Saturday, February 13, 2016

On Memetics and Mimesis: Turning McLuhan's tetrad upon social media

As the internet evolves, I become ever more fascinated by it.
Applying McLuhan's tetrad to social media, just to see what happens to the theory when its pushed beyond its historical limit. Textual hashtags and pictorial memes serve the media differently, the former being rather more concise and compact, but they represent a similar departure from the dominant 20th century media: Audiocast, cinema, telecast, comics, and printed periodicals of various periods. [Let me know what I'm missing].
The obvious qualitative difference is to be found in the distributional schemes corresponding to mass publishing and networks organized by hitting the "Accept request," "post," and "comment" buttons. One class of schemes strongly favors centralized economy, the other not so much: it has radically weakened the value of hierarchy in the publication process.
Let's examine the tetrad. This is only one way to focus the lens, however. I'd be interested to see any differing analyses.
1: Pictoral memetics enhances the everyday process of abstracting narratives, themes, and characters from our immediate surroundings. Even our most fleeting thoughts and impressions become the figure of social media.
2: The practice makes obsolete the format of scheduled entertainment. It's all just stacking up in your feed, waiting for you to look at it at your own pace, and it organizes dynamically into a continually shifting "whole" no matter the level of throughput. This flexibility and dynamism is the new "ground."
3: Concisely, reality returns and supercedes hyperreality. The personal and subjective finds itself at last vindicated. From Vaudeville-infused stunts to mic'd and lighted studio (cybernetically transcoded, mixed and mastered by specialized labor force) to Hollywood spectacle in the cushioned, sugared, and perfumed theater, the trajectory towards the hyperreal has been apparent in cinema since the silent era.  Away from the tiny, neurotic, hidden being, and towards the iconic, bold, spectacular event. The trajectory is there in radio, television, even to some degree the popular song [culminating in the radio-rave anthem, think Swedish House Mafia, but that's another story], although this is hardly an innovation belonging purely to the machinic screen: Long before conservative Christians lamented Hollywood's lack of moral integrity in the era of the action spectacle, Plato lamented the psycho-social potential of reciting Homer in public. Odysseus is a hyperreal hero; no human, who works during the day and finds entertainment come evening, would expect to accomplish what he accomplishes. The referenced war had passed into legend by Homer's time, freeing him from any impulse to historical accuracy or realism. He is important to the audience not because he stands for the actions of an actual hero of theirs, but because he represents an ideal of heroism that any audience could learn about by watching: "he" operates on them by telling them the right things to do. Of course, adhering to rationalist aesthetics, we might find this thought objectionable. Morality must be decided upon according to principles, after all, not simply followed blindly!
Even in the most apparently mundane of genres, the family sitcom, we find not an actual family, but a hyperreal, aesthetic ideal of a family: Always cracking jokes and making fun of one another, ocassionally fighting about important issues but always coming back together at the end of the arc. They are an icon, economically, of stability and growth at once, psychologically of the pleasures of life itself, and socially, of all those qualities the hazily defined but nonetheless actual mainstream audience is supposed to judge virtuous in families. And this "supposed to" is at the heart of the modern paradigm: Supposed by *who*? By whoever prepares the media, of course, that specialized and rarefied class of professional entertainers and engineers. Though the sitcom family members go through life changes over the course of the series, their changes in situation are only used to more fully explore the persisent qualities of their character, which must be agreeable to the broader economic and psychosocial narratives. Anyone who wants to discover the true dynamics of bourgeois whiteness and color in America need only trace the history of people of color operate within the frameworks of the sitcom. At every stage, this must be lock step with the real interactions between subcultures, or the show will tend to be cancelled. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for example, is about how blackness works in white space, and as such must bow to certain white ideologies, at least within the space of the explicitly given story. A book could be written on that show alone.

[Allow me a digression here.
The camera is more or less forbidden from depicting Smith's character in his native setting of the opening song, in a largely black and brown West Philadelphia neighborhood, presumably. I don't mean to say that the show is not conscious of Blackness, which it surely is. What I mean is that its events could plausibly take place wholly within the white imagination, without reference to the perspective of the Other. It uses the images of blackness that were familiar to average, NBC watching, middle class white audiences at the time. Seeing Will as anything but the black-one-out would detract from the show's exploration of its themes. This is not because black people had not been portrayed in sitcom before 1990, but because that is not an actual place in the canon of the show: The observed motion takes place only in white psychological territory. The entire account of his hometown given in the song would appear to symbolize white discomfort with urban black life, and the resulting tendency to understatement: "And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school. When a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood." [Compare to 19th century depictions of slaves as happy go lucky entertainers.] But Will's not one of *those* black people, that we hear about selling crack and packing heat on street corners: He only got in one little fight before his overprotective mother took extreme measures. Having removed him from the dangers of blackness and inserted him into bourgeois white society, we've made the actuality docile enough to laugh about in comfort. A similar narrative prevails over the life of his uncle Phil, which much more closely resembles the life of a historical person. At every bend in this fictional biography, Phil's blackness [activism, reading Malcolm, listening to James Brown] bows and bends one piece at a time to the prevailing white aesthetic bias, eventually giving way to an almost Uncle Tommish veneer: And what does the show say? Look: it worked for him, here he is with a manor in Bel Air, raising a good family, a secure and impressive sounding bourgeois job, all due to the merit of his hard work. The subconscious message received is to just give in, to cease to be Other, and the rewards of white privilege will be yours. Absolutely fascinating.]

