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Mystics behaving badly

We never get used to it:  People who lead us to sacred truths sometimes behave badly, sometimes very badly.  They do wrong but that doesn’t mean they are wrong.

I was sick anyway over the weekend so I thought I might as well finally read Brian Anderson’s South Park* Conservatives.  He points out how libertarian political perspectives are distinct from Tea Party conservatives, and distinct again for those I call truly principled conservatives.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the former, and are well represented in media if not in electoral politics while principled conservatives have no one to represent them these days anywhere.  Or so it seems to me.

So what does any of this have to do with the metaphysics of digital media in general and Kenny’s capacity to die and then not be dead, defying biological processes, but then so what?   He’s a cartoon character.  He is, at the same time, illustrative of a metaphysical truth: Time’s arrow is not simply bent.  You might best imagine it pointed straight up so that it will go towards infinite space, and so it does.

Only narrative time has a beginning, middle, and end.  And we just make that shit up.

That has little to do with US politics which isn’t about metaphysical time, but the present narrative time.   Parker and Stone’s politics might be ethically offputting, even indefensible, the positions presented in their series sometimes despicable.  They are still good at what they do, and it makes us laugh.  Yet with respect to the metaphysical structure of the universe… they have a point and it’s funny too, seriously funny.

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Trey Parker and Matt Stone – Mystics in Cyberspace

Next to me are two books: Kind of Minds by Daniel Dennett, and The Essentials of Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. The twelfth edition, water damaged, makes claims tentatively offered and supported by ancient mystics qualifying everything, as if they might be saying too much by saying anything at all.

Contrast that with Dennett’s claim, “You great, great…. Grandmother was a robot! Not only are you descended from such macromolecular robots but you are composed of them: your hemoglobin molecules, your antibodies…”

Both volumes fall apart in my hand, literally.

(‘Literally’ – as if writing something down, making it literature, which certainly must be the underlying assumption of the expression, makes it really true.  The expression ‘literally’ entails so many implicit assumptions regarding the primacy of mental activity and expression over the thing itself, but I digress.)

Dennett uses robots metaphorically here.  The biological being who created robots is now described as that which is created, the terms of the metaphor becoming an odd example of circular reasoning.  This is not at all what he is talking about.  He is pointing beyond the expression, and that extension of meaning is precisely the point.  It’s not that we can’t get there from here; here is all there is.  Dennett’s insistence on this point makes me aware that I have given short shrift to the here and now.  Focusing on Kenny’s out-of-body experiences of death and rebirth, I missed Kyle’s moments of wisdom and failed to follow Trey Parker and Matt Stone into the twenty-first-century gaming world.  Here.  Now.

Here. Now in Toronto two brothers are sitting on a couch fighting over the console while I help their grandmother set up for dinner.  They are having some difficulty keeping up with their cousin who complains, “That isn’t fair.  I’m not … What are you doing?”  The cousin is playing with them from Mexico City.  The oldest of the three, eight years old.  He’s going to quit if they don’t start playing fair.

Distances are diminished in this gaming world that is as familiar to these three boys as the four-square painted on the asphalt in playgrounds of yesteryear, and today.  These three cousins get together apart from cyberspace and might play four-square, their physical world seamlessly integrated across North America and through cyberspace.  These boys are not robots.  Robots are just their tools, not unlike the spoon I use to serve soup.  Dennett’s reductionism isn’t helpful in figuring out what is happening here. The cousin in Mexico is now thoroughly annoyed.  “I’m hanging up now!”  Felt-space is bigger; for these boys it’s the entire continent and their playground.

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Printed books are the new media that still fascinates me – new if your perspective includes hieroglyphics. Mine does.

Marshal McLuhan and friends identified how the Guttenberg Bible, the first printed book, created a social and political revolution known as “the Reformation”.  Once everyone could own their own copy of the Bible, hold it, interpret it themselves, it wasn’t a big leap for Jesus to become their “personal Lord and Savior”.  Jesus was less a man of the crowd, feeding the crowd; now Jesus was a friend there in the privacy of one’s own home, helping everyone who can read to understand the Word up close, personal. The priests and pope are not­ so much mediaries as meddlesome.

