Hat tip to Mel. These two articles (here and here) do a nice job articulating claims about extended cognition or the manner in which technologies change the nature of thought. From the first article:
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
In discussions with cultural and literary theorists I sometimes get the sense that work investigating online modes of communication, ARGs (alternate reality games), video games, television, etc., is somehow a sort of trick. That is, the subtext seems to be that academics should be engaged in serious work(tm), analyzing high literature and art, and that those that work on film, modes of internet discourse, ARGs, video games, television, and so on are folks that have managed to game the academy so as to find a way of meshing their cheeto eating tendencies (pop-cultural fluff) with their academic work. Although there is certainly a lot of fluff out there in the ever growing body of pop-culture research (just as there is in literary studies), I think this severely misses the point.
If these things are worthy of investigation, then it is not on the premise that somehow all cultural production should be approached in an egalitarian fashion that treats them all as having equal merit (an aesthetic judgment), but because these things have become dominant modes of communication that pervade our entire lifeworld and which constitute the dominant mode of symbolic activity for humans. Although I have myself engaged in quite a bit of semiotic analysis of pop-cultural entities like films and television shows, what really interests me is not so much the content and meaning of these things, as the technologies themselves. As always, the work of Walter Ong and Friedrich Kittler are invaluable here. What they both investigate, in their own way, is the manner in which writing technologies transform the very nature of our cognition. Thus, for example, differential calculus is literally unthinkable prior to the advent of writing. Where the primary mode of cultural transmission is oral in character, the use of equations divested of narrative and rhythmic content simply cannot get a foothold in the world due to how our minds are put together. With the advent of writing it becomes possible to think the world and relate to one another in an entirely different way. As Vernant notes in his ethnography of the Greeks, the inscription of laws on public buildings in the market place changed the nature of the law by transforming something that could shift from speech act to speech act across time, into an enduring persistence standing there as something literally written in stone.
This is the significance media studies. Not only is there the issue of how the Gutenberg printing press transformed the nature of the world, but in our own historical context, there is the issue of how different forms of computer programming, telephone communication, satellite communication, internet communication, visual and auditory forms of communication such as we see on television and in film, structure the nature of social relations and cognition in very different ways.
August 26, 2009 at 5:49 pm
dr sinthome my joyful discovery throughout blawging has been that the very operations of commenting create new forms of communication, in which these hauntological entities in between the blawger and the real person take on a life of their own. the narcissistic cat is and isn’t you, she has her own what I’d guess you’ll now fancily call the OO-trajectory. so ”pseudo” is perhaps not the word, because the pseudo-doppelganger is at the same an object just like any other, and in this sense just as ”real” as any other object.
however we must not hasten ourselves, dr. sinthome, thinking that this automatically means the power of language has been compromised, because despite the Web 2 proliferation, self-generation, spontaneus mutation of all these new media forms, they all still do operate on semiotic principles and without that aspect you would not be able to have them in a network, or they would be completely useless to the human user; my animation teacher told me for every single innovation that hit the scene since the beginning of the interactive media: is there a CUT in it? And indeed, dr. Sinthome, there does not exist a motion sequence without the cut.
August 26, 2009 at 6:03 pm
dr. sinthome in this tremendous de palma book i’ve been reading from a scholar who sounds related to bruce fink but has a very different, oriental spin to his thinking, the cut is redefined to not be just a split, but a Moebial membrane: when in De Palma’s split screen technique you see two frames, they simultaneously relate and do not relate to each other, they are antagonists and they are complementary, at the same time, like your objects that retain their unique indentity despite being in networks. so the cut, in this sense, is the Uncanny, not a mere sequential splitting.
August 27, 2009 at 1:35 am
Weirdly, and sadly, I think McLuhan has fallen largely out of favor in media studies. Perhaps this is partly because many scholars see him as a technological determinist, even though this is a mischaracterization. (We could easily call blame correlationism and not be entirely wrong.) Anyway, I think the truth of the matter is that far too much media/pop culture scholarship isn’t descending from media ecology and similar efforts, but from cultural studies. I think McLuhan takes things too far, but excising the media ecological perspective entirely is foolish.
On a related note, I’ve just assigned my ~100 Intro to Computational Media students the task of writing a McLuhan tetrad analysis of a computer-related medium of their choosing.
August 28, 2009 at 2:55 am
Students in my Digital Humanities course are reading selections from Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media for next Tuesday. I agree with Ian that McLuhan remains extremely useful, especially when introducing humanities-based students to a new media curriculum. Of course, the Medievalist in my English Department also appreciates that I’m resurrecting his work and introducing it into general student discourse!
August 28, 2009 at 3:04 am
Yeah, I’m hoping to teach McLuhan– hopefully in the context of my “extended pedagogy” experiment –in the next semester or so. Any suggestions as to what text would be good to assign would be terrific. In other contexts I’ve spoken about OOO in the context of a project I refer to, following Paul Ennis, as “re-construction”. Part of that project would consist, as Deleuze suggested, in creating a counter tradition and in resurrecting those moments of the philosophical and theoretical tradition that are particularly valuable from the standpoint of onticology and ontography. Harman has already been doing quite a bit of this himself. His book on Latour is certainly an example of such a re-construction that functions to bring a thinker, largely neglected by philosophy (he’s huge elsewhere), to center stage. He’s been seeding McLuhan all over the place as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that he has another book in the works on him. If he doesn’t, I guess it falls to me or Ian or someone else to write such a book. Kittler and Ong, I think, on that list as well. Stengers has written the book on Whitehead that renders such a resurrection possible, as has Shaviro (though I doubt he’d call himself an OOO theorist). Re-construction will thus be organized along two fronts. On the one hand it will consist in object-oriented readings of the tradition such as Harman’s reading of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, etc., or Bogost’s reading of Badiou. On the other hand, it will consist in the creation of a counter-tradition of “minor” (in the Deleuzian sense) thinkers that alethetically strives to bring a set of tools and concepts to center stage that have been significantly overlooked by a tradition dominated by anti-realist thought. I’ve learned a lot from media and technology folk such as yourself. I’d really enjoy hearing the historians, critical animal theorists, environmentalists, and artists speak up on these matters, drawing attention to those crucial moments in this counter-tradition requiring disclosedness.
August 28, 2009 at 3:21 am
[…] Leave a Comment In response to my post on Extended Cognition, english140prof or Alice writes: Students in my Digital Humanities course are reading selections from Gutenberg Galaxy and […]
August 28, 2009 at 4:17 am
As for McLuhan texts, he makes it hard by not having as centralized a body of work. I’m already using The New Media Reader in my class, which excerpts both Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. I suppose the latter is the classic text, but it’s really Laws of Media that’s the more concisely philosophical one. But yes, you’re right that it falls to one of us to write the book that we really want!
Ong and Kittler are great of course, and Kittler has the benefit of having all those lovely short pieces, perfect for teaching.
August 28, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I’m also using The New Media Reader, Ian, along with supplementary readings (including a chapter from your book, Persuasive Games). I’ve had some success with the reader in the past, but this is the first time I’m using it at my new institution. I have to say I’m amused by how dated the CD-ROM seems to the students. I met one of the editors, Nick Montfort, at a conference on “Technology Platforms for 21st Century Lit” at Brown back in 1999 and enjoyed witnessing some of the initial debates that inspired the collection.