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Intro

It feels strange to criticize Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics more than thirty years after its initial publication in 1993. Plenty of others have already done so in the field of Comics Studies (yes, this is an actual field), including Thierry Groensteen, Bart Beaty, Scott Bukatman, Charles Hatfield, R.C. Harvey, David Carrier, and more. Since McCloud’s work was published, there have been plenty of competing accounts about what comics are, what they’re meant to do, how they work on the mind, and so on. But the thing is, McCloud is the only one who made an explanation of comics that is actually fun to read, and so he remains the top guy, whether you like it or not. Out of all the existing accounts, his formalistic approach to comics has been the most influential by far, and Understanding Comics has been a required text for students in many different university courses dealing with the topic. Additionally, he has probably been highly influential in the elevation of comics as a valid middlebrow mode of storytelling. When you see publications like Newsweek, NPR, and BBC News release lists of the top 100 novels from the last fifty years (or whatever), you’ll now see Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000-2003) on those lists pretty commonly. I think that McCloud has played a significant role in building up the confidence for educated people to treat comics as literature — for better or for worse.

And to be sure, Understanding Comics gets a lot right. Above all else, it’s clear that McCloud is really, really into comics, and that’s my favorite thing about the book. His enthusiasm is infectious. When he references artists like Osamu Tezuka, José Muñoz, R. Crumb, Dave McKean, or Sergio Aragones, you think to yourself, “Man, I should check out more of that guy’s stuff! Wow!” Additionally, I think he’s more or less right about many of the things for which he’s been criticized. His discussions on “closure,” the importance of the “gutter” between panels, sequencing, the compression or expansion of time, the six types of panel transitions, and so on, are all basically right. I’m sure that they all have minor conceptual flaws that niggling academics have made sure to correct, but they’re right enough to be useful, and that’s what matters.

I also will say that I disagree that comics necessarily need to be studied from an historical or sociopolitical lens instead of a formalistic one, as some of McCloud’s critics have argued. It’s perfectly valid to study comics as a mode of storytelling from a formalist standpoint with less emphasis on history, and I don’t think it’s productive to just whine about one school of theoretical criticism while promoting another. The reality of academia is that just about everything will eventually be approached by just about every school of thought, and there’s little to be done about it. McCloud was at least passionate about analyzing comics in the way he chose, and he did it on his own accord. He wasn’t just haplessly trying to secure tenure at some backwater university in the middle of nowhere because his life had become nothing more than a constantly-shrinking prison cell. This alone speaks volumes, and it suggests that the vantage point he took is worth something and deserves to be taken seriously. And besides: professional academics study works (or genres) of literature from far dopier theoretical vantage points.

However, there is something that I think he gets very wrong about comics. It doesn’t come from his approach, or his definition of comics, either, which may be a bit too liberal but which I still don’t have much of a problem with (who cares about definitions, anyway?) Instead, it concerns something even more basic, and it’s how he conceptualizes the relationship between language and images. I’m into both semiotics and media ecology, so I think about this topic often. For comics in particular, it’s the essence of the art form itself. So for the big fans of McCloud, understand that I’m not just trying to crap all over him for no reason — I actually think that his work acts as a springboard for some decent takeaways on not just comics as an art form but also semiotics and media ecology. Even if these takeaways must be adversarial.

I. The Semiotix of Comix

McCloud’s characterization of the relationship between images and language — let’s just acknowledge this at the outset — comes from what seems to be an insecurity about the content found in comic books, which is often seen as simplified, childlike, and distinctly non-literary. This perception would have been a big problem for McCloud, who was writing a conceptually ambitious treatise on the topic back in 1993. Back then, the main problem with taking comics seriously was that they’re for dummies, you know. Little children. People who can barely read. Nowadays, everybody can say they enjoy comics, and it’s no longer a guilty pleasure — but not then. During the early 90s, only the really smart guys could say that they enjoyed comics, like the famous novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, an avowed fan of American strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Italian fumetti such as Corto Maltese. But he could say this as a way of flexing, basically: it indicated that he had intelligence to spare.

However, despite the shift in cultural perception since then, comics themselves really haven’t changed all that much. The first theorist on comics, and also the inventor of the modern comic, was Rodolphe Töpffer, and McCloud both cites him and draws some influence from him as well. Yet Töpffer, as revolutionary as he was, had no illusions about the kind of audience to whom his work would appeal. About the comic book, or “picture story,” he had this to say:

The picture story, to which the criticism of art pays no attention and which rarely worries the learned, has always exercised a great appeal. More, indeed, than literature itself, for besides the fact that there are more people who look than who can read, it appeals particularly to children and to the masses, the sections of the public which are particularly easily perverted and which it would be particularly desirable to raise.1

So for him, a comic isn’t real literature, it’s something children can understand, and it’s mostly valuable as a source of moral instruction, which is sorely needed because the derelict artists of the contemporary world are constantly forgetting about the importance of such things. And when you look at Töpffer’s words, it seems clear that people still basically feel the same way today, though they might not want to admit it. Why is it that Marvel Comics is so “woke,” as its conservative critics love to point out? It’s because the writers recognize that comics are good tools of moral instruction for the semi-literate masses. So, not much has really changed since the mid-19th century when Töpffer was active. The main differences are that 1) society is less literate than before, and 2) educated people now read comic books with less shame. Maybe these two things are related. Who knows.

But for McCloud, Töpffer’s sort of thinking simply won’t do. He indicates throughout his book that comics deserve to be taken just as seriously as their neighboring yet more highly esteemed art forms like novels, paintings, and film, and so he won’t brook the commonplace that “comics are just kids’ stuff.” To offer an alternative perspective, he establishes a semiotic theory designed to elevate the artistic value of the cartoon character, the fixture of modern comics from the nineteenth century all the way up to the present. And this is where I begin to get irritated. One charitable discussion on McCloud claims that he recreates and elaborates upon the theory of signs established by Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce proposed a tripartite scheme for the classification of signs, which he divided into symbols, icons, and indexes. Now, McCloud does discuss icons and symbols… but given how far his definitions of symbols and icons differ from Peirce’s, I suspect that he either had never heard of Peircean semiotics at the time of his writing, or he simply didn’t care enough about it to take it seriously.

Here is how Peirce defined icon, index, and symbol:

• Icon: A sign that represents something through resemblance or similarity (e.g. a portrait, a map, onomatopoeic words like “ZAP,” a musk-scented perfume, a grape-flavored soda, an Audubon bird-call)

• Index: A sign that represents something existing in a specific place and time through a direct connection or causal link (e.g. smoke indicating fire, a weathervane indicating wind direction, footprints, bullet holes, jaundiced skin, the smell of fresh-baked cookies coming from downstairs)

• Symbol: A sign that represents something through convention, habit, or learned rules, and not through motivated resemblance or connection (e.g. spoken words in a language, mathematical notation, music notation, traffic lights, country flags, coats of arms).

For McCloud, however, an icon is “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea.” So, basically, an icon is any representative visual image, even when the referent is abstract. This is an incredibly wide definition. “Symbols,” then, are just one species of an icon, and they include things like the Christian cross, the “Om” insignia, the swastika, the peace sign, national flags, corporate logos, and traffic lights. Stuff like that. Letters, scientific notation, and numeric signs, however, are not symbols. They’re a different subsection of icon entirely, and McCloud doesn’t bother to give them a special name. Now, despite the massively inclusive definition he gives to “icon,” according to McCloud, some pictures are “more iconic than others” because “as resemblance varies, so does the level of iconic content.” You got that? Yeah, I don’t follow that, either. It’s simply impossible to know what that statement means on its face, and McCloud seems to realize it, so he proceeds to demonstrate what he means, essentially forcing us to come up with a new, truer definition of “icon” based on inference.

We come to find that for McCloud, a genuinely iconic picture involves something like the bare minimum amount of information to convincingly portray its referent. Think of the nine-stroke portrait of Alfred Hitchcock:

For McCloud, that portrait would be more iconic than a photograph of Hitchcock. This conceptualization couldn’t be further from Peircean thought, since Peirce would argue that the more something clearly and unambiguously represents something else, the more iconic and less symbolic it is. For McCloud, though, the icon lies about two thirds of the way between “resemblance” on one end, which is passively received, and “meaning” on the other, which is actively perceived. And once icons stop being icons, they immediately transition into… the printed words of a phonetic alphabet:

Here’s another demonstration of the same sliding scale, from McCloud’s personal website:

McCloud then comes up with a triangle figure. The top, which opposes both resemblance and meaning, indicates pure abstraction. Visual realism is on the left, and visual meaning is on the right.

So, completely non-representational works (like Jackson Pollock’s or Barnett Newman’s paintings) go at the top, photographs go on the left, and language-signs go on the right. And at the furthest right, the absolute edge of the triangle, we have, like, lots of language signs, lots of words… and they’re written in italics, or scribbled handwriting, or something. But somewhere in the sweet spot (about two-thirds through), we get the images of comics. The classic comic style of art shows up in that pristine area, and it runs all the way up to the phonetic alphabet, where it becomes language.

Now, I want you to ask yourself this question, and try to be as honest as you can. No — ask yourself a couple. Does the progression from a photo of a face, to a realistic drawing of a face, to a stick figure drawing of a face, to eventually the word “FACE” feel natural to you? Let’s expand his example a little. If I draw a stick figure of a whole body, am I somehow just a stone’s throw away from writing out the word “BODY”? or maybe “STICK FIGURE”? Let’s push this example even further. If I draw a simplified picture of an Extreme Ultraviolet lithography machine, am I conceptually just a hair’s breadth away from writing out the words “EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET LITHOGRAPHY MACHINE” instead of drawing the picture? Well?

To that last question, McCloud might respond,

Well, no, because any drawing detailed enough to make the specific type of machine recognizable would have to go further toward ‘resemblance,’ while any description of the machine with several words would have to move closer toward ‘meaning.’ If you wanted to bring them as close to each other as possible, you would have to draw a highly simplified and thus non-specific machine, and the word next to it would just be ‘MACHINE.’ Then, as they diverge, you could specify what kind of machine it is, through intricate visual depiction on one end and intricate written description on the other.

That seems like what he would say, anyhow (I’m trying my best to ‘steelman’ the argument here). But if that’s true, then how does a more intricate drawing — intricate enough to show us the exact type of machine it is — go further away from meaning, while a more thorough verbal description goes closer to it? Let’s consider this whole entire concept of “meaning” for a moment. Is there no “meaning” at all in a photograph if it tells you everything that a lengthy verbal description would tell? Is there no “meaning” in detail when it’s portrayed visually? And how is it just passively “received” — doesn’t it require more active interpretation the more detail there is? If I can see all the parts of the machine, I’m forced to think about what they actually might do in order to identify it, am I not?

Let’s alter the line of questioning a bit: is meaning really rooted in verbal abstraction? And more importantly, if we’re assuming that this is the case, then how does this attitude not betray a glottocentric (AKA language-centric) theory of communication, exactly the thing that places novels above comics in value? It seems to me that the more you disambiguate something, the more meaning there is, so a picture of (for example) a bird detailed enough to tell you its exact type carries more meaning than an “iconic” drawing that could indicate potentially a hundred different kinds of birds.

The truth is, there’s just simply no smooth transition going from a photograph to a simplified drawing to a word written in the phonetic alphabet. Interpreting a simple picture and interpreting a word involve entirely separate mental processes located in separate parts of the brain. It seems to me that what McCloud wants to do is say that simple images and words written in the phonetic alphabet are both similar because they’re visually less cluttered and less distinct, and perhaps this means they have less “ground,” to use the term from the legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan (McCloud is a McLuhan guy, which I don’t consider a bad thing at all). But here’s why Peircean semiotics shouldn’t be ignored: no matter what superficial similarities a simple image and a written word in a phonetic alphabet share, the picture still has an iconic referent (i.e., something that it portrays through motivated resemblance) while the written word has no iconic resemblance to hardly anything besides other instances of the same written word. That is a huge conceptual difference. If you really wanted to represent the transition from picture to word correctly, you’d have to put a giant gap between them, maybe with a “???” in the middle. And when you think about it, this need for such a gap is exactly why the phonetic alphabet was such a revolutionary invention, such a great leap forward for the ancient Greeks — a truly profound discovery not to be bested by Lysippos’s innovations in anatomical realism (and, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same culture that produced one would also produce the other).

Someone will now say, “But what about hieroglyphics, Kerwin? Aren’t they drawings?” and sure, yes, they are. And some of them did carry iconic resemblance — or, in other words, some of the glyphs were logograms, drawings that directly signified their apparent referent in an iconic, motivated way. But the problem is that these logograms were only a minority of the hieroglyphs, while the others either signified sounds, like full syllables or entire words, while others still acted as contextual determinatives to clarify the meaning of the sentence without being pronounced at all. This is why the hieroglyphic script was supremely elite, only known by the highest of clerics, while merchants, jurists, and accountants would use the more streamlined and sound-based (though not completely alphabetic) hieratic script, and then later, the even more streamlined and more sound-based (though still not totally alphabetic) demotic script, which looked like this:

Yeah, you see that? The script where you don’t recognize anything at all is easier to learn than the thing with the recognizable pictures. So, this is my point: if you look at a series of hieroglyphics simply as icons (in either Peirce’s or McCloud’s sense), they’re incredibly simple. Couldn’t be easier to interpret. Look, there’s a bird! And wow, there’s an eagle! And hey, a feather! Oh, but there’s a stick… But if you look at them as how they were intended, namely as symbols (in the Peircean sense), all of a sudden they become more or less impossible. There’s a reason we weren’t able to translate hieroglyphics until all the way up to the 1820s, and it’s one of the reasons why hieroglyphics were fully abandoned by the 5th century A.D.: they were complicated as shit, and highly inefficient! And again, all of this is because iconic interpretation and symbolic interpretation involve totally separate mental processes. They cannot be placed together upon the same linear sequence.

II. The Image and Language as Mutually Evolving Phenomena

I kinda hate to beat up on McCloud so badly here, because he doesn’t return to his “picture plane” for a few chapters, and the intervening ones are quite good, as I’ve said. But alas! He does return to it again in Chapter 6, and his conceptual flaws here lead to further errors, all of which concern the same misunderstanding regarding the relationship between visual images and language.

In Chapter 6, McCloud wants to explain why the combination of pictures and words is now considered crass and lowbrow. In order to do so, he tells the story of pictures and their relationship with words, and McCloud shows how humans once created representative images before they ever developed literacy. Some of these images were fairly intricate, while others were “iconic” and acted as “symbols.”

Already, we’ve got some problems. It isn’t altogether clear if McCloud believes that primitive drawings naturally evolved into language, or how exactly the process came about. But the more important thing he misses, I think, is that while it’s true that humans made cave paintings 15,000 years ago, those were not the first images humans ever made. As Andre Leroi-Gourhan pointed out in his Gesture and Speech (1964), the first images humans ever made were not representative of anything at all: they were purely abstract notches, waves, and other assorted scratchings on things like rocks and bones. Think spirals, clusters of dots, and rows of little lines, like this:

They indicated rhythm more than anything, and it was probably fun for those guys to just move their hands about in various patterns to create these little designs. Although there are some theories that such scratchings indicated specific things (like kill counts in hunting), I kinda doubt it, as do many others. As far as we can tell, they were purely non-representational.

Now, think about language for a second. Language started out orally, not written, and it’s a collection of phonemes that are assigned symbolic significance. Language is abstract, and it certainly came before the cave paintings at Lascaux to which McCloud is referring. It isn’t clear if hominids were making non-representative scratchings before they developed language or only afterward, but language was a way of exteriorizing and formalizing a rhythmic, predetermined series of abstract utterances. It therefore comes from the same psychological substrate that prompted early man to create those little scratched-out notches and waves pictured above, even if they were far from being formalized with the same ingenuity. Language also, I think, was a necessary innovation for representative art to come along much later, like in those Lascaux cave paintings, since language gave man the gift of cognition — or at least a cognition sophisticated enough to imbue images with specific functions (like map-making, or warning others, or practicing magic). So from the beginning, abstract shapes and lines were there alongside language. It took a good while for mankind to finally reunite his earliest visual inscriptions with symbolic meaning, but regardless, the impulse to make non-representative drawings was there before representative pictures.

Now, the reason this matters so much is that it shows how visual images and media (including spoken language itself) have always evolved in an intertwined fashion. Even though they occupy different modes of interpretation, they still can mutually influence one another, if in unexpected ways. Language and abstract scratchings came about around the same time, and then, much later, cave paintings showed up around the same time as more complex tools were being developed. Literacy eventually showed up thousands of years later, and it was essentially a mnemonic tool for stock-taking, economic, and administrative purposes. So it was effectively an extension of earlier tools, and it took a while for people to use for cultural or aesthetic purposes.

For McCloud, innovations in language media slowly created an effect wherein pictures and language became gradually separated from one another. He argues that the printing press in particular pushed language into one direction while images evolved in an opposite direction. But as Marshall McLuhan has (I think correctly) observed, the printing press was responsible for the Renaissance innovations in visual perspective, like the “vanishing point,” since the uniformity of the printed page created the illusion of a fixed point-of-view. So again, a language medium allowed the visual image to evolve in complexity, even though they involved different interpretive practices.2 Moreover, the printing press brought written language closer to what McCloud calls “the icon,” since the letter had never been so visually bold and clear beforehand. The press even led to the standardization of spelling and grammar, creating maximum clarity and ease of absorption.

It also doesn’t seem to be the case that the printing press pushed language and images in opposite directions by prohibiting them from intermingling. Intricate images still occurred throughout the age of print, and they interacted with texts to which they corresponded, but not in the way McCloud has in mind. The most obvious example is in the way paintings from the Renaissance all the way into the nineteenth century depended upon the Bible and its associated tradition. Sure, these paintings weren’t photographed and copied into the printed editions of the Bible (an impossibility), but they were clearly designed to interpret the text creatively, creating a kind of mutual interaction between the painting and the Biblical scene being depicted. For instance, if you look at Caravaggio’s highly detailed The Calling of Saint Matthew, c. 1600, his interpretation is so striking that it threatens to assume sovereignty over the story itself. It becomes nearly impossible to think of that episode from the Gospels the same way again.

At other times, elaborate images formed the frontispieces to many different kinds of books, and these frontispieces often relied on a certain kind of conceptual glue known as allegory to portray the book’s ideas. For instance, the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628 edition) depicts the many different states of mind that Burton is about to expound upon, and it actually looks quite a bit like a comic strip. In fact, many of these frontispieces did. The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) was actually drawn in close collaboration with the author, and through allegory, it visually portrays Hobbes’s philosophical argument about statecraft and the figure of the sovereign. It was heavily commented upon back then, and it still receives academic analysis to this day.

If you probe further, you’ll find books loaded with folio images, like those of Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century German polymath. Kircher not only had incredible and often highly allegorical frontispieces drawn for his books (great works of art in their own right), but he loaded up his books with folio images of maps, diagrams, and models, like this fascinating depiction of the earth’s core from his Mundus Subterraneus (1665):

And then there was the genre of emblem books, which were loaded up with images that contained written explanations next to them, since it was prohibitively difficult for a printing press to mix writing with images at the time. Among the most striking of the emblem books is Michaelis Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617), an alchemical treatise filled with not only intricate allegorical images but also poems, and even music pieces for chamber performance, all while slowly recounting the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomene (see the emblems in color here).

Again, all of this involves heavy intermingling between text and image — and music, for that matter.

When William Blake finally came along in the late 18th century, it should go without saying that he took poetry and illustration into unknown territory. He invented his own idiosyncratic printing method known as relief etching, which allowed him to combine words with images on the same page with much greater ease, and once he used it to produce his own works of “illuminated printing,” he became nothing short of revolutionary. However, he was a revolutionary who failed to incite a revolution only because of how bold his vision was. The illustrations we typically find added to reprints of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) pale by comparison to the conceptual unity we find in Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-1820), or his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), and it amazingly took quite a while for twentieth century academic literary scholars to realize that Blake must be read with his drawings — his drawings must be taken just as seriously as his words! But as sui generis as Blake was, it still must be understood that he was coming out of an earlier print-based tradition in which both image and text mutually augmented one another, even if the technology didn’t allow for images and writing to occur within the same space. And yeah, sure, these images don’t look like modern comics… but who cares?

It therefore just isn’t accurate to say that text and image became alienated from one another during the age of print. As I’ve noted, the modern comic only came along during the nineteenth century, and there wasn’t anything too much like it beforehand, even prior to the Renaissance. McCloud, who considers the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry a comic, seems to believe that an alienation occurred after a mutual harmony between text and image. But once you recognize that logogrammatic language scripts weren’t being treated the same way we typically treat representative works of art, and that his examples of early sequential art weren’t exactly common, you quickly realize that the harmony he’s imagining was never really there. What the new medium of print accomplished was to allow both language and visual art to reach levels of complexity never seen before, but there’s no reason to assume that their complexities were growing in opposition to each other. Works of art like the Bayeux Tapestry were never the norm, and as McCloud recognizes, sequential art never stopped being produced during the age of print. He himself mentions examples. There’s also a big, giant book of examples collected by David Kunzle called The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (1973). I haven’t read it, though, so I won’t comment on it. Maybe I will sometime soon.

Still, we haven’t yet answered the question McCloud poses as to why images eventually became devalued and relegated to lowbrow status during the 20th century — unless, of course, they were highly abstract, and (ironically enough) incredibly primitive. So primitive, in fact, that they were going back to Homo erectus times, back to the times of those non-representative swirls, spirals, waves, dots, and notches. McCloud’s view is that pictures and words had been pushed so far to opposite extremes, they each had nowhere else to go but to reconvene at that breaking point between “icon” and “word,” but because all of this happened through the mass media, people scoffed.

Despite his terrible “picture plane” model, I think he’s about half-right on that last point. I suspect that the reason has to do with the advent of electronic media, which cheapened the image by making it endlessly reproducible and available to everyone, thus eliminating its uniqueness and its mystique once and for all. And in America, when comics in the style of Töpffer’s “picture books” became mainstream entertainment among working class Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Irishmen, there was no chance for redemption in an Anglo-dominated society (the French and Italians, for their part, never had these social status problems that McCloud identifies in their own countries). Meanwhile, intellectual Jews such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg were theorizing about art and then effusively praising the artists who demonstrated their theories. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word (1975), modern abstract art had become subordinated beneath theory to such a degree that it derived its sole aesthetic value from it. This was an altogether new phenomenon, not to be found during the days of the Church’s dominance over the west.

III. Visual Stereotypes, Schemata, and Comics

We come to McCloud’s most criticized claims, and these are the claims that most clearly reveal his need to try and elevate the dignity of comic book art. Cartoons have traditionally not been terribly detailed, as we’ve established, and McCloud wants to give us a way to appreciate works of art that aren’t photorealistic — works of art that rely on stripped-down visual forms that small children can appreciate just as well as adults. This is a worthy enough aim. But again, he runs into the same problem established by his “picture plane” triangle. It happens when he tries to suggest that mere simplicity is the essence of the cartoon, as he does here:

“The more cartoony a face is … the more people it could be said to describe.” Again, is that really right? Just look at the picture to the furthest right. Would you say that it’s the most cartoony out of all of them? I certainly wouldn’t say so; in fact, it looks humorless and bland. The guy on the far right could only be the protagonist of a pretty shitty cartoon. Let’s think about that for just a second.

There are a handful of guys that McCloud totally omits from his analysis, and perhaps he should have included them. They’re the caricaturists. He does discuss Rodolphe Töpffer, as we’ve mentioned a few times… but then there are guys like the inventors of the caricature, the Caracci brothers: Annabale, Agostino, and Ludovico (mid-16th to early 17th centuries).

The art historian E.H. Gombrich, in his Art & Illusion (1960), discusses trying to figure out with a colleague why it took so late in western art history for the caricature to have been invented. So, to try and answer the question, he contemplates these fascinating bros:

The word and the institution of caricature date only from the last years of the sixteenth century, and the inventors of the art were not the pictorial propagandists who existed in one form or another for centuries before but those most sophisticated and refined of artists, the brothers Carracci. Few of their caricatures have been identified, but according to literary sources which we have no reason to doubt, they also invented the joke of transforming a victim’s face into that of an animal, or even a lifeless implement, which caricaturists have practised ever since.

We thought at the time that it was the fear of image magic, the reluctance to do as a joke what the unconscious means very much in earnest, which delayed the coming of that visual game. I still believe these motives may have played their part, but the theory might be generalized. The invention of portrait caricature presupposes the theoretical discovery of the difference between likeness and equivalence.

[…]

IN THIS formulation caricature becomes only a special case of what I have attempted to describe as the artist’s test of success. All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. And this equivalence never rests on the likeness of elements so much as on the identity of responses to certain relationships. We respond to a white blob on the black silhouette of a jug as if it were a highlight; we respond to the pear with these crisscross lines as if it were Louis Philippe’s head.

He’s referring to this 19th century caricature of Louis Philippe I:

Gombrich’s analysis of art seeks to deny (or at least seriously compromise) the validity of iconicity as a concept. He’s one of those guys I’ve written about who are suspicious of the icon as a valid semiotic category, and this is why he can’t fully bring himself to say that the caricaturist is embellishing characteristics that are really there. But his point is nonetheless well-taken: caricaturists were able to come along because they practiced a bold kind of experimentation. That is, they were able to borrow the forms of other known objects and superimpose them upon their subject, doing so in a way that seemed acceptable to the audience. They also sometimes made up their own forms and tinkered with them, finding a way to synthesize these alien forms with the faces of their subjects until it would unlock some hidden essence of the subject’s appearance or personality. So they weren’t just “simplifying” the images but actually introducing an element of distortion, exaggeration, and grotesquery as well. That is the essence of what makes an image cartoony. Simply reducing the cartoon to lack of detail effectively neuters what makes a cartoon special.3

There are other caricaturists that McCloud doesn’t mention, either, like William Hogarth (1697-1764). Actually, that isn’t quite right. He mentions in Chapter 1 that Hogarth created works of sequential art, like A Rake's Progress (1732-1734)... but he ignores the fact that Hogarth was also a caricaturist. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same guy who experimented with sequential art would also have experimented with caricature. Hogarth, like many of the other innovative caricaturists, wasn’t interested in slavishly copying likenesses as they appear in nature. As Gombrich points out, he was interested in “learning the language” of objects and finding a “grammar” to them. In other words, he didn’t see the need to simply copy models posing in front of him, but rather to memorize forms for the various physiognomies and expressions of the human face and body, respectively, and then experiment with them.

Others had the same basic idea and pushed it even further, like Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), who advocated for intentional deviations from the canon of standard classical beauty when drawing comic faces. And then there was Francis Grose, who in 1788 published a pamphlet called Rules for Drawing Caricatures. Again, here’s Gombrich:

It certainly met a demand at the time when the merging of the Hogarthian tradition of comic art with the fashion of portrait caricature led to a popular craze for such drawings among amateurs. Grose combines the diagrams of [Charles] Le Brun with the variation principle advocated by Cozens. The academic standard face, which corresponds to the canon of Greek art, is experienced as beautiful, he says, precisely because it lacks expression. Try varying the proportions as drastically as you like, and watch what happens. You will soon be equipped with a repertory of funny faces that will be useful in drawing humorous pictures.

Ah, yes, there we go! Humor! Expression! Experimentation! Distortion! Imagination! This, my friends, is the essence of the cartoon image — NOT the stupid three-pronged American-style electronic outlet just staring at you blankly:

Now, if you consider how McCloud reduces the cartoon to simplicity, then the cartoon as a category must include all sorts of things, like the weird medieval guys from those high-medieval manuscript illuminations. And given how silly some of them look, not to mention the elements of scatology in some of the images, we can perhaps accept this classification (although it’s also clear that the artists weren’t usually trying to be funny). But his reduction of the cartoon image would also have to include the Grecian vase paintings and Chaldean bas-reliefs. It would also have to include the stick figures on those “pedestrian crossing” signs. Is any of this right? Yes, these things are all simplified images… but are they cartoons? Do they carry the same function as cartoons? Do you they make you feel the same way?

The answer — for me, anyway — is mostly no. And if I interpret some of these things as cartoons, like the depiction of the Christ on the mount of olives in the famous Book of Kells, then some better part of my judgment knows that I’m interpreting it the wrong way. Meanwhile, the work of Honoré Daumier is cartoony as hell, and yet it is highly detailed, not simple. So why does McCloud insist that naked simplicity is the essence of the cartoon? What could his argument gain from such a misrepresentation of what we typically think of as cartoon drawings?

We finally come to the crux of McCloud’s argument: the reason for why he’s so insistent on simplicity tout court as the essence of the cartoon. And it is indeed the most-criticized claim he makes. For McCloud, the advantage of such simplification is that it allows the reader to psychologically project himself or herself onto the character, using the character’s appearance as a mask. Essentially, the simplified form exploits the viewing subject’s primary narcissism. This psychological theory has been widely criticized from a number of angles, and I don’t want to spend too much time on it for that reason, but I can’t resist quoting the way he makes his point:

I know I can’t be the only one who read that question and thought to himself, “Uhhhh, yeah. Sure, I would. Why not?” But even if the answer had been no, it wouldn’t be because I need to see myself as McCloud in order to find what he says interesting. It would have more to do with the fact that the realistic figure is more alluring and interesting than the text above him, while the simpler figure is easier to register, gives me less to care about, and thus directs my eyes right to the text.

Usually, the appeal of simplicity isn’t about man’s inherent narcissism. Maybe sometimes, but not usually. For one thing, cartoons often involve a protagonist and an antagonist, and it isn’t as though the antagonists are maximally detailed so as to alienate them furthest from the viewer. Bluto is just as simple as Popeye. Peg-Leg Pete is just as simple as Mickey Mouse. Tom is just as simple as Jerry — it’s not as though Tom is played by a live-action cat. When I watch the Roadrunner outwit the Coyote, am I supposed to sympathize with both of them at once? Is the entire spectacle of their mutual antagonism just an internal psychomachia taking place inside of me, in which one faculty of my mind is at war with another?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that it’s just too cute of an idea to take seriously. The process through which a viewing subject will start to identify with a character is an interesting phenomenon, and it certainly is real, but it happens all the time in, say, film (see the final girl theory). It happens in television. There are actually transsexuals who claim that playing as a female character in video games — including those with precise graphics and detail — eventually awakened their transsexual urges. All of these examples seem to indicate that formal simplicity has little to do with the process of identification. Plus, simplified forms can be just as “othering” as they are inviting. This is probably why Scott McCloud doesn’t address the rich history of ethnic stereotypes in cartoons, which are indeed quite funny and enjoyable, and very cartoonish.4 But despite being amusing, these presentations always portray the ethnicity as a grotesque heterogeneous figure — there’s nothing instantly relatable about, say, Sunflower, the now-erased character from Disney’s Fantasia (1940):

The nature of the cartoon is better understood as something that triggers an instinct inside of us. A culturally conditioned instinct, perhaps, but an instinct nonetheless. McCloud starts to apprehend this instinct when he talks about how we always liken inanimate objects to the human form (like that three-prong outlet above), but he misses the mark when he says that we’re all just looking for versions of our individual selves. Rather, humans have always responded to distillations or exaggerations of broad categories, like e.g. in the form of literary or stage play “stock characters,” like those found in burlesque theater, the performances of the medieval jongleurs, the Commedia Dell’arte, or puppet shows such as Punch and Judy. And the reason we’ve always had an interest in such imaginative embellishments is that they correspond to the way we internally characterize and classify the types of phenomena we encounter in the world. Essentially, we’re all walking around with an array of schemata loaded up in our minds that we project outward onto our surroundings, and each schema acts as a lens through which we interpret what we encounter. Some might call these schemata “archetypes,” as C.G. Jung did, while others might call them “stereotypes.” But however we conceptualize them, we develop these things through a complex mixture of native instinct, direct personal experience, and cultural conditioning.

The visual form of the cartoon plays upon these schemata in a humorous fashion, and whether we like it or not, such schematized presentations of life can’t be considered highbrow or intellectually respectable in any meaningful way because they are indeed so psychologically nonspecific. The highbrow mentality insists upon us recognizing the individuality within everything. When we’re being highbrow, we’re engaging in lengthy interpretations of all the psychological particularities that go into this person or that person. The cartoon, on the other hand, invades your mind with deeper and sometimes darker truths that resonate with the animal senses — truths that language will always fail to capture adequately. Yessss, the cartoon hisses into your ear, tickling the cartilage with its forked tongue, that man with the speech impediment sounds utterly RIDICULOUS! Let us laugh at his misfortune! Oh, and look over there! That redheaded woman with the big boobs — she sure is SEXY! Watch as her mammoth-sized mammaries jiggle hither and thither, to and fro! And Yessssss, it continues, look at that Polack standing at the streetlamp! Observe his shabby appearance juxtaposed against his austere countenance! Say… wouldn’t it be FUNNY if he slipped on a banana peel??? Violence is a GAS!!!! And so on.

What McCloud does to divert our attention from this awkward yet undeniable truth is set up a semiotic model wherein maximum value is placed upon simple character designs because they’re more “meaningful,” since they invite us to imaginatively project ourselves upon them. But in doing so, he winds up creating a much worse problem, and it’s a problem that has plagued the comics and animation industries for the last thirty-five years or so. Although I don’t think McCloud has been solely or even majorly responsible for the growth of this problem, it is a problem that his thinking demonstrates nonetheless. Whether intentionally or not, he winds up indicating that the real value of the simple character design is in its proximity to language.

I already mentioned way back in Part I that McCloud’s “picture plane” triangle is inherently language-centric because of how it assigns maximum “meaning” to the written word, but I think that only now the implications can be fully explored. When you look at all of the most highly rated, critically appraised comics, they all seem to involve simple-looking characters, not even particularly cartoony ones, and they have deep, deep thoughts. I’ve already mentioned Maus and Persepolis, but then there’s Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006), various projects by Daniel Clowes, Love & Rockets by Los Bros Hernández (1981-), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and plenty of others. And look: I don’t want to attack all of these things. I think Love & Rockets is great, personally. But most of these critic-friendly comics derive their value from their writing rather than their art, to such a degree that they’ll often prompt me (and many others) to ask, “Why am I even reading this and not an actual novel?” At best, this combination of simple art mixed with psychological realism (or perhaps ideological/philosophical complexity, or some other uniquely novelistic feature) can yield something like a Love & Rockets, which has excellent character design, great visual storytelling, and shows strong awareness of both the history and potential of comics as a medium. But at worst, you wind up with, well, a gaggle of opportunistic hacks who aren’t literate enough to write a real novel and can’t draw well enough to produce a great superhero comic, or crime comic, or horror comic, or bande dessinée in the style of Blueberry or Thorgal, and so they settle on producing sheer “slice of life” mediocrity. On the whole, the desire to achieve critical respectability has harmed comics, and it unfortunately involves a kind of style that McCloud’s theorizing privileges.

Not only is the problem bad in comics, but it’s bad in animation, too. Bojack Horseman is probably the best example of what one critic has called “therapeutic realism,” a kind of novelistic approach but tailored specifically to the nuances of therapy culture and all that it stands for. And while such realism more often shows up in live action entertainment (although there’s also Tuca & Bertie, not to mention Big Mouth), Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s use of cartoon animals to convey it here pretty much goes by the Scott McCloud playbook to a tee. Simple and crude character design, maximum proximity to the word — the holy, sacred word. This is why the show can feature an episode in which the main character devotes about 90% of the runtime to self-indulgent monologuing about all of the problems he has with his mother. Hey, I have a question. If I must be subjected to such blathering nonsense, can I at least get some pretty pictures to go with it?

By my account, the value of comics isn’t necessarily in the fact that they’re cartoony (they don’t have to be cartoony to be good, and many of the best aren’t), but it is largely in the fact that comics are a lowbrow art without novelistic pretense. People don’t quite understand what this means, because when they think “lowbrow,” they think technically unimpressive or undisciplined. But this has never been the case. Monster trucks are lowbrow, but they’re also masterpieces of vehicular modification, and they require great driving skill to master. Pro wrestling is lowbrow, but it’s essentially an athletic form of theater that takes years of practice and conditioning to excel at. Death metal is lowbrow, but it involves rigorous technical musicianship and stamina, especially if you’re the drummer. Pole dancing is lowbrow, but it requires impressive calisthenic ability and proprioception, especially if you’re doing it the proper way, i.e. at a strip club in eight-inch heels. Jazz was once lowbrow,5 but the critics decided to start loving it all of a sudden, and then it became “music for musicians.” Bodybuilding is lowbrow, but it requires a lot of time spent in the gym, plus the endurance to starve yourself nearly to death, and some serious knowledge of chemistry. You get the idea.

In an interesting way, McCloud managed to create a model which actually confirms my point, because he places technical drawing skill in such stark opposition to the written word that he essentially renders the former completely optional — if not, quite frankly, undesirable. Of course, this opposition is imaginary, as I’ve stressed, but it gives us intelleckshuals all the reason in the world to turn our noses up at, say, a pornographic and ultraviolent yet stunningly impressive sci-fi comic like Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri’s Druuna (1985-2018), while we now have all the theoretical justification in the world to drool over something like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, even though any single volume of the former required far more brilliance and ingenuity to create than the entire run of the latter. In response to this mentality, I say, paraphrasing Thomas Carlyle: open thy Druuna and ignore thy Maus.6 Comic books are a visual medium, their meaning comes from images, and when comics are properly made, the image is the master, and the word, its envoy.

Alright, that’s enough rambling for today. I’ll see you later.

Edit 6/16: I tidied up some grammar and fixed some typos, made some light edits for clarity and disambiguation. Added a few hyperlinks.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog dedicated to violently cramming the precepts of media ecology together with those of nonstructuralist semiotics.

Some quick preliminary housekeeping: you may have noticed I’ve unpublished last week’s entry and taken it off the blog. That’s because I decided it sucks, basically. It was an attempt to synthesize what should have been two different ideas entirely, and it wound up being kind of a disjointed mess, riddled with factual errors and structural problems. Thanks to the people who called me out on it, thus confirming my own suspicions that it, in fact, blew chunks. I’ll try to revisit the topics it covered sometime later, though, since I do think it had some solid points. Can’t win ‘em all! Alright, now let’s get back to business…

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I. Contentious Lists, Pop Culture

We’re now living at a time during which our legacy publications have discovered a neat trick to keep the clicks coming: create a “best of list” associated with some aspect of culture, and then bask in the attention as everyone fights about it. Here are some examples. In 2023, The Rolling Stone updated their “200 Greatest Singers of All Time” list from 2008, removing Bob Dylan from the #7 spot and inserting singers such as Mariah Carey and Beyonce Knowles into the top 10. Everyone then argued about it, as they surely did back in 2008. This sort of thing happens often with The Rolling Stone. But we’ve also seen other similar lists emerge from even more greatly respected publications in recent months. For instance, The Guardian put out a 100 Best Novels list in May of 2026, which generated a lot of attention — so much so that they put out an additional article about how much buzz it got. A month before that, the NY Times put out a list of the Top 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, and it managed to annoy almost everyone because it featured several notoriously unambitious pop artists while neglecting more widely respected songwriters and lyricists with longstanding accolades such as Billy Joel or Todd Rundgren; or maybe Tracy Chapman, or Erykah Badu. One particularly controversial entry was Young Thug, a rapper who doesn’t create his own backing music, instead leaving the task to DJs and producers (like nearly all rappers), and who has claimed in interviews that he never listens to any music at all besides his own and Lil Wayne’s.

It cannot be overstated how much lists excite everyone. Social media has turned them into centerpieces for endless debates and posturing competitions, and so we can expect to see more mainstream newspapers pumping out such lists. To be clear, though, these lists are not just being produced for economic reasons. These lists are also conscious attempts to change the minds of the educated into adopting different criteria for cultural value, and in doing so, lay the groundwork for a future, more definitive canon to be taught in some of our higher institutions. Because, yes, make no mistake about it: these lists are ultimately groping toward the establishment of cultural canons — bodies of work that everyone should know if they want to belong to the culture. It seems unlikely that a frivolous and mostly ephemeral mumble-rapper like Young Thug will ever be considered an essential artist among serious purveyors of American songwriting, but provocative lists like these are where the tastemakers and would-be cultural authorities can experiment a bit and see what works.

“Canon wars” (we should really call them “battles”) were a major fixture of the broader culture war from the 1980s and 1990s, and they were highly ideological in nature. Most of the fights people in academic offices and lecture halls were having concerned the canon of great books from western civilization, and they dealt with the question of whether or not the canon should be expanded to be more representative of minority voices — racial and otherwise. And since then, amid the west’s longstanding state of permanent cultural war, most of the arguments about pop culture resemble miniature versions of these academic canon wars. But since nowadays colleges feature courses on pop culture, these smaller debates about “best of [whatever]” lists can still influence what young people are taught at their generic backwater “State U” universities, if only in a secondary manner (like through some individual professor allowing himself to be influenced by the NY Times and its embrace of “poptimism”).

II. Canons as Tools of Collective Mnemotechnics

The reason these pop culture list and canon debates get so contentious in part is that canons are inseparable from identitarian concerns. By their nature, canons are tools of what the late Egyptologist Jan Assmann called “collective mnemotechnics,”1 which we can define as externalized, institutionalized practices through which distinct and self-conscious groups of people remember themselves, preserve a sense of common history, and stay mindful of their shared destiny. Collective mnemotechnic tools and techniques can include rituals, prayers, symbolic taboos (such as dietary restrictions), monuments, memorials, holidays, ceremonial clothing and uniform, and more — but the key with them is that they require institutions and deliberate maintenance to keep from disappearing, and therefore, they fall to some extent under the political domain.

The idea of the canon originally referred to the establishment of the Bible’s official texts, but it can be extended to other formations of official bodies of writing that have occurred cross-culturally. The Upanishads are the canon of texts that the Vedanta is based on, the Pali Tipitaka is the canon that forms Theravada Buddhism, the Analects of Confucius is another canon, and so are the Quran and the Hadith. What has made these kinds of canons so impactful is that they allow for the production of exegetical writings produced by scholars, which expand, refine, or clarify certain passages in the original texts. These different interpretations can sometimes disagree with one another, creating lively scholarly debate. Other times, interpretations can build upon each other, branching outward into uncharted territory. Thus, canons can serve as the foundation for monasteries or universities filled with exegetes whose writings spur on intellectual activity, creating more writings that expand outward in a cumulative fashion, and all of this activity serves to exalt the greatness of the original canon rather than attempt to contradict it. Canons can even lend inspiration to secular poetry or literary fiction, giving artists a tradition with which to interact creatively. But above all, they preserve a culture’s collective memory, keeping that culture from losing itself and allowing its identity to dissolve in a sea of undisciplined, chaotic thought.

However, while they still maintain a collective mnemotechnic function, the original role of canons has changed in the modern world. Whereas they could originally function as the basis for entire religions, if not civilizations, their role has since been diminished. Creating a new canon for something (anything) will have almost zero chance of forming the basis of a new civilization — the world is pretty full, just about everything has been modernized (even the few hunting-gathering and horticultural tribes that remain still rely on the modern world in various ways), and you can’t start anything new from scratch. We thus create canons now for different purposes.

In the case of highbrow culture, canons often facilitate a sense of national identity, though in the Anglophone world, the maintenance of a literary or philosophical canon is a far more complicated matter than it might seem at first glance. For instance, in the United States, the professor John Erskine pioneered the Great Books program during the 1920s, and it was partly designed to serve the American national identity, though he didn’t frame it in such stark terms. Erskine’s viewpoint was shot through with liberal assumptions, and it was distinctly more cosmopolitan in nature than the assumptions behind the formation of other literary canons elsewhere in the world. Erskine treated America as the outcome of great ideas from many different western cultures, all of which could contribute to the moral righteousness of intelligent, rational thinking (he perceived intelligence as essentially moral). And this attitude was indeed quite a contrast from when the American universities were adopting England’s canon of specifically English literature decades before. The American universities in that case had started from the assumption that America is the continuation of a distinctly Anglo-Saxon ethno-cultural tradition, but over time, this assumption lost out. Erskine’s more liberal viewpoint began to prevail, though not without some controversy, and by the 1950s, the New Critics came along and completely removed all identitarian aspects of the English literary canon, aiming for a standard of pure aestheticism by treating the quality of a literary work as an objective trait.2 It was not long before schools of critical theory could emerge and explode the whole thing.

Given the lack of a distinct, straightforward identity underpinning America’s canonical selections from that point onward, it is not hard at all to understand why its cultural canons of great books (whether fully international, broadly western, or simply English) have drawn so much contention. If you look at America’s specifically English literary canon, for instance — or at least the books that have been taught to high school and university students as essential works of literature — the selections have shifted incessantly since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Spanish, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, and especially French literary canons have remained pretty much intact with very little change. The American great books canons have invited too many challenges to stay intact, and most of these challenges have been explicitly identitarian in nature, typically coming from racial, ethnic, or even religious groups calling for more representation. This is probably why they have been so powerful, actually. Again — canons have a collective mnemotechnic function, and black Americans form a collective, as do other immigrant diaspora groups, not to mention populations of formerly colonized regions. When they demand representation, the purpose of a canon isn’t lost on them.

III. Canons and Voluntaristic Identity

But there are other canons that have stemmed from entirely different sets of assumptions. If you consider high western concert music (you know, classical music), it didn’t really get its own distinct canon until the nineteenth century, and the canon was formed on strictly aesthetic principles from the beginning. Organized music had itself gone through a series of varied purposes and justifications as civilization had progressed, but it had never been simply “music for its own sake.” Early on, its institutionalized presentation formed an essential part of religious or spiritual life, with its compositions often guided by metaphysical or eschatological assumptions. But after a long process of secularization in the nineteenth century, music was treated as an expression of national identity. We call this the time of musical nationalism, in which composers were thought to embody the Russian spirit, or the German, or the Finnish, or whatever. But there was also a distinctly pan-European selection of pieces being formed during this time that represented the best of what music qua music had to offer, and this list of great works formed the basis of today’s international classical concert repertoire. Around this time, the idea also formed that a piece of music has an almost Platonic essence and each performance of it is merely an imperfect representation of it. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is simply Beethoven’s 9th (preserved on paper, of course), while Toscanini’s or Bernstein’s versions of it can only be understood as representations.

Although there have been some mostly limpwrist attempts to “shake up” our assumptions as to what constitutes great classical music (e.g. nowadays, BBC Music magazine will often spotlight random woman or minority composers who usually aren’t that impressive), the international repertoire has remained pretty much the same, and people largely share the same or similar understandings as to what great music is.3 There are a few reasons for why such a non-identity-based canon could survive, and I’ll sketch out a few:

1. The same principles that form the western musical canon also treat instrumental music as its highest form, since it represents music shorn of all ideological or sociopolitical qualities. Music is understood as a matter of pure form, and while literature always involves ideas that can “spill out” into ideological or sociopolitical terrain, music doesn’t do this as much.

2. There are economic considerations at play. While the western music canon isn’t exactly the same thing as the international repertoire, they’re pretty closely linked, and you cannot just throw a new composer into the repertoire so easily. A bunch of professors can start to pretend that Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the greatest American novels of all time pretty easily without much risk. But if you wanted to add a work by a new composer onto a concert program, it would require finding a conductor, training the orchestra, and selling some concert tickets. The wheels of change must turn more slowly.

3. Thinking about classical music just simply isn’t required for daily life — it isn’t even required for the members of the striver class to demonstrate their high status anymore. And if it isn’t required in those areas, then there’s not as much reason to fuss over it.

Then, there’s one final reason that closely corresponds to number three, and it’s this: because classical music has become a completely optional aspect of society for pretty much everyone involved in it, it actually does have an identitarian component to it, but in a counterintuitive way. The canon of great classical music pieces establishes “classical music person” as its own identity group. So, in other words, the canon is there for people who want to become classical music guys and take that on as a part of who they are on some essential level.

Now, when we canonize the various discharges and secretions from the wide world of popular culture, we’re essentially doing the same thing as with classical music. Here, we’re engaging in a practice of collective mnemotechnics for people who have taken up a branch of mass culture and adopted it into themselves, turning it into a part of who they are. It’s true that classical music is highbrow while pop culture is lowbrow, but they both possess an optionality not found in the canons of the past. In fact, the arguments about canons within pop culture are a more intense affair, since popular culture inspires genuine interest while classical music is largely propped up by the state. A canonical list of must-see films is essentially a tool designed to preserve the collective memory and identity of cineastes and assorted film dorks. A canonical list of death metal albums is for people who want to take up the identity of the death metal dweeb. A canonical list of must-read graphic novels is a way of strengthening the identity of comic book geeks. And speaking of comic book geeks, if you’re trying to become fully up-to-speed on the lore of Marvel or DC comics in particular, you need to know the official canon of comics that contribute to the greater storyline of the Marvel or DC Universes (or multiverses, or whatever) — a different kind of canon, but no less significant.

If you’re fully immersed in one of these subcultures, then debates about canons can feel immensely important, but at the same time, it isn’t exactly difficult to understand why people have stepped out of these worlds altogether, even after a period of heavy entrenchment. One reason for what’s been known as the “woke” era (let’s say the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s) is that cultural prestige declined with the growth of the internet and the explosion of internet piracy, and thus a pretty good chunk of yesterday’s vinyl-recording-collecting hipsters turned into the finger-wagging moral scolds of today. When they switched over from seeking status in their record collections to seeking status through political grandstanding, it simply felt like more was at stake.

