Alan Jacob's thinking and writing often refreshes me. He ably rejects generalization in favor of a deeper look at specifics in a way that is instructive. Here is just one example.
"I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, but mediated in a wide range of ways. Perception itself, neural activity itself, is a mediating activity. I often think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”
So we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience. The choices are always among various forms of mediation. I don’t think Heidegger fully realized this, which is why he could speak of writing with a pen as something you do with your hand but typewriting as something alienated from the hand — never acknowledging that we type with our hands too.
Now, if someone wants to argue that the mediation of the pen involves our body in more intimate ways than the mediation of the typewriter, in that (for instance) in writing with a pen we shape the individual letters instead of just striking keys with a uniform motion, I’m ready to listen — as long as it’s okay to point out that writing with my finger on an iPad screen is more intimate still!
Analogically, consider Walker Percy’s great essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he points out that our cultural formation makes it impossible for anyone actually to see the Grand Canyon: only some immense dislocation of our expectations can make is truly visible to us. It is at least possible that some technological mediations could help us achieve that valuable dislocation.
In short, we need fewer binary distinctions and more attention to the detailed phenomenology of particular technologies and their interactions with the mediating powers of our perceptual apparatus."
Citation: a comment Alan Jacobs made at this site, <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/01/responding-to-carrs-digital-dualism/> accessed 3/9/13.
1 comment:
I've been thinking lately about how our experiences are mediated, both by expectation and by technology.
I found your blog while searching for details on the Auden quote you used recently (will borrow the book from the library; should be p128 of the 1968 publication).
The question of intimacy is an odd one (pen or typewriter?); it's kind of analogous to voice v. harpsichord. I'm not even sure it's more direct to write by hand, though it was my first impulse to say so. The typewriter has a limited vocabulary of letter-shapes it can produce, so in that regard the typist enters a different sort of form-making than hand-writing. The conventions of how typewriters are used are even more limiting.
Your last sentences hit the nail on the head, I think: depending on what you're after, one mode of inscription will be better suited, or more effective, or whatever, than another.
I'll look up "Loss of the Creature" happily enough; "Lost in the Cosmos" is quite dear to me.
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