Pretense and introduction to the end of the Basis of Love:
What you’ll notice from the subtext to this final part to my trilogy on the “basis” of love (I avoided using the terms history, philosophy or even theory of love), is that it is both “modernity” and “technics”. As philosophers would surely have bashed your head in by, a phenomenology of the purely “digital” aspect of modernity is a particular element of modern times but not the full picture. While, yes, the digital is perhaps the most unique innovation and technology presented to us, these are just subjected to a fuller process. Here, I will build out technology as the locus between intermediating between realms, realities, or sheaths of being.
November 19th, Editing Note:
While, originally, I had anticipated Todd Kappelman to have a skewed reading of McLuhan; and for lack of time to pour through Gutenberg Galaxy, Mechanical Bride, or Understanding Media, I’d rode through his assertation, nonetheless. The problem I’ve encountered, upon reading some book reviews and synposis’ of the above is that many of my suspicions regarding McLuhan were wrongly attributed. Much of my counter-analysis to what Kappelman writes is actually echoed in some chambers of McLuhan’s thought. This isn’t to disparage Kappelman, as he’s providing a generalized, pedagogical material, but it is exactly that. A learning material for newcomers and not an actual article belonging to the intellectual tradition; thus, shouldn’t be treated as such. There is much complexity to the study of media as many of the North American intellectuals had founded and any introductory material should be welcomed, but we may lose our groundings if we begin to confuse it for the more refined material of sincere introspective labors.
I had wrote this rather mechanically, again; attempting to focus on the particulars of my points rather than a kind of ultimate reverence to the history of the media studies tradition. I’ve long forgotten the days when I’d stumbled upon peculiar websites spouting some suspicious nonsense, taking in most information in its value and not the character of its writers. Remembering back, I had some fond memories of these audio-recordings—huge, huge amounts of them—of McLuhan. They were fantastic, and you can really hear his depth through them. I’ve always remembered his, bemused, remark on his term, “the medium is the message”. He’d explained it actually was a typo by the company printing his work! Get a load of that! One of the most widespread, recognizable phrases in the entire discipline, originating from a typo; that is if I’m remembering properly—either way, there was a mistake in the dissemination process. He’d originally meant, “the medium is the massage”. Which, always had a rather sensual, interesting connotation to it, than the abstracted term “message”.
Anyways, in some strange ways I’ve audited the bottom to better represent my history with McLuhan’s teachings and representative of his value.
Marshal McLuhan
Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
Todd Kappelman’s Reading of McLuhan
The fact that more people watch television than go to church is nothing new to us, but it was one of the tell-tale signs of a cultural shift in history for McLuhan; a shift which has been imperceptible to most, and devastating to all. If anyone doubts McLuhan’s warning that “we become what we behold,” he should reflect on the consuming desire of many average teenagers to be like Michael Jordan, Madonna, or Britney Spears: a desire that has resulted in a culture of plastic surgery and drive-by shootings to obtain tennis shoes.
The only foreseeable problem in this framing is the fact that media and physical technologies have fundamental different properties from mental ones. As we have been remarking on throughout this article, firstly, we have an increasing condensation, destruction and protection measures of different “sheaths” of being. The whims of a child are still the whims of a child, no matter the technology. What we really see going on is the increasing effect of ‘senseless’ martyring of protecting innocence, actually, rather than a procedure that allows us to transform and progress society.
Much like how, in the previous article, the bear destructive-artistry is used against cultures in stagnation to promote change; in this case, it is used for the romantic egoistic individual. They play on inertiatic desires, seeking intensifications rather than reversals and transformations. Actually, in advanced media landscapes we’ve seen even more advertising and groups preying upon this new reaction to advertising as a whole. Kitschy new age video-scapes, meme-ification, and other inertiatic desires.
