Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020)

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The Artist’s Emergent Journey Clinton Ignatov—The McLuhan Institute—[email protected]

To examine computers as a medium in the style of Marshall McLuhan, we must understand the origins of his own perceptions on the nature of media and his deep-seated religious impetus for their development. First we will uncover McLuhan’s reasoning in his description of the artist and the occult origins of his categories of hot and cool media. This will prepare us to recognize these categories when they are reformulated by cyberneticist Norbert Wiener and ethnographer Sherry Turkle. Then, as we consider the roles “black boxes” play in contemporary art and theory, many ways of bringing McLuhan’s insights on space perception and the role of the artist up to date for the work of defining and explaining cyberspace will be demonstrated. Through this work the paradoxical morality of McLuhan’s decision to not make moral value judgments will have been made clear.

Introduction In order to bring Marshall McLuhan into the 21st century it is insufficient to retrieve his public persona. This particular character, performed in the ‘60s and ‘70s on the global theater’s world stage, was tailored to the audiences of its time. For our purposes today, we’ve no option but an audacious attempt to retrieve, as best we can, the whole man. To these ends, while examining the media of our time, we will strive to delicately reconstruct the human-scale McLuhan from what has been left in both his public and private written corpus. Especially, we will compare his rarely- publicized thoughts on spiritualism and religion with those of the one of the fathers of our medium: Norbert Wiener. One can only hope McLuhan would find this humble attempt at imitation of his art—in both his definition and his performance of it—at least flattering. The Artist The goal of the artist is to show us “what our world is made of,” according to McLuhan’s definition. Prerequisite to fulfilling this prescription, he insists, is a long tenure of dedication to perceptual training. Reacting against art intended to serve in a religious or spiritual capacity for secular society—resulting in the ascendance of the artist to performative godhood above those captive to their illusions—McLuhan conscripted the artist instead in a solemn, dangerous, comparatively unrewarding and only-apparently mundane duty of service to humanity. Rather than enchant the world, he says the artist’s role is to perceive first the present collective condition and render its make-up re-cognizable to the rest of us.

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What does this mean in practical terms? The artist is to leave the safety of socially-constructed, institutionally-founded, and culturally-inherited forms of perception, and open themselves to the maelstrom of ungated sensory stimuli. The artist is to become raw to the complexity of combinatorial-explosion and to embody runaway processes of prehensive interpretation. In their willing submission to battery by resonating meaning from all directions, the artist’s waking-life becomes a manic parade of ad-hoc, synchronistic symbols comprising many layers of signs ripped from their familiar contexts in memory and ontology. From this state, their work is then the re- establishment of poise in relation to space and in time, feeling and researching their real origins and form. Finally, the means for achieving this poise must be patched into pre-existing culture as an artistic production tailored toward the public audience the artist has been simultaneously working their way back into being sociable member of. In other words, the artist heads into chaos and returns with a broadly-communicable means of coping with—or structuring—the otherwise traumatic encounter with the contemporary real. Undertaking this mission himself in the 1950s, McLuhan’s saw that humanity now existed in a post-historical all-at-onceness of changing and rebounding proportions and cycles of retrievals and obsolescences of old and new. His proffered rescue-craft to us—for use in our mechanized world undergoing electrification and simulation—was perception of the self as consciously aug-mented by its artificial extensions, externalizing a now-numbed function of the human body. The resemblance of this questing into chaos and return with invaluable artistic treasure to the “Hero’s Journey” of Joseph Campbell is no accident. Moreover, the deliberate difference between McLuhan’s secular artist explaining the material world and Campbell’s spiritual hero is key to appreciating McLuhan’s “New Science”. Secularizing the Spiritual Early on, McLuhan had securely ensconced himself within a longitudinally-vertiginous, ancient vein of Western and Catholic pedagogical tradition during the development of his 1944 doctoral thesis on Thomas Nashe and the Classical Trivium. He styled himself as a New Thomist, practicing a tradition reinvigorated by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson1. Owing this atypical line of personal development, McLuhan in the early 1950s stood firmly rooted in moral opposition to each-and-every approach to ritual initiation into higher-states of being, or adult maturity, on offer by the non-Catholic world. In this time he published numerous analysis of two traditions of European Manicheanism, which he variously categorized as pagan or gnostic. The substance of his analyses echoed those made by both Jacques Maritain and the artist Wyndham Lewis against

1 “Whereas St. Thomas was a great abstract synthesizer facing a unified psychological world, the modern Thomist has an abstract synthesis of human knowledge with which to face psychological chaos. Who then is the true Thomist? The man who contemplates an already achieved intellectual synthesis, or the man who, sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos? I say ‘sustained’, not guided by, that synthesis; because the Catholic Thomist does not know the answers to contemporary problems in social and political ethics. He knows only when a particular line of action is promising and analogically consistent, whether it will tend to support a valid solution, and whether it is in conformity with reason and being.” (McLuhan 1948)

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The Artist's Emergent Journey the metaphysics of Henri Bergson, and also those by Eric Voegelin against gnosticism2. Their rough consensus was that worldviews outside the long Western philosophical tradition (going through the Medieval Catholic church) were, even at their best, infantile (Lewis, 1932), irrational (Lewis, 1927; Maritain, 1951), and exploitable by design (Lewis 1926). By the late 1950s McLuhan was becoming the media scholar who was to become well known for not making moral value-judgements. But the earlier McLuhan of the 40s and early 50s had no lack of indignation and scorn while describing the disservices in an ostensibly secular world mythologically-enchanted by demiurgic, sell-out artists. In ‘The Heart of Darkness’3, a review of a book on demonic subtext in the works of Herman Melville, he quotes a passage by Father Victor White, O.P. from Blackfriars (a Catholic magazine) regarding the supposed atheist nature of Leninist-Stalinist communism (which Voegelin consistently identified as gnostic):

Marxism, in short, only denies God in the sense of setting on record that he is, in our society, in practice denied and ineffectual, and in the sense of echoing the Satanic assurance, ‘You shall be as God’. Its power against contemporary Christianity lies in the fact that it has stolen Christ’s thunder: the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, of the triumph of the Son of Man, the reign in some new dimension of reality of the despised and rejected. It has made its own the eschatological preaching of deliverance for the oppressed and damnation for the powerful and rich, wherewith Christianity itself first gained the masses of the Roman Empire. But just because it is the ape of God and his Christ, the Christian must see in Marxism a supreme embodiment of the spirit of Anti-christ; the corruption of the best which is worst of all. (White, 1952)

As expressed in his well-known February, 1953 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan had recognized rather suddenly that advertisements and political propaganda were “The use of arts for sectarian warfare! ugh. The use of arts as a technique of salvation! as a channel of supernatural grace!” (McLuhan 1987, 235) His personal revulsion, however, was not toward the study and application of the means and methods of pagan initiatory rituals. The letter continues, “The validity of the rituals is entirely in the cognitive order. Art is imitation of the process of apprehension. clarification [sic] of [the process of apprehension.]” As he puts it in ‘Hearts of Darkness’:

The arts from Homer to the present day indeed form an ideal order, as Mr. Eliot has said, because they have been representations of the spiritual quests of the pagan rebirth rituals. ‘Rebirth’ in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of descent of the soul in the hell of matter and chaos which is existence. As such, the pagan rituals are in reality representations of the process of abstraction, or

2 See Maritain’s first book, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism and Lewis’ Time and Western Man. Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics focuses entirely on his perception of contemporary secular ideology as identical with the gnostic tradition, especially in its revolutionary aspects (i.e. “immenantizing the eschaton”). 3 Digitized at http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com/2011/08/heart-of-darkness.html.

