technology do to us, to thought? Gregory Ulmer was one of the most comprehensive writers on the subject.
All of this technological change also occurred within the massive intellectual, political, and aesthetic shift that we call postmodernism. I don’t have time to really explicate postmodernism or poststructuralism here, but I do want to highlight three larger ontological/epistemological/subjective changes it produced.
- Postmodern theories recognized that human experience and institutions were often underwritten by “metanarratives”–supposedly universal beliefs/expectations/ideologies for how the world works. Postmodernism believed metanarratives were bullshit and harmful to human experience
- Postmodern theories argued that the desire for universality and objectivity often ended up negating the lives and experiences of people who were not part of the dominant group (white/males). Objectivity wasn’t necessarily something to strive after.
- Postmodern theories argued that the Platonic/modern/Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and logic repressed pathos and emotion. This was also bullshit and harmful to human experience, since emotion is a natural response that is often rejected by literate/modern/enlightenment philosophy etc
Maira Kalman and What Is/N’t the Kalman Project
Now, if you are smart, you have some sense of why we are reading Kalman in a class on video.
Kalman’s work is not necessarily postmodern. Kalman’s work is certainly not technological in our (or Douglas Adams’) everyday sense of the world. But I think it is electrate.
For the next six weeks, you have a terribly simple but horribly complicated assignment. You have to make me a Kalman that is not a Kalman. That’s it. That’s the assignment. To help with this assignment, I have a very bear bones prospectus for you to complete (by next Monday). There will (of course) be more parameters and expectations–and I will have you develop those on Friday. Eventually we will use my criteria and yours to create a rubric for the assignment. You will write me a final reflection paper (generally 3-5 pages) that explains how you respond to this challenge and evaluates your own work based on the rubric we collaboratively construct.
(Note: for those of you who like cheat codes, I have published on this project here and here).