The Superwoman
As one might suspect, there is a male counterpart to this advertising bombardment. The overwhelming superwoman, the possessor of beauty and grace in degrees hitherto unimaginable, demands an impossibly high standard of virility from her male counterpart. The result says McLuhan, are men who are readily captured by the gentleness and guile of women, but who are also surrounded by a barrage of body parts. The man is not won over, but slugged, and beaten down in defeat.{7}
Recalling from the last quote, this one is rather easy to see. It is the perplexity in the various ways we can now war against each other, that make it much more, initially, difficult to reflect and transform them into protective, immunological measures. In this sense, perhaps, in older cultures in comparison to todays women did, indeed, have demurred “rights”. That is to say, it is the advancements in the increasing techno-logization—held primarily by males in their disciplines at that time—that led to an imbalance. There was nearly no way for a woman to be “held” in the ways that lackluster men were gaining “holding” power.
Their ways they were being “held” had become increasingly arbitrary with this new influx and intensifications of varying technologies. These “innovations” in technology aren’t really innovations at all, but rather like a teddy bear that has been stuffed to the brim with fluff. McLuhan sees so much of life in the inertia of lower-forces; that men, in this new intensified landscape—idolizing the held—have two outlets. Most commonly among these targets is the act of being slugged into submission, but perhaps—had McLuhan been alive to see it, or Kappelman smart enough to write about it—he’d also see the reverse vitriol and depressive-anger focused towards the ‘Superwoman’. This is much the fantasy and martyr of the feminist icon type; an enemy of their own creation. The problem lies not in the reversal procedure (we should obviously seek balance) but is directly in line with an inability to transcend and then genuinely use these new, greater forces.
Extensions and Amputations
An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet.
Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of archery skills with the development of gunpowder and firearms
Rather than intensifications, we should perhaps adopt, here, the terms extension and amputation. The introduction of gunpowder becomes extended into other, pre-existing “arms” of material and metallurgical technologies. These are the industries of the fire, smithy, bellows and various mining procedures; originally these were dedicated for the creation of armed melee weaponry. What’s important to understand, is that institutions dedicated to creation of objects are identical to groups of people devoted to their protection. I think it is a little blithe to say, “both weapons shoot, so firearms overtook and amputated the bow, because of gunpowder, metaphysically.”
What really happened was that we saw an innovation within this “assembly” line of artisans. The products they were enabling the existence of switched with this new ‘schema’, which, then, was given birth through the introduction of gun powder. Gunpowder makes possible explosions and steel projectiles, cannon fodder; then the miniturization/perfection into the handheld fire-arm. It is less so “fire-arms” abscess the banal, material technologies but they simply refined their ‘intent’—we simply continued the sadhana of bringing down a principle. Wood gets reshuffled, in terms of resources, back into logging, housing and other artisans—and still keeps some element of productivity in torture devices, hides for handles and such.
However, while I’ll refrain from criticizing this aspect of McLuhan’s thought (that it can be too simplistic). We are really doing a short overview, in actuality, of some general forms of it. These are provided by Kappelman, supossedly as pedagogical materials. The fault of their lack of vision is not McLuhan’s here. One can see that emblemized through this next quote on a sentiment of McLuhan’s:
We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.
McLuhan, here, understands well what we were talking about in the above. An extension with no amputation (the making obsolete, or the making of the unintelligent) is a danger. What made gunpowder innovative was that it challenged so many new structures, while maintaining ties through the various metallurgical artisans. Giving them new breath. If we seek no amputation, at all, what would that look like, exactly? Well, the institutions that gave the bow its existence would’ve been easily wiped out by the war-games of the men bellowing their iron-fires, nearly instant explosive-technics and brass helms. It is precisely this acceptance of the ‘more perfected’ technology as an extension of man’s abilities that leads to the overtaking of another, lesser, technology. That is to say, the disciplining/progression of the sadhana to procure and bring down a principle. Of course, history was always messy and many of these technologies coexisted due to actual ability to procure resources. We treat technology much like we, ourselves, are the arbiters of its existence, but technology is neither conscious nor moral. It is the product of the descent of a principle, the more higher-minded and perfected it is the greater its effect in reality. This has only become even truer in our current society.
