Relation and Meaning in Barbara King’s Evolving God

For a bit of background—the blurb on the book Evolving God from Barbara J. King's website:

Can scientists discover a prehistory of religion just as they have traced the evolution of technology, language, and art? What does compassion in chimpanzees, or burial patterns in our human ancestors and Neanderthals, tell us about the origins of religion? In Evolving God, named a Top Ten Religion Book for 2007 by the American Library Association, Barbara King explores these questions.

    In Breaking the Spell, philosopher Daniel Dennett expands upon biologist Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes to explain how belief systems could ultimately co-opt the will of their adherents the way that a parasite can change its host animal’s behavior to further the parasite’s own reproduction. Memes, in this view, are a cultural analog to genes, and as such are the basic units of cultural transmission. The ‘memes’ that survive are the ones that are more memorable and impart advantages onto their users. Whatever the reasons for why and how religious behavior evolved in humans (Dennett reviews several theories), the concept of the meme as a ‘selfish’ entity is central for him, and he appears to feel that religion has essentially outstayed its welcome—outlasted its utility in the human race. The threat of religion, for Dennett, is that it somehow undermines individual capacity for rational and logical thinking.

    Memetics, at least as employed by Dawkins and Dennett, does not seem to be a detailed enough theory of cultural transmission because it attempts to argue that cultural evolution must operate by the same rules as genetic evolution. In this model, memes—as replicating units of culture—can be either beneficial, neutral, or parasitic to their ‘hosts’. Even in the realm of cognitive science where theories of “memetics” are more articulated, units of cultural transmission are often explained in terms of “thinking”, “ideas” and “cognition”, while the roles of emotion, situatedness, and affectivity are minimized or absent. While the meme-gene analogy may offer useful ways (especially for scientists) to think about culture, it is too easy to use memetics in its Dennettian form to essentially “write off” human culture as epiphenomenal, occurring on the surface of biological evolution. It seems odd to characterize any system of human meaning (in this case religion) as epiphenomenal or vestigial when one is interested in questions of “experience." When it comes down to it, Breaking the Spell just doesn’t seem to address issues of devotionalism, phenomenology, or subjectivity in religion, if simply because the author has concluded that the ‘pros’ of these things don’t outweigh the ‘cons’ he sees in religion. The book is a standard textbook for introducing cognitive-evolutionary approaches to religion, and contains many fascinating and sensible conclusions. Even so, using “memes” as the only way to broach the subjective realm leaves much to be desired for the religionist.

    There might, however, be a way to investigate, and even emphasize human subjectivity in a “scientific” account of religion’s origins. In her book Evolving God, evolutionary anthropologist Barbara J. King attempts to excavate the affective and emotional roots of religion which she believes to be foundational to the human imperative of spirituality. For her “religion is all about practice and emotional engagement with the sacred, as defined by one’s social group; it is not necessarily about a set of beliefs concerning supernatural figures.” Thus her definition of religion differs from Dennett’s, who is more of a proponent of religion as a set of beliefs organized around supernatural entities. King criticizes the mainstream emphasis on “genes and brains” in her field, contending that it is too clinical and focused on individual psychology and pathology, and also on information as opposed to modes of transmission. Dennett’s conception of religion does indeed focus more on individual “brains” (and also assumes the homogeneity of cognitive architecture across the human race) while King believes that the human need to belong—arising from our evolution as social mammals—gave rise to what we call religion. In this view, the need to connect with each other led to the need to connect with the sacred. Though our need to connect with each other might have arisen from an evolutionary strategy for favoring group formation, it has manifested subjectively as a set of emotions and desires relating to connecting affectively with “others”, and consequently the ultimate “Other” that is God (or other, non-sentient sacred realities like the “infinite”). King goes so far to assert that sociality and “belongingness” drives cognitive evolution, and not the other way around.

    It is not my intention to confirm or deny the outcome of the book’s larger goal of demonstrating the existence of religious meaning in pre-history. However, King’s emphasis on meaning, sociality, and the process by which meaning is made provide for an interesting thought experiment for human apprehension of the sacred in primitive settings. For King, meaning itself is not as much informational as it is emotional—which also means vectored or gestural “to” and “from” something—and thus shaped by specific group dynamics and mutable instead of fixed. In fact, it might make sense to say that for King, emotion and meaning form a feedback loop, because emotion is stirred through the experience of shared meaning and the dynamics of inter-personal communication. While Dennett, in a more Cartesian vein, is guided by questions of being and substance (e.g. memes and cognitive architecture, ‘neural wiring’, etc.), King in a more Whiteheadian vein emphasizes becoming and encounters (events) as being the true primary building blocks in human religious reality. She quotes Buber several times in the first chapter as someone whose philosophy corroborates her theory: ”all life is encounter”, “in the beginning is the relation”, and “man becomes an I through a You” all echo the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others which sees events (not individual objects) as what give rise to the characteristics of reality, including the illusion of its static or essential nature.