In this way, sitcoms can be used as proxies for all sorts of middle class attitudes. Likely an even lengthier book could be written on the interaction of gender and sexuality within the sitcom.
The common thread is that whatever human question we wish to focus on through the lens of sitcom, we find the answers that come back are iconic and comforting, coming with all the same connotations as the concept "family friendly." This trajectory has everything to do with mid-century economics, which I will leave here undelved. By centralizing and forcibly collectivizing the answers to questions of family, the genre has become impotent to speak powerfully to the organismic reality of family.
Again, the comic book has branched out from voyeuristic, visuo-visceral delights to the full blown graphic novel, every bit as sophisticated in its conception as the Great Novel of modern tradition. This is the essence: A graphic novel of the stature, of say, Watchmen, cannot be undertaken in a merely whimsical way, simply because it takes too much work. Stick figure drawings are for whimsy; hyperrealist noir landscapes are for overhuman icons. It is simply too seriously undertaken a work to deal with issues at any other scale than the spectacular, in analogy to the development of the 2 hour movie.
What has been retrieved by pictorial memetics is the capacity for expressing the subjective over the objective.
4. We now come to the most remarkable aspect of pictorial memetics as pushed through the lens of the tetrad. Pictorial memes, when pushed to their technical and psychosocial limits, flip into *reaction memes,* which merely break the rules which has been adhered to. Turing-mechanical digital pictorial and textual memetics is a stable medium. That is, the medium is in some way a categorical limit. It is unique from the historical media McLuhan considers in that no line proceeds from it to some distinguished medium which rests on it in terms of technical abstraction. We have instead classical Turing computation as limitting the living interface with the medium, and instead must branch into entirely new philosophy, mathematics, and science to see new meme-media emerge: Quantum computing and biocomputing offer two possible places of departure. But it's not clear whether these modes will emerge as social network infrastructures unto themselves, or whether we will again re-route into the old structure, or stop using social media altogether relatively soon. Having never observed the flip from classical determinism into radical non-determinism on a societal level, we cannot even establish a probability distribution over these possibilities.
So we find the theory must dissolve itself when pushed to the limit. I think this is only another form of the intuition that Land called accelerationism, which appears more or less as an idea that Western society must ultimately force itself out of existence (and further, the '-ism:' what could be more just?). However, the supposedly inevitable singularity has not happened, and doesn't appear to be yet on its way at all. It has become less clear over the past couple of decades whether anything is accelerating at all, whether there is a tendency towards anything at all. There is intimate relation between the bursting of Land's philosophical bubble and that of the tech bubble, though it is too complex to delineate within the rectilinear confines of this blog. That seems to be the paradox of critiquing linear extrapolation using linear extrapolation: Using the theory itself, one can only say what it must be bound to do. But that was the trap we were trying to avoid! Clearly, Western rationalism is not its own solution.
You see, the above paragraph has become confused and only sporadically sensible to any audience of large enough size. However, it does deeply express thoughts and feelings that occur to me daily. This is because what I am attempting to explore and express pushes beyond the limit of the technology we are using: I am trying to refer to actual thought and feelings, which are poorly conveyed with this machinery. And we already know what plastic and metal do when they are pushed past their structural limits, without embarking on this analytic trip.
However better the 2-hour theatrically released movie is suited to conveying heroism, the economics and organization of such works prevents people from interfacing authentically with those heroes.
Posting pictures that directly reflect an abstraction peformed is a way of iconizing oneself and interfacing directly with the resulting "hero" or "idol" via comments, likes, shares, creation of reaction memes, or whatever else might happen in the social medium.

As a consequence, an older superorganismic mimesis returns, older than recorded history almost by definition, and of a far more radical sort than when an orator is situated centrally in an auditorium of designated listeners, allowing humans to simply regurtitate raw surface impressions "at random" without regard for any notion of ultimate meaning or any anxiety that every utterance must fit into an unambiguous, rationalized, linear historical narrative, ordered from beginning to end by the Western philosophical concept of causality. If it doesn't fit a form or sequential casual narrative, there need be no question of "what it is;" it "is" this: a continual motion in silica. Philosophy has dissolved; long live philosophy!

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