Subject: RF Dissertation Proposal #1
From: Royce Froehlich (royce@pipeline.com)
Date: Sun Jan 16 2000 - 23:53:07 CST
Dear readers,
Here is a collection of my thoughts for what I'll be thinking about
pursuing in my dissertation research. As the first of the preliminary
proposals to hit our site, it is a guinea pig. Let's slice and dice. Let's
establish a model for proposals!!
There are endnotes for citations of quotations but they didn't translate
into e-mail ascii. If there is a way around this, let me know.
Here goes:
Royce Froehlich's Dissertation Proposal as of January 17, 2000
The Transformation of Symbols: a cross disciplinary approach to the study
of the image and its container-silence.
Media studies, like philosophy, sociology and anthropology, talks about how
we live, i.e., among many things, what we consume and occupy our time with.
It reflects on what we think about and also how we think. Media philosophy
receives plenty of attention and input from post-Freudian sources; Slavoj
i ek for example, who applies Jacques Lacan's psychological principles to
analyses of film and popular culture. My proposal is to contribute to the
field of media studies through a project that incorporates my primary
academic interests (Media Studies, Depth Psychology, and Theology),
professional background (audio engineer for broadcast radio) and creative
pursuits of sound and music. I intend to show that media theory can benefit
from applying the principles of analytical psychology, the school of the
Swiss psychologist, C.G. Jung, MD. Jung and some who followed in his
tracks—James Hillman and Aniela Jaffé for example, have written extensively
on the image and the myth of meaning, but their names are rarely included
in discussions of media or culture studies. I believe their contributions
would greatly enrich our field of media studies, which already incorporates
the disciplines of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols;
phenomenology, a philosophical method of describing ‘things as such',
laying aside questions of value; deconstruction, which continues
Nietzsche's mission of the transvaluation of values; and communication
theory.
John Naisbitt, author of the mega-hit Megatrends, has recently published
High Tech/High Touch: Technology And Our Search For Meaning, where he says:
Old-fashioned technologies become reference points for us all. They mark a
certain time in our lives, triggering memories. They evoke emotion. . . .
Today we romanticize outdated technologies . . . High tech has no reference
point—yet. High tech holds the hope of an easier life but it does not
provoke memory. High-tech consumer goods are only new toys to be explored.
They are not yet evocative.
I find this provocative.
Before dismissing Naisbitt, or accepting and appropriating parts of his
work into my farrago—my motley assortment of ideas, my melange, my
leftovers dinner—I want to spend a little time with what he is saying,
partly because of what I see as a sort of elegance as he traverses so many
fields. To deconstruct or reconstruct?, that is one of the questions that
faces critical analysis—and new strands of Judaic thought and observance,
just look at some of Derrida's recent writings.
Another media theorist, friend of Mark Dery (Escape Velocity), Erik Davis,
calls his book Techgnosis—technology+gnosis—"a secret history of the
mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world's
obsession with technology, and especially with its technologies of
communication." The Internet and its World Wide Web is a network like the
brain, which is a neural network. Both telecommunications experts who
develop and maintain the Internet and neuroscientists tell us something
mysterious: as well-functioning and immensely powerful as Internet
computers and the brain are, there are gaps in both systems. "These
irreducible fissures and faults," says Mark Taylor, "break the grip of
determinism and create the space and time for chance." Is this the mystical
impulse that Erik Davis speaks of at work? Is God sneaking through the
cracks in technologies?
Depth psychology and negative theology also talk about gaps, the rupture
called "the in-between." We find it in Lacan and in the Buddhist concept of
emptiness. This in-between is the space through which, in Jungian language,
the transcendent functions. A cousin of Hegel's dialectical synthesis, the
concept of the "transcendent function" is Jung's taking Nietzsche's notion
of "will to power," which rises from the abyss of nothing—where chance is
the guardian of the gate—one step further. Sherry Turkle talks about "life
on the screen," and finds in cyberspace a corroboration of Jung's notion of
a collective unconscious. "Jungian psychology encouraged the individual to
become acquainted with a whole range of personae and to understand them as
manifestations of universal archetypes. The space of the screen, is the
non-place of the aleatory [chance]. I would like to explore this further.
Meditation is what happens between two thoughts. Another way of talking
about the "crack between the nothing" is through the metaphor of silence.
Here I will revisit some themes first encountered in the MA thesis I wrote
at the New School, The Sound of the Future—the Coming Silence: an
epistemology of sound in technologically and non-technologically mediated
cultures, advancing ideas that were in kernel form and revising others that
might still positively contribute to an ongoing discussion regarding
possibilities for living. Phenomenology, Zen and other paradigms for
describing the way things are all share an emphasis on the need to pay
attention. Heidegger talked about poetic dwelling requiring "an evermore
painstaking listening." Aural attention, like meditation, is not easy, and
emptiness is a difficult image to constellate. A selection of perspectives
on how to foster the possibility for better attaining an attentive attitude
will be outlined.
In our time, when philosophers are looking to establish their legal right
to hang out a ‘shingle' and open a therapeutic practice, and some
psychologists believe "there will be no theology in the 21st Century
without depth psychology," depth psychology will also be nourished by media
philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said "the limits of my language mean the
limits of my world." It also seems to be the case that the limits of my
images mean the limits of my self, cultivating images of silence may be of
some cultural benefit.
This project looks to expand our language into the silent arena of the gap,
to probe ever more deeply into gnosis, the drive for knowledge that fuels
the questions of Socrates and Erik Davis. Popular culture contributes to
and highlights psychological trends while it helps foster new technologies.
Philosopher and writer Umberto Eco says, "One should at least trust pop
culture." I trust popular culture to reflect the Zeitgeist, the spirit of
our age. I trust, too, that in spite of the rate at which we are surrounded
by technologically mediated images, there is a space for silence somewhere
in it. Calling upon ancient techniques of listening to and appreciating
silence in this day of massive media might be considered a quaint romantic
idea. It is a task that probably wouldn't interest a wholly virtual
machine, for whom silence is a relative measure of ones and zeros and not a
space between and in which thought arises. This paper may be useful for
21st century humans, cyborgs in Donna Haraway's sense, and there may be a
need to discuss ontological implications of the place for silence in
totally virtual culture, too. That is, at least in this preliminary stage,
what I aim to offer.
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