5.16.2005

Hospital

My dad's in the hostpical, so consequently I'm not blogging. But, I have a horrible hospital story for when he's better, so check back soon.

5.06.2005

Dead Day Eve and Cinco De Mayo

Wow...double fucking whammy. Its our last day of classes (Dead Day Eve), which is one of the biggest college drinking holidays at MSU, and Cinco De Mayo, which of course is also a big college drinking day. There has to be a fucking stomach pump traveling van cruising downtown tonight to save all the drunk college kids lives.

We went and partied with our friends Sean, Jordan, and David. Chambers is now puking into a trash can, looking a little green; Jordan called and sounded like death warmed over, and David is apparantly still passed out. Ahhhh, you gotta love college.

5.02.2005

McLuhan and Mieville: Understanding Media and Perdido Street Station

At first glance, one might be tempted to say that Mieville’s use of a pre-electric culture in Perdido Street Station is an escapist’s route; a romanticized version of Victorian-age industry, presumably to critique our predilection for and dependence upon electronic technology. However, I believe that Mieville uses a pre-electric age society as a means to remove distractions of familiarity from the minds of his readers. Such distance affords Mieville room to explore socialism, diversity, and activism without the expectations one would have about a society so similar to ours. Furthermore, I believe that Garuda society is a metaphor for Marshall McLuhan’s post-electric utopia; the “electric technology” that affords their society new, inclusive perceptions is simply their natural ability to fly. I intend to explore this thesis through a modest interpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory as presented in Understanding Media, War and Peace in the Global Village, and The Medium is the Massage.
According to the theories of McLuhan, media are extensions of man, and such extensions change the perception of the societies and individuals who adopt them (Understanding Media pg 4, War and Peace pg 7). The content, or message, of the media is not important, for it’s “the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (Understanding Media pg 9). Mieville is aware of this and illustrates it in Garuda society: “The actions vary: the crime...is the theft of choice” (Perdido pg 610). Literacy is a visual perception, an extension of the eye (The Medium is the Massage) that nourishes a tendency to fragment and classify. Electric media, however, is an extension of the central nervous system (Understanding Media pp 3 & 4), and affords us more sensory depth in the marriage of sight, sound, and touch.
The invention of the Western alphabet, grammar, and the printing press caused a shift towards a linear and structured world with little room for variation or diversity as the written (or printed) word must conform to certain guidelines and rules if it is to be an effective communicator. This need for order in literacy caused new perceptions in those who were literate: it became necessary to structure the world in a linear, orderly, and homogenous fashion to complement the written word. Reading and writing allows us to become aloof and detached; literacy give us “the power to act without reacting” (Understanding Media pg 4), to experience without experiencing.
Words have certain meanings, and those meanings and usages predispose those involved to act in certain ways (The Medium is the Massage). In Perdido, Mieville shows his understanding of the power of connotation when Isaac meets Kar’uchai in chapter 52, “He raped you,” Isaac says, to which she replies “He stole my choice…You cannot translate into your jurisprudence” (Perdido pg 609 & 610). To understand, people must place words and sentences in sequence; thus, they began to conceive of things both abstract and concrete as sequential and continuous despite the randomness of the world. Literacy begat fragmentation (Understanding Media pg 8), and as more and more people became literate, everything from social relationships to education to industry began to conform to this new perception of fragmented detachment. New Crobuzon is the essence of fragmentation: the map at the beginning of the book confirms this. For little more than 400 years, we have been a society of this visual, fragmented world, and we are beginning to see the perceptual shift as electronic media takes the place of print media.
With the advent of electricity, television, and computers came the possibility of new perceptions afforded by electronics: a global, non-spatial view of the world (Understanding Media pp 4-5). Suddenly space and time began to recede; the idea of relationships that are not linear but related in different ways began to spark within the minds of those exposed to the new media. Electric media offers people the perceptions of others, sometimes oceans away, to ponder, and eradicates lines of territory and distance as neatly as if they had never been there. With the receding of space and time, societies began to see the world as fluid and simultaneous, rather than linear and consistent. People began to welcome variation and attain a more balanced – visual and aural – perception as electric senses began to replace print senses. The invention of the mouse as a means to navigate the new graphical user interfaces began to bring the tactile world into the mix, allowing for even more balance and shift of perception.