But why have these aesthetics-based, opt-in identities formed in the first place? Well, much like the reason for why people exit from them, the reason for their proliferation in the first place is also not particularly hard to understand. With the inventions of the phonograph, the radio, the cinema, and the television, there was a concomitant explosion of artistic and cultural products associated with the various electronic media, and these products could facilitate new identities mainly rooted in aesthetic enjoyment rather than religion or ethnicity. In fact, the explosion of information actively degraded the concentrated power of religion and ethnicity. Clothing also assisted in the formation of these identities — probably a response to the depersonalizing standardization of clothing across the industrialized world. In 1964, from his Gesture and Speech, Andre Leroi-Gourhan had this to say on the subject:

Dress, truly the symbol of humanness, is a precise measure of ethnic and social organization, and what is happening to dress at present deserves careful attention. In Europe and America the standardization of dress has reached an advanced stage; masculine and feminine costume hardly varies from one social class to another except by its greater or lesser costliness and the immediacy of its adaptation to fash­ion. This may denote across-the-board social advancement, the disappearance of social barriers, and higher levels of culture and information, but it is also a sign that the individual is losing his or her links with the framework of the group within which he or she is personally integrated. […] The standardization of dress symbols may mean acquiring a planetary consciousness, but it also means losing the relative indepen­dence of your ethnic persona. The disappearance of carnival disguises is another symptom of the same development.

Understood this way, what happened to clothing in the twentieth century was a sign of man’s massification, but the advent of the flapper, the (1950s) hipster, the punk, the hessian, the hippie, the disco guy, the (2000s) hipster, et al. have amounted to small acts of resistance rooted in consumer consciousness.

The question that remains, then, is what may happen to all of these opt-in identities as time advances. The answer isn’t altogether clear. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, cultural lists continue to fascinate people and spark up heated debates. Even for relatively niche cultural areas, lists of things from them will inspire outside attention, perhaps because a “best of” list suggests an intrusion into the broader culture, as though the minds of the young might somehow become impacted by these normally avoidable subcultures. Nevertheless, these lists only resemble canons in a nascent state, and it isn’t clear if any of these opt-in subcultures will ever find a way to impose themselves upon the broader culture, the mainstream, in a meaningful way. At times, I wonder if it could happen. Could classical music snobbery somehow gain truly cult-like dimensions, with classical music starting to carry its own ideological or metaphysical precepts — maybe some kind of religion with a greater array of collective mnemotechnic artifacts and techniques beyond the existence of a respectable canon of composers/compositions and some attenuated penetration into the western university system? It seems that the answer is no, since the art form has refined itself into an advanced position of state-funded irrelevance.

The popular or lowbrow art forms, on the other hand, seem to be a different matter entirely. Could a group of extreme metalheads form some kind of hallucinogenic mushroom cult and start influencing society in a hidden, subterranean manner? Could the “Disney Adults” somehow start to mobilize as a new ersatz-religion? They do already have two distinct sites for quasi-religious pilgrimages… Could Japanese animation start to become an integral part of neo-fascist teenage thought? That is, could an ultra-decadent canon emerge that blends the works of Yukio Mishima together with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Urotsukodoji: Legend of the Overfiend? Basically, the question I’m asking is, could it be possible for these relatively inert, consumer-based identity groups to one day flip over, stop offering the simulated feeling of tribal belonging, and start to become the real thing, i.e. central outposts of identitarian activity, with their own institutionalized set of rituals, array of monuments, uniforms, and even political/religious insistences?

These are always the possibilities that start to emerge, however faint they might be, when lists and canons permeate the social space — particularly those associated with popular rather than highbrow culture. And if that question from the last paragraph seems ridiculous, understand that to some extent it is already happening. There is some sort of continuity, for instance, between the Democrat party and the fanatical celebrity-worship of pop singers like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles, and the NY Times’s list of the greatest living American songwriters has, to some extent, helped form the bridge between those seemingly disparate spheres. What has been going on for the last dozen years or so has caused Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the aestheticization of politics” to feel downright quaint. Yet it seems as though society has not become sufficiently fragmented for anything too fruitful to emerge in a contrasting direction. Regardless, the manner in which the internet blends together aesthetic and ideological currents seems to offer interesting possibilities for the future. Even if it is a distant future.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog whose ideas largely stem from media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics.

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I.

A while back, I wrote a post about how language is not a fiat currency. It was a response to the oft-stated claim that if someone overuses some word in a sociopolitical context, then eventually its meaning will go away or become greatly diminished. When I was growing up, the claim was typically, “If people keep accusing us of being racists, then eventually the word will lose its sting, and no one will care about the accusation!” My contention was (and remains) that words don’t inflate in value through overuse that way, because language doesn’t work like a currency with its value determined through supply and demand under conditions of scarcity.

So, how does language actually work? Well, consider all the people who accuse the mildly insensitive of racism rather than reserving the word for only the hateful bigots. When a word starts to cover more and more semantic ground, it ideologically reinforces the importance of the concept racism = bad. It doesn’t particularly matter if the word is being used too liberally to maintain a consistent definition, because that’s not really the point. Its persistence and ubiquity serves as a reminder that racism is the worst thing there is, and therefore the worse the racism, the worse the person.

One might object, what happens when you’ve used the word “racist” to describe totally normal or relatable thoughts and feelings for long enough? What do you even say when it’s an actual racist who blatantly discriminates against blacks in the workplace? Well, then it’s simple: you call him a racist. Maybe you throw some qualifier in there like “literal” or “actual,” but that’s about all you need. When people make the accusation of “racism,” it’s like when a schizophrenic hallucinates something happening. If the schizophrenic then actually sees the real thing happening, he’ll typically say something like, “No, it’s real this time!” because some latent part of his mind actually does recognize the difference between reality and fantasy. So it goes for these overused words.

The basic idea of my post was that language doesn’t just have a signifying function but also a mnemotechnic one. If I’m constantly blathering about racist this, racist that, and all of my friends are doing the same, we’re reminding each other of what really counts in this life; what we need to stay vigilant against. We’re keeping our values at the forefront of our conscious minds. This is a function of language that we often don’t recognize.

Now, at the time I wrote that post, I focused on the word racist… right when it was starting to lose its power to affect public opinion. Of course, it hasn’t lost its power as an accusation, and it matters tremendously in academic, corporate HR, and legal contexts (such as when determining the motive of a crime). But in the court of public opinion, it has indeed lost much of its sting, particularly among Republican voters. So, how did that happen? Some will say that indeed the prophecies came true: people kept saying the word over and over again, and then finally its value inflated and it could no longer retain the same semantic punch that it once did. Much like the papiermark during the Weimar Republic, or the Hungarian pengő following World War II, the word “racism” finally hyperinflated and lost all of its power. Never mind that it is still incredibly powerful within certain milieux, particularly those whose inhabitants discuss it and think about it most often. Never mind all that.

But if you really do think that this shift in public opinion was all because of word inflation, here are some more plausible alternative explanations for why the accusation of racism seems to matter less nowadays:

• The ideology around racism itself has shifted and become more politically polarized, with Republicans simply caring about it less in America. Although most people overall were supportive of Black Lives matter when it was happening from the years 2014-2020 (or at least that’s what they told pollsters), its memory has clearly grown more sour, with public approval between 2020 and 2025 dropping from 67% to 52%, while the number of people with actively hostile views toward the movement has grown. Similarly, from 2024 to 2025, Republicans who feel that black Americans face at least some discrimination declined from 66% to 55%. Skepticism towards DEI initiatives has also grown.

• The gatekeeper institutions that are largely responsible for hurting people’s reputations over racism — namely, the ADL and the SPLC — have lost a ton of credibility, particularly among the left. Regarding the SPLC, founder Morris Dees’s personal sleaziness finally caught up with him. This is interesting, because progressives had been criticizing the organization’s financial corruption since the late 1980s, but Dees eventually was forced out of the organization personally for allegedly discriminating against nonwhite staffers and sexually harassing the young females. Meanwhile, the ADL has lost much of its credibility following the October 7th attack in Gaza, with progressive publications like The Nation subjecting them to strong criticism, while progressive campaigns against them like DropTheADL have formed. Without these gatekeeping (some might say “shakedown”) organizations to credibly monitor racism, there is less organized power behind such public accusations.

• Social media has recently started allowing for more freedom of expression with Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to use less censorship across his social media platforms. This shift has perhaps signaled to people that what was once called “racism” is not so terrible and will thus elicit less negative consequences.

• Crowdfunding seems to have proven valuable in disincentivizing people from “cancelling” people through viral racism accusations. The 2025 case of Shiloh Hendrix, who called a small child a racial slur for stealing from her child and was caught on video, has been particularly illustrative. While she is being prosecuted by the state for saying the racial slur, she did crowd-fund nearly a million dollars when someone tried to “cancel” her for it on social media. For many of her backers, the rationale was simple: send a message that when someone tries to organize an online mob to harass someone else, the mob victim will get paid lots of money by the mob’s ideological enemies.

• And lastly, people now seem to have been distracted by a new bipartisan moral concern that isn’t racism…

II.

Ten years ago, back in 2016, the science-fiction author and blogger Vox Day posted this on his blog:

If they call you a racist, you simply call them a pedophile. After all, it’s something worse than a racist, and you need to show everyone observing the exchange that you’re always on the offensive. It’s how you “maintain your frame” in a confrontation and win the rhetorical joust. Doesn’t really matter if the accusation is true or makes any sense. Just go ahead and call them a pedophile.

OK… listen. Say what you will about his ethics, but Vox Day was conjuring up the American cultural zeitgeist for probably the next thirty years. At least.

In all likelihood, V.D. was inspired by the viral success of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which was starting to become prominent around that time. A widely-read Reddit post dated November 4 had alleged that Comet Ping Pong was involved with a child sex trafficking ring involving Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, and the theory had been cooking on the 4chan forum for at least a few days beforehand. Vox Day was reading the cultural moment. And again, whatever his faults, he pretty much understood what was on the horizon. Consider how the next several years went:

• In 2018, a year after Mr. Day’s post, QAnon, or just “Q” for short, first emerged on 4chan, then quickly migrated to the 8chan forum, a somehow even less moderated version of 4chan. QAnon presented a theory in which a global Satanic pedophile elite was engaging in a worldwide sex trafficking as well as adrenochrome harvesting operation. Donald Trump, according to Q’s account, was a covert operative preparing to bring down this pedophilic elite via a series of military tribunals (for some reason, Q believed that most of the military officials within the deep state were morally unblemished, and only a few bad actors had already left or were soon going to leave).

• In the summer of 2018, some boys from a soccer team got trapped in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand. Elon Musk claimed that he could hire engineers from SpaceX to build a miniature submarine to help rescue the boys. A British cave diver named Vernon Unsworth called this idea impractical during a CNN interview and accused Musk of engaging in a PR stunt. Musk responded by calling him “pedo guy” on Twitter. He later doubled down and referred to him as a child rapist in an email to Buzzfeed. There was no basis to these claims, of course.

• A year after that, in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges. The /pol/ subforum on 4chan then learned about Jeffrey Epstein and his child molestation allegations from 2005 and started cogitating together. The information about Epstein quickly became absorbed into Pizzagate lore, and in the same year, the alt-right podcast Fash the Nation dedicated an episode to the matter. QAnon quickly scooped up all this info, and the global pedophile elite theory began to incorporate both Epstein as well as Pizzagate. It was all coming together pretty well.

• Starting in the same year, Cyntha Koeter and Janet Ossebaard put together the Fall of Cabal conspiracy theory “documentary.” Completed in 2020, The Fall of Cabal is a series of slide-show videos with a voiceover providing a summary of the QAnon posts on 8chan. It includes information on Epstein and Pizzagate, but also some information about pedophilia in Hollywood (which is actually pretty well documented) as well as some wacky stuff about Hitler, cannibalism, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, the NXIVM sex cult, the theory that 50,000 indigenous Canadians were raped, murdered, and buried in mass graves under churches, the “spirit cooking” art of Marina Abramović… and more!1 The three-hour “documentary” is altogether a pretty loose hang, weaving in and out from one thread to another, often neglecting to tie it all up into a neat package. But pedophilia is a clearly recurring theme throughout.

• In 2021, the popular social media account LibsofTikTok started accusing gay and transgender activists on social media of “grooming” kids, referring to the practice in which pedophiles or sex traffickers build trust with their victims, essentially to prepare them to accept forthcoming abuse without being able to prevent it or alert any authorities.

• In 2022, the insult “groomer” became wildly popular among right-wingers, in large part because of the practice of “drag queen story hours,” in which drag queens read books to small children. When Ron DeSantis introduced the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which sought to prevent school discussion on gender or sexual identity from teachers to children up to the third grade, its conservative advocates endorsed it as an “anti-grooming” bill.

• In the same year, Gays Against Groomers was formed, an organization which (as far as I can tell) comprises homosexual conservatives who oppose progressive legislation regarding transsexuals, particularly laws enabling minors to “change their sex” or receive double mastectomy surgery.

• In 2024, Kendrick Lamar released “Not Like Us,” in which he rapped — with no evidence whatsoever — that Drake and his record label are “certified pedophiles.” It became a major hit, and Lamar would later perform it during a Superbowl halftime show.

• In 2025, Trump indicated on social media that the Epstein Files (a vast collection of investigative records related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes) do not contain any legally actionable information, denied the existence of a “client list” of child rapists, and claimed that the Epstein conspiracy theory (i.e., about Epstein enticing his clients to rape children, and then taking photos of them to use as blackmail on behalf of the state of Israel) is a “Democrat hoax.” The DNC Twitter account posted on June 5, 2025, “What is Trump hiding? Release the Epstein files.”

• At some point around 2025 to 2026, the “Ripped Redneck” online shop started selling “Pedo Hunter” hats.

• In February of 2026, Bill Maher apologized to QAnon and declared that he agrees with them about massive international pedophile networks. He did say that he feels that the Democrats don’t, in fact, eat the babies, but thankfully, Lauren Boebert was there to correct him.

• In March of 2026, world-famous climate change activist Greta Thunberg offhandedly called Donald Trump a pedophile while discussing a seemingly unrelated subject.

• In April of 2026, MSNBC’s Joy Reid declared that QAnon was right and that there is, in fact, an “international pedophile conspiracy.”

Meanwhile, at the level of vulgar discourse, it’s pretty much acceptable to accuse anyone of pedophilia for whatever reason at this point. At least, it’s acceptable among the general public. Vox Day’s rhetorical strategy has won.

To be sure, many high-profile pedophilia accusations have turned out to be entirely right, while attempts to discredit them have been wrong. The documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) is a good example of a pseudointellectual attempt to add false ambiguity to a rather straightforward pedophilia case from the 1980s in which a father and his teenage son ran a “computer class” in their basement during which they committed vile acts of child abuse. Additionally, some accusations have taken forever to generate a proper investigation, like the lead singer from the alt-rock band Lostprophets [sic] Ian Watkins, who sexually assaulted at least two babies (and likely more children) yet was only arrested and tried after repeated accusations from various women between 2008 and 2012. Then, there’s Jimmy Savile, a notorious pedophilic celebrity who died a free man. There’s also the sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham, England, which lasted from the late 1980s into 2013, and which stands as a particularly potent example of how the fear of being called “racist” prevented justice from being served. Lastly, the rampant child abuse in the Catholic Church is well-documented, and what we know about child abuse in Hollywood seems like it could be only the tip of the iceberg. There is a reason that we should take pedophilia accusations seriously.

But of course, everyone baselessly throwing around the accusation knows this. And curiously enough, I’ve yet to see anyone show up to say, “If you keep calling everyone a pedophile, then the word will lose all meaning!” This is a talking point that would regularly surface surrounding the accusation of “racism,” though not so much now. They both are, after all, essentially thought crimes that are impossible to prove one way or the other, so the accusation works in a structurally similar manner. Yet most of the people critical of these wanton pedophile accusations seem to be more concerned about innocent people being wrongfully accused than the potency of the word itself.

Perhaps everyone is starting to slowly understand how language works better than they did before. Such understanding would be in part a consequence of our electronic environment, in which the abundance of digital information discourages us from having a scarcity-based mindset when it comes to the use of words. It is pretty easy to see that rather than causing everyone to care less about pedophilia, the word’s overuse coincides with a heightened sensitivity about it that will probably remain for a long time, at least at the popular level. Concomitant with this development is an increasingly sexually conservative temperament in the western world, though it is a conservatism that seems to place more responsibility upon men and less upon women.

It is also possible, of course, that concerns over pedophilia occur in waves, and soon everyone in society will decided that racism must go back to being the accusation of choice. The “Satanic panic” during the 1980s was largely a reflection of societal concerns over the safety of children, and pedophilia accusations were a major part of it (the McMartin preschool trial being perhaps the preeminent example). But then, it just kinda fizzled out after official investigations failed to produce any persuasive evidence for its most salacious claims. However, the Satanic panic was also the last great hoo-rah of a time in which fundamentalist and evangelical Christians had the power to tip the scales of widespread public opinion — something they’ve simply lacked since the 1990s. Today’s cultural obsession with pedophilia might instead resemble the hostility toward pedophiles that develop in prisons, which are standardized, heavily controlled, multicultural total institutions in which no one can claim to be morally upstanding.

Whatever the case, whenever our current “pedophile” moment blows over, it won’t be because the word itself lost value. It will be because of a change in collective attitude, or just some other “Current Thing” to keep everyone occupied. I’ll say it again: language is not a fiat currency.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that’s theoretically rooted in media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics, believe it or not.

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I. Intro - Beer and Hops

I recently finished reading Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops (2017 ed.), a history of craft beer in America. It isn’t a bad book in that it provides a thorough account of all the major developments that contributed to the rise of craft beer as we know it: Fritz Maytag’s work with Anchor Brewing, the spread of home brewing, the slow growth of microbreweries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Samuel Adams and contract brewing, the more rapid growth of microbreweries in the 90s, the formation of the Brewers’ Guild, the creation of the Great American Beer Festival, and so on. But the book mostly focuses on the business side of the craft beer phenomenon, only giving a partial glimpse into craft beer as a cultural phenomenon that reached its apex in the 2010s before fading into the ambience of American life. I say “ambience” because even as people now declare that the millennial hipster urbanite’s moment in the sun is over, the landscape of alcohol consumption has still been changed forever. As I’m writing this, brewpubs are common just about everywhere in America, and grocery stores all across the country carry a large amount of local beer in a wide variety of styles and alcohol percentages. Two craft beer tycoons, Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada and Jim Koch of Samuel Adams, have even become billionaires. All of this would have been unthinkable in the 1980s, which suggests to me that whatever we might think about the beverage itself — or the often irritating culture surrounding it — craft beer has won.

Still, though, the book is called The Audacity of Hops. Yes, it’s a clever pun on the Obama book, but it has “hops” in the title, and a huge part of the craft beer explosion had to do indeed with the many fascinating possibilities and innovative techniques that breweries were discovering with regard to the humulus lupulus plant. Acitelli mentions that the hop-forward IPA (“India Pale Ale”) is the most popular style of craft beer, and he does passingly explain that the Cascade and Centennial hop varietals (first commercialized in 1972 and 1990, respectively) were necessary for the growth of the “West Coast” IPA, a beer style that put a strong emphasis on bitterness complemented by piney, floral, and citrusy flavors. But he doesn’t give enough attention to just how crucial the selective cross-breeding of hops really has been throughout the growth of the industry, especially in the 21st century. The hop farmers who were quietly working in the background, spending sometimes decades just to create a single new strain, are the unsung heroes of the craft beer explosion largely missing from Acitelli’s account.

The book first came out in 2013, and then Acitelli wrote an updated edition in 2017, mainly to chronicle all of the big corporate buyouts that were happening at the time, so perhaps we can forgive him for this oversight. But consider this: usually when anti-craft-beer people think about what a “craft beer” looks like nowadays, they envision an opaque, viscous, and maybe even sludgy yellow-orange liquid with some sediment at the bottom and about a finger’s-width of foam at the top, sitting in a pretentious tulip glass being ogled by some overfed bearded urbanite — a beverage sure to be cloying, heavy, and hard to drink more than two sips’ worth. This is a style known as the “New England” or “Hazy IPA,” and it is distinctly different from the West Coast IPA. Whereas West Coast IPAs are bitter, piney, clean, and dry, New England IPAs are slightly sweet, fruity, turbid, and oily. Whatever one might prefer (and Americans, not being big fans of bitterness, seem to prefer the latter), the New England style could not have been possible without the new hop strains that had been debuting on the market, particularly from around 2008-2013.

When New England IPAs first showed up around the early 2010s, many craft beer experts were at first bewildered. Cloudiness was understood as a sign of sloppiness and poor fermentation practices (perhaps this is why Acitelli does not mention them in the 2017 edition at all). But it soon became clear that the cloudiness came mainly from a protein-heavy grain bill, and that the style is actually quite hard to do well because of the beer’s heightened sensitivity to oxygen exposure during the brewing process. Once people figured out the technique for brewing these “Hazy IPAs,” they came to dominate the market, forcing many of the West Coast IPA specialists to do their own version of one just to meet the consumer demand. If Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Columbus hops had still been the most flavorful kinds available, then this new type of IPA likely wouldn’t have taken off. But as it happens, a number of new hops had just been put onto the market, such as

• Amarillo (released 2003)

• Citra (released 2008)

• Galaxy (released 2009)

• El Dorado (released 2010)

• Mosaic (released 2012)

• Azacca (released 2013)

• Vic Secret (released 2013)

• Idaho 7 (released 2015)

And these hops didn’t really taste floral, herbal, or grassy (as with the classic Old World hops), nor were they piney, earthy, or citrusy like a grapefruit (as with the West Coast style). Instead, they invited comparisons to mango, papaya, passion fruit, pineapple, lychee, white grape, peach, plum, berries, and sweeter citrus fruits like clementines. Such hops certainly were being used in West Coast IPAs, and their “tropical fruit” flavors were detectable in that style, but New England IPAs added these hops at later stages in the brewing process so that the flavors found in their oils would be more noticeable. Given the timing of when these hop strains were released for commercial use, it is unsurprising that the New England IPA would eclipse the West Coast IPA in popularity, since it more fully exploited the hops’ potential. The brewmasters at places like The Alchemist, Trillium Brewing, or Tree House Brewing Company may have been able to perfect the technique required to bring out the sticky and resinous juiciness latent within these new hops… but just as important in craft beer, if not moreso, were the actual guys who created those hops in the first place. These were the guys on the periphery, quietly working at various farms located in North America, Australia, and New Zealand to breed more palatable strains into existence — guys like Jason Perrault, the most well-known name in that field, and someone whom Tony Magee, the founder of Lagunitas brewing, once called the most important person in American craft beer.

II. Artistic Expressions of Selective Breeding

Hops are just one example of how the relatively hidden process of selective breeding can inform consumer habits, even though the practice isn’t always given its due. Selective breeding is an interesting practice, because it’s rarely examined as a standalone activity, and it’s often a neglected aspect when we think about nutrition or even domesticated animals. Selective breeding is why your parents remember brussels sprouts tasting harsh and bitter, though ever since the end of the 1990s they have become quite pleasant. It is also the reason why corn has gotten a lot sweeter. It’s also why pit bulls have contributed to 66% of all deaths by dog bite from 2005 through 2019, while other dogs are comparatively quite wimpy. It is something humans have been doing for millennia, pretty much since the dawn of agriculture in fact, and it has radically changed the genetic makeup of the watermelon, the eggplant, the carrot, and the apple over long expanses of time, as well as the horse, the donkey, and the canine. However, it was not refined to a precise science until the Europeans more or less perfected the practice during the 1800s.

Since then, selective breeding has evolved into a kind of art form that treats the genes of living organisms as the media with which to experiment, and this is where it becomes a point of fascination. For me, anyhow. About a year ago, the poet Christopher Sandbatch remarked on social media that selective breeding is the great art form of the Anglo-Saxons, and for a good while I’ve grown to suspect that he is correct. While selective breeding for food is fairly humdrum, goal-oriented, and commercially widespread — and not a particularly Anglo-Saxon practice, since the guy who changed the flavor of brussels sprouts was a Dutch scientist, not an Englishman — there are other forms of selective breeding that don’t merely concern the improvement of essential fruits and vegetables, and they veer off into the realm of the aesthetic rather than the utilitarian. Here are just a few categories.

Foods that aren’t particularly necessary

I’ve already discussed the topic of hops, and it’s a good example of an herb that isn’t really necessary for the survival of civilization, since it pretty much only goes into beer and a non-alcoholic alternative called “hop water” (its bitterness overpowers basically everything else). But hop farmers have often worked with university-sponsored agriculture programs or on for-profit farms, and thus there’s less individual passion or obsession associated with the process. There are better examples of how hobbyists have used selective breeding to produce edible plants that were never really needed, and which no one even asked for.

Take, for instance, the Carolina Reaper hot pepper. From 2013-2023, this was officially judged the hottest pepper in the world, and it was developed over about ten years by the American breeder Ed Currie, a former stockbroker with near-suicidal depression who decided to turn his life around and moved to Fort Mill, South Carolina, the town in which his parents lived. There, he started to experiment with hot peppers in 2001, and he soon created the PuckerButt pepper farm in 2003. It’s now the largest organic pepper farm in America, even though Currie at first treated it as more of a side hobby, working at a bank until 2012. The Carolina Reaper was an early project of Currie’s, and he created it by breeding a Naga pepper he got from a doctor in Pakistan with a Red Habanero that a co-worker gave him from the Island of Saint Vincent. After about ten years of cultivation (it takes about 8-10 generations of breeding to stabilize distinct characteristics), the Carolina Reaper was born, and two years later, it entered the Guinness Book of World Records.

Currie learned about horticulture from his mother, who was a master gardener, and she taught him the art of cross-breeding with flowers like the Iris and the Lily. As Currie grew older, he experimented with selectively breeding marijuana (producing results he called “dangerous”), and then, after giving up drugs and alcohol entirely, he realized that hot peppers could give him a similar feeling of euphoria that hard substances once did. From that point on, he became obsessed with trying to create the hottest peppers in the world, and it has worked out pretty well for him. As I said before, the Carolina Reaper was the hottest pepper on record until 2023. The pepper that surpassed it, Pepper X, was also an Ed Currie original.

Gardens and flowers

So far, we’ve been looking at quite recent examples of selective breeding, and they’re products that demonstrate America’s unique preference for gastronomic extremism. But selective breeding in plants has been used for purely aesthetic reasons rather than dietary ones, and the garden is where the Anglo-Saxon practice of selective breeding has most clearly been able to showcase its artistry. In the nineteenth century, both the French and the English were heavily involved in selectively breeding flowers to make them look prettier, but the French were more prominent in that area for a good while. The Hybrid Tea rose (the kind that most of us picture when imagining one) was a nineteenth century French innovation, a cross-breed enabled by Joséphine de Beauharnais, AKA Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, and her obsession with acquiring more roses to fill her gardens. However, in the twentieth century, the British horticulturalist David Austin became the most important rose breeder in the world, producing tons of hybrids known as “David Austin roses” such as the Abraham Darby introduced in 1985.

The Anglo-Saxons have done some other interesting stuff with flowers besides roses. The delphinium is another example of a flower in which the British overtook the French in creative breeding: the Frenchman Victor Lemoine produced the first Elatum hybrids in the mid-nineteenth century, but then James Kelway brought them to England in 1859, and they were extensively bred in the twentieth century by Charles Langdon and James Blackmore.

In Cornwall and Scotland, wealthy landowners were able to produce a number of hybrids of wildflowers that Joseph Hooker brought back from Sikkim, India (in the Himalayas) during the 1840s. Consequently, there was an explosion of Victorian aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie experimenting with them, and a favorite was the rhododendron plant. The Rothschild family in particular helped to produce a number of azalea and rhododendron hybrids, and these continued well into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, George Russell, a self-taught gardener in York, spent about twenty-five years in the early twentieth century breeding lupins, completely transforming their color range and form to create flowers that were altogether new and even shocking in their beauty. Russell, like many breeders, was driven by obsession, refusing to show his work publicly for decades and only selling the stock later on in life, convinced that others would mishandle these botanical delicacies that he had created. Sadly, most of the original Russell lupin hybrids have been destroyed by diseases and insect pests, but some remain, and they’re quite striking.

Animals

For the category of animals, we can limit our inquiry to just two kinds: horses and dogs, since they form the most striking case studies.

Regarding horses, the British essentially created the Thoroughbred between around 1680-1750. Even though there had been plenty of animal breeding all across the world at that time, the speed of the process was quite rapid, and its intentionality was unusual. The breed itself came out of three Arabian stallions who had been imported to England: the Byerley Turk (c.1680s), the Darley Arabian (1704), and the Godolphin Arabian (c.1729). Breeders mixed them up with English mares, they remained absolutely focused on producing a distinct new type, and now every Thoroughbred today comes from one of those Arabian horses. There was one particular factor that allowed such a specific and intentional breeding project to take place: horse racing was quite popular and attracted quite a bit of gambling, and so there were financial incentives to breed faster horses.

What’s more interesting, though, is what came after the creation of the Thoroughbred. In 1791, James Weatherby published the General Stud Book, which was a breed registry for horses in Great Britain and Ireland, and this little contribution did something unique for animal breeding. Namely, it tracked the actual mating of these horses to ensure the purity of each lineage. If a horse was a true Thoroughbred, then it could trace its lineage back to the established foundation stock. Now, when you think about it, the reason that the Arabian horses were so fast is because the Arabs themselves were selectively breeding them to be that way. So selective breeding is a pretty natural human impulse when a culture has a reason to do it, even though it probably took the Arabs longer to get there. But by creating an approach of thorough documentation, the British allowed for both efficiency and creative possibilities in animal breeding that simply couldn’t have been achievable elsewhere. The stage had thus been set for advanced dog breeding.

Again, it was pretty common in Europe for wealthy landowners to own selectively bred dogs during the nineteenth century. But in 1873, the Kennel Club was established, which used the kind of logic found in the General Stud Book in order to record the various kinds of dogs, essentially inventing and institutionalizing the very concept of the standardized dog breed. As Wikipedia puts it, the Kennel Club would “maintain breed standards, record pedigrees, and issue the rules for conformation dog shows and trials and accreditation of judges.” All of this amounted to a specifically British aristocratic pastime, one that aestheticized the dog in ways that the continental European countries hadn’t. The Kennel Club even has its own little version of the Superbowl, the Westminster Dog Show, which I know mostly because it would typically cause a scheduling conflict for cable television, causing WWE Monday Night Raw to air on a different channel.

Humans (Eugenics)

It should come as no real surprise, given everything we’ve covered thus far, that the modern theory of evolution would originate in England through Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published On the Origin of Species. There was already a Victorian fascination with the concept of evolution, and many scientists were already trying to find the most convincing account of how gradual change in a species takes place. In 1844, for instance, Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and this was read aloud to Queen Victoria, who found it eminently fascinating. Other scientists actually discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin and even published their findings before Darwin published his. One Patrick Matthew actually published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture in 1831, a book on how to grow suitable trees for Navy warships, and in it, there’s a digression that contains the theory of natural selection in a rough-hewn form.

As we can see, within the culture of Great Britain, people were thinking about these questions pretty seriously, and so it’s fair to say that Darwin was picking some low-hanging fruit when he wrote his theory. But then, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, took this theory of natural selection and ran with it, pushing it into all kinds of different directions, arguably demonstrating through his sheer curiosity and creativity a greater knack for applied science than Darwin ever did. In 1883, he coined the term eugenics and started promoting it heavily, and for this reason, he is largely neglected or diminished by popular science historians as a moral heretic, even though he invented the concept of psychometrics (still in use today), he was the first to apply statistical methods to study human differences, he came up with the concept of regression towards the mean, he innovated various methods of collecting data on human communities (again, still in use), he popularized the phrase “nature versus nurture,” and — although this isn’t really connected to his work with anthropology — he also created the first weather map.

Although eugenics is often seen as a hateful concept borne of ill-intent, it was initially embraced by socialists and progressives, although the support from that camp faded in the wake of… well, a certain failed German political regime from the mid-twentieth century. Before then, supporters of eugenics included Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (something that today’s pro-life conservatives never tire of mentioning), John Harvey Kellogg (the corn flakes man!), Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, sci-fi writer H.G. Wells, feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and even Helen Keller, of all people. This may seem surprising, but the idea is perhaps more intuitive than you’d think. In my own personal experience, I’ve asked hundreds upon hundreds of first-year college students as well as high school students what they think about marriage and children, and a rather significant amount of them will often say something like, “The world is getting too filled up with stupid people.” I’ll then ask them, “What do you think about making people get some sort of license to have children, with maybe a literacy test that they have to pass in order to breed?” and they’ll respond to the idea with enthusiastic approval. Then, I’ll say, “Oh, OK.” Clearly, they have not yet been taught by their teachers that such thinking is pure evil. Some probably have but don’t care.

Still, though, calling eugenics an art form is something of a stretch, since it has never been instituted for purely aesthetic reasons. Not in humans, anyway. Eugenics has often been promoted from a conservationist standpoint, and one of its major promoters, Madison Grant, was actually a wildlife preservationist who was responsible for establishing various National Parks across America. It has also been promoted in a Malthusian context, and in fact, there was a British organization called The Malthusian League which existed from 1877-1927, one of whose founders was Annie Besant, a hippie-dippie theosophist who wanted to promote birth control and contraception. Although it was not a strictly eugenicist organization, it was intertwined with the eugenics movement fairly closely, as they both wanted to limit and control the human populations.

Regardless of whatever we consider its moral value today, eugenics was a popular idea among Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, it still remains popular in softer forms (hence the outlawing of incest, which is totally eugenics-minded), and therefore, calling it “pseudo-scientific” is highly misleading. Actually, the only courageous way to morally oppose eugenics is by acknowledging that it could perhaps have some underlying truth, but then to say that it is nevertheless wrong to place humans along the same conceptual and ethical framework as plants and animals. If one’s main problem with eugenics is that it’s “pseudoscientific” (a consequentialist position), then this prompts the question: shouldn’t we just improve eugenics with better science?

In any case, aestheticized eugenics still remains fertile territory for exploration in science fiction and/or horror writing, at least for any author ballsy enough to explore the topic these days. We’ve seen eugenics touched upon in works like Gattaca, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Dune, but I can’t think of any examples of fiction in which a demented and perverse aristocracy breeds humans to have strange new traits that we wouldn’t typically encounter in an unaffected population, just for the hell of having them. Additionally, eugenics remains an interesting filter through which to interpret contemporary social trends and political policies once you start thinking about how they will affect sexual selection. The British anthropologist Edward Dutton wrote a book called Woke Eugenics, in which he interprets social justice politics as operating functionally the same way as Social Darwinism once did, despite its strongest advocates expressing totally different intentions. I haven’t yet read the book, so I cannot speak to its merits, but I have made similar observations privately.

III. Selective Breeding as a Diabolical Practice

This post is going on longer than I intended, so I’ll conclude with a few points that could probably be expanded upon at a later time. A couple years ago, I wrote about the 1973 folk horror classic The Wicker Man, about a Hebridean island off the coast of Scotland called Summerisle, which is populated entirely by neo-pagans. Summerisle has a typically high produce yield, shipping its fruits to England annually, but the harvest from the previous summer was quite bad. A British police officer comes to visit the island after hearing of a missing girl there, and eventually comes to suspect that the islanders sacrificed the young girl to appease the Gods in hopes of a better harvest next year.

In my post, I discuss the island’s pagan origins: its leader, Lord Summerisle, had a great-grandfather who was a British agronomist, and he settled in the island because he wanted to introduce some new crops to it. He was selectively breeding fruits and then treating them with a certain inorganic fertilizer whose substance is never explained, but some local ministers found this blasphemous, and so he spread propaganda to the islanders and converted them to paganism. In one scene, Lord Summerisle gives a detailed account of what happened to the officer:

You see, Sergeant, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed. And so you see, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, my great-grandfather set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist ministers, who threw tons of his artificial fertilizer into the harbour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He’d have provided it. My great-grandfather took exactly the same view of ministers, and realized he had to find a way to be rid of them. The best method of accomplishing this, it seemed to him, was to rouse the people, by giving them back their joyous old deities; so he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane; backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief to the Age of Mysticism.

The fruits these islanders produce are quite special, like “the Summerisle famous apple,” the “Star of Summerisle pear,” and the “Flame of Summerisle apricot.” And some of the fruits really shouldn’t be growing in Scotland at all: in old photos that the officer examines, we see various images of women holding watermelons, a fruit that could never survive in that region. Although the Christian ministers supposedly opposed the fertilizer in particular, the film seems as if it’s portraying the act of selectively breeding crops to survive in a normally inhospitable clime as equally diabolical in its aims just on principle alone.

The movie is thus not merely a recounting of “the rise and fall of an experimental biome on a Scottish island,” as one insightful blog puts it, but something of a statement on the manner in which the soundness and precision characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon mind could so quickly and easily lapse into scientific imprudence and outright irrationalism. Because, after all, Lord Summerisle turns out to be a rather deranged pagan rather than just a propagandist leading the islanders about. As the film comes to reveal, there is something a bit diabolical about toying with nature, documenting everything through formal registry systems as the British were starting to do in the mid-Victorian era, and then using such precision and managerial expertise to push plants and animals to limits previously considered unthinkable. The Wicker Man only focuses on the selective breeding of plants as the catalyst for a complete reversion to paganism, but in a way, this makes its point all the more trenchant.

Systematized and self-conscious selective breeding — or, the refusal to bend before nature’s wisdom and instead take matters into one’s own hands — would be the supreme art form of the same nation that brought us Paradise Lost. To become so adept at selective breeding, there has to be an element of irreverence toward God and nature, a sense of intellectual detachment, and a feeling of rootlessness; a rejection of fixed borders, hierarchy, and formality coupled with an enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism, international commerce, economic universalism, and (taken far enough) liberal capitalism. These are all characteristics that the British Isles have embodied more strongly than the rest of Europe. As the German political theorist Carl Schmitt observed in his Land and Sea (1942), Great Britain is a maritime power, one which created a specifically maritime style of world order. Britain’s values, in other words, have often reflected its general orientation to the world economy. Its style of rule has accordingly brought it into stark intellectual contrast with the rest of the European land monarchies — a contrast that persists even to this day, if you consider the opposition between analytic and continental philosophy in the humanities as just one example, not to mention the haste with which Britain fled the European Union. When considering the Anglophone countries and their adeptness with selective breeding in this light, we can see that all the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors were in place for them dominate not just the practice (e.g. through access to colonial territories all over the world) but also provide the definitive theory behind it.

What makes the situation funny, though, is how aggressively the Anglo-Saxons have come to reject applying selective breeding to humans. Your average WASP now considers eugenics to be the most utterly immoral practice ever, second only to total genocide, even as they’ve done more than any culture to formalize the procedures behind selective breeding and create the conditions that seem to lead inexorably towards eugenics, or at least an ersatz version of it. But the anti-eugenicism and anti-racism (a closely related view) of the liberal Anglo-Saxon are in many ways just as irreverent and Promethean as the systematization of selective breeding itself. Instead of accepting the inherent dignity of the human races by allowing them to produce offspring as they naturally are inclined to do, the Anglo-Saxon throws his hands up in the air and declares, “Race doesn’t exist at all! Everyone is equal!” and thus he preserves the intellectual freedom to keep observing the world through the lens of endless becoming as opposed to definite being. Both eugenics and blank slate theory reflect an ideology of anti-essentialism — they just happen to express the view in different ways.

Regardless of how we feel about these weighty matters, though, selective breeding is a cornerstone of economic and cultural life, and it has given us some great-looking flowers, some really spicy peppers, and some decent beer. God bless hops! God bless the Anglophone world! And God bless you.

update 5/17: lightly touched up the paragraph discussing Carl Schmitt for clarity

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I.

Back in 2019, a book came out called A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead. It argues that the political climate has been permeated by a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking that differs from the earlier kinds of conspiracy theories, like the ones about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the claims about the moon landing being fake. This new kind of “conspiracism,” the authors contend, represents conspiracy theory without the theory. It operates as a kind of fallback disposition of reflexive skepticism rather than a genuine striving for truth with a clear epistemological framework, a developed account of how the conspiracy in question actually works, or any potential for organized and collective resistance. Now, that’s certainly an interesting premise, but for those who might be interested, I’ve got some bad news: this book was underdeveloped, lazy, and dumb. In essence, it was a work of advanced DNC propaganda designed to explain, among other things, why the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory about Donald Trump being a Manchurian candidate for Vladimir Putin was perfectly legitimate and truth-oriented, while Donald Trump’s characterization of the Russiagate conspiracy theory as a “witch hunt” was poisonous for Democracy. Never mind that the former amounted to an attempt to overturn the outcome of a legitimate election via a drawn-out FBI investigation — one which ran on literally no credible evidence whatsoever — and the latter did not affect the outcome of any known elections or impede the operations of any elected official. You can sense that the authors are running on a rather exceptional definition of “Democracy,” one which they never bother to explain.

But besides such astonishing displays of argumentative chutzpah, most of the book’s basic distinctions between the old “conspiracism” and the new “conspiracism” don’t hold up under scrutiny. Some are inconsistent with how the authors classify individual examples of conspiracy theories, while others just simply don’t make any sense; this critical review by Oliver Traldi explains the book’s problems well. For a work that complains about how today’s conspiracy theories lack theory, it is itself void of convincing theoretical reasoning, the kind that’s necessary for the argument it’s trying to make. So, rather than being a serious sociological analysis on how conspiracy theorists/theories have changed over time, or a contribution to a broader theory on conspiracy theories, or anything that would have had lasting value, the book is simply a partisan work of political hackery and should probably be understood as yet another attempt to cash in on anti-Trump mania of the time.1

There is, however, one thing that the book gets right: conspiracy theories are getting dumber and lazier. Trying to explain the situation with the pretentious phrase “new conspiracism,” and then including every statement of mistrust (no matter how minor) toward the media or the government as part of this phenomenon, convolutes the issue far more than one can forgive. But there’s no question that conspiracy theories are now typically expressed in a different way than before, often coming from a different psychological sensibility. I remember back when I was young, only a few unusual people would latch onto conspiracy theories, and they’d take them pretty far. They wanted to “go down the rabbit hole.” Believing in conspiracy theories was generally a sign of eccentricity, and conspiracy guys would knowingly take on the role of the eccentric. The late-1990s cartoon show King of the Hill, at least in its earlier seasons, actually does a decent job of portraying such conspiracy theorists in the character of Dale Gribble. He’s self-consciously strange, his actual political views are often incoherently expressed (but closest to civil libertarianism), he’s not exactly perceptive about what’s immediately going on around him, and above all, he’s genuine in his reflexive mistrust of big, complex organizations and institutions. Dale is a unique character for various reasons, but I can say that his conspiratorial disposition resembles that of various people I’ve known in real life.

Today, however, there is nothing eccentric about embracing a conspiracy theory. It is, in fact, the default “normie” position. Normal, everyday people watch conspiracy theory videos on TikTok, they listen to conspiracy theories explained in their favorite podcasts, they circulate conspiracy theories with each other on Facebook and other social media platforms, and crucially, such theorizing is totally bipartisan. Everyone does this; left, right, and center. If a shooting or terrorist attack happens, it’s a false flag. If an assassination attempt takes place, it was staged. If a bad candidate wins an election, it was rigged. If some inconvenient news comes out, it has been manufactured. Of course, some events will invite more suspicion within one political corner than the other depending on their character, but pretty much everyone seems to agree that nothing is at it seems. The bipartisan nature of conspiracy theorizing was already pretty obvious back in 2019 when A Lot of People Are Saying was published (and anyone even slightly disinterested could have realized this), but the sheer laziness of it all wasn’t as apparent. Not to me, anyway.

The beginning of the 2026 War in Iran was when I really started to figure it out. It began when I talked to someone about the war, expressed my annoyance, and she murmured somewhat vacantly, “Yep… just a cover-up over the Epstein files…” as if this were common knowledge, so common that it was boring to even say it. But the statement, far from boring, was a real-world expression of things I had only been reading online up to that point. Now, did she believe in all of the most fantastic and lurid claims about Epstein? Probably not. But after a few more incidental conversations with random people over time, I realized that this viewpoint in its most stripped-down version was totally normal. You yourself might actually believe some version of it right now! Of course, the Epstein files have not led to a single arrest, nor will they because they do not contain anything legally actionable, and moreover all of the redacted files were redacted because of the alleged victims’ requests, not the potentially accused… but then again, as the Pizzagate theory made it clear, the fantasy of a pedophilic cabal doing everything in its power to create distractions from the muckraking research of our intrepid citizen journalists is just too tempting to resist. Hey, why should the 4channers and QAnon faithful get to have all the fun?

Not long afterward, Cole Tomas Allen (himself an Epstein pedophile conspiracy theorist) attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and I made a passing reference about it to an acquaintance: a fairly normal, average baby boomer. She said to me immediately, “Oh, come on, you know that was staged.” I said to her, “But it’s true that there’s a lot of gun violence in this country. You don’t think that at least one guy who would commit it might turn his attention to a high-profile politician?” She then asked me in response, “Well, then why didn’t he seem to hurt anyone? He practically shot no one when rushing towards Trump.” I told her, “He released a manifesto where he specifically said he didn’t want to hurt any guards — something about not wanting to hurt low-level employees, only the top guys.”

She then contorted her face into an expression that could only have meant, “Oh dear, this poor fuckin’ rube… he’ll believe anything.”

II.

One reason that so many attempts to essentialize the mind of the conspiracy theorist end in failure is that there isn’t one type of conspiracy theory, and there isn’t one type of conspiracy theorist. The more enthusiastic and motivated theorists still exist, there’s no doubt about it, and they often exert influence upon the less motivated. But conspiracy thinking is very much an opt-in affair, and you get to choose the extent to which you engage that realm of suspicion. Accordingly, there are specific types of conspiracy theories that are more compatible with lazy speculation, while other types are less inviting. I can’t put together an exhaustive account of how all conspiracy theories work here, but it’s important to have at least some framework for understanding them, since such a framework can explain why they often get jumbled around in people’s minds nowadays, creating a vague cloud of suspicion among the general populace. So for this discussion, I’ll divide conspiracy theories into three basic types using scale as the delineating factor.

#1 - Suspicion of criminal conspiracy or collusion

This is a conspiracy theory in its most conservative, bare-bones form. Criminal conspiracy happens all the time, and federal prosecutors nearly always slap a conspiracy charge onto any crime in which two or more people were involved. Sometimes these accusations are correct, sometimes they’re not; such is the nature of the justice system. But they are conspiracy theories, even though they are rarely labeled as such, and when we hear the phrase “conspiracy theory,” we almost never think of these situations. Many of the more adventurous conspiracy theorists always bring up this point to defend some of their more controversial views. For instance, you’ve probably heard this one: all explanations of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks are conspiracy theories, including the official story about the terrorists hijacking the planes. So, no matter what, 9/11 has to be explained by a conspiracy theory of some kind. This claim, strictly speaking, is correct.

That being said, this kind of conspiracy theorizing can get pretty damn wacky and even downright frightening, not despite but because of its specificity. If you consider the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, it would fall under this category, since it involved mostly specific people: John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, Marina Abramović, James Alefantis, and more, and it had a specific location: Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C. Although the theory presumed the involvement of anonymous participants, it was mainly directed at distinct people who had sent actual emails to one another, and it assumed that various and sometimes (admittedly) strange references to “pizza” in these emails were in fact references to trafficked children. It also proposed a motive that was specific to everyone involved: they all were perverts who wanted to use children for sexual gratification. These claims had no evidence behind them whatsoever, and they threatened to destroy peoples’ lives — particularly Alefantis, a small business owner whose shop was eventually targeted by a vigilante gunman. Although some have tried to argue that Pizzagate lacked specifics and didn’t have a “theory,” this is not true at all: it was a remarkably clear-cut and highly detailed accusation of criminal wrongdoing and was thankfully met with some skepticism. No authorities investigated Alefantis because there was no evidence that merited an investigation, and the mainstream media overwhelmingly disapproved of the theory.

It is unfortunate, then, that other evidence-free conspiracy theories belonging to this category have not always been met with similar skepticism. For example, when Rolling Stone magazine published “A Rape on Campus,” a defamatory article accusing the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity of criminal conspiracy to commit gang rape, the university immediately suspended all fraternities, and mobs of outraged students vandalized the accused fraternity’s house. And, as I mentioned before, the accusation of criminal collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin resulted in a major criminal investigation — one that hindered the administration’s ability to engage in foreign policy, and which has justifiably damaged the public’s trust in both law enforcement agencies and the mainstream news media.

#2 - Suspicion of a specific plot orchestrated by a complex, abstract entity (like a government or a corporation) with a specific outcome in mind

Whereas the previous category concerns individual people, this one moves up a step in abstraction. Here is your standard conspiracy theory, the kind we typically think of when we hear the phrase. It includes false flag theories (a very big category that includes all orchestrated terrorist attacks and high-profile assassinations, as long as there’s a claim of a designated patsy, scapegoat, or falsely accused group), voter fraud or election manipulation theories, financial conspiracies about price-fixing and deliberately engineered economic crashes, and pretty much all other theories of orchestrated deception, even minor deceptions, with a coherent motive. Some include, but are certainly not limited to, the Obama “birther” conspiracy theory, theories about the moon landing being faked, theories of UFO cover-ups, theories about rigged matches or games in sports, theories of dark/hidden money being supplied by wealthy elites for various projects, cover-up theories involving disturbing new weapons or technological innovations designed to oppress people (“chemtrails”), theories about government agencies conducting experiments on people without their consent (“MK-Ultra”), accusations of entrapment by criminal justice organizations, and even most theories about scams, false advertising, and undisclosed invasions of privacy (“your cell phone is spying on you”). The key to these theories is that although they might involve one or more particular individuals, they almost always include nameless, faceless people doing at least some assistance work, if not all of the work.

What makes these conspiracy theories so frustrating is that they aren’t as easy to dismiss as we would like to hope. They sometimes have a grain of truth to them, and some are just simply true, straight-up. These theories almost always have a motive that one can explain,2 and the reason they focus on corporate entities like government and big business is that the methods through which these entities operate are often inscrutable. Americans learn about how their government works in a civics or social studies class, but ever since FDR’s presidency, the government has been filled with unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable by voters. Although educated coastal elites will scoff at the phrase “deep state” and roundly deny that such a thing even exists, they themselves will gladly use the phrase “intelligence community,” sometimes in the same breath, and not realize the hypocrisy of what they are doing. But however you want to label it, whether it’s a deep state or intelligence community, it is a real thing, and it invites suspicion.