The media is the message, was McLuhan’s catchphrase. (Understanding Media; The extensions of Man, 1964)  Moveable type and mass printing changed everything. Then came the radio. Franklin D. Roosevelt used that well with his fireside chats, taking politics out of the public square and into everyone’s living room.  Then movies, brought faraway places into every small town.  Then television, with white people learning more and more about themselves in the privacy of their living rooms, while African Americans often gathered and watched white people, laughed at them, critiquing their lifestyle.  It was a different experience for racially segregated new medium, as Bell Hooks has so brilliantly identified. (Reel to Real; Race, class and the Movies, 2008)

Now digital media.  Now South Park, created using 3D animation but taken back to 2D animation in its look, media moving backward, reversing its progress, time’s arrow bent backward.  Why.  That’s a question for the creators, why use a more advanced technology to create an older aesthetic appearance?

Obviously, it’s just a tool.  The use of 3D as the first step, computer-generated technologies make animating the characters a faster, if more expensive process.  Yet, the real advance is the aesthetic appeal of the characters, not the process, taken even further into a primitive paper cutout look with South Park’s Canadian characters.

McLuhan was just half-right.  The medium extends our ability to imagine and create, but one medium doesn’t supplant another and there’s a dialectical relationship between medium and message.  Some call it art.  Modern graffiti artists may use spray paint, the gesture and motivation akin to a cave painter and Davinci painting a fresco.

McLuhan saw progress as time’s arrow but it isn’t anything without our imagination.  We make time; rocks don’t.  Only living things can conceive of a narrative structure.

But that’s not nothing.  We do make time, a narrative.  Time might be one of the great inventions of biological beings.  History.  The notion of progress or regression.  Making sense of sunrises and sunsets, days ‘passing’, birth and death.  We make sense.

I’m running out of time here.  To be continued…

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Who Cares?

I stayed up binge-watching a season of South Park, a story about penis sizes, men’s anger management issues, with riffs on Canadians including racist stereotypes of indigenous people.  Sometimes my mind wandered and I’d be thinking about… what?  I remember these plots and forget what I was thinking about.  Who cares?

Perhaps care is beside the point.  We aren’t meant to care.  We are meant to escape our cares, to be distracted.  Friday night, I’m home late, and this is great.

Proximate Experience – this isn’t 

There’s this pact between the creators and the audience.  It’s true of live action and animation, an alliance.  It might hold strongest when we all are unaware of it, are transported in the experience of creating or screening an episode, painting or viewing a painting, preparing or eating a meal.

Why It Takes Popcorn to Make Movies a Sacrament

An aside: this might be more obvious in Babette’s Feast (my favorite all-time food film) than in South Park.  It’s rated #2 in one line-up of great food films, a genre:  check it out at https://www.seriouseats.com/2013/02/favorite-food-movies-slideshow.html  The absence of smell and taste in film and television experiences made me think it takes popcorn to make movies a sacrament.  Being transported in the experience requires all our senses activated, totally here and not here.  That was my underlying theme: that it takes popcorn to make movies a sacrament.

Escapist entertainment, even tedious episodes of South Park opens us up to the other; what is other than ourselves, other than the present situation, even Other in Levinas’ sense which is God.  We’re escaping ourselves to find ourselves fully present in this unitive experience.

“They are just movies!” Tom Perlmutter once complained to me, having trudged through my dissertation on this point years ago.  He’s a producer.  Documentaries.  He’s responsible for representing what is real. If anyone should care, he would.  Yes, Tom, only movies and maybe the more banal the better.  And now I’m not even talking about movies – just an episode of South Park.

He might be beside himself if he knew I was quoting him to support my thesis:  There is deep meaning in this season’s South Park.  On the eve of the Shabot, in the week leading up to Yom Kippur no less.  Invoking Emmanual Levinas to mine the meaning of South Park.

“Sin boldly.”

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South Park games and metaphysics; Let’s back up first

So… we live in the present, the unmapped and unchartable present, that is past as soon as we formulate the experience – actually before we even ‘experience it’ which occurs in the conscious processes so already past, even if just a nano-second past.  We formulate experience as neurological phenomena.  We can only analyze media as a past experience.

Maybe gaming is not past-enough.  I’m still enjoying the metaphysical meat that old-school digital media gives us to chew on.

Early digital-era metaphysics

I first presented my analysis in a philosophy conference at the dawn of the digital media revolution, it was a “mind the gap” metaphysics.  I was pointing to the discontinuity that the media actual presents – gapped.  Someone I respected tried to explain how I was wrong.  My argument goes: digital media is gapped experience because there are open spaces within the code, similar to alphabetic texts, that we fill in because we are biological beings.  “Nature abhors a vacuum” indeed.  With photos and sound there is always something, even if we perceive it as empty space.  Not so with digital media.  It’s a code that represents, rather than presents, the experience that is decoded.