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the stages of human apprehension. From this point of view, may not the pagan rituals be valid as art and metaphysics in spite of their own assumptions, but impotent as religion? James Joyce seems to have been the first to grasp all of these relationships.

What had been a religion for pagans and gnostics, McLuhan endevoured to reinvent as a wholly secular science of perception of the “earth earthy” (McLuhan 1987, 244) denuded from mystic and religious overtones and re-premised upon critical art theory and cognitive science4. This was nothing less than a mission for the salvation of corporeal being from artificial gods. Time and Space, Vertical and Horizontal, Hot and Cool A year later McLuhan is able to elaborate an exhaustive account of the features and orientations of two complimentary styles of paganism which are detailed in many various accounts of art theory, philosophy, and wisdom. He does so, for instance, in an April 1954 address to the Catholic Renascence society entitled “Eliot and the Manichean Myth as Poetry”5. In this speech, he introduces his 4000 words of brisk, uninterrupted exposition of philosophical and magical initiatory rights by way of examining the titular character of a cheesy science fiction novel which had been recently reviewed in the New York Times:

The crime of Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom is to attempt to invent a machine for reducing the time-world of the arts to the space-world of the sciences. Time and space thus appear as two gods, one light, the other dark. Time is heavenly, space is infernal. Since this is not and never has been a Catholic quarrel, the shifting terms in which the quarrel has been conducted through the centuries seem both familiar and unreal to Catholic ears. Socrates abandoned the outer world of Ionian science and Sophistic rhetoric for the inner world of the dialectical quest. The division between inner and outer, between astrology and alchemy, between Philosophy and magic is a familiar one. In the same way as F. C. Burkitt says, (p. 40 of Church and Gnosis [1932]) "There is a Gnosticism which is mainly a philosophy, and there is a Gnosticism which is mainly a mythology" and whose bias is towards magic. Naturally the roots of these divisions are Light and Dark, Spirit and Matter. And they are expressed in the age-old idea of the body as the tomb or prison, which usually involves the notion of pre-existence, of metempsychosis and re-incarnation. Greek pagan religion relies heavily on this notion of pre-existence as does Buddhism and other Eastern religions. The idea of human existence itself as damnation for

4 After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan hit upon and adopted the then-current right-brain, left- brain dichotomy for space and time, respectively. These dynamics persist today in abstracted form in theories such as Daniel Kahneman’s S1 and S2 model, laid out in his book Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). 5 Digitized at https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Eliot+and+the+Manichean+myth+as+poetry.-a0280004567

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previous sins tends to be the universal rationalist explanation for the problem of evil.

Whereas Catholics harboured in the spatio-temporal continuity of the Church (not to mention the ubiquitious Anno Domini Gregorian calendar), which was itself anchored in history about the singular, central, fixed life of Jesus, McLuhan percieved the rest of the world as being lost in both time and space; inevitably self-identifying as fallen devils within a fallen, hellish world and aspiring for divinity. Furthermore, such souls were usually lopsided in regards to which dimension of relevance-realization their hapless groping toward the Absolute would be oriented:

In idealist terms, the vertical school [or time school] claims cognitive status for its symbols, because the conceptual meanings attached to art are in this view a means of raising the mind of man to union with the higher world from which we have been exiled. Whereas, on the other hand, the horizontal, or space school, appeals to intuition, emotion and collective participation in states of mind as a basis for communication and of transformation of the self. The vertical school seeks to elevate the self above mere existence. The horizontal symbolists seek to transform the self, and ultimately to merge or annihilate it.

The soul groping through time is at the outset dualistic, aristocratic and elite, detached from strong involvement in the world-at-large, but with a strong sense of historical continuity. Through self-control and will power these souls strive to rebuild within themselves the Temple of Solomon, atop the clockwork universe. Conversely, the soul in space begins deeply involved in “a wilderness of horrors multiplied by mirrors,” with a taste for sensation and a socially-embedded identity (weighted down by personal reputation or ego and caught within cycles of trust and loss of trust in a parade of various authorities) that they must learn to surrender so as to gain detachment, perception and, eventually, serenity. Referencing John Lindberg’s Foundations of Social Survival, a 1953 book he would revisit in two other contemporary pieces6, McLuhan notes the author’s observation that a rapidly- interconnected world seems to demand a movement from long-dominant top-down, vertical myths of constraint and control of the populus toward a horizontal means of controlling the masses through their tastes and passions, and means of expression. “It is the shift from the dualism of the time school to the monism of the space men. It is a magical shift to the centre of the poetic process, which Mr. Eliot, among others, has revealed in our time7.” (McLuhan 1954) It is during this period of intense scrutiny of occult and spiritual materials when McLuhan begins to develop the idea that communications media were responsible for the varying orientations

6 Both “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” (1954) and “The God-Making Machines of the Modern World” (1954) can be found in The Medium and the Light (1999). 7 Should the reader wish to glean the nature of this revealed poetic process, careful study of both McLuhan’s 1969 collection of essays and reviews The Interior Landscape, and of the works it critiques, is recommended.

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Clinton Ignatov toward developing and training artistic sensibility and apprehension of the world. In February of 1954 he wrote to the Vorticist painter, novelest, and polemicist Wyndham Lewis:

This year and next year I am Chairman of a Ford Foundation project here at the University. We have a group of 5 faculty and a dozen graduate students to consider the impact of the new media of communication on any aspect of life and society which we choose. Your books are indispensable to us. Of course our group is split over time and space. We have both the vertical and horizontal doctrinaires to contend with. Only a year ago did I find out the religious basis of these, to me, almost meaningless quarrels. The Mechanical Bride was written in all innocence of such knowledge. The world of the arts and of science has taken on a much more intelligible character for me since this self-initiation. For the present, at any rate, it has simplified but not ennobled the scene. (McLuhan, 1986, 242)

In his doctoral thesis McLuhan had traced the “ancient quarrel” of the three branches of the classical trivium8 across two millennia of Western history, as exemplified by the representative curricula of their competing figures and schools. McLuhan had identified the flourishing of the European Renaissance as owed to the all-too-brief re-emergence of grammar and rhetoric after their stultification under the weight of heavy-handed, over-wrought dialectic. During the enlightenment, under the sudden popularity of Peter Ramus, dialectic took over once again.9 After this focus on style, he moved even further away from analyzing the content or ideas expressed writing toward the study of its effects. In ‘Catharsis and Hallucination from Machiavelli to Marx’ (McLuhan, 1947) he explained centuries of Western history in terms of emotions, examining the excuses “sensationally” popular authors like Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau and de Sade gave for casting-off the restraints of traditional religious morality. Now McLuhan would again consider this period in history, not to explain it in terms of its philosophies, pedagogies, major figures, ideologies, or zeitgeists. He would examine how the wedding of humans to the technology of any age—in this case the printing press, in his case the television, and in ours the computer—might explain the unconscious forces which shaped their entire perception of self and their relation to their world. The result would be his perception that technology at large—and especially the leading or “constitutive” media of communication— overwhelmingly determined the orientation of lost, secular souls in any given time or place. Instead of classifying people themselves as vertically or horizontally inclined, he decided for reasons we will closer examine that it made more sense to classify media as engendering one or the other dispositions in its usage. His 1964 book Understanding Media appropriated the slang of his day in designating these media as “hot” and “cool”, respectively. McLuhan did not invent these

8 In the medieval pedagogy, dialectic was a logically discursive use of language, while grammar was interpretive and rhetoric persuasive. Once taught, this trivium would then applied to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Collectively these subjects comprised the seven liberal arts.

