Storm-porn and the Technology of Emotion

There were so many places to start this post.  Seems like any one, and none, would quite work. Thought about doing the lawn-mower tease:  think about all the times you've mowed the lawn, push or riding. Whether for pride or allowance or sheer habit. The hot sun, the sometimes breeze, the smell of the cut grass, the smell of the dirty-engine exhaust, the daydreaming, that oops! when you run over the new tulips, those pictures in your head of what the swath of green is 'sposed to look like, maybe the police order that keeps your lawn under 4" tall, maybe the neighbors' dandelions which parachute in like the communists in Red Dawn...all that.  File all those images away, and--but nah, didn't want to start with that tease.  Forget the lawn.

Instead, look at this photo I just took, a ways down my road, walking the dogs about midnight, the moon already up and down and long gone.  What's wrong with this picture?

Oh, another trick.  Probably nothing wrong exactly.  Just that with my cell phone camera, I can't take a picture of that host of fireflies swirling like an elfin city through the elder oaks and cottonwoods there by the creek.  Not even a mini-flash recorded, of the hundreds of dis-junct, patterned flashes every instance.  So no still photo. And I can't give you that in a poem (I've done the poetry, but nobody read poetry).  And I haven't, for years, been able to interest my film friends into capturing scenes like this, creating our own film bank. (I'm determined to get our film group, Dark City, back into production this summer.  I started on a Busch Light-induced script last night.)  And without any of those mediations, those technologies, I can't even begin to give you the simple wonder of walking through this every night.

The mediations are what we need to figure out.  At AAG this spring in Chicago, at this session, "Alien Phenomenology--Sounding the Thermal,"

the main presenter, I think Kevin McHugh (his son the one in NY, he said), gave us demonstrations of altered media, using [sound], and thermal imaging.  The effect and purpose were mostly to offer us a dislocation of our "normal" (that is, habitual, conditioned) sense of  being.  A lot of the images looked a bit like these bits from Predator (I linked this because I know some film-challenged folks, the film-equivalent of me and music--scary!):

or on this aslant look at sports .

More interesting, McHugh was the first I heard at this conference to talk, at least in passing, about OOO (and here's a nice piece on 'how to explain OOO to your non-OOO friends').  But not so strangely, Wikipedia is always the best at the basic run-down.  (Soren and I have spent a good deal of time this spring working through Graham Harman 

                                    

     

                  "Graