I like your cosmology, baby

Here are some ideas I recycled from last year's Loebel into this year's Powe:

Still Cosmic After All These Years

Wired in. Motionless. Unaware of anything outside the hove of vision. Electronically sustained; force fed, IV drip saline solution, body losing definition every passing moment in favour of a different kind of survival.
OR
Expanded. Evolved. Understanding of both immediate surroundings and electronic extensions. Growing outward as a means of growing inward and vice versa. Interchangeable ideational planes that inform one another instead of one that dominates and obscures all others.

These two scenarios represent two possible theories of the potential outcome of fully embracing the new media. One is worse than even the most stubborn Huxlian would conceive of being possible and one is so optimistic about emerging digital realities that it seems far too good to be true. One of the questions posed by the emergence and subsequent ubiquity of the new media is that of the effect that have on society’s consciousness with regards to the constant balance struck between the individual consciousness and all other individual consciousnesses: “By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.” (McLuhan, Probes 296) Previous structures of understanding the divisions created physically and ideologically between our minds and bodies seem to dissipate in the face of the global village. This dissipation, rather than a regression, is a simulated return to Lacan’s imaginary and a realistic growth into Haraway’s cyborg. But what does it mean that these two processes happen hand-in-hand?

To begin, Lacan’s imaginary is the unmediated realm that every child exists in before he sees his reflection. It is at this point that the child begins the process of differentiation:

The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject. (Mirror Stage 2)

For Lacan, the moment at which this process begins is the moment at which every person becomes alienated from his desires, which cannot properly be encapsulated in language and thus cannot be expressed in communion with others or the Other. Thus, all of our relations are constituted in a lack and our chief goal in life and as a society becomes the removal of this lack through various means.

The shift from writing to the myriad of other potential communications is a social and technological embodiment of our attempt in this regard. While McLuhan’s aforementioned aphorism uses the word “surpassing” to describe this process, it seems more correct to assert that writing has been dethroned as the king of communications and engrained into a larger system in which other technologies are at least its equal. Since writing is a physical representation of the language that initially catapults the subject out of the imaginary and into the symbolic, it is necessarily less effective in the attempt to return to our originary oceanic primordial phase of existence than its successors, television and the Internet. While the process of learning language can never truly be reversed, the revitalization of oral culture in the new media simulates this process by fostering a collectivity that plunges us into a different ocean, a digitized oceanic mosaic of others relating to Others relating to others in an endless weblike chain.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a convenient example of how this chain produces the individual and necessarily, the collective, identity both technologically and emotionally. She likens the shift in consciousness to the difference between thinking and processing. By developing into processing machines, humans (or now, cyborgs) achieve a kind of community impossible in the world of the written word as the process of reading and writing is rendered close to, if not totally, obsolete in a world in which our minds can directly connect to one another:

Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. (Haraway 11)

The common language that Haraway refers to is necessary in the creation of the new symbolic, the state of Lacanian lack in which the new media harness an oceanic collectivity in which we extend outward into each other via our lack rather than being sealed inside ourselves by it. Since “no objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves” it must be concluded that, in this case, the physical is inconsequential in the face of this common language that binds the entirety of human thought.

This dissolution of the physical body’s importance in the process of identity making is what McLuhan seems to mean by probing about “regain[ing] our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.” National and cultural identities still hold weight in our society, but only on a surface level (as can be seen in the Olympics). The true divisions between nations and people are actually based in issues of wealth and prosperity, which are directly tied to and have a reciprocal relationship access and control of new media and information technology. It is important to remember that access to McLuhan’s cosmic plane, the possibility of communion with the Other that the new media seem to offer, has a price. Everyone can be wired into the system in different ways, as Haraway asserts, but the new systems definitely have hierarchies of control, in much the same way that pre-existing systems of communication did, that should not be mistaken or taken for granted.

That being said, there are more television sets in existence as of this moment than at any other point in history. The Internet can be accessed, mostly wirelessly, from any place in the world given the proper resources (which are becoming increasingly available.) As I type this very sentence I am doused by electric light in a heated room, surrounded by gadgets and devices flashing and charging their batteries, with the Internet open on the same computer I use as a creative tablet. Each of these is an extension of my mind outward into my own lack, my drive toward desire, and an extension outward into McLuhan’s cosmic plane and each is ingrained into the normalcy of my everyday life.

The move into the new symbolic as evidenced by Lacan, Haraway and McLuhan seems to highlight a different kind of evolution. Our technologies undergo natural selection rather than our bodies. The human body, at least in the Western world, is becoming increasingly sickly and powdered from living in environments that are created for and by the evolution of the mind. The common acceptance of wildlife as the natural is rooted in the idea that our bodies constitute as large and important a part of us as our minds, but as a society our system is structured to give our bodies cheap and useless food for the good of information, money. To assert that this is only because of greed on the part of the food providers is short-sighted; the system is self-regulating, and while power denominations exist, there is no ultimate puppet master pulling the strings. De-emphasizing the importance of the body on a global scale is something that we are doing on a global scale, and regardless of whether it proves to be positive or negative, it certainly affirms the idea that the evolution of our technologies and thus our minds and their connections to each other is taking precedence over our physical concerns.

This is the element of McLuhan media theory that can seem quite a bit like Christian mysticism at times; all this talk of communion with society and cosmic unity can be a little lofty and heavy handed. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theories of Noosphere and Omega Point are certainly very close to many of the ideas I have just juggled with; the sphere of human thought evolving into an absolute complexity of consciousness has vast implications for desire, the body, Lacan, Haraway and pretty much everything and everyone else that exists, has existed or will exist. While McLuhan’s probe asserts that we have indeed surpassed writing (which is not quite correct) and that we have achieved our wholeness (which I do not quite believe either) it is more likely that all of our mental and technological efforts seem to be moving in the direction of the cosmic plane. We are not there yet.

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Not sure how much of it I agree with. I also think it's a pretty bastardized use of Haraway... anyhow, there it is.