I need to stay with the silent running for just a bit longer, as I'm finishing up a web consulting project, an interesting departure from my academic work. But I did have a few days in which, after holding out for a very long period of time, I booted back up the old Xbox and played my newly grabbed copies (used) of Halo 2 and Fable. I played them both a bunch, albeit within an allotted span of time, and will get back to playing them when I finish up some other work, but for now the Xbox is off and I'm in work mode. But given that my work right now is in web design, and that my current academic project is about media ecologies at work in Tron and the Matrix movies, the question of technology, and our imbrication with it, is never very far from my mind.
Now, one take on this, which you can see over at Einstein's Corner, is a somewhat mournful gloss on media addiction. We have become a culture addicted to media, or so the argument goes, and only now, at the end, do we understand how intense our attraction has become and how profound its consequences. I'm deliberately alluding to the Emporer of Return of the Jedi here, since he is after all the moral and technological father of everyone's favorite malevolent cyborg: Darth Vader. Darth is freed from his bondage to the emporer, which is above all and before anything else a technological bondage, at the close of Episode VI by removing his technological garment, freeing himself from his addiction so that he can look upon Luke with "his own eyes." The removal of the technology is also a death sentence, you'll remember, but at least it is a death brought about through a more natural, more axiologically correct approach to that thing we call living. This theme, a sort of humanism amidst FX, is a constant play within the Star Wars movies, and one can always see the battle with the dark side of the force as a battle against the potential seduction or further integration of technology and the mind-body - Luke's reconstructed hand, for an example. And like any addiction, there's a dangerous slippery slope to be avoided, for once you start down the "dark path" (of technology) "forever will it dominate your destiny." Yada yada yoda.
I find this thinking impoverished to say the least, and worse, I think it's politically dangerous. One cannot help but note the ablism inherent within the view that media addiction is something to be feared, that new media are especially or distinctively addictive, and that imbrication of media/technology and the body is something of which we must remain forever skeptical and eternally vigilant. I call this view political in the way that any rhetorical schema that works to write supposed ontological truths is political, in that this writing is always already laced with an ideology and a drama that necessarily privileges some beliefs and behaviors and realities at the expense of others. Here, for example, the addiction narrative presupposes that the body has a normal, natural state and that addiction is a supplement grafted on that destroys and overwhelms that which it supplements. But what if this supplementarity is actually the original state, and what if the "natural order" is simply the term of art we use to describe a certain generational comfort with a particular subset of these media and technological supplements? What if human being only comes to be because of these supplements, these so-called addictions? What if the various frameworks by which we view subjectivity - phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the cogito, intersubjectivity - emerge from the logics and processes of supplementarity rather than being objective descriptors of some universal human essence?
I want to spend some more time with the addiction metaphor and its costs in future posts, but these questions will have to do for now.