How many boys have turned to lifting, to discipline themselves, in hopes of becoming the vitalistic Superman deserving of the advertising’s ‘Superwoman’? Or, even more banal and weird, “looksmaxxing”, as if none of us are born worthy anymore. It was a rather recent meme for people to call average looking people “mid”, as in mid-tier, middle-of-the-road, as well. As we discussed in Christianity this is partly due to the nature of stratified arbitrary agricultural—we can say now, advanced resource-mining artistry—societies that lead to a divorce between male and female institutions. What happened to wooden bows was what happened to the male and female in extremely-advanced resource-driven societies. Now (even in the digital) information, concepts, maps and the majority of literary technologies, as well, have been brought into the fold. How can one find love when the inertia of the lower forces becomes pressing on all sides, even when ones principles are used against you?
The Dangers of Overextension
We know the advantages, even before implementation, but we choose to accept the disadvantages because there is a privileging of all types of technological extension, even deadly and horrific forms.
Consider what we described in Christianity, is it not the case that Pentacostalisms greatest evil was the enforcing of a lower principle—unconscious unacceptance of African ways of life—much like if we rudely tried to enforce the bow-technologies over the gunpowder ones? The progression and march of history cannot be stopped, however, it is more imperative nowadays—with the intensification of mans mining-technologies and resources-procuring procedures—to stop the unprincipled from enforcing dumb, inertiatic tendencies on the powerless.
Agential Theories
Ultimately, this then leads us to an “unconscious” society. Which, really, is never, truly, unconscious. We should rather say, overextended beyond the necessary. Much like the stagnation of those mythic societies.
I’ve talked about boundary work in my Think Tanks article. Theories of language deal with agency and history within institutions, or the act of drawing boundaries—creating scenes. Ultimately, any theory of politics is a theory of the emergence of actions. In this sense that once the abilities are acquired, the fundamental act for future actions is the same, yet (by definition) must be expanding. The dual effects of agency map onto formal linguistic usage and institutionalized traditional structures, as we discussed in that article.
Here, we’ve expanded on the secondary dialogue I mention there. Formal linguistic usage can be typified through love. It is transcendent in its goal, yet constantly subjected to the outer, lower forces. The institutional are the immune systems, the artisans, who then work towards protecting that spark of love. In an overextended society it is even more imperative to meet it upon its stagnant terms; no longer, nor was it ever truly the case, where senseless mirroring of lower actions can provoke transformation.
Origin Hunting
One solution, not only to finding love, but also resolving this dilemma is to find where we first encounter the new—the transcendent in the relative. Much like the old Kundalini manuals, there is much blocking the way in which we don’t realize.
The Primary Meta-Political Sequence
We reach a point, entertaining an origin to agency, where despite there being consecutive links between objects of study, agency always implies a transcendence of these relationships.
There are infinite and innumerable descriptions of agency, as history has shown. In fact, if one is to increasingly bring our “objects of study” backwards in historical relationships (in an attempt to find increasingly original forms of agency, primal ones) you get this. We begin to trace scientific ones back to theological, and those back to magical, shamanistic ones.
Likewise, the goal of any origin scavenger hunt is to excavate the, now buried, relationships that have amassed throughout history. We must show why people have made the decisions they have, and why we continue to expand our domain; if we are to continue to expand the ineffable and transform all relationships into agency.
I am fairly self-explanatory here, but figured it was succinct enough to reproduce herein. Where it takes place for love, in modernity, is in relativity. The focusing on this Faustian expansion of the relative quantity, without a transcendent objective, will only lead to despair and ruin. We can all start small, whether one takes the older ascetic Christian sadhanas through monogamy; the much more primal older polygynists variants; the new sado-masochism holding/held duals; or child-like jovial light, life and joking laughter over a lunch. Ultimately love is commanded through a history of sheaths which contain many relative resources—it is displayed through discipline oriented to a common soul, an identity. A prism where one individual bleeds into another, almost imperceptible but all the more electric.
Particular Language and Processes
Learning and creating new command structures must still have referents and issue-ers of orders. […] [I]nstitutional history, and where each proponent of differing theories gathers their data, […] must be tailored. It cannot be […] co-mergence when letting each […] grow into its own would better lead each hierarchy where it must.
