The Charlton Heston Question

Some ideas in my head, wanted to get them somewhere safer (more permanent?) than the flow and flux of my (unreliable) mental equipment, so here we go.

I’ve been thinking on the question of the neutrality of technology, which is a question I think needs to come near the top of my thesis argument. Can we ask questions as to the inherent morality of given technologies, disregarding particular instances of their use? Thus, the title of this posting comes in a fashion after McLuhan, who responds to the suggestion that individual modern technologies are neither good nor bad: “That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say ... “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11)

I’ve been thinking through this example, still used by the National Rifle Association in the US to counter those who seek to limit the availability of guns to civilians in the form of “guns don’t kill people, people do” (hence “the Charlton Heston Question, “ in honour/parody of the late president/spokesman of the NRA). I think it is nonsense to talk only of the particular uses of technologies and disregard the inherent ways in which they work on and shape the ways we relate to the world, our very psycho-social fabric. The very fact that we create guns at all, regardless of their eventual use, is, I think, instructive as to human nature.

For McLuhan, of course, mediating technologies are never neutral, they implicitly shape the messages they carry, in much the way a given metaphor transforms (and thus biases) our understanding of a concept – example: “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, which might tend to make us see ourselves as actors spouting words karaoke style from a predetermined script, but neglects to tell us, then, who the writer, the director, the audience, even the lighting-guy, is (presumably they’re all God, but then this means that this metaphor is implicitly shaping our view of the world as one created by a creator, who wants to watch over us, who approves or not, etc.) – thus we see the world in a novel way, a little differently, see common objects from new aspects, and hence we come to understand it a little better. Ok, so this is a good thing BUT we must heed the baggage and biases, and so iterate the ways in which that media (or metaphor) implicitly shapes the way in which we see the world.

Which is a somewhat similar starting point (though they reach different conclusions) to Heidegger, whose “The Question Concerning Technology,” (In: "Basic Writings", London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, pp.287-317) seeks to address the essence of technology in relation to human existence. There, he posits the view of technology as neutral to be the instrumental/anthropological definition. Thus “According to ancient doctrine”, he advises, “the essence of a thing is considered to be what the things is” (288) and through this definition, we arrive at two statements: “One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity” (288). In these terms, technology is neutered, reduced to nothing more than a human activity pursuant to particular ends.

For Heidegger, this “uncannily correct” (288) definition does not, of course, tell the whole story. For him, in the terms of his earlier work, this would be the ontic explanation, correctly identifying states of affairs but not telling us what it is to be in this relationship. We have privileged ourselves, as the efficient cause of the coming to be of technology, at the neglect of Aristotle’s other three causes: material, formal, final. The material a technology is made of, the particular form it takes, and its telos, that which gives it its cultural bounds as a technology for a purpose, are all responsible for, all at play in the “bringing-forth” of, a given technology.  

Thus the potentialities of the stuff and structure of given materials, along with (and most importantly for Heidegger) the cultural context into which that technology is to be employed, are all necessary causes alongside that of the efficient cause. Given this, in the example of the coming to be of a sacrificial chalice, the silversmith is the efficient cause, “not at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making ... The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. To consider carefully is in Greek legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacred vessel’s bringing-forth and subsistence take and retain their departure.” (291, author’s italics)

So technology is an occasion of “revealing” rather than creation, bring out of concealment into unconcealment, and this, if right has big implications for our understanding of what it is to be the cause of something, as inventor, creator or author. If we aren’t in full control of the coming to be of technology, then the instrumental/anthropological definition is deficient because it neglects the ways in which our technologies act on us, the way we are influenced to bring them to be. Heidegger goes on to argue that our true relation to technology is one of the enframing (Gestell) of nature, challenging it as a “standing-reserve” of resources to be plundered, and that this has a negative impact on our existence. I don’t want to tackle that can of worms just now though, rather just use the first part of his argument (can I just use the first part without being bound to accept the latter? – I think so, but maybe not) as an illustration of why the view of technologies as neutral is deficient, to demonstrate that human intention is not the sole author of technology, and to iterate the reasons why we must attend to the ways in which they are working on us as well as us on them.  

