allthingseurope:The Dark Hedges, Northern Ireland (by Maximilian Pilz)
more on mediation
Another comment from the same thread:
Mike, thanks for the thoughtful reply! I continue to think, contra mundum, that both Nathan and Nick are making valuable points, but I don’t think Nick makes his case best by appealing to an ultimately unsustainable distinction between the mediated and the unmediated. And I think that the mediations of the sensorium are relevant because they can be altered, either for the better by practice or for the worse by neglect.
So what I’m pressing for is an enhanced vocabulary of both description and practices that would allow us to discriminate among the various mediations possible to us, not as a way of saying that it doesn’t matter whether we’re online or offline, but to say that those categories are just too crude.
You write, “I suppose I must grant that ‘it is at least possible’ that some technologies might help win that struggle, but I’m having a hard time imagining which those might be.” Well, consider the arts, all or almost all of which are technologically enabled. (A capella singing might be an exception, depending on how you define “technology.”) I’ve taken a lot of photographs over the years of the natural world, and I think the disciplines of composition, establishment of depth-of-field, and choices of coloration (in the old days achieved primarily by choice of film) have helped me to see that world better. The photographs and paintings of others have done the same. It’s possible that someone’s experience of seeing the Grand Canyon could be enhanced by listening to Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite.” I have walked a good deal in the Lake District of England, and I believe that the beautifully illustrated and hand-lettered guidebooks of A. Wainwright have greatly improved my ability to see and appreciate that landscape.
None of this erases the distinction between the human-made world and the world we did not and cannot make; but it does I think show that we don’t wisely pursue an encounter with what I would call Creation by seeking to remove or avoid mediation. To repeat myself, what we need instead are far better ways of describing the manifold varieties of mediation and better accounts of the practices of mediation.
on mediation
Here’s part of one of my comments on a debate between Nathan Jurgenson and Nick Carr, here:
I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, but mediated in a wide range of ways. Perception itself, neural activity itself, is a mediating activity. I often think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”
So we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience. The choices are always among various forms of mediation. I don’t think Heidegger fully realized this, which is why he could speak of writing with a pen as something you do with your hand but typewriting as something alienated from the hand — never acknowledging that we type with our hands too.
Now, if someone wants to argue that the mediation of the pen involves our body in more intimate ways than the mediation of the typewriter, in that (for instance) in writing with a pen we shape the individual letters instead of just striking keys with a uniform motion, I’m ready to listen — as long as it’s okay to point out that writing with my finger on an iPad screen is more intimate still!
Analogically, consider Walker Percy’s great essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he points out that our cultural formation makes it impossible for anyone actually to see the Grand Canyon: only some immense dislocation of our expectations can make is truly visible to us. It is at least possible that some technological mediations could help us achieve that valuable dislocation.
In short, we need fewer binary distinctions and more attention to the detailed phenomenology of particular technologies and their interactions with the mediating powers of our perceptual apparatus.
Nobody loves snow as much as Malcolm loves snow.
It is surely no accident that the idea of sincerity, of the own self and the difficulty of knowing and showing it, should have arisen to vex men’s minds in the epoch that saw the sudden efflorescence of the theatre. A well-known contemporary work of sociology bears the title, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life — we can suppose that the Hamlet of our day says: ‘I have that within which passeth presentation.’ In this enterprise of presenting the self, of putting ourselves on the social stage, sincerity itself plays a curiously compromised part. Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we cincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.
Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year. The patrons of Harris Hoole, a local coffee shop, had just learned to their horror that the supermarket chain Tesco owns a 49 per cent stake in the company. Shaken caffeine-guzzlers told the Guardian that they felt “duped” and “upset” because they’d thought it was an “independent” coffee shop. A rival coffee hawker sneered that Tesco was “trying to make money” out of “artisan values” – although, presumably, so was he. Most charmingly, the manager of the café confided that head office had instructed her to make the store feel as independent as possible. “We try to be independent,” she said. “We want to be independent. We want to have that feel.”She is right: we all want to have that feel. But the appropriation by Tesco and Harris Hoole of the consumer allure of “independence” and “artisan values” is a symptom of our present predicament: there is no way out of simulation. What we get in an “authentic” cultural product is still a simulacrum, but one that insists even more loudly that its laminated, wood-effect veneer is the real thing. Authenticity is now yet another brand value to be baked into the commodity, and customers are happy to take this spectral performance of a presumed virtue as the truth.
A spread from ‘The Dark’, written by Lemony Snicket. Comes out April 2nd!
And so scientists are busily animadverting on Nagel’s account of science. They like to note condescendingly that he calls himself a “layman.” Yet too many of Nagel’s interlocutors have been scientists, because Mind and Cosmos is not a work of science. It is a work of philosophy; and it is entirely typical of the scientistic tyranny in American intellectual life that scientists have been invited to do the work of philosophers. The problem of the limits of science is not a scientific problem. It is also pertinent to note that the history of science is a history of mistakes, and so the dogmatism of scientists is especially rich. A few of Nagel’s scientific critics have been respectful: in The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr has the decency to concede that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. But he then proceeds to an almost comic evasion. Finally, he says, we must suffice with “the mysteriousness of consciousness.” A Darwinii mysterium tremendum! He then cites Colin McGinn’s entirely unironic suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Students of religion will recognize the dodge—it used to be called fideism, and atheists gleefully ridiculed it; and the expedient suspension of rational argument; and the double standard. What once vitiated godfulness now vindicates godlessness.
The sad truth is that most families who stretched their finances to the limit for the sake of a set of encyclopædias would have been better off spending half that money or less on books with beginnings, middles and ends that children might actually read. In many homes, by sheer weight and volume, encyclopædia sets often added up to more than all the other books in the house put together. While they were the most admired volumes on the shelf, they were also the least read. Sure, every now and again someone would say: ‘Look it up in the encyclopædia,’ or you’d go searching for a fact that was eluding you. More often than not, however, you wouldn’t find it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who didn’t even really understand the difference and relationship between the 17-volume macropædia and the 12-volume micropædia; or the two-volume index and the one-volume propædia. Trying to find anything in there made me feel like the baffled child who asks how to spell a word and is told to look it up in the dictionary; how can you find the word if you can’t spell it in the first place? No wonder only a tiny fraction of the 44 million words in the Encyclopædia Britannica were ever read, and most of the 30,000-odd pages were never even opened. The volumes gathered dust because we literally didn’t know how to use them.