Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which at the time lead me to wonder why I never heard him brought up at all in in contemporary cultural squabbles over post-modernism.

Since then, I’ve realized the reason is that most people never leave the impoverished bubble of secondary sources which Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: summaries and encyclopedia entries substitute for any encounters with primary sources. And of those that do seek primary sources and full texts, virtually nobody actually bothers to go out into the weeds of reading old books which aren’t already recommended to them or aren’t by someone they’ve already heard of. So there’s a million people reading Lyotard or Derrida or Foucault to understand post modernism—and nobody reads the actual English speaking guy, Ken Gergen, who actively influenced culture and academia into the direction of post modernism via social constructionism. Another problem is that Gergen isn’t sufficiently radical or ideological—he’s not a good villain or hero in a political sense. Reading him, he seems like a genuinely nice and well-intended guy with an absurd metaphysics which denies the ability to know the truth of anything—and that’s not sexy for the purposes of culture-wars fights. You’d actually feel bad attacking him.

That’s the problem with all our culture wars in a nutshell. We want Manichean struggles between good and evil. All the affable, generally well-balanced and prudent writers like Kenneth Gergen get forgotten, precisely because their points are well-argued and methodically made and, well, boring. Take this description of the post-modern subject from The Saturated Self, page 173:

In the final analysis, we find technology and life-style operating in a state of symbiotic interdependence. The technology opens opportunities, and as these opportunities are realized, the person becomes increasingly dependent on the technology. The technologies engender a multiplicitous and polymorphic being who thrives on incoherence, and this being grows increasingly enraptured by the means by which this protean capacity is expressed. We enter the age of *techno-personal* systems.

Brilliant sentence! And it cuts right to the cause of post modern subjectivity: the underlying environment of technology which subsumes our body and, thus, our grounding for identity, within media content.

But books which describe things are boring. And books which argue for things which aren’t immediately classifiable, and thus don’t put you in an obvious culture-war camp, are useless for getting clicks or likes or whatever. So despite the fact that the internet has spent ten years trying to figure out what post-modernism is, I still haven’t seen anyone actually zoom in on a human-language, fair, relatable definition which doesn’t imply political intrigue or diabolical subversion.

Gergen’s last book, Relational Being, won the 2010 Erving Goffman Award from the Media Ecology Association. I read that one too—it’s a beautiful book written by and for a generation who have completely given up on understanding the material world they live in, lost in cyberspace, who need methods and reasons for talking to people they have no hope of understanding or agreeing  with. Contemporary post modern literature is very bittersweet.

As the conception of relational being is grasped, so are new forms of action invited, new forms of life made intelligible, and a more promising view of our global future made apparent. No, this does not mean abandoning the past; the traditional view of the bounded individual need not be eliminated. But once we can see it as a construction of our own making—one option among many—we may also understand that the boundary around the self is also a prison.

This is, ultimately, gnostic. But nobody is going to rally the troops building outrage around such a sentiment. This isn’t a guy out to destroy the fabric of society by arguing reality isn’t real and everything is relative and so awful things are good—it’s a human being whose entirely career has been deeply concerned with the fabric of society, working to hold it together as reality fell away beneath him.

McLuhan was was observing contemporary discourse losing its moorings from any common perception of an underlying reality back in the 1940s, caused by glossy photo magazines and cinema and radio and other dreams creating an worldly “education” which schools in his time couldn’t compete with. Borrowing the concept of a figure/ground gestalt from psychology, he saw heavily-conceptual language becoming self-referential and circular, and called it figure without ground. He expressly did not use the semiotic language of signs and signifiers, and I’d like to strong advocate use of these concepts in thinking through these things, however this is where McLuhan meets post-modernism. Post modernists get into gnosticism by ignoring embodiment—literally the human scale of how everything understood in the world must be felt proportional to us as embodied beings—by focusing on signs and symbols and signifiers which flow around. McLuhan’s whole point is that they don’t, and when they do they comprise a maelstrom or storm. But signs and symbols and archetypes, as a make-believe substance of “culture” are the substance which “saturates” Gergen’s titular post modern subject. We’re still there today, we just know less by ignoring the boring academic history of how we got here, focusing instead on subversive radicals we can turn into punching bags, or heroes of tradition we can valorize in a Manichean—that’s right, gnostic—fantasy LARP online.

I’d recommend you read Gergen’s book The Saturated Self, and then see if you find a way out of his hall-of-mirrors. At least, I hope you’ll come to see “post modernism” as a description of a very real subjective state of being which has posed a mass cultural problem for nearly a century, instead of a plot to ruin some widespread, bedrock, mainstream “common sense” which was grounded in empirical reality and clear moralism.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay Tradition and Individual Talent, gave the formula for mastering a tradition while keeping it current. McLuhan studied the Western Tradition as nobody else has since—everyone else just takes parts piecemeal from what’s prescribed by canons, governed by elite universities. Breaking out of the box of what has been taught in schools in the past couple centuries by studying the origins of what is taught is very, very hard for someone inside the system to do. But since the cultural dialectic has moved online, it should be easier than it has been before—is autodidacts have the self-control to remain disciplined in their studies and the grounding to not get suckered into mysticism or conspiracy.