For Langdon Winner, in “The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,” technologies have political consequences:

“The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.” (28-9)

Thus, he proposes that the neutral view of technology blinds us to an essential matter of enquiry: “we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.... If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.” (25)

All of which (I think) I agree with, and leads back into my research, where the definition of materiality I gave in my last post (“materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content”) can be, perhaps, be sharpened into the research question:

“What are the material differences between analogue and digital forms, and in what logically and temporally prior ways do these differences hold the potential to effect and affect creation, consumption, and curation of content?”

As an example of the sorts of questions this is trying to pose: what does it mean that I can put a hyperlink here to something which may or may not be related to this piece, how does that effect my writing this, your (if you’re there) reading of it (did you immediately link through to it, or if you didn’t, will you ignore it now that I’ve made it questionable whether its even connected, will you even come back to read the rest of this if you do click on it?), and the effects on the archive (e.g. if this blog were being archived, would that page now be considered part of this work?). How does this sort of interlinking of information affect us? Is there anything in the truisms that concentration suffers, depth of thought sacrificed for a life of surfing/scratching the surface? Are we all living essentially post-modern lives on the net, lives of a random flow of unrelated shreds of information, a loss of traditional narrative form for one where any casual interconnection is taken to be symbolic of the larger web of meaning(lessness)? Etc, etc, etc. Wild speculation at the end, I know, but that’s where all this stuff is eventually heading ...

 

Apples

I've been reflecting this morning on the ways in which the materiality of blogs, as opposed to paper letters and diaries, effects and affects their use (for the writer, reader and archive). Investigation of this is going to be a major part of my thesis, and I've been trying to figure out how best to frame that question. I came up with the following:

materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content

I think that this distinction definitely has legs, and it'll then allow materiality to be the axis concept for discussion of how the way we write acts on what we write (and vice versa?). As is the way of things, though, I then began to think further into this content/carrier distinction, and think although its workable is problematic. I thought I'd jot down my reflections on the nature of these problems quickly, so as not to forget, viz:

If I go to the shops for a bag of apples and bring them home, I’ll likely do so in a carrier bag. What, then, is the carrier and what is the content? We would likely agree that the carrier bag, and the bag the apples were packaged in were the carriers and the apples the content. Hence, this packaging is the medium through which the apples were delivered back to my house – to say nothing for the moment of the time and space (pavement, bus, shop) I travelled through to retrieve them.

But what if I peel the apple before I eat it? Is the skin then just carrier, or is it still content? More, what if I didn’t want the apple per se, but was just collecting apple pips so I could plant a tree in my garden? I would argue that then the flesh of the apple becomes the carrier, and only the pips the content. To problematize further, what if, all along, I didn’t actually like apples at all, and only bought them so I could paint a bag of apples, then we would surely say that the bag itself becomes content.

Hence, the carrier/content distinction becomes blurred into a question of intentionality. My subjective desires in buying the apples become central to the question of what is content. The mediation (carrier) can itself become content, and the content become mediation. This, I believe, is similar to the distinction of Marshall McLuhan between figure and ground. It is not just that carrier works on content and vice versa; the two interact so inextricably that they become one another; hence the impossibility of objectification except in the dynamically constructed flow of the subjective life.

What all this means, I don't know. It maybe just muddies the water further ...

Gender differences

Today I’ve been happily ploughing through “Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing,” by Ruth Ray. It provides an excellent review of theories of life-writing, and I’ve harvested much grist for my mill. Among much other good stuff, there is an illuminating stretch of writing on gender difference in life-writing.