In order to understand these conspiracy theories and why they have been common for decades now, some basic concessions must be made among America’s most faithful institution-trusters, and one of them is this: we have very little idea as to how our government actually works, we have very little idea as to how corporations actually work, we have very little understanding about the interrelation between the two, and there is virtually no reliable, easily-accessible way to get good information about such matters, even with such attempts to provide transparency as the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 - Suspicion of a massive, overwhelming, longstanding plot in which our basic understanding of reality itself is at stake

Here is where conspiracy theory gets interesting. This type acts as a kind of big, recursive meta-theory that can absorb as well as generate smaller theories. It can sometimes form additively from these smaller suspicions as it gradually subsumes them over time. In other cases, it can start from a grand theory and then gradually incorporate various incidents and situations into its lore, both by waiting for new ones to arrive and ret-conning old ones. Whatever the case, in this sort of theory, a grand narrative is presented that can explain an incredible amount of things. Just pull a string, and you can unravel the entire universe. Such a theory might constantly occupy the adherent’s thoughts all day, every day, and enough engagement with it can have an almost hallucinatory effect. Because of how wide-ranging the theory is, it requires a certain level of discipline from the committed adherent: one must slowly reorient one’s own perceptions to fit the theory, or perhaps change around one’s own everyday vocabulary to stay consistent with its doctrine. And because such theories directly concern the fabric of reality, they will often veer toward the metaphysical, the theological, and/or the eschatological dimensions of human understanding.

Almost always, these theories come from genuine paranoia3, though minor adherents might get involved in them for other reasons. In some cases, the theory can take on a cult-like structure, and people will join simply because they want to be in a group of some sort. In other cases, the theory can resemble a sort of antinomian rejection of mainstream society and attract followers for that reason. But it would be a mistake to say that such theories are merely performative or symbolic. The people who believe in them, with few exceptions, really do believe.

Some examples of these conspiracy theories would include flat earth, QAnon (which absorbed both Pizzagate and the various Jeffrey Epstein theories and slowly grew to resemble a millenarian Christian denomination), various theories about extraterrestrials interacting with humans at one or more early periods of human development (and the attempts from the government to cover this up), and theories about reality being a simulation of some kind. Nobody seems to take the phantom time hypothesis seriously these days, but if they did, it would count. These theories also include grand unifying metanarratives about history being controlled, or at least routinely impacted, by mysterious and shadowy groups including, but not limited to, Freemasons, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Jews, and the Reptilians.

What makes this tier of conspiracy theory so fascinating to me is that it in some cases, it can become simply a “theory” without the conspiracy even being necessary. For instance, the New World Order acts as the conceptual linchpin to explain why globalization is happening (an undeniable situation), but one will rarely encounter specific claims about a New World Order with official, self-identifying members — it instead acts as an abstract unifying concept that includes the Bilderberg Group, the Skull & Bones Society, and others. It can include plenty of far-fetched conspiracy theories belonging to the second type, but it doesn’t really require any. In this way, it is hard to find much meaningful difference between the New World Order theory and University-approved theories such as “structural racism,” “patriarchy,” or “capitalist superstructure,” all of which I would place in this third category.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of overarching theory eventually dispenses with identifiable groups altogether and becomes a pure condemnation of abstract forces, whichever kind the adherents dislike. In the Italian esotericist Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins (first published 1953), Evola discusses the concept of the “occult war,” first postulated by Emmanuel Malynski and Leon de Poncins in 1936 as a Judeo-Masonic plot against traditional Christianity. Evola, however, sees the occult war as a spiritual struggle taking place at the most subtle level of metaphysics. On the same theme, he had written an approving introduction to the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903) in which he acknowledged that it is probably indeed a fraudulent document, but then further contended that this doesn’t matter, because the book’s description of what is happening sociopolitically is true regardless of who is causing it to happen. In Men Among the Ruins, Evola thus warned readers not to invest too much energy in blaming one particular group such as the Jews or Freemasons, for these groups might themselves be unwitting pawns of the forces of subversion driving this occult war and bringing traditional civilization to complete dissolution. So, in other words, there is an occult war taking place, and it does seem to cause the Jews and Freemasons to do terrible things, but the actual driving force behind it is abstract and impersonal.

The manner in which Evola describes the forces of subversion isn’t too conceptually dissimilar to how the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault describes power. In Foucault’s theory, power seems to act in a similarly free-floating way with no identifiable targets. You get to have all the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist without any of the fun of picking a scapegoat (although this hasn’t stopped some of Foucault’s more dull-witted fans within the university system). In any case, these are fairly advanced and unusual examples of how conspiratorial thought can unravel itself when pushed far enough.

III.

Now that we’ve gotten our taxonomy out of the way, we can look at the dumber and lazier conspiracy theories that we find expressed in daily life. Typically, these conspiracy theories fall under the second category. The first and third categories require too much thought and/or personal commitment to be attractive for the average person, but the second category of theory tends to demand a pretty low level of commitment. All you really need to do is state that something isn’t the way it seems, figure out a party responsible, identify a motive, and voila, you’ve got your theory. However, the first and third types of theory lend an air of credence to conspiracy theories of the second type by dint of their mere existence. Theories of the first type, which can become “canon” simply by being repeated enough, sometimes form the building blocks of a lazy and stupid theory of the second type.

We still need to figure out why exactly the second kind of theory has gotten so low-quality on the whole, though, at least compared to how such theories were articulated prior to the 2010s. And unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be just one reason. So, rather than providing everyone with one superimposing meta-reason under which every other reason can be placed, I’ve come up with seven small ones, and I’ll end this post by providing them. Here they are:

1. Greater popularity of something usually means dumber people are getting involved

This should be pretty self-explanatory. If conspiracy theories can be disseminated at an unprecedented rate through the internet, then those that appeal to the lowest common denominator will win, and the most successful presentations of these theories will not be particularly ambitious or demanding.

Conspiracy theories also seem to operate now through a bottom-up process of transmission. An intelligent and rational person might be a reliable source of truth if she subsists in a community predominately filled with other intelligent and rational people, but individually, the intelligent and rational are quite powerless. Such people are often emotionally vulnerable and easy to sway through appeals to pathos, moral grandstanding, and peer pressure (and note: on the internet, everyone is a peer, no matter how superior one person might be to the other by every measurable standard). Therefore, when a conspiracy theory gains traction, those who once would have helped nullify it in an environment with greater barriers to entry will instead find themselves engaging in apologia, saying things like, “Well, surely, something is going on here,” or, “Well, even if it isn’t literally true, it sure does reflect a deeper underlying reality,” and so on.

Thus, the environment is set for typical people to go around vacantly believing in a conspiracy theory, even if they aren’t particularly committed to it or don’t feel obligated to work out its underlying mechanics. With little pushback from above, there is little incentive for them to do so.

2. American life is increasingly filled with scams and deceptions

I remember being roughly eight or nine years old and seeing one of those “You May Have Already Won 10 Million Dollars!” letters that the Publishers Clearing House would send to everyone. After being overwhelmed with excitement, my old man came home and presented me with a hard truth on that day: there are all sorts of people in this society who just make up nonsense and then try to scam you with it. In America in particular, these kinds of deceptions are remarkably common, and one must get used to them early on. The ad in the classifieds that seems too good to be true is probably fake. The massive sale at the clothing store on the strip mall is only giving you a discount from a prior mark-up. The medicine that the doctor is prescribing you might actually make things worse. The new nutrition study that just came out probably doesn’t mean anything because it hasn’t been replicated (even though the news seems quite confident in its legitimacy). The new cryptocurrency is probably designed to take your money. The insurance company denying your claim probably will accept it despite their assurances to the contrary, but you’ve got to lawyer up first.

Under such conditions, assuming that something is fake or misleading is often a reasonable starting position, and it is simply naive to expect that the average person who maintains this disposition so often in day-to-day life should carve out an exception for “official channels of information” like a respected newspaper or a government organization. In the book A Lot of People Are Saying, the authors claim that all usages of the term “fake news” constitute “the new conspiracism” because “fake” implies malicious intent. But looking at a news article that seems wrong and labeling it fake is, cognitively speaking, only a stone’s throw away from looking at a deceptive advertisement and calling it fake. I don’t believe that everyone who uses the word “fake” is implying malicious intent. But if someone calls something “fake news” and then concocts an impromptu conspiracy theory to explain why it’s fake, again, we’re not too far from the man who says, “The reason that hot dog buns are sold in eight-packs while hot dogs are sold in six-packs is because the hot dog company got together with the bun company, and they decided to scam the people by forcing them keep buying more of both until they reach a common multiple!”

The bottom line is, when people live in a society in which a skeptical disposition has become something of a day-to-day requirement, they will lose trust in just about everything and come up with their own way of explaining the world.

3. There is an epistemological crisis in the west

The epistemological crisis has been defined as a major breakdown in the shared societal framework for determining truth, and this pattern has been acknowledged countless times. It is often Democrat voters who seem most alarmed by it, though various philosophers across the political spectrum have been discussing the matter for decades. What’s amusing, though, is that the awareness of an epistemological crisis has actually broadened the epistemological crisis. The university system has discussed philosophers who have commented upon this crisis from Heidegger to Arendt to Lyotard to Baudrillard, and it has accordingly taught students — correctly, I might add — that pure objectivity in the reporting of facts and stories is an impossibility. In the same way that there is no “object” without a “subject,” there is no way to present information without some kind of vantage point. This idea is not mere postmodern nihilism; thinkers like Goethe and Herder showed awareness of it when discussing the concept of history.

But with lower barriers to university entry, many dumb students have taken dumb lessons from such ideas, and they’ve concluded that objectivity should not even be attempted. Moreover, they’ve encouraged the smarter students to agree with them. These students, both dumb and smart, have then gone onto occupy elite spaces in the information-circulating sector of American society. The concept of “the view from nowhere” has been altogether dismissed as a bourgeois prejudice, and consequently, many academics, journalists, and info-tainers have no problem at all seasoning their work with ideological bias, citing the (again, true) teaching that bias is unavoidable. Because, hey, if it’s unavoidable, why not crank it up to 100?

This is just one of the many reasons that our elite institutions have discredited themselves and broadened the epistemological crisis, but there are economic and media-ecological reasons as well. Mainstream news has had a difficult time transitioning from print to the online world, and it often relies on hysterical “clickbait” articles to attract attention as well as deceptive and “sexy” reporting, even among the most respected papers. Additionally, 24/7 cable news networks have struggled to maintain television ratings, and they have been financially incentivized to pursue titillating nonsense to keep the viewers hooked. Although I believe that the decline in reliable journalistic analysis and academic integrity is more ideologically driven than economic in nature, the economic situation has provided support for the downturn by providing immediate short-term gain.

4. Decline in literacy

Here’s another media-ecological reason for not just the widespread epistemological crisis affecting the west but also the uniquely dumb and lazy status of so many of today’s conspiracy theories. Without diving headlong into the thought of Marshall McLuhan, I will just briefly sum up how he and his colleagues like Walter Ong distinguished between the mentality of those in print cultures vs. oral ones. McLuhan believed that the printing press trained people to possess linear reasoning, emotional detachment, a knack for sequence and causality, and analytical distance. Oral cultures, by contrast, emphasize immersion, simultaneity, collective identity, pattern recognition, group participation, and mythic thinking. Lest we assume that he considered the former superior to the latter, he actually spent quite a bit of time articulating the flaws within the print mentality, since it created the feeling of rupture between the mind and body, which has led to the preponderance of desiccated intellectualism (recall my point that the intelligent are often easily dominated by the foolish in a direct interpersonal setting, allowing for the bottom-up transmission of ideas). Oral cultures, by contrast, possess a more unified, holistic perspective.

That being said, the electronic environment seems to have taken on more attributes of oral epistemology with less of a literate counterbalance. Highly literate people, for instance, tend to prefer interpreting troubling news in structural terms, using a theory as a sort of lens. Internet-based people seem somewhat prone to person-oriented if not mythic thinking, which strengthens the tendency to engage in conspiracy theory. For a good while before the widespread dissemination of high-speed internet and smart phones, a conspiracy theory could live alongside a structural analysis, even within one person negotiating between both. Now, conspiracy theories seem to be supplanting structural analysis altogether. This may mean that the third type of conspiracy theory will grow increasingly mythopoeic and less intellectually sophisticated over time.

5. Boredom and the need for entertainment

One of my favorite new conspiracy theories popular among Generation Z is the one that Helen Keller didn’t actually do anything particularly impressive, and her “handler” Anne Sullivan largely faked her accomplishments for personal gain through various tactics of deception and subterfuge. It’s a pretty good example of how conspiracy theories have an “opt-in” quality to them. Some people have put a great deal of effort into the theory, while others have caught whiff of it from a cursory glance at Tik-Tok and came away with the impression that Helen Keller never actually existed. There’s a range. But one of the reasons the theory has proliferated is partly because it’s a whole lotta fun. It’s just simply amusing to talk about how Helen Keller didn’t really do anything and your fifth grade teacher was being a gullible buffoon.

Fun is certainly a reason for the growth of conspiracy theories in the internet age, and fun conspiracy theories are often interchangeable with urban legends. When I was a kid, there was an internet-based rumor about how Kevin’s brother from the TV show The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson. This isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory, but it’s thematically similar to another internet-based theory that Barbara Bush was the secret daughter of British occultist Aleister Crowley, which has more conspiratorial undertones, even though it started as an April Fool’s joke.

The need for fun does not necessarily make a theory dumb or lazy, however, as long as there’s a genuine element of paranoia accompanying it. Pizzagate actually started off on 4chan as a joke, or at least a half-joke. Although I can’t find the quote at the moment, I recall seeing a poster on 4chan when the theory was in the midst of being concocted saying something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter if all this is nonsense, this is just too funny not to run with.” Something like that, anyway. I should also point out that there’s a satirical computer game about Jeffrey Epstein popular among 10-year-olds. Again, paranoia about Epstein is real, but this particular thing is fun, and it contributes to what the journalist Michael Tracey has called the “ambient folklore” surrounding Epstein.

6. Increased political partisanship

Here’s a pretty obvious one: you’re more likely to go along with a conspiracy theory belonging to the second type if you’re a true believer in your political tribe and cannot emotionally process inconvenient information that compromises your loyalty. I have no idea how far the folks on BlueSky have gone in trying to prove that every Donald Trump assassination attempt has been a hoax (though they have indulged in such conspiracy theories), but their motivations are pretty obvious. There’s no need to dwell on this one, because it’s quite straightforward, but it is worth mentioning that agonism is a persistent condition of the oral world identified by Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy (1983). And as Marshall McLuhan said repeatedly, the world is becoming a global village… but it’s a tribal village.

7. Conspiracy theories as a counterintuitive way to escape from politics

I’ll end with a more interesting point here than the previous one. Lazy conspiracy theorizing is growing across pretty much all age groups, but Generation Z is definitely leading the pack. As many have noted, Gen-Z has an interesting relationship with politics. On the one hand, they absorb an incredible amount of political content online… but on the other hand, their actual political engagement (as measured by voting, volunteering, organizing, etc.) is historically low.

Although it is too early to say, it seems possible that lazy conspiracy theorizing might be a sign of political fatigue rather than enthusiastic engagement. Dismissing a news story by saying, “It’s all fake, it was staged, it was a false flag,” etc. acts as a shield from the obligation to engage with it, and such shielding might become increasingly common in a society that expects the average person to form opinions on virtually every topic that dominates the headlines. Additionally, Generation Z is scrutinized to an astounding degree: just about every time I log onto Twitter, I find someone attacking them for some perceived inadequacy, and many of these attacks are political in nature. Just about everyone seems to place all of their hopes and expectations onto Generation Z and accordingly demands great things from them, as if they’re supposed to function collectively as a kind of deus ex machina that will swoop in and save civilization from driving itself off of a cliff. But as Generation Z continues to age, they will probably not deliver on being such a redemptive force, and Generation Alpha (or whatever they’re called) will likely encounter the same if not more excessive scrutiny. For that reason, it seems that the conspiracy theory acts as a stress-relieving way to feign engagement with politics while actually abstaining from politics altogether. And if I’m being honest, it’s easy for me to understand the situation from that perspective.

Alright, that’s it. We’ll end the discussion here.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that traffics in non-structuralist semiotics and media ecology, and the occasional kulchural analysis like this one.

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Last week, I talked about some sex machines in a post entitled “Some Sex Machines.” Instead of discussing masturbation machines (a less interesting subject), I was talking about machines found in lowbrow media, cult films, “midnight movies” and so on, which treat sex in a manner that extends beyond the achievement of orgasm. In Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), we found a sex machine that elicits pleasure so intense that it kills people. In Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973), we discovered a sex machine designed to make couples procreate, alleviating them of the need to do any work and allowing them to be frigid. And in Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (also 1973), we were introduced to a feminine, womb-like machine that a user is meant to penetrate with a gigantic electric phallus, which not only gives it a big robotic orgasm but actually causes it to reproduce itself, creating a smaller baby robot.

In all three films, the forces of the erotic are set in contrast to sex itself, and the movies suggest that while the erotic is a wild and even uncontrollable power, there nevertheless are sinister forces among us that seek to tame it by conquering sex itself through the power of the machine. While Barbarella and Sleeper give an optimistic, “sexual revolution” vision about erotic energy defeating oppressive conformity through sex, The Holy Mountain suggests a more pessimistic view, one in which the power of the erotic could be made to serve the cold logic of the machine. Although Jodorowsky doesn’t quite go that far in his conception of “The Love Machine” — it does, after all, miraculously produce offspring and humorously resembles a human mother — it seems clear to me that he was leaning in that direction, especially given the intense satire that pervades the rest of the movie.

Now, it occurs to me at this point that this two-part blog post will have to be regarded as a “fixer-upper,” since I think I’ll need to turn it into two separate essays entirely if I want to make it work. You’ll perceive a thematic tension between sex machines that treat the erotic as a potent source of quasi-mystical energy and those that don’t. Plus, I probably need a few more examples of sex machines to write about; feel free to suggest any in the comments if you’re familiar with a good one. But in any case, the basic point I’m trying to get across here — and I do think this holds up — is that over time, depictions of the interaction between eroticism and machinery started to tip the balance in favor of the machinery. That is, instead of persistently seeing the non-rational force of eros conquer the machine, or at least subsume the exterior of the machine beneath its own organic sensibility, we start to see the emergence of narratives in which eros not only serves the machine but actually winds up conforming to a mechanistic logic. So, here are a few more case studies in which this happens.

The Lord-of-Chaos-Summoning Rape Machine, Urotsukidōji 2: Legend of the Demon Womb (1990)

The first story arc of the Urotsukidōji hentai franchise, “Legend of the Overfiend,” was originally released as a surprisingly high-quality animated trilogy of videos for retail purchase in Japan, but it became infamous for having a time-edited (though still uncensored) single runtime version that was given a limited theatrical release in the United States back in 1989. Although most of the local theaters gave this movie an NC-17 rating, not all of them did, and so a few of the moviegoers who went to go watch it had no idea what they were getting themselves into, knowing only that they were going to see a cartoon from Japan. After a few found themselves scandalized by its content, some local newspapers discussed how perverse it was, explaining that it contains quite a large amount of gore and tentacle rape, and, well, its reputation only grew from there. Urotsukidōji was more or less singlehandedly responsible for the perception that anime is for degenerates and perverts who want to watch women get violated by mutant tentacles — a view that I definitely held back in high school, even as some of my very wholesome classmates participated in a recreational anime club.

Anyways, we’re not discussing tentacle rape today. We’re discussing Urotsukidōji’s sequel, which is not as well known but nonetheless about equally impressive in terms of its budget and production values. This condition of lowbrow animation having surprisingly high-quality art would not last, as Japan’s economy was about to suffer a major downturn, causing big setbacks for its animation industry on the whole. For that reason, these two releases are somewhat anomalous in the history of hentai (A Kite is one of the only other examples from the world of hentai to rival Urotsukidōji in terms of visionary scope and production values).

The scene we’ll examine is the very opening, in which an occult Nazi scientist named Dr. Munchhausen activates an elaborate rape machine. It is 1944, the penultimate year of the Third Reich, and the machine is located at the Headquarters of the Vril Association. Hitler can be seen in the distance, watching the gruesome experiment unfold. This machine consists of a circle of nude women who are hooked up to masturbation devices that penetrate the women with metal dildos, and their backs are connected to additional machinery, which is apparently designed to harvest erotic energy from them. In the middle of this circle of women is a large electricity-conducting apparatus that goes a few stories high and whose design is somewhat reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s “biomechanical” style. There is also a mysterious purple glow that emanates from within this massive monolith. Once the rape machine is activated and the sexual energy is harnessed from the women, the purple monolith starts emitting electric bolts of lightning. Over in Munchhausen’s control room, countless rows of analog dials start tracking the electricity levels. As the erotic energy is sapped from the women, their bodies become withered and corpselike, and soon, the rape machine starts to do what it was meant to do: summon the Lord of Chaos, the arch-nemesis of the Demon God known as the Overfiend, a mythological quasi-deity who appears every 3,000 years to bring about an apocalypse that wipes out the Earth and begins life anew. However, the machine is clearly being overloaded, and it starts to act janky. And just as we’re about to find out if it will work, some Allied bomber planes enter Berlin and destroy rows of buildings as they presumably head toward the Vril Headquarters. The experiment proves a failure, and thus ends the Prologue.

All of this is, of course, pure sensationalist nonsense. But the key takeaway is that we once again find the power of the erotic being harnessed as a sort of energy, and here it is presented as such in the plainest possible terms. Whether we want to conceive of this erotic energy in terms of Wilhelm Reich’s orgones, or as the shakti of Hindu Tantra, it is used in any case to summon an all-powerful giga-beast from the interdimensional realm, and so the machine fully exploits its potency. Moreover, it does so not through erotic love but rather forced intrusion, with the women reaching orgasm against their own will before being desiccated, killed, and ultimately discarded. In this presentation, the cold logic of the machine fully dominates any element of romance that often gets lumped together with human sexuality. In other words, all of the hippie-dippie sex-positivity of Barbarella or Sleeper is completely absent from this picture: the demented scientist is fully on the verge of getting what he wants with his fully instrumental usage of the erotic, and only the Allied bombers thwart his plans.

One major conceptual advantage to Urotsukidōji is that it is self-consciously lowbrow cartoon pornography and thus it operates on both pornographic and cartoon logic. Both pornographic and cartoon logic are often psychologically unrealistic in terms of the storylines they portray, which often serve as wish-fulfillment fantasies, but both retain the ability to be primordially truthful — in much the same way as the simplified figures you’ll find in Greek tragedy or Noh theater, or even the commedia dell’arte can be. In pornography, there doesn’t need to be any socially redeeming element at play, either, and so all of the least romantic aspects of sexuality can be explored in their strangest, ugliest, or most extravagant dimensions, even as the material encourages the audience to indulge in such perversity. This curious and seemingly paradoxical condition between the content and the viewership is probably why various parts of the political left, not just feminist ones, have accused pornography of being crypto-reactionary by nature — inherently fascistic, even. But in having the freedom to strip bare the darker aspects of sexuality, it can nevertheless communicate certain truths regarding the erotic that friendlier modes of storytelling simply cannot.1 Perhaps that is a separate point better left to a separate discussion.

The automobile, Christine (1983) and Crash (1996)

We’re now going to take a departure away from magical beast-summoning sex machines and focus on something different: the erotic reinterpretation of an old and familiar invention, in this case the automobile or motorcar. The car turns into a sort of erotic machine in both John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) and David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). I’ve already written a little bit about Crash, both the J.G. Ballard novel from 1973 and the David Cronenberg adaptation from 1996. In that post (which I think holds up pretty well despite getting little attention), I made a few points about the material that I haven’t seen elsewhere, the most important being that Crash is not about new technology but old technology. To understand the novel and the film, this is an absolutely crucial point. The story’s erotic subtext is about nostalgia, looking backward from a detached vantage point, not looking forward to the future. Essentially, in my view, Ballard was responding to the newer logic of the electronic world whose consequences were becoming increasingly apparent, and which was (and still is) causing us to conceptually modify our understanding of many familiar inventions and media — including the internal combustion engine, shifting it from being a petrol-driven motor of economic instrumentality into the animating heart of an aesthetic device, the car, in which the erotic could find a new home.

The horror film Christine (1983), about an evil 1958 Plymouth Fury that possesses whoever owns it almost perfectly corroborates the point I was trying to make about Crash. Based on a Stephen King novel released the same year, John Carpenter wisely chose to scrap most of the backstory that lends some coherence to why the car behaves the way it does, how it got the name “Christine,” or how it even became sentient in the first place. Instead, Carpenter ignores those questions and focuses mainly on the transformation of the main character Arnie, who starts off as a bumbling nerd when he purchases the car from a mysterious working-class man who sells it to him in poor condition for a meager $250 (we later learn that the previous owner died in “Christine” from carbon monoxide poisoning, a year after the same fate befell his wife). But as the movie progresses and Arnie because increasingly fixated on the car, ensnared by its mysterious seductive powers, he slowly turns into a 1950s greaser throwback. As with Crash, Christine is a film that deals extensively with looking backwards, and in that sense it acts as a subversive response to the ‘50s/early ‘60s nostalgia that pervaded the previous decade, from American Graffiti (1973) to Happy Days (1974-1984) to Grease (1978).

Once Arnie fixes up the car and becomes filled with the confidence that “Christine” gives him, he snags the prettiest girl in his high school. But of course, when the girl comes between him and his car, he make it clear that he prefers the car. To make matters worse, the car has an unfortunate habit of driving itself around and murdering Arnie’s enemies when he’s asleep in bed. It rams itself into various walls and crevices as it crushes them to death one by one, even turning itself into a flaming mass by careening into a gas station pump at one point. But no matter what happens to it, it magically heals itself afterwards, looking as though nothing ever happened. If you can accept the absurdity of the story at face value, the scene in which Arnie discovers that the car can fix itself is probably the coolest in the whole film, in large part due to Carpenter’s excellent original score:

Anyhow, the erotic subtext never reaches the surface to become explicit. Arnie gets killed in the bloody climax before he ever gets to consummate his love with “Christine.” But there is an excellent scene in which Arnie tells his best friend while driving down the highway, drinking beer,

Let me tell you a little something about love. It has a voracious appetite. It eats everything. Friendship, family… it kills me how much it eats. But I’ll tell you something else. You feed it right, and it can be a beautiful thing, and that’s what we have. You know, when someone believes in you, man, you can do anything, any fucking thing in the universe. And when you believe right back in that someone, then watch out world, because nobody can stop you… nobody, ever.

He then lifts his hands from the wheel, drives into the opposing lanes, and plays chicken with oncoming automobiles.

Now, this is all good and fun, but if you really want to get a portrayal of the automobile as a retconned sex machine, Cronenberg’s Crash is where you’d want to turn. It is, plainly put, a film about people who develop a sex fetish for car crashes. I don’t care to write more on the topic than I already have (again: go read my earlier post), but I’ll provide the (gently edited) money quote from the piece, which explains how it isn’t really about new technology:

The only thing truly novel in Crash’s technological landscape is the way people respond to it — their alienation from the three-dimensional world, the newfound creativity they engage in with the body, and the normative barrenness that they associate with the sex act. All of human sexuality is rendered into a matter of technical jargon and clinical analysis (I mean in the novel), even while the perversions of the characters grow increasingly unrestrained. And in fact, this basic psychological disposition has expanded in modern society since the novel was written and the film was made.

Beyond that point, I’ll just add that here we aren’t dealing with erotic energy presented as a kind of magical or scientifically inexplicable force as with the previous examples. Crash is not science fiction at all. The most inexplicable aspect of it is not the machinery of the automobile itself but rather the coldness of the psychology juxtaposed against the fieriness of the erotic passion that the automobile inspires, simply by dint of its ability to crash and burn.

The Homoerotic Iron Amalgamation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

If you want to pair three films together for how they combine the subjects of erotic attraction and cars, you could do no better than Christine, Crash, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Shinya Tsukamoto, the director of Tetsuo, has been open about his admiration for David Cronenberg’s work, and he was strongly influenced by Videodrome (1983), but the correspondences between Tetsuo and Crash are considerably more striking. This is quite astounding because Tetsuo was released seven years before Crash the movie was released, and one year before Crash the J.G. Ballard novel was released in Japanese translation.2 So, how are they related? Well, Tetsuo is essentially about the aftermath of a car crash in which an unnamed Japanese businessman (he’s called “salaryman” in the credits) strikes a body modification enthusiast who has just inserted some scrap metal into a self-inflicted leg wound. We later learn, through a series of the victim’s flashbacks, that following the accident, the businessman has sex with his girlfriend right there and then, apparently aroused by the intensity of the experience, right before driving off. This is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that happens in Crash. There is even an element of nostalgia to the situation, since the crash is slowly and artfully portrayed with some 1950s-style rhythm & blues music (similar to Fats Domino) accompanying it — a major contrast from the propulsive industrial soundtrack that ornaments most of the film.

However, Tetsuo is outwardly more bizarre than Crash, because it is an experimental black & white sci-fi film told with a hallucinatory and nonlinear plot structure, and unlike with the eerily sober Crash, here the viewer is thrown into the world of the supernatural. After the car crash takes place, the businessman is haunted, at first by a mysterious woman whose body is partly metal (she later, I think, turns out to be androgynous), and then by his own body, which slowly starts to be taken over by metal while growing its own metal appendages. He starts dreaming of being sodomized by the guy whom he ran over (again: in Crash, the main character has homoerotic fantasies about the man who introduces him to car crash fetishism), and later, he himself grows a gigantic metal drill to replace his penis. This drill eventually impales his girlfriend to death, taking her, along with the entire female element, out of the picture entirely.

As all this is happening, the wounded body modification enthusiast finds that he is also growing metal on his body, and in fact his brain is being replaced by metal. It’s as though the implant he gave himself in the beginning of the film is functioning as a seed. He eventually tracks down and confronts the businessman who ran him over for a final showdown. At first, it seems as though they are fighting, but as their confrontation continues, the R&B music starts playing again, a flashback to the car crash takes place, and then everything becomes still. Finally, the two men declare their love for one another and complete their amalgamation into a gigantic and hideous mech of twisted iron and junkyard scraps. (It can shoot fire, too.) The body modification enthusiast’s head (located atop this warped mech) tells the businessman’s head (located somewhere in its midriff), “We can mutate the whole world into metal. We can rust the world into the dust of the universe. Our love can destroy the whole fucking world!” to which the businessman replies, “Let’s do it!” And then, off they go, ready to blow the world to smithereens.

Again, as with Crash, it isn’t exactly right to say that Tetsuo is about the fetishization of “technology,” whatever that word means. It’s about the fetishization of a certain kind of technology. When the body modification man and the businessman confront one another, the former tells the latter, “You see all this rust on my body? My first metal implant was already rusty before my cells began to assimilate it. But your shaver was stainless steel!” Iron, of course, rusts, while stainless steel does not, and iron is what ultimately wins in the end. Therefore, the “technology” that our body modification enthusiast favors is one amenable to the forces of entropy. His solution is to spread this familiar technology everywhere, as if horizontally; he isn’t trying to serve technology “vertically” through better scientific research and development. Although Tetsuo is lumped in with the cyberpunk genre, which is largely inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), this association is mainly because of the punk aesthetic as well as the metal imagery that pervades the film. But in reality, cyberpunk is about futuristic technology set against urban decay. Tetsuo is about the spread of urban decay without the futuristic technology.

It is also, of course, a movie about the power of eros ultimately creating a machine that spreads iron, rust, and destruction wherever it goes. Particularly important is the total denial of female sexuality, with homoerotic love prevailing, since homosexual sex is non-productive by its very nature. Again, although the erotic seems to have a kind of magical quality here (it seems to be spreading iron all over these guys’ bodies), it is all in the service of the machine, the denial of the organic. As the machine slowly takes over, the feminine aspect of eros grows altogether diminished until it disappears entirely.

The Virgin and the Dynamo

One point worth making here is that it’s probably no coincidence that two of the examples here — indeed, the most extreme ones — come from Japan. Being a country that developed largely without the influence of Christianity, Japan, particularly following the economic boom of 1955-1973, experienced a certain kind of creative freedom to handle the subject of technology through an artistic treatment. For America, electronic technology accompanied its development as a country, and in a sense, it grew to resemble a kind of substitute for the divine feminine found in the image of the Virgin Mary. In his prophetic autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams explains how he started to think about the spiritual difficulties that this situation might present as he walked down a room full of electric dynamos at the 1900 Paris Exposition, marveling at their mythic potency:

To [Adams’s acquaintance], the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

As with the Marcel Duchamp piece that we examined last week, this passage is an example of an early insight into the contrast between the machine and the erotic element, though Adams conceptualizes the latter in the form of the mythic feminine.

The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either. This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction — the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.

The point here is that the second industrial revolution and the growth of electric power didn’t offer a clear place for the feminine element to dwell, particularly in America, since Calvinism didn’t venerate those things to the extent seen in the Catholic church. Instead, electronic technology came to replace it altogether. This is probably the condition that not only made Americans particularly vulnerable to psychoanalysis, which sought to demystify sex in the most clinical possible fashion, but also created a pronounced sense of absence as new technologies grew and spread. The sex machines that we’ve been looking at can be considered attempts to negotiate the (feminine) erotic pole against the (masculine) machinic one, and it is possible that this is why the automobile slowly became charged — at least in some narrative presentations — with erotic power as it became increasingly familiar as a non-electric yet incredibly powerful automotive machine. But the other takeaway from this passage is that it should also come as no surprise that the most unromantic meditations on these opposing conceptual poles would come from the east — particularly a country like Japan, which experienced rampant technological growth during the Meiji Restoration, dealt with the ravages of World War II, and then experienced another shock of unprecedented economic growth shortly afterwards.

Alright, that concludes this discussion on sex machines. Now go outside, walk around, climb some trees, pick some wildflowers, and enjoy yourselves.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that messes around with non-structuralist semiotics and media ecology.

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Today, I feel like talking about some sex machines. Here, I do not mean mere masturbation auxiliary devices, like the steam-powered dildos that were invented in the nineteenth century to help cure female hysteria. Instead, I’m talking about fictitious machines, ones found in trashy, lowbrow comic books and exploitation movies — ones with grand designs and powerful ambitions. These are machines that interact with the power of sex to achieve various ends beyond mere orgasm. Last week on this blog, I talked about the neo-Darwinian idea that organic life can be reduced to machinery, and I concluded that the most “animalistic” moments of various species (like the ones involving sex and violence) are the most machine-like, but the vast majority of organic life is spent in a non-machinic state of existence. It is interesting, then, how often the erotic and the mechanistic are paired together and dealt with artistically, and sex machines are just one example of how the pairing has been explored throughout the twentieth century. We’ll discuss a few of them.

“The Excessive Machine,” Barbarella (1968)

The Excessive Machine, simply put, is a machine designed to bring people so much sexual pleasure that it kills them. It originally appears in Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella comic (1966), which Roger Vadim’s film was based on, though its design isn’t as interesting as the one in the movie. In the movie, the machine vaguely resembles a pipe organ, with a keyboard and a series of translucent tubes connecting to its sides, and it even has its own obscure sheet music. The idea is that one person “plays” the Excessive Machine, while the other, its victim, lies down beneath a row of planks that resemble an organ’s pedalboard. The planks proceed to undulate in a stimulating fashion, and the victim is thrown into erotic spasms. Once the machine reaches its crescendo, its victim will die of pleasure.

At least, that’s how it works in theory. In the actual movie scene, Barbarella is so sexually potent (I guess?) that she winds up taming the machine, causing it to erupt in flames, and ultimately destroying it. All of this results in one of the worst line reads ever in cinematic history: “You’ve burnt out the excessive machine! You’ve blown all its fuses! You’ve exhausted its power! It couldn’t keep up with you! This is incredible! What kind of girl are you? Have you no shame? Shame! Shame on you! You’ll pay for this!”

Interestingly, in the comic, it’s Barbarella who asks the operator of the machine, “Aren’t you ashamed?” after it gives her an orgasm, and they don’t bother to have her destroy the machine by passively overpowering it. It’s just a two-panel gag, and they briskly move onto the next plot point. The comic actually holds machines in rather high regard, as evinced from one panel in which Barbarella reassures a self-conscious robot that he is, despite his own misgivings, a perfect lover:

There’s nothing like this in the film at all. So, clearly, Vadim had his own frame of mind when adapting the original work. Barbarella, in Vadim’s version, comes from a futuristic Earth in which sex has been managerially reorganized. Only people with compatible “psychocardiogram” readings are able to do it with one another, and they do so by taking drugs known as “exaltation transference pellets,” touching their hands together, and remaining still for a minute. For centuries, only the poor have been having sex the old-fashioned way, while the middle-classes and above stopped doing it because it was proven to be, in Barbarella’s words, “distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency.”

But of course, in the first half hour of the movie, Barbarella winds up having primitive sex, and she quickly decides that she prefers it that way. The film is thus a celebration of raw eros as contrasted with copulatory micromanagement. There is no point in trying to find character development in this self-consciously ludicrous film, so we can’t say something like, “Once Barbarella was introduced to sex, she quickly mastered it, and the Excessive Machine was her final test!” There’s nothing like that happening here. The point is that we’re dealing with some half-developed themes about the power of the sex drive versus man’s attempts to harness and/or control it, either through mechanistic procedures or technological innovations, and the conclusion clearly points to the erotic assuming primacy over the mechanistic.

“The Orgasmatron,” Sleeper (1973)

In this Woody Allen movie, Miles Monroe (Allen’s character) gets cryogenically frozen and finds himself in a dystopian future world in which, as the love interest Luna Schlosser explains, “Sex is different today, you see? We don’t have any problems. Everybody’s frigid.” Instead of having old-fashioned sex, both partners get into a machine called the Orgasmatron, and it does all the work for them. The Orgasmatron was supposedly influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s pseudoscientific invention of the Orgone Energy Accumulator. Or at least, this is what the internet tells me. But in reality, Reich’s invention wasn’t any kind of “sex machine” — he actually wanted it to treat cancer by having people sit in it and feel vaguely pleasant. However, given the sensationalized way it was covered in the press at that time, it would make sense for Allen to interpret the Orgone Accumulator that way, so perhaps it was an influence after all. Speaking of which, the psychedelic space-rock band Hawkwind also gave their own take on the same exact subject in the same year, and I’m not sure it has much to do with Reich’s thinking, either. Reich is actually an interesting figure worth taking up for a separate discussion, since he’s perhaps the only vitalist who really thought that he found the essence of all life in material form underneath a microscope: a gambit that was sure not to pay off. In any case, Allen’s futuristic concept here is more thematically similar to what we find in Barbarella than anything from Reich’s thought.

At the end of the movie, Miles and Luna declare their love for one another, but Luna objects that science has proven that men and women cannot have meaningful relationships due to the chemical incompatibilities between the sexes. Miles dismisses this objection and says he doesn’t believe in science, claiming instead that the only two things worth believing in are sex and death. Thus, the movie ends on a note of primitive eros defeating the oppressive managerialism of the future. Given that I’m not a huge fan of Allen’s work, I won’t spend too much time on this one, but you get the idea. We’ll move onto the next sex machine.

The “Love Machine,” The Holy Mountain (1973)

About halfway through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bizarre occult “midnight movie” classic, we meet eight different men and women who are all going to depart on a quest for spiritual enlightenment by climbing a mystical Holy Mountain located in parts unknown. They have sought the help of a guru, a mysterious alchemist played by Jodorowsky himself, who introduces each of them, one by one, to a thief, the film’s main character. The heavily satirical introductions of each person during this part (they’re essentially vignettes, so that’s what I’ll call them) take quite a while to get through, occupying nearly a solid third of the movie’s runtime. The first would-be initiate whom we meet is a man who corresponds with the planet Venus, and he runs a rather ridiculous cosmetics and prosthetics business to help beautify people. The second is a woman who corresponds with the planet Mars, and she runs an equally ridiculous weapons business, one that can effectively appeal to youth fashion as well as people’s various religious sensibilities. Then, we meet the third man, Clen, who corresponds with the planet Jupiter. Clen, a sleazy-looking fellow who vaguely resembles Penthouse Magazine’s Bob Guccione, introduces himself as the owner of an art factory which “produces a new line of art every season,” one of which involves a row of nude men and women stamping their paint-covered butt cheeks onto canvases that pass by them one by one, much like a car part going through a Model T assembly line. This is an apparent jab at Andy Warhol and the pop art movement.

After seeing a number of different examples of Clen’s “art,” the scene switches, and we are presented with an unassuming metallic cube sitting in a warehouse of some kind. In a voiceover, Clen announces, “We created a Love Machine. To make it live, the spectator has to work with it, guide it, receive it… give himself in the act of love. With this electronic rod, he will rub its mechanical vagina. The skill of the spectator will determine the machine’s ability to reach a climax.”

The electronic rod is, of course, an oversized metal phallus, and it’s about as tall as the user himself. Clen’s personal chauffeur volunteers to demonstrate it, but he proves quite unskilled with the rod, outing himself as a poor lover. But then, Clen’s erotically superior mistress takes the rod and manipulates the machine with it. The machine opens itself up and expands outward, revealing its various diodes, buttons, and levers, resembling a work of modern art. Upon reaching climax, it shoots out a brown, then white goo onto the floor. And following that, it gives birth to a small robot baby, which it starts to nurture while Clen and his mistress walk toward the camera, the mistress raising her hand in triumph before the scene cuts to the next vignette.

In all of these vignettes, the would-be spiritual adepts resemble corrupted versions of their planet’s associated alchemical meaning. Venus clearly represents the commodification of erotic desire, and Mars the commodification of war, and so Jupiter demonstrates the commodification of artistic creativity. It is curious, then, that the sex machine is given to him instead of Venus. Clen’s approach to the erotic is decidedly technological in a way that his approach to art is not. We might say that his factory-produced art, for all its innovations in production, remains “analog” rather than “digital,” but the Love Machine really shows the scope of Clen’s Jupiterian vision. The nude mistress recruits her erotic prowess to enliven the cold wires and circuitry of the machine, and apparently this idea works — so well in fact that the machine reproduces itself. Whatever Jodorowsky’s thought process behind the sequence may have been, it is interesting that his view on the relationship between the erotic and the mechanistic is more cynical than in the previous two examples. While he does portray the erotic as the superior, non-rational, life-giving force, he also shows its power being used in the service of the machine rather than overcoming it. This segment, along with a surprising amount of others throughout the film, actually suggests a skepticism towards sexual liberation politics, something that hasn’t been commented upon much vis à vis Jodorowsky’s work.

On Erotic Machines

There are, of course, plenty of other examples in cinema and other narrative arts that depict the relationship between machinery and the erotic, and in a more interesting way than presenting machines as mere masturbation or bondage aides. Of course, there are thousands of examples of those, which are not only found in erotic cinema or comic books (see Guido Crepax’s Valentina for an excellent example in which such devices abound) but they’re also collected and displayed in various tourist-friendly museums, like the Sex Machines Museum in Prague. The previous three examples I’ve discussed are more interesting, though, because they go a little bit further in their aims. For one thing, they come hot on the heels of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, a time in which the erotic was presented as a spiritual antidote to the proceduralism and conformity that characterize the modern world, and each example juxtaposes the erotic against the machine (or rational processes reminiscent of machines) in largely the same fashion.

In Barbarella, the titular character’s native erotic energy ultimately overcomes the oppressive power of the machine, while in Sleeper, the same thing basically happens, though in a less literal fashion. In The Holy Mountain, which takes a much more critical view towards the youth counter-culture (despite its participants enjoying it anyway), the erotic is actually used to power the machine, an indication of how the former can be corrupted and commodified. But all the same, the erotic is presented as essentially superior to its cold rationality, since it is ultimately what makes the machine operate and multiply itself. Thus, in all three examples, the erotic is presented essentially as different from the mechanical, an organic substitute to the cold rationality of modern life — something with its own mysterious and exotic power.

This is not an altogether new approach to the subject, either. Throughout western literary history, desire has always been presented as something virtually impossible to plan or account for; a kind of power that no mechanism could ever properly capture. We can see this in the satire of Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose from all the way back in the thirteenth century, and even the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus back in the twelfth (though, I should point out, the satirical interpretation of it remains controversial, as I’ve discussed here). One can also find this sensibility in Book III of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or the chaotic events that unfold in Shakespeare’s various comedies, especially the haphazard endings of his “problem plays” like Measure for Measure. But of course, these are only examples that point to the insufficiency of overwrought schemes and rational planning; they don’t specifically contrast the erotic with mechanical devices or electric machines.

One good early work specifically contrasting the irrationality of the erotic to the machine itself is Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923). This nine-foot-tall glass pane divided into two halves doesn’t really look like much of anything at first glance, only a vague figure in the upper half next to some sort of window-like structure, and some smaller figures and other funky-looking abstract shapes in the lower. But Duchamp conceived the work as a specifically textual experience, and getting a sense of its meaning is impossible without the use of notes that he prepared as a schematic for the piece, and which were later collected in another piece entitled The Green Box. However, the notes it contains are so excessive, complicated, and seemingly arbitrary that one can never actually make sense of the work with a feeling of completion or finality. I’ll quote extensively from how Octavio Paz presents it while relying on Duchamp’s notes from the Green Box, in a passage from his essay “Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare” (1968):

The upper half of the Large Glass is the Bride’s domain. A complicated piece of machinery fills the far left. It is the Bride herself, or to be exact, the Bride in one of her personifications. […] The vague similarities to a human form are accidental; the Bride is an apparatus, and her humanity lies neither in her shapes nor in her physiology. Her humanity is symbolic: the Bride is an ideal reality, a symbol manifested in mechanical forms, producing symbols in its turn. It is a symbol machine. But these symbols are distended and deformed by irony; they are symbols that distill their own negation. The way the Bride works is physiological, mechanical, ironic, symbolic, and imaginary all at the same time; the substance on which she runs is a secretion called “automobiline,” her ecstasies are electric, and the physical force that moves her gears is desire.

[…]

Moving to the right, below the Milky Way, a groove holds up a metallic shaft or stalk connected with the “desire-magnet” lower down. The desire-magnet contains in a cage the “filament substance” (invisible). This substance is the Bride’s secretion, which materializes at her moment of “blossoming.” The Green Box indicates that it “is like a solid flame … which licks the ball of the Handler of Gravity, displacing it as it pleases.” The shaft of the desire-magnet is an axis, which is why its other name is “arbor-type.” It is hard to decide if it is also called “motor with quite feeble cylinders,” or if this expression denotes another part of the machinery. The arbor-type axis or spinal column is connected to a sort of syringe or lancet: this is the “wasp.” The wasp has unusual characteristics: it secretes the “love gasoline” by osmosis; it possesses a sense of smell that allows it to perceive the “waves of unbalance” emitted by the black ball of the Juggler of Gravity; furthermore, it is endowed with a vibratory property that determines the pulsations of the “needle” and of a ventilation system. In turn this determines the “swinging to and fro of the Hanged Female with its accessories.”

Below the wasp is the “tank of love gasoline or timid power.” This erotic gasoline “distributed to the motor with quite feeble cylinders, in contact with the sparks of her constant life (desire-magnet) explodes and makes this virgin, who has attained her desire, blossom.” The tank, also called an “oscillating bathtub,” is what provides for the “hygiene of the Bride.” Lower down, the “pulse needle” is balanced. It is mounted “on a wandering leash. It has the liberty of caged animals.” The pulse needle is in the shape of a rather threatening pendulum, swinging over the void: the horizon-garment of the Bride.

The Bachelor-Machine is a “steam engine on a masonry substructure on this brick base, a solid foundation.” The machine has “a tormented gearing,” and it gives birth to its “desire-part.” Thanks to the latter, the steam engine turns into a “desire motor.” But this motor is separated from the Bride by a “cooler of transparent glass” that blends into the horizon-garment. In the Large Glass these items are hard to identify, and the Bride’s architectonic masonry base does not appear.

[…]

In the lower half of the Large Glass, at the far left, we find the group of the Nine Malic Molds, or Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, or Eros’ Matrix. All three names suit them because the Bachelors have no true personality. They are empty suits, hollow pieces inflated by the illuminating gas. “The Bachelors serve as an architectonic base of the Bride, which thus becomes a sort of apotheosis of virginity.”

The differences between the Bride’s and Bachelors’ respective universes are vast. First of all, “the principal forms of the Bachelor-Machine are imperfect… that is, they are measurable…. The principal forms of the Bride are more or less large or small, have no longer, in relation to their destination, a mensurability.” […] The region of the Bachelors is governed by the laws of classical perspective; the Bride’s by a free geometry where “more or less” is the rule. A world of free forms, which cannot be measured and can be seen only with difficulty: the realm of indetermination, where causality has disappeared or, if it survives, obeys laws and principles that are different from those here below. The Bachelors’ domain is that of measurements and causality, the region of our two- and three-dimensional geometry and, therefore, of imperfect forms.

This is, of course, only Paz’s attempt to make sense of all the parts — one could certainly interpret them differently — and this is only a (very) partial description. In Paz’s essay, the full explication goes on for pages and pages. We haven’t even gotten to the sieves, the water wheel, or the Chocolate Grinder next to the bachelors. This YouTube video, featuring a contrived discussion between two art critics, does a pretty good job of explaining the piece in a relatively short amount of time. But the point is that in this work, we recognize a certain machinery fueled by erotic desire, and yet its final meaning is always endlessly deferred, the desire that fuels it never fully consummated.

Duchamp’s work stands as a pivotal point in the modernistic attitude toward sex and machinery, since it has one foot firmly planted in western tradition and another foot planted into the future. The western literary tradition, somewhat uniquely, honors the irreducibility of eros and treats its essence as beyond all rational comprehension, but as time goes on, the arrival of the electric machine ultimately puts such a conceptualization of it into question. What Duchamp was able to do was draw an explicit connection between the erotic and the machine, which he ultimately (being a Dadaist) reduces to absurdity. This elevation of eros above rationality is actually, in a certain way, a conservative conclusion, and the same conservative conclusion is likewise reached in the three pulpy film examples I’ve discussed. Only Jodorowsky, at that time, was looking toward a world in which the erotic could prove vulnerable to the total dominance of the cold and controlling marketplace, or even actively assist it. But he doesn’t quite go so far as to equate the erotic with the mechanistic. This perception does, however, eventually make its way into the modern imagination, and we could discuss some examples — but this post has gone on long enough, and I feel like ending it here. I will continue the discussion later in a second part.