    Based on this, one guesses that King doesn’t locate primary forms of religious meaning in doctrines, texts, or even in language—but in experience. King writes that “humans seek God...in order to co-create meaning with sacred beings.” She rejects theories of semiotics that are based on a linear sender-receiver model in which a signal is sent from creature A and subsequently interpreted by creature B. This model places too much emphasis on “the signal” as something fixed and static that is sent—like a package—and ‘deciphered’ by the receiver, and also overemphasizes the “signal” as the central thing around which the act of communication is based. No doubt a computational understanding of information—as being digital and code-based—has influenced such models. Instead, King favors a hypothesis of meaning-making she calls “co regulation” that emphasizes the dynamic and embodied aspects of communication as it occurs in a situated time and place. In this view, the unit of “semiotic” analysis is the social event of communication, rather than disembodied signals. King writes:

“When apes or humans communicate, they adjust to each other’s actions and choices moment by moment, just as one dancer subtly shifts the placement of a hand, or the speed and angle of a turn, as her dance partner shifts his. Co-regulation, then, is the unpredictable and contingent mutual adjustment between partners.” (42, King)

Thus, meaning not contained only in signals themselves, but in the act of communication. Really, signals cannot be separated from senders and receivers at all—it is almost as if we, as living, communicating beings, are signals ourselves—we are somehow fundamentally semiotic in nature. “Co-regulation” illustrates the ways in which signals and meaning are dynamic and have to be constantly re-negotiated and agreed upon. It is in the event of communication between two beings where any gap or dissonance between a ‘signal’ and its supposed ‘meaning’ is adjudicated. This contested nature of language and meaning has been taken up in the humanities by thinkers like Derrida and Ricoeur, and has greatly influenced postmodern and poststructuralist discourse. It is notable (and heartening for religionists interested in transdisciplinarity) that King’s theory, firmly situated within evolutionary and biological anthropology, comes to similar conclusions.

    The Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept of religion resonates with King’s. In On Religion, he writes that “religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.” The most “universal formula of religion” is “intuition of the universe,” a sense of the infinite. Whether or not supernatural beings exist in an empirical sense, for King as for Schleiermacher, the phenomenon whereby sacredness is perceived is a fundamental framing mechanism for all human meaning. Sacred reality is an impression, a feeling created by (and generative of) a desire not just to agree upon meanings with other humans, but to somehow share meaning with the larger, super/supra-human world. For King, as for contemplative philosophers of religion like Schleiermacher, this reaching-for the sacred is a fundamental index for human purpose and meaning, and not delusional in the least.

Related posts on semiotics/memetics:

Reviving Eliade for a Semiotics of the Sacred
the oldest language on earth
Computers: Confounding Philosophy Since the Atomic Age 
Memetics, Religion, and the Ancient Greco-Roman World

The Word Made Cybernetic: The Cyborg as Ascetic

In the first pages of his book The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Geoffrey G. Harpham opens with a discussion about St. Athanasius of Alexandria's Life of Antony, one of the most influential texts in Western literature and more directly formative in the genre of Late Antique hagiography (saint's lives). Seen as the hagiography par exellence, this text gave shape to the holy man as cultural superhero in the Late Antique world, at a moment when the formerly sectarian Christian religion was spreading to the point where it was being endorsed an even defended by the Late Roman and Byzantine State. The text is also fundamental because of its authority in a specific discourse of asceticism, which is derived from a Greek word meaning "training" or "discipline", but is associated with its more visible 'effects' as encountered by a non-ascetic: the unkempt hair, long beard, single garment, emaciated figure, spartan abode, and tranquil presence of the ascetic master.

St. Antony was a founding figure of the Christian tradition of desert monasticism that took off in the 4th century C.E.—withdrawal from urban or populated areas to solitary wilderness abodes where a practitioner would effectively practice defeating any desire for 'the world'—often, as with Antony, this took the form of battling with demons. Ascetic practice often consisted of daily prayer, meditation, dietary austerity, fasting, and strict restrictions on sleep. It bears many similarities to Indian yogic tradition as well as the renunciation undertaken by the Buddha, but ostensibly the Christian ascetic was engaging in a form of imitation of Christ, and also imitation of the Christian martyrs who made up the first saints and 'holy people' in the tradition.

