Last Media Poetics thingy

Here's the final short assignment for the Media Poetics class I've been posting work from.


Impossible Media, and the Nature/Nurture Relationship of Culture and Technology


My girlfriend Anita and I have had a long-running conversation, usually held as we make dinner and drink wine, about the whole nature-nurture question. Anita is more of a scientist than I am, but also a bit more of a philosopher in some ways too, a mystic. And so for her, she always settles on the idea of an endlessly bi-directional loop, on the impossibility of there being two distinct sides to the nature-nurture debate, on the ways that this dichotomy, like so many, is a false one. Each will endlessly inform and be informed by the other. Each will shape the other. Her argument, and she's probably not the first person to postulate this, is that our biological nature in fact creates our nurture, that out of its own needs it shapes and alters the social, which in turn shapes and alters the biological. I.e., our big clunky brains need a long time to develop. They require a long, unhurried infancy and growth period. A long developmental period requires a committed caregiver, so that the bonds we experience between ourselves as the human species could in fact be seen as growing out of the biological necessity. A committed care-giver equals a long infancy which equals a thoroughly socialized and human-developed brain.


All of that was simply about working into the idea of an endless bi-directional loop then, of the ways that to think in dualistic terms is often to start with the wrong set of questions. In Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola, Siegfried Zielinski writes about the idea of Impossible Technologies/Media/Machines that "cannot actually be built, (but) whose implied meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media." In this light, his discussion of Mazzolari's cymbalon, a 17th-century Italian "'machina electrica', (where) the discharge of electric sparks over long distances is posited as a means of communication between geographically separated persons" is especially interesting. It's not hard to imagine that Mazzolari describes something very much like the internet, leading to the question of how much his ideas (or similar ones) would have influenced later thinkers which would have influenced the eventual development of the internet itself.

This is interesting partly because, whether or not they were aware of Mazzolari's ideas, we can see that many fiction writers after him, even once the age of electricity had begun, still conceived of very similar ideas. Jules Verne, with his electrical-powered and instant global communication systems in his 1863 novel Paris in the 20th Century, Issac Assimov with A Fine Day for a Walk, and Gene Rodenberry with so much of his Star Trek franchise, all imagined and sketched out ideas of a system where the discharge of energy over long distances is not only a form of communication, but also one of teleportation. It seems that, for quite a long time, humans have thought about the possibility of ideas, images, or even a person being transported instantly and across great distance. What is the shamanistic concept of astral travel other than a variation on Mazzolari's cymbalon, with the sparks of information being substituted by the human consciousness itself? So across various times and cultures, we can see similar impulses and ideas at work, leading one to speculate on the degree of influence culture imposes on this kind of thinking, or in what ways this kind of thinking imposes itself upon culture.

In this regard, Rodenberry, or H.G. Wells become interesting for their often very utopian visions, their conceptions of futuristic worlds that unconsciously represent the purest, cleanest, most excellent development of a western, liberal set of values. Even in the often-bleak works of Verne, we see a world that is in many important ways identical to ours--or at least a world that is perfectly recognizable to us, but that is always somehow better, more peaceful, more refined.

The war-like Klingons, for example, stand out in Star Trek particularly because of their hawkishness, of the ways they stand in such direct opposition to the benevolent and recognizably classical liberal ideas of the Prime Directive, not to mention their distinctly non-European features and dialect. And so even in an imagined and mostly benevolent inter-galactic future, we instinctively seem to paste our own cultural framework on top, westernizing the "good" and orientalizing the "bad".

Thinking back to the whole nature-nurture question then, and back to the bi-directional loop of technology and culture, which creates which? Did Mazzolari's ideas literally shape the future, or was he himself, like the later fiction writers, simply working within his then-contemporary ideas of Impossible Media? Rodenberry was certainly creating the early Star Trek series in a time of increasing awareness of multiculturalism, so his inclusion of African and Asian American characters seems to reflect the spirit of his age. And yet his show was the first major television production to feature either of these so-called ethnic minorities, and so how much can his work be seen to have helped shape the era's thinking? Do cell phones look like Star Trek transponders because Rodenberry invented a whole new meme, or do they look that way because he was borrowing from existing military and scientific work, which then borrowed back from him? Were Rodenberry and Verne, like Mazzolari, incredibly prescient, forecasting inventions long before they existed, or were they simply reflecting social norms about media and culture in various stages of development?

In asking these questions, we seem forced to conclude that the sources of inspiration and action on a cultural and individual level are often inseparable from the actions themselves. Each one endlessly feeds and shapes the other. Certainly Mazzolari's ideas would have shaped later thinkers (such as the inventors of the internet), but just as with Star Trek, what other framework did they (or he) have to work in other than that which was already existing?

In referring to the projection rooms of Athanasius Kircher in late 17th-century Italy, Zielinski mentions the use of images of the Grim Reaper and a woman's soul burning in Purgatory as giving "an idea of how powerful an instrument for the projection of signifiers of the imaginary is being outlined here." Few images would have held as much power for the 17th-century Catholic mind as these two, and so in referring to technology as being "signifiers of the imaginary", Zielinski alludes to this bi-directional loop again, the idea of each fueling the other, of the imagination driving the technology which in turn drives the imagination. Zielinski writes that "the relationship between what is imagined and what in fact exists, between (mere) fantasy and (actual) reality is fluid, unstable." Rodennberry, Verne, Wells, Kircher and Mazzolani, each in their own ways and within the frameworks of their time and culture, conceived of Impossible Media which eventually came to being and thereby gave rise to further imaginings. And so it goes.