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I’ve been typing “biosemiotics” into YouTube lately just to see what kind of wacky results might turn up. And indeed, they have been quite wacky. It seems that over the past few years, the term is starting to spread into strange places. Among the results I’ve found, first, there’s this seemingly AI-generated podcast adorned with a thumbnail of an Indian guy not wearing a shirt. There’s also this talk with Kalevi Kull, who has actually done serious work in phytosemiotics (plant communication). Although he’s not the greatest talker, his material makes up the best content you’re likely to get out of YouTube. But then there’s this talk, which is supposed to be about the link between biosemiotics, trauma, and social policy by a hurried and discombobulated British man who never quite gets to his point until deep into the Q&A session. And then there’s this interview with the environmental philosopher and public health scientist Yogi Hendlin, whom I’ll discuss in a moment.

The last two links in particular suggest to me that biosemiotics is turning into a vague catch-all term that you can sport as a sort of fashion. It’s meant to show that you’re into biology, but not in a cold, reductionistic, unfeeling sort of way. You’re not into that whole “nature red in tooth and claw” way of thinking. No, you’re more of a hippie-dippie kinda guy — you’re in touch with your feminine side. You see the animals and the plants, and you’re all about feeling what they feel. In the discombobulated British guy’s talk, for instance, he specifically contrasts biosemiotics with sociobiology, which he feels is a dead-end because it’s a “male” point of view that treats aggression as inborn and part of nature — as opposed to socially constructed, I would have to presume. He also claims that no cooperation can ever happen under the neo-Darwinian framework unless it occurs as part of kin selection. This is a claim which would come as news to Richard Dawkins, who dedicated an entire chapter in his second edition of The Selfish Gene (1989) to showing via game theory models how “tragedy of the commons” situations often compel different species to work together cooperatively across kin lines in ways that would seem irrational at first glance (he called the chapter “Nice Guys Finish First”). So on the whole, the guy’s talk is a bit of a mess, but given that he doesn’t pretend to be an expert, I don’t want to pick on him too much.

The real mess is the interview with Yogi Hendlin, whom I’d never heard of before, but definitely gives off pretty strong charlatan vibes. He constantly shifts what he’s talking about, regularly peppering his discussion with tantalizing non sequiturs. He endorses a strong linguistic relativism, even saying that the Greeks couldn’t see blue because they didn’t have a word for the color blue — an old chestnut that I addressed on this blog last week, incidentally. He endorses the Hollywood slopfest Medicine Man (1992), a preachy film about curing cancer in the rainforest by learning from nature, all while finding true love. He talks quite a bit about getting high on psychedelic drugs (he feels they should be called “ecodelics”) and getting back in touch with your feelings. He, at one point, starts talking about the importance of “killing” your “inner-Nazi,” which is, I’m quoting, “a default mode network which is restraining us from acknowledging the synesthesia— all the feelings that are constantly washing over us.” And, you know, I don’t get that last part, admittedly. After all, who was more emotionally sensitive than Hitler, the man who cared for music so passionately that he ordered a special bunker to be built just to protect Wilhelm Furtwängler from the Allied bombing raids?

Anyways, when the interviewer finally asks Hendlin, “What is biosemiotics?” about twenty minutes into the video, Hendlin chuckles, looks at him knowingly, and says, “Great.” before giving what, by any fair-minded account, would have to be regarded as a pretty weak explanation. He messes up Peirce’s triadic model of signs by confusing the interpretant with the living subject, and he also implies that the “object” is unknowable, almost like Kant’s “ding an sich.” He then turns to Jakob von Uexküll, and he doesn’t do a great job with him, either, calling him a neo-Kantian rather than someone who simply (and luckily for all of us) misunderstood Kant. But beyond these slippages, he never really explains what biosemiotics is in clear terms, or how it relates to any of the other stuff he goes on about. The actual video is entitled, “Biosemiotics: A New Way To Understand Non-Human Consciousness,” and yet you’re left to figure out what it is based on the trail of discursive clues dropped throughout the interview. Apparently it’s about getting high on psilocybin, lying down in a forest, and letting all of your feelings out. Or something.

It seems pretty clear to me that biosemiotics attracts left-wing types with an oppositional mentality. They’re into philosophy, they’re into biology, they’re into the humanities, maybe they’re religious, they want to synthesize these things somehow, and they want recognition for doing important work… but they are mainly driven by the spirit of protest rather than inquiry, and this seems to be crucial for understanding them as a community. Essentially, biosemiotics is attracting people in the market for a “new way of thinking,” one that makes people more opposed to capitalism, or environmental exploitation, or male chauvinism, or whatever. Back when I wrote an informal post on the value I see in semiotics a couple years ago, I basically equated Peircean semiotics with biosemiotics, since the latter seemed to me at the time like a catch-all to describe the study of non-symbolic semiotic processes, i.e. forms of communication occurring at the animal, plant, and even cellular level. But I also said that I’m not too wild about the term “biosemiotics” because semiotics in general should be commonly understood as incorporating all of these forms of communication; it shouldn’t require the prefix “bio-.” In hindsight, I believe I’ve made the right choice in not fully embracing the label.

Since I’m in a “devil’s advocate” sort of mood, I’ll even go a step further and say that their opposition to neo-Darwinism is overstated. Let me explain this point. There’s no question that neo-Darwinism attracts its own kind of subculture, one that is more obnoxious than what the culture of biosemiotics might be (and I only say “might” because I’ve never actually gone to a conference, so I’m just feeling around from the outside). Neo-Darwinism is still the mainstream, accepted evolutionary theory, and it’s flexible enough to accommodate plenty of additions, like niche construction and epigenetics. In fact, its flexibility is enough to make me suspect that it will remain the mainstream account of biological evolution for a good, long while. But when you look at the kinds of public intellectuals it has generated — guys like Richard Hanania, “Professor Dave Explains,” and The Four Horsemen of New Atheism — it doesn’t take long to perceive a streak of puerility at the heart of its most strident adherents; a deep-seated inability to grasp, or perhaps a discomfort with grasping the fundamentals of human psychology, even as they insist that the inner-workings of the green world are precisely what allow us to understand man.

Nevertheless, though, it isn’t exactly hard for me to see why even the most misleading accounts of evolution have proven so popular and so enduring. For biosemiotics, probably the most offensive of these accounts is Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (first published 1976), which has been massively influential all over the world and reprinted numerous times. It also has propounded the coldest and most mechanistic view of life in all of popular science, and if you actually sit down and read it, it is pretty clear that it was written with more than a tinge of self-satisfaction. Dawkins revels in playing the flamboyant role of myth-destroying idol-smasher. What else could explain his rhetorical questions such as, “When you are actually challenged to think of pre-Darwinian answers to the questions ‘What is man?’ ‘Is there a meaning to life?’ ‘What are we for?’, can you, as a matter of fact, think of any that are not now worthless except for their (considerable) historic interest?” and, “If … you are not religious, then face up to the following question: What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?” Pure silliness. Like I said, the neo-Darwinian synthesis has an uncanny ability to attract teenaged minds.

But probably the most outlandish claim of Dawkins is also one of central importance, namely that all organisms without exception are merely “survival machines” that genes have fashioned as vehicles to ensure their ability to keep replicating themselves in perpetuity. I’ve already discussed the conceptual flaws with this characterization of the issue a couple weeks back, and I haven’t changed my mind about the excessive gene-centrism of Dawkins’s account since. But let’s try to be fair-minded about this presentation, since it does actually offer some things that biosemiotics simply cannot. To put it simply, it gives the people what they want: a heuristic framework to serve as the basis for a precise analysis of what’s going on in the natural world at any moment — along with predictions about what will happen in the future. Yes, this is all very unphilosophical, but the Dawkins model gives people an answer to the question, “So what? What’s the application?” and the appeal of such a thing cannot be denied. Even if a narrative-based simplification like “survival machines” ultimately causes more confusion than it resolves, people will still accept it if they feel it offers enough punching power when it comes to explanation and prediction-making. And if your story is amenable to some supplemental game theory analysis or mathematical probability calculations to bolster the feeling of having infinite precision, then all the better. Neo-Darwinism gives an excited response to Leibniz’s clarion call, “Let us calculate!” Biosemiotics, meanwhile, doesn’t really provide anything like that.

So, are organisms really “survival machines,” then? No, I don’t think so. But the metaphor enables the acquisition of what the British philosopher Owen Barfield calls “dashboard knowledge,” since it sidesteps the problem of essential understanding in order to enable operative understanding. And operative understanding is really, really attractive. Barfield explains the concept like so:

Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motor-car, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an ‘operative’ knowledge of it - because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, though he has perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or not there is another kind of knowledge of nature, which corresponds to ‘engine-knowledge’ in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call ‘dashboard-knowledge.

This hypothetical boy, by the way, could easily rely on animistic explanations to help himself understand the car. He could assign one lesser pagan god to each button, switch, and pedal, while reserving a mysterious greater sky god for the operation of the car as a cohesive whole. Such reasoning might even help him learn to drive better. It’s like how the Waldorf schools will use little allegorical gnomes named Mr. Odd and Mrs. Even to teach arithmetic. I’m digressing, here.

Anyhow, back to Dawkins. If these “survival machines” were truly machines, we probably would have been able to fully figure them out by now in a non-superficial way, since we as a species are pretty good with machines. But the truth is that we haven’t even come close to figuring out the simplest of these “survival machines.” Consider this example. Some computer programmers actually tried to digitally recreate a C. elegans worm: a well-researched, transparent, non-parasitic, 1mm long nematode that lives in temperate soil environments — or, in other words, the perfect organism to try and recreate through programming. Relying on an extraordinary body of pre-existing scholarship as well as a scientific advisory panel to guide their every decision, they began the OpenWorm project in 2011. But as it happens, the project has been a failure, with extremely little progress having been made despite plenty of outside interest and support. People seem a bit surprised by this, too. If we can understand nematode worms, surely we could create them, right? If we aren’t stewing in the ignorance of religion, then what on earth could we possibly think animals are, if not robots, albeit complicated ones? And yet, we’ve got nothing.

Dawkins, of course, understands that the brain is not a computer. He even says so in the endnotes to a later edition of The Selfish Gene: his critics are being too “literal-minded” because he’s only saying that brains are analogous to computers. He isn’t so foolish as to think they’re exactly the same thing! But then again, it’s a perfectly fine analogy to use over and over again, because, “Functionally, the brain plays precisely the role of on-board computer—data processing, pattern recognition, short-term and long-term data storage, operation coordination, and so on.” But don’t worry, it’s just an analogy; stop being so literal about everything.

Perhaps Dawkins should have been more concerned about his literal-minded fan base, because many of them didn’t seem to realize that the analogy has serious limitations. Maybe if people had less faith in not just Dawkins’s version of ecology, but the entire “science fiction” outlook on life in which Dawkins has indulged so shamelessly, there wouldn’t be such tremendous confusion about, say, artificial intelligence right now, which appears to be on the verge of a catastrophic speculative bubble revulsion, in large part because no one really knows what intelligence actually is and they seem to think it just means “computation.” A good metaphor can yield plenty of superficial, operative insights, but over time, it can lapse into outright distortion, particularly as it starts to literalize in people’s minds as a hangover from its prior use.

If I’m going to be fair, though, I have to concede something: it is easy to see why the idea of organisms as machines has proven so attractive, even beyond predictive punching power and dashboard knowledge. In nature, organisms do often act “machine-like” in that they don’t demonstrate the kind of reflection or wisdom that we expect of humans. The machine-like behavior of animals actually influenced Martin Heidegger’s philosophy: in his book of lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-1930), he describes an experiment in which a bee is placed in front of a dish of honey. Normally, the bee would consume the honey until satiated and then fly off, but in this experiment, the bee’s abdomen had been physically severed while it was feeding. The bee, apparently either unaware of or uninterested in the new circumstance, keeps consuming the honey indefinitely, even though it cannot digest it anymore. So, it just keeps eating and eating as the honey seeps out of its mutilated body, helpless to see the situation for what it is. This experiment caused Heidegger to conclude that non-human animals reside in a state of captivation (Benommenheit), primed by their immediate environment yet unable to step back and approach each of its component parts as beings in their own right. Thus, whereas humans are “world-forming” (Weltbildend) in a decisive manner (e.g. by being able to perceive deeper contexts, meanings, and possibilities within their surrounding environments), animals are “poor in world” (Weltarm) insofar as they have access to stimuli but not what Heidegger considered Being-as-such.

Later philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, have criticized Heidegger for these conclusions, but the basic point seems pretty hard to toss aside. Typically, when we characterize a behavior as “animalistic,” we’re talking about sex, violence, or gluttony. The most “animalistic” behavior is often automatic and thus reducible to the operation of machinery. If life were simply eat, fight, fuck, and die, then project OpenWorm probably would have been a resounding success. But it’s all of the other stuff that takes place in the intervening periods that makes life so difficult to understand, and perhaps impossible to recreate from the ground up.

What biosemiotics has always promised, to me anyway, is a framework for understanding these “unsexy” aspects of life — those that don’t immediately draw our attention, since they aren’t strictly about survival in an immediate way, and yet are essential to understanding life’s inner-workings. One dog humping another dog is pretty easy to explain, but it’s less easy to explain the behavior of dogs when they’re engaging in nonproductive play. When they’re just messing around for the hell of it, basically. In those instances, one can never predict what will happen next from moment to moment. Heidegger was probably right in his view that humans have a privileged access to meaning, which he elsewhere attributes to language (“the house of being,” as he famously called it). Because humans are the only species with symbolic communication, they actually can ponder the greater contextual circumstances that make up any situation. Human beings have an elevated capacity for recognizing the haeccitas, or uniqueness, of any given entity or scenario, and as a corollary, they can also recognize its quiddity, or its essential nature. But all the same, biosemiotics is there to keep us mindful of one of C.S. Peirce’s claims that in even the most rudimentary forms of experience or semiosis, there is always the distant potential for “thirdness” or symbolic understanding. That is, from the very beginning of life in its simplest manifestations, the seeds of symbolic awareness are already planted, and this condition is what imbues all of life with semiotic freedom — even if this freedom is not exploited so decisively until organisms reach a sufficiently complex state.

It’s worth noting that Dawkins himself, the arch-villain of the biosemioticians, recognized that humans are unique in their ability to overcome their genetic programming. While he may have oversimplified the significance of this genetic programming, it is undeniable that he was positing some kind of free will among the human species. Over and over again throughout The Selfish Gene, he denies being a genetic determinist and says things like, “Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes.” Of course, he lacks any kind of philosophical framework to explain what this rebellion actually is, or how it could come into being — and given that he’s now 85 and spent the majority of his life agreeing with the statement that all attempts to explain human nature prior to 1859 are worthless (it’s always so convenient when we can find an excuse to be less erudite), it’s safe to say he’ll never find one, and neither will his biggest fans. But all the same, the admission is there. And concomitant with that admission, if we really want to take this claim seriously, is the possibility that the evolutionary model for all other species that the neo-Darwinists use — namely, kin selection as opposed to group selection — might not even meaningfully apply to humans. In other words, the rules-of-thumb that the neo-Darwinists have spent such painstaking amounts of time to explain the green world might only have an attenuated value when it comes to understanding man. This could explain why sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, fields I’d say are worth taking seriously despite some conceptual flaws, often result in lousy, unconvincing research.

I’ll end this rambling, wandering post with this final statement. To the extent that I’m interested in biosemiotics, I’d have to say that the biosemiotics I prefer is one more compatible with the poet William Blake, who once wrote, “Where man is not, nature is barren,” as opposed to, say, the radical environmentalist Pentti Linkola, who once wrote, “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.” In other words, I’m always going to approach biosemiotics anthropocentrically, if that word can be taken in a certain sense. Here I don’t mean “anthropocentric” epistemically, in the sense of anthropomorphizing the world and analyzing it according to human laws, which is indeed a prejudice that should be eliminated when possible. Instead, I mean it rather normatively, in the sense of acknowledging that only man so far has demonstrated the ability to decisively steer his own destiny and behave in a way that can be minimally machine-like, minimally automatic, and minimally robotic — that is, when he isn’t lapsing into what’s commonly known as “animal nature.” For that reason, when I’m looking into the world of ecology, I’m looking for hints of what later grows into man’s more fully realized semiotic freedom, his symbolic understanding of life, and his creative imagination. But it seems that these hints are not essential to the survival of any given species, while the essential behaviors are often brutish and machinic. This acknowledgment would seem to place me at odds with how some of biosemiotics’ vocal advocates can be at their worst: actively avoiding the uglier aspects of non-human life, almost like a frightened child who simply wants reconciliation with The Great Mother.

I’m reminded of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2005), about the conservationist Timothy Treadwell, who went to go film brown bears in Alaska seasonally over the course of thirteen summers. Given the different viewpoints on nature between Treadwell and Herzog, I must admit, I’m closer to Herzog when he says, among other things,

What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.

Treadwell, if you haven’t seen the documentary, was eventually mauled to death by one of these bears that he so enjoyed visiting and filming. Any account of nature that cannot confront this crucial side of life should probably forfeit all claims of scientific/philosophical authority.

edit 4/19: fixed up some minor grammar issues, did some superficial rewordings

edit 4/21: I replaced the word “overdetermined” with “overstated” because I was using it wrong

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that deals with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. And sometimes linguistics.

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I. Intro

If you were in a first-year “intro to linguistics” class at the university during the ‘00s, you probably learned about something called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and you then quickly learned about how it’s wrong. The level of detail you’d hear on the topic would vary from teacher to teacher. For instance, you might have learned that “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” is a bit of a misnomer, since neither Edward Sapir nor Benjamin Lee Whorf officially wrote down a hypothesis to be tested, and therefore, it’s really several different claims that people have thrown together. You might also have learned a bit about Sapir and Whorf themselves, and what kinds of things they were interested in. But you’d get at least these two basic pieces of information: first, that there is such a thing called “the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” and second, that it’s wrong because it is the main theory that represents what’s known as linguistic relativity, which is basically linguistic determinism, which is wrong. For most people, that’s where the story would begin and end, and very few within my generation would pursue the question any further. From what I gather, the topic may be handled a bit more carefully now, but I cannot confirm this. I’m only speaking for what the perception is among most educated millennials and their elders, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it has remained the same for the most part up to the present day.

In its strong form, linguistic relativity is the idea that the structure and lexicon of a language shapes and determines all of its speakers’ thoughts — or, in other words, that our linguistic categories limit and restrict our cognitive categories. There is, to be sure, no evidence for this claim, and indeed it is wrong. We should all be thankful that it is wrong, too, because if it weren’t, then things like propaganda, Orwellian “newspeak,” “woke” neologisms, and other such shenanigans would prove so overwhelmingly powerful as to preclude all critical resistance. Actually, if taken to a far enough extreme, linguistic determinism is absurd on its face, because if language exhaustively determines thinking, then it would be impossible for any neologisms to be created in the first place. No innovation would be possible at all! But fortunately, there is a weaker version of linguistic relativity, which says that a language’s structure can influence its speakers’ perceptions without absolutely determining them. For a while, I’ve suspected that this view is correct, and so I was glad to finally discover some academic research that strongly indicates its accuracy. That is what this post will be about.

First, I should point out that relativism is still a contentious topic. All of Chomskyan linguistics depends upon linguistic universalism to be the case, Chomsky’s theories dominated the field for quite some time, and this is why the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was usually presented with a negative framing for so long. In 1994, Steven Pinker’s mega-popular bestselling The Language Instinct took aim at all forms of linguistic relativity, devoting special attention to trashing Benjamin Lee Whorf in particular, and Pinker would go on to promote the universal hypothesis in other books from a variety of angles. Pinker is probably the most famous Chomskyan linguist besides Chomsky himself, and his anti-relativist ideas on language have even seeped into broader sociocultural discussions, like for instance his concept of “the euphemistic treadmill,” which in his view shows the absurdity of “politically correct” language reforms. I’ll come back to that point later.

II. “Mentalese”

The reason that Chomskyan linguistics depends upon universalism is more subtle than your typical culture war discourse, however. Chomsky’s theories require universalism because in order for language to be an instinct, or an adaptive trait that we evolved to have, or a mental faculty essentially stored within the physical structure of brain, or something characterized by a “universal grammar” that can take on many different manifestations — all views associated with his framework — then everyone must have the same basic pre-linguistic mental state which language can only build upon by creating words and thus a means of vocal/written expression. In other words, Chomsky took for granted that all languages convey the same pre-linguistic thoughts, only using different words and word-orders. When Pinker sought to expand upon this view and give it some scientific validation, he recruited the cognitive theories of Jerry Fodor, who strongly advocated for something called “mentalese,” which is the idea that we all have a language of pure thought without any words — innate ideas that come to us before we ever put them into our native spoken language. According to this view, our ability to perceive the world is already there, and language simply gives us the ability to articulate it. The concepts that we have are already in our minds, and words simply act as media, which dutifully convey the concepts in a neutral, unobtrusive fashion.

Advocates of “mentalese” can be found all over the place, often where you wouldn’t expect them. The novelist Cormac McCarthy, for instance, believes in it, and without using the actual word, he even wrote an essay about how human language was a parasitic innovation that actually diminished non-linguistic thought’s expressive range. Despite McCarthy’s pessimism, however, I think the idea of “mentalese” is on the whole pretty optimistic. Pinker is one of the great Pollyannas of our time, and it isn’t because of his books like The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), with its delusional assessment of what he calls “The Long Peace” of the post-1945 world. No, the reason his view is so cheery is because of how he understands the relationship between “mentalese” and spoken language: spoken language, in this model, is the medium, and non-linguistic thought is the real message. He really thinks a medium can be a passive, neutral vehicle that simply conveys information, and that’s that. If only life weren’t so messy! But the problem here is that all of cognition involves our minds penetrating outward into the transcendent, material world. Indeed, our minds cannot do otherwise, because there is no such thing as a purely internalized mind. We may have built-in calibrations or instincts that come prior to all experience (passed down through genetics, no doubt), but those instincts cannot assume a form and an expression until they’ve got something to interact with. Languages are what come out of this direct, worldly engagement between man and his surroundings. Man’s thought can only develop alongside his ability to use symbols to great effect, and all symbols (including letters, numbers, words, morphemes, glyphs, and diacritics) are gifts to us from the exterior. They are not “built-in,” nor could they be.

In his Incomplete Nature (2011), Terrence Deacon skewers the concept of mentalese, showing that it’s just another expression of the homunculus fallacy so characteristic of Cartesian thinking. Responding to Pinker’s claim that everyone has an interior “language of thought” that spoken languages merely translate into words, Deacon remarks,

If thought equals language, then all that needs to be explained is the translation. But wait a minute! Exactly who or what is producing and comprehending mentalese? Modeling thought on language thus implicitly just pushes the problem back a level … For a language to be “spoken” in the head, an unacknowledged homunculus must be interpreting it. Does this internal speaker of mentalese have to translate mentalese into homunculese? Is mentalese self-interpreted? If so, it is not like a language, and it is unclear what this would mean anyway.

Essentially, there can be no language without inputs. And linguistic universalism is the assumption that the shapes and contours of these inputs will have no effect whatsoever on the way people use them to form thoughts, because the thoughts are already pre-formed. Again: if only our beautiful, precious minds could be so pure…

So far, I’ve been explaining the problem with linguistic universalism from a theoretical standpoint, which has largely formed my thoughts on the subject of language in general. But for the question of relativity, I realize that mere theory is not enough. This is why I recently read The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct (2014) by Vyvyan Thomas. I should point out that although I read it and will use some information from it, I would not actually recommend it as a whole, since it has some serious shortcomings. Thomas seems overly focused on contradicting Pinker even in areas where he seems to be on more solid footing, such as his distinction between human language and animal communications systems. This works to the detriment of Thomas’s secondary goal, which is to propose a more robust theory on the nature of language, one that he calls “language-as-use” rather than “language-as-instinct.” Thomas is also largely uninformed about semiotics in general, which would have helped inform a better theory of language. The book is also not especially well-written, indulging in polemic a bit too often to provide a fair presentation of the controversy. However, its seventh chapter, which attempts to rehabilitate a soft version of linguistic relativity, is a good, solid presentation of the recent empirical research on the topic. Thomas shows pretty convincingly that this research has been methodologically convincing and well-executed, and it has helped redeem the position that language does, in fact, contribute to the shaping of thought. That chapter is actually why I wanted to read the book in the first place, and so in that sense, it did not disappoint.

Thomas spends most of the chapter rehabilitating Whorf in particular, since between him and Sapir, he was much more professionally interested in language’s effect on thought. Whorf’s foundational principle of linguistic relativity was this (as quoted in The Language Myth):

Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

And most attacks on Whorfian thought rarely contend with this statement as it’s formulated. Typically, critics focus on Whorf’s most extreme claims (or their own misinterpretations of his claims) when attempting to debunk him, as Steven Pinker did in The Language Instinct, which caricaturizes Whorfian thought pretty unfairly. But Whorf actually maintained a reserved version of linguistic relativity, as he himself clarified in his writings:

The tremendous importance of language cannot, in my opinion, be taken to mean necessarily that nothing is back of it of the nature of what has traditionally been called ‘mind’. My own studies suggest, to me, that language, for all its kingly role, is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness, which are necessary before any communication, signalling, or symbolism whatsoever can occur.

Note that he isn’t proposing a theory of mentalese, but is instead acknowledging the depth found within consciousness itself — a multi-processual awareness of one’s phenomenal world that precedes language. Again, this is the Whorf that linguistic universalists typically choose to ignore, instead focusing on canards like the one about Eskimos perceiving snow differently because they have dozens of words for it (a myth that neither Sapir nor Whorf promoted).

A good example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the notion that cultures with different words for colors will perceive them differently upon encountering them in nature. This is actually a totally defensible claim, as I’ll show in a second, but it can get pushed to absurd lengths. For instance, it has been the basis of a popular claim that the Ancient Greeks didn’t see the color blue because they didn’t have a word for “blue,” instead characterizing the ocean as “wine-dark” (as Homer did), thus linking it instead with red/purple liquid. This belief is, of course, false — the Greeks didn’t have a straightforward color for blue as with modern English, but they saw blue just fine. To draw a similar parallel, the European languages didn’t always have a word for “orange” — for instance, the current word for orange in Hungarian is “narancssárga,” which literally translates to “orange-yellow,” but the “narancs” part was borrowed from the Old Italian “narancia,” referring to the citrus fruit. And, as it happens, the citrus fruit only became the word for a new color in Italian during the 16th century. So, the fruit came first, then the color. But I’m pretty sure the Europeans all could see the color orange before this, even if they didn’t have a need to identify it as such.

With the intent of disproving such wild claims as the one about Greeks and the color blue, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay put out a book called Basic Color Terms (1969), which argued persuasively that the color spectrum exhibits cross-linguistic universals, and all language speakers can see all the same colors as the others, regardless of how each language divvies them up. In other words, our shared neurobiology constrains language, and so cross-linguistic variation is always undergirded by semantic universals that will always inevitably be specified in context. So, if I don’t have a word for, say, chartreuse, I can at least give some context clues with the words I do have to point to that color. For a good, long while, this study dominated the field, and it seemed like any relativistic claims about color were completely out of the question. If you thought that any language’s words for colors caused that language’s speakers to perceive the colors differently, then you were a knucklehead. End of story.

But eventually, in the 1990s, an influential critique emerged, first led by the American cognitive linguist John Lucy, then adopted by other researchers. Among other things, it pointed out that investigating the effect of man’s innate color perception on the language he speaks doesn’t actually prove all that much. Yes, a culture might qualify a specific color with more contextual clues if they don’t have a specific word for it… but who cares? The only way to truly disprove linguistic relativism would be to demonstrate conclusively that language does not influence man’s psychophysical operations in the domain of color, and this is something that Berlin and Kay did not even attempt. But then again, the neo-Whorfians like John Lucy didn’t attempt to do the opposite for a good while, either. Instead, they pointed to the sheer diversity of how languages could conceptualize color. It had emerged since Berlin and Kay’s research that not all languages carry the same basic color terms. For instance, Yélî Dnye, the language of Rossel Island in New Guinea, only has three basic color terms corresponding to black, white, and red — nothing close to the whole spectrum. In fact, the speakers don’t even have a single lexical class from which color is drawn. Surely, the neo-Whorfians reasoned, this would mean that they aren’t seeing the world the same way, right? But such observations didn’t impress Steven Pinker and other universalists, because the data didn’t demonstrate that the language is specifically impacting thought itself, which Pinker, Fodor, and others see as operating prior to language.

III. The Experiments

Eventually, research was conducted by neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry and psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos which sought to prove that language really is impacting perception. This would be a hard thing to do, because an absence of words or some other peculiarity in a given language wouldn’t be enough to show that the speakers perceive the world differently. So, they found a solution: they aimed to show that language affects automatic, unconscious, and low-level perceptual processing — the kind of “thinking” you do before your conscious mind has the time to process what’s happening. If language could affect people in that kind of psychophysical domain, then surely language would have to influence thought in a meaningful way. And so, in 2009, they released a study entitled “Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception.” Its results were pretty striking.

The experiment worked like this: Thierry and Athanasopoulos took a group of Greek speakers, and a group of English speakers. They measured their responses to colors by charting the electrical activity in their brains, so they could determine each participant’s perceptual awareness at fractions of a second. They then showed them a series of successive circles in four blocks. The blocks were colored dark blue, light blue, dark green, and light green. They asked study participants to press a button when they saw a square coming onto the screen rather than a circle — this instruction was a red herring, so the participants would not know what they were being tested on. Now, this is the interesting part: occasionally, a dark blue circle would enter into the light blue block, and vice versa; and also, a dark green circle would enter into the light green block, and vice versa. The participants would believe that this was just a trick and try to withhold from pushing the button. But in reality, the point of the study was to measure how long their brains would take to register the mismatched colors as indeed mismatched. The button they pressed was irrelevant, and the real significance was in their brain activity.

So would they be more sensitive to a different shade of some color? That is, would they show stronger and swifter brain activity? And if so, why would that happen? Simple: in Greek, there is no single word for blue. There is a word for dark blue (ble), and a word for light blue (ghalazio), and so blue is treated as two separate colors. But in Greek, there is just one word for green. In English, however, there is no such basic distinction for either blue or green. The debate about linguistic relativity had finally come full circle: originally, arguments about the Greek language and its relationship to the color blue had been cited as examples of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’s most absurd claims, but now, an argument about Greek and the color blue was being used to redeem Whorf and strike back at linguistic universalism. The results of this study indicated that the Greek speakers were indeed a little bit more sensitive to the differences in the blue range, but they were not more sensitive to differences in the green. Additionally, the English speakers were equally sensitive in both blue and green blocks. So, in other words, at the pre-conscious, directly perceptual level, the language seemed to determine how readily a speaker would detect a color difference. The results didn’t show a drastic difference, as perhaps the researchers had hoped, but there was a difference nevertheless.

This same basic procedure was also used in other ways by other researchers, such as the neurolinguist Bastien Boutonnet. In collaboration with Thierry, he was able to find that language has a relativistic effect on how people classify different objects. The English language distinguishes between a cup and a mug, while in Spanish, they simply use taza for both. They devised a similar methodology to what we saw in the previous experiment about the color blue, and Boutonnet & Thierry found that English speakers are more sensitive to the shape of drinking containers than Spanish speakers. And just as with the color experiment, this was all measured at the pre-conscious level, before lettered reasoning could take over and linguistic bias could make the judgments for the participants.

A similar procedure involving the measurement of brain activity was also used to measure the way gendered language can impact our perceptions. For this study, Boutonnet, Thierry, and Athanasopoulos recruited English speakers (an ungendered language) and native Spanish speakers (a gendered language) who spoke English as a second language. In this experiment, they presented participants with images of two objects that had the same grammatical gender in Spanish, one at a time. Then, a third image was presented — for half the participants, it was the same gender, and for the other half, it was the opposite. Participants were told to indicate using a button whether the third image matched the same semantic category as the first two. This way, they wouldn’t know what the study was about. And once again, Spanish speakers had a more sensitive pre-conscious reaction to the images that did not match the same gender, while there was no such pattern among English speakers.

Although this next one wasn’t covered in Vyvyan Thomas’s book, I can’t resist including one more of such experiments. Over on this linguistics podcast, recorded in 2017, one of the hosts describes an experiment conducted by Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos in the same year. In this experiment, they tested the way spatial metaphors cause people to perceive the duration of time. Understand that in Swedish (and English), speakers use the spatial metaphor of “long” or “short,” to describe a temporal event, like say, taking a nap. In Spanish, however, they use “big” and “small.” What the researchers did was show 40 Swedish speakers and 40 Spanish speakers two videos, both exactly three seconds, and both depicting an animation of a line growing longer. In one, the line grew quite long, and in the other, the line only grew a little bit. The Swedish speakers, who conceptualize time as “long” and “short” overall thought that the videos with the line growing shorter took less time than the other video, in which the line grows longer. So, the length of the line influenced how they interpreted the duration of the video. The Spanish speakers, lacking such a spatial metaphor, did not make such an error. They did, however, get a little bit more fooled by two similar animations depicting a container filling up: one getting filled up less, and another getting filled up more (since they often use the metaphor of “fullness” to describe a temporal event), while the Swedish speakers did not. Again, none of them knew that they were being tested on linguistic relativity.

There are a few other studies that Thomas presents from Stephen Levinson and Lera Boroditsky. I’ll summarize the latter first. To understand Boroditsky’s research, know that in Mandarin Chinese, speakers conceptualize time using vertical rather than horizontal spatial metaphors, so they’ll say something akin to “the transistor came higher than the microchip” rather than “the transistor came before the microchip,” as we would say in English. To give a precise example of this tendency, their word for morning is shang-ban-tian, literally “upper-half day, while the word for evening is xia-ban-tian, “lower-half day.” In Boroditsky’s research team’s experiment, they presented English and Mandarin speakers two photos of a given celebrity; one in which he’s young, and another in which he’s old. They then told participants to press one of two buttons indicating whether the second picture was taken later or earlier than the first. In different tests, they calibrated the keys differently: for one, the keys were arranged horizontally with “earlier” on the left and “later” on the right, while for another it was reversed. In a third, the keys were arranged vertically with “earlier” at the top and “later” at the bottom, and in a fourth, the top and bottom were reversed. What the team found was that both English and Mandarin speakers were quicker to press the correct key when it is arranged in a manner consistent with the language on the horizontal plane, but when “earlier” was to the right of “later,” they were a bit slower to hit the right key. Makes sense. However, this same condition did not apply to when the buttons were arranged on the vertical plane: Mandarin speakers were significantly faster to hit the correct button when the “earlier” one was at the top and the “later” one was at the bottom. For English speakers, it didn’t matter either way. So in this case, the manner in which the language conceptualizes time caused the Chinese speakers to complete their task faster.

Levinson’s research is a bit more vulnerable to criticisms alleging correlation rather than clear causation than the others, so I will explain it in a more truncated manner. In his case, he has done work on the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithir, which uses an absolute spatial reference frame. That is, instead of the way we say that an object is to our “left” or “right,” or the way we say the sun goes “down” or “up,” they use universal and not relative spatial terms, so for them, everything is “north,” “south,” “east,” or “west,” and these terms must be used accurately. Levinson found that the speakers of this language were significantly better at “dead reckoning” than other groups, which means that when they were taken to an unfamiliar location, they were faster in determining their precise spatial coordinates. So, in other words, their reliance on establishing absolute spatial relations in order to use their language correctly influenced their ability to determine what the spatial relations are even in unfamiliar territories.

The problem with Boroditsky’s and Levinson’s research is that one could just accuse them of ignoring other variables that would increase the skill level of the language’s speakers in these tasks. In Levinson’s case, that criticism is quite easy to make, since we’re dealing with a primitive tribe who might have gained the skills to orient themselves to their surroundings predominately as a means of survival, with the language merely reflecting an externally-imposed demand for such spatial awareness. Therefore, one could argue that if they modernized themselves, their spatial terminology would naturally become more relative than universal, and this development would reflect their changes in needs. But in Boroditsky’s, it is harder to make such a criticism — I can’t really understand how the Chinese would have a more “vertically-oriented culture” in any other domain besides language, so it would seem that in that case, the language really does have an effect.

IV. Implications

Now, when you look at all of this research put together, the results might seem a bit underwhelming at first. In all of these studies, the differences between the language groups being tested are pretty minor, and they’re being tested for highly specific brain patterns and behaviors within very distinct situations. There is nothing in these studies that will blow anyone’s socks off. However, I think the significance of these results might be a little elusive at first. After all, we are dealing with the question of whether our adopted language — something that none of us are born with — has an impact on how we perceive the world at the pre-conscious level, before our verbally-articulated interpretations start to kick in. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this mode of interaction “secondness,” a state in which a living being perceives actuality, fact, and objectivity, but without yet bringing it into verbal and reflective understanding. This is the state in which we recognize that something is there, and it’s something distinct from us, but we haven’t yet placed it into a symbolic order of relations. It is the state of being that most non-human animals occupy, themselves lacking language. And if our language has the ability to retroactively influence how we perceive life in this more immediate, more instinctive state of understanding, then the implications could be quite far reaching — much more than we’d at first assume when looking at such meticulously designed studies, all of which measure fairly acute phenomena just to evade accusations of research bias.

The implications could extend into areas that we typically have strong feelings about, even those of us who have been “properly” educated to believe in linguistic universalism. For instance, if you take Chomsky and Pinker’s theories on language seriously, you would have no choice but to dismiss the writings of George Orwell, who strongly believed that the choice of words that authoritarian regimes use in their state-issued propaganda has an effect on how their actions will be perceived. Orwell’s observation has been the basis for attacks on “political correctness,” “woke” terminology, and other progressive attempts at language reform. But Pinker addressed all of this with his concept of the “euphemism treadmill,” a term he coined in 1994. For Pinker, political correctness is bad not because it is dangerous or harmful, but because it is simply pointless. Once a politically correct word is introduced, the associations that people have with its referent will take over the elevated connotation that word once had, and so the politically correct word will become just as tainted as the previous term it sought to replace. Therefore, political correctness is bad, but there’s also no reason to find it threatening.

It is actually remarkable how few people actually buy this argument, at least when you judge their actions. George Orwell is just as popular as ever, and people quote him all the time. Even those who agree with Pinker in a more reflective, intellectually distant way still react to politically correct or “woke” language reforms with as much hostility as they would if it were truly a threat. Perhaps they should. While Pinker was encouraging people to react to these changes with an air of superior quietism rather than outward resistance, books by professional tenured linguists like Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (1995) were being published (I review it here), which basically argued that linguistic prescriptivism is good when it is being done for progressive political reasons. So even within the field of linguistics — a field filled with people who had no problem paying lip service to the ideas that “prescriptivism” is bad, the concepts always come before the words, and so on — there was a certain strand of left-wing thought that attempted to square the impossible circle by maintaining that orthodox position, on the one hand, and yet on the other, still agreeing with progressive language reform anyway. It’s as if instinctively they realized that linguistic universalism is a bogus theory, “mentalese” isn’t real, and language really does have an effect on how we perceive the world around us.

Perhaps their actions should have told us something; namely, that these reforms have always been capable of changing how people think. For instance, if we consider one feminist language reform of the 1970s, which deprivileged “he” as the default pronoun for unknown or anonymous people (at least in most professional copy-editing handbooks for big-name publishers), this change seems to have made a real impact on how people perceive gender in society. When authorities replaced the masculine “he” with the neuter plural “they” and imposed it in a top-down manner, I can’t see how it wouldn’t have affected the way people’s minds actually conjure up the image of the anonymous person about whom they’re speaking. Accordingly, it doesn’t surprise me at all that transgender activism turned its attention so aggressively toward the proper use of pronouns in identifying transgender individuals throughout the 2010s. A linguistic universalist would dismiss all of this as meaningless finger-wagging, but it would seem that the activists knew better.

Anyhow, I didn’t really want to take this direction into such fraught sociopolitical territory, since there are so many other implications for even a soft linguistic relativity… but let that one area stand as a clear example. The bottom line is, a language is a medium for conveying ideas, and no medium is ever “neutral” or “pure.” Every medium has an impact on that which it conveys, and it couldn’t be otherwise. Whorf’s name has been tarnished for no good reason.

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That “memetics” has failed as a path of scientific inquiry is not new news. It has been well over a decade since any reputable scientists have tried to take it seriously, and with the semi-recent death of Daniel Dennett, probably its most high profile advocate, it seems all but guaranteed to stay buried in the footnotes of evolutionary historiography. People were predicting its failure from the very beginning of the term’s coinage, and the criticisms only grew over time as the field tried to legitimize itself. The Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission was launched in 1997, and it ended in 2005 due to a lack of quality submissions. In its very last issue, one of its editors, Bruce Edmonds, observed that the idea of the “meme” had failed to provide any added value in how we understand phenomena, cultural and otherwise. Meanwhile, the philosophy of science writer Kate Distin published a book in 2005 called The Selfish Meme, but then in 2011, wrote a thematically similar book called Cultural Evolution, in which she explained in an appendix that she had abandoned the concept of the meme entirely. Since then, the word has only been used in its original sense as a kind of shorthand among laymen, but its feeling of potential has long since faded. It is certainly interesting that the word “meme,” first coined in 1976, would take about a decade to gain traction within the scientific community. Also interesting is that it continues to thrive as the word for online joke templates that people re-post over and over, often with slight alterations to fit new circumstances. In that latter sense, the word’s legacy has been firmly solidified. But for anyone who took the subject seriously, the failure of the “meme” as a concept to aid in widespread cultural inquiry should have been completely predictable from the start.

If you’re feeling a little lost right now because you’re only aware of the frivolous, fancy-free, superficial, internet-exclusive meaning of “meme” (the only meaning that should be in use), let me supply some background. The concept of the meme was first introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his groundbreaking work of popular science, The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins’s book remains one of the best-known user-friendly explanations of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, i.e. evolutionary theory following the synthesis between Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance (we call this “the modern synthesis”). Dawkins’s basic argument is that life began on Earth when molecules gained the ability to copy themselves, becoming “replicators.” Though he shies away from the term “RNA,” his view is broadly aligned with the RNA World hypothesis, which argues that self-replicating RNA molecules spread before the evolution of DNA and proteins. But however you conceive of them, eventually, these “replicators” became better and better at protecting themselves as they grew more complex. They eventually upgraded themselves to DNA molecules, and thus the gene was born, whose various potential forms would be determined through the rigorous trials of Darwinian natural selection. These genes, which are made of DNA, slowly developed structures in which to ensconce themselves, and we call these structures organisms. And organisms are nothing more than what Dawkins calls “survival machines,” since the genes devised them gradually through random mutations that occurred over many sequences of copies, with only the fittest mutations being selected by the genes’ surrounding environment to aid them in survival. So, yes, you and I, along with all other flora and fauna, are nothing more than “lumbering robots,” mechanistically-determined tools for these selfish, selfish genes to keep copying themselves into the future. It’s a hell of a story.

Now, what does all that have to do with memes? Well, Dawkins came up with “memes” as a direct correspondence to “genes.” He even fashioned the word “meme” (a bastardization of “mimesis”) to sound like “gene” specifically. It is a clever coinage, and it doesn’t surprise me that the word itself has succeeded so well despite being divested of its original meaning. For Dawkins, human culture can be explained by “memes,” and he mainly came up with the idea to show the importance of replication — the essence of life, in his view. The Selfish Gene has been criticized for being excessively gene-centric (more on that later), but Dawkins must have anticipated such a criticism, and this is why he bothered with the concept of the meme in the first place: it isn’t just genes that act as replicators, but other things as well. And, in his view, as long as his audience could accept this concept of the “replicator” and think about other contexts in which it might be appropriate besides the world of genes, then his chapter on memes would be a success. He was never trying to posit anything that could amount to a rigorous science, and if you read the chapter, it bears all the signs of being more of an elaborate thought experiment than anything else.

The “meme,” or the replicable “unit of cultural transmission,” is presented the same way as the gene: as something that “wants” to survive despite having no consciousness. In the same way that Dawkins presents genes as selfish, memes must be selfish, too. Memes can even be parasitic, harming entire communities of humans all for their own survival — this, for Dawkins, is his explanation for why religion exists, something he considers essentially harmful. But memes aren’t all bad. In fact, they’re quite all-encompassing, since they also include ideas, melodies, catch phrases, clothing fashion, and even technologies such as ways of making pots or building arches (these are all his examples). They are basically everything that humans have ever created that is repeatable and in some way contributes to what we call culture. But the key thing to keep in mind about the meme is that it replicates by traveling from human brain to human brain: in the same way that genes have their own environments, the human being is the meme’s environment. This was the core idea that launched the discipline of memetics in the mid-1980s with the work of Douglas Hofstadter, and which inspired the attempt to establish the scientific legitimacy behind the concept of the meme.

It isn’t hard to understand why the concept of memes didn’t really blow up until the spread of the internet, though. When the internet became common in most American homes, the idea of “memes” became highly well-known, since internet memes “go viral” in the same way Dawkins conceptualized the spread of memes as basic cultural units. Or, at least, so it seemed. The computer is the meme’s vehicle of replication, but the human is the meme’s environment, or what it ultimately “infects.” At the time, it all came across as so straightforward. It was therefore compelling to consider all of the ways in which, for instance, that dancing baby video, or the hampster dance, or “all your base are belong to us” are adapted to survive in our minds and compel us to spread them further. “Hmmm,” someone might think, “Babies are cute… and yes, they must be cute because they speak to our need to replicate ourselves… yes, yes. And just observe this baby’s hypnotic rhythms… I can see how the dancing baby is adapted specifically to infect our minds.” Someone else might start to think, “Ahhh, mistranslations are funny to us, because they highlight the significance of proper communication. And a given mistranslated sentence can spontaneously occur just about anywhere, the absurdity of the location corresponding to the absurdity of the phrasing. Therefore, ‘all your base are belong to us’ is especially potent for replication.” And so on. Writers like Mike Godwin and Richard Brodie primed us to think of internet content in terms of “memes” during the mid-1990s, right around when guys like Daniel Dennett were promoting memetics as a serious science, and in doing so they helped form the bridge between Dawkins’s understanding of evolution and how we might imagine the evolution of online information.

But today, it is hard to imagine that anyone really still believes that internet virality is a meaningful sign of a message’s intrinsic fitness. Ever since the arrival of TikTok, which has brought internet viral culture to an unforeseen plateau of real-world significance, commentators have started pivoting to a different, more pessimistic position. Instead, it is now remarkable how utterly meaningless and random new online-centered trends actually are. A memetics-advocate might say, “Well, the randomness perfectly matches the randomness of the mutations that occur in genes!” but the problem is that the content of a successful internet trend is often completely immaterial — more of an afterthought than anything. A recent Bloomberg article explains how TikTok is used to make seemingly random consumer products go viral, and how this has produced a mostly disorienting effect, even on some of its most enthusiastic consumers:

What the hell is a Labubu? Is Dubai chocolate a brand or, I don’t know, just a genre of candy bar? Who is Benson Boone, and what does he want from us?

At first, I thought this might just be another worrisome sign of aging: I no longer understand kids these days. But kids these days seem just as baffled as their elders by many of the things that they—and to a significant extent, we—are expected to latch on to. On social media, the confusion of teens and twentysomethings has become a meme unto itself.

Whereas a “memetics-based” approach would tell us that all of these things are special in some way — that they burrow in our heads and possess us to spread them around due to their unique memetic potency — people are slowly starting to realize in that in actual practice, today’s memes are not inherently too impressive, and their ephemeral, fleeting moments of popularity are rather driven by our human need to have things to latch onto when finding social commonalities. They are more like Schelling points, the game theory concept, than viruses, and thus they’re actually more amenable to a purely structuralist mode of analysis than a memetic one. Can anyone seriously give an explanation for the adaptiveness of “six seven”?

But of course, this is just a criticism of memetics applied to internet culture, where information is abundant, fast-paced, and seemingly inexhaustible. Human culture in general hasn’t always operated the same way, as information has often been slow, sparse, and unscalable (another popular writer, Nassim Taleb, has called the pre-literate information world “Mediocristan” as opposed to today’s “Extremistan”). But even there, in more predictable low-scale information environments, the framework of memetics has proven unsatisfactory. In 2002, the aforementioned Bruce Edmonds issued three challenges for the study of memetics, recognizing that the concept was in serious trouble. They were:

1. Produce a case study of a cultural process whose nature is essentially evolutionary (taken in a strict sense).

2. Come up with a theoretical model for when it is appropriate to use a memetic analysis (i.e. situations that aren’t simply the transmission of instrumental ad hoc information, like someone orally sharing the bus schedule with someone else).

3. Create a simulation model showing the true emergence of a memetic process.

And all three of these challenges produced nothing that could elicit widespread agreement. Even the first of Edmonds’s suggestions, which should have been the easiest, failed to yield anything convincing.

One reason is that it is nearly impossible to determine whether a modification to a supposed meme constitutes an “adaptation” or just “genetic drift.” Dawkins himself seems to have not taken such questions seriously, even all the way into the year 2016. One of his examples of a meme in the first edition of The Selfish Gene was the song “Auld Lang Syne,” and in the 40th anniversary 2016 edition, he offered this commentary on his own example in an endnote:

‘Auld Lang Syne’ was, unwittingly, a revealingly fortunate example for me to have chosen. This is because, almost universally, it is rendered with an error, a mutation. The refrain is, essentially always nowadays, sung as ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’, whereas Burns actually wrote ‘For auld lang syne’. A memically minded Darwinian immediately wonders what has been the ‘survival value’ of the interpolated phrase, ‘the sake of’.