Within the tradition, Asceticism is not seen as hate for the body or "deprivation", even though those are popular 'outsider' associations. Instead, it is seen as a perfection of the body for its highest possible purpose, which especially in the Eastern Christian tradition was a form of theosis in the contemplation of God. As one Abba said, it is not the body that he wants to 'kill', but desires.

Also germane for our discussion, asceticism is associated with special abilities or "gifts." In The Lives of the Desert Fathers and other hagiographical literature from Late Antiquity, desert fathers (and mothers) often possess powers of clairvoyance (they know for example, the very moment an Abba dies in a faraway region), prophecy (seeing the future), teleportation (Abbas often crossed rivers this way), shamanistic abilities to communicate with animals, exorcism, and of course, healing the sick (even by distance). They also typically possess superhuman levels of endurance—especially with regard to nourishment. Some are said to have gone without eating for unbelievable amounts of time or subsist on very little food (a few lentils per day). In the 'ascetic zeitgeist' of the desert movement, it was often hard to separate these charismatic, extra-institutional figures from cult heroes that would distract people from devotion to Christ (or, politically worse—the Church, which was fragmented with factionalism at this time and fighting for imperial alliance). Thus, it was important for the ones fighting for authority through textual discourse to emphasize that these holy people did not acquire their power themselves, rather it was conferred by God. Thus emerges this image of the (Christian) ascetic as someone who is granted special abilities and charismatic gifts because they "meet God halfway." They do all the work, but when that work finally pays off in the form of ability and mastery, it is God who ratifies, and is ultimately the source, of their holy gifts. This says something interesting about human agency and the ability for humans to "signify" anything (to each other). I.e. Who is the source of meaning—us or what created us? (And you don't even need to be a theist to ponder this point, as the question is being hashed out in non-theistic fields of inquiry like process philosophy and biosemiotics). Harpham, engaging in what could be called an interdisciplinary 'literary analysis' of asceticism, writes:

[H]uman beings are incapable of true signification; the successful "performance" of signs can only be God's work. The best we can hope for ourselves is not that we learn to use signs, but that we become signs—and not spoken signs, but durable signs, "written in heaven" in a script which, defying the nature of script itself is intimate with the divine essence.

Thus, God is the "true author" of the sign that is the ascetic body—the sinewy figure and glowing countenance of the yogic master is not (just) a product of his own individual agency, rather it is a signification, a sentence, a word, written—made decipherable—by the Creator (or Cultural Discourse if you like) as part of a higher-order "conversation" (in which living creatures, ever expanding in semiotic complexity, are like set-pieces on an infinite game-board). The will of this holy man may have played a great part—indeed, it did most of the heavy lifting—in engendering what is seen when we behold him. But none of this—none of his training, his discipline—is legible to others unless it is somehow inscribed on his body—or as his body. The integration of a "bottom-up" process with another "top-down" process provides the outcome, which is: The living body as a whole cannot be a sign unless recognized, and ratified, by an Other, or others. This is why in many ways we are signs not authored by ourselves (even though we are)... because we appear to others as coherent systems, whereas we experience ourselves as fragmented, incoherent, and open. Thus, along with thinking of asceticism as inscription upon the body, it is also useful to think of the body as itself an instrument of inscription. But who is the Scribe? Whoever or whatever it is (God, Evolution, Nature, Memes, Stardust, take your pick) it has always seemed clear that we cannot be it.

Or can we? Enter the cyborg. The cyborg is a "cybernetic organism" that has been, in modern literary imagination, divided roughly into two categories: The android, who is manufactured and not of human origin, that incorporates living tissue (to varying degrees), or the bionic (modified) human. Androids can, and do, vary in their ratios of organic/mechanical, but as technology within science fiction and cinematographic special effects become more advanced, androids have been envisioned as less like machines reducible to parts (i.e. the Terminator or Data) and as functional simulacra of humans, even biologically indistinct (like the later model Cylons). Cyborgs of human origin come from the imagination of a future in which human technology will enable a cybernetic merging of human-with-computer (in both mental and physiological capacities) to produce life extension and/or "superhuman" abilities (one example of this kind of cyborg is Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in the Shell franchise). Just as hagiographical literature constructs the holy ascetic is a "sign" authored by God, Cyborgs are "signs" authored by us—in code—in a machine language. But to what end? As part of what conversation? In essence, I think it's a conversation we've been having for a long time.