9 Ramus would again play a key role in The Gutenberg Galaxy, this time not as constituting his age through his pedagogy, but as himself constituted by the effects of the later book’s eponymous topic.

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The Artist's Emergent Journey simple dichotomies, and he is not nearly the most recent thinker to use them, as we will see by now examining contemporary thinking on the constitutive media of our day: computing. The von Neumann and Learning Games The Fisher Rare Book Library on the campus of the University of Toronto holds the collected reading library of Marshall McLuhan, replete with his handwritten annotations of many famous works. Fortunately for those of us seeking to bring his perceptions into the 21st century, among those books is Norbert Weiner’s 1964 book GOD AND GOLEM, Inc, wherein the MIT cyberneticist elaborates two primary approaches toward programming that we now call artificial intelligence or AI. Here we must get a little technical. Anticipating the notion of solvable games in modern game theory, Weiner classifies games such as tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, and go as “von Neumann10 games”. In these games, he theorizes that an automated “von Neumann” player against any less exhaustively-systematic (i.e. human) opponent operates by methods analogous to God-like determinism. In short, they play the game perfectly. With the limitations of computers when the book was written, such an approach to creating a game-playing AI was feasible for a game like tic-tac-toe, but not checkers. Still today, the complexity of chess and go put them beyond the ability of a computer to absolutely master by this method (even though they can now beat the best human masters). Wiener goes on to describe another strategy of designing a game-playing AI which comports more closely to a human player’s approach to play: when anticipation of every possible play and outcome of a game is beyond calculation, a computer might resort instead to the learning game. This meta-game is spread across a great many rounds of play against either equal or more capable players. After each such round the formula for calculating the merit of each of every possible next move is tweaked based on the recent outcome. Strategies which have resulted in better outcomes are then weighted heavier in merit for play in future games; this is analogous to the adjustment of Bayesian priors11. Wiener uses a biological metaphor to contrast these two approaches to machine play. The von Neumann style is akin to “phylogenic” traits, meaning those long-evolved and inherited; this approach McLuhan analogizes to “reprogramming DNA” in the book’s margin. In contrast the learning game is “ontogenic”, meaning developments occurring under realtime experience. These approaches correspond neatly to nature and nurture, respectively, and McLuhan notes they correspond neatly to hot and cool. The hot approach to a game either works up-front with the complete picture, or when what has evolved across-generations becomes deeply embodied a sufficiently-complete, fixed form such that in its very constitution it inheres deeply within its environment, reliably selecting for species survival. The cool approach to a game is dynamic:

10 John von Neumann, among many other accomplishments, designed the most common digital computer architecture which practically instantiates the hypothetical Turing Machine designed by Alan Turing. 11 The relevance of Bayes Theorum (i.e. the honing of one’s predictions by iterative re-evaluation and updating of the one’s prior expectations) to the convergence of cognitive science with computing and artificial intelligence research can be explored in the work of public-outreach done by researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, easily accessible at https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/bayesianism.

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Clinton Ignatov constantly readjusting and adapting to gradually evermore involvement through memory of specific circumstances and outcomes within a single life-span, ideally developing detachment from total involvement in any one instance of game toward a general plastic strategy toward them all through multiple iterations. For us, and for AIs “cultural” inheritance blurs both.12 This formalized language of 1960s cybernetics is, unfortunately, very obscure. So let us, for now, leap ahead two decades to a complimentary articulation of this dichotomy within the same medium—to perspectives informed by Jean Piaget’s theories of childhood development. Hard and Soft Computing The results of MIT Professor Sherry Turkle’s years-long ethnographic study of children, adolescents, and adults using and interacting with early digital toys and microcomputers are published in her 1984 book The Second Self. During her investigations into child programmers, she developed the idea of two complementary modes of learning first epitomized by fourth-grade classmates Jeff and Kevin. Jeff “is meticulous in his study habits” and “approaches the machine with a determination to be in control.” He programs by first “making a plan” in what computer

12 In Electric Language, Eric McLuhan judges T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ to be not only more revolutionary, but also a greater service to mankind than Einstein’s theories on relativity (McLuhan 1998, 94). This essay makes clear the Eliot’s ideal fusioning of both approaches, the crux of of which can be found in these lines:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” (Eliot, 1951)

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The Artist's Emergent Journey scientists would recognize as the “global ‘top-down’, ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy”. Conversely, “Kevin is a very different sort of child. Where Jeff is precise in all of his actions, Kevin is dreamy and impressionistic. Where Jeff tends to try to impose his ideas on other children, Kevin’s warmth, easygoing nature, and interest in others make him popular.” In approaches to programming, “Kevin cares more about the aesthetics of the graphics… He works without a plan, experimenting, throwing different shapes on to the screen… Kevin knows how to write programs, but his programs emerge—he is not concerned with imposing his will on the machine [but rather] allows himself to be led by the effects he produces.” (98-100) Turkle labels these two approaches toward learning as “hard” and “soft”, respectively.13 In contrast to the designing programs which play human games, we see here the hot and cool dichotomy not as a category of a medium, but as a way of categorizing any particular human’s approach toward mastery of a skill. Note the causal inversion between the application of these labels and McLuhan’s application of his: In Turkle’s anthropocentric framing, the hard-learning or cool-learning child uses a versatile medium in that particular way, as afforded by its interface. Inversely, in McLuhan’s technologically-deterministic way, the hot or cool interface of a medium shapes or massages the child into that disposition. Common to both perspectives is the consideration of hard/hot and soft/cool as classifications of different forms of interface with the medium.14 More important, however, is the nature of specific medium under consideration: what does it mean that the interactive, programmable computer is equally amenable to both interfacings? Let us carefully consider the words of the 13 year old programmer Dorothy, interviewed by Turkle, who who ultimately inspired the title of her book:

When you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind… and now you can see it. I mean, the computer can be just like you if you program it to be, your thoughts, your pictures, your feelings, your ideas; not everything but a lot of things. And you can see the things you think and change them around… If it’s just on a piece of paper, it’s not the same. With the computer it’s different. It’s somebody there. It’s having something that you can make your own things on. I liked it because I could put my feelings into it.” (ibid., 137)

13 These two styles are elaborated more in a 1992 paper by Turkle and Piagetian researcher and educational software pioneer Seymour Papert, ‘Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete’. They elaborate on Turkle’s ethnographic work to make the case that a better understanding and facilitation of soft-approaches to computing would facilitate greater inclusion of women within the field. (http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html) 14 By classifying the interface itself, does it not seem possible to ambiguously include both perspectives by eliding their differences, so as to forestall judgment on the matter of technological determinism? If McLuhan had only said, all along, that we interface hotly with books, and cooly with TV, who could say whether it was the TV or the watcher that was cool? Or whether it was the book or the reader that was hot?