[…]

I don’t think the answer is far to seek. The sibilant ‘s’ is notoriously obtrusive. Church choirs are drilled to pronounce ‘s’ sounds as lightly as possible, otherwise the whole church echoes with hissing. A murmuring priest at the altar of a great cathedral can sometimes be heard, from the back of the nave, only as a sporadic sussuration of ‘s’s. The other consonant in ‘sake’, ‘k’, is almost as penetrating. Imagine that nineteen people are correctly singing ‘For auld lang syne’ and one person, somewhere in the room, slips in the erroneous ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’. A child, hearing the song for the first time, is eager to join in but uncertain of the words. Although almost everybody is singing ‘For auld lang syne’, the hiss of an ‘s’ and the cut of a ‘k’ force their way into the child’s ears, and when the refrain comes round again he too sings ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’. The mutant meme has taken over another vehicle.

This is, again, a hell of a story. And it isn’t too far-fetched in the sense that copying errors can indeed result in permanent cultural changes due to the error’s inherent phonetic properties. For instance, in the English lexicon, we say “impossible” rather than “inpossible,” even though “in-” is the far more common negating prefix, and this is because the M is closer in the mouth to the labial “P” than N is. The prefix has simply switched from one sound to the other. So undoubtedly, some changes are caused by inherent phonetic properties associated with either acoustics, or man’s anatomy, or whatever.

But in order for Dawkins to establish that the change in his example is “adaptive,” he has to say that S and K phonemes are somehow more likely to be heard, remain in people’s minds, and reproduce themselves. They must be “stickier” in some way. If that were true, however, then Grimm’s Law wouldn’t exist, in which the K in Germanic languages predictably turns into the voiceless fricative /X/ over time (the German “ch” sound, like in Bach). We also wouldn’t have the historic pattern from proto-Greek wherein the word-initial sibilant S slowly turned into the much weaker aspirant H in a process known as debuccalization. We also wouldn’t have widespread word-final S-deletion in Black American English for third person present-tense verbs (e.g. “he work” instead of “he works”). In sum, there is simply no way to take Dawkins’s speculation and turn it into a predictable rule about the memetic fitness of song lyrics. Instead, one gets the sense that Dawkins simply tried to explain something inherently non-adaptive using the logic of adaptation, stumbled ass-backwards into the field of phonology, and took some shots in the dark.

Beyond the problem of adaptation, the deeper problem is that there is no straightforward way to conceptualize memes in the first place. Regarding his first challenge, Edmonds himself offered a couple suggestions, the first of which was nursery rhymes. It seems intuitive enough. Nursery rhymes are transmitted orally from generation to generation, and thus we could imagine that they replicate themselves using little children as their hosts. But even with such a straightforward example, there is no satisfying way to conceptualize the nursery rhyme as a “meme.” In other words: it isn’t clear what the “replicator” in the rhyme actually is — is it the wording of the rhyme? The rhythm? The content? The melody of the song (if there is one)? The rhyme scheme? After all, plenty of nursery rhymes and well-known folk songs have produced different variations that survive and coexist among each other just fine. Little children, for instance, know the standard lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” as well as the version in which Batman smells and Robin laid an egg. But it isn’t clear what the common property is that unites all of the different versions of all the different nursery rhymes. In an article entitled “Why Did Memetics Fail?” Radim Chvaja sums up the crux of the problem pretty well:

In the case of the gene-centered evolutionary theory, there was first the work of Gregor Mendel on pea crossing and then the independent theory of natural selection which were later, after many conflicts between Mendelians, embryologists, statisticians, paleontologists, and other biologists, fused into the modern evolutionary synthesis (Sapp 2015). Subsequently and independent of the development of the evolutionary theory, molecular biologists identified the genetic information in the physical structure of DNA (Watson and Crick 1953). Thus, when Dawkins made his generalization from a gene to a replicator, he already knew that there is an exact physical ontology of the gene. However, when he introduced the abstract concept of a replicator into the study of culture, memeticists had no previous work analogous to the work of Watson and Crick at their disposal. What they had was limited to a highly speculative argument about a substrate-independent replicator.

And, of course, without a substrate, “meme” could refer to practically everything: the technology that gives us the television set, the shows that the television broadcasts through it, the commercials within the shows, the jingles within the commercials, each individual word within the lyric of the jingle, and each morpheme within each word from the jingle. The hubris of trying to come up with a single catch-all discipline that could encompass linguistics, media studies, literature, ethnomusicology, religious studies, etc., using the concept of gene-like replication as its conceptual cornerstone is somewhat astounding when you sit back and seriously think about it. Of course, semiotics tries to synthesize all of these things through the study of the sign vehicle rather than the meme, often in a synchronic rather than diachronic manner. But of course, even with that self-imposed limitation, it is rare that any two randomly selected semioticians will agree with each other about anything.

As much as I would love to sit back and make fun of memetics all day, I don’t believe that everything about the concept of the meme is wrong, however. There is no question that humans have created an environment of cultural ideas and products, machines and media, totems and taboos, etc. all with their own needs and requirements that sometimes will outweigh man’s own needs or desires during his day-to-day existence. The French paleontologist and Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called such an environment “the noosphere,” which I’ve discussed here. We could easily take language itself as our primary example of a meme that helps make up this environment, since it amounts to a tool that we use in such an extensive fashion that life without it is more or less inconceivable. It is also, we could say, “parasitic” in that it has demanded adjustments from the human species in its development and expansion, particularly with the invention of literacy. Calling all of human language a “meme” is probably more accurate than calling it an “instinct,” as Steven Pinker has done, since he, too, lacked any physical evidence for his theory. And if this characterization is true for language, it can certainly be true for many other aspects of human culture, all of which emerge in some manner as its consequence.

So if the “meme” has at least some limited validity as a broad concept, then what’s wrong with it? I think the real problem lies is in conceiving of the meme as a replicator, as if it possesses agency. Ironically, the concept may have grown so popular during the internet age precisely because reversing the commonly understood causality of information transmission is so counterintuitive as to be exciting and memorable. There is a sort of exhilaratingly horrific quality to the way memetics is postulated: the meme is so irresistible, so infectious, that we’ve all had no choice but to spread it! And when I repost an “all your base are belong to us” .gif on Usenet, why, it is the meme that is alive, while I am nothing more than a passive sack of protoplasm to serve its aims! But the problem with eliminating human agency in this process is pretty obvious, so much so that spelling it out would be ponderous.

Because the problem is quite easy to see in this context, it actually should have cast a cloud of doubt upon Dawkins’s larger project. That is, instead of causing us to become more enthusiastic about “replicators” and grow more ambitious in trying to spot them everywhere, Dawkins’s chapter on memes should have made us do the opposite: namely, become skeptical about the concept of the replicator in the first place. It certainly isn’t clear why we should see genes primarily as replicators. In Dawkins’s presentation of them, genes are the star of the show while everything else is just a bit player. The genes the guys who built the survival machines. They are immortal, while we lowly organisms are the mere vehicles for their ongoing ascent. But even granted its metaphoric or simplified status, the account doesn’t truly seem to be reflected in the scientific understanding of cells and organisms. In his Mind in Life (2007), Evan Thomas states the counterargument in unflinching terms:

It is simply not true that genes are prime-movers and cells their vehicles (Moss 2003). For example, although there can be no membranes without the gene products that constitute them, genes cannot exist without membranes, and the gene products that constitute membranes are put together from an already existing membrane template. Indeed, the very term replicator is fundamentally misleading, for it obscures this circular causality by implying that genes are self-replicators, as if DNA could replicate all by itself. Actually, DNA replication depends on the complex orchestration of numerous intracellular processes in the global context of autopoiesis. Not only do cellular processes make possible the transmission of genes into the next generation, but many cellular elements are transmitted along with the genes and are necessary for the proper development of the cell, as we saw in the case of epigenetic inheritance systems.

So, giving causal primacy to genes obscures the fact that genes themselves are just as much adaptations as they are drivers of life. And treating genes as replicators ignores just how dependent genes continue to be on the very molecules that brought them into existence in the first place. A DNA molecule outside of the organism that houses it does not convey meaningful information about anything; it’s just some goo. Therefore, its value depends upon the context into which it is placed. In his excellent essay “Memes as Signs in the Dynamic Logic of Semiosis” (1999), Terrence Deacon makes a similar point, and explains the importance of context in relation to genes:

Gene sequences (homeobox genes, for example) that contribute to the embryogenetic assembly of heads and brains in flies have almost identical counterparts in humans, so much so that inserting the human gene into mutated flies with the corresponding gene damaged can partially restore normal fly head development. But notice, that it does not produce human heads (as in a science fiction parallel). The cross-species sequence similarity (and evolutionary common ancestry) is essential to this function, but the information is interpreted in a fly context. In both the evolution of words and of genes, these units of pattern have been preserved over time because of the ways they contributed to the usefulness and replication of the larger systems in which they were embedded. Replication has always been a multilevel affair. It is not a function vested in a gene or in a word, or even in a complex of genes or words, but in a dynamic system in which these are only one kind of unit.

And being someone who takes semiotics quite seriously, Deacon pivots to demonstrate that the same kind of multilevel, dynamic process is required to understand human culture, since the situation in which a sign appears is ultimately what will determine its meaning:

The ultimate significance of a sign is grounded in the consequences of the system of interpretive habits and dispositions it generates and is generated by (i.e., in the larger context of patterns of sign usage of which it is a part). As in biology, then, the relative prevalence and probability of a sign’s use will be a function of the correspondences between its significant consequences and some relevant aspects of the larger context in which it is embedded.

It seems that Dawkins wasn’t totally wrong to make a correspondence between genes and sign vehicles, then… but he was wrong in assigning primary agency to each of them rather than treating them as the context-dependent outcomes and influencers of ongoing, mutually reinforcing processes. While memetics was admirable in trying to uncover the mysteries of how cultural sign vehicles evolve, it front-loaded an oversimplified causal mechanism that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It would therefore seem that any account of human culture would have to remain mindful of its co-dependent status between itself and the human beings it both serves and is served by.

The counter-argument against memetics can, at this point, go into all sorts of potent philosophical directions, like relational ontology, the question of man’s free will, and so forth. I will mercifully avoid broaching those subjects, though, since I’d prefer to wrap up this blog post. As time goes on, I suspect that people will generally find it strange that the concept of the meme was ever proposed within an evolutionary framework, or that the discipline of memetics was ever attempted in the first place. They will grow accustomed to the idea that memes are nothing more than wacky computer images and videos — trifling bits of data with which we distract ourselves while bored at work, or which inspire our conspicuous consumption habits — and that will be that. I would say, however, that its time as a fad science should prove instructive for how we approach human culture. The failure of memetics should be a warning against all unidirectional theories of influence concerning man and his cultural artifacts. Things are a little bit more complicated than that.

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One of the big philosophical positions that always leaves me dissatisfied is, “The self constitutes the whole body,” or, more bluntly, “You are your body.” On the one hand, it should feel like an improvement over the illusory Cartesian distinction between “mind” and “body,” something that has vexed the whole of western philosophy for hundreds of years and still animates the wildest fantasies of the AI-soothsayers and the trans-humanists. “No,” the wily physicalist objects, “The self is unified, and it is distributed through the entire body! The brain is located in the head, but there’s a second brain in the gut! So be sure to preserve the diversity of its bountiful flora and eat lots of sauerkraut!” Wow! All of a sudden, we can start seeing the interconnectedness between the nutritional, neurological, or kinesiological choices we make in our daily lives and the manner in which our brains cogitate, the way they put ideas together, the attitudes they develop, and so on. The “mind” stops resembling a little alien hanging out in our heads, looking out at the world from the cockpit of a giant remote-controlled armored flesh-mech. We’ve clearly reached a more sensible understanding of ourselves.

But on the other hand, there’s still something to be desired in this position. I am not referring to the fact that it inherently denies the existence of a soul, either. That’s a significant omission, but not everyone believes that there is such a thing as an incorporeal soul, and the incorporeal realm isn’t really needed for the statement to be insufficient anyway. The bigger problem here, to my mind, is that the body of any being is not a self-sufficient thing; it cannot be uprooted from its environment and remain the same. This notion should be especially apparent when considering species that rely on constructing or modifying their own external environments. If a beaver spends its life unable to construct a dam, is it really the same being when compared to another potential version of itself that does? The dam isn’t just an external barrier to provide safe food during winter but rather an extension of the beaver’s very being, its own selfhood. The dam is needed for the beaver to be itself.

When a creature modifies its own environment, that modification isn’t an extension of its being simply because it was created, and it now exists, and that’s that. To take a counterexample, if I produce some feces — even, let’s say, if I drop a really big turd — this isn’t an extension of myself. I would prefer to discard it and pretend the whole thing never took place. But a modification to an environment forms a dynamic and indispensable part of how the creature interacts with its surroundings. We can see this principle in how, for instance, a spider will actually relegate its own decision-making process to the web that it builds, allowing the web to do the “thinking” for it. In An Immense World by Ed Yong, a book I recently reviewed, there’s one particularly illustrative passage:

Zoologist Takeshi Watanabe showed that the Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its web when it is hungry. It adds spiral decorations that increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web’s ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by smaller prey. When it is famished, every morsel counts. To capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its senses by changing the nature of its web.

But here’s the truly important part: Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed onto a tense web built by a hungry spider. The spider has effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to attack to its web. The choice depends not just on its neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but also on something outside it—something it can create and adjust.

So in other words, when you take a satiated spider and plop it onto a web built by a hungry one, it will still respond to the vibratory signals that the hungry spider calibrated specifically to suit its own heightened appetite. The satiated spider will ignore its own interoceptive hunger signals (or lack thereof) and give more credence to the web. The web has become a part of that spider’s sensory apparatus. It shouldn’t be possible not to see it as an extension of its being. The spider is not simply the spider’s body.

And if this true for animals that do not possess the gift of advanced cognition, it would seem even more true for humans, who do possess such a gift and use it to interact regularly with an entire ecosystem of specially made tools on a daily basis. The American philosopher C.S. Peirce once mused that his mind must be partly contained within the inkstand that he uses to write — the implication being that he could not come up with the thoughts he has unless able to write them down and work through them in an exteriorized form. But although he is considering only himself, a philosopher who works with advanced abstract systems (he specialized in formal logic), the point could be made for people with much less lofty ambitions. If we consider the example of the Japanese orb weaver and how it treats the web as an organ to determine its own level of hunger, that principle of outsourcing functions much like an old man who writes himself notes and places them around the house because he is aware of his own short-term memory loss: the notes displace the sovereignty of the brain. The notes are an extension of that man and thus part of his being.

For this reason, it is hard for me to take seriously the proposition that the self is simply the body, as if the two are coterminous. The self is always in dynamic interaction with its environment, and thus it must be characterized by its interactions rather than its primary locus, the body, as an isolated, independent substance.

Now, this characterization of the self, I’m starting to realize, puts me in the territory of relational ontology, since the essence of the self cannot be separated from its relations. But relational ontology isn’t a single doctrine, and there are different versions of it, and I can’t exactly say which one I would prefer, since I’m only in the first stages of recognizing it as a philosophical approach worth some time and effort. To demonstrate one less overt framework of relational ontology, we can use the medieval scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus as our example. In his system, the relations between entities are a distinct part of their being. You could list them as essential attributes, like how a Christian considers Jesus to be not just the embodied avatar of God, but God’s actual Son (a relation). And indeed, these relations are not just a real part of a given individual being, but all of being as such, since in order for relations to be real, all entities must share in a unified (or, per Scotus, “univocal”) being. This is a relational ontology insofar as it is characterized by a strong philosophical realism (as opposed to nominalism) that considers relations to be true qualities rather than merely accidental attributes with no ontological legitimacy, as other medieval scholastics believed. But in this more conservative model, one still maintains that all entities have their own distinct individual essence, or haecceitas, “thisness,” as Scotus called it. Therefore, relations are real but not do not assume ontological priority over substantive entities.

For a more aggressive framework, we can use the Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna as our chief example. In his system, the relations between entities are more fundamental than the entities themselves. This is because in his interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness), nothing has an independent, self-sustaining essence. Being doesn’t exist, but objects don’t really exist, either. The only real qualities are the relations between these illusory figures that we mentally register as “beings” or “entities,” but which are in reality only conceptual designations. It might perhaps seem at first like Nāgārjuna is a nominalist, since he denies the reality of being-as-such. But this would be an improper label, since nominalists believed in the reality of particulars, i.e. individual things, over universals, like categories or genera. For Nāgārjuna, both particulars and universals are equally fake, and the ultimate truth of śūnyatā is the truth of pure relationality. We can see from these two examples that relational ontology has quite the range of articulations.

What got me thinking about this topic was a book by the semiotician Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life/Culture/Biosemiotics (2016). It is an interesting one, in part because it’s sort of a mess. I’ll start with the bad stuff: in the middle of her book, she makes a full-throated argument for some of the worst “trad-cath” commonplaces you’re likely to find on the internet, all of which she bundles into one grotesque package. The argument basically goes like this: the nominalists, starting with William of Ockham, ruined the west’s philosophical progress and plunged us all into a world of nihilism and hatred of the earth. But also, the gnostics are bad and nihilistic, too (as per Voegelin, as per Han Jonas), and the nominalists and gnostics are essentially the same thing. And, what’s more, their spirit lives on through the impulses of a whole bunch of bad guys, like the authoritarian communists as well as the neo-Darwinians like Richard Dawkins and other hyper-mechanistic thinkers.

Awful. I’ve often considered writing a short book of no more than 80 pages explaining why this argument is nonsense, granting full amnesty to both the gnostics and nominalists (note: I myself am neither), since different versions of these claims have been floating around for quite a while, and they all posit a causal framework that is simply unsustainable. Perhaps I’ll jot down a rough sketch of my thoughts on this blog some other time. But anyhow, besides hopping aboard this unfortunate train of thought, Wheeler elsewhere possesses a great deal of real intellectual curiosity, and she manages to reach into the world of French post-structuralist thought to find some thinkers worth engaging, since they have relational ontology in common.

She also ably explains the value of incorporating relational ontology into one’s own thought:

Of course, it is precisely the multiplicity of potential relations through which being can become (and can become whatever it does specifically) that makes change possible. If you think, for example, about the relation between logs and the stones they enable to roll forward in the process of early constructions, it becomes possible that you may then think eventually about the relation between a wheel and a shaft. This thinking about relations of similarity allows the possibility of comparison (as Hume noted), and thus of similar relations applied to something different. Thus, you can go on to think about the relation between a gear and a gear wheel, for instance, or (in an example offered by Simondon) the relation between a wheel, a shaft and ball bearings.

[…]

Thinking simply about substances themselves alone cannot produce this possibility of the multiplicity of becomings which are in fact the case — as evolution from a common ancestor which existed approximately 3.8 billion years ago indicates biologically, but as we can also see in cultural, aesthetic and technological evolution also.

[…]

An ontology of relations is an ontology of change, and thus of habits and expectations. It indicates how things can grow.

This justification is also simpatico with a closely related mode of thinking: process ontology, which views dynamic processes and change as the fundamental constituents of reality — this perspective is probably most thoroughly and systematically expressed in A.N. Whitehead’s work (which I’ve never read, so I won’t say anything more).

Anyhow, Wheeler begins her book with a discussion on Deleuze & Guattari in the first chapter, then ends it with a discussion on Gilbert Simondon in the last, endorsing them both (I should say all three) as thinkers who were trying to move toward an ontology of relations, albeit in different ways. And when you consider Wheeler’s position as a semiotic thinker, it would make sense for her to find some potential in these guys, something I suspect she might be right about. For one thing, Deleuze was a much better student of semiotics than any of the prior 20th century Parisians. He didn’t just reject the conclusions of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, as many other post-structuralists did; he actually moved beyond Saussure in a meaningful way, first by engaging with Louis Hjelmslev, then semiotic philosophers like C.S. Peirce (he still didn’t quite grasp Peirce’s triadic sign relation model, but whatever), and even Thomas Sebeok. I also knew beforehand that he had rejected Lacan’s glottocentric model of the subconscious mind and even, according to Derrida in one of his lectures, took C.G. Jung more seriously than Sigmund Freud. All good things.

But more significantly, the semiotic perspective itself is one that distinguishes itself primarily through its analysis of relations — and processes, for that matter. Paul Bains (whom Wheeler cribs from quite a bit) shows in The Primacy of Semiosis (2006) how John Poinsot’s Treatise on Signs (“Tractatus de Signis,” 1632) is essentially a work of relational ontology, since Poinsot posits that signs operate according to a triadic relation (sign, object, interpreter), and these sign-relations, no matter what entities they involve, always have a kind of real being to them. Poinsot was more of a Thomist than a Scotist, since he denied the univocity of being (in other words, he thought that being was relational, and there are different gradations of it), but this is by the by. The point is that his mode of thinking predicted philosophical approaches to come over a couple hundred years later, after the delirium of Descartes had finally started to fade. The major forerunner of modern semiotics, C.S. Peirce, came onto the scene in the late 19th century, he developed the modern approach to semiotics, and his thinking was similarly relational to Poinsot. Although he was probably unfamiliar with the rather obscure Poinsot, he did know the philosophy of both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus quite well, and scholars still seem unsure as to whether he thinks like more of a Thomist or a Scotist.

So, semiotics is a kind of process ontology. But that isn’t all. Media ecology (this blog’s other major theoretical area of interest) involves a kind of relational ontology as well, since that discipline refuses to observe a message simply as “the figure” by itself, but always recognizes its meaning and significance as being determined by “the ground,” or the informational medium that conveys it. For a while, I’ve been thinking about how to properly synthesize semiotics with media ecology into one well-articulated approach, and it seems that a relations-based ontology could be perhaps one way to do it. Gilbert Simondon might be a key figure, since he was (like Deleuze) a relational thinker who rejected “thing-focused” analysis and instead opted to focus on the broader processes of each apparent thing’s individuation. He also wrote quite a bit about technical objects as evolving entities which operate according to their own internal logic, brought about by complex individuating structures. And, of course, just as the more conventionally recognized media ecology figures like Ong and McLuhan understood, Simondon understood that technical objects themselves act as participants in the process of human becoming.

All of this is to say, as I wrap up this post, that I’ve wound up throwing yet even more books onto my “to read” list, which is already unwieldy and unworkable. And it’s quite unexpected, especially concerning Deleuze & Guattari, since I told myself years ago that I would never read their work — the main reason being that they have the most dysfunctional online fanbase out of any modern philosophy project I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who has read Deleuze and has improved his life afterward. On Twitter, a few years back, I wrote this:

And that post is true, by the way; those accounts really did exist. Elsewhere, I’ve said this:

And this:

But this isn’t particularly fair criticism, since the most compelling philosophers in general tend to have the dumbest fans. Nietzsche is probably the most obvious example. And although I don’t agree with those who insist that one must familiarize oneself with the entire works of Aristotle before moving onto Nietzsche, I get why they’re saying it: they don’t want morons to bother them about Nietzsche. Make sense.

More importantly, though, I’ve slowly developed a better overall picture of French poststructuralism over the past several years, and I feel pretty confident about which currents within it are worth engaging, and which should be left behind in the garbage heap. Now that I have an actual reason to read more of this stuff (I was already pretty well-read in Derrida and bits of Foucault), I think I can afford to let curiosity get the best of me. Even if it means burdening myself with a hundred more books. Suffocating myself in books.

I’m not really a philosopher, you know. I’m a simple-minded boy who just wants to watch pro wrestling and cartoons.

But that’s just how these things go, I suppose.

Edit 3/27: I wound up throwing in some hyperlinks, polished up some minor stylistic deficiencies here and there, and added more of a real conclusion about how I’ve mistrusted Deleuze for quite a while, which I suppose is now exclusive to those who actually clicked the link and went to my blog. We can consider it our little secret.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that screws around with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics.

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There’s no question that mainstream popular culture is losing its relevance rapidly, and the internet is the main reason why. Audiences have become split into smaller niches; trend cycles are waxing and waning faster and faster (the explosion of trivial and often arbitrary “brain rot” memes has aided in this development); “watercooler moments” are fewer and further in between (the Superbowl is perhaps the last regular cultural event that middle-class Americans can discuss comfortably at the office); the traditional gatekeepers such as professional critics and mainstream publications are becoming obsolete, while unpaid amateur user-reviews are slowly starting to replace them; content-recommendation algorithms are personalizing people’s culture-engagement habits at an unforeseen level; and, not even lastly, people increasingly experience audio/visual culture in a multi-tasking, attention-deficit manner, e.g. listening to music while watching a show, or watching a movie while scrolling social media on their phones, limiting the potency of any single work of art. The internet is responsible for pretty much all of this.

But here’s a question: does the internet represent a major departure from what came before, or is it a stimulant for large-scale trends that were already well underway? I would argue the latter, since its most salient characteristic is that it aids in the exchange of information, and the invention of electronic media already had the effect of amplifying information, making its reach wider and its audiences larger. Yet the internet’s strongest critics don’t seem to view it that way. For them, the normative state of culture is what we find in the 20th century, and the internet is villainous because it is taking us away from that time. Of course, they never state their grievances in such clear terms. They don’t say, “The 20th century was the best,” and for that reason, I suspect that they aren’t aware of just how exceptional the 20th century actually was in terms of man’s relationship with the arts. Such critics seem to take the experiences of their childhood (in the 1980s or 90s, typically) and telecast it back into history, as if their own experience amounts to how cultural engagement has always worked. If that were true, then the internet would be quite perverse for what it’s currently doing.

So this post will largely be about that topic, since I’m of the view that the explosion of information during the 20th century has created cultural expectations that simply didn’t exist beforehand, and I think that these expectations linger within the minds of the internet’s strongest critics. They don’t realize just how novel their beliefs regarding culture actually are, and moreover just how alien they would seem to, say, your average 18th century lawyer or merchant, let alone commoner. I’m all for criticizing the internet, and if has to be done, then let’s do it. But if we are going to do it, we should probably rely on well-selected premises. And probably the worst premise to rest upon would be the idea that cultural development has always worked the same way; that western civilization has always “progressed” according to a process from which the internet has estranged us. In truth, the internet has only estranged us from a mode of cultural affiliation that was never destined to last.

I. High Art

In 1934, Ezra Pound released a collection of essays in a volume entitled “Make It New.” Although his name would be associated with that mantra, and that mantra would soon become a clarion call for modernist invention and innovation, he didn’t come up with it on his own. He got it from an ancient feudal Chinese ruler, King Tang of Shang, and the quotation was from a volume translated by the renowned orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. The quotation and the means through which Pound appropriated it are inseparable from one another if you want to grasp the essence of modernism — not just in literature, but in all the arts. Fenollosa wasn’t the best Sinologist, being trained primarily in Japanese language and literature, but scholarship on the ancient eastern cultures hadn’t become totally specialized yet. The label “orientalist” hadn’t been turned into an epithet meant to attack western ethnocentrism, and it was still something that intellectual historians would gladly call themselves. There’s no question that “the orient” is far too vast a category for any meaningful scholarly generalization, but the fact is, deep knowledge of the east was just starting to open up in the west, and so the term would have to make do. If you were a westerner interested in feudal China, you were interested in something only beginning to be understood.

So, there’s Ezra Pound, and there’s his saying “Make It New.” He’s going off into hitherto-unknown corners of the past in order to find ideas that will set the pace for the future, and the irony isn’t lost on him, or anyone. The ethos of modernism was about taking newly acquired information about the world — the entire world, all of it, no exceptions — and allowing it to chart the course for bold and unapologetic artistic innovations. Pablo Picasso had already been borrowing from the masks and figures of Gabon and Côte d'Ivoire, Africa, to develop the style of Cubism. And over in the world of music, Olivier Messiaen consulted a 13th-century treatise on rhythm by the Hindu musicologist Śārṅgadeva, using many of its ideas to compose bold and intense chamber and orchestral works, perhaps most notably the Turangalîla-Symphonie. The modernist creator would approach his craft Janus-faced, looking backward even as he moved forward, and with every step, he would produce something novel, indeed wholly original. This is what modernity’s explosion of new information about the world would help to inspire.

But as time went on, the energetic, even manic attitude of the modernists would gradually crust over into a disposition of lifeless academic proceduralism, a desiccated surrogate for the pursuit of technological discovery, and this is where the twentieth century would leave us by the time it came to an end. Many noticed the problem even about halfway through it. In the world of music, plenty of dissenting opinions on the importance of innovation could be found during the heyday of the Darmstadt school, which is known mostly for establishing the post-World War II trend of total-serialism (think Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen). And these dissenting voices weren’t just coming from stubborn tonal composers; they included those who actually attended Darmstadt, like Hans Werner Henze, who described the attitude of Boulez and his disciples this way (as quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, 2007):

Everything had to be stylized and made abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead-game, a fossil of life.

Of course, in Hermann Hesse’s novel to which Henze refers, the titular Glass Bead Game players weren’t trying to be innovative, and in his situation, they absolutely were. But it was nonetheless easy to perceive a certain lifelessness in their approach, even despite their often poorly-concealed desire to shock and scandalize audiences. Meanwhile, in France, Musique concrète had been born, and its composers would often dress like scientists, wearing thick glasses and storing pens in their front shirt-pockets. Pierre Schaeffer actually compared French composers to atomic physicists working in a laboratory. Almost no one actually listens to this sort of music today.

Over in the sphere of visual culture, the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis wrote an essay called “The Demon of Progress In the Arts” (1954) in which he pointed out the shallowness informing the modern art establishment’s obsession with novelty. Elsewhere, the British avant-garde theater director Edward Gordon Craig expressed similar sentiments in various writings, stating that all great art stands on its own and thus the artist shouldn’t pay attention to what’s popular. In his writings, the American beat poet Jack Kerouac regularly praised the fellaheen — an Arabic word for farmers and rustics popularized by Oswald Spengler, who used it to describe the state of cultural inertia that a civilization falls into once it has declined. For Spengler, the fellaheen are the peasants who survive the death of one civilization and find themselves there in the next, never becoming fully part of any, and continually remaining indifferent to their place in the grand metadrama of human history. In Lonesome Traveler, for instance, Kerouac says of the Mexicans, “you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues,” and this is all quite respectable. Kerouac didn’t care about being on “the cutting edge” of anything, and for him, the mentality of peasants was preferable to the need to remain dialed-in to the newest cultural fads and trends at all times.

“Making it new” thus didn’t quite pan out the way Pound would have perhaps thought. It turned into a bit of a racket. In America, the problem was exacerbated by the massive glut of academic funding that the government pumped into the university system for Cold War research. Starting sometime in the 1950s, every field (including those within the humanities) had to justify itself through the language of progress and scientific innovation, even if the innovations did not mean anything to anyone outside the field. Milton Babbitt thus composed his essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” in 1958, in which he explained that composers should not be held by the standards of a mass audience. They are specialists, much like any scientific researcher is a specialist, and they need to be respected and supported, even if they are mainly composing pieces exclusively for one another, and their critics. Although Babbitt himself didn’t title the piece, the question it posed more or less summed up the attitude of not just the musical establishment but the entirety of the high arts in America and across Europe. We’re doing important things here with our work! We don’t have time to consider whether or not the public will register its approval! Of course, if your funding is coming from the expectation of progress and scientific discovery, then you will consider these criteria more important than those of the public — a bunch of yahoos, and moreover, yahoos to whom you are held not even slightly accountable in material terms.

II. Mainstream Culture

Now, up until this point, I’ve been discussing how things turned out in the world of highbrow art. When access to information greatly expanded — an expansion that occurred concomitantly with the spread of electronic media — there was an initial burst of creative energy. Artists were enlivened; they were excited. They wanted to issue insolent challenges to the stars. But as time went on, there was no way to sustain that intensity. Of course it would all become faddish and ridiculous. Of course a sense of aimlessness and sterility would develop over time. And of course many would stray from the ideal of progress and simply devote themselves to making what they consider good rather than “important” art, even if that meant their names would have to wallow in only the footnotes of the history books, if represented there at all. But the basic assumption of the twentieth century, i.e. that culture has to “evolve” and “progress” in order to be worthwhile, remained strong in the minds of the educated boys and girls from all over the western hemisphere, and it trickled down to the mainstream mass-media monoculture; or, the “culture industry,” as the Frankfurt Schoolers dubbed it.

I’m not usually one to talk about “capitalism,” since the term is often vacuous and ill-defined. But critics of capitalism have nevertheless made some valuable points about marketplace dynamics over the years, and these points are worth keeping in mind when we discuss the business of culture. Back in 1902, the German economist Werner Sombart wrote the essay “Economy and Fashion,” in which he discusses how the fashion industry has a sophisticated way of creating artificial demand. In order for the industry to thrive, people need to buy new stuff from it regularly, as everyone knows, so the whole industry collectively found a way to turn clothing into a sophisticated mechanism for social signaling. That way, new trends could emerge and die down while the flow of money would continue unabated. “Fashion,” as Sombart put it, “is capitalism’s favorite child,” because the unexamined assumptions we carry with us about clothing often flow from the historically unprecedented role that it began to play in the wake of mass industry.

The same observations can apply to the ingenious manner in which the mass-media monoculture would create artificial demand for new products, from music to cinema to clothing to food to television. Business executives took stock of how many distinct personality-types there are within various age demographics, they found a way to link product choices with personal fulfillment by using different marketing strategies, and they managed to create a “vibe” for every single decade starting in the 1920s (even if this “vibe” would itself be retconned into the cultural memory decades later). Fashion preferences, music choices, dietary habits, video entertainment, and other aspects of mainstream society changed continuously, so that one aging generation could remember itself through the lens of its past consumption choices, while an up-and-coming generation could carry a sense of identity based on its current consumption choices. Although capitalism itself never necessitated any of this, the situation nonetheless fit nicely within a capitalist framework because it rested at the intersection between technological development and big business.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this unusual historical situation is the manner in which professional critics would help to legitimize mass culture and convince as many people as possible that it must be taken seriously. In Marxist terms, we could call them participants in the culture industry’s ideological “superstructure.” And generally speaking — this part is very important — they legitimized this system by using the language and ideological assumptions of the highbrow art world. Perhaps the most important assumption they borrowed from that world was that culture, no matter how seemingly frivolous, must move forward in some way. In other words, the regular and predictable shifts in consumption choices weren’t to be understood as cyclical but rather progressive, as if each new shift forms a new development in a continuing story leading up to a grand climax. Swing begat bebop begat cool jazz begat rock’n’roll begat fusion begat progressive rock begat punk rock begat power pop begat indie rock… etc. Starting in the late 1960s, if you were an intellectual-type who wanted to “slum it” a bit and listen to some rock music, you could take solace in the rock’n’roll critic who would assure you that your decision is aesthetically valid. You weren’t just engaging in mindless hedonism. You were participating in an expression of working-class authenticity. You were engaged in a dialectic of rawness and confrontation. etc.

This attitude explains some of the various prejudices held by the critic, like the idea that rock bands shouldn’t make albums that sound similar to each other over and over again. An album wasn’t just a music storage device that emerged alongside the invention of the long-playing vinyl record — not at all. Instead, every album, in this middlebrow progressive model, was now an artistic statement (willingly or not) about the cultural moment in which it takes place, and therefore it should change with the times. Of course, there is nothing universally valid about this perception, and it doesn’t reflect the way artists actually work. Imagine applying it to Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas, which he composed between 1738 and 1757. What would the critic say about each new “album” of sonatas if they were released onto the market as Scarlatti wrote them?

Scarlatti, in his 36th outing, has once again presented us with a characteristically angular yet chilled-out collection of decadent aristo-core soundscapes. And as always, he has chosen the sonata as his vehicle. It’s a style through which he could push the envelope and break some new ground if he really wanted to. But once again, he has chosen to abstain from developing the transgressive elements that his work merely hints at, and which once seemed so promising at the start of his career. Yes, there are some thorny, even skronk-adjacent licks and trills that occasionally emerge within the mix, but Scarlatti treats them as accidental cracks on the ivory walls he’s trying to build. Instead of exploring them when the opportunity arises, he retreats from them just in the nick of time, doubles down on his signature sound, and rest on the laurels of his past triumphs — from back when it seemed as though he was taking us somewhere truly exciting. Just as with every other recent album, you could slot this one seamlessly into his earlier catalog and not miss a beat. 4/10.

This is, of course, a ridiculous scenario, but I’m trying to give the reader a sense of how contingent the aesthetic standards of the 20th century culture industry have been. Its preferences were mainly decided upon for the continuation of the industry itself, everything else being secondary. Of course, things like “authenticity” have always mattered for rock critics, and social awareness has always been a concern for film critics, and then artistic “maturity” is something that we hear about from time to time. But beneath everything, there was a persistent and universal desire for something “new” to emerge. Rather than being sages and savants, the music critics, fashion critics, film critics, etc. were always the unreflective tools of the business they worked for, and the artists were right from the beginning to call them idiots — as they often did, over and over again.

Still, though, they were necessary idiots, at least when it came to establishing a hierarchy of preference and managing the flow from one cultural trend to the next. Whereas the highbrow art world kept trying to “make it new” over and over again until it refined itself into what we would call irrelevance, the mass-media art world’s sphere of criticism acted as a force for aesthetic conservatism even while posing as progressive. The critics demanded “new” ideas, but none of the ideas were actually new. All of the truly new ideas had already been done in the highbrow world, and they often weren’t very interesting, or worse, they were simply obnoxious. Here, what was “new” was in fact merely different from what came immediately before, and the public had already been conditioned to accept it. Rather than being revolutionary, the cultural products of the 20th century — particularly starting in the 1950s — were marketable, they were entertaining, and they were palatable to the masses. The job of the critics/intellectuals was to fabricate for them a symbolic weight and importance that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

III. The Internet

It thus shouldn’t be too surprising that so many intellectual types nowadays have grown despondent over the waning power of the 20th century culture industry and are angry that the internet has shattered its complex arrangement of embedded hierarchies. After all, nowadays everything feels pretty insignificant. “Have you seen such-and-such movie?” your friend asks you. “No,” you say. “Oh, OK,” he responds before switching the subject. It doesn’t matter, and what if it did? There’s no pressing sense of urgency to go and watch the stupid movie. It isn’t hard to grasp why sensitive men in their 30s and 40s want to go back in time to a period in which that urgency could be felt — to a point during which even the vapid and vacant lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison seemed like incantations from visionary oracles.

I can think of three written examples showing this despondency, though the attitude is seemingly everywhere on social media. But we can go through these three one by one, in part because I’ve already done some of the leg-work in previous writings. The first example is the democratic-socialist Freddie DeBoer’s various attacks on “poptimism,” a trend starting from the 2010s in which critics decided to take even the most absolutely mindless pop music just as seriously as rock music. DeBoer has been banging away on the topic for years. He also has recently attacked the decline of criticism in general, pointing out (rightly) that critics are afraid of being negative nowadays, and he associates these two developments with one another. But as I’ve said in a previous piece, poptimism was simply a response to changing material conditions, and its rise was entirely predictable. It amazes me how poorly DeBoer — a guy who seems to take Marx seriously — grasps this basic point. Because of the internet’s decentralization of information and the consequent obsolescence of the professional critic as a viable career path, critics are hanging onto their jobs, and they’re doing so by being very nice. Much nicer than ever before. They write for web sites whose traffic is almost entirely dependent on Facebook ad algorithms, and both they and the sites make very little money. The critics also realize that they simply aren’t a necessary part of the cultural infrastructure anymore. They served their purpose when print was dominant and digital streaming services didn’t exist, and now the companies who put food on their table rest upon a foundation of sand. Why are we pretending like they have any other choice but to kneel down and beg for mercy?

But more importantly: why are we pretending that poptimism is such a radical departure from what rock criticism originally was? The first “poptimist” publication was Rolling Stone, which launched in 1967, almost sixty years ago. And while it may have cared about “authenticity” more than today’s poptimists do, and maybe a few other aesthetic considerations that the poptimists downplay, it nevertheless played a similar role in the cultural economy, only with the power to make or break careers. These critics were never serious about music as an art form; they were just “vibeologists.” But given what they were working with, they didn’t need to take music so seriously. Rock music is enjoyable, but it’s also pretty dumb.

The second example of despondency over the decline of the mainstream monoculture comes from a book I reviewed, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith (he now goes by Justin Smith-Ruiu, but I’ll call him Smith here, because that’s what his name was when he wrote it). In what amounts to an otherwise sober and reflective work, Smith, apparently guided by a mysterious compulsion, decides to complain about how young people aren’t pursuing the cultivation of their aesthetic sensibilities, because they’ve become enslaved by the recommendation algorithms on streaming platforms. He writes,

There was a time, before the ubiquitous application of algorithms to our social life, when it was considered salutary […] to actively cultivate one’s aesthetic sensibilities, for example, one’s musical taste. The “You may also like” function of music-delivery platforms such as Spotify has largely obviated the need for such active pursuit, and now a person who happens to start exploring music from a given song in a particular genre will typically be guided along to other songs categorized as similar to the first one based only on criteria that AI is capable of “understanding.”

[…]

The algorithms … keep the listener trapped in that inane, market-defined cage known as musical “genre.”

To this general criticism, I responded like so:

There is simply no way to argue against the internet according to Smith’s line of reasoning here, no matter how much he might want to qualify or refine his point. The truth is, we’re living at a time in which first-world people are quite comfortable and bored, and thus the greatest total amount of human beings in all of history are pursuing self-actualization through the dedicated cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities. If it doesn’t seem like it, it’s only because the internet has made us believe that the number should be even higher. The internet, after all, has shone a light on all of the people who don’t pursue aesthetic cultivation — people who have always existed as the vast majority yet were invisible in previous epochs.

Perhaps I should expand on this point. We know that Mozart was the most influential composer of the classical period, unless we count Beethoven as classical rather than romantic. So surely, he would have been a celebrity all across Europe, right? Well, no. During Mozart’s career, the news of his music spread through courts, churches, and print media. The only people who would have heard of Mozart probably lived near the major urban centers and were either bourgeois professionals, noblemen, clergy, or musicians, while the vast majority of ruralites would have been blissfully unaware. We can thus estimate that less than 5% of the entire European population would have heard about him, and within that number, only about half would have heard his actual music. If I’m off, it’s not by much. Now, when we keep all of this in mind, should we be particularly surprised that the majority of people respond passively to what their streaming algorithms tell them to engage with? Why are we foisting expectations upon them that would have been considered ridiculous for the vast majority of human history?

The third example comes from a fairly recent piece by Sam Buntz, who argues that the internet has caused the younger generations to experience cultural time not as a continuous flow from one event to the next, but rather as a vast, suspended eternal-present. This experience of time as a synchrony — he calls it “living in The Archive” — ultimately overwhelms young people, rendering them unable to create their own vital popular culture, while the few who do try to create new music (he focuses on music) can only produce impenetrable niche avant-garde nonsense:

[Gen-Z people are] reacting to everything that has ever happened. Which is impossible to actually do. On the one hand, it might make you more cosmopolitan (though this is hard to do without a guide to help develop your critical intelligence). But, on the other, it ruins your ability to assimilate anything and reduces you to a quivering lump of uncertainties. It also reduces your own ability to create because your response to life becomes so indeterminate. You can’t figure out what to respond to.

There are lots of strong points that Buntz makes about the effect that electronic media has had since the start of the 20th century, and his term “The Archive” is actually a pretty good one. He also is correct in suggesting that too much information presents problems for the construction of a cultural metanarrative — this is something I’ve discussed in a piece on Jan Assmann’s concept of collective mnemotechnics. But there are two serious problems with his reasoning: the first is that he thinks that he’s only talking about the internet right now. The second is that the only time period that he can use as a more favorable comparison point occurred during the 20th century when The Archive was almost 100% finished. There is actually far more continuity between his generation and the Zoomers than he seems to realize.

For example, he brings up the fact that Zoomers mostly listen to music made by older generations, seeing it as proof that they’re somehow unique in their lack of creativity. They don’t have music just for themselves, in other words. Okay. But what do we consider, say, Baby Boomer music to be? The Beatles? The Beach Boys? Bob Dylan? Jimi Hendrix? Janis Joplin? Jeff Beck? Well, all of those musicians were born before 1945, which would make them Silent Generation people, not Baby Boomers. How about the Gen-Xers? What did they like? The Sex Pistols? Metallica? Eddie Vedder? Madonna? Prince? Well, they were all Boomers, not Gen-Xers. So it seems pretty clear to me that the most emblematic artists associated with one generation are actually going to be from the previous one, with some exceptions here and there (Kurt Cobain was definitely a Gen-Xer making music for other Gen-Xers). It is certainly interesting that major record labels are taking less chances on younger artists than they used to — among today’s Top 40 stars, I can only think of Billie Eilish as an example of a real bona fide Zoomer — but this says little about Generation-Z’s creative agency and probably a lot more about corporations hedging their bets due to internet piracy, the decline of physical media, and thus diminished profits.

What Buntz really seems to be upset about is the decline of the mainstream monoculture — a system of constraints that keeps people on the same page by focusing their attention on a collection of predetermined products and trends. There was, in reality, always a ton of information available to sift through from the very beginning of the 20th century. As soon as the phonograph was invented, western man was already living in The Archive, and it’s precisely The Archive that came to establish the expectation for each generation to have its own unique culture, and for the average person within every generation to be conversant with that culture. The Archive of yesteryear mainly differed from today’s in that both music and videos were stored in tangible media, and so there were some conditions of scarcity that could be directly monetized. With such monetization, you could have a monoculture that directs young people’s aesthetic preferences and tells them which products to purchase, which ones to ignore, and so on. But once the switch to digital was finalized, the monoculture started to disappear, and that is what is still continuing to happen now. It will probably take a while to go away entirely, if it ever does, but when you consider how brief and fleeting its lifespan actually has been, it’s hard to feel as though something truly indispensable is being lost. The mainstream monoculture was always just a stopgap while The Archive was reaching its final stages. And now that it’s more or less finalized, it feels silly to start wishing that we could go back to the glory days of Kurt Loder on MTV News, or whatever. You can’t really criticize The Archive too harshly if it shaped your own thought process in the first place.

Frankly, I’m not too concerned about young people. I think they’re fine. And if they’re not fine, then they’ll figure something out. Trying to interfere with and fix their problems would only make things worse. If we really, really want to diagnose them, I would say that the main thing they currently lack is a way to make sense of all the information that surrounds them. Buntz seems to agree, and this is why he ultimately decides that they’re just screwed, more or less. But I think that people generally find ways to make sense of things. They create tribal groups, they form affiliations that respect the principle of the Dunbar number, they come up with metanarratives for themselves, and they discover forms of collective mnemotechnics that create limitations and set boundaries on what to pay attention to and what to ignore. There is no actual need for Lester Bangs to step in and tell them what is and isn’t cool. If anything, the desire to be “relevant” is what’s keeping them from self-actualizing, since self-destructive behavior seems to be the main driver of mainstream engagement. But if they jettison that goal altogether, stop trying to please people like Buntz (and me, for that matter), and start focusing on improving their own small-scale communities with little concern for the approval of outsiders, then they will probably be better off. The future generations will adjust to the digital world, and we know this is true because they don’t really have much of a choice. They will figure things out by hook or by crook. They will find meaning in their lives. And, if this analysis carries any weight, they will slowly start to discover the power of the fellaheen mentality. Just as it has always been for the vast majority.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that takes you on a journey through the wide world of media ecology and Peircean, i.e. non-structuralist semiotics. Back in 2024, I started what was intended to be a series called “Principles of Semiotics,” but this wound up going nowhere for a almost two years. I’m not sure why; I guess I just had other stuff I was excited to write about instead. Anyhow, I’m returning to it with this essay. Part I, on the concepts of “the icon” and “iconicity” can be found here. Consider reading that one first, if you haven’t already.

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Today we’re going to continue with our discussion on the three basic types of signs found in the semiotics of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce — namely, icon, index, and symbol — and this installment will be all about the index. “Index” comes from Latin, and it is related to the verb “indicō,” from which we get the verb “indicate.” All indexes are thus indicators of something or other. The index finger, for example, is a pointing finger because you use it to point at stuff that’s there. The index you’ll often find at the back of a nonfiction book, to take another example, was originally called an index locorum or index locorum communium: “index of places,” or “index of commonplaces,” respectively. And of course, such an index neatly and alphabetically “points” to the topic you’re trying to find within the book by giving you the page number(s) in which the topic is located.

Before we move on to the index as a kind of sign within the domain of semiotics, this example of index locorum or “index of places” is worth a bit of discussion, because the locorum (the genitive form of locus, loci, cognate with “location”) suggests areas in the real world — actual spots you can find. This particular usage of the word loci, however, was originally not physical but virtual. It derives from classical rhetoric, wherein the orator was meant to produce his speech by going into various “places” stored within his mind. These “places” were really more like headings that contained sub-arguments or details about the topic such as its causes, effects, related things, unlike things, etc. And the speaker, once he had gone into these “places,” would then retrieve them for oral recitation. The loci, in this sense, were just mnemonic tools that a speaker would use to jog his memory, and they were similar to “a bag” that a jazz musician contains in his mind when he’s about to jam — a “bag” is similarly virtual, and it’s just a collection of memorized riffs, licks, and other musical phrasings to incorporate within an improvised solo. According to Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy (1982), the invention of the printing press caused these once-psychic “places” to become visually and spatially organized, with the book taking on a new position as a substitute for the human memory, leading to a new noetic experience altogether.

The point of this brief aside on indexes in books is to show that although “places” can be either physical or mental, an “index” won’t be so abstract, since it always leads us to something concretely there. The various loci in your mind don’t need an index. But the loci found in a book will require one since you need to be shown a specific, tangible page. So, an index is generally understood to access things existing in the real world, and that is how Charles Sanders Peirce intended its use within the context of semiotics.

