Sustainable Scatterbrain
Inverting the locus of "distributed" being
Maybe you’ve noticed by now that my posts seem kinda all-over-the-place conceptually. A straightforward reason might be that my style is something like my ostensible main topic: psychotic. I’m just an internet shizo-poster, or rather I present as such, to better exhibit and demonstrate what I write about.
I’ll own that intention, sure. It’s not like I sat down one day and considered several different styles—one straightforward and structured, another an eclectic bricolage, etc.—and picked what you read. You’re really just getting a peek at how I think. When my fingers happen to be resting on a computer keyboard, my thought ends up getting mediated in a way that it doesn’t when I’m, say, on the bus or smashing bottles at work.
In turn, in the past few months that I’ve begun making public writing a regular, weekly habit, I think that the form and structure of my thinking has been improved. If there has been an improvement in my writing (and I hope that there is, and always will be!), it has been a reflection of that greater change. My writing, in other words, is not a context-less activity divorced from anything else.
I place great value in stating the obvious because I think people are scared to do so. Media ecology begins with observing and talking about everything that is taken for granted and unremarked upon. The ubiquitous and the banal. What McLuhan called the “cliché to archetype” process is precisely the readiness to recognize how nature perpetually replenishes, in time, all the low-hanging fruit which most foxes have turned their eyes upward from.
My point is that there is no conceptual umbrella or unity behind my writing. I am not expounding a theory or a thesis—although, when asked, then I will readily concoct a general summary of what it is that I write about. The wonderful thing about “media ecology” is that its umbrella is mostly organizational—it’s a social umbrella, not an episteme or ontology. Sciences have domains. Psychology studies the mind, psychiatry the health of the mind, physics the material world, biology the living material world, etc. Writing in those domains have a conceptual umbrella, a clear demarcation of boundaries of thought in the abstract. In a way, these demarcations are organizational too—the departments of a university need to be zoned institutionally and geographically for practical purposes.
But there is no reason for my thinking to be so constrained. I am a singular person who is in my own relation to my material environment and with other people comprising my family, friends, and greater society. I am not obliged to keep my thoughts categorizable.
Selfhood
I’m thinking all this lately owing to re-reading of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen. Her first book, Psychoanalytic Politics, was an overview of Jacques Lacan’s popularity in the radical social upheavals in ‘60s France (which involved fewer daisy-festooned music festivals than those in the New World). All of her subsequent writing, then, is grounded deeply within the tradition of psychoanalytic therapy and the theoretical roots of post-modernism.
She writes in Life about how the work of “connectionist” AI pioneers, resurgent in the ‘80s, was leading psychology to new theories of the mind. Instead of a singular “ego,” the mind could be seen more as a series of inter-operating agents. The connectionists were the AI scientists behind neural networks and “emergent” intelligence from the brute-force, behaviorist training of black boxed models—their coup de grace is today’s AI revolution.
The lessons from connectionists for psychologists was the falseness of the self as a singular whole over-which executive action was possible—there are too many facets and we are each many people and many competing forces.
I don’t buy it.
The Edge of Me
The reasons I don’t buy it is because I am not the various concepts which I something think about, or the various spaces I work in, or the various people whom I mimetically recapitulate. What is coherent about me, my identity, or my ego is the fact that I am one single body. I’m me, a 36 year old Canadian dude who walks and drives around Ottawa, Ontario.
No matter how irreconcilable the things I say or the opinions I state may seem when taken as abstracted text, they are all have a coherency by virtue of it having been me who thought or said or wrote them. It is the fault of the printing press that we all think thoughts and opinions and domains exist in some floating, disembodied world of abstract mind—cultural mind or singular mind—within which they dialectically clash and synthesize.
Trying to model one’s “ego” or “self” in the abstract doesn’t make sense to me outside of an appreciation about why it is philosophers or psychologists have come to attempt to isolate mind-stuff at all. I’m sympathetic to their reasons because I study media ecology.
The most well-known, popular intellectual whose work demonstrates this is Michel Foucault. His writings are efforts to demonstrate how ideas about madness, justice, sexuality etc. all operate within very practical material and social contexts which gave rise to their framing. Media ecology is a lot like this, with emphasis on artificial material-environmental factors. The reason you’re all conceptualizing things the way you are is because of how your perception has governed your way of construing your world, and your self, into the parts and wholes which you have.
“…we should not look for great complexity in the laws governing human behavior, in situations where the behavior is truly simple and only its environment is complex.”—Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
My ego, or my “self concept” as something which I psychologically project onto my physical body, is not something I really perceive as virtual “object” installed in my brain. The world makes me when I take it in and assemble it from my disparate senses. Somewhere in my brain my eyes and ears have to sync up and present one world coming in from two different swaths of flesh—same with touch, smell, taste etc. McLuhan’s “sensory ratios” are about exactly that admixture of how what is without is reassembled within. The “edge of me,” as one of the students I’ve tutored put it, is the world that I put on—starting with my clothes and continuing into my legally-protected personal property and fair-share of public spaces and services.
That will always be coherent, and will always be me. Not some imagined software architecture in my mind supposedly puppeting all that about.
I strive, every day, to ensure that environment which I put on, and take off, is a materially-real one. The “virtual worlds” of the screen are not floating outside of that material world, they are perceptually-instantiated within the computers I own and control. This is, I think, an improvement on the power-dynamic of on-screen fantasy worlds which actually exist within film studios which I do not own and control.
What makes me feel coherent, whole, and in control is not thus some over-arching theory-of-everything. I don’t need to integrate my “ego” or my “self” or my “identity.” I’m not on inner-quest to the top of some ontological pyramid to look down upon the world—or the bottom, next to Atlas, where-from all forms emerge. I actually just have to get out of bed each morning, get dressed, and put-on and take-off what is in my reach to become-again who I am going to continue to be for the rest of my life.
The ability to continue being myself, as an embodied person in the material world, holds me together just fine. My writing, as scattered as it is, is the interface of myself with the outside world—and it’s the outside world that’s scattered, and which might be in need of integration!