St. Antony, who was mentioned above, is one among many Christian saints who, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have been the objects of local cult veneration for nearly as long as Christianity itself. I won't get into the theological technicalities of how the Vatican and the Patriarchates formally justify saint worship and separate it from idolatry—because that would entail nothing less than a book on the history of Christianity. But the point is that saints have historically been venerated as "intercessory" figures that can grant miracles (especially healing) and treated as spiritual 'celebrities' or personal guardians/patrons (even to the exclusion of God/Christ or the Virgin Mary), yet they are also historical people who were members of actual Christian communities and lived and died like 'the rest of us'. Yet they are also enhanced, super-human, "perfect", but yet not in an unreachable way (since they are not God). The lines of distinction between Christ and the Saints grows thin, since especially according to the metaphysics of relics they are envisioned as physically merging with Christ after death (and so their physical remains are, much like icons, 'overshadowed' and in some sense alive with the presence of the Holy Spirit). Tracking the history of Christian saints is a fascinating way to do anthropology because it reveals the way in which diverse local conditions across Europe and the Near East met with extant ideals that defined what a holy person was—the tension created by these dual realities has proven to be immensely prolific. They are like the ancient hero cults of the Greco-Roman world, but somehow a more open category, less located in a mythic past. They are also like the Bodhisattvas of Mayana Buddhism if only in their intercessory role in the spiritual economy.

Many people in American culture, influenced by Protestant, anti-clerical views, see saint veneration (and the veneration of the Virgin Mary) as silly or superstitious. To them it represents the remnants of a broken system. This is unfortunate, because what many fail to see beyond their "patriotism" and political biases toward the Catholic church is the immense and patently obvious devotional value of saints. As one of my professors succinctly put it, representations of saints reflect anxieties and desires related to what it means to be human—their representation in literature, iconography, or oral tradition, are means to track these concerns. What are the limits of human freedom? What are we capable of? How do we remain after we die? (Not to mention all the ethical shenanigans)... moreover, there is often, in my view, something mutant, deviant, abject, about the holy men and women that win sainthood. In many ways the entire discourse of human sanctity anticipates contemporary transhumanist thought. In fact, it makes better sense to say that transhumanist thought and cyberpunk literature is merely the latest iteration of existential anxiety surrounding questions of the nature of the consciousness, death, mind/body dualism, and essential continuity of anything that could be identified as the self.

There is a sort of secular devotionalism inherent in our attitudes toward cyborgs, because they share one particular discursive role with the figure of the saint—that is, they try to "answer" similar existential/spiritual/ethical concerns. We are not "done" with the question of being... far from it...we have only just begun! Comparing the cyborg to the ascetic is delightfully ironic, since the two seem philosophically opposite—the former associated with godlessness and hubris, and the latter associated with exemplary piety and servitude (and its reward)? But yet "opposites attract", and I have a feeling that the cyborg is, in the symbolic order, a sort of inverted saint, yet functionally they serve a similar "devotional" purpose, and this is what I'm interested in. Perhaps it is only what we are worshiping has changed—then it was God's power, and his mystery, now it is the power of science, which is the power of nature as ours to appropriate—and so just as it is a sort of worship, it is also recognition of something ominous, awesome, and fearful—because we have now divided God into a million parts and are "free" to do with them what we wish—but there is a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we are still not "free"—there is still a fate for us. Thus the cyborg is a sort of eschatological figure, especially in its vengeful "evil" guise which is more apocalyptic.

In the universe of science fiction, the cyborg/android is the "perfected body"—the modern spin on the ancient ascetic. But the cyborg is perfected by a radically different technology than the dialogic and rhetorical "technologies" that produced ascetic bodies in the Late Antique Mediterranean. They are "perfect" in an a-priori way—born or made that way—they didn't have to "work" for it. And this privilege (cyborg priviledge?) is connected, in our literary imagination, with an insidious darkness. The "perfected body" is the goal of ascetic praxis, but enfolded within the perfection of the body is the perfection of the mind. However, the cyborg is "made" perfect (though a different definition of perfect than in ascetic discourse), but the "mind" is deranged—characterized by void, lack, privation. But this is yet another epistemic trap that we've set for ourselves, because there is no "mind" apart from the body. Thus the persistence of Cartesian mind-body dualism in modern culture embarrassingly shows through the earlier cyberpunk conceptions of "the evil cyborg". Students of gender studies will have a field day with the depiction of cyborgs in film, since one interpretation of their 'perfection' is iterated through notions of ideal masculinity or femininity—not to mention sexual prowess and allure. But yet this is merely one more "empty sign"—a trick, since their sexuality is vestigial, "for show"... this epitomizes their ability to "be signs" and also "not be signs". They are skeumorphs of humans. Somehow this is an intense object of desire/fear...