Whereas an icon is something that resembles something else and thus forms its meaning by way of resemblance (like synthetic perfume resembling some flowers or artificially flavored drinks resembling fruits), and a symbol is something that refers to something ontologically different from it by way of received convention (like music notation referring to a series of potential vibrations, which would, if played, provide a sequence of such-and-such numbers of Hz), an index is something that “points” to something else that exists in a distinct space and time. Essentially, it’s a sign that transcends the realm of the virtual and makes the sign’s interpreter aware of the real. Despite the ease with which indexicality can be explained, the index is a deceptively brilliant concept. Thomas Sebeok, in his Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (2001, 2nd ed.) called it one of Peirce’s greatest contributions to the study of semiosis, and even some of Peirce’s more negative critics like Rulon Wells have acknowledged its fruitfulness. But why is the index such a valuable concept?

I think to answer the question, you have to consider just how it operates in the real world. We can start with some obvious examples that you’d find in a semiotics textbook. A weathervane is often decorative, but it also tells you something distinct: the direction of the wind. It might have a little rooster statuette perched upon it (an icon, essentially), but it also tells you something about the world itself that it inhabits by the manner in which it is affected. Consider another classic index: a footprint. Let’s say you’re walking in snow and see a dog’s paw print. You can tell quite a few things from it, the most obvious being that a dog was there. Beyond that, perhaps you can tell what kind of dog it is, whether it’s big or small, or how long ago it was there (depending on the crispness and definition of the print itself). There’s an element of iconicity taking place, since you have to know what a paw print looks like and recognize it through comparison. But again, the sign also tells you something that transcends purely virtual connection-making, and so it assumes the role of an index.

Peirce once wrote that an index is a sign which refers to an object by being really affected by that object. That’s a bit simplified, but not a bad way to put it. So, according to this logic, bullet holes are indexes, crumpled paper is an index, the scent of fresh paint on your front door is an index, the craters on the moon are indexes, smoke is an index, a door being knocked is an index, and so on. As long as your mind is brought to an understanding of what must have happened in the real world to make the object or phenomenon that way, then indexicality is taking place.

One can take the concept of indexicality quite far, since any kind of communication that draws one’s attention to the physical world bears at least some trace of this category of sign. Although Peirce originally developed his system of semiotics by declaring that a sign can be either a symbol, an icon, or an index — meaning that it can only be one at a time — he quickly realized that it’s impossible for a “pure” type to exist. In some way, there will always be an element of one intermixed with the other, and it’s common for all three types to coalesce, with one predominating over the others depending on how it’s being interpreted within a given moment. So let’s consider how far indexicality can go. Consider phytosemiotics, the study of plant communication. Can plants communicate with the outside world, or even each other? Well, yes, they kinda do, as this overview from Kalevi Kull demonstrates:

There exist many examples of mechanisms in plants where certain external signals are recognised by specialised cells or other plant structures, followed by a reaction chain that leads to an adaptive response in the same, or sometimes in another, organ of the plant. Here belongs, for instance, graviperception, which regulates the direction of growth in shoot and root tips (Volkmann, Sievers 1979). Another example can be the adaptive formation of reaction-wood as a result of changes in mechanical tension in root or shoot tissues (Wilson, Archer 1977). The third example may be the release of abscisic acid in roots in drying soil, which leads to stomatal closure and thus saves the plant from desiccation (Davies, Zhang 1991). There also exist photoreceptors, which are different from chlorophyll, reacting to certain light parameters and regulating plant differentiation.

The German semiotician Martin Krampen has argued, building upon the work of Jakob von Uexküll, that when plants communicate, they rely mostly on indexical signs, since they lack sense receptors as we traditionally understand them. The question of whether or not we should consider these environmental interactions/adjustments from plants to be examples of true “communication” is up for debate, so I won’t get too far into it, but to the extent that communication can take place at the cellular or plant level, it should probably be labeled indexical.

A less philosophically vexing example would be the disease symptom, which is actually the very first subject to receive a semiotic treatment known to mankind, found in the work of Hippocrates. A symptom, of course, is an outward signal that helps a physician to identify an underlying virus, trauma, chemical irregularity, or pathogen. When a doctor sees his patient cough up some yellowish-brown goo, the harmful bacteria of his sinus infection are communicating something to us (namely, about their very existence) whether they are trying to or not. Although we might not usually think of symptoms in semiotic terms, it is pretty easy to recognize that the symptom is the lifeblood of the entire health field, and without it, the field would go away. In psychology, experts faithfully rely on outward behaviors (read: symptoms) to provide an indexical meaning for them even when the psychologists don’t know what the index is pointing them toward. For a long time, researchers assumed that long-term psychological depression is pathological, and it’s caused by a serotonin imbalance in the brain. Thus, the depression symptoms collectively formed an index pointing to this chemical irregularity. Recently, however, this theory seems to have been discredited, and yet psychologists seem fairly certain that they’ll eventually come up with a materially-derived explanation for long-term depression, if only they just keep searching. They are probably right, though the answer might be more complicated than they initially had hoped. But for our purposes, note that the symptoms here point to something that only exists as a potentiality. Although the index’s role is to connect the virtual with the real, sometimes an index can prove to be a dead end.

Whenever we try to determine signs of a disease or illness from the work of any artist, musician, or writer, we’re approaching it indexically. Examples abound in literary analysis. Some have tried to claim that Dante Alighieri suffered from narcolepsy because of his descriptions of sleep in The Divine Comedy. When Ezra Pound was judged mentally deranged during his trial for treason after the end of World War II, passages from his Cantos were read aloud in the courtroom for proof. I’ve even encountered this in music: in a documentary on the prog rock band Magma, its frontman Christian Vander says that when he heard John Coltrane perform on the Live at the Village Vanguard Again! album (1966), he could tell from just one note emanating from Coltrane’s tenor saxophone that he had some kind of disease that would soon kill him (Coltrane later died of liver cancer in 1967). I could go on with more examples. But finding evidence of disease isn’t the only way artworks can be used indexically. Whenever we interpret a work of literature as containing any real biographical elements, like the anti-Stratfordian theorists love to do concerning Shakespeare, we are approaching the subject indexically, acting as detectives… essentially doing forensics research. And detectives, of course, work with indexes all the time. A fingerprint is an index.

Technological conditions can change the status of a sign, and the nature of its indexicality will sometimes be at stake. When C.S. Peirce discussed the invention of the photograph, he astutely pointed out that its indexicality predominates over its iconicity. That is, one sees the photograph and immediately tries to establish physical, material connections. But with the invention of A.I. image generation, our indexical reception to the photograph may diminish: that is, we might initially assume that the photo is fake from the very beginning. We usually access photographs through computer screens subject to limitless digital manipulation, AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, and thus we might interact with visual images largely as a mere resemblances bearing only attenuated real-world implications. Time will tell.

As you can perhaps figure by now, the index is a topic upon which one could dwell for quite a long time. But because this is my blog, I will share with you two particular aspects of indexicality that strike me as especially fascinating for my own purposes. They both concern language and contain some strong implications for its philosophical understanding. The first aspect is that animals can possess some impressively complex communications systems, but their complexity is always in the service of the indexical — just about every time. Birds provide a wealth of examples, but I’ll just share one popular science article about them, in part because it’s so recent. Articles about birds having “language” come out all the time, unceasingly, and this one is just yet another addition. It is entitled “Scientists Find a Global ‘Language’ Hidden in Bird Calls.” Here’s a snippet:

Birds across the planet share a learned warning cry that may echo the origins of language itself.

Bird species that live thousands of miles apart and diverged millions of years ago are using strikingly similar alarm calls to warn of parasitic threats near their nests, according to an international team of scientists.

The researchers found that this vocal signal is learned, yet it grows out of an instinctive reaction that appears across multiple species. It is the first documented case of an animal sound that blends an inborn response with learned use in this way.

The sound is a warning call to make other birds aware of brood parasites, or, birds that deposit their eggs into another’s nest, thus tricking the mother into raising another’s babies and making a cuckold of her mate.

The team discovered that more than 20 bird species across four continents produce almost identical “whining” calls when they detect a parasitic bird nearby.

Without a doubt, that’s a great find, and it’s very interesting for a number of reasons. But the team concludes that what makes this really interesting is that the warning call is used not just as an instinctive vocalization, but it’s partly learned and its use is determined through social context, and this mixture between “nature” and “nurture” might give us some insight into how humans might have “evolved” to have language.

As long-time readers will know, I strongly, strongly doubt that humans inherited language through natural selection, so I’m not particularly impressed by this takeaway. The problem with it is that this sort of cooperation isn’t unique to humans, and there’s no reason to suppose that groups of animals couldn’t come up with a conventionally-determined call, or stomp, or growl, or whatever to indicate something happening around them. Think about your dog Fido. What happens when you shout to him, “Dinnertime, Fido! Time for dinner!”? If he’s like most dogs, he hears the word “dinner,” and then he realizes that some food will soon be poured inside of a bowl. The word bears an indexical meaning for him, and indeed, he has learned it; it’s conventionally adopted. But he isn’t going to be able to think of “dinner” in an abstract sense: he won’t know how to think about the dinner as such, dinner as a quasi-Platonic εἶδος, the way we’ve done for many centuries before Plato came up with a word for it. He won’t muse for even a second about how a dinner can include anything from beef wellington to paneer butter masala to creamy mushroom stroganoff to bryndzové halušky. Fido is pretty much stuck with a rather ad hoc understanding of “dinner,” one which probably involves some noisily-poured kibble to be served for him imminently, and this understanding seems to suit him just fine. There is certainly a hint of the symbol here, but it’s faint. So it goes for birds with this warning call. What would really show us the bridge between a typical animal communication system and human language would be an example of an animal using a call, a mark, a stomp, a tweet, a flutter, or a whatever in a predominately symbolic fashion, i.e. with no predominate reference to the outside world. That would be pretty damn special. But then again, I have no idea how this would be possible without some kind of specifically developed syntax to accommodate it, and once a species invented that, then they’d be using symbolic communication all the time.

As soon as you familiarize yourself with the concept of indexicality and really give it some thought for a good ten-to-fifteen minutes, you will have the ability to spot instantly so many flaws within a whole literature dedicated to arguing that human language isn’t so different from other animal communication systems. I recently have been reading a book called The Language Myth by Vyvyan Evans (2014), in which the author spends the first chapter insisting precisely that point. For his example, he uses the honeybee’s dance:

We now know with certainty that honeybees, as well as other species, are indeed capable of communicating information about sources of food. Once a worker has located a source of nectar, it returns to the hive in order to signal the location to the other forager bees. This is achieved via a sophisticated dance performed on a wall inside the hive. The dance indicates the distance of the food source from the hive, as well as its direction. For instance, in a species of bee from Italy, a circular dance indicates that the food source is relatively close, within 20 feet, a sickle dance - a crescent-shaped pattern - indicates the food source is between around 20 and 60 feet from the hive, while tail-wagging - or waggle dance - indicates a distance greater than 60 feet.

[…]

Finer distinctions are indicated by the frequency with which the dance is repeated. A slower repetition indicates a greater distance. This means of communication is much like some of the traits central to human language: it is symbolic - conveying a message using an arbitrary symbolic code to do so, e.g., a dance; it is inter­subjective - involving a signal between two or more individuals; and it is referential - involving reference to a third party, in this case a source of nectar. And, arguably, bee dances exhibit cultural differences: different species of bee have slightly different dances to convey much the same meaning.

The fascinating thing about this book is that Evans’s main purpose is to argue that Steven Pinker is wrong in his view that humans evolved the use of language through natural selection, so one might wonder why he bothers to go after one of the major points that Pinker brings up which actually does harm to his own thesis. The astonishingly wide gulf between human language and other animal communication systems is actually why Darwin’s frequent collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace wound up completely rejecting the theory of natural selection, even after he helped create it! Yet this doesn’t stop Evans from insisting full-throatedly that humans are really pretty similar to other animals with how they communicate, even though that would bolster the natural selection theory… a problem of which Evans shows little cognizance. And of course, if you’ve been following along with our discussion so far, you’ll recognize immediately that Evans is wrong. The bees are not using symbolic communication; it’s indexical. Pretty sophisticated… but not language.

Yet nevertheless, human language can and will get pretty darn indexical, and this brings me to my second point: even though symbolic communication is the thing that makes human communication special — the sine qua non that separates it definitively from all other animal communication systems, and frankly by a long shot — there could never be a functional human language that lacks indexicality to some degree or another. Attempts to refine language in such a manner that removes context almost always betray a deformed, autophagically logocentric understanding of life.

So, how is a language indexical? Although Peirce said that an index tells us something about an object by its being affected by that same object, the index as it occurs within human language is a bit more subtle. In language, for instance, indexicality explains the nature of words whose meaning is strictly dependent upon context. I’m talking about deixis, or deictic words — words that “point” to places or times — words such as “here,” “then,” “now,” “later,” “next year,” “over yonder,” and so on. These all serve a “pointing” function because they lack specificity and, like the bird’s anti-cuckoldry-defense call or the honeybee’s nectar dance, can only be used to refer to specific spatial and temporal circumstances. Now, they certainly are partly symbolic as well, but because they are context-dependent, they predominately assume indexicality when your brain interprets them. When someone says “look over there,” you’re inclined to swivel your head that-a-way, to wherever the person is looking, and because his gaze is part of the message, it is not a purely “text-internal” utterance. Even the phrase “next year” is indexical to some extent (though perhaps not predominately) because although the future isn’t really factual and thus isn’t “real” — and therefore the words cannot “point to” any physically extant things — the fulcrum that determines what “next year” even means is still now, whatever time that is at the moment of the utterance. So even in that phrase, one’s attention is still drawn to physically extant realities that could perhaps influence some potential future.

This sort of thing gets complicated, and the subject of deixis has been highly theorized, with linguists having created additional subtypes, like discourse deixis, social deixis, and so on. The invention of writing adds further complication. Since writing overtly suspends its message over time and often space (if it’s portable), it has an indeterminate audience, one which gives all deixis a kind of built-in irony. And people instinctively like to experiment with its ironic potential. If I write down “don’t eat me!” on a sticky note, the note doesn’t make much sense, since “me” could mean anyone, presumably the paper itself. But then, if I put the sticky note on some Chinese takeout in the refrigerator, then I’ve given the Chinese food a “voice” through which it communicates to my roommates, or whomever. This is a fairly commonplace way of communicating, but it’s also ironic, even if irony was far from my intentions. I believe that average people use language in this way all the time, namely as a tool to forge pathways between the virtual realm of the human mind and the carnal world of matter, even going so far as to play with their contextual circumstances in a similar fashion, or anthropomorphize the world around them just to reinforce that indexical pathway. And amazingly, they don’t even find this tendency particularly special or creative; it comes quite natural to them. What really requires discipline is to keep everything text-internal, acting as though all messages must remain hermetically sealed, or — to put it in semiotic terms — to make the writing as purely symbolic as possible. This is the sort of thing that writing teachers instruct us to do.

Regarding the tension between the index and the symbol, Sebeok has this to say in his aforementioned book Signs:

The overall interest of linguists and philosophers in indexical expressions is bound up, as I understand it, with their search for an ideal language, consisting of a set of context-free sentences, to use as an instrument for probing the universe sub specie aeternitatis. In [A.J.] Ayer’s (1968: 167) phrasing, the argument has been about ‘whether language can be totally freed from dependence upon context. ‘ Ayer was unable to decide this for himself, and I believe that the matter is still wide open. However, whether or not this indecision has any serious consequences for indexicality in general or for Peirce’s view of this matter in particular seems to me quite doubtful. For as Ayer (1968: 167) thought as well, ‘although a reference to context within the language may not be necessary for the purposes of communica­tion, there will still be occasions, in practice, when we shall need to rely upon the clues which are provided by the actual circumstances in which the communications are produced.’

This is probably why Peirce felt that the index is essential to human speech and it couldn’t be otherwise. After an aside on deixis, Sebeok continues:

Barwise and Perry (1983: 32-9) coined the expression ‘efficiency of language’ for locutions - even though these retain the same lin­guistic meaning - which different speakers use in different space­ time locations and with different anchoring in their surroundings, and which are susceptible to different interpretations. To put it another way, the productivity of language depends decisively on indexicality, which is therefore ‘extremely important to the infor­mation-carrying capacity of language.’ These authors convincingly argue that philosophical engrossment with context freedom, that is, with mathematics and the eternal nature of its sentences, ‘was a critical blunder, for efficiency lies at the very heart of meaning.’ However this may be, linguists at present have no inkling of, let alone a comprehensive theory for, how this commonplace, global human enterprise is carried out.

If you’re a little familiar with analytic philosophy, you’ll realize that Barwise and Perry (in their book Situations and Attitudes) are making claims with direct bearing upon the study of formal logic, particularly Fregean logic, which sought to purify language to such a degree that it resembles mathematics (Rudolf Carnap, if I understand his early work correctly, took this pursuit to a ludicrous extreme). But it couldn’t really be done, probably for some of the reasons Barwise and Perry propose. Language simply isn’t “logical” the way we want it to be.

But since I don’t want to traverse the muddy waters of formal logic — I’ve only just started reading Kneale and Kneale’s 700+ page treatment of its long and tortuous history — I’ll leave that topic for another day. In the next installment of the “Principles of Semiotics” series, whenever that may be, I’ll discuss Peirce’s notion of the symbol, its value, maybe its connection to medieval scholastic philosophy, and perhaps even some of the problems that arise with it.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that engages in media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. And intellectual history, from time to time.

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Being interested in semiotics, one thing that has always fascinated me is the way in which a word, symbol, concept, or even entire ideology can slowly come to signal something entirely different from what it stood for, if not its exact opposite. With words, this can happen quite often. It sometimes happens due to simple misprision. “Nonplussed” once meant baffled, but now it increasingly means “unfazed.” “Peruse” once meant to read something very carefully, but nowadays it often means to skim. Sometimes a word can change its meaning because of exaggeration: “literally” now tends to mean “figuratively.” Oftentimes, words can mean one thing and its opposite at the same time: “with” used to mean both “with” and “against,” the latter definition surviving in the word “withstand.” With symbols, things can get a bit more interesting. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine of Hippo noted that symbols can often mean one thing and their opposite as well. For instance, the serpent can resemble both Satan (its more familiar association) and God, as well, as when Christ says, “Go among you, and be as wise as serpents and as meek as doves” (Matthew 10:16). This sort of ambiguity can lead to wild textual revisionism. One early Christian sect called the Ophites tried to work through the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Old Testament, and they decided that Yahweh was a deranged demiurge and the serpent was actually a symbol of divine wisdom. So through an act of Biblical philology, the entire tropological meaning of Genesis switches around. And in today’s times, of course, we know that political ideologies change all the time. In America, Democrats believe in things that Republicans once believed, and vice versa. Environmental activism used to be associated with racial preservationism and eugenics, and eugenics was originally championed by British progressives. All of this is quite fascinating, and I’ll occasionally happen upon this phenomenon when I least expect it. And it happened recently when I was reading a pretty interesting book to try and understand Tantric Hinduism.

The book was The Origins of Yoga and Tantra by Samuel Geoffrey (2013), and it’s worth commenting on for its own sake. Though a little slow-going at first, it wound up being probably the best explanation of how the yoga of Patañjali, the Kaula tradition, the Shaivism of Kashmir, and Vajrayana Buddhism came into existence from a non-doctrinal perspective. That is to say, instead of focusing on how one doctrine evolved into the next by explicating primary sources and analyzing their historic developments intra-textually, Geoffrey focuses more on the material conditions that led to these developments, like the expansion of urban areas, trade, war, other sociopolitical conditions, and so on, all the way up to the thirteenth century before the Muslim invasion. Most attempts to explain Tantra that I’ve seen will deal with the topic from either a scholar-practitioner’s perspective, or through the famous religious historian Mircea Eliade’s approach of letting the tradition speak for itself. Although Geoffrey openly owes plenty to Eliade, his approach is to talk about all the other stuff that lies outside of the intricacies in doctrine, including eschatology, soteriology, or metaphysics — the stuff that goes unmentioned yet is clearly essential to understand any religion or spiritual movement. Which is valuable because, of course, all religions and movements do have a material component to them.

But through his analysis, he winds up commenting on the origins of Buddhism and Jainism as well, since they belong to a trend of renunciant orders that emerged in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in Northern India, now known collectively as the śramaṇa. These renunciants (which also included the somewhat underdiscussed Ājīvikas) were heavily linked to the emergence of urban areas — indeed, as Geoffrey argues, they couldn’t have come into being without them — since these zones actually gave spiritual practitioners a centralized space to depart from in their newfound embrace of asceticism. But they also influenced and helped inspire a new kind of asceticism altogether, with very different goals from its previous forms — an asceticism that would later inform the various kinds of Tantra. Whereas in the Vedic tradition, asceticism was practiced either for worldly reasons or for the securing of a blessed afterlife, the śramaṇas were after something a little bit more subtle: they were trying to attain a radically different, other state of being in this life.

Geoffrey’s focus is aimed mainly toward the Buddhists and Jainas, and although the former are better-known, the aims of both groups weren’t too dissimilar from one another. In the context of this discussion, however, the Jainas are a bit more interesting. Just as with Buddhism, the Jainas wanted to attain moksha, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth, and concomitantly a state of pure, unalterable bliss. And as they saw it — this is also similar to Buddhism — the way to attain these things was through nonviolence, celibacy, and detachment from worldly possessions, with nonviolence being the most important virtue. There’s no question that the Jainas take nonviolence seriously, as the principle (they call it “ahiṃsā”) means nonviolence to all living beings, including even the smallest insects. Jainas, in fact, often cover their mouths with cloth to prevent themselves from accidentally inhaling fleas or gnats. They also can’t eat root vegetables, since one cannot eat a potato or beet except by uprooting the whole thing and thus killing it, which, in their view, counts as violence. Though Buddhism wound up being the more popular world religion, perhaps due to its relative laxity, not to mention its reception to metaphysical adjustments, Jainism nonetheless predated it, if slightly: its leader Mahāvīra started his teaching practice before the Buddha started his by about decade or so.

Now, the reason I wanted to cover this was because of a theory on the Jainas from the Indologist Paul Dundas. First postulated in 1991 in a volume entitled The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society, Dundas argued that the śramaṇas who later made up the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ājīvikas themselves were the spiritual descendants of ancient Indo-European warrior brotherhoods. He was referring to the mysterious and oft-mythologized vrātyas, who originated from the Kuru-Pañcāla region, the bedrock of Vedic civilization, which the Indo-Europeans (or Āryans) of course founded and maintained from 1500-500 B.C. Here is how Geoffrey describes the vrātyas, borrowing in particular from the work of Michael Witzel and Harry Falk (I’ve removed the in-text citations):

At the time of the Kuru-Pañcāla state or its historical equivalent, they seem to have been associations of young men who have not yet married and achieved full adult status. These groups of young men went out on raiding expeditions into neighbouring territories, these expeditions perhaps acting as a way of canalising the ‘traditional aggression resulting in cattle rustling, fighting and small scale warfare existing with one’s neighbours’. They also had a specific ritual function, which Witzel regards as preserving elements of the old Vedic ritual before the Kuru reformation. It particularly involved the performance of extended midwinter sacrificial rituals out in the forest, away from the village community, on behalf of the community as a whole.

[…]

As for the ritual function of the vrātyas, Falk regards their midwinter twelve-day sacrifices as related to such Indo-European phenomena as the Roman Lupercalia and the twelve nights of Christmas. This was the time when the wild hunter Odin rode through the forests of northern Europe. Odin’s equivalent in the Vedic context was Rudra, the Vedic prototype of Siva. As Rudra’s ‘dogs’ or ‘wolves,’ they slay the sacrificial cow in the food shortages and drought of mid-winter, and so help to bring about the return of prosperity in the following year. The most notorious vrātya ritual was the mahāvrata or ‘great observance’, which involved ritual sex between a brahmacharyin (presumably, in this context, meaning a young man otherwise vowed to celibacy) and a prostitute.

[…]

The vrātyas in the earlier period … represent an important prototype for the situation of an ‘unorthodox’ group whose activities, though dark and associated with death and transgression, are nevertheless somehow essential to the well-being of society.

Eventually, however, the term became associated with low-caste or otherwise devalued populations and lost much of its original associations. This loss is found as early as in the Laws of Manu (c. 200 B.C. to 200 A.D.), which forbids vrātyas from partaking in religious rituals and associating with Brahmins, considering them impure, and that same negative association persists today.

So essentially, the vrātyas were groups of young men who waged war and went on raids yet also engaged in transgressive forest rituals that may or may not have been taken straight from the Indo-European tribes from which they originally came. Is it possible, then, that they could set the precedent for groups like the Jainas, or the Buddhists?

According to Dundas, it’s quite likely, although he stresses that the śramaṇas borrowed from them in terms of organizational structure, imagery, and rhetoric — he doesn’t suggest a direct genetic lineage, though he doesn’t exactly deny one, either. In any case, the evidence is pretty striking. For one thing, the founding teachers of Jainism and Buddhism, Mahāvīra and the Siddhartha respectively, were nobles and kṣatriyas, i.e. members of the warrior caste. Additionally, the Jainas in particular made great use of martial imagery. Jina (the word from which Jain originates), after all, means “conqueror,” and Mahāvīra means “great hero.” Military imagery is used quite often in both Jainism and Buddhism, and perhaps most strangely, the Jainas often found patronage in violent and aggressive military rulers despite their belief in pacifism. Dunda, in his 1991 essay “The Digambara Jain Warrior,” explains it further:

Not all kṣatriyas in ancient India were warriors continually engaged in the performance of acts of martial violence as a profession or social obligation, but it should not, therefore, be assumed that the pivotal position which the Jain religion gives to non-violence is at variance with being patronised by ‘practising’ warrior adherents. In fact, Jainism has always been ambivalent about war, and two examples testify to the existence of Jain practitioners of warfare at completely different periods of Jain history. The Pāli canon refers to a Jain general (senāpati) called Sīha, contemporary with Mahāvīra and the Buddha, who was a Jain layman (nigaṇṭhasāvaka) while, two thousand years later, in the sixteenth century AD and afterwards, Jains participated in what Bayly has called the ‘all-India military culture’ and fought in the armies of the Moghul emperors. However, despite this, Indian historians of the Deccan have always been uneasy when attempting to account for the undoubtedly violent activities of the many rulers who were connected with Jainism in the medieval period, often expressing bafflement at the incongruity involved. In fact, it does seem likely that total adherence to the principles of non-violence was of importance only in certain specific and precisely defined religious contexts, such as ritual or contact with a monk, and that non­ violence did not inform broader issues, such as a king’s obligation to expand his kingdom.

Geoffrey extends the same point to Buddhism:

The same would have to be said about Buddhists, for all of the splendid example of the Emperor Aśoka’s conversion to Buddhism as a result of his revulsion at the slaughter involved in the war against Kalinga. The Sinhalese Buddhist willingness to justify King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī’s slaughter of the Tamils on religious grounds is only one well-known example, if one that has become particularly notorious because of its lethal consequences in modern times.

And in his 2002 book The Jains, Dundas explains how, perhaps, formal organizations of ascetics were founded as they were:

Terms employed in Jainism and Buddhism to employ groups of ascetics such as gaṇa, ‘troop,’ and saṅgha, ‘assembly,’ are used in early Vedic texts to refer to the warrior brotherhoods, the young men’s bands which were a feature of Āryan nomadic life, and the stress found in the old codes of monastic law on requirements of youth, physical fitness and good birth for Jain and Buddhist monks, along with the frequent martial imagery of Jainism and its repeated stress on the crushing of spiritual enemies, may point to a degree of continuity with these earlier types of warrior.

Geoffrey eventually decides that he doesn’t really think that the vrātyas should be understood as the major precedent for the śramaṇas. But then, bizarrely, after erring on the side of caution, he offers further evidence: he cites Willem Bollée, who raises the point that the śramaṇas’ close association with the cult of the dead may have came from the vrātyas, since the former would often settle on the sites of the dead, although Geoffrey counters that this may have been a strategy — for the Buddhists, in any case — to build links with local communities, by assisting with the process of death and looking over the dead.

Whatever the case may be, there is no question that martial imagery and rhetoric appears fairly often in early Buddhist and Jaina writings, and their approach to asceticism does come much closer to what you’d expect to find in a warrior’s mentality than what you typically find in the thought process of both groups’ modern adherents, particularly in the west. It thus isn’t too surprising that early Buddhists and Jainas associated themselves with cremation grounds or other sites for treating the dead. Among the śramaṇas more broadly, a proper death actually may have been the very thing that they were attempting to achieve with what we now so casually call their approach to “meditation.” Geoffrey discusses one work of scholarship asserting that early Jaina meditation was but one aspect of a broader attempt to stop all the activities of both mind and body, including even breathing — an attitude which brings them closer to e.g. Simeon the Stylite than Richard Gere. Although Jaina meditation has become perhaps less extreme over time, the act of fasting to death does actually still remain an ideal in certain contemporary texts, though it is not done often (early Buddhist texts, for their part, also make reference to fasting to death). It thus seems that “meditation” for the śramaṇas in their nascent form carried a different meaning than what the word indicates now. The idea had more to do with attaining the perfect state in this life to ready oneself for a righteous and elevated death, not to “clear your mind” so that you can focus better on your schoolwork, or some other paltry consideration.

The idea of the śramaṇas looking back toward Āryan organizational or spiritual forms for guidance wasn’t altogether new even back in 1991. Long ago, I read The Doctrine of Awakening (1943), the Italian perennial traditionalist/occultist Julius Evola’s book on Buddhism, in which he argues that the Buddha was attempting to restore the rigorous discipline of the Āryans for an elevated spiritual elite; he certainly wasn’t trying to create a mass religion focusing on compassion or social justice, as many understood Buddhism even in the 1940s. For his methodology, Evola focuses quite extensively on the martial and warlike language found in the suttas from the Pāli canon, the only body of Buddhist texts which he considers legitimate. And of course, the overall attitude of the Buddha found therein (such as his ambivalence towards women) leads Evola to conclude that Buddhism was really a kind of Āryan restoration project taking place during decadent times in which the caste system was hopelessly broken and no authentic traditional authority could be found. Of course, Evola had a fixed philosophical perspective (one that we could describe as a sort of heroic Platonism) and typically tried to incorporate what he liked best about various world religions into it. And this book is no exception. Consequently, when I first read it, I initially suspected that his thesis was wildly overstated. But having seen evidence of other similar scholarly claims with more specific detail, I’m now not so sure. Though the Jainas provide the greater amount of evidence (one wonders why Evola didn’t focus on them instead), it seems quite possible that these śramaṇa religions were indeed attempting to copy the organizational structure and ascetic thought process of actual descendants of the same Indo-Europeans who once invaded India and introduced Vedic culture to it.

The question is, how exactly could such a transformation in ideals take place? Although it took mainstream scholarship an embarrassingly long time to accept it, thanks in particular to the anthropologists during the 1970s, the Indo-Europeans (or Aryans) were not nice, passive guys, to say the least. Having invented the horse-drawn chariot, they traveled incredible distances armed with massive battle axes, killing, raping, and plundering their way to dominance all over Europe, India, and Iran. If you want to understand them, think of Conan the Barbarian instead of, say, Avatar. And spiritually, they remained focused on the solar dimension, worshipping a sky god as their supreme deity and aiming toward outward transcendence, thus rejecting the supremacy of the chthonic gods and consigning them to an inferior status. This is why, as Calvert Watkins has demonstrated through rigorous comparative analysis, one of their most enduring poetic motifs involves the slaying of the dragon — the forces of solar, masculine radiance humiliating the scaly, slimy, subterranean forces of chthonic decadence. You wouldn’t expect them to turn into hippie-dippie vegans who completely reject all forms of violence, as they ended up being. If any of this scholarship on vrātya origins is to be trusted, then one should ask: how could it be that the organizational structure and ideals of Indo-European war bands eventually evolve into a group like the Jainas?

The answer, I think, has to be found in simply how pliable of a metaphor war can be. During times of peace, war often turns inward and assumes a strictly spiritual or psychological connotation, and there is a certain solemnity and power in this when it happens to those with experience in combat. In Islam, for instance, there is the concept of the “greater jihad” (Jihad al-Nafs), which is mainly a call to self-discipline and inner-purification. But “war” can also be invoked to entice those with no experience in it, offering people an attractive surrogate for the actual combat that they believe would edify them. It is possible that the warlike imagery of the Buddhists and Jainas initially attracted those to its fold with no war experience, even as the practices of both groups drifted toward total and complete pacifism. Elsewhere, in modern times, the U.S. government has declared war on poverty, war on crime, and war on drugs over the past several decades starting in the 1960s. Pat Buchanan famously brought the idea of a “culture war” into being in 1992, and it hasn’t gone away since then.

The problem with “war” as a metaphor is that it seems to be parasitic in nature, meaning that it must subsist on the memory of actual combat to retain its plausibility, and if that memory becomes irretrievable, then the metaphorized “war” can go in just about any direction. In other words, the vehicle of the metaphor demands some familiarity with the tenor, and once that familiarity goes away, the metaphor threatens to veer toward the unrecognizable. About ten years ago, for example, the insult “social justice warrior,” or “SJW” became quite popular on the internet, because it mocked the pretense of the online left-wing activist who demands social justice. That is, the people who went onto their computers and aggressively typed out calls for racial equity, transgender rights, and castigated their enemies for “microaggressions” and other slight offenses seemed to see themselves as warriors. Understandably enough, they were aggressively mocked for it. But as that insult faded in popularity, anti-SJW right-wingers themselves started to invoke images associating themselves with bronze age steppe warriors, adorning their social media profiles with Frank Frazetta’s paintings while aggressively typing out Republican party talking points. They, too, have been mocked for their lack of familiarity with actual violence.

The difference, though, between that situation and the topic of this blog post is that whereas the developments of the 20th century have led to war becoming the metaphor of choice precisely for those who lack experience with it — even as war itself increasingly turns into a largely virtual, technological experience (for industrialized nations, anyway — the Buddhists and Jainas eventually divested themselves of warlike connotations, and few who try and spread their ideology today see themselves as “warriors” of any kind. For this, perhaps we should give them credit.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that dallies about with non-structuralist semiotics and media ecology

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When people think “media ecology,” they usually think McLuhan, and for good reason. He was the guy who put it on the map. He synthesized all of the previous research up to that point into one kaleidoscopic medley of observations and musings, his works written ingeniously to imitate the same electronic media environment that he was tasked with explicating, and he rightfully became an international celebrity for his efforts. He also interacted closely with some of the other, more “serious” (AKA more confidently cited) figures in the same area, most notably Harold Innis and Walter Ong. And he also did a lot of playful stuff that the French intellectuals did later on; I mean the ones who would wind up dominating American English departments. Before Derrida’s experimental “anti-book” Glas (1974) came out, McLuhan published an “anti-book” of his own — and Wilfred Watson’s, his co-author — called From Cliche to Archetype (1970), which orders each chapter alphabetically rather than sequentially, including the preface and even the table of contents, which doesn’t show up until late into the book. He even started to author all of his books as collaborations with other people before Deleuze & Guattari started up their working relationship, thus demonstrating through this intentionally distributed authorship the way in which the electronic media environment pierces through the fiction of any single, individual “author” for any text. Yet for all those impressive accomplishments, over in France, there was a popular philosopher and paleontologist who was writing around the same time as McLuhan, whose influence never really reached America, and he, too, was essentially a media ecologist — and quite an impressive one, at that. I’m talking about André Leroi-Gourhan, whose main contribution was in recognizing that the process of human evolution was inseparable from technogenesis, or the evolution of technical systems over time.

Leroi-Gourhan’s work is reasonably well-known in France, but it is quite obscure in the Anglosphere. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Leroi-Gourhan had a marked impact on Jacques Derrida and other Parisian continental philosophers such as Deleuze & Guattari and Bernard Stiegler. Derrida’s usage is probably the most well-known, though it was a bit disappointing: he merely discussed Leroi-Gourhan’s observation that early man’s visual art was initially symbolic rather than representative in order to bolster his own claim contra Saussure that all of language is essentially “written” (i.e., just as much graphic as it is phonic)… so, in other words, he borrowed from Leroi-Gourhan to try and deprivilege the oral aspect of language over the written aspect, instead presenting them as impossible to oppose against each other… but that was about it. Even though Leroi-Gourhan’s seminal two-volume work (and arguably his magnum opus) Gesture and Speech came out in 1964-65, a time in which Parisian philosophy was about to give birth to poststructuralism, the actual substance of Leroi-Gourhan’s thought didn’t have much purchase — at least not until 1980 when A Thousand Plateaus came out, which begin to grapple with his ideas in a more ambitious way. So for a good decade-and-a-half, the Parisian intellectuals were too busy doing their own thing, grinding their own axes against trendier thinkers and topics. And today, Leroi-Gourhan’s proximity to media ecology is only really understood in academic departments, not so much among the average uncredentialed-yet-smart guy.

This is sort of a shame, because there is a tremendous amount of overlap between Leroi-Gourhan’s observations and those of Marshall McLuhan, even though the two developed their own work independently of one another, without any real cross-influence. What they shared in common was an appreciation for Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911), a book that — despite being thoroughly dismissed by today’s mainstream evolutionary biologists for its vitalism — contains certain ideas that have proven frustratingly obstinate. Leroi-Gourhan basically argued that the human body evolved not because of a larger brain capacity, but in order to make room for the brain’s growth. Bipedalism emerged as a way to free up the hand, allowing hominids to develop and manipulate tools like the Acheulean hand axe. This encouraged brain growth. But bipedalism also allowed for the development of language by freeing up the face and mouth, which allowed for speech and further encouraged brain growth by acting as an apparatus through which ideas could be retained and recalled at will. As he puts it in Gesture and Speech:

The origin of language in anthropoids preceding Homo sapiens […] seems to have been closely linked with technical motor function. […] Indeed the link is so close that employing as they do the same pathways in the brain, the two main anthropoid characteristics could be attributed to one and the same phenomenon. The early anthropoids’ technical activity suggests an extremely slow but roughly synchronous evolution of tools and of the skull toward the status of Homo sapiens. […] If language really sprang from the same source as technics, we are entitled to visualize language too in the form of operating sequences limited to the expression of concrete situations, at first concurrently with them and later involving the deliberate preservation and reproduction of verbal sequences going beyond immediate situations. […] At the moment, humans still have a very long way to go, but their journey will not be so much a matter of biological development as of freeing themselves from the zoological context and organizing themselves in an entirely new way, with society gradually taking the place of the phyletic stream.

That’s a mouthful, because he’s saying that not only did tool use and language develop coextensively, but he also says that the body doesn’t really have anywhere to go, with broader society being the only thing that could “evolve” to broaden the body’s natural capacities. Framed this way, technology and the body are inseparable from one another and have been since the beginning of the hominid’s ascent to bipedalism. As technology expands, it essentially just extends the body through exterior apparatuses — and anyone with McLuhan’s work will find that observation familiar: the saw is an extension of the teeth. The lens is an extension of the eye. Clothes are an extension of the skin. Etc.

There are potential issues with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory, since he neglects to discuss how the evolution of technics can in turn impact the evolution of the body itself — a question now taken more seriously, even though it involves man’s own self-made environment affecting him, something the early neo-Darwinists of the 1940s weren’t thinking much about. But considering that this book was written in the 1960s, still a fairly long time ago, it is impressive that Leroi-Gourhan was able to offer such a different approach to man’s relationship with his techniques and tools, one that many Darwinian thinkers neglected for a good while afterward. The book does touch upon objectionable notions concerning the human organism’s free will and self-direction (these are verboten ideas into which a Bergsonian vitalist will have no problem going), but its theory concerning human evolution isn’t actually too far from where mainstream evolutionary theory is now — even within our current neo-Darwinian paradigm. For one example of a theory posited in the same spirit, the evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham argued more recently (in Catching Fire, 2009) that the invention of cooking, i.e. the manipulation of fire for food preparation, allowed the brain of Homo habilis to grow by freeing up bodily energy that would otherwise be spent on the laborious process of finding, chewing, and digesting raw foods. It’s a controversial theory, but it isn’t challenged due to the evolutionary biomechanics that Wrangham posits — instead, it’s the archeological evidence, or lack thereof, since there’s no direct evidence of cooking from that far back.

However, the real reason that Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech is so exciting isn’t because of his strict work in paleontology. The first hundred pages of the book are mainly about analyzing the fossil records: bones, tools, brain size, and that sort of thing. If you decide to read the book and find yourself put off by the technicality of that section, you can skim through most of it and not miss too much — we have a better understanding of man’s evolution now, and anyway, he always refers back to what’s in those pages when he later analyzes a given finding. What makes the book truly exciting, then, is what he does with his theory; the implications he’s able to tease out from it, touching upon such a wide range of topics as to beggar belief, including the role of workers and intellectuals in society, the cultural aspects of the city vs. rural environments, the tension between the relatively un-evolved body and the advancement of technology, religious and spiritual ideas, aesthetics, ecology, the distant future, and more. And incredibly, he does so in a manner that suggests serious familiarity with all of these topics, never giving them a callous or superficial treatment.

And because I feel like being a little bit lazy today, I’ll go ahead and quote some interesting parts of Gesture and Speech at length. I’ll let the readers make up their own minds about if they think he’s worth paying attention to or not.

On society’s attitude toward the artisans, AKA the extensions of the hand:

In all historical periods and in all nations, even when their activities are closely integrated in the religious system, artisans were relegated to the back of the stage. The priest is “holy,” the warrior “heroic,” the hunter “brave"; society acknowledges the orator’s “prestige” and will even concede “nobility” to the peasant’s tasks, but what the artisan does is merely “skillful.” Artisans embody what is most Anthropian in humans, but as we survey their long history we begin to suspect that they represent only one of the two poles — the hand, the antithesis of meditative thought. Society’s discrimination in favor of the “intellectual” as against the “technician,” which still persists today, reflects an anthropoid scale of values on which technical ability comes lower down than language, and working with the most tangible elements of reality lower than working with symbols.

More on artisans/technicians:

It is not by chance that the myth of Prometheus gives us both Man triumphant over the gods and Man shackled by the gods, or that Genesis speaks of the murder of Abel by the farmer Cain, builder of the first city and ancestor of Tubalcain, the first metallurgist.

Technicians then are the masters of civilization because they have mastered the furnace crafts. From the hearth (which they learned to operate in several centuries of pottery making) comes plaster, soon to be followed by copper and bronze. Slag and clinker, the residues of metallurgical processing, are at the origin of glassmaking. But the artisan is an enslaved demiurge. We have already seen that the artisan’s position within the technoeconomic machine is a subordinate one. It is he, Vulcan the all-powerful, the lame, the derided, who forges weapons for the chieftains’ use, makes jewels for their wives, hammers out dishes for the gods. His is the “hand” that over the course of fifty centuries, during which humanity‘s ideological levels remain practically unchanged, provides the “head” with the means of ensuring the triumph of the artificial over the natural world. The mood of malediction that hangs over the furnace artisan’s history in most civilizations is the reflection of a frustration intuitively felt by humans from the earliest times.

On the industrial revolution:

It is very difficult to speak of facts so close to contemporary history without seeming to state the obvious, but the decentralization of the iron and steel industry and the rise of cities that had lost all traditional character and were nothing more than agglomerations of workers round their workplace are facts at least as important and interesting as the preeminence of technical specialization in the primitive couple or the bond between farmers and herd breeders in the transition to an agrarian economy. They are all the more important as the industrial revolution was the only major change to occur within the agricultural societies in five thousand years. So its repercussions on the social edifice as a whole must be considered comparable to those of the transition to an agrarian economy. Indeed metallurgical decentralization and the establishment of urban units in coal and ore fields led to a complete reappraisal of all existing social structures, including religious ones, within the space of less than a century. The upheavals caused by the industrial revolution are common knowledge. A point worth making is that they were not at odds with but consistent with the functional development of an artificial sociotechnical organism that seems increasingly to reflect properties of living organisms.

On the first works of art not being representational or mimetic but rather symbolic:

A fact of particular relevance in our present context is that graphism certainly did not start by reproducing reality in a slavishly photographic manner. On the contrary, we see it develop over a space of some ten thousand years from signs which, it would appear, initially expressed rhythms rather than forms. The first forms, confined to a few stereotyped figures in which only a few conventional details allow us to hazard to identify an animal, did not appear until around 30,000 B.C. All this suggests that in its origins figurative art was directly linked with language and was much closer to writing (in the broadest sense) than to what we understand by a work of art.

One can see the influence upon Derrida in that passage. But the point about the earliest visual art expressing rhythm is not by any means trivial, and is in some ways more interesting, since rhythm is felt not just through the beat of the animal-skin drum or the computerized drum machine, but also the consistency and reliability of the train tracks, the yellow lines on the roads, or the pistons of an internal combustion engine.

On the development of cranes and loom as extensions of the hand:

In cranes and pulley blocks, known since ancient times, the hand intervenes only as a hook, and the machine is a simple exteriorization of motive force. The example of weaving too is conclusive: in the most elaborate fabrics such as those of Peru or in oriental brocades, the hand picks up the threads individually in order to make the desired design. Yet freeing of the fingers was achieved quite early, perhaps as early as the Neolithic, by reducing to the repeated lifting of one thread in two or three. Not until the nineteenth century did the introduction of a punched-card system raise mechanical weaving to the level of handling skill of which the bare hand had been capable from the start. In both cases the development is the same: in the first stage, the hand can perform diverse actions that are limited in terms of force or speed but infinitely diverse; at a later stage, that of the pulley block or the weaving loom, a single action of the hand is isolated and transferred to the machine; in the third stage, the programming of movements is reconstituted through the creation of an artificial and rudimentary nervous system.

On wheel innovations:

Generally regarded as historical phenomena of technical significance, the invention of the four-wheeled carriage, the plough, the windmill, the sailing ship, must also be viewed as biological ones — as mutations of that external organism which, in the human, substitutes itself for the physiological body.

On robots, the singularity, and the threat of hostile AI:

Our constant search for more powerful and more precise implements has inevitably led to the biological paradox of the robot, a creature which, in the form of the automaton, has haunted the human mind for centuries. The ape-ancestor image, […] the expression of a nostalgic retreat into the past, has its counterpart, not in the spiritual image of the angel or the physical one of a perfect human body, but in the image of a perfectly made machine, the Anthropoid’s mechanical twin — Tarzan, the astronaut, and the robot gravitating like a constellation around the human of flesh and blood.

[…]

The freeing of the areas of the motor cortex of the brain, definitively accomplished with erect posture, will be complete when we succeed in exteriorizing the human motor brain. Beyond that, hardly anything more can be imagined other than the exteriorization of intellectual thought through the development of machines capable not only of exercising judgment (that stage is already here) but also of injecting affectivity into their judgment, taking sides, waxing enthusiastic, or being plunged into despair at the immensity of their task. Once Homo sapiens had equipped such machines with the mechanical ability to reproduce themselves, there would be nothing left for the human to do but withdraw into the paleontological twilight. In point of fact, the chance of machines equipped with a brain taking our place on earth is slight; the threat lies within the zoological species itself, not directly in the exteriorized organs. The nightmare picture of robots pursuing human beings in a forest of mechanical tubes will come true only to the extent that other human beings will have regulated the robots’ automatic system. What is to be feared — if only slightly — is that in a thousand years’ time Homo sapiens, having exhausted the possibility of self-exteriorization, will come to feel encumbered by the archaic osteomuscular apparatus inherited from the Paleolithic.

On the inevitability of AI:

The artificial brain of course is still in its infancy, but we can already be sure that it will be more than just a nine days’ wonder with limited applications. To refuse to see that machines will soon overtake the human brain in operations involving memory and rational judgment is to be like the Pithecanthropus who would have denied the possibility of the biface, the archer who would have laughed at the mere suggestion of the crossbow, most of all like the Homeric bard who would have dismissed writing as a mnemonic trick without any future. We must get used to being less clever than the artificial brain that we have produced, just as our teeth are less strong than a millstone and our ability to fly negligible compared with that of a jet aircraft.

On aesthetics being irreducible to language:

Of all branches in philosophy, aesthetics has always found it most difficult to find expressions in words. When it succeeds, it is by evocation, by relying on the reader’s imagination and experience to supply the sounds, forms, and gestures that words can conjure up but not reconstitute. Language, it seems, is not adequate for expressing the aesthetic. The marvelous thing about poetry is that it creates an ambiguity between its rhythm and the words that the rhythm carries. The words of a song are the less intelligible, but the more the song is really music, it is as though the vocal function served not only intellectual expression but also something else in which intelligence, the faculty of understanding, plays no part.

On the significance of time and space concerning the aesthetic:

We may end up forgetting that even when, lying down and surrounded by complete silence, we read a poem, whatever image is conjured up by the words we read is significant only to the extent that it refers to everything we have experienced in the past in concrete situations comparable enough to the poetic image to make it intellectually graspable. Yet the first reference of all concrete experience is to the body, or rather, all experience relates to time and space as perceived by the body. It is essential to keep this idea in mind when judging aesthetic or intellectual performances or products at a high level. Seen by animals or by organisms fundamentally different from ourselves, we would appear to be obsessed by time and space. Ever since the emergence of civilization these concerns have dominated all our areas of thought. The fabric of our practical life is woven of the material conquest of geographical and — eventually, cosmic space — the compression of time through speed and methods of medical research. Speculation about astronomy and light, metrology and the physics of the atom, beguiles our philosophical and scientific dreams. Our spiritual dreams feed upon the conquest of eternity and the celestial spheres. For thousands of years our favorite game has been to organize time and space in rhythms, in the calendar, in architecture. Our microcosmic creations support the religious apparatus in which the fate of the universe is settled. Even negatively, time and space weigh upon every one of our gestures, and if we withdraw into the desert seeking immobility and contemplation, we do so to escape from “the age,” that is to say, from both time and space in which the rhythms of normal life are taking place.

