January 18, 2009
- Ephemeralization -
I think what I am trying to get at here is the emphemeralization of language. We need to find a way to structure and communicate our thoughts such that the communication mimics to the point of indistinguishability the thoughts in all their interconnected detail.
We should be able to send and receive communications that consist of holistic states of mind, rather than needing to simplify our thoughts in order to make them fit into a common linguistic pattern system. I want to find a way for us to say exactly what we’re trying to say, more accurately and completely, using the same amount of brain power we currently do to communicate. We need to get our language to emphemeralize enough that the Logos can incarnate in it directly…
Check this quote from McLuhan. It’s exactly what is happening around us now. We just have to figure out how to fit ourselves into it…
All Art does this. The best Art feeds back into language, bringing forth new words. This is what McLuhan called ‘cooling of the overheated medium’: each medium naturally expands in complexity until it brings forth its replacement, which is always of elegant atomistic simplicity, and rooted in truth about the way things are.
There is a modern tendency to shortcut the Art stage, however, and without Art to plunge ahead and create false words. To bury ideas beneath onion layers of the same meaningless stuff. Our overheating never cools; our Arts are forgotten. This in itself is a new Word, but a language of one Word is not helpful. I think there are no shortcuts; we must rediscover Art in our activities.
Comment by speedbird — January 22, 2009 @ 8:25 am
Yeah, right on Speedbird! I’m all for rediscovering art in our daily lives. Do you happen to know if McLuhan had any ideas similar to Bucky Fuller’s emphemeralization, in that the cooling of the superheated medium is really it’s attainment of a higher stage of organization?
Perhaps this relates to your earlier comments about ‘exquisite complexity’?
Comment by Ian — January 22, 2009 @ 11:23 am
Well MM and BF were contemporaries, and I’ve often heard them mentioned in the same sentence. The link does make a natural kind of sense.
The ‘exquisite complexity’ was about things like snowflakes, I remember. To say ‘water freezes and becomes ice’ is to miss the point of /snow/. It’s false reductionism to deny the existence of snow as a phenomenon. Snow is *cool*, in a very McLuhan kind of way: each snowflake is complex, but collectively they form an elegantly simple and very different state of being.
In IT, everything gets packaged as a ‘new phenomenon’ almost as soon as it’s discovered in its own right. It’s one of the things the machines let us do. Trouble is, most of that packaging is pure exercize of the ego with no respect for reality. A /big/ cooling off of the IT world is due, in which the whole tower-of-Babel collapses and something new and beautiful is revealed.
Comment by speedbird — January 23, 2009 @ 7:20 am