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Is the poignancy of this observation—which amounts to a personal account of de-centered self— perhaps not owed to the capability of the medium to capture both of the dimensions of cognitive processes (identified thus far several under various terms) in equal measure? The same cognitive processes which, for nearly all of human evolution, took place within our embodied experiences in physical space? It is precisely the phenomenon of confluence of hot and cool which McLuhan sought to explain through his many discourses on “software”.15 The computer only takes software as its content, which in turns makes content of all it simulates. Space Perception and Simulation In Through the Vanishing Point (1968), McLuhan explained the effects of various styles of painting as follows:

The renaissance was unconsciously engaged in creating a pervasive visual space that was uniform, continuous and connected, but the Middle Ages had had a very different kind of space as its psychic and social environment. One of the reasons for this was the “idea” behind Medieval communication. It was the idea rather than the psychological narrative connectives between figures that was central to Medieval communication. Thus there was no need for a “rational” or continuous space in which the figures could find psychological interaction. At one Renaissance extreme, the spectator finds it easy to put himself into the painting as if his space and the space in the painting were the same. This became possible when the “vanishing

15 By 1972, in collaboration with communications engineer Barrington Nevitt, McLuhan still explains software in terms still more inclusive than those familiar today in Take Today: The Executive as Dropout in a chapter titled “The Etherialization of ‘Hardware’ by ‘Software’: From Wired Connections to Resonant Interfaces”:

Every new conquest of speed moves toward the minimizing of “hardware” and the maximizing of “software” or structural design. As the West approached this awareness in the nineteenth century, biologists began to ask, “Why is there so much unused beauty in Nature?” The answer came later, from the mathematicians in the world of “software.” “If an equation is symmetrically beautiful, it is almost certain to be true.” What the artist has always known, namely, that the greatest effects result from the utmost economy of means, has now become a truism of the material sciences.

THE UNEXPECTED EFFECT OF “HARDWARE” SPEED-UP HAS BEEN TO RESTORE THE WORLD AS A WORK OF ART OR OBJECT OF CONTEMPLATION.

As a work of art, the world impels the viewer to Make it New, to cite the Chinese injunction to the artist concerning his role. Man becomes both explorer and maker of beauty as “hardware” and “software” merge. The “hardware-software” complementarity is a new version of the old form- and-content relation. The old hang-up about “form” and “content” had arisen under the regime of merely visual culture, where “content” had to be contained in something. With the figure- ground relation of Gestalt psychology, the “content” was continuously created in the gap between figure and ground. The new physics carried this relation even further, citing resonance as the very stuff of “hardware.” (McLuhan and Nevitt, 1972, 95)

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point” was established “inside” the painting. With the vanishing point came the illusion that space was a continuum between spectator and art situation. The spectator becomes part of the lines of force which find their focus in the vanishing point. In Medieval painting, on the other hand, the focus and vanishing point are in the spectator. In contrast, in the seventeenth century, when a portrait turns its eye on the observer it creates a dualism that is intended to be noticed. The portrait becomes, in effect, a self-portrait in which the subject is also the observer of the painting. The painting becomes a mirror with, as it were, a psychological vanishing point in the viewer. Here we encounter the world of Descartes and of Hamlet. This use of art as a mirror proved to be an original Renaissance method of involving the audience in a reaction and by making the audience the actor. For the first time in the history of art the spectator shared the point of view of the artist. There would seem here some slight anticipation of modern painting: a sharing in the creative process by the spectator. (McLuhan, 1968, 12-13)

The illusion in perspective art—that the spectator’s “space and the space in the painting were the same,”—apply to the world of skueomorphic metaphor-laden graphical computer interfaces today. Graphical user interfaces close the gap between user and computer by presenting the illusion of existing as extension of physical, document-cluttered desktops. By preserving the identity of documents across the interface boundary, printers and scanners/cameras further facilitating the impression of the tangible unity of of physical and virtual space. While GUIs simulate a crude, flattened facsimile of space, they simultaneously comprising the display of a mosaic of various icons, each resonating with intuitive meaning, leading to their own means of “recovery of iconic and sensory involvement” (McLuhan, 1968, 137). It is necessary here, having laid out these developments, to now try and fit them within the larger historical context which McLuhan developed. McLuhan had argued his 1962 book Gutenberg Galaxy that the printing press—by popularizing the rapid, silent reading of identically-repeated phonetic letter faces—changed human perception from involvement with enchanted, resonant, multi-leveled meaning into being separate from— yet physically-trapped within—the empty, abstract, cold mathematical space of Cartesian grids changing over clock-measured time. What resulted was a few very-anomalous centuries of detached, robotized humans in the West creating an industrialized machine-world. These peculiar enactors of run-away ‘Know How’ were challenged by Romantic, Symbolic, and Modernist artists who managed to go through the looking glass and retrieve modes of perceiving and re-imagining the world in ways not confined to the reigning logic of the day. It is in the language of “sensory modalities” and “space perception” that McLuhan ultimately expressed these contrasts: of the eye and the ear, partial to either logically-connected, fragmentary “visual space(time)” or resonating, multi-layered, simultaneous “acoustic space”. With the invention of the telegraph, detached, linear, visual space began its slow collapse, and the acoustic space of ancient and medieval non-literate culture was returning—with a twist. The

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Clinton Ignatov resonating, enchanted environment had become the “global theater” as the Soviet satellite Sputnik traced the planet’s proscenium arch. Electricity extended our nervous system: our senses spanned the world, not merely the small patch of flat earth which had been the home of our space-bound, time-bound ancestors. With all of history at our fingertips, and all the world within our reach, McLuhan declared that it was time for specialists to cede the control towers to artists in order to coordinate the sensibilities of the planet. We can now revisit the point with which this paper was opened. The artist’s foothold into poise would be careful study of “the media”, where media meant all the tools and technology making up the total environment—along with the humans who live in an intimate relation with it. According to McLuhan most of us are somnambulists, asleep to the reality of our world, comfortably hallucinating bygone days. Whatever was ignored by most is what the artist would need to study the closest. What was salient to most was the art which was inert “content”— neutralized of truly creative potency—for the unseen new. In order to see the present, the artist would need to develop—train themselves into—a different, closer embodied relation to material space than what was readily offered institutionally. Education sells ready-made curricula to aspiring specialists, the end-results of which are well known in advance and are thus already obsolete. Self-security within this predictability amounts to nothing less than living inside a simulation. While not using the term, McLuhan had been attacking the capture of mass audiences within simulation back in the 1940s, as evidenced in his first book The Mechanical Bride. The norm- alizing function of Hollywood film test-audience screenings, Nielsen radio-program ratings, and Gallop opinion polling provided the parameters within which artists (who had sold-out to commercial interests and propagandists) would fashion the modern secular consumer dream world. This normalization also resulted in a society which punished outliers with alienation, diagnoses of pathology, and goods reasons for general misanthropy. The “observed wants and preferences” of poorly-educated people vivisected via endless interviews, questionnaires and A/B testing in the 1940s were being met by corporations with endless corresponding products and services and roles and places and idols and dreads. This software nature of the material environment as simulation would be further analyzed by Jean Baudrillard in this way. Since this is application of cybernetics with which McLuhan began foray into studying media by examining, it is the context within which our examination of computers naturally fits. As computers became smaller and faster, simulation came to mean something more explicit: something a user interfaced with directly. McLuhan gives a useful, inclusive definition of ‘interface’ to Fr. Patrick Peyton in a television interview16, in the context of the telephone:

It’s a term in chemistry, in the new quantum mechanics. The term ‘interface’ implies a resonant interval in which there are no connections in matter (as understood in the new physics), but there is a perpetual resonating interval between particles, or among particles, and this resonance is the interface, and it is in this

16 Accessible at https://youtu.be/vVCuE4vGgK8?t=540

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interval of resonance that the action that takes place. It leads on to the most basic matters about our own world of the drop-out, because the drop-out is a person who experiences the need to set-up more space between himself and things, he wants more room, he wants an interface, he wants a kind of resonant dialogue, he wants to rap, to chat, and empathize with everybody about everything, and this constitutes an interface change. In dialogue, people undergo change. It isn’t just the passing of gossip back and forth, but it’s a kind of interrelating by which people feel they are changed, they are getting with it, they are getting involved, they are participating. All of these things it seems to me profoundly relate to the rosary, and to the Church and the mystical body. This is also—amazingly—instant, surround, interface, a source of change, renewal, and an endless source of nourishment to everybody.

