Complex Systems

Explaining an absense

“Pick a Side?” I Thumb My Nose!

When I get into what we’re calling the post-modern condition, I’m trying to explain what is lacking in society which leaves people with no alternative other than to go find themselves online, where their bodies aren’t. Explaining an absence is difficult. First you have to explain what should be there, and justify why it ought to be. And then you have to explain what is there instead.

So. What’s missing from the social world, and the material environment, which should be there? Which would keep people from flying off into imaginary world-building or dreaming of finding groups or families other than those which exist?

I could have saved myself years of trouble if I just accepted commonplace political answers. I could have pointed at some vague absence of love or solidarity or compassion or acceptance in the world—caused by greed or the creation of chartered corporations or colonialism—and joined in the progressive project to bring a better world into reality by being the change I believe in. Or conversely I could have accepted the conservative complaint about the intentional deconstruction of the Western way of life; subversion by the Frankfurt school or some other foreign ideology, the cynical propagation of utopian delusion, and the seductions of self-destructive modes of living of demonic ostentation and excess.

Adopting a ready-made diagnosis of the world’s situation provides one readily with a side—with an identity and complementary social network to mingle and rise within. But finding one’s self, and one’s community this way is too fraught with peril for me to recommend it to anyone:

At the very least, raging against greedy billionaires and communist infiltrators would never satisfy my intellectual curiosity. But pointing the finger at people isn’t an explanation. Attributing intentions, motivations, and goals to people would be a way of cheating myself of the work of explaining what’s actually happening in my life, or in the world. Picking a team always seemed more like an post-hoc justification for rage—and I’d rather get to the root of the problem than blow-off steam. I had learned too much psychology to trust in my own rationality, let alone anyone else’s!

Blaming people was pointless—people are mostly irrational, beholden to something greater which exceeds them. So what made more sense to me was to consider the person as a complex, developing system in relation to his or her environment.

Show Me On This Doll Where The Being-as-such Touched You

John Vervaeke’s timely Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series was a foundational primer for me in what contemporary cognitive science thought. It established a strong base from which my further reading into cybernetics past and present could flesh things out. Very pertinent was how the series itself seemed to have gone completely off the rails into unintelligability with all the Heidegger stuff at the end. It was as unrelatable in its needless abstraction as the rest of the series had been coherent and concrete.

What was missing from this juxtaposition of canon philosophy and cognitive science was a proper relating of mind to body and mind to external environment.

Of course, I had McLuhan’s ideas about technology and embodiment for contrast. That had made immediate, overwhelming sense to me in proportion inverse to the alienation I feel from phenomenology. What McLuhan was saying fit my immediate perception in a way which continental philosophy never tries to. He deals in particulars of the actual world we live in, and the discrete parts of the machine we actually live in. It was like, “finally, an English-native speaker explains an extremely difficult topic in plain, simple English!”

No wonder nobody understands him.

McLuhan was actively studying cybernetics, and largely recapitulated the findings of that new science within the terms of literary and artistic criticism. His ideas about the old environment being the content of the new is analogous to how Kurt Gödel saw that, to prove the validity of a consistent logical system, one must “surround” it with a bigger, more complex system. Or, rather, an environment can’t recursively know itself without the creation of another environment above/outside itself to capture itself within. This is, in the cognitive science Vervaeke is versed in, the function of a self-organizing, “auto-poetic” or self-creating system. The form of its developing complexity is the growth of a new outer layer, like rings on a tree, as a natural adaption to what it was before.

When talking about McLuhan, this dynamic is most commonly illustrated in terms of communications media. McLuhan often said that speech is the content of poetry is the content of drama is the content of a stage-play is the content of film is the content of television… we’d continue to say cable television, VHS, digitized video, and network-streamed video. Each enveloping environment re-equilibrates the entire technology and the social systems and environment around it—flipping loci of control and restructing relations and the causal “lines of force.”

But the larger picture is better illustrated at a more environmental scale. His first major project in media analysis was carried out in the late ‘50s for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. In the project’s final report, we can observe the “Dynamics of the Inquiry” applied to cities, rural areas, and roadways.

At first the tractless pastoral countryside, as in the the television series Rawhide.

A road comes into existence to fetch rural produce to town areas and is in Low Definition, coexisting with pedestrian and mounted man.

As road goes into High Definition, it fetches the town to the country.

It next becomes a substitute for the country, and we can “take a spin” in the country.

As it improves, it destroys the country by simply making it less and less country-like. A little later it becomes a wall between man and his country.

As it continues to improve, or be more of a road, speed of movement in and out of city destroys the city…

In large metropolitan areas, the arts tend to be supported not by the natives, but by tourists and the natives tend to revert to the state of provincial bumpkins. As Margolis points out in his teenage piece (American Scholar, Spring, 1960), the juvenile gangs are the only authentic face to face community in the metropolitan areas. Socially this parallels the physical return to the tractless waste of the rural environment of the highway city, in the airway age.

Again, like rings on a tree, a new environment surrounds and subsumes the old, integrating it into itself. I’ve already discussed this in the clinical theory of developmental psychology elaborated by Robert Kegan. How are we to bring this all together? Is it cybernetic?