The gapped experience presented in digital media, unlike celluloid film and the imaging chemicals in photography, present us with nothing.  Really nothing.  We can’t take that in so we fill in.  We make up a continuous image, that we experience as present though it’s past.  (See everything I’ve said before about this…)

Mind the gap

My astute critic/collaborator told me I just misunderstood code.  The ‘o’ in the x and o is just another piece of code.  It could be (indeed) a ‘b’ or ‘c’ – but that is totally misunderstanding what I’m suggesting here.  I’m not suggesting that ‘0’ is like a donut with a hole in it.  I’m suggesting the gap within the code, the gap between any symbol and the next is what opens the code up to infinity.  Certainly, as biological beings, we have to fill it in.  We live as narrative beings and the narrative has to continuously unfold.  The continuity of our cellular interactions is absolutely necessary, just as continuity with our stories is necessary.  If the continuity is radically disrupted it’s called death.  With a story, it’s called ‘the end’.

Back to Kenny for a minute.  When he yells at his friends that they don’t get it, that it isn’t cool, as Kyle suggests, that he can’t die, he screams at them, “It hurts!”  He demands they pay attention to the pain – his pain.  He demands some comprehension, if not compassion, that he suffers his super-power.  Yet it’s the process of dying, not the actual death, that hurts.

Like Jesus on the cross:  “It is finished” meant that the pain stopped.

(I’m a priest; you must have known all along I’d get to this… and also if you read Vigil.)  It might be that God knew about death – as all-knowing creator actually created death – but for God to know what it feels like for a human to experience death Jesus had to do it, and even then it would only count as this experience o knowing if Jesus was indeed God.  There have been storms, fires, whole universes exploding, but no pain there.  Only biological beings experience pain, and only a human experiences human pain.)

Radical disruption of the sequence, the narrative sequence with the beginning, middle and end, happens with every space within the code where one symbol ends and another begins, where one pixel breaks to allow the next, like the alphabet – we’ve been here before but perhaps failed to notice.  Digital media in this way is closer to the printed page than to photography.

The trajectory of a theory

Just as the invention of the printing press, that radically personalized western folks’ experience of scripture, gave way to the Reformation, the invention of digital media allows for the birth of a new spirituality, highly individuated yet shared… (to be continued…)

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A new frontier for Metaphysics and Media

… So once the South Park kids in 2D animation morph to digital characters, from drawings to pixels, then comes the new video game South Park; Fractured but Whole:

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&hspart=pty&p=review+South+Park+video+game#id=1&vid=18d29df277be61e7d99c889d55a02547&action=click

This isn’t the first South Park game.  The South Park franchise produced a first-person shooter game in 1998,  and this style of game is perhaps not the most challenging game for our metaphysics.  But even then, do our metaphysics keep up?  We haven’t come to terms yet with Shane Hipps’  “communities of individuals” identified in Flickering Pixels.  So how do we recognize communities reconstructing themselves as games?  They might refer to themselves as ‘virtual communities’ but they are very real.

Who recalls “Chose Your Adventure” books?  They are closer to these games than regular printed pages, inviting interaction.  The robust quality of modern games is matched by the communities they create – groups of people engaged, creating their own identities – go far beyond those children’s books.  And these programs overtake television and movies as the preferred medium, not just preferred by adolescent men but women of all ages as well.

At least for the purposes of philosophy, I want to crawl back to the printed page.  I don’t even own an Xbox.  Yet, I was one of the Pokemon Go traffic hazards.  I chased after virtually real objects which is a misnomer for sure given any metaphysics,  And am I now preparing to go where no metaphysicians have gone before…

… Just not yet.  Let’s get back to the concept of “virtual” as in “virtual reality” after taking the weekend off to play South Park, Fractured but Whole…

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Kenny in Infinity – coming of age in the digital era

Kenny is produced as 2-D animation, old-school animation that is now largely superseded by 3-D animation.   Here’s a good video that explains some differences between 2-D and 3-D animation by “Bloop Animation” if you’re not clear on the difference:

The difference between 2D and 3D animation

The metaphysics I’m setting out are more evident with 3-D animation, where it’s all algorithms.  Kenny is not the code; the code points to Kenny, creates Kenny pixels, but that’s not Kenny.   The process of how computers make an image is described in some detail here:

http://How computers make images

http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/tech/computerdisplay/Display.htm

Yet Kenny is more than pixels that present the idea of Kenny.  Kenny is encoded and we read the code, sort of the way an alphabet presents the sounds of a word we hear, a silent alphabet read as a spoken word.

