[DISCLAIMER: Please forgive the verbal diarrhea below. I didn’t construct a cogent argument or do anything creative with the text. It was all I could do to make sense of the book. ~MM]
An old Zen Buddhist parable on enlightenment goes something like this:
Before Enlightenment, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers;
During Enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers;
After Enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers are once again rivers.
http://peacefulturmoil.blogspot.com/2006/03/mountains-and-rivers.html
It’s been said many different ways by different people over the years, but the one above is the most straightforward (and I don’t have time to dig through my books to unearth the original). This saying, I believe, gets at the crux of the message (or mind game, if you will) Fuller communicates to the reader in Media Ecologies. Through his incredibly dense prose, recondite with references both overt and covert to a multitude of thinkers and lines of thought – Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Kittler, Marx, De Landa, James Gibson, Heidegger, Whitehead, and numerous others I’m sure I failed to see – one conclusion we can safely draw from this week’s reading is that Fuller – yes, in his own odd way – is trying to teach us to see the world around us anew aka help us reach (a kind of) enlightenment. He strives to have us perceive things in a new light, differently. He wishes to make us aware of the machinic phylum at work in media ecologies, elusive phrases that more or less describe “… how elements of complex medial systems ‘cooperate’ to produce something more than the sum of their parts” (p. 6, emphasis mine). It is at the seams or vortices where technologies (medial elements) collide with people who manipulate and repurpose them – often in defiance of their standard, ordained, predefined roles – that we witness real change (the mutation), excitement, novelty, a kind of vitality that mixes the natural with the artificial and yet is never entirely one or the other.
Examination of the behavior and relations (“relationality”) of the actors and medial elements rooted in a delimiting and yet enabling vital materialism and acting within overlapping dimensions of culture, economics, politics, aesthetics, etc., contribute to the overarching concept of media ecologies, a phrase chosen very deliberately here for its suggestion of living, vitally interlaced systems. In advocating this nuanced (deeper?) way of examining events around us, Fuller is essentially writing a manifesto of new thinking and (hopefully) creative impetus:
Through much of this text it has been hoped that the writing would itself edge toward making escapes and inventions, that it would not so much make its argument dead, as in obvious, as much as working by the cumulative and interacting operations of ideas and activity attempt to induce such processes in its reading. … [To] open gateways to new formations of thought and activity. (“Inventory,” p. 167)
It would be shortsighted to argue that developing a new perspective is the sole purpose of the book, but I think it comes closest to explaining (one of) the major driving force(s) behind this week’s reading. (Besides, who am I to unravel every little meaning hidden in this hyper-layered text?) He illustrates new ways of perceiving things and events around us (“perceptual forces”) in every chapter – the examples of the pirate radio phenomenon in London (ch. 1), Kafka’s Warsaw Eruv (p.85), Cornelia Parker’s Embryo Firearms sculpture (p.87), the light switch (The Switch) open to a neighborhood’s control (p. 88), the automated radio interrupter in NYC (p.102) and so on – that I believe he hopes will inspire us to create or contribute to new phenomena within the affordances arising from the medial elements of the machinic phyla (and its “morphogenetic forces”, p. 169) against which we are subjected (if I am understanding those ever-so-loaded terms correctly).
So what the hell does all this talk of combinatorial productivity, machinic phyla, and media ecologies lead up to? Why title this piece “It’s Alive!”? To me, Fuller strongly implies with his carefully crafted diction the existence of artificial intelligence within these media ecologies. Where there’s (artificial) intelligence, there is life … activity … becoming. I shall close with an inventory of the vocabulary he uses that lead me to such an inference:
ecology
(machinic) phylum
dynamic
thriving
relationality/relations/interrelations
(will to) power
forces
autopoietic (self-producing)
recursive (function)
self-reflexive
heterogeneity (vs. homogeneity)
cooperation
transmutational/permutational
aggregation
multiplicity (incldg. “index of multiplicity”, p. 52)
combinatorial morphogenesis (p. 24)
nomad and sedentary
paradox
creation
flow/fluidity
(medial) assemblage
appendages
processes
anti-hylomorphism (the bifurcation of all elements into isolatable “form” and “content”)
memetic/memes
seams
schizophrenic/schizophrenizing tendency
affordances
reveal and conceal (Heidegger)
layer
supersede
conjoining
transduction
time-space
“misplaced concreteness” (p. 9)
irruption/disruptions
public space (“public sphere,” anyone?)
standard objects (arranged or composed in such a way as to give rise to new productions)
BECOMING (as opposed to BEING)
mattutd 