It’s the Media, Stupid

As I mentioned above, I believe the way out of the post-modern bubble of socially-constructed reality divorced from ground is in reforming an embodied relation to our media and technology. This doesn’t just mean understanding machines as cold, abstract systems. Rather, by learning and appreciating the stories of their origins in the context of the humans who made them. Our material, human-made environment has a story just as we do. If we are made of stories, so is our world. When we tell stories about our selves but not our world, we become divorced from it, we are attached to it the wrong-way around, superficially. We float away in from the world, collectively or alone, as gnostics.

The role technology has played is writ large in the story of the ’90s internet. There had been a strong online culture in the ’70s and ’80s, best documented in the monumental, essential tome Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Net, assembled and written by Michael and Ronda Hauben and released in 1997 as a free ebook. Nobody who hasn’t read this book several times ought to claim any awareness or knowledge about what the internet truly is—it was a collaboration done with many of the scientists and creators who built the machine we are all living in. It’s also where my site, The Concerned Netizen, got its name!

What post-modernism is, then, is simply what reality is to everyone who doesn’t know the actual story of our technology. It’s reality made up in the vacuum of not knowing history which has been relegated to specialist domains (the “division of labour” in economic speak), or ignored for being too “technical.” Sorry, reality is technical. Get over it! Or be a post-modern yourself.

If you rely on popular books in the ‘90s to tell the story, than online culture really began once the first users of Stewart Brand’s The Well started writing books about themselves and getting public gigs talking about “cyberspace.” They also conveniently rendered California as the geographic center of online media in the same-way which Hollywood had done for film. Here discourses on embodied relations to the world behind-the-screen shifted toward the “cyberpunk” ethos, and toward gnostic religious allegories. With ‘60s gurus Terrance McKenna and Timothy Leary all aboard, California VR-futurism was a full-blown revival of the 1960’s American psychedelic revolution. Only this time, it was the microdosing of neuroenhancers, raves, vr headsets, collective intelligence of computer-mediated communication, and total information freedom which would liberate society from the grip of the man.

By the end of the ‘90s, writers like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dary, Sherry Turkle, Howard Rheingold, Arthur and Marrilouse Kroker, Erik Davis, and N. Katherine Hayles had created the theoretical framework to reinvent the metaphysics of science fiction literature and cinema. Sufficiently rich in metaphor, the images of an online “cyberspace” within which one could find a permanent habitus has remained rich and exploitable for authors up to the very present. They could draw on the examples of films such as Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man in 1992, or Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days in 1995. These two films share a similar direction as that early prophetic movie of David Cronenberg, his 1983 film Videodrome. Whereas Videodrome took place within the ostensibly real world of Toronto, showing the main characters hallucinations bleeding into the world of his embodied reality, Cronenberg’s 1999 film Existenz is able to begin in the opposite conceipt: a video game which totally subsumes one’s embodied sensory-experience within lifelike illusion from the get-go. Alongside the film releases of Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor and the Wachowski’s The Matrix, the release of Existenz definitely marks 1999 as the inaugural year for simulation-theory[glitch in the matrix review] as the metaphysics for the new millennium—the shift when we’re now longer trying to get into the computer simulation, but rather born into it and trying to get out. And if you do want to get California conspiratorial, Bruce Wagner’s serialized graphic novel Wild Palms predicted it all in 1993! I recommend the original over the Oliver Stone adaptation (although the later is worth it to see Boy Meets World star Ben Savage as a sadistic hell-spawned cretin. Wagner’s spritual sequal to Wild Palms, Maps to the Stars, was adapted into a film by Cronenberg. And his cancelled book The Marvel Universe, is written in the same vein and was released freely online a few years ago).

Time Travel

There is no going back to traditions. There is only going back for traditions, and then returning to the present. Kinda like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure—you need to explore the past, but you don’t want to live there. You just want to give the most kick-ass history presentation you possibly can, helping situate the present within the stories of the past. Specifically, stories which return to the tale of the tribe the reasons why their environment, the material world they live in and talk about with each other every day, is the way it is. Abstract concepts like corporate greed or late stage capitalism are based in concepts, not the material ground of our being. We are embodied creatures, and our intellectual development, Piaget showed us, is in disentangling the barriers between our selves (our bodies) and the world outside (each other and materially). The alternatives is solipsism or nihilism, collectively or alone.

Culture readily shows us that the fictional world inside our computer has overtaken the generation which grew up in the end of the 20th century, and everyone born thereafter needs to know how that happened if we are to avoid the post-modern blues. Because living inside computer content, as epitomized by the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product” entails getting a handle on just what our world is made of. Even if it is rather technical.