Ray notes that “men’s writing often takes the form of a continuous, public narrative or ‘autobiography proper,’ while women’s writing takes the form of private diaries, letters, notebooks, journals, and memoirs—discontinuous forms consistent with the fragmented, interrupted nature of women’s material lives.” (p24)

Ray quotes anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s reflections on gender differences in basic functioning in the world, where women, in contrast to men, are more “interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward.” She goes onto quote Margo Culley, who studied American diaries from 1764 to the present: “Those [diaries] kept by men, in particular, record a public life or are imbued with a sense of public purpose or audience.... Women diarists in particular wrote as family and community historians. They recorded in exquisite detail the births, the deaths, illnesses, visits, travel, marriages, work, and usual occurrences that made up the fabric of their lives.” Ray tallies the existence of such performative gender roles with the fact that women are more likely to keep personal journals than men. She quotes one study of 75 college students which found that only one male (of 35) kept a diary/journal of their own, while among the 40 women, the number was close to eighty percent, and that “young men were also much more likely to evaluate the genre of journals negatively than women.” (p13-4)

Given that the Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus study, “Weblogs as a bridging genre,” found that most blogs (70.4%) were of the personal journal type, and that females were more likely to keep this more reflective, inward-looking type of blog, while the more outward looking filters and knowledge-logs were “created almost exclusively by adult males,” this is very significant for my investigation of blogging practices. Is would seem clear that gender (either through nature or nurture) largely influences the use of blogs as much as diaries/journals. Of course I’d known that gender differences would be an important point of investigation, but this perhaps makes clear how important ...

If I reflect on my own keeping this blog, I find that I’m using it mostly as a k-log, putting down thoughts, etc, related to my research. Even when writing reflectively (as now), my talk is confined very squarely to what I think about my research; I’ve not discussed myself yet, nor do I think I will. I think I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’ve not even really reflected on the progress of the PhD per se, although it’s early days of course. This, I suppose, is down to purpose of use. This blog has one (i.e., to reflect on blogging) and thus to stray outside of that domain of discourse, to start talking about personal feelings or events, would maybe feel like a breach of the rules. I’ve set those rules of course, and no-one is really listening anyway, so you could say it doesn’t matter, but those boundaries are an essential part of my keeping this blog. I think that if this were a depository for just any old thought, nothing would ever go into it due to a lack of focus. The deal is that I write about blogging, not myself.

I do wonder if I would want to make my own personal feelings a matter of public record. I think I would be most likely to do so only if anonymized, but then can’t see myself doing that if I can’t keep a diary anyway. Hmmm... Is all this down to gender? Hmmm ...

Typecasting

Having been reading a bit of Derrida and Kittler on the ways in which the technologies we use to inscribe our thoughts also shape them (i.e. "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" as Nietzsche had it), I was intrigued to come across the blogging phenomena called typecasting, where writers compose on typewriters before scanning their work and uploading it (example).

Is it the case that the mechanisation of the production of the word might also produce an experientially different relationship with language, both for author and reader, and thus change the way language is used? If so, this has obvious implications for blogging. As I compose this I find myself typing fluidly, I'm trying to get the words out and down (down where? the screen?) as quickly as possible, and to keep up a flow of thoughts. I can do this because I know I write in a revisionist medium, always above the safety-net of the delete key. Were I writing on a typewriter (assuming I didn't have any tip-ex), or by hand, would I be so cavalier in spitting the words out? Would it not be more deliberative, and how would this affect the content and the style of this writing?

Phenomenologically, each (handwritten/typewritten/digitally written) word affects us in different ways. The handwritten word, a self-evident testimony of effort, the proof of a body pressing the pen to the page. The handwritten word is taken to denote identity. It signifies at once authenticity (the autograph) and personality (graphology) and is presumed to represent (portray/betray) the person, link us intimately to them.

The typewriter, in comparison, bangs the words to into the paper with mechanistic anonymity. As Kittler would have it, a mid-point between creation and publication. Heidegger once questioned whether one would countenance writing a love-letter on a typewriter, and that underlying tension still seems valid. We privilege the personal.