The "evil cyborg" epitomizes the poststructuralist apprehension of the "runaway text" lost in a maze of discourse, completely escaped from its original "authorial intent." The sentient machine, though, is text (literally code) that has become sentient—self aware—but since its sense of self is alien to our own, what it has really become is "other-aware": aware of us. And this is the moment when the cyborg-android is its most threatening—perfect, superhuman, aware of us, yet not necessarily "aware of itself" in any human way at all. But it is interesting that we would incarnate a sort of concsiousness that "sees us"... because that is what God was (is) supposed to do. But the cyborg is decidedly NOT God. And therein lies its chilling power, its 'creepiness'... it has most of the attributes of God, except for care. Love. Probably "God's" most defining factor. And when you leave out that ingredient, what do you have? The Devil? Cyborgs are certainly demonized, especially in their cyberpunk forms. But that argument is too simplistic—they can't be the "devil" by the same exact token by which they aren't God. They are somewhere between human and God. Which is to say, because we're talking in hermeneutical language here, they are somewhere between what we "mean" when we talk about being God and what we "mean" when we talk about being human. The saint, too, is such an intermediary figure, suspended between theosis and "mere" humanity.

They are the subject of our envy not only because of their physical ability, but because they often don't have human desires or fears. They have a different relationship to "death"—if they have one at all. One common trope for android-cyborgs in science fiction is that they learn to become more human, either by their own volition or because of encouragement from their human peers. In other words, they are 'forced' to desire it. The result is the becoming-human of the Other (as God became human in Christ?) and the climax is the (our) emotional relation to this Other, achieving the seemingly impossible and paradoxical. This sort of emotional catharsis is so well epitomized in the relationship between John Connor and the Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Here, the human boy and the cyborg programmed to protect him forge a friendship, but it ends in emotional tragedy (for John) because ultimately the cyborg has to self-destruct to fulfill his mission.

 In this way we sublimate our desire for relationship with the unknowable into the figure of the cyborg. We want to be them and they want to be us. How quaint! They are envisioned as malicious by default—abject-ified—but also envisioned as heroes, saviors, oracles—thus like saints and "holy men" their power, their signification, ultimately comes from a strange but efficacious mix of deviance (or hybridity or mutation) with sanctity—and what is sanctity if not at least the enshrinement of what is "ideal"? Since the "miracles" our cyborg-heroes perform are a product of techno-science, reducible to code that we wrote, they somehow outperform their ascetic predecessors because they are programmable—there is no mystery or question of whether they will succeed in their heroic endeavors. They do actually embody a certain kind mystery but it is elsewhere—instead of the sublime mystery of faith they embody a sort of "dark mystery", the darkness felt by the fragmented and incoherent self.


We need our fix... Even in an age—in a genre—that has forgotten about God, and with him, the Devil... we still have to get our darkness (ourselves) somewhere. 

Is Virtuality Inherently Social?

Exploring the consideration that virtuality is fundamentally social—both its greatest asset & greatest weakness

Social media in its current —and defining—form is perhaps only a little over a decade old. But the core essence—which is, the function—of things like Facebook, Reddit, and Tumblr, that is, sociality (and the reification or formation of group identities), is the seed of the entire internet (and I contend, possibly all of virtuality, which predates even telecommunication in print forms). It's easy to see the world wide web as a disembodied sea of data—an entity in its own right—with which we each individually interact through the lens of our computer screens in order to procure information, as if we're miners extracting ore from the earth, or devotees all propitiating a faraway god in respective isolation. This image reveals a dilemma—the computational ideology that we are mired in that sees meaning and semiosis as linear processes that consist of the transmission of static packets of 'information' between entities. Not only is our interaction with information at large seen in this way, but our very cognition, too—our perception of reality. Ironically, this thinking of the mind-as-Turing-Machine was born out of the age of computing. Computing was born out of a need that was indeed, one could say, purely informational—the need to calculate, to count. But though modern computing may have given birth to the now-adolescent field of cognitive science that seems all too preoccupied with the individual (as opposed to the collective) and the mind (as opposed to the body), it gave birth to something else—cyberspace. Connecting machines gave rise to something that could not be farther from the cold, mechanistic nature of the algorithm—a new, terrifyingly open platform for human affect. Nothing could be, comparatively speaking, more messy, more fuzzy, more dynamic, than the interpersonal—the social relation, and also more ironic than its marriage with the smooth, hard, angular, clockwork precision of the computer—like hot blood running through cool metal veins. For a moment (some time in the 60's or 70's?), the most rudimentary personal computers were tightly coupled extensions of a single mind and personality—that is, they were closed systems. But then, through the phone line, those systems started to crack open, and this virtual self started to bleed out. After that, things were never the same. In the end, our affair with electronics as personal items that only lead back to ourselves will have been a blip on the screen of modern history. Now, all electronic devices are synechdoches of virtuality, with its eternal promise of sociality, and with that, an eerily open, omnipresent void.
   
