Steam Calliope Scherzos
I’m not particularly good at mission statements, like the kind you find on the web sites of socially conscientious corporations who want to reassure their prospective customers that they’re profoundly thoughtful individuals. Mission statements are pretty damn powerful, though. The TED Talk project has a mission statement. Starbucks and Whole Foods have mission statements. When that porn star Sasha Grey began her career a couple decades back, she wrote a mission statement about it on her Myspace page, and it gave her instant fame and notoriety. Perhaps I’m too cynical to feel good announcing what I’m about, joining the ranks of these fine people. Or, rather, perhaps I’m not cynical enough. But nonetheless, I’ll try to sum up my general outlook on things in a way that doesn’t waste too much of your time.
At my core, I believe that what drives both human and animal activity is an ineffable spiritual pulsation that none of us can adequately comprehend or explain. But because apophatic theology can only get one so far (and it does, after all, get pretty tiresome trying to paint a picture of God or Being, or whatever, simply by saying what it isn’t over and over again), I have a strong sympathy with materialist thought. At least, that is, provided the materialism doesn’t imply some vulgar reduction of everything to money and class relations, or the sex drive, or the survival of the fittest, or whichever other gross oversimplification that hobbyhorse theorists have built their careers upon and used as a poison to sicken the humanities.
There are two schools of thought fully compatible with materialism that intrigue me. One is media ecology, which is really a sort of technological determinism (people often characterize it that way as an insult, though I don’t see why it should be taken as one). Media ecology can’t teach us too much about the animals, but I think it can help us understand humans a great deal, because man’s evolution has, I believe, been more or less self-directed beyond a certain point. I agree with the theory that the invention of cooking (i.e. the organization of fire) allowed early man to digest his food more easily, preserving energy to let the brain grow, bringing him from homo habilis to homo erectus. And I also agree with the theory that later on, the invention of language (i.e. the systematic arrangement of grunts, growls, tongue clicks, and other noises into propositional statements) allowed man’s cognition to grow increasingly complex, far above the rest of the animals, bringing him from homo erectus to homo sapiens. A “medium” in my understanding of media ecology can be nearly anything, including food or language — just as long as it was acquired via a technique, produces an exterior manifestation, and helps establish what we might call man’s Lebenswelt, or his uniquely human interpretation of his surrounding environment.
The second school of thought that intrigues me is semiotics. Specifically, the branch of semiotics stemming from Charles Sanders Peirce (rather than Ferdinand de Saussure), and which includes the study of animal communication as well as linguistics. Semiotics proceeds from the assumption that all of life, even down to the level of the eukaryotic cell, is bound up with the action of signs, and every living thing is therefore always participating in communication. A key insight of Peircean semiotics, however, is that not all communication works the same way, and so it cannot be reduced to the same analysis we’d apply to verbal interaction. Once you analyze communication in Peircean terms, you’re better equipped to understand what occurs in our cultural environment that places us on the same footing with animals, and what we do that’s wholly distinct from them.
Beyond my influences, this blog stems in part from a private conviction. I believe that modern, industrialized man is suffering from a glut of what the vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages called logocentrism (his definition of it is different from that of Jacques Derrida, who popularized the term). The digital environment we inhabit typically proceeds from discourse, and it’s through discourse that we form bonds across immaterial space. Digital media, even when not primarily discursive, engages our intellective senses in hearing and sight, but it fails to engage our senses of taste, smell, and touch. Accordingly, it has prompted us to seek salvation in the depths of the earth, turning us into worshippers of the chthonic, both for better and for worse, simply because the chthonic realm seems distant from the lofty heights we inhabit. Some of us have become desperate to feel comfortable in our own bodies; others, desperate to shunt off the inalienable features of our very humanity. The primordial stew of the earth seems for some like the salvation towards which we must levitate rather than the very muck from which we collectively emanated. The characteristic condition of life in the digital era isn’t Gnosticism, as some conservative commenters try to claim, but its precise opposite.
When I discuss art and literature, understand that these suspicions are what’s largely driving the discussion forward. I’m keen on the aspects of visual art and music that cannot be reduced to language and thus can momentarily liberate us from the clutches of the logos without driving us into permanent madness. Similarly, I respect poetry because when properly executed, it uses language to free us from language’s most parasitic effects on the soul. You get the picture.
When I’m discussing metapolitics, these suspicions should similarly inform where I’m coming from. I’m interested not so much in specific policies or politicians but rather broader questions of how power is both mediated and ventilated in ways that my main interests can perhaps help explain.
This blog began because I felt the need to publish something once per week. I didn’t have any particular aim or goal beyond that — just publish something concerning a topic that interests me, come what may, and hope that it generates some useful discussion to detract some attention from the endless sea of blather about recent news events (always ephemeral and meaningless) or the ongoings of some ineffectual politician who recently (so I hear) stepped on a worm, or sneezed awkwardly during a speech, or raised an eyebrow in a vaguely suspicious manner at an inopportune moment. So, leaving all of the foregoing philosophical baggage aside, this site always reserves the right to be, in its most basic sense, just an assortment of musings on kulchur and other various intellekshual interests.
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