So, while 2D animation is old school, 20th century techniques, the metaphysics of 21st century 3D are way older. Remember Plato’s cave, circa 400 BCE? Real old school.

Here’s the allegory for those who forget: Outside the cave, the freed slave finds what’s real – really real – which are the forms of everything, rather than the manifestations shown on the screen within the cave.  The stuff of the world is just a manifestation of the forms.  2D animations are those manifestations; 3D animations are the forms.

The difference between the metaphysics is manifest in the artistic practices of 2D vs. 3D animators:  2D animators work with stuff – pencils and paper, human and animal models. 3D animators work with code beneath screens, computer simulations, algorithms, the form of the human body, not bodies and not physical models, just computer models, again: the forms.

So 2D Kenny can die. The drawings can fade, celluloid film is notoriously fragile and disintegrates; the Buddhist principle of impermanence is painfully obvious with this medium.

Code, on the other hand, doesn’t deteriorate. It might get corrupted, but then it’s no longer the original code but a new code. It is represented by Xs and Os but those symbols are not the thing itself. They simply represent the thing itself – the code creating something entirely different than code, pixels we intuit as images.

Kenny was born in the celluloid era, but his reality as a super-hero, as a being who cannot die, is realized in the digital era.  We learn the truth about Kenny,  the real Kenny, Kenny as Kenny always was.  The audience just didn’t get it yet.  Kyle didn’t get it yet.  Maybe Matt Stone and Trey Parker didn’t even get it yet.  It wasn’t clear until the digital medium allowed it to be clear – manifest.

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Kenny’s consciousness – like Jesus only not

Try this:  Think about your own future:  What’s the chances of that actually happening?  We might not be responsible for what actually happens in the future, but certainly what we think might happen is all in our imagination, therefore partly in our control. Yes, possibly it’s informed by logic, careful planning, or maybe it’s just a leap of faith but we have to will it (in time) and leap (in time).  And by the time we will and leap, that action is past.

Similarly, and more obviously, the past, rooted in actual historical occurrences, is brought back to consciousness through memory, a construction, our own construction of what happened, and we forget a lot.  (This proves particularly annoying to Kenny – that his friends don’t seem to remember that he died, again and again and again…)  Kenny remembers, and we can check his memory (if a cartoon character can have a memory) by scrolling back through past episodes, but even then…

I’m being ridiculous here – you remember.  But you might also forget, like Kyle…   Or you misremember.  In any case, memory is a process of re-creating the past from traces.

So this crazy animation represents a point I am belaboring.  Just to get to the present moment…

Which is already past….

It’s way past by the time I cut and paste this text into the blog, but it was already past by the time I thought of it, even before I wrote anything, even in the present moment by the time I thought of it as present, or as a moment.

And not just because I’m slow.  If you were thinking about your own past, present and future… well, think about it.  There it goes, you just thought about it in the present moment, and it’s past now.   By the time the present is brought to conscious awareness it’s over. That’s my point, and I’m sorry if I’m belaboring the obvious.

I just love Kenny.

When Kyle objects that maybe it’s not so bad that Kenny can’t die, that maybe it’s a good thing, Kenny loses his temper.  The point isn’t about being dead; it’s that dying hurts.  “It fucking hurts,” Kenny shouts and pulls out a gun.  “See?  Try to remember this time,” he shouts at his friends and then shoots himself.

Here’s where Kenny really isn’t a Christ figure: “Accepted death on the cross” is a phrase used in creeds, that can be misleading.   Jesus didn’t embrace the cross; he was nailed to it.  Jesus didn’t kill himself; he was murdered.  And once was enough, and it wasn’t suicide; it was murder.  It’s a lot different.

But there are some similarities to Kenny’s reality is all I’m saying… that the present moment may not have any structure in consciousness.  It certainly doesn’t have a narrative structure: past, present and future.  So, like Kenny, we live in infinity even if we die.  Even if we’re born again (like Kenny) or rise from the dead (like Jesus.)

We live in infinity, this unstructured timeless present/presence, unlike Kenny.  He’s just a comic character, but he makes this much clear which is only one reason why I love him.

[Check out this tribute video:

Kenny as Mysterion – https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

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