Except that the typewriter itself is now a relic; in comparison to word processors, it demands an unnecessary expenditure of effort. The performative aspect, where revisions (crossing-out, or using tip-ex) will remain visible, stands in contrast to this digital writing, where a wrong key stroke is easily erased by a dab of the delete key, where revision is a central part of the act of writing (for me, at least). If forced to write in a performative manner, would my psychological processes be different? Would each word have to pass through the hands of some internal censor before being committed to the page? How would what I am now writing be different? More structured? More coherent? But then, this blog identifies itself as a notebook anyway, would I strive for coherence in a notebook? What if that notebook would be visible to others? Hmmm ...

The blog in time

Following a supervision meeting this afternoon, the question floating around my head at the moment is how to link the temporalised "self", with the intention to blog. In writing this blog, for example - and to ignore for the moment the possibility of communicating (to temporarily quarantine the "other") - I produce an inscription and thus exteriorise what was heretofore interior (thoughts, ideas). Insodoing I thus allow myself to reflect on those thoughts in a different way. I gain distance from those thoughts, can see them in the cold light of the exterior world, examine them more "objectively". This reflection, then, relates to the present self. The intention to blog allows the present self reflection on itself.

Clearly, though, the blog is a memory object also. As I create these strings of words, whether consciously or not, I also open the possibility of memorialisation. My future self then has access to these reflections; it'll be able to remember (parts of) what it was like to exist at an earlier time, and in the similarities and differences exposed be able to explore what it is to be that person identified as "me". So (and whether consciously or not), I serve both my present and future selves in writing this, through reflection and memorialisation. To what extent, though, am I also serving my past self?

Perhaps, in laying those words down, in reflecting on who I am, I'm also betraying where I've come from. Perhaps I'm intentionally laying down memories, eulogising, reconstructing the past - and perhaps insodoing I'm idealising, mitigating, explaining, mourning. Perhaps the past self, from whence we've been thrown (in Heidegger's parlance), is always the subject of this life-writing, of this reflection. Maybe it's the Proustian search of lost time which lies behind any such activity; at the very least, the mourning of that (now past) lost time which prompts me to exteriorise my thoughts now, so at least some of the "now" doesn't get lost.

There are lots of perhapses there, but then these words themselves form only initial ideas of course, a train of thought, an exteriorisation of some things that have been on my mind. And quite rambling they are too ... perhaps a little too close to comfort to other post-modern musings. Do I want them to be published (broadcast? - are these only metaphors anyway?)? Well, it’s too late now, here they go ...

First post

Dear ... who? Diary?, me?, "you"? (whoever you are?) ...

These are the first steps in an experiment on the self. As my research is (in part) about the intentionality of bloggers, it has been pointed out that I perhaps should have a go myself. Despite my better judgement, and more in hope than expectation, I thought I'd launch in.

What will this blog be about? Hmm, no quick answer to that one ... my research, me, blogging in general? A blog about blogs maybe, how very postmodern! ... perhaps a place to note new ideas, a place to put them while they ferment, to later be bottled nicely and presented as thesis quality vintage ... perhaps it won't be about anything, maybe it will die on the vine ... maybe in not being about anything it'd say more about life anyway ...

I have tried to keep a diary three times in my life, as an early teenager, again in my early twenties, and while away travelling ... all three times saw entries of diminishing enthusiasm and length for the first week or two succumb to a gradual stalling, until the inevitable tranch of blank pages, missed days, overtook the endeavour, to be interrupted only by an occassional self-castigating apology. But each time, the thought that I was really only repeating myself. Even when I was away travelling, the thought was always there that I was just (re)telling traveller's stories heard too many times before, told better before, and what then is the point, except as excercise, or as self-indulgence? So the pen gets put away ...

Is there really that much to say anyway? Even if I do keep up this blog, will I just end up counting eggs? I guess we shall see?

(Who is we, anyway? Too many questions!)