The transition between these two modes of perception causes social and psychological tension and pain (War and Peace pp 7 & 11). Artists, McLuhan believes, are the only people capable of embracing the challenges presented by new media; the artist “glories in the invention of new identities” afforded by new technology (War and Peace pg 12). Art is then a representation of the transition from one media to the next, a thought that Mieville echoes in Mr. Motley: “[Transition] is what makes the world....I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic….It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are” (Perdido pg 37). Art is the media for both the nostalgia of the old tech and the potential of the new, and changes or reinforces ideology as the artist sees fit. Mieville sees art as a means to challenge the current ideology and the exalt the potential of the new technology, albeit through an old medium. Rather than use the old technology to do the job of the new, Mieville uses old technology to illuminate the possibilities of the new; to embrace new media with Perdido, Mieville would have to write an interactive video game. However, such a medium would negate his careful distancing, as his demographic is likely pretty hip to such new technology.
Yag’s introduction proves that new modes of perception afford you different ways to look at something. Roads, which McLuhan associates with literacy and the Roman empire (War and Peace pg 26, Understanding Media chapter 10), create a sense of sequence and homogeneity, that what follows is either the same or can be predicted by careful observation. “What trick of topography is this, that lets this sprawling monster hide behind corners…?” (“Perdido pg 2). That trick, according to McLuhan, is not one of physical but mental geography; the confusion brought about by new technology distracts us from noticing the effects of our changing perceptions until it is too late to counteract (War and Peace pg 136).
Mieville removes as many distractions of familiarity as he can to encourage his readers to perceive his novel in new ways, forcing new perceptions without new media, if you will. His purpose in Perdido is to analyze ideology, and, as noted in class, one cannot approach ideology directly, but rather must court it coquettishly. Just as literacy allowed us to act without reaction, distance allows us to examine more closely what would normally make us uncomfortable, and it makes expectations irrelevant. Mieville distances his audience through his use of the novel as his medium, pre-electric society, and non-human sentients. A novel is the ultimate form of detachment; instead of experiencing life, we can read about it, safe behind our expectations, our ideology, our current perceptions of the world. Most of, if not all, Mieville’s readers cannot remember a time without electricity; this simple fact alone gives perhaps the greatest distance of all. Likewise, non-human sentients quell our sense of “humanity” and “human nature,” affording us a clear view of who the actant is and why the author chose them.
Yag’s perceptions are rooted in the totality of existence rather than the fragmentation of it; when one is flying above something you cannot help but see the whole. “I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then…you would see it from miles and miles away…” (Perdido pg 2). This distance affords the flyer new perceptions and assumptions about their environment, much the same way as Mieville’s choice of a pre-electric society affords his readers distance. These perceptions gained from flying form the basis of Garuda society; such a total and collective whole could never be accomplished in New Crobuzon’s fragmented and specialized print society. These perceptions gained from flying are the direct parallel to McLuhan’s post-electric perceptual utopia. The Garuda are the natural evolution of the perceptions obligatory of electric technology: “[t]he aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology” (Understanding Media pg 5). Mieville hints that a system such as New Crobuzon can never understand the collectivism of the Garuda: “Your laws…for whom individuals are defined abstract…where context is a distraction…cannot grasp that” (Perdido pg 610), and McLuhan would agree.
Mieville retreats to a pre-electric time not because he is an escapist seeking a retropia, but because it affords his readers – and him – distance to scrutinize ideology. By allowing such distance, Mieville’s message rings that much clearer: you are bound to remember a black cloud in a perfectly blue sky, but would have difficulty in picking out a silver cloud among the thunderheads. This apparent detachment lulls you into a false sense of security; you are lead to believe that this book is like other books. Ultimately, an author chooses every detail of their story for its effectiveness of advancing his or her message, and Mieville does just that. Moreover, an electric society is redundant, as the Garuda society gives us all the perceptions of electric society with none of the capitalist hassle. Mieville seems to agree with McLuhan that inclusive perceptions, such as those in Garuda and electric culture, bring their possessors that much closer to utopia.

5.01.2005

I'm a freak

I'm 88% freak!!

Like this is a surprise to anyone who knows me. Pretty cool site as well, filled with online tests and quizzes you can take.

Yesterday


Sitting Pretty
Originally uploaded by xtoq.
Chambers and I walked all around my creek yesterday. I wanted to walk all the way to the road that cuts across the creek, but he said no, and there were a fuckton of fallen trees and shit, so I guess he was right. Damn him. But, we got great pix of the animals, went for a nice walk, and had a ton of fun.

It made me think of what the meaning of each day is. I think I'll take a picture of something that expresses the day perfectly each day.