Now we see how interactive, real-time computer simulation and advanced input/output de-vices made computer interfaces into literal extensions of our inner sense of space, hypo-stitizing tangible, virtual objects and materials for our manipulation. In her 2009 essay Simulation and its Discontents, Sherry Turkle meticulously enumerates the effects, services, and disservices of long- term interface with computer simulation which became apparent when they were introduced:

Immersed in simulation, we feel exhilarated by possibility. We speak of Bilbao, of emerging cancer therapies, of the simulations that may help us address global climate change. But immersed in simulation, we are also vulnerable. Sometimes it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it, or even acknowledge that everything is not captured in it. An older generation fears that young scientists, engineers, and designers are “drunk with code.” A younger generation scrambles to capture their mentors’ tacit knowledge of buildings, bodies, and bombs. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important slips away.

In 1984 an MIT professor of architecture said that to use simulation responsibly, practitioners must learn “to do” and “to doubt.” He thought that students were not in a position to sufficiently doubt simulation, because the demands of acquiring technical mastery made it too hard to achieve critical distance. But he believed that, in the end, professional maturity would bring with it both immersion and skepticism.

Civil engineers as well as architects said that simulation let them go beyond simple classroom exercises to problems that gave them a sense of “how an actual building behaves under many conditions.” For some, computer- aided design made theory come alive. One student observed that when he studied engineering principles in class, “I knew them to be facts, but I didn’t know them to be actual and true.” But

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when he saw the principles at work in virtual structures, he experienced them in a more immediate way. He expressed a paradox that will become familiar: the virtual makes some things seem more real. (7-8)

Professors who early-adopted computer simulations in their curriculum noticed that the imm- ediate gratification of simulation made students to feel more in touch with computer models than the real things being modeled. One professor, teaching architecture, tells Turkle of a student who overlooked an incline of 25 feet on a ground-slope, placing a road on an impossibly steep angle. This happened because the screen would have been too-cluttered had it displayed all the elevation lines which reflected the contour of the hill he was working on. Design students who had worked from scratch in pencil, calculating all the dimensions for by hand, felt cheated of authorship over models partly generated for them from default software offerings. In one anecdote, a frustrated protein-folding expert finds it impossible to convince her overjoyed colleague—an engineer—that the new protein molecule his students designed couldn’t possibly exist in nature, in spite of the fact that imperfect simulation software had allowed them to model it. Students who were comfortable working with detachment on a usually-abstract subject were overwhelmed and enthralled by the sense of involvement and merger that simulation gave their theory-heavy mathematical models. On the other hand, students who were used to playing with and exploring their designs on paper, or with models, felt cheated by the distance and coldness forced between them and the phoney images on the screen, to which they felt little attachment or ownership. One architect would print off his designs and then lay on top of them on the floor to try and bring his body into the world of the simulation. There may be a clear analogue to the relative placement of the “vanishing point” in each form of relation to simulation, relative to the subject being simulated and their hot or cool orientation, which could explain these various feelings. Further exploration here is needed. Regardless, in both cases of enthusiasm and disappointment, the apparent identity of simulation and reality are the cause, which in turn is caused by ignorance of the medium itself. Black Boxes I’ve already traced the nature of the computer stack from physical hardware and CPU as agent in memory space, up through to “cyberspace” comprising the trifecta of permanent non-linear filesystem storage, high-level object-oriented programming, and the graphical spatial desktop metaphor in my paper ‘A McLuhan-syntonic Approach to Computer Literacy: Toppling the Pillars of Cyberspace.’17 In the new introduction to the 2004 edition of Second Self, Turkle recalls her own experience of appreciating the full computer stack:

Although I did not build my own personal computer from a kit or learn to program in assembly language as did many of the early home computer enthusiasts I interviewed, my experience with CP/M and my naked Apple II provided a reference

17 http://www.concernednetizen.com/2019/01/a-mcluhan-syntonic-approach-to-computer-literacy-toppling-the- pillars-of-cyberspace/

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point for my understanding the aesthetic of technological transparency that I met in the early personal computer culture. Such transparency was described by one enthusiast as “the pleasure of understanding a complex system down to its simplest level.” This was a culture committed to developing a relationship with the computer as a rule-based, understandable machine. It was a culture in many ways reminiscent of that around early automobiles, a world in which most drivers understood the workings of the internal combustion engine, or at least how to fix it in a pinch.

In Simulation and its Discontents, Turkle’s interviewees explains how a failure to appreciate the total computer stack undergirding simulation leads to the unfortunate consequence of “black- boxing” the experience. In the 1980s, many steps were proactively taken to mitigate this risk:

No member of the MIT physics faculty expressed greater commitment to transparency and the direct experience of nature than William Malven. Of direct experience he said, “I like physical objects that I touch, smell, bite into. The idea of making a simulation... excuse me, but that’s like masturbation.” On the need for transparency, Malven was a purist. Ideally, for Malven, every piece of equip-ment that a student finds in a laboratory “should be simple enough…. [to] open…. and see what’s inside.” In his view, students should be able to design and build their own equipment. If they don’t do so for practical reasons, they should feel that they could have. Malven saw his role as a teacher and a scientist as “fighting against the black box.” He admitted that this required a continual “rear-guard action” because, as he put it, “as techniques become established, they naturally become black boxes.” But, he added, “it’s worth fighting at every stage, because wherever you are in the process there is a lot to be learned….” (Turkle 2009, 32-33)

Physics professors Barry Niloff and David Gorham designed an Athena- sponsored freshman seminar that began by having all students learn to program… (ibid., 35)

Like Malven, Nilooff and Gorham believed that students needed a deep knowledge of laboratory software that could only come from knowing how to program it. Niloff went beyond this: students needed to understand how com-puters worked, down to the physics of the processor and the graphics screen. Understanding these deeper levels would ultimately bring students closer to problems of estimation, scale, and error. Said Niloff, “When students plot points for the first time, they literally understand what the physical screen is, what the graphics screen is, how to actually put points on the screen.” A curve drawn on a screen and a theoretical curve might look the same, but a student who understood the screen’s resolution might find a difference at “the tenth of a pixel level, which you can’t see…. And this tenth of a

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pixel level may be of critical importance. It may be the margin of error that makes all the difference.” (ibid., 37)

