Page 29 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 29
Genre in the Technological Remediation of Culture 29
with them specific cultural and epistemological models. Virtual reality,
which poses interesting philosophical questions, will certainly play a key
role here: it combines physics and metaphysics into the theory of con-
sciousness as a key research field that blurs the boundaries between the
sciences and arts. The metaphysics of virtual reality, in fact, highlights
McLuhan’s fundamental thesis that human culture has been ‘cyber’ and
virtual ever since the invention of the wheel: technology is introducing
new ontological categories. In this sense, the cultural history of mankind
can be understood as a continuous process of ever more explicit virtual-
ization—books, films or virtual reality representing only three forms of
a metaphysical extension of humans beyond their biological restraints,
with no real metaphysical difference between them except in the degree
of colonization of human consciousness. Vaporwave could be seen in this
context as a kind of naive intuition or simulation of future cultural de-
velopment as a consequence of technological remediation; the ‘chimeri-
cal ‘reality’’, which goes in the direction of McLuhan and Powers’s obser-
vation that “the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that
man was not designed to live at the speed of light (McLuhan and Pow-
ers 1989).
Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new
video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the
informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at
enormous speeds—imagistic, sound or tactile—from all areas of the world,
the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will
remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, be-
ing everywhere at once in the data bank … Caught up in the hybrid energy
released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “real-
ity” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive
as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts
somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to
the real world because they have a frame of actual time and space (usual-
ly in real time); fantasy has no such commitment (McLuhan and Powers
1989, 97).
From a deontic point of view, the key question is whether this pro-
cess is culturally a progression, as McLuhan saw it (although not uncriti-
cally),7 or a regression, as Baudrillard described it with the notion of sim-
7 A common misconception about McLuhan’s work is that he was affirmative or cele-
bratory of new technologies. McLuhan’s private stance on new technologies was dis-
approving but he did not include it into his studies since he believed that moralizing
with them specific cultural and epistemological models. Virtual reality,
which poses interesting philosophical questions, will certainly play a key
role here: it combines physics and metaphysics into the theory of con-
sciousness as a key research field that blurs the boundaries between the
sciences and arts. The metaphysics of virtual reality, in fact, highlights
McLuhan’s fundamental thesis that human culture has been ‘cyber’ and
virtual ever since the invention of the wheel: technology is introducing
new ontological categories. In this sense, the cultural history of mankind
can be understood as a continuous process of ever more explicit virtual-
ization—books, films or virtual reality representing only three forms of
a metaphysical extension of humans beyond their biological restraints,
with no real metaphysical difference between them except in the degree
of colonization of human consciousness. Vaporwave could be seen in this
context as a kind of naive intuition or simulation of future cultural de-
velopment as a consequence of technological remediation; the ‘chimeri-
cal ‘reality’’, which goes in the direction of McLuhan and Powers’s obser-
vation that “the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that
man was not designed to live at the speed of light (McLuhan and Pow-
ers 1989).
Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new
video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the
informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at
enormous speeds—imagistic, sound or tactile—from all areas of the world,
the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will
remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, be-
ing everywhere at once in the data bank … Caught up in the hybrid energy
released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “real-
ity” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive
as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts
somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to
the real world because they have a frame of actual time and space (usual-
ly in real time); fantasy has no such commitment (McLuhan and Powers
1989, 97).
From a deontic point of view, the key question is whether this pro-
cess is culturally a progression, as McLuhan saw it (although not uncriti-
cally),7 or a regression, as Baudrillard described it with the notion of sim-
7 A common misconception about McLuhan’s work is that he was affirmative or cele-
bratory of new technologies. McLuhan’s private stance on new technologies was dis-
approving but he did not include it into his studies since he believed that moralizing