This is to say, the existence of the personal computer, and the 'democratization' of computing that it has enabled, plays deceptively well with modern neo-liberal notions of individuality—ideal personhood means professional, autonomous, knowledgeable, original. And this is all catalyzed and annealed through a bionic coupling with a world of information modulated via the computer—an ethereal, oddly "other" world whose human history it is too easy to forget. But don't let it fool you! This "individuality" is provisional—a stepping stone on the path to collectivity of a higher order. Our concept of information itself—and thus our definition of "Information Technology"—is fundamentally flawed, too. There is a need for a paradigm shift, and part of that involves shifting backwards through time, to the moment where the first sign appeared. What was it, a chemical excreted by an amoeba, an animal's scratch on a log, a footprint, a circadian rhythm? But that's just it—signs don't just appear, they are apprehended. They become signs—that is, they come to 'contain' information—through relation. When you talk of information, you must try to train yourself to stop using the verb "to be", because information never "is", it only "becomes". There is no fundamental substance of which information is made—nope, not even now, when it's stored as code, on vast server farms, because it's still, when you get down to it, just light (and mostly trash). No technology can escape the fact that all matter is energy. That technology—the technology of vibration—is woven into the very fabric of the universe.

 My dictionary defines "virtual" (in its computational sense) as "not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so". Thus, the virtual reiterates the metaphysics of process philosophy—which contends that the world is made up of events/apprehensions/relations, not particles or substances. But… it had us tricked for a moment, there. The passage to digital technology has somehow placed glaringly in the spotlight something fundamental to ALL information, that is to say, its dual nature. The simultaneous existence and non-existence of information now appears more 'concrete' because we wrote the f*cking code for it, thus essentially making it apprehensible to a 10 year old watching The Matrix. This wave/particle duality shared by both information and, according to quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, has begun to engender new ways of thinking about reality—as in, everything is information, and so every artifact is a text—which up-cycles the older esoteric adage that the world is made of language (which itself informs many magickal/occult systems of thought). But we are dealing here with information in the new, dynamical understanding, not the old, computational understanding of reality-as-computer and God-as-programmer. (That's so 1980's!) Rather, Neo's realization, whispered under his breath in The Matrix Reloaded at his second meeting with the Oracle "programs hacking programs" more more closely approximates 'what is actually going on here' (though it's still a metaphor). You may just associate this "literary" thinking with the obscure upper-floors of the ivory tower (humanities wing), but NO, you'd be wrong, because Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory, in my view, are commensurable with post-cyberpunk (even nano or biopunk) conceptions of the self and reality, and with it the ultimate plasticity and immanent semiotic potential of all of nature and the universe—which manifests in cutting-edge corners of Neuroscience, Biology and Ecology and Evolutionary Sciences if you care to look. HOW COULD EVOLUTION HAPPEN IF THE WORLD WASN'T MADE UP OF CONTINGENT MEANING AT THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL? Yet I'm an atheist. It's just that "meaning" isn't what we thought it was...

 To get back on point, I think that virtuality is ontologically—and inescapably—social, and that is why it's such a fraught and contested medium, especially today with the incursion of social media into the lives of anyone who spends time with computers. It is obvious that cyberspace is a social space, or at least, a place for encounters with other entities—but I get the feeling that this relationality somehow pervades (or has pervaded?) into all virtual and hyper-textual worlds. Thus, virtuality is social, but it's not recognized or treated as such all the time. Since humans classically fail to see what matters to them most, its utility is still little understood—but it has a history, one in which actions speak louder than words (or in this case, text). The internet came out of the needs of a particular (and exclusive) discourse community to share information (the military's DARPANET, in fact). The social/tribal/and playful uses of virtuality go back to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems, Usenet, and MUDs. You can take 'social media' even further into the analog than even BBS, into the realm of phone phreaking, where members of that community from far and wide would meet on party lines (essentially giant conference calls) to form friendships and build community (trading tips on how to build a black box was, you might be surprised, more of an added bonus). You could take it yet further into print culture, in personals ads or "letters to the editor", or you know, actual bulletin boards! As computing took over social media, it accelerated the rate of time-shifting (though this is still a defining feature of social media)—but the gap between virtual events and our apprehension of them is indeed getting thinner.