Simulation and its Discontents ends with the discontents: the apparently irreparable loss of grounding of simulated content within an awareness of complex medium conveying it. This lack of grounding is analogous to the way in which McLuhan says dialectic, when not subordinated to grammar and rhetoric, becomes a figure without ground, disassociating the sensibilities. Of course, when simulation is scaled to ubiquity, the problems get even worse Clown World With the mainstreaming of networked computer mediated communication in many com- mercially commoditized forms, much of reality itself has, to the somnambulist, become the simulated content of black-boxed computers. The “little pieces” of ourselves which are “inside” the computer are no-longer propositions and bits of procedural logic, but fully our own (self-)image in sound and vision. All of time and space isn’t just ours to go experience at a library, on television, or in travel. We’ve now the ability to call upon and experience or interact with it on demand at any moment. Our sense of our material environment encountered in the flesh, be it visual or acoustic— sequential and Cartesian or enchanted, discontinuous, and mythically-rich—is peanuts compared to the space we sense as laying on the other side of our interactive looking-glass. In its vastness, cyberspace is like a vacuum, waiting for our high-pressured lives to blow us right out the window into its infinite content. Today’s popular commoditized and commercialized cyberspatial interface is Junji Ito’s Amigara Fault, beckoning us with its siren’s call toward our own personal hole. In fact, a black box may just as well be called a black hole after the astrophysical phenomenon. The event-horizon of a black-hole is the sphere surrounding it, the radius of which marks the precise distance at which the escape velocity of the singularity’s gravitational field equals the speed of light. The result is the hypothetical “surface” of the black whole seen (in simulation of course) as a flattened screen of the last visible trace of everything that had been sucked into it before becoming lost to the perception or sense by the rest of the universe. If contemplation of this phenomenon presents a paradox to the rational mind, or breaks our intuitive conception of space—then how could it be that a black-boxed computers (or any unexamined communication media or infrastructure) does not introduce the same paradoxes into our sense of space and time? Computer interfaces resonate with a limitless fullness of things we only dimly know they can’t possibly contain, while being completely materially-inscrutable while we use them. Yet another apt analogy would be the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was impenetrable, and yet held primates such as ourselves utterly captive, enchanted by it’s apparently limitless depths of content. “My God, it’s full of stars!” Basic “physics” in our cyberspace, with its portals and sutures which collapse distances and merge at strange scales within artificially-symmetrical gauges, match those found in Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Recursion is not only possible, but a daily fact of life for both celebrities and an increasing number of regular folk. Each day we sit over our computer screens like owners of a tank

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The Artist's Emergent Journey of Sea Monkeys, watching the little critters inside scurry about their lives, poking and prodding them from high above. And then, without a thought, we put on our Sea Monkey costumes and enter the public sphere, to in turn be subject to the gaze of voyeuristic spectators of our mindless dithyramb like a wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, dedicated to Dionysius. Well beyond McLuhan’s analysis of analogue electronic media as extending our senses, we live now in a world which, to naive sensibilities, is short-circuited and criss-crossed by space and time sutured by invisible media, structures of a very strange sort can be hypostasized by the collective, merged perception of those who socially co-construct them into existence. Concomittant with perception of the media-content-augmented total environment’s post-modern topology comes the complimentary perception of our fellows as figures inhabiting differently-demarcated and distorted perceptions of the same gestalt. The New Art Returning to our examination of McLuhan’s copy of Wiener's GOD AND GOLEM, Inc., we are now prepared to see how the disservices of involvement, horizontalism, or norm-finding within contemporary, black-boxed cyberspace were not only anticipated but, since then, instantiated for today. Recall that Wiener’s “learning game” corresponds to cool involvement in interface: learning through experimentation, intellection within multi-layered perception, and “soft” learning. Conversely, von Neumann play is the rigourous adherence to formal, logical rules resulting in perfect method within the parameters which define the game. A player of the learning game— either human or machine—is always playing within temporal-spatially localized bounds. That is to say, the cool player lives their life as an agent in an arena which is beyond their scope to frame.18 In the book’s margins, McLuhan notes this larger, insensible arena as “env”, meaning that it constitutes an environment. One major concern Wiener raises is that, in its short-sighted, exploratory, involved nature, the learning game is adaptable not just to von Neumann-type games, but also a second type. This second case is exemplified for Wiener by the Red Queen’s irrational croquet in Alice in Wonderland, wherein the mad monarch changes the game’s rules at whim. In spite of the unencapsulable scope of a complex von Neumann game (i.e. unsolved for by hot, invincible approach) for determining the perfect strategy of play, it can at least be determined to be solvable. That is, even though its rules may demand a prohibitive computational expense for brute-forcing a perfect play strategy, they still precisely specify the conditions of a win or a loss. Simple and complex, all von Neumann games at least afford “clear-cut, objective criterion of merit” for training the cool player. Checkmates are at least well-defined, even though elusive for beginners. The players knows objectively what success or failure looks like. However, when adapting the learning game to an arena or environment as chaotic as the Red Queen’s croquet—or the complete domain of human existence at large—the player must resort

18 This inability to frame the total environment is expressed in the Thomistic notion of the non-commutativity of the analogy of being: God can be like us, but we cannot in turn be like God.

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Clinton Ignatov to defining their own win conditions. Absent rules, the game becomes that of coup d’etat against the ruling order, so as to impose one’s own. In explaining the necessity of adopting only cool forms of play for both von Neumann games and formless, Alice in Wonderland games upon-which win-conditions are imposed by whim, Wiener hints toward the nature of applied cybernetics within society at large.

Be this as it may, there will be many other games that will continue to offer a challenge to the games engineer. Among these is Go, that Far Eastern game in which there are seven or more different levels of recognized mastery. Moreover, war and business are conflicts resembling games, and as such, they may be so formalized as to constitute games with definite rules. Indeed, I have no reason to suppose that such formalized versions of them are not already being established as models to determine the policies for pressing the Great Push Button and burning the earth clean for a new and less humanly undependable order of things.19 (Wiener, 24-25) Religion and Material Reality At this point, Wiener segues the book toward religion. Given the world and his ruminations over the new technologies he has helped to bring about within it, the cyberneticist posits some new forms of sin which the development, application, and use of cybernetics will allow for. The first sin is to succumb to the temptations of self-interest in the course of schematizing human lives into a “game”. Bias in the definition of win and loss conditions—necessary for defining the merit each “player” optimizes towards in their life-long “learning game”—is tantamount, says Weiner, to the heresy of Simony (51). Named for the biblical gnostic Simon the Magus, and also known as “sorcery”, this is the sin of performing miracles for reasons other than for the greater good of the glory of God and his human flock. He observes that Christian orthodoxy reserves the right to officiating a mass only to trusted, ordained priests so as to avoid Simony. Declaring this literal use of the term “extinct”, Weiner retrieves Simony as the sin of an inventor, engineer or scientist who, wielding the many potential powers of automation and cybernetics over society at

19 In Understanding Media, in the chapter on Games, McLuhan has several observations to this point:

The games people play reveal a great deal about them. Games are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. In games we devise means of nonspecialized participation in the larger drama of our time. But for civilized man the idea of participation is strictly limited. (238)

What disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also disqualifies the stock market and business—the rules are not fully known nor accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is too fully participant in war and business, just as in a native society there is no true art because everybody is involved in making art. Art and games need rules, conventions, and spectators. (240)