On human-mediated rhythms overtaking the natural rhythms of the natural world:

These archeological observations enable us to identify the phenomena of spatiotemporal insertion, from the Upper Paleolithic onward, with the symbolic apparatus of which language is the main instrument. They correspond to a real taking possession of time and space through the intermediacy of symbols, to a domestication in the strictest sense of the term, since they lead to the creation of controllable space and time within the home and radiating outward from the home. As a result of this symbolic “domestication” the human was able to pass from the natural rhythmicity of seasons, days, and walking distances to a rhythmicity regulated and packaged within a network of symbols — calendrical, horary, or metric — that turned humanized time and space into a theatrical stage upon which the play of nature was humanly controlled. The rhythm of regularized cadences and intervals took the place of the chaotic rhythmicity of the natural world and became the principle element of human socialization, the very image of social integration, to a point where our triumphant society’s framework is today a checkerboard of cities and roads on which the movements of individuals are controlled by horary time.

This is especially relevant to what I wrote about last week, about how our era of man-made light has completely severed our relationship to the cosmic rhythms that generally govern time, bringing us into a formlessness and chaos never seen before. There are even more passages that directly bear upon my claims, like this one:

The calendar of primitive peoples or of farmers, constructed upon mythical time, is a cycle marked by the return of certain game birds or animals, the ripeness of certain plants, the tilling of the soil; time in such a calendar is a concrete, operational entity in which astronomical bodies participate either as copartners within the vast technicoreligious machine or as remote dispensers. The periodic return of the seal for the Eskimo, the sprouting of corn for the farmer, give rise to a time symbolism in which religious thought is applied in the first place to operational reality. The development not only of an abstract measurement of time but also of an ideology that attributes to the stars the role of supreme deities came only when agricultural societies had reached a highly urbanized stage. It was not by chance that eighteenth-century travelers unhesitatingly described almost all the peoples they encountered as being sun or star worshippers, while at the same time the French revolutionary calendar attempted to relate time to the activities of agricultural and technical life. On the one hand, the thinking of philosophers was permeated by the extraordinary importance assumed by astronomical machines and by the millenary traditions of astrology, while on the other the practical traditions of the farmer’s year were used as an antidote to divine time.

Again, this is an important point that I didn’t even consider when writing the piece, since it indicates that ordering time based upon the movement of celestial spheres is itself fairly advanced. The medieval period and the enlightenment are both linked together for being reasonably advanced compared to the paleolithic era or later hunting-gathering cultures, or even later agriculturalists of the ancient world… but by the time the enlightenment comes to a close, it is actually trying to return to a more primitive method of organizing time even with advanced tools. Leroi-Gourhan spots such paradoxes fairly often, as in his passages about how “modern art” is in many ways a return to the most primitive forms of art, rejecting representational depiction while embracing purely symbolic/abstract modes of expression (I’ll present one passage in a minute, but he discusses it several times).

Here he is talking about the modern city and its break from all prior attempts at symbolic organization:

Ever since humans erected the first shelter in the middle of their territory, humankind has lived in a state of balance between the artificial and symbolic universe and the sources of material and mental energy found in the material world. A transposition of the natural into the artificially constructed, such as a garden city, is perfectly conceivable. But our formless city lacking any semblance of logic, with its girdle of factories and its grid of utilitarian streets under a sky of toxic filth, can only be regarded as the result of pathological disturbance. That efficient tool of social production, the nineteenth-century city — still alive in most parts of the world — represents an alarming break with the laws of biological harmony upon which our humanness is surely founded.

On clothes:

Dress, truly the symbol of humanness, is a precise measure of ethnic and social organization, and what is happening to dress at present deserves careful attention. In Europe and America the standardization of dress has reached an advanced stage; masculine and feminine costume hardly varies from one social class to another except by its greater or lesser costliness and the immediacy of its adaptation to fashion. This may denote across-the-board social advancement, the disappearance of social barriers, and higher levels of culture and information, but it is also a sign that the individual is losing his or her links with the framework of the group within which he or she is personally integrated. Living in the costume of your province or craft makes you feel that you are an individual element of your own group and, at the same time, reminds you that you do not belong to other groups. Living in a standardized human uniform implies a high degree of interchangeability of individuals as parts of the universal macroorganism.

On modern art:

Paintings made by throwing, by burning, by lacerating the canvas, and sculptures made of crushed motor cars genuinely represent a return to pre-Homo sapiens structures in that, like art which uses uncut stones or roots, they succeed in creating an aesthetic situation similar to that which existed at the time of Neanderthal man, when forms were products of the play of natural forces. The paintings executed by anthropoid great apes, obtained by training though they are, bear witness to a still more intensive thrust toward the very depths of aesthetic behavior, a reimmersion in a rhythm born of the crossing of chance with psychophysiology.

On the future of literacy (and keep in mind, he’s writing in the 1960s):

The preservation of thought can now be envisaged otherwise than in books, which will not offer the advantages of quick and easy manageability for very much longer. Preselected and instantaneously reconstituted information will soon be delivered by a huge magnetic storage facility with electronic selection. For centuries yet, reading will go on being important — although significantly less so for the majority of human beings — but writing is probably doomed to disappear rapidly, to be replaced by a dictaphonic equipment with automatic printing.

On the price of man domesticating himself:

In the case of the wolf and the dog, the price paid for liberation from the natural environment is the dog collar: “social security” tends to restrict not only the risk of too rapid deterioration of the individual’s living conditions but also the uncontrolled exercise of personal aptitudes. Freedom, that fragile element of the human edifice, rests upon the imagination, both in the sense of illusion and in that of emancipation through the use of symbols. The Australanthropians’ world was already an imaginary one to the extent that it was founded upon the first materialization of what were in effect symbols taking the form of tools; so is the world of an average person today all of whose knowledge is derived from books, newspapers, and television and who, using the same eyes and ears as our remote ancestor, receives a reflection of a world that has expanded to the proportions of the universe but has become a world of images, a world the individual is plunged into but cannot participate in except through the imagination.

And with that, I’ll go ahead and say goodbye for now. Read Leroi-Gourhan.

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There’s a widespread understanding among the educated that during the medieval period, man felt content with outer space because of his geocentrism, as well as his confusion about the proximity between the heavenly bodies and himself. The Earth was in the center, the moon seemed to be right near the sun, and Jupiter was right there hanging around Mars. Every element had its own sphere beyond the firmament, and it all seemed so familiar and so close by. True, there was some awareness from as early as Isidore of Seville’s time that the moon was smaller than the Earth, and that the Earth was smaller than the sun, but there was not yet the perception that each star was like a sun in its own right, some of them even governing over their own incomprehensibly distant solar systems. There was also an absolute Up and an absolute Down because the universe was enclosed within a finite sphere, which meant that the directions all made perfect sense and lacked relativity. The firmament was like a ceiling separating the Earth from everything else, so really, all you’d need to do in order to ascend the heavenly spheres was just find a way to jump really, really high. The denizens of the medieval era were thus feeling quite satisfied and comfortable, certain that they understood themselves and knew their place in the world.

But all good things, alas, must come to an end, and so then, along came the Copernican revolution and thus the ultimate shattering of the geocentric, Ptolemaic perception of the universe. And with that shattering — so this widespread narrative tells us — chaos ensued. Men no longer felt that up was up and down was down; they became faintly aware of how distant everything truly was; they realized that the universe does not revolve around them; they became gradually stricken with existential emptiness and numbness; and for the first time, the sublimity of the cosmos attained a tincture of not just wonder… but horror.

When you think about it, though, this is really an exaggerated understanding of things. In reality, the men of the medieval world knew that because they were the center of the universe, they were maximally distant from God. Additionally, the attitude about an infinite universe didn’t necessarily imply existential angst, or anything like that. The first man to postulate an infinite universe was none other than the Hermetic occultist Giordano Bruno, and he conceptualized this model of the cosmos in pretty optimistic terms. As the French philosopher and intellectual historian Alexandre Koyré explains it in his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957),

To the old and famous questio disputata: why did not God create an infinite world?—a question to which the mediaeval scholastics gave so good an answer, namely, denying the very possibility of an infinite creature—Bruno simply replies, and he is the first to do it: God did. And even: God could not do otherwise. Indeed, Bruno’s God, the somewhat misunderstood infinitas complicata of Nicholas of Cusa, could not but explicate and express himself in an infinite, infinitely rich, and infinitely extended world:

“Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, but in a thousand, I say, in an infinity of worlds. Thus not in vain the power of the intellect which ever seeketh, yea, and achieveth the addition of space to space, mass to mass, unity to unity, number to number, by the science that dischargeth us from the fetters of a most narrow kingdom and promoteth us to the freedom of a truly august realm, which freeth us from an imagined poverty and straineth to the possession of the myriad riches of so vast a space, of so worthy a field of so many cultivated worlds.”

The attitude is one more of manic elation than grim but duty-bound commitment to truth. It is, as Koyré puts it, “that of a prisoner who sees the walls of his jail crumble.” So it seems that if the scientific worldview slowly turned into one of nihilism and moroseness, the expanded view of the cosmos probably didn’t have much to do with it directly, or at the very least, only could amount to a small contribution.

I say all of this because ever since reading Martin Jay’s excellent Downcast Eyes (1993), which I reviewed a couple weeks back, I’ve been pondering the question: why exactly did eyesight become such a pronounced target for twentieth century French intellectuals? After all, seeing stuff is just something that humans do without any prompting. How could something so foundational to the human experience be so bad? Jay’s study on the phenomenon markedly avoids the conclusion that the polemics against vision or standpoint of anti-ocularcentrism among these intellectuals should be understood simply as an attack on “the enlightenment” (which, of course, is an ocularcentric metaphor) or the ocularcentrism of René Descartes in particular, the enlightenment’s premiere forerunner (see his La Dioptrique, 1637). Jay does cover these things, but he also goes into the direction of media ecology, particularly in Chapter Two, even approvingly citing both Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong in different places. He spends a great deal of time discussing visual media like the daguerreotype and the camera, and cinema as well. But, interestingly, he doesn’t go too much into the phenomenon of lighting in general, something essential for clear vision. This passage is about all we get:

The progressive perfection of artificial illumination allowed virtually everyone to transcend the natural rhythms of light and dark. After 1805, use of gas lamps in cities like Paris grew in frequency. In 1869 the introduction of brighter and safer kerosene furthered their efficiency, and finally, in the 1890s, Thomas Edison’s invention of electrical lighting seemed to turn the night into day.

And for his purposes, it’s reasonable not to spend too much time on that, since the French thinkers whom he covers were mostly flawed in their treatment of both vision and ocularcentrism anyway. They basically were responding to things like photography and cinema while ignoring the greater, more fundamental issue of all-pervasive, human-controlled light. McLuhan was all over this, but these French guys, not so much.

Perhaps they should have been… though to be fair, perhaps some were without saying it overtly: Bataille’s writing, for example, was pointing toward something vital about the primacy of light and vision in man’s relationship to the universe and all of the problems that lie therein. His writing suggests a hangover from someone (if I can trot out this bad pun) who has gotten “burnt out” on light. Though in his case, it wouldn’t be the light of light bulbs but perhaps the searchlights and lamps, the signal and illumination flares, or perhaps even the flamethrowers and incendiary rounds of World War I, in which he briefly served for the French army. And it’s also conceivable that Luis Buñuel was foreseeing the conditions of modernity in a more all-encompassing sense when he infamously sliced open the eye in his Un chien andalou (1929), a predecessor not only to surrealist cinema but also the “torture porn” horror subgenre that has grown over the last two decades. But when Sartre and Lacan arrived on the scene, criticisms toward ocularcentrism went into a glottocentric, psychologically muddled direction — in Sartre’s case producing work more indicative of personal problems and/or sociopolitical obsessions as opposed to genuine insight.

Nevertheless, the twentieth century would indeed become the century of amplified light: endless, all-encompassing, all-pervasive light that would project outward from the Earth and stain the heavens. Those who were invested in criticizing the faculty of vision could not have failed to realize this, even though the point was seldom raised. It did take a while to happen, though. Consider: the camera started to become widely used in 1900, while cinema became mainstream entertainment starting around 1905-1910, and discussions on these media have flourished ever since. But electric light bulbs, an often ignored but far more influential technology, didn’t become commonplace in the west until the 1920s-1940s (depending on your location). The light bulb brought about a shift in man’s consciousness so all-encompassing and ubiquitous as to be imperceptible. There’s a reason why Marshall McLuhan used the light bulb as his premiere example of an information medium in his seminal Understanding Media (1964): it’s all ground, no figure. All information, no content. It creates an environment by its mere presence. In many ways, it’s the ultimate medium of the modern world.

It is also, as it turns out, a major source of pollution — one that is changing the parameters through which we experience the outside world — and that is gradually proving to be the greater aspect of its legacy, not the fact that kitchens and living rooms can stay illuminated all night. Quite soon after the light bulb became widely adopted, cities were lit up twenty-four hours a day, and not soon thereafter, in the 1950s, the concept of “light pollution” was born. The DarkSky advocacy movement started a couple decades later in the ‘80s, and in 2001, the first global atlas of light pollution was created. According to Ed Yong’s An Immense World (2022, I reviewed it here), this atlas found that two-thirds of the global population live in light-polluted areas, where the nights are at least 10% brighter than the natural darkness of the primitive world during a “new moon” phase. About 40% of the population permanently experiences the equivalent of some moonlight, while about 25% of the world experiences light that exceeds that of a full moon. That was 2001. But again, in 2016, the numbers were updated to show that 83% of humanity (and 99% of all Americans and Europeans) live in light-polluted areas. And in all light-polluted areas, the stars are harder to see. Over a third of humanity, and about 80% of all North Americans cannot see the Milky Way. And sometimes, particularly in major metropolitan areas, almost all of the stars are completely invisible, while the strip malls and skylines below them remain queasily suspended in a permanent gloaming.

Now, let’s return to our contrast between the pre-Copernican and post-Copernican world. Whether or not the death of geocentrism and then the awareness of the vastness of space actually created a feeling of existential despair or even nihilism… this is a question that remains up for debate. But the middle ages and the enlightenment had something in common: they at least were intimately attuned to what was going on in the cosmos that surrounded them. They simply had no choice but to recognize the stars above them. After all, they were always out at night, and the cycles of the heavenly bodies were an unavoidable part of each person’s life. So much so, in fact, that mechanical devices were used to chart the stars: astrolabes were used in the ancient and medieval world (Chaucer wrote an essay for his son about how cool they are), and the sextant was developed out of them. These devices measured the position of the stars and planets against the distal horizon and the current time in order to determine the user’s latitude and longitude, making them effective for navigation and exploration by essentially using the celestial skies to link time and space together (they are still occasionally used today, but only as a back-up when GPS systems fail).

Compare that situation to ours, and it gradually becomes apparent that suffusing the world in man-made light has been far more alienating than anything that ever occurred in the renaissance or enlightenment. Today’s light-blotched environment has reduced contrast in the skies, and instead of making the cosmos seem impossibly vast, it has done something arguably more perverse: it has made them seem altogether artificial. The first satellite picture of the Earth was released in 1959, profoundly influencing globes, almanacs, and ultimately, through GPS, our understanding of where we are situated in space. We developed the ability to look down upon ourselves through photographs and screens, even as the stars became ever-more obscure. And when we want to see these obscured stars for whatever reason (we almost never need to), we are forced to rely on photographs, typically shown on a screen somewhere, many of which are enhanced through digital editing. The way we encounter the stars is thus marked by interference, and their presentation has become fantastical. Regarding the value of direct perception, Goethe once said,

The human being in himself, to the extent that he makes use of his sound senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus there can be; and that is the greatest disaster of modern physics, that it has effectively separated experimentation from the human element and recognizes Nature only in what artificial instruments can register, and indeed, wants to limit and establish thereby what Nature can achieve.

These “artificial instruments,” like the telescope and microscope, the lantern and (later on) the light bulb, essentially function as extensions of the eye’s capabilities. But in expanding their use to such a staggering degree, modern man has unavoidably dimmed his own direct perception in a real, measurable way, becoming forced to rely only on mediated images — thus sadly disproving Goethe’s stalwart optimism about the reliability of man’s native sense faculties.

News stories about the whimsical rocket fantasies of derelict billionaires work very hard to convince us that space exploration for the common man is just around the corner. But speaking from a strictly phenomenological perspective, outer space is more closed off to us than ever before. The mythology regarding the constellations has become almost entirely unknown, and although people still care about their daily horoscopes, their direct astrological associations are almost never taken into account: they’re just simply fun little lists of personality types.

Even the manner in which we temporally order ourselves has been changed as a result of light pollution, since the rhythm of outer space was often the basis of our cycles and rituals. For primitive man, the cosmos weren’t the stuff of science fiction fantasy but rather an unadorned fact of life, and so the cyclical revolutions of its spheres gave him daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly events and rituals to help ground and organize the flow of life. Today, however, such events and rituals are in steep decline. Night and day have become intermixed, as I’ve mentioned, but that is not all: the birth control pill has disrupted the longstanding association between the lunar cycles and menstrual cycles; specific foods to mark certain times and occasions have lost their currency, with so many people exalting in eating breakfast for dinner and vice versa; and a growing number of people would like to avoid seasonal holiday celebrations entirely. Although Christianity helped to obscure Christmas’s original pagan purpose of marking the Winter solstice in Ancient Rome — something that one can only determine through identifying the Earth’s tilt away from the sun — the glow of the newly secularized holiday’s electric decorations has finally eradicated such an association altogether.

It is therefore not hard to understand why science fiction fantasies about space exploration started proliferating in the 1950s and have grown ever since — it was happening right at the same time during which our place within the cosmic structure of the universe was beginning to grow undetectable to our naked senses. Even as we know more than ever about the stars conceptually, and this knowledge in turn fuels our dreams and fantasies, our basic consciousness of the stars has withered. Outer space feels faker, more fictitious than ever before. And light, bizarrely enough, is the reason why.

And yet, for all of that, we still seek out more light. We have swapped our books for electronic tablets and newspapers for smart phones, so that even contemplative reading offers us no respite from it. Unless you’ve printed it out, you are reading this polemic on a device with an LED-backlit display. Even sleep offers no respite from the ubiquity of electronic light. According to an LG Electronics survey, 61% of Americans sleep with their TV on in the background, even though it diminishes its quality, while 95% use a screen-based electronic device of some kind within an hour of bedtime. It is not a major surprise that health experts are trying to reverse these trends, as insomnia becomes a growing problem in America, if not a full-blown public health emergency, as some argue it is.

At times I wonder if it is possible that “light” will one day stop being received so straightforwardly as a metaphor for truth or moral purity. I occasionally will stumble upon instances that attempt to resist it. Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” essay is an obvious example for anyone who spends too much time on political social media. Other examples of resistance to light can be found in areas often dismissed as juvenile or adolescent in nature, like the occult, or heavy metal music. But it also occasionally happens in unexpected places. For instance, when the German film director Werner Herzog was once asked about psychoanalysis, he responded,

It was one of the greatest stupidities and the greatest mistakes of the 20th century. There is something finally and definitively wrong about psychoanalysis. […] Explaining every dark little corner that we have in our souls is a very unhealthy and a very stupid and a very dangerous thing. We should not do that. Why? Because when you inhabit a house, and you illuminate every last corner of the house with strong lights, the house becomes uninhabitable.

And thus, he continues, the souls of human beings under such conditions of illumination turn them inhuman and similarly uninhabitable. This, of course, is all very true.

But whatever its truth, on the whole, our longstanding cultural understanding of light and darkness will probably continue to remain dominant for quite some time. There is no collective will to recognize the problem of excessive light, either literal or conceptual, which grows more and more dire each year. In fact, when light pollution was first explained to me, it was promoted as a good thing because it makes the sunset look brighter.

Perhaps the most important philosopher to try and reverse the polarity, quite deliberately as a response to the oncoming problems of the 20th century, was Ludwig Klages, who extolled the value of darkness as a clarifying, even sacred condition. This is hard to appreciate at first, because the vocabulary for him to explain what he meant was limited — so many of our words to describe understanding, recognition, knowledge, and so on, are etymologically derived from visual metaphors. Therefore, he played with these metaphors to point at their opposite meaning, like his friend Alfred Schuler’s concept of the “blood-light,” which he presents as a decidedly figurative kind of internal non-light. Klages described this blood-light as a “dark strangeness” through which the mysteries of the maternal cosmos could be revealed. There is also Klages’s own concept of the “world of images,” which again, would seem on the surface to valorize light, since images are visual, and light is what makes them appear. But these “images” that Klages referred to were not, in fact, visual in an outward sense but instead resided internally, acting upon man’s consciousness as raw, fleeting, ever-changing experiences and expressive configurations that penetrate deeper than any one particular sense could — like vision, touch, etc. Essentially, Klages thought that what man requires lies in his blood, i.e. his ancestral memories from many generations prior, all the way to his origin, and thus the glut of “objects” and vulgar, material images from the exterior world threaten to cleave him from these more vital, fundamental necessities. Taken this way, his “world of images” can be understood as a dark counter-proposition to Plato’s “forms,” which were characterized by permanence, stability, and typically conceptualized in terms of light.

Klages was mostly writing at a time before the light bulb was widely used, so no one could say that he was responding to that particular invention. He also could not have foreseen the specific environmental phenomenon of light pollution, though it seems by itself to confirm so many of his criticisms of where the twentieth century was headed. But all the same, his response to the metaphysics of light going all the way back to Plato’s time went far more decisively in the opposite direction, namely towards darkness, than anything that had been produced during the “counter-enlightenment” or the romantic period to follow. One biographer has argued that his ideas were largely influenced by his battles with chronic insomnia, which now seems like it is slowly becoming the default condition of modernity. Whatever the case may be, Klages was prescient in his judgments, and thus he stands tall as a neglected figure in understanding that light is indeed a pollution. Eventually, people will figure it out and start translating him into English more widely.

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A couple months ago, I discovered that the jazz pianist Denman Maroney put out an album with his quintet in late October 2025 called Umwelt. Maroney is a good modern pianist. You know how John Cage would mess around with a piano and put little screws, bolts, plastic strips, rubber bands, and other objects on its hammers and steel wires, just to give it some interesting additional noises? Well, he did, and he called it the “prepared piano.” Maroney does the same thing, but he plays jazz with his prepared pianos, and it sounds pretty cool… although, admittedly, he only does it on one track for this album. At any rate, it’s a shame that Umwelt didn’t show up on any “Best of 2025” year-end lists on the jazz blogs and other sites that I encountered, because it’s excellent: modern and angular, but controlled and mature. And his band definitely knows how to play. But what really caught my eye was the title of the album: Umwelt. Right off the bat, I wondered, was this a reference to the semiotic concept of the German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll? The same brilliant philosophical intervention that has persisted in the field of biosemiotics through Jakob’s son Thure and other great minds like Thomas Sebeok and John Deely? Is Denman Maroney… a biosemiotician…?

Well, I quickly realized where he discovered the word, because it says right there on his Bandcamp page. It comes from An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden World Around Us (2022) by the popular science writer Ed Yong. The fact alone that Yong decided to try and popularize the concept of the Umwelt was enough to convince me to check this thing out, so I got it on an audiobook and drove around listening to it. I’m glad I did, because the book is not only very enjoyable and cool — filled with tidbits of information that will make you say, “Gosh!” “Golly!” “Jeepers!” and other such things — but it also makes for an excellent introduction to animal semiotics for a lay audience.

So, what is an Umwelt, exactly? Let’s start with the man who coined the word, Jakob von Uexküll. Uexküll, believing that he was expanding upon the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (mistakenly, thank goodness), described the Umwelt as an organism’s subjective sensory world. That is, it’s the world of personal experiences that each organism constructs out of the physical environment in which it lives. Instead of the exterior or “objective” world simply presenting itself to us in a straightforward fashion, we, along with every other living organism, construct a distinct understanding of the exterior world through our own motor and sensory capacities. Therefore, the way we experience the world around us is always going to differ from that of another species. The idea of the “Umwelt” is important because it serves as a reminder that everything we know about the world around us is shaped by our distinct faculties; it isn’t simply given to us from the outside as something we passively “take in.” Instead, we are always actively creating an understanding of what lies outside of us.

Along with Umwelt, we can also consider the concept of Innenwelt, which is the purely interior aspect of the Umwelt: the manner in which the body is constituted, its chemical and neural aspects providing the framework necessary for an Umwelt. And there’s also the Lebenswelt, a concept which comes from Husserl, then developed further by Heidegger: this is the distinctly human lifeworld of shared cultural and social significance, something that requires a full language to exist and which other species therefore lack. Yong does not use the word “Innenwelt,” though he does discuss it using other terms. And he also does not extensively cover matters pertaining to the Lebenswelt, either, but he certainly doesn’t need to. There’s more than plenty to discuss without going into the problem of language and other specifically human modes of communication.

Although the idea of the Umwelt can be used to discuss differences between two individuals of the same species (e.g. a deaf man vs. a blind man), it is usually analyzed at the species-specific level, since each species will vary from one another pretty decisively in its sensory-motor capacities. Yong’s basic aim in this book is to show just how different each species is from one another at the level of mere perception. He isn’t making an original argument at all, since everyone knows that animals experience the world differently: kindergartners are used to hearing about how bats are blind and dogs can smell things better than we can. But there’s a difference between “knowing” something at a superficial level and truly getting it. Yong is trying to make people get it. Uexküll, in his writings, makes a comparison between the Umwelten of each species and various houses, each with their own unique array of “sense” windows all surrounding the same garden. Using the same metaphor, Yong explains the crux of the issue this way:

The human’s house might be bigger than the tick’s, with more windows overlooking a wider garden, but we are still stuck inside one, looking out. Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

The upshot of all this is that each Umwelt put together cumulatively creates a surprisingly vast, immense world, one to which every given species including humans has only limited access.

To make his point early on, Yong argues that although we’re inclined to think that there are only five senses — hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch — there are actually more, like proprioception. And additionally, even though we might assume that a certain sensory phenomenon or ability (e.g. sensing vibrations) is linked to one sense, for other animals it might not be. Yong loosely organizes the book so that it moves from one sensory phenomenon to another, but as you read onward, you start to be aware of how philosophically complex the issue of sense perception can really get. For instance, consider this question: is pain (nociception) an epiphenomenon of touch? We typically assume so, but for some animals, this does not seem to be the case — enough to the point where we’ve assumed that they don’t feel any pain at all. But “pain” might work very differently for some animals than others. For instance, when a squid experiences bodily harm in one specific place, its nociceptors are activated for the entire body, so it “feels” pain everywhere; it goes into a hypersensitive state as an entire unit. Squids thus don’t bother to groom their own wounds, probably because they can’t even tell where they are. And regarding fish, there is still lively debate about whether or not they can feel pain at all, themselves lacking a neocortex in the brain. Yet we know that they have some kind of sensory alarm system, so is it possible that “pain” for them is an entirely different experience than it is for us?

Such a question concerns the inability to draw meaningful comparisons between our own human sensory world, or Umwelt, and those of other animals, and questions like this occur surprisingly often throughout the book, particularly the chapters that don’t concern vision, like hearing, touch, and the various senses that we simply cannot imagine having, like the ability to detect electric fields underwater. To the extent that we think about them at all, we tend to conceptualize these senses in other animals visually in order for them to make sense to us, since vision is the primary sense through which we construct the three-dimensional world around us — even Uexküll’s metaphor about the houses overlooking the garden is visual. But for plenty of animals, vision simply isn’t available, so they have to rely on other senses, like touch. Star-nose moles, for instance, touch everything around them with their interestingly-shaped snouts, and that is their primary organ used to make sense of the world they inhabit. To try and understand them, we might say something like, “That’s what they use to see,” but of course, their experience of the world is hardly comparable to those of us who rely on vision.

I’ll give another example. Yong discusses vibrations for an entire chapter, explaining how many animals will make use of vibrations for detecting distant intrusions in advance (like potential predators or prey), and this is neither an epiphenomenon of hearing or touch, but rather something in between the two. This, of course, should make sense, since all sound is based on vibrations. And Yong makes the same point for echolocation (something we’ve replicated with sonar technology), which bats and other animals use to construct a model of their surrounding three-dimensional space. Whenever we try and think about echolocation, we often conceptualize it visually, but again, this is just a crutch we rely on to make sense of a specific mode of environmental attunement that is, strictly speaking, non-transferable to our own (although, interestingly, Yong discusses a blind guy who taught himself to use echolocation from a young age by making a loud tongue-clicking noise).

Because Yong always presents these philosophical problems unassumingly, never plumbing them with too much thoroughness, the book does an excellent job of preparing the reader to ask herself questions that correspond to semiotics without forcing the issue. It “leads the horse to water,” in other words, giving the horse the option of taking the drink. For instance, consider this passage on silk webs and how spiders use them to detect vibrations:

An orb-weaver not only builds its own vibrational landscape but also can adjust it as if tuning a musical instrument. […] Some silks can transmit vibrations over a wider range of speeds than any known material. A spider can theoretically change the speed and strength of those vibrations by altering the stiffness of its silk, the tension in the strands, and the overall shape of the web. It can do this every time it builds a new web, by pulling silk out of its body at different speeds, by creating fibers of different thicknesses, or by adding tension to the new strands. […]

Zoologist Takeshi Watanabe showed that the Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its web when it is hungry. It adds spiral decorations that increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web’s ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by smaller prey. When it is famished, every morsel counts. To capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its senses by changing the nature of its web.

But here’s the truly important part: Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed onto a tense web built by a hungry spider. The spider has effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to attack to its web. The choice depends not just on its neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but also on something outside it—something it can create and adjust. Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it’s aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness—the extent of its Umwelt—by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider’s senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.

This is an excellent way to introduce someone to a new way of thinking about the mind-body problem. After all, compare that observation to a point made by the philosopher and semiotician C.S. Peirce in 1905:

In my opinion it is much more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than they are in his brain. (CP 7.364)

And, elaborating further,

A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain (nihil animale a me alienum puto) and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, “You see, the faculty of language was localized in that lobe.” No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand. (CP 7.366)

His point being that the faculty of mind is not simply located in the brain (as some naïve analytic philosophers like Jerry Fodor think) but rather something that resides amid the interplay between our bodies and the media/tools that we ourselves regularly use and even create to engage with our surroundings (Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand,” or Zuhandenheit, is also relevant here). Our thoughts are signs, which makes them already-external insofar as they can be expressed through the inkstand. But the inkstand, by allowing us to stabilize our thoughts and reflect upon them at a distance, allows us to think better, and at greater capacity — not unlike how a spider’s web technically comes from its body but then acts as a medium which transmits signs back to it, ones that it would not otherwise receive.

Rich passages like this occur throughout the book, any one of which can send the reader down a fresh rabbit hole of inquiry. Chapter 12, which discusses how the senses all work together to aid the organism as a cohesive unit, is particularly fruitful. But of course, if one isn’t interested in the question of how an external medium can act as part of the mind, or perhaps the question of how our supposedly “passive” senses have actively caused the living world around us to evolve differently, or if it’s possible for the body to be divided into multiple Umwelten that don’t necessarily communicate with each other too well, then there’s no need to ponder such dense questions for long. The book will simply continue, and more fascinating facts about animals will continue to appear. And speaking of fascinating facts, there are plenty to be found. Here are some, just to give a small sample:

• Snakes with forked tongues use them to smell, and the sense is of primary importance for them, since it is essential for picking up on the trails of potential prey.

• Scallops have up to 200 eyes lining the perimeter of their shells, which means that they should possess full 360 degree vision, something entirely inconceivable to us. However, their vision probably works differently from ours: it may just pick up on vague signals that the eye sends to the brain based on necessity, similar to how we’re constantly touching things with our whole bodies yet we only focus on sensations that seem relevant to our needs.

• The majority of birds have tetrachromatic vision (humans are trichromatic), which means that they can see colors in the ultraviolet light spectrum, i.e. different colors that we can neither perceive nor imagine: Yong calls them “rurple, grurple, and yurple.” This means that some birds we simply identify as “blue” like the Eurasian blue tit actually give off various colors to other birds with their feathers, making them easier to distinguish from one another.

• There is actually a small percentage of human beings, mostly women, who are tetrachromats and can see within the ultraviolet light spectrum. However, scientists have difficulty finding them because they don’t believe themselves to be special, since they don’t possess the language to express what they see and moreover take for granted that everyone sees the same things. To make matters more difficult for scientists, the vast majority of people who believe that they possess tetrachromacy do not.

• Flies seem to have such a random and chaotic flight path because they’re using thermotaxis to plan out their movements, picking up on subtle gradients of hot and cold within the air that humans cannot perceive.

• Ticks don’t find their hosts through smell but rather infrared detection. They can detect a warm-blooded creature from up to thirteen feet away.

• Insects often communicate using surface vibrations on plants (e.g. blades of grass), creating highly unique sound patterns or “songs” that humans cannot hear.

• The majority of mammals hear what we call “ultrasound,” or pitches with frequencies above 20,000 Hz. For them, it’s just “sound.”

• Blue whales communicate to each other by “singing” using infrasound, or frequencies so low that we can’t hear them, from up to 1,500 miles away. We know very little about this behavior beyond that.

• Various aquatic species (mainly belonging to two groups: elephantfishes and knifefishes) can generate weak electric fields as a way to locate and perceive objects around them, a sense known as “electroreception.”

• Other aquatic species simply detect electric fields around them — this is what sawfish use their gruesome-looking snouts for.

• Magnetoreception, or the ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field for orientation and navigation, remains the most mysterious sense, even though we know that it is possessed by migratory birds, sea turtles, and some bacteria.

And this is indeed a small sample — some of these facts contain plenty of equally interesting details within them, particularly the last three.

Although I would recommend this book to most anyone, I’ll criticize one thing about it: the writing style. Almost invariably, Yong will start a chapter recounting one of his interviews with some scientist, either by using the present tense to convey a snippet of startling information in medias res, or by leading with an out-of-context anecdote to generate a sense of mild confusion and curiosity before moving into the interview. This approach is apparently chosen to “lure the reader in,” and only once that opening takes place will he get to the interesting stuff. Such a formula will work just fine for a lengthy article, but it becomes downright monotonous by the end of a full-length book. The problem with the formula is that it’s typically used to “sell” the reader on the text to follow, creating a sense of intrigue… but no one needs to be sold on a chapter halfway through a book they’ve already committed to reading. Instead of being intrigued, you get the sense that Yong is trying to be the Guy Fieri of animal semiotics, with An Immense World acting as his own version of “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” But I’ll stop belaboring this point and just say that the book would have been better had he dropped the conceit after the first few chapters.

That mild annoyance aside, I can’t really say anything bad about this book. Check it out. And check out Denman Maroney’s music, too.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that deals with all the tough questions that life has to offer… so long as they pertain to Peircean semiotics and McLuhan-style media ecology.

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Here’s a question: how many senses do we have? If you’re like most normal people, you say five. They are (in no particular order) touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight. That is, after all, the answer that Aristotle gives us in his De Anima, and it has been a pretty resilient classification scheme up to this point. One academic philosopher has recently argued that there are just five senses and five senses only, and it is all really quite obvious, so the persistence of Aristotle’s model is not so much because of Aristotle’s great reputation among the hoi polloi as it is the often underrated value of folk wisdom. But not everyone buys this five-sense model, or that particular argument. Some other academic philosophers, such as Fiona MacPherson, believe that there are at least some more that we ought to include, such as various interoceptive senses. Interoception refers to the senses that perceive interior bodily states, like our body temperature, hunger, wakefulness, and anxiety. Exteroception, by contrast involves senses that perceive what’s going on in the external world, and they include the five classical senses. Whether or not we believe that interoception should be included, it certainly is worth asking the question: when we “feel” ourselves becoming hungry or tired, are we doing so because we are “touching” something? And if not, then what the hell is that feeling if it isn’t coming from a sense of some kind?

In her introduction to The Senses: Classical and Contemporary Philosophial Perspectives (2011), MacPherson makes a case for two senses that really ought to be included in the classic canon of senses: proprioception and equilibrioception. And others seem to agree. Here’s a definition for “proprioception” from a web site called Sixth Sense Abcderium:

The term proprioception is composed of the Latin proprius (one’s own) and perception and thus literally designates one’s own perception. It is the sense of position and posture, movement and velocity of the body and body parts. This involves the location of our body or body parts in space, the relation of our body parts to one another, and the extent to, and pace at, which they change their position. Some accounts also attribute to proprioception a sense of effort through which weight can be evaluated and a sense of touch through which the size and shape of objects as well as the geometry of external space can be detected.

Now, this is an interoceptive sense, since it involves understanding the internal dynamics of the body. It isn’t quite the same as the way we sense our internal organs’ needs (hunger, sleep, etc.), but it’s adjacent to those senses, and it certainly isn’t exteroceptive. Proprioception involves the body’s various parts in space, yes, but it doesn’t seem to arise beyond the awareness of where each body part is in relation to the other, and so it can’t qualify. Proprioception, taken as a standalone sense, helps us to understand things like how we’re able to tie our shoes without looking at them. Yes, we are touching the laces, and that’s all very helpful, but we have to know where our fingers are in relation to one another as well. Similarly, proprioception can help us to identify the shapes of objects we can’t see. If we close our eyes, extend our fingers, and touch something in the shape of a tetrahedron, we can’t simply identify the shape based on touch alone. We have to know where are fingers are in relation to the other when we feel its contours. All of this involves an awareness of our body’s internal state of existence.

If we want to explore an exteroceptive sense that determines where the body is in space, then we would have to look into equilibrioception, which is our sense of balance and spatial orientation. One might object that it can’t be a standalone sense because it relies in large part on our sense of vision: if you try to hop on one foot with your eyes closed, you’ll find that it’s much more difficult than if you fix your line of vision on a point in the room. But equilibrioception also relies on proprioception (of course) as well as something we don’t think of too often, namely the vestibular system located in the inner ear. The inner ear’s connection to balance explains why some inner ear infections, such as labyrinthitis or vestibular neuritis, will cause you to become dizzy, nauseous, or suffer a feeling of vertigo. But if your proprioceptive senses and your vestibular system are in good working order, you will be able to sense where your body is in space and how to adjust it to retain balance, even without the aid of vision. And it’s exteroceptive because when it’s most active, it responds to real external changes that the body is going through.

Having established these two senses of proprioception and equilibrioception, let’s consider this fun question: can there be art forms that primarily stimulate these senses more than all the others? Keep in mind, I’m talking about the effect that the art forms have on the audience, not the artists themselves. Another academic philosopher, Jiri Benovsky, wrote a book called The Limits of Art: On Borderline Cases of Artworks and their Aesthetic Properties (2020), and he does indeed contain a section on proprioceptive arts. But he deals mainly with arts that concern the experience of the artists themselves, not the experience of the audience. In this conceptualization, dance, rock climbing, and martial arts are all considered proprioceptive arts, but the problem is, if you’re an audience to any of these things, then you yourself are not going to feel your proprioceptive or equilibrioceptive senses stimulated, unless perhaps you are very good at imagining yourself in the position of the performer — enough to undergo some psychogenic experiences of imbalance or bodily motion. The question of how art can affect the proprioceptive senses of the audience is therefore a bit trickier, though I think it’s the more interesting one. After all, if fine dining is an art form for the gustatory sense, and perfume is an art form for the olfactory sense, then why can’t there be an art form that primarily stimulates proprioception and/or equilibrioception?

Whether “proprioceptive art” can really exist seems to be a live albeit obscure academic question, as this introductory lecture to a conference on “Proprioceptive Art” from 2022 with only 153 views indicates. But it seems to be pretty obvious to me that a work of art can primarily stimulate the proprioceptive sense, and that moreover it can be quite popular despite having no literary qualities or narrative or philosophical elements, or anything at all that we might describe as “smart.” The proprioceptive/equilibrioceptive senses cannot pick up on language, much like taste or smell, although vision, hearing, and even touch (through Braille writing) can. Thus, if an art work communicates its artistry primarily through the proprioceptive/equilibrioceptive sense, you can be reassured that it probably won’t make a “statement” or tell you anything particularly profound about “the human condition” without some kind of buttressing. Proprioceptive arts don’t seem to work that way.

Now, having said all of that, there is no question that proprioceptive art does indeed exist. Interoceptive arts exist, too: we can interpret pornographic or horror movies as artworks of interoception… or even mawkish works of sentimentalism, ones that intentionally try to make the viewer cry for whatever reason. These are art forms for the brain, not the “mind.” That is, they specifically try to elicit a physical reaction pertaining to the body’s internal chemistry. Most of these art works are frowned upon and dismissed as “cheap”… unless, of course, the cheapness carries some sort of ethical justification.

But for this discussion, we’ll just look at art works that manipulate the feeling of being situated in space. I’ll explore some using three broad categories. Here’s the first.

Virtual reality headsets as well as extremely large visual displays

In this category, the sense of vision is used to create the illusion that the body is moving through a certain kind of space different from that in which it is currently situated. I first encountered this kind of proprioceptive feeling as a fifth grader when we went on a school field trip to some museum, and there, we watched an IMAX short film about mountain climbing. Maybe it was Everest, I don’t know. I also have no idea what the museum was or what the trip was supposed to teach us, but in this short film, a point-of-view shot is presented at one point, and it looks directly downward from one of the ledges so that the viewer can see just how far the climber has brought himself upward. Although I remember very little else about that day, I do vividly remember feeling weightless when the camera tilted downward, as if I were about to fall. It was not unlike the sensation people sometimes get when they have a dream about falling down, they abruptly wake up, and then they still feel like they are in the process of falling for about a split-second, sometimes physically jerking their heads forward.

Because vision is so closely connected to the feeling of equilibrioception, large two-dimensional displays that take up either most or all of the viewer’s eyesight range can by themselves foster the feeling of being weightless, or suspended, or upside-down, or otherwise spatially compromised. Theaters with incredibly large screens (such as IMAX) can generate this feeling, but so can VR (virtual reality) headsets, which are available for purchase as home entertainment. I haven’t yet played around with a VR headset, and I also think they look too silly for me to want to try one, so I can’t really say much about the device from personal experience. But looking through a brief catalogue of upcoming VR games gives me a pretty good sense of what VR can do. Among the games, there are lots of rhythm/action hybrids where you physically engage in some kind of action set to a rhythm (similar to the highly popular Dance Dance Revolution, which is certainly proprioceptive), there are exploration/sandbox games, first-person combat games, flight/vehicle simulators, and exercise games in which the player is compelled to physically exercise.

One point worth considering, however, is that VR is not growing in popularity as much as investors have hoped. It was first introduced back in the 1990s and tech enthusiasts seemed certain that it would instantly take over the entertainment market… and yet it did not. Three decades later, its growth has still failed to meet expectations. For instance, Meta (formerly Facebook) spent about $73 billion on what it hoped would be a large interconnected virtual reality social space, and this failed pretty badly. Even point-of-view pornography for the VR helmet is not selling too well, and porn is often a good predictor for how well a medium will succeed. It is possible that for all of virtual reality’s immersive potential, people nevertheless simply don’t want to buy something that makes them look dumb.

Immersive Museum Installation Art

Now we can turn to something that is actually quite successful — at least according to some much lower standards — and that is gallery art installations that directly engage the proprioceptive/equilibrioceptive senses. These installations achieve such an effect in a couple different ways: first, by optical illusions (as with extremely large or VR displays), and second, directly, often by creating rooms designed to manipulate the body’s position in space. There are a few examples I’ve been able to find, so let’s get into them.

• Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms

In these installations, viewers walk around rooms in which cleverly placed mirrors reflect upon each other endlessly. Large amounts of hanging lights with bright colors adorn the space, and they look pretty cool. And because the mirrors have the effect of dissolving a stable visual horizon and making the contours of the rooms hard to locate, what results is a floating, disorienting spatial experience for the visitor. Here’s a YouTube video discussing them:

• The “Performance Architecture” of Alex Schweder, particularly “ReActor”

Schweder, sometimes with the help of partner Ward Shelley, creates architectural installations with the purpose of being immersive and participatory. Some of them seem to involve only performance artists who engage with the work as part of the display, and some of them seem to be open to the general public. One piece in particular, ReActor, is a long studio-apartment room that balances upon a fulcrum, so if everyone walks to one side, then it will tilt in that direction. Maintaining equilibrium forces the people in the room to be distribute their weight evenly on both sides. It also twirls around with the direction of the wind. See it here. It doesn’t look like it was open to the public back during 2016-2018 when it was being displayed, so it sadly doesn’t count. But if had been, then it would definitely engage its audience equilibrioceptively. Maybe one day the idea can be expanded upon.

• “Planets” and “Borderless” by teamLab

If you want to go to a real tourist trap in Tokyo, Japan, you could hardly do better than the MORI Building Digital Art Museum, which features two permanent installations, “Borderless” and “Planets” by teamLab, a group of digital art engineers. The main purpose of these installations is to be highly immersive/interactive, with “Planets” even going so far as to make you take off your shoes and walk around in streams of water within one of its sections. “Planets” also features an “augmented reality” wildlife-simulation area for cell phone interaction, where you “catch” little digitally projected animals on the walls with your cell phone and then have the option of “releasing” them back into the wild. It additionally has areas where visitors are encouraged to jump up and down, climb onto platforms, and slide down slides, and various colorful lights and images will respond to their actions. Here’s a video of it below, and it looks like a whole lot of fun for little children:

These installations are wildly popular, they each take about two-three hours to get through, and they regularly have long, long lines of visitors at the entrance, as this video comparing the two installations explains.

• Installations at the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern art gallery, particularly “Test Site” by Carsten Höller

The Turbine Hall at the Tate is a good place for exhibiting proprioceptive art installations, and it is no enemy of interactivity, as you can detect from the web site for the location, which prominently displays a photo of little children playing around on the guard rail accompanying a ramp. If you take a look through their catalogue, you can find plenty of examples of works that involve direct participation, but perhaps the most conspicuous is “Test Site” by Carsten Höller, pictured here. It’s just five metal slides. You go up high, and you slide down, and that’s about it. It’s pretty cool, right? Who doesn’t love a big ol’ slide? Even The Beatles had a song about how great slides are, which Charles Manson famously took to be a prophecy of an apocalyptic race war. But it wasn’t any such thing; it was just a statement about how much slides kick ass, and you know what? They sure do.

Now, all of these installations have been quite popular. They have succeeded in garnering quite a lot of attention from the public. Some of them are big-time moneymakers. But there’s a problem: the professional art critics don’t like this stuff. They see most of it as spectacle for the sake of spectacle, with no deeper meaning behind any of it — just a way to generate interest from the masses, who themselves are only interested in cheap thrills and nice backdrops for their selfies on Instagram.

And to be honest, these critics are not entirely wrong. There’s nothing “high art” about these installations, and it’s not like they’re not in the tradition of ready-mades, which were originally supposed to be conceptual and anti-aesthetic. These installations don’t even qualify as pop art, either. Whereas critics could convince themselves that Andy Warhol was actually a deep and sensitive soul who was making some kind of statement about the repetition and vapidity of celebrity/consumer culture, no one can really say in a parallel fashion that, for instance, Carsten Höller is making a statement about the, uh… place of, err… slides… in our society. So while the installations might succeed on a level of pure enjoyment, they seem to fail at the level that they’re ostensibly aiming for. Or at least the level for which the concept of the museum/gallery suggests that they should aim. So let’s turn our attention to the kind of proprioceptive art that actually succeeds in what it’s trying to do.

Amusement Park Rides

Alright, now this is the good stuff. This category makes up easily the most successful example of proprioceptive art forms, and probably by a long shot. I’m not the only one to notice this as well, as can be seen from this talk from the above-linked proprioceptive art conference, although the speaker, Charles Spence, really struggles with accepting such fairground rides as “art.” And the reason isn’t hard to grasp. Amusement parks aren’t thought of as places where you go to experience art, and if they were, people would probably like them less. The rides aren’t created and designed by auteurs but rather teams of engineers working for design/manufacturing companies, which means that few of these incredible monoliths of architectural ingenuity can be attributed to any one artist. And the sheer commercialism required to keep amusement parks financially solvent means that the images and sounds accompanying the rides will always have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Therefore, you can expect plenty of “adolescent” or “juvenile” themes, or corporate entertainment franchise tie-ins when you visit a theme park. Whereas museums and galleries are uncomfortable with the concept of “the spectacle,” there is no such discomfort in amusement parks, where “the spectacle” is in fact their bread and butter, contributing indispensably to what then becomes a full-body experience. Essentially, amusement parks are unapologetic about what they are: places where you go to have your body jostled around by gigantic machines, screaming and laughing all the while. So let’s just consider some of the different kinds of rides.

• Slides

We’ve already encountered slides in museums. Welp, amusement parks had them beforehand, and they often look cooler, too. Slides are special because they involve primitive technology, and they’re in fact the most primitive ride an amusement park can contain. They take a number of forms, but “helter skelters” (remember that Beatles song) are among the oldest and most well-known, often seen not just in amusement parks but also on boardwalks and water fronts because they’re specifically designed to look like lighthouses (see here).

• Water slides

If you want to get complicated with slide design, water slides are where you should turn. By adding water to the slides through an elaborate pump system, some friction is eliminated, and therefore, longer and/or steeper declines become possible. They can look pretty cool, too, like this perplexity of slides from WhiteWater World, located in Gold Coast, Australia. If we want to think about art that really makes a “statement,” perhaps the greatest artistic masterpiece within the genre is the “Cannonball Loop” from the now-defunct Action Park in New Jersey. It actually contained a loop-de-loop — something highly unusual if entirely unique, especially since there was no flume or raft involved — and Wikipedia explains its history like so:

The slide was open for only a month in 1985 before it was closed at the order of the state's Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety, a highly unusual move at the time. One worker told a local newspaper that "there were too many bloody noses and back injuries" from riders. Some early riders came back with lacerations to their bodies, whose cause was later determined to be teeth that had been knocked out of riders' mouths and become lodged in the interior walls. A former Navy physician found that riders were experiencing as much as nine Gs of acceleration as they went through the loop.

For context, nine G-forces will cause the average person to lose consciousness after just a few seconds, while longer exposure will result in serious bodily injury. Additionally, a very short spike of 30-50 Gs will typically cause a serious, life-altering injury, while 70-100 will result in death instantly. For this reason, just about every amusement park makes its users experience only about 3-5 Gs maximum.

Essentially, during the Cannonball Loop water slide, mere enjoyment takes a backseat, and interaction with the artwork becomes something more akin to a life-altering experience of the sublime. It is fairly easy to see why this ride only lasted a month.