This is to say, by looking through micro- and macro-history, we can delineate the categories, or technologies (which are always the product of sadhanas) we use to enact the Divine into the earth. The emergence and varying usage of a technology is similarly identical to a relative agential modes birthed from a transcendent one.
[I] hold my ground here in agential theories being the key between data (quantification of relative modes of theory) and true moral compulsion (in transcendent, qualitative, eventual and experiential modes of theory) for metapolitical actions.
This is exactly the definition of technologies as discipline and deliberation (relativity) and the descent of the Divine (through the transcendent),
Conclusion
We have established a few premises:
Orienting to the Divine, a most minimal ineffable transcendent pole, is the ultimate foundation of ‘true’ love.
This is differentiated from the lower forces, which contain a kind of inertia
These act in opposition to higher-abstracted principles, which are generated out of the originary primal act of agency
History is not just a complexifying process, but also an innovative (creating technologies for the self to use) and transformative one.
These are general, but the goal should be to showcase that the basis of love begins with a higher-principle (if we want a purer love we seek the highest). This highest, most transcendent principle is found in the first act of agency which engenders all relative modes dependent on it. While technology as an institutional term needs much to be desired, it is much like the artisanal product of a discipline. That discipline is the descent of an abstraction, a transcendent, into the relative; the broader technology, or imbedded principle, is that of primal sheaths of being. These correlate roughly with the varying chakras of the Kundalini Yogas and are emblematic of where inertia enters us. That is to say, where the un-disciplined comes into contact with an older discipline.
It is the rule of man to become indulgent in “resource” surpluses. Much of modernity is the icon type of this resource, “principality”, surplus. Even if we are huffing an innovation of our previous ancestors, an inherited technology of the self, it is still an inertia. This is similar to what Sloterdijk mentions in his usage of Seinsvergessenheit, or ‘forgetfulness of the mystery of existence’, or forgetting the Divine.
More accurately this is the inability to integrate new phenomenon into a broader historical perspective. We can encounter a general shape to an emergent meta-politics (of love) in theories of agency. This reveals a procedure in which we mark up history through various ways we’ve expressed the emergence of transcendent in the relative; that is to say, developing a repository of human abilities.
Depth psychology, and various modes of introspection used today (irony and other self-referential modes), are a particular technology. When confronted with a relativistic surplus of principles and concepts, the self turns inward. It directs articles of philosophic and existential reflection in an attempt to reclaim individuality. This is done as an immunological procedure. It is a surgery in which it attempts to graft seals over punctured holes, and protective shields. The result is a generational divide between love styles, fundamental to their modes of self-hood and individuation. That is, this is how the ego disciplines itself to bring down a higher principle—without the Divine, it is just a mutilation procedure.
In conclusion, love can’t ever be described because it is the process of higher mindedness bringing down principles into the relative modes of reality. It is myriadic in form precisely because of the individual requirement, done for the Divine, but it can follow general structures through time. These structures are similar to technologies, or sadhanic procedures, that enable the prolongation of their existence.
They follow generally the physical and the appearance, the sexual and the vital processes, the appetitive and objects of conflict between people, the “ego” or communal identities and souls; then, (not in any particular order) familial, technological, economical, spiritual and especially nowadays aesthetic, digital histories and so forth; this is of course, non exhaustive but offers a great foundation for anyone who wishes to begin a “journey” for all loves throughout time itself.
So, that concludes this expedition through love. Next I will be employing an “applied theory” section. We will talk more in depth on the actual problems of love in an analysis of “hypermodernity”.
Acknowledgements
None of this could’ve been possible without the works of Adam Katz, John David Ebert and Imperius. All of which have directed me, explicitly, or simply offered materials to finding many of these intellectual resources. There is much to say about the work done by these guys, but I’ll save that for another date. I can hope, in my establishing of theories of agency, and with ecstatic vision pointed towards the future, we all can continue to progress along this long journey.
Thanks for the many memories. And cheers to the (even) longer road we have ahead.
Love is always there, even in the darkest caverns. Good health and good tidings.