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The Artist's Emergent Journey large, sells out to a “captain of industry” for personal gain. In the margins McLuhan’s derides the human adoption of this strategy for living as “cash register spirituality.” Next, Wiener defines a category of sinner he calls the “gadget worshipers”. This is someone who finds security in offloading the responsibility of their own personal agency onto inhuman, external systems, such as the drawing of lots, or dogmatic adherence to unquestionable policies. As hardware instantiations of abstract software systems, mechanical and electronic machines are likewise potential authorities who catch the buck which would otherwise stop with their worshippers. When blame is easily foisted onto the inevitability of logical systems, both external and internal, moral human decisions easily don the guise of fate. One merely followed orders, or was merely following the GPS. The parallels to McLuhan’s servo-mechanistic “Gadget Lover” (McLuhan 1964, 41)—or somnambulist slave to typographically-constituted “applied knowledge” or “Know-How”(McLuhan 1962, 118)—needs no elaboration. Technological determinism results. Returning to our earlier thesis that McLuhan’s media project was largely to render a mystic, gnostic interpretation of art and media within secular terms, we can see here how the Wiener’s modern magus, in practicing Simony, corresponds to the artist whose intention ought to be the alleviation of disservices of gadget-worship both for themselves and for the public at large, by revelation of the nature of the media itself, or “what our world (i.e. the environment) is made of.” These fears regarding the consequences of black-boxed media are mirrored in the worry with which Turkle’s professors and students regard the growing ubiquity of computers and simulation in both the classroom and professional life. First of all, the animate nature of interactive, digital machines both lend themselves to be understood in uncanny metaphors taken from life, and conversely, in their nature, suggest new machine metaphors to be applied to the world and the self.20 For simple “von Neumann” programs, the problem is surmountable:

For children a computer toy that steadily wins at tic-tac-toe can spark questions about consciousness and intention. For adults such primitive machines do not have this power. Since almost everyone knows a mechanical strategy for playing tic-tac- toe, the game can easily be brought under the reassuring dictum that “machines do only what they are programmed to do.” (Turkle 1984, 27)

In Turkle’s examination of children we see them grappling with the metaphysical existence of computerized toys, and their relation to life and consciousness. Computers can’t be made sense of when taking apart. They appear to have a mind, yet may or may not have feelings or intentions.

20 In her 2010 book The Freudian Robot, Lydia Liu explains “the uncanny valley” in a critical reading of Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny which is directly applicable in this context. Furthermore, she retells the story of cybernetics in a way which, while revealing the nature of computation, demonstrates how their black-box nature was only pushed one level deeper into an opacity which was shared by both a statistical re-invention of English and its formalized projection into the psychoanalytic human subconscious by post-structuralist theorists following Jacques Lacan. Liu’s thesis is that, as computers are developed to imitate human cognition, humans are being computerized, and that infidelity in the English translations of Post Modern theory to its precise mathematical language obscures its origins, relevance, and applicability as a cybernetic psychoanalysis.

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They may or may not cheat. And when they remain black-boxes, and their content becomes an object of fixation beyond reduction, paradoxes remain well into adulthood.

Tic-tac-toe computers are not metaphysically “evocative objects” for adults. But other computers are. (ibid., 27)

As she enumerates and analyzes examples of alienation, obsession, over-formalized thinking, and the colonization of many fields by poorly-designed expert systems in fascinating detail, one feature of salience is that of the general systems notion of order emerging21 from chaotic systems. This occurs owing the formal capability of computers for recursion: to feedback on themselves.

The idea of a computer system as a “society” of competing programs is one of several key ideas from the AI community that challenge the image of the computer as following step-by-step instructions in a literal-minded way and make it easier for people to think of mind as machine. Another one of these is that the computer is capable of “learning.” In that case, you don’t have to tell the computer everything it needs to know; you have to tell it how to learn. And yet another, which combines these two, is an idea that I will refer to as “emergence”: you don’t have to tell the computer everything it needs to know; you have to arrange for it to obtain—by being told or by learning—the elements out of which something non-programmed can “emerge.”

In the 1950s, research began on the theory of random networks, inspired by the impression that neurons in the brain are randomly connected and by the hope that intelligence might emerge from this disorder as a phenomenon of critical mass. And also in the 1950s, Oliver Selfridge, then a brilliant young disciple of Norbert Wiener, proposed a machine, “Pandemonium,” whose name captures his idea of what it might take for intelligent order to emerge. Unfortunately its name also captured what turned out to be the problem with his idea: chaos... (ibid., 253)

Let us again revisit the original cybernetic scene from a new perception: that of “emergence.”

One of the most famous and influential “learning” programs was written by Arthur Samuel in the late 1950s. This program played checkers according to built-in rules. In that sense, it did what it was programmed to do. But it was also programmed to modify its rules based on its “experience.” It played many games, against many opponents, and it did get better, finally achieving the status of a “world class” checkers player. But the dramatic moment in this program’s life was not the day it

21 For more on emergence, and its broader relevance to McLuhan, please see ‘Marshall McLuhan’s General System Thinking and Media Ecology’ by Robert K. Logan in this very same issue of New Explorations Journal.

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beat a champion, but the day it beat its creator. The program became good enough to beat Arthur Samuel at his own game.

Among those struck by the drama of that moment was Norbert Wiener. For the mathematician usually regarded as the founder of cybernetics, the machine triumphing over its creator symbolized a new era. In God and Golem, Inc. he suggested that the implications bordered on the theological: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” (ibid., 255)

Turkle goes deeper into the mechanics of the “learning game” which Samuel invented than did Wiener in his book. Samuel relied on a division of the checkers program into multiple methods, each with their own simple strategy. Each could cast a vote for proposed moves, and over many iterations of play their votes would be weighted according to past success and failures, shaping the “emerging” strategy of play which arose from the “democratic” “society” of agents who evolved to form a single player capable of beating humans. We have called this the cool learning game. She cites Wiener’s concern of having overstepped the ancient taboo of speaking of “living beings and machines in the same breath,” and then elaborates:

In the classical [model of programming multiple interacting, simple agents] that Samuel used, intelligence emerged by simple addition of “votes.” What didn’t work out mathematically for a large number of [later, more complex] cases was the idea of “simple addition.” But what remained a strong metaphor within the AI world was the idea of a society of limited agents whose intelligence is emergent from their interaction, the idea that a computer system as a whole will be significantly, qualitatively different than the sum of its parts. We use this idea when we think about living things and about creation: for example, the DNA that emerged from the inert molecules of the nonliving earth. AI has seized it to think of how intelligence might “grow” in a computer program in a way that might model the way it grows in a child. (Turkle 1984, 256) The Posthuman In what has been come to be called the post-human22 age, this idea of emerging complex systems—which if not intelligent, are still agents decentered from human agency and inhabit and operate within various dynamic substrates transcending pschology, biology, and technology—has taken hold in every field. Turkle explains it as a cybernetic “colonization” advanced into many domains under the auspices of being both easily “implemented” and “scientific” (Turkle 1984, 229- 230). Such systems of multiple-levels feeding back on themselves, giving rise to higher-levels of organization, seem a sensible means of perceiving order. In many cases however the black-boxing

22 i.e. descriptively in N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, and enthusiastically in Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman.