• Carousels AKA merry-go-rounds

This is about as classic of a ride as you can get. You sit on a horse-shaped seat and go around in a circle. Bonus points for the ones that feature classic organ music, adding to the gentle but distinct multi-sensory experience.

• Swing rides

These are “souped up” versions of the classic merry-go-round carousel, in which swings are suspended from the top of a revolving carousel. If the ride is especially good, the carousel will then tilt around in various directions for some added variation in the movement.

• Haunted swing

This is a curious style of ride, and there aren’t too many of them since they would tend to induce feelings of nausea. First designed in 1893 (it’s depicted at the top of this blog post), the haunted swing intelligently deploys visual illusion in addition to actual bodily manipulation. The idea is, park-goers sit on a platform within a room, which swings back and forth. But as it swings, the room itself rotates with the swing, and the room gradually starts to rotate more than the swing. The room eventually goes to a full 360 degrees over and over while the platform continues to swing normally, creating feelings of maximal disorientation, making the rider feel as though she is being flipped over, or perhaps descending into madness. The most elaborate example is the Villa Volta, located at Efteling in the Netherlands, with a platform that seats 78 people. The ride takes ten minutes to complete and it has apparently gotten mercifully slow over the years, which probably makes nausea less of a problem, but which might cause boredom for the riders (here’s a video).

• Drop towers

You sit in a gondola, you go up to the top of a gigantic tower, and then you free-fall, only gradually slowing down at the bottom with a (usually) magnetic braking system. Some drop towers will blast the riders up into the air, while others will slowly raise them, giving them quite a while to contemplate the experience that they’re soon going to go through.

• Pendulum rides

A gondola is attached to an arm, which is attached to a suspended axle. The gondola simply swings back and forth using the axle as the fulcrum. Some versions feature a counterweight on the opposite end of the axle, which will allow the gondola to go through a full 360 degree inversion. Pendulum rides are often modeled after pirate ships (like this one here), since such a platform can seat a fairly large amount of people while looking cool, though the themes can vary. One structural variation is known as the “Frisbee,” in which the gondola rotates as it swings. Very few Frisbees, if any, will swing a full 360 degree inversion due to nausea-inducement. Here’s a video of “CraZanity” at Six Flags Magic Mountain, a Frisbee and in fact the world’s tallest pendulum ride.

• Roller coasters

Alright, now, there are plenty of other kinds of rides that we can discuss, and I’d gladly talk about all of them if I had the time. But to avoid needless repetition, lets just jump over to roller coasters, the grand daddy of all proprioceptive/equilibrioceptive art forms. Roller coasters have an extraordinary amount of types to choose from (wooden, suspended, inverted, bobsled, launched loop, mine train, floorless, boomerang, 4th dimension, wild mouse, twister, side friction, single rail, etc.), and their design always aims to achieve a delicate balance in which the riders feel thrilled and excited, yet do not feel nauseous, nor become imperiled by exceeding a certain amount of either vertical or lateral G-forces, which as I mentioned can cause bodily discomfort or injury. The most Gs a roller coaster has ever reached was around 6.5, the “Moonsault Scramble” at Fuji-Q Highland, Japan (video here), and it was one of only two coasters ever to put its riders through a pretzel-style knot formation. Sadly, it closed in the year 2000.

The roller coaster is a fascinating architectural innovation because it evolved alongside railway technology, and it has always been with us through the development of modernity. The first major one to show up in America was the “Switchback Railway” from Coney Island, which debuted in 1884, and as transportation technology has grown more complex, so, too, has the roller coaster. I find this fascinating because it suggests that as soon as the infrastructure started to develop within industrial modernity, there was always a parallel development in which the same tools and devices that made up modern urban and commercial infrastuctures were always being rearranged in a grotesque manner and presented as an attraction, as if to reflect modernity’s most fascinating and/or disturbing possibilities back upon it. It thus makes perfect sense that the fairgrounds also commonly feature halls of warped mirrors, themselves also proprioceptive works of art.

But unlike most of what we encounter in modernity, roller coasters are actually among the most honest works of architecture/transport that there are. There is no façade to a roller coaster. Most works of architecture try to cover up their mechanical processes with a nice, sleek, eye-catching exterior to make the patrons try and forget the skeletal structure within. With the roller coaster, the skeleton is the entirety of the visual design, and park guests can almost always see their supports, chains, brakes, guts, nuts, bolts, levers, and wires with ease. Although the roller coaster certainly gives the patron a visual experience, the visual appeal isn’t found so much in the ride design itself (except incidentally) as it is in the sights that the rider catches when going through the actual ride.

Now, this is quite interesting, because when you see the roller coaster from a distance, you know exactly what is going to happen: the experience is mapped out for you upon your first glimpse. And yet you go ahead and ride one anyway because you know that the bodily experience is going to be starkly different from the mere visual knowledge of what’s in store when looking at a distance. In other words, you go because the “map” is going to be different from “the territory,” the latter being bodily sensation. Compare that sort of transparency to the murkiness of, say, a haunted house, which is appealing precisely because of what’s hidden, only waiting to reveal itself through blind corners, hidden passageways, and trap doors.

It is quite clear, to me anyway, that roller-coasters mark the apex of proprioceptive/equilibrioceptive art, but because of the characteristics I’ve mentioned of amusement park rides in general, it is unquestionably a lowbrow art, and it must remain that way. As I said above, equilibrioception is a non-intellective sense, which means that one cannot use it to communicate language. Therefore, there is nothing innately symbolic about it, and the only way to make it symbolic is by affixing a thematic subtext to it. A ride can be “about” snakes, or birds of prey, or panthers, or mythical creatures, or the Batman, or the Joker, or something similarly exciting, but that’s about it. The subject of the ride has to match the intensity of the experience. And once the ride is finished, the rider never really thinks about how it has communicated to us something deeply penetrating and insightful about the nature of any of these things. I learn nothing about anacondas by riding a roller-coaster named after one.

Now, to be fair, I suppose that one could try to make a roller-coaster about something deeper and more cerebral. He could make one in tribute to, I don’t know, the victims of Hiroshima, or some other intense historical trauma that has been the subject of many novels, pieces of classical music and artistic films — and he could even make the ride deliberately unpleasant, to mark the sincerity of his intentions. But most would still regard the gesture as tawdry and cheap, not artistically valid. And they would probably be right.

Nevertheless, one cannot do a whole lot better for aestheticizing the sense of proprioception than an amusement park. And any professional artists or MFA degree-holders who want to “elevate the medium” of the amusement park ride will probably only be able to do so by making the art worse.

edit 2/5/26: added a link I forgot to insert

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My first exposure to anti-ocularcentrism was in watching the original Star Wars movie (1977) as a small child. Toward the end of the movie, Luke Skywalker is flying his dinky little X-wing starship into the surface of the Death Star, a massive, moon-sized space station capable of blowing up entire planets. As he’s preparing to fire some missiles that will somehow travel into its highly vulnerable core and destroy the whole thing, the voice of Skywalker’s deceased mentor Obi Wan Kenobi instructs him to “use The Force, Luke” and turn off his targeting computer, which provides visual assistance to help pinpoint when and where to shoot. The idea here is that by removing the faculty of vision, he will no longer be contaminated by its distractions and constraints, and he will have no choice but to rely on this mysterious, occult, superior “sixth sense” known as The Force, which operates on another plane of perception altogether. And, of course, it works: Skywalker completely blows up the all-powerful Death Star, he flies away, and Obi Wan’s voice comes back to tell him, “The Force will be with you. Always.”

What makes the scene so effective is that the idea isn’t particularly original. Ancient religions and mystical disciplines the world over have held that our vision actually prevents us from understanding certain truths or realities that we must obtain through awakening a deeper mode of philosophical/spiritual awareness. The Upanishads and later Vedantic branches claim that the sensory world is characterized by māyā (illusion) and thus we have to go beyond our worldly senses to perceive the ever-present metaphysical unity that subtends all of creation; Taoism similarly instructs its adepts to go beyond sight and hearing; Buddhism specifically warns against “eye-consciousness” (cakṣurvijñāna) as an inhibiting source of knowledge; the Gnostic sects in their various manifestations held that the world we perceive is merely the product of an insane, irrational Demiurge, and we must attain γνῶσις (“gnosis”; transcendental knowledge) through other means. And the most influential doctrine on western thought, Platonism, used the “allegory of the cave” to maintain that our earthly vision perceives only the inferior forms of all objects and things, like shadows reflected upon the wall of a cave, and that one must escape from “the cave” in order to perceive their higher, originary “forms” (είδη) bathed in pure light — light so powerful that it would blind the unprepared.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is a good starting point for understanding western ocularcentrism, because even though it outwardly characterizes our vision as potentially deceptive, it nonetheless uses a visual metaphor to point us toward a higher sensibility: we stop looking at the fire-lit shadows on the cave walls, and instead we “see” the “light” of a higher order. This metaphor has continued throughout the growth and development of western civilization, and as Martin Jay, the author of Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993) demonstrates, our language is shot through with it. When we perceive higher truths, we are “enlightened.” We see light! When we know things in an a priori manner, we possess “intuition,” from the Latin intueri, “to look at.” If something is known in advance, it is “foreseen.” If we conjecture on a topic, we’re “speculating” about it, from the Latin specula, “watchtower.” If we want to know if a friend comprehends an idea, we ask him, “Do you see?” One could go on.

For this reason, 20th century French philosophy stands out as particularly interesting: many of its foremost representatives targeted the faculty of vision for criticism — not just the various images that come from modern entertainment culture (though there is plenty of criticism towards those), but vision itself — the noblest of the senses according to Aristotle. This is particularly strange when you consider how visual of a culture France’s is: just take a look at its Gothic cathedrals, like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris with its opulent stained glass windows. Note the fact that even today, comics are taken far more seriously as a legitimate art form in France (and Belgium) than almost any other country besides perhaps Japan. Or consider the philosophy of Descartes, which Jay discusses at length: in La dioptrique (1637), Descartes agrees that sight is the noblest vision and strongly urges for the creation and development of more sight-enhancing devices, like the telescope and the microscope. Martin Jay’s task is to contextualize this visual aspect of all of French culture leading up to the 20th century, and then explain why many of the post-WWII Parisian philosophers so decisively rejected it. And I must say: he does all of this quite successfully.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that there are few books that I would recommend unreservedly. I tend to nitpick just about everything. But Downcast Eyes is a book I would unreservedly recommend to anyone interested in this fascinating, if rarefied subject. In nearly 600 pages of writing, Martin Jay contextualizes the role of vision in not just French but all of western pre-20th c. intellectual culture, particularly from the Baroque era onwards (Chapters 1-2), and then moves through the 20th century, chapter by chapter, in an approximate chronological order. Each chapter focuses on two intellectuals or intellectual movements at a time, usually by thematically linking them together. And although Jay frequently refers back to the past or forward to the future when it suits him, one gets a sense of steadily building historic momentum as the book moves on.

To be sure, not every writer Jay features is straightforwardly anti-vision, or even anti-ocularcentric. One of the major concerns I had when beginning the book was that vision is such an all-encompassing sense that it’s hard to tell when people are attacking vision qua vision or just things meant to be seen, like posters or movies. Additionally, we don’t “see” everything the same way, as the verbs “gaze,” “look,” “stare,” “glance,” “eyeball,” “view,” “ogle,” “peer,” “scan,” and “watch” should make clear. All of these words involve vision, yet every single one of them connotes a different action. So before I read this book, I was expecting to encounter writings complaining about “visions” or “images” or “spectacles” but not necessarily vision itself — or, alternatively, complaints about specific types of seeing, but not necessarily vision as such. On the whole, Jay does a good job of differentiating between all of these philosophical notions, and he is honest about when a philosopher is not necessarily attacking vision in general but rather one of its applications. But it is striking how many of these philosophers actually go after vision the entire sense in expressly stated terms even when evidently singling out just one of its subcategories — Sartre being perhaps the worst offender. There is no question that the Parisian intellectual culture of the 1950s and beyond had some sort of problem with vision and wanted to remove it from its formerly exalted position.

But even if these philosophers weren’t all totally denigrating vision (and some of them weren’t, as the book responsibly points out), the book does an excellent job of at least recounting a long, arduous, and fairly insulated scholarly discussion about vision that moves through Cartesian perspectivalism through Husserlian phemonenology (transmitted through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) through avant-garde art and literature (e.g. Bataille, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism) through structuralism (Barthes, Lacan, Althusser) through post-structuralism (Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida) and even, briefly, through feminism (Irigaray), with plenty of side-discussion on Marx and Freud. I find myself sympathetic to some of these intellectual currents, indifferent to others, and actively hostile to others still, and I suppose the typical reader would feel the same way, since we’re covering a diverse array of perspectives here. But that all contributes to the charm of this text.

I’m not the first to point out that post-WWII Parisian intellectual culture is insulated. The linguist Noam Chomsky once said the same thing in his assessment of postmodernism: no one from Paris reads anything outside from of France, and if they do, it’s only because their friends told them to. This remark was entirely condemnatory, and partly for good reason. The absurd application of Ferdinand de Saussure to just about everything, for instance, is not a great achievement of French thought but rather a demonstration of its collective failure. And indeed, when reading Downcast Eyes, one gets the sense of Paris being a tight-knit philosophical culture in which everyone reads everyone else’s works, canons are rapidly and loosely formed/forgotten largely through hearsay and the desire to fit in, and faddishness ultimately dominates the evolution of thought. The disadvantages to this are plentiful and obvious. But because Parisian intellectual culture was so insulated and faddish, it couldn’t help but become notable on the world stage. Instead of amounting to a conglomerate of thinkers whose thoughts were dispersed and bestrewn in a thousand different mutually irrelevant directions, everyone in France was locked into each other and aware of each other’s ideas, and thus the lockstep uniformity of everyone involved formed a kind of elite, unified, cognitive fist. It couldn’t help but command attention from the outside — the kind that a freer, less centralized intellectual culture such as that of the United States routinely fails to secure. In philosophy, anyhow.

For this reason, France is an ideal place about which to write an intellectual history. The French intellectuals certainly weren’t alone in downplaying the importance of vision, as Jay points out. The Germans, for instance, had their own miniature tradition of stressing the importance of “listening” over “seeing,” and this notion can be found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and even Klages. And in the Anglosphere, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan were discussing problems that occurred when the eye became the predominant organ of information reception during the age of print, which Jay doesn’t fail to mention (he really covers all his bases, it’s quite impressive). But the French are always conversing with each other, following one another, differentiating themselves from one another, and moving from one fascination du jour to the next, and so they make for a vibrant and dynamic, yet ultimately unified narrative.

This narrative — to me, anyhow — amounts to a story of gradual degeneration and only partial recovery in the philosophical treatment of vision. Anti-ocularcentrism might seem to be the right standpoint to adopt casually, but it’s not one that’s easy to master. And the reason that anti-ocularcentrism is hard to get right is actually something that can be explained in Peircean as well as media-ecological terms. Let me try to explain. Vision can encounter all forms of signs: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. It can gaze at images, but it can also see language and read the written word. Whereas hearing cannot “hear” a pile of dog feces just lying there on the pavement in the sweltering heat, nor can it detect the beauty of a lithe-bodied nude woman with large breasts, sight can indeed detect these things in a privileged way. When we think of things that attract or repel us, we usually do so in a vision-first manner (dogs, by contrast, don’t; they’re usually smell-first). And yet, our vision can also scan through images that are presented in the most uniform, stylistically unimpressive way possible and make incredible sense of them. To put it more pointedly, our vision can read the phonetic alphabet rendered into print, which McLuhan correctly understood as removing the “ground” from the symbolic image as much as possible. By “ground,” we mean the parts of the image that do not directly contribute to its linguistic meaning, its materiality (e.g. handwriting giving hints of a distinct person, letters that form separately meaningful shapes as with Egyptian hieroglyphs, etc.) When we attentively read a printed book, for instance, it doesn’t feel like we’re “seeing” the letters and words.

So essentially, our eyes can stare at images for seemingly endless periods of time and focus on the image for its own sake, and yet they can also treat what they’re looking at — usually (but not always) language — as merely a portal to a virtual realm of pure cogitation. Vision is to some extent always engaged in a balancing act, since it must mediate between interpreting the image as the image, which invites an exploration into its relationship to the other senses (such as how it might feel, taste, or smell). And yet, vision must also know when to interpret the image virtually — as an egress leading to another, faraway realm of incorporeal ideas that subsist entirely in the mind. It is no wonder why so many ancient philosophers always found vision to be so impressive and some have even conceived of spiritual awakening in predominately visual terms, even when denying the primacy of vision itself!

But because vision plays this mediating role, attacking its centrality to our lives can go in different directions. One can criticize it for its over-intellectualizing tendency, while one can also attack it for its tendency toward excessive sensory indulgence. It’s also possible to attack one aspect of vision while taking another for granted, and I believe that this is what some of the later post-WWII French philosophers wound up doing, since even though some of them inveighed against the sense of vision so aggressively, their insights were nonetheless distinctly bookish. But we’ll get to those guys a bit later. In the case of Henri Bergson, whom Jay puts in conversation with the impressionists such as Claude Monet, Bergson’s criticisms were a bit more palatable. He felt that vision suffers from a tendency to let images imprint themselves upon the mind in a static fashion, which directly contrasts with the body’s always-fluid and kinetic experience of the world. So, in other words, it causes us to focus excessively on space while forgetting about movement and the flow of time. Although it is an insight that obviously came from an era in which the photograph predominated over the video (Creative Evolution came out in 1907), it is not an altogether terrible point. While Nietzsche felt that vision can cohabit with the other senses in a properly balanced manner, Bergson leave it as an open question. This isn’t necessarily bad, and much in Bergson seems to be salvageable.

These ideas about bodily awareness would later find treatment in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who approached Husserlian phenomenology through sense-perception as a starting point. Instead of attacking vision outright, Merleau-Ponty argued for a rehabilitation of vision as “the noble sense,” as Aristotle would have it, but only if one can properly attune himself to it, using it a way to negotiate correctly between the body and its surrounding world. Later commentators would attack him for being ocularcentric, and they did so for various reasons — like, for example, the fact that he took up quite a lot of space discussing paintings yet almost none at all discussing music. But Jay makes a convincing case that even though he himself might not have been anti-ocularcentric in an overt way, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy contains plenty of material that one could use for anti-ocularcentric arguments, as indeed some did, sometimes unwittingly.

From Jay’s treatment, I get the sense that Merleau-Ponty was ultimately stifled by his own intellectual narrowness. He spent his career approaching the same handful of questions concerning phenomenology over and over again, struggling to find ways of rethinking them whenever he felt he had hit a snag. And toward the very end, he discovered Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism — which suggests he didn’t search very far — and decided to apply it to his thought. This could have gone very badly, but we will never know for sure, since his final philosophical project never really got off the ground. Many years ago, I actually read The Visible and the Invisible (1968), his last unfinished book compiled and edited by a colleague after his death, and while I can say it contains one of the best takedowns of Jean-Paul Sartre’s conceptualization of “nothingness” ever written, it doesn’t offer much positive content beyond a few tantalizing ideas (“the flesh” being the main one). In truth, we have no idea how Merleau-Ponty would have made everything fit together. It is possible that his philosophy could have gotten much worse, since Saussure does tend to have that effect, but he also may have applied Saussure to his project in a much more intelligent way than others did. He also may have scrapped the whole project altogether. It’s impossible to say.

Whatever the case, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty were at least asking the right questions, and they were right to insist upon the body as a subject of valuable philosophical inquiry, whatever one might think of their conclusions. Georges Bataille, another anti-ocularcentrist, was also quite “body-oriented” in his writings, such as his pornographic Story of the Eye (1928). And while he may have been a bit ridiculous at times, he was nonetheless a powerful and provocative writer. He wasn’t a great philosopher, sure, but he was a force of artistic thymos, and he, again, raised the right questions. But where things took a bad turn was with Merleau-Ponty’s on-again, off-again friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, and they became still worse shortly afterward with Jacques Lacan. If you want to ask the question, “Why is French philosophy so awful and obnoxious?” then those two characters form a good starting point for understanding where things went awry (Roland Barthes does as well, but he at least had the virtue of being a decent writer). Although these philosophers were terrible for various reasons, their condemnation of the visual sense provides a good case study as to what made them so deficient.

Jay summarizes Sartre’s anti-optical tendencies like so:

Sartre’s critique of ocularcentrism was especially powerful because he conflated many of the complaints expressed by other critics into one relentless, overwhelming indictment. Not only, he claimed, does the hypertrophy of the visual lead to a problematic epistemology, abet the domination of nature, and support the hegemony of space over time, but it also produces profoundly disturbing intersubjective relations and the construction of a dangerously inauthentic version of the self. Sartre’s interrogation of the eye thus included social, psychological, and indeed existential dimensions, which he invariably described in the most frighteningly negative terms.

[…]

Sartre’s obsessive hostility to vision — by one estimate, there were over seven thousand references to “the look” in his work — was so unremitting that it has been tempting to account for it as a personal problem.

It probably was. I won’t belabor this review with too extensive a critique of Sartre, but reading through Jay’s surprisingly fair, even charitable account, it is nearly impossible to avoid the conclusion that Sartre was only considering one aspect of vision and thus painting an entire faculty of perception with a broad brush. Merleau-Ponty also made the valuable criticism that even when Sartre took pains to be anti-Cartesian, he himself often unwittingly adopted a Cartesian pose, particularly in his hypothetical question from Being and Nothingness about what might happen if a voyeur staring through a keyhole (in other words, viewing others as a supposedly pure subject) himself became gazed upon.

Lacan, for his part, developed some of Sartre’s arguments incidentally, but he broadly featured a glottocentric element to his philosophy derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, preferring the Symbolic (language) over the Imaginary (visual images) — even though, as Jay points out, he did not differentiate these two things nearly as cleanly as his fans thought he did. Anyhow, Lacan’s famous “mirror stage” concept explained that the human construction of the ego is contaminated by man’s predominately visual understanding of himself, and this idea carried serious weight. It is quite incredible that Lacan’s influence was as strong and as lasting as it was, even up to this day — his notion that our subconscious processes are structured in the same way as language is patently absurd on its face. But even more fascinatingly, the people who were most strongly influenced by Lacan didn’t even seem to understand his arguments very well, particularly Christian Metz with his film theory that sought to combine Lacan with Althusser (also a Saussurean), and which has retrospectively been criticized for its inadequate understanding of the former. Metz’s film theory classic The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977) is also about as straightforwardly anti-cinema as such a theory could possibly be, and some of its arguments that Jay recounts are indeed quite ridiculous. Gilles Deleuze eventually attacked the whole enterprise, calling the linguistic-centered approach in cultural analysis “catastrophic” and describing the notion of the Imaginary as a muddle. But these ideas still hold a great deal of currency in the academic world, as countless school-oriented discussions on them will demonstrate.

One reason for the embrace of the language-centered yet anti-visual approach that followed Sartre and Lacan could be found in Louis Althusser, whose personal life Martin Jay does not hesitate to discuss in detail. Althusser is known for combining Marxism with Saussurean structuralism, just as Lacan combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Saussure. He was also, as it happens, mentally ill, and he murdered his own wife, so some know him for that, too. And eventually, he produced two autobiographical texts after he killed her and, incredibly, got away with it. In these texts (now available as one volume), he confesses to quite a few things, one of which was that he wasn’t really all that familiar with Marx, only having read a few of his books. But he discusses why he turned to Marxism with an explanation that comes remarkably close to Sartre’s thinking (emphasis in original):

The eye is passive, at a distance from its object, it receives its image without having to work, without engaging the body in any process of approach, of contact, of manipulation (dirty hands, dirtiness was a phobia of my mother’s and it is why I have a sort of complacency for dirtiness). The eye is thus the speculative organ par excellence, of Plato and Aristotle to St. Thomas and beyond.

[…]

When I “encountered” Marxism, it was by my body that I adhered to it. Not only because it resembled the radical critique of all “speculative” illusion, but also because it permitted me to live by the critique of all speculative illusion in a true rapport with naked reality, and gave me the power henceforth to live the physical rapport (the contact, but especially the work on social or other matter) in thought itself. In Marxism, in Marxist theory, I found a thought that takes into account the primacy of the active and laboring body over passive and speculative thought.

We can thank Althusser for being so nakedly honest about his own motivations, since he speaks to a problem found in many intellectuals. Plagued by the guilt of their own middle-class bookishness and passivity, they turn to odd rationalizations exclusively through their intellectual pursuits, even while they refuse to engage in the actual labor or bodily activity of those whom they lionize and/or envy (in the case of Marxists, it’s the proletariat, but one can think of other examples in other intellectual communities). The embrace of Saussure, Marxism, and Lacanian attacks on “the imaginary” (or, vision) allowed various self-loathing middle-class intellectuals to stay motivated in their brainy pursuits: they could declare the importance of language (thus giving them an excuse to read more books), while attacking the “images” of the culture industry and celebrating “action” — ignoring that they’re reading books with their eyes, and not particularly doing anything “active,” either, like a true, bare-chested, hammer-wielding proletarian studmuffin.

It isn’t until we get to Jacques Derrida that we find the point made that vision includes not only the engagement with image and spectacle but also books and language — a simple observation that apparently got lost somewhere in the mix. Now, Derrida’s view was that even though we read books with the intention of treating the words as a portal to a purely virtual realm of cogitation (as I mentioned above), we as readers can never entirely rid ourselves of the materiality comprising that which we see. There is always a trace of the object as an object that contaminates the “pure” message that it purportedly sends. Derrida got famous for making this point about spoken language in his critique of Saussure in Of Grammatology (1967). In that book, he was criticizing Saussure’s “phonocentrism,” or, his preference for hearing over vision. But because Derrida never actually had any interest in dealing with either vision or sound as sensory phenomena with distinct characteristics, he could just as easily attack ocularcentrism on the same grounds. In his view, no sign or mode of sign-transmission can come prior to another; every sign is a “supplement” of some other sign, making any kind of hierarchy impossible. This is an interesting semiotic theory — and make no mistake, it is a semiotic theory, even though Derrida’s defenders such as Geoffrey Bennington have gone out of their way to deny it — but it completely ignores the experiential aspects of how we receive and interpret signs in practice. Nevertheless, Derrida does actually get some credit for at least taking seriously the sheer breadth of what vision can do and how it functions, an awareness that is surprisingly absent from most of the philosophers surveyed in this book.

One question that crops up throughout Jay’s survey concerns Judaism and the Biblical banning of graven images. Though anti-ocularcentric discourse took its bizarre turn with mainly lapsed Catholics (Sartre, Lacan, Althusser), it also features plenty of Jews as well (Bergson, Derrida, Levinas), and this is something worth investigating. Though Jay refrains from giving a personal opinion on the subject, he does cover a fascinatingly strange essay called “Figure Foreclosed” by Jean-Francois Lyotard that claims Judaism is itself a psychopathology, at least according to interior logic of psychoanalytic theory. In that essay, Lyotard covers Freud’s theory about Moses being a gentile in Moses and Monotheism, arguing that Judaism’s ban on graven images is a way to repress the memories of long-forgotten mother goddesses whom the Israelites worshiped prior to the arrival of Moses. However, because Judaism’s rejection of the sacred Mother is so extreme as to foreclose the image altogether and replace it merely with the disembodied voice of an invisible Father, this creates a kind of hallucinatory psychosis. It is far more potent than mere repression, since Jews are constantly moved to extinguish and replace the governing Father-figure in typical Oedipal fashion (as Freud did with Moses, declaring him a gentile and creating his own surrogate religion of psychoanalysis), except in this case, there is no mother figure with whom to reconcile. Hell of a theory!

Since I have already discussed other modern treatments of Moses elsewhere, I might actually take up Lyotard’s essay at another time, because it is quite interesting indeed. And to be clear, every single chapter in this fascinating book could receive its own essay-length commentary. It is quite thought-provoking. But to my mind, Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze each represent a partial recovery of the anti-ocularcentric discourse, rescuing it (with varying degrees of success) from the silliness of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Saussurean structuralism. Although Jay never discusses Deleuze in length, he has given me added reason to check out his work, since he rejected the glottocentrism of previous Parisian intellectuals quite decisively, and even (as I’ve read elsewhere) fully endorsed semioticians like C.S. Peirce and Thomas Sebeok as the better alternative to Saussure. In other words, he actually took the question of semiotics seriously, even as he pursued his own different intellectual project.

But now is not the time to evaluate everyone whom Jay mentions and rank them one by one, since we’d otherwise be here for far too long. I should mention, however, that fans of Baudrillard will be disappointed by how dismissive of a treatment he receives. I have no problem with this whatsoever, but considering that Baudrillard has become the internet’s favorite Frenchman in the past decade or so (unquestionably, this is in part because of his refusal to sign a petition calling for the decriminalization of pedophilia, which many of the other French guys including Derrida and Foucault did sign), I could see this being a matter of contention. On the whole, however, Downcast Eyes has been a great source of information on the treatment of a fairly narrow philosophical question, and it has certainly given me much to think about. And whenever I read a book from a university press published during the last forty years, I’m pretty surprised if it can achieve those two things.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that traffics in media, semiotics, and cultural analysis.

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I. Intro: Game Theory Mania

I recently watched James Cameron’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) in hopes of understanding what seems to have been a Hollywood fascination with game theory that developed throughout the decade of the 2000s, and well into the 2010s. Game theory didn’t exactly dominate mass culture, but you’d occasionally see moral/rational “game” scenarios crop up in movie plots, and I say this with two major examples in mind. The first is in the form of the Saw franchise (2004-present), which seems to scenarios amenable to a game theory analysis and make a mockery of them by a) pushing the outcomes all the way to the brink of life and death and adding moral dimensions to the decision-making process that game theory cannot possibly account for, and b) giving unpredictable outcomes to the scenarios themselves, since the Jigsaw killer cannot be trusted, which disrupts the certainty of the rules within each “game” (for just one game theory analysis of a Saw movie, see this here, which looks like some sort of high school assignment).

The second example I have in mind is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), in which The Joker devises a scenario that combines The Prisoner’s Dilemma (more on that later) with The Trolley Problem by taking a boat filled with chained-up prisoners and another boat filled with chained-up civilians, and giving them each the opportunity to blow the other boat up in order to ensure their safety (spoiler: neither boat does explodes the other, thus demonstrating both Nolan’s belief in human virtue). And although this wasn’t exactly a Hollywood production, there was also the 2007 Adam Curtis BBC documentary The Trap, which portrays John Forbes Nash — the subject of A Beautiful Mind and the guy who came up with the famous Nash equilibrium — as a demented mind whose belief in the rationality of selfishness characterized the mentality of the Cold War. There is no question that The Trap has had some influence on later perceptions of John Nash and game theory among a young and educated audience.

Curtis’s dim view on Nash and game theory appears to correspond more closely with the way “game” situations seem to play out on the silver screen. Whenever a set of conditions that blend rational decision-making with moral scenarios are established in such a meticulously calculated, “perfect” manner, then you know that some evil is afoot. So I started to wonder what A Beautiful Mind actually had to say, since I was told that it portrayed Nash as some sort of great hero. The main thing to understand about John Forbes Nash — and this would surely be one of the movie’s major obstacles to overcome — is that he was indeed an asshole. Everyone seems to agree on that point. The other thing to understand about him is that while working at MIT, he began to exhibit schizophrenic symptoms during his 30s. He suffered from some seriously warped delusions, and he went through a decades-long process of overcoming his illness before receiving a Nobel Prize in 1994 for the work he did on game theory all the way back in 1950. When Adam Curtis mentions all this, he does so to indict Nash’s moral character, as if to say that all of his mathematical innovations came from his selfish and mistrustful mentality, of which his paranoid schizophrenia was but a natural outcome. So, how would Ron Howard, the all-American, apple-pie, Fourth-of-July former child actor from The Andy Griffith Show treat this highly complex figure of mathematical history? How would he and his team of producer Brian Grazer and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman find a way to tell the tale?

Well, what I discovered was that A Beautiful Mind actually goes out of its way to confuse people about Nash’s mathematical contributions while making a subtle but distinct political statement about the evils of Cold War paranoia. It makes a few other points, too: its main argument is that Nash’s fortunes came not just from his innate gifts, but from the real human connections that he was able to establish throughout his life. When he comes up with his equilibrium concept, he does so while spending time with some friends as they strategize about how to get laid — a decisive shift from the many hours he spends in solitude failing to come up with a great original idea. And when he overcomes his schizophrenia, he does so because of The Power of Love: his Nobel Prize speech is all about how his long-suffering but faithful wife helped him to recover. In reality, he never gave a Nobel Prize speech, and he and his wife were divorced from 1963-2001 — though it is remarkable that they did remarry — but never mind all that. The main message of A Beautiful Mind is that rationality isn’t enough to get you anywhere: you have to guide and nurture it with the warmth of loving relationships and the powerful bonds of friendship. This is all true enough, I guess, and it’s a classic Hollywood theme to which few will object.

But the more interesting thing about this movie, to me, is its secondary message, which is political. Nash is indeed lionized as a psychologically troubled hero, but for all the wrong reasons. First, his game theory contributions are completely misrepresented as a bold repudiation of Adam Smith’s view that rational selfishness serves the best outcome for all — completely the opposite of what Adam Curtis’s documentary would later argue of Nash, and equally wrong for reasons I’ll explain below. And second, the film presents his paranoid fantasies as exclusively right-wing and anti-Communist in nature. Also wrong.

II. Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Let’s explore both of these misrepresentations starting with Nash’s actual mathematical contributions. As mentioned above, Nash won the Nobel for his Nash equilibrium. Google defines it like this:

A Nash equilibrium is a stable state in game theory where each player chooses the best strategy for themselves, given the [possible] strategies chosen by all other players, meaning no single player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing their decision.

Got that? You’ll have to pardon the sudden switch to this relatively demanding logical prose, but it’s necessary. Basically, to determine the equilibrium, I weigh the various choices that all the other guys have in a zero-sum game situation with limited resources, and I ask myself, “Given their perspective and what they would do to benefit themselves, what should I do to achieve the best outcome for myself if any combination of them chooses something I won’t necessarily like?” The Nash equilibrium is that point in which every player in the game asks himself that exact question, and then answers it correctly. The answer is called an equilibrium because everyone reaches it mutually. It is always available in zero-sum games, it is driven primarily by the question of self-interest, and it also assumes that everyone in the scenario is “rational,” which is defined as: each does what benefits himself/herself the most within that situation, shutting off all other considerations. (Whether or not such a state of “rationality” is actually achievable so often in the real world is a question for another time; we’re just going with that simple definition for now.)

Now, in A Beautiful Mind, here’s the scenario that’s meant to show us the moment at which Nash is struck with inspiration and conceives his equilibrium principle. Nash and three of his nerdlinger Princeton friends are at a bar talking about nerd stuff. Then, five chicks walk in together as a group: four are middling attractive brunettes, and one is a smoking hot blonde played by some model who apparently didn’t get any other show-biz work besides some voice acting for the racing video game Need For Speed: Underground. One of Nash’s friends in that four-person group, commenting on the girls — and particularly the hottest girl — says, “Have you remembered nothing? Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics! In competition, individual ambition serves the common good!” So they all decide that they must go try and have sex with the hot blonde.

But then, Nash — envisioning a situation that assumes that all the ladies are a) total sluts, b) will view each of the four men as complete equals, and c) must be each man’s first choice — concludes that Adam Smith needs some serious revision. Why so? If all four men go up to the blonde at once, she will reject them all, not being able to choose only one. And if they each then go to the other girls, all four will be offended by having been chosen second, and so they will reject them, too. Therefore, no one gets laid. But if they all agree to ignore the blonde and go for the middling attractive brunettes, then they all will get laid except for the blonde. As Nash himself puts it, “The best result will come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself… and the group. Governing dynamics, gentlemen! Governing dynamics! Adam Smith was wrong!”

Wow! Pretty amazing example of a Nash equilibrium, right? Right…? Not really, no. There is no equilibrium here, and the reason is because everyone decided to cooperate in order to reach a sub-optimal outcome from the very beginning. As this blog post from 2007 explains, the whole point of a Nash equilibrium is that you’re exploring every single possibility within a non-cooperative framework. Even in this silly scene, Nash’s friend smiles and makes the point, “Nash, if this is some way for you to get the blonde on your own, then you can go to hell!” Just a friendly joke, sure, but that is actually something that would occur in a game theory scenario. Given the bizarre rules of this “game” (and to the film’s credit, it does portray Nash as a weirdo who doesn’t understand how human courtship works), everyone has a rational incentive to agree not to bang the blonde, but then defect from the agreement and steal the blonde from the others, hoping that no one else defects. This is precisely the issue that the real-life Nash was concerned with, not whatever collectivist strategizing breakthrough that the movie attributes to him.

If we’re being charitable, what the movie might be trying to do is demonstrate the principle that a Nash equilibrium does not necessarily lead to the best outcome for everyone. In fact, it can lead to a pretty crappy outcome for all in some situations. This principle is best demonstrated by the classic game known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Nash did not create this game, but I believe that the movie was making a vague, roundabout reference to it. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is explained well by this cute math teacher:

The situation goes like this: two prisoners are arrested for a minor crime for which they each will get one year in prison, but they’re both suspected of committing a bigger, more major crime together, and they are indeed guilty of it. If one snitches on the other for that bigger crime, he gets to go free while the other gets three years… and that stipulation works both ways. But if both snitch on each other at once, then they both get two years — double the time they would get if they cooperated. In this situation, cooperation would make for the best outcome, but the more rational choice for each individual is to defect, because the risk of taking three years is just too high. In the situation with the blonde and her brunette friends, making the “irrational” choice of ignoring the blonde would ensure a greater outcome for everyone as a collective, but the problem is, if one goes for the presumably hot-to-trot blonde, then he takes the top prize.

From all this, Nash decides, “This proves that free market economics doesn’t work!” or something similarly goofy, but that was never a takeaway that any serious person could get from the scenario. The reality of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the temptation to defect is always high, and in depersonalized situations, people often do — it’s why we have things like religion, and bonds of loyalty, and rigorously enforced codes of honor, and rituals to improve group cohesion, that sort of thing. This is all stuff that prevents us from wanting to defect from collectivist agreements and then behave sociopathically.

Interestingly enough, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is actually used by Adam Curtis in The Trap to show how evil John Nash was, and it forms a fascinating contrast to A Beautiful Mind:

In a series of equations from which he would win the Nobel Prize, Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness did not have to lead to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of “equilibrium” in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other. But the stability — the “equilibrium” — would only happen if everyone involved behaved selfishly, because if they cooperated, the result became unpredictable and dangerous. A famous game was developed at [the] RAND [Corporation] to show that in any interaction, selfishness always led to a safer outcome, which was called the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

If you’ve been paying attention so far, then already you should see that this is nonsense. (Nash also never said that cooperation leads to unpredictability and danger, but whatever). Curtis then proceeds to explain the Prisoner’s Dilemma, doing so in a distorted fashion. In Curtis’s version, cooperation results in two people getting a point (either a diamond or some money of equal value) if they cooperate. One person defecting results in him getting two points (a diamond and money) while the other guy gets nothing — again, this works both ways — and mutual defection results in both getting nothing. The difference is subtle but crucial: the point of the actual Prisoner’s Dilemma is that cooperation is better than mutual defection, but it is nevertheless irrational given the limited knowledge of each player about the other’s motives. But Curtis misrepresents this deliberately by claiming that mutual cooperation and mutual defection lead to the same outcome. This allows him to obscure the game’s actual point, interpreting it this way instead:

What Nash’s equation showed was that the rational choice was always to betray the other person, because that way, at the worst, you got to keep the diamond, and at the best, you got both the diamond and the money. But if you trusted the other person, you ran the risk of losing everything because he might betray you. It was called the sucker payoff.

[…]

What Nash had done was to turn that into a theory of how the whole of society worked, which had enormous implications for politics because it proved that one could have a society based on individual freedom that wouldn’t degenerate into chaos. But the price of that freedom would be a world in which everyone had to be suspicious and distrustful of their fellow human beings.

This is an absurd takeaway from the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it’s just as absurd as how its underlying principle is demonstrated in A Beautiful Mind (if that is indeed what the film was trying to do).

What both interpretations get wrong is that there is nothing prescriptive about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It isn’t a mathematical justification for being either an asshole or, alternatively, a nice guy who always keeps his promises. In the same way that Carl Schmitt didn’t invent the concept of friends and enemies (although people seem to think he did), and René Girard didn’t invent the concept of scapegoating (although people seem to think he did), John Nash didn’t invent the concept of selfishness, and anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history or human nature will understand this. For just one example: in 1837, the king of the Zulus, Dingane KaSenzangakhona Zulu (half-brother of Shaka) invited the Dutchman Piet Retief and his Voortrekkers to a peace talk and told them to leave behind their weapons to ensure maximum trust among both parties. The Voortrekkers did so, and Dingane responded by slaughtering Retief and the 500 of his men who attended. Mutual cooperation could have benefited both, but Dingane chose to defect. So, was Dingane KaSenzangakhona Zulu… a game theorist…?

No, he just took the easy choice, and the whole point of game theory is to explain the mechanics behind stuff like this. Again, the cute math teacher explains it pretty well: the tragic lesson of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that although both parties would prefer mutual cooperation from the outset, once they are in that situation, it becomes really, really hard to sustain mutual cooperation when the incentive to defect is so high. And this is why relatively frequent tragedy of the commons situations and public goods games often match a Prisoner’s Dilemma setup. When policy planners and economists come up with strategies, they’re usually trying to anticipate these scenarios so they can avoid them altogether if possible.

In A Beautiful Mind, when John Nash submits his dissertation to his advisor, the advisor asks him, “Do you realize this flies in the face of 150 years of economic theory?!” But this claim is just as much of a delusion as the most outlandish notions that ever occurred to Nash.

III. Nash’s Delusions

In addition to misrepresenting Nash’s accomplishments, the movie misrepresents the nature of his paranoia. Once he graduates from Princeton and is seen celebrating the completion of his dissertation, the scene quickly cuts to the exterior of “The Pentagon” in 1950, as a caption explains. John Nash walks into a room where some military guys tell him that they’ve been intercepting secret transmissions from Moscow, which they’ve placed onto a grid of screens. On the screens, there’s a series of numbers, and John Nash just stares at them with the movie camera rotating around his head (this shot was used in the movie trailer). He eventually realizes that they’re codes indicating latitude and longitude points on the American map, which function as routing orders to various places in America. “You’re doing a great service to your country,” one of the military guys explains. In the corner of his eye, Nash sees a mysterious gentleman peering at him from a distance.

Later on at MIT after teaching a class, Nash meets this mysterious gentleman and learns his name: Mr. William Parcher (Ed Harris). Parcher tells him that he oversaw the Manhattan Project and worked closely with Oppenheimer, taking him to a plot of supposedly abandoned warehouses in which a secret military operation is being conducted. He further tells Nash that during the end of World War II the Soviets seized a Nazi factory in which its German engineers were attempting to build a portable atomic bomb. A small faction within the Soviet Union called the “New Freedom” took this bomb, and they plan to detonate it on US soil so as to incur maximum civilian casualties. However, there is a way to thwart them: they have sleeper agents in the USA who communicate to each other through codes embedded in published newspapers and magazines, and only Nash can be the man to decipher them. Parcher accordingly instructs Nash to read a stack of assigned magazines and commit them to memory, finding and notating any secret codes in them that he can. The military then implants something called a “radium diode” into Nash’s arm, which shows a sequence of digitized red numbers that can glow in the dark from beneath the skin. These numbers are said to change sporadically, and they indicate codes for various drop-off points to which Nash will submit his Soviet cryptography research. Over the following months (years?), Nash dutifully does this research, poring through hundreds of newspapers and periodicals, finding secret codes within them and submitting them to a mailbox at the front of an abandoned mansion. All this, while Nash does his teaching work at MIT and maintains his relationship with his girlfriend and, later on, wife. And things indeed get hectic: at one point, he and Parcher are even shot at by Soviet spies!

Well, all of this turns out to be complete nonsense. We learn that Nash hallucinated the whole thing: his time at the Pentagon in 1950, his orders from the government to search for codes in magazines, the radium diode implant in his arm — everything pertaining to Communism, basically. He also turns out to have hallucinated his beloved best friend from the Princeton graduate school, whom he later accuses of being a Communist spy once his hallucinations become unmanageable. But besides his first hallucinations of the roommate, pretty much all of Nash’s delusions in the movie are Communism-related. And in Nash’s hallucinations, discussions on Communism get surprisingly specific. In the scene in which Nash meets the imaginary Mr. Parcher, Parcher tells him, “McCarthy is an idiot, but unfortunately, that doesn’t make him wrong,” an obvious reference to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the figurehead of anti-Communist paranoia within the post-Cold-War liberal imagination. The film never goes so far as to say that America’s climate of anti-Communism is what caused Nash’s mental illness in the first place… but it comes pretty damn close.

In any case, the whole situation is badly misrepresented on a number of levels. For one thing, Nash’s schizophrenic delusions didn’t begin until well into his academic career; they certainly didn’t accompany him all throughout graduate school. They started sometime around age 30 in the late 1950s, making the movie’s chronology off by over a decade. And they also weren’t nearly as “logical” as the movie portrays. Schizophrenic and manic delusions are almost never so straightforward. According to this documentary from 2002, when people first noticed Nash’s irregular behavior, he showed up to a costume party dressed as a baby in a diaper and laid in his wife’s lap for most of the time — a disturbing display, and a marked departure from his normal eccentricities. A couple weeks later, Nash claimed that aliens from outer space were sending him coded messages via the NY Times. He later interrupted a lecture to announce that he was on the cover of Life magazine disguised as the Pope (it was just simply the Pope). He also believed that he was going to become the emperor of Antarctica. Instead of being delusional about mere politics, he really thought that he was chosen by a higher power to be the messenger of a great revelation, much like Muhammad was the messenger of Islam. To be sure, he did believe that Communists were after him, so perhaps there were some elements of “red scare” paranoia to his thinking… but as he himself later explained, he was just as wary of the anti-Communists as he was of the Communists, believing them both to be essentially the same.

So why does the movie take what was clearly a chaotic array of cosmic delusions and turn it into straightforward Republican politics? I suspect that the team of Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman, and Brian Grazer saw in Nash a good occasion for making a statement on the evils of anti-Communist paranoia. They must have known that he worked for the RAND Corporation as an off-and-on consultant on national defense matters, and that the Nash equilibrium was actually used as a guiding principle by US military strategists in crafting the approach of nuclear deterrence. That was all real stuff that happened. But removing those facts and focusing instead on his mental illness was Howard and co.’s way of redeeming John Nash rather than condemning him as an anti-Communist toady, as Adam Curtis later did. In doing so, they could present him as a thorny but lovable eccentric whose innocent mind was warped by a political disease that had been rapaciously eating away at the fabric of America’s trust.

Consider, for instance, the very first words of the movie, a speech that the Princeton Mathematics faculty head (and, later on, Nash’s dissertation reviewer) gives to the incoming graduate students:

Mathematicians won the war. Mathematicians built the Japanese codes and built the A-bomb. Mathematicians like you. The stated goal of the Soviets is Global Communism. In medicine or economics, in technology or space, battle lines are being drawn. To triumph, we need results: publishable, applicable results. Now, who among you would be the next Morse? The next Einstein? Who among you would be the vanguard of democracy, freedom, and discovery?

This hackneyed speech could have easily come from one of Nash’s hallucinations, but it doesn’t. It’s part of the actual story (actually, most of the dialogue is pretty hackneyed, which dampens the effect of the hallucination sequences, but whatever). Then, compare that speech to the last caption in the film:

Nash’s theories have influenced global trade negotiations, national labor relations, and even breakthroughs in evolutionary biology.

This is what the film wants you to know about his accomplishments, and it contains nothing about war deterrence, or Communism, or anything like that: just international trade and science, the two guiding lights of post-Cold-War American unipolarity. The contrast is so striking because the movie is essentially trying to present Nash’s madness as a distillation of what was happening in America at the time. Nash’s madness is America’s madness. When he’s sane, he’s saying that Adam Smith was short-sighted. When he’s insane, he’s trying to stop Communist spies. By portraying his breakthrough of the Nash equilibrium as some sort of pro-collectivist idea and then further separating the “sane” parts of Nash from the “insane” anti-Communist paranoia that characterized the climate of the time, they could not only separate game theory from its use in anti-Communist foreign policy but also portray it as a tool to be used as an alternative to excessive greed in matters of global finance. Understood this way, A Beautiful Mind can be considered an example of the Hollywood anti-anti-Communist political subgenre, which includes movies like The Majestic (also 2001) and Good Night and Good Luck (2005).

But nevertheless, what the film left out was too tempting not to comment upon, and so Adam Curtis went for the wide open shot and decided to turn John Nash into some kind of anti-Communist paranoiac villain. The politics of Curtis and Howard seem to be essentially the same — at least regarding this enigmatic figure of John Forbes Nash — only the vantage point switches.

Without a doubt, there’s something alluring about game theory, whether one’s attitude toward it is positive or negative, and the temptation to apply game theory to international relations is just too strong to downplay. This is why in 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an amateur bass player and online entrepreneur named Eric Garland wrote a long and largely incoherent yet effusively praised thread about a conspiracy involving Trump and Vladimir Putin. The most memorable line in it was, “It’s time for some game theory” (the thread did not contain any actual game theory). Additionally, game theory questions — ones that arrive at the intersection of morality and rationality — will sometimes pop up on social media, and a small minority of people will fume with rage over the fact that the majority of poll respondents choose the “irrational” option, which is always pretty amusing to watch. Perhaps at some point, I’ll comment on how game theory and rational choice modeling actually interacts with the real world as it factually plays out… but this post has gone on long enough. It will have to come later.

Edit 1/21/26: I accidentally mixed up Eric Garland’s name, the guy who wrote the “It’s time for some game theory” thread, with Eric Garner, the black guy who got killed by some cop - fixed it.