One of the things I really wanted to talk about in this essay is attention, intention, and focus, and the way that modern virtuality has in many ways fragmented, derailed, or changed-the-quality-of these human capacities. I'm not here to demonize communication technology, because I don't think that it is inescapably 'bad' for human mental, social, or physical health. But I think that many of its problems arise because we still haven't really collectively, as a society, apprehended why we have it. And to me, it has become clear that the virtual world we are continuing to create, and have been creating for quite some time now, is not as much about learning as it is about connecting. That might sound obvious, but I think it's more profound than we give it credit for—for one thing, are the two things even compatible all the time? Why should they be? I think PLAY is much more AT PLAY here than we realize, or want to realize (Apes Love Graphical User Interfaces) The virtual world may have didactic functions, but only because it is discursive. It may contain information, but only because that information was put there by a person with some intention—though by the time you see it, the original intention may be unknowable. In that way, a lot of the information that "floats" in the datasphere, some in more unmoored fashion than others, is like a footprint, an animal track that is never erased—from an animal long dead, or completely elsewhere, and in that way, is basically gibberish masquerading as information, which exhibits the unfortunate formality of being decipherable. But I digress… though there is a point of connection: Today's virtuality turns all information social (which as we discussed, it always originally was)… and our subconscious mind has figured this out long before we become cognizant of it. The effect of this subconscious awareness is that utilizing virtual space—ANY virtual space, even if it's not ostensibly social-virtual-space—maintains an odd, unavoidably open quality to it. One finds one's focus losing clarity, getting fuzzy, oscillating, in a way that simply wouldn't happen if you were sitting in the woods with a pen and paper as your only 'information technology'. (Yet, I don't mean to say that cognition does not naturally oscillate or behave like a wave-form, because I think that is its fundamental character—after all, it is the interplay of pattern and deviation from pattern that produces novelty—but virtual space, hyperspace, and cyberspace can change the frequency of the neural wave, which is most problematic when we do not understand what is happening) You see, virtuality operates in a fundamentally mantic way—it gives back what you put in (and this happens in multiple dimensions, but you can take Google algorithms that tailor search results to individual IP addresses as an extreme [blackmagic IMO] example of this sort of cybermancy) And I'm sure what I'm about to say has crossed your mind, but the tendency of virtual space to either lead you to the treasure of "finding yourself" or the trash of "losing yourself" (it doesn't usually deviate from the two extremes) underscores the fundamental ambiguity of its value, and of the ethics connected to its use. Consider this—some of the most focused I've ever been, when acting in virtual space, is when I'm INTER-acting (because this reifies the actual purpose of virtuality in the first place). Even writing a blog post is easier if I'm doing it inside the web browser and not simply in a text file on my desktop, because its inter-activity is more phenomenologically present in my perception—the potential social ramifications of it feed into my creative process, and are a part of it, instead of obstructing it and derailing it. When sociality and creativity can potentiate each other in the strange, atemporal continuum of virtuality, they produce a gleaming and sharp synergy, startling in its ability to cut through the fog that cognition often contends with in the landscape of cyberspace. My attention and will in cyberspace is most focused—sharpest—when I'm writing an email to a loved one, finally typing up a blog post that's been percolating in my mind for weeks, or _yes_ posting a comment on a Facebook thread (ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE'S A DEBATE THAT'S RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS). What this means, to me, is that agency and attention—and by extension, creation of meanings— in the virtual realm is most effective, most productive, when it is vectored in dialectic. Whether we like it or not, every action has a direction, but in cyberspace it can become easy to forget where you're pointing, because of the illusion that we leave our bodies behind and mind-meld with data. In that instance, the location of individual agency is destabilized, distributed—even more radically than it normally (already) is in meatspace, and maybe it's a good thing, if it can just teach us how powerful, how magical, how sacred, our agency is in the first place.

It's its own kind of wilderness out there in cyberspace, where the sun never sets… a wilderness of collapsed dichotomies of public and private, self and other. It's a space where expressive modalities like writing and speaking, or perceptive ones like reading and hearing, aren't so distinct. It's a city built by aliens. It's a place where shadows become real. It's an illusion that we all keep buying into because everyone else is, just like every other semiotic system that ever was. POINT IS: THAT SHIT NEEDS TO COME WITH A WARNING.

