IVIV photos, etc.

[Doug Millison]

I like Mark K's take on photos and electricity in Pynchon's work. In  
this, I read Pynchon as following McLuhan's critique, laid out in most  
detail in The Gutenberg Galaxy in the 1950s, then Understanding Media.  
Even as McLuhan sees deeply into the way that print and now electronic  
technologies have shaped humans, he also sounds appalled that we  
humans continue to enmesh ourselves in our technologies without  
heeding what they're actually doing to us -- those waves that we  
encounter everywhere with the spread of electronics -- even after we  
have the possibility to redirect our efforts, to control what we're  
doing.  McLuhan -- writing in the 1960s --  returns several times to  
the notion that we can "reprogram" the human sense ratios that we've  
permitted technology to distort; he also strikes me as rather  
fatalistic when he voices this wish.  I read McLuhan as somebody who  
sees the pull of technology, print now electronic, as inevitable and  
unavoidable as the force of the Moon which daily alters the  
configuration of land and sea here on Earth.  I read Pynchon as  
applying McLuhan's insights to his own times, using McLuhan's insight  
to underpin fictions that show some of the consequences of people  
being caught up and swept away not only by political forces and  
financial powers over which they have no control -- or, considering  
Monte's shading, the people who wield those forces -- but being swept  
up and pushed to the very edge of the deep dark wavy ocean by our  
technologies in ways we don't even realize are happening.

In those 2 books McLuhan argues that humans see photographs only  
because we've been raised in a culture that teaches us how to see  
them.  Some of his remarks about Africans reflect limitations of the  
era, but he gets the essence when he describes people who, without  
this prior conditioning, don't see photographs as representing little  
framed pieces of the world that we live in, they see something  
different.  We attach enormous significance to representations of the  
world expressed in photographs via  print, electronic, now digital  
technology, they spur us to action or not (the napalmed girl and  how  
many more who didn't have their photo taken), and according to McLuhan  
the people who don't grow up with photos see that we're putting all  
that attention and effort into stuff that doesn't have much to do with  
the real world at all.  Photos are pornography in Pynchon.  The  
picture of the sunset so pretty that no real sunset can match it, the  
movie of sex we'll never have -- in turning to the representations we  
turn away from the direct experience that life offers us, and  
impoverish our lives by taking the fake for the real.

Understood that "fake" and "real" break down in a context like that of  
cognitive science.  Still, I'll prefer my own personal brain  
chemistry's mediation of the world  over that of, say, Sarah Palin's,  
any day.