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Clinton Ignatov or ignorance of the true media, or substrate, is what creates the arena of their emergence and agency. Of importance here is when the substrate within which such a greater system emerges through collective human mimesis is invisibly facilitated by contemporary communications media. Ignorance of the intervening physical environment sublimates appreciation of its various recursions, amplifications, erasures, filters, processes, incentives, and affordances. It is this scene that creates the post-human. The social construction of systems and patterns of behaviour, through “horizontal” mimesis, norm-setting, and involved experimentation and play no longer occurs just locally, embodied, and within the context of family, friends, and neighbours. It now occurs through mediated icons: with mythic heroes, the rich, the famous, and the entire industry of ad models, copy-writers, journalists, and celebrity star-systems of performers in mass media and public relations. It is through trusting others, as authorities, then that the immediate environment is only indirectly re-cognized. Furthermore, in the 21st century, such social construction may include each and every one of us. This mediated influence—while perceptually working on the person-to-person, empathetic level of interpersonal socialization and role-modeling—today take place within convoluted, post- Newtonian, artificial spaces of simulation, personal choice, and recursion. Emergent social constructs exist in a space which only exists in the shared subjective space within which its participants sense co-operate, facilitated by the illusions of direct interface and occlusion of the black- boxed, underlying media. The potential here for disunity between player and arena—or mind and body (what T.S. Eliot diagnosed as “dissociation of sensibility”, and the understanding of which is essential to all of McLuhan’s work)—is clear. The feeling of the mediated content space leaves the underlying infrastructure abstracted away, or numbed.23 From these premises, is it not obvious that technical knowledge—awareness of the media itself— can preempt participation or inclusion in social groups formed in electric conditions? Does media knowledge exclude one from groups whose social constructions operate in such imaginary, high- level, fictional abstractions as “cyberspace”, “social media”,—or any other pyschotechnological augment to physical space—whose members focus exclusive on the media’s content? It would seem that the artist who commits to McLuhan’s injunction accepts a mission to deconstruct social bonds which cannot withstand the dissolution of grounds upon which they were formed. The rear-view mirror—the comfortable old environment which has become the artistic content of the intimidating new infrastructure—is load-bearing. People live within it, and furthermore have every emotional incentive to ensure its continuation for the security of the identities they have

23 That the gravity of this topic is sufficient to bring matters of religion into the discussion can be felt by the assertion that this process—referred to in Deleuzean terms as virtualization—entails a transformation of human being itself. (Lévy, 16). The referents to which common language refer become virtualized as their substrate changes. Inheriting from and adapting Henri Bergson, the work of Deleuze underpins much of the contemporary discussion of human-machine merger, post-humanism, and decentered nature in modern theory, especially that of Braidotti. Both Liu and Turkle (in her 1978 book Psychoanalytic Politics) put Deleuze downstream from Jacques Lacan’s seminars on the cybernetic subconcious.

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The Artist's Emergent Journey developed within it. Somnambulists, or sleep walkers, have every motivation to exclude anyone embodying a perception which unweaves their social dream-fabric. Now we can further appreciate the public, satiric, performative McLuhan’s commitment to avoiding moral value judgments: the work of the artist was to make humanity (not re-make humanity) by creating the perception of environment. That work is so disruptive in-and-of-itself that one’s own private opinion on any matter would be not only redundant, but puny in comparison. Like a missionary, McLuhan had to enter into and work within the society he wished to change. He’d go “horizontal” and rub off, letting people get involved and inside of his scene. Since the desired changes would come about naturally as the make-up of electric world was revealed, any actual discussion of issues would have been a distraction. Issues of the day were just more material for probing the ways in which the media might be playing an unnoticed role. This is how it is that McLuhan himself could attend Mass daily, yet his electric mirage is still today sometimes repudiated for its failure to weigh in on topics of moral import. His work was so serious that he didn’t have to be. In a put on for the public, McLuhan found success striking a playful, satiric, paradoxical poise. Confronted with a contradiction in his probes, the apocryphal McLuhan quips, “Don’t like that one? We’ll I’ve got more”. The arena his image was acting in—being what we today consider the imaginary cyberspace world of the posthuman—allowed him such nonchalance. The discarnately- embodied McLuhan, a carnival-mirror reflection a man mis-taken by the public as utopian and amoral, could wax lyrically on subjects that would strike the fear of God into any human-scale person. Topics which drive a real human to religion can be tossed-about weightlessly by an electric mirage. How much time is being wasted today discussing issues which would evaporate were, instead, the time be spent on perceiving many mundane facts about the material environment and its history? Media ecology needn’t attack social problems directly—its work is to restore the human scale by gently wringing people out of the social fabric which has elevated the post over the human. Downloading people out of the imaginary spaces of their media and back into embodiment won’t be accomplished with very serious conversations, but by demonstrating and teaching good poise in the present and cutting people enough slack to figure it out for themselves. The Hero’s Return McLuhan’s good humour in approaching the science fiction predicament of “that maddest of all sane scientists, Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom, to bend time, space and matter to his somewhat lunatic will.” is assuring:

It is impossible to stop laughing long enough to give any coherent account of Ransom's mad forays through time when he and MacTate manage an arena that features fifth-rate gladiators; or through space, where the pair wind up as marital relations counselors on Mars.

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Clinton Ignatov

Is this not just mundane reality today? In creating art, the artist need only work to marry awareness of the madness of our own predicament with awareness of the environment which empowers and sustains it. The existence of so much material suitable toward these ends, which can orient us toward a dispelling of many illusions, is a blessing. In his work to re-contextualize mystic knowledge in reference to—and application of—scientific frameworks and the engineering of our material reality, McLuhan pointed and himself traveled in the direction of a humanistic approach capable of revealing to all the substance of any would-be emperor's new clothes who might elect to put on the style of a technologically and cybernetically augmented trans/super-human. Paradoxically, it is as merely human that the perennial hero of mystic foretelling always returns. References Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. London. 1951. Ito, Junji. “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.” Gyo: The Death-Stench Creeps. San Francisco: VIZ Media. 2003 Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011. Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum. 1998. Liu, Lydia H. The Freudian Robot. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010. Logan, Robert K. “Marshall McLuhan’s General System Thinking and Media Ecology.” New Explorations Journal. Volume 1, Number 2. Autumn 2020. Maritain, Jacques. Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. New York: Philosophical Library. 1951. McLuhan, Corinne, Mattie Molinaro and William Toye. The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. 1986. McLuhan, Eric. Electric Language. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing. 1998. McLuhan, Marshall. “Eliot and the Manichean myth as poetry.” Typescript. Library and Archives Canada collection MG31-D156, box 130, file 29. 1954. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Heart of Darkness”. Typescript of uncertain authorized publication status. Library and Archives Canada collection MG31-D156, box 130, file 22. “Review done possibly 1953.” according to hand-penciled note on original typescript. McLuhan, Marshall and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1972. McLuhan, Marshall. The Classic Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. Berkeley: Gingko Press. 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1962. McLuhan, Marshall. The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943- 1962. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium and The Light. Toronto: Stoddart. 1999.

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McLuhan, Marshall. The New American Vortex. Unpublished typescript. Library and Archives Canada collection MG31-D156, box 63, file 24. 1947. McLuhan, Marshall. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper & Row. 1968 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall. Introduction, “Where Chesterton Comes In.” Paradox in Chesterton, by Kenner, Hugh. London: Sheed and Ward. 1948. Lewis, Wyhndham P. The Art of Being Ruled. London: Chatto and Windus. 1926. Lewis, Wyndham P. Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus. 1927. Lewis, Wyndham P. Doom of Youth. London: Chatto and Windus. 1932. Lindberg, John. The Foundations of Social Survival. New York: Columbia University Press. 1953. Turkle, Sherry. Civilization and its Discontents. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2009. Turkle, Sherry. Psychoanalytic Politics. New York: Basic Books. 1978. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005 Edition). 1984. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1952. White, Victor. O. P. “Four Challenges to Religion I—Freud”, Blackfriars, Volume 33, Number 385. April 1952. Wiener, Norbert. GOD AND GOLEM, Inc. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1963. Marshall McLuhan’s personal annotations consulted in The Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto.

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