Media Permaculture

I don't want to make a habit of depending on other people's words and thought-scapes for blog content -- indeed, the influences of many people nourish my own thought-scapes.... but in lieu of the time to digest, ferment and re-synthesize the following, I would simply like to share it with you, the way people like to share a cake someone just left on their doorstep... or something...

I am re-copying here an excerpt from Antonio Lopez's book Mediacology. The excerpt can be found on the P2P foundation wiki... which is a project devoted to all forms and kinds of open sourcedness, peer to peer synergizing, etc. - many concepts of which I personally believe to be quite applicable to meatspace as well as cyberspace, btw... That said, their entry on permaculture is unfortunately only one sentence long. This should change (get on it, farmpunks!), since I quite consider permaculture to be no more than responsibly applied ecological cybernetics.

Anyway! I digress. Take it away, Lopez.

"The necessary change in our pedagogy is quite simple, but incredibly profound. To quote graphic designers Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard (2004, p. 11), our work is not "about the world of design; it's about the design of the world." In a nutshell, this encompasses the tension between an old world approach to media literacy versus one that is ecological, because most education efforts focus on the world of designed products, meaning advertising or commercial media, but not the design of the system itself. By design I don't mean an analysis of the economic power structure of multinational media corporations or the ideology of liberal capitalism, which are what I consider to be symptoms of deeper issues. Here I want to consider what environmental educator David Orr (1994) calls "ecological design arts," which he defines as a "set of perceptual and analytical abilities: ecological wisdom, and practical wherewithal essential to making things that 'fit' in a world of trees, microbes, rivers, animals, bugs, and small children. In other words, ecological design is the careful meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world and the study of those patterns and flows to inform human purposes" (p.104). Orr proposes that we need "biologic": "When human artifacts and systems are well designed, they are in harmony with the larger patterns in which they are embedded" (p.105).

In this context it is important to consider Wendell Berry's (2005, pp. 33-4) concept of "designing for pattern," which argues that design solutions should not create more problems, but on the contrary, should solve other problems as well:

"A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns, most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal.... A good solution is good because it is in harmony with those larger patterns-and this harmony will, I think, be found to have the nature of analogy. A bad solution acts within the larger pattern the way a disease or addiction acts within the body. A good solution acts within the larger pattern the way a healthy organ acts within the body. But it must at once be understood that a healthy organ does not -as the mechanistic or industrial mind would say-'give' health to the body, is not exploited for the body's health, but is a part of its health. The health of organ and organism is the same, just as the health of organism and ecosystem is the same. And these structures of organ, organism, and ecosystem-as John Todd has so ably understood-belong to a series of analogical integrities that begins with the organelle and ends with the biosphere."

• * *

If permaculture is a design solution for the biosphere, then "mediacology" is a design solution for the "semiosphere"-the "synchronistic semiotic space which fills the borders of culture" (Lotman, 2001, p.3). Mediacology achieves these permaculture principles by applying cybernetic thinking and paradigm mapping. Cybernetics takes the view that our information environment is inherently a feedback system. As such, mediacology uses natural models based on systems thinking to map and reconfigure media education pedagogy by applying a circular inquiry process called the "Media Wheel."

It is my sense that media literacy represents a "sick" pedagogy, so mediacology is meant to "remediate," using both senses of the term. On the one hand remediation means mending troubled ecological niches, and on the other the media theory concept that newer media forms incorporate older media forms with the contradictory purpose of having immediacy and opacity. Mediacology "remediates" (fixes) the industrial model of mass media literacy and its print literate perspective, and it also remediates (incorporates) alternative epistemologies to become more fluid.

As a design solution, mediacology promotes sustainable human cultural and economic practices in its approach to content by revealing patterns of thinking that underlie the forms of media systems. Intrinsic to this approach is a multicultural view that recognizes perceptual and semiological border worlds called "mediaspheric niches." These zones are the mediacological equivalent of bioregions, which are ecologies defined by watersheds. As such, mediacology is an approach that can be flexible according to particular community needs, just as sustainable agriculture needs to be practiced according to the particular characteristics of a bioregion. To extend the cultivation metaphor, synthetic communication produced by corporate mainstream media can be likened to industrial agricultural, whereas community media is akin to organic farming and permaculture. This means integrating the local with the global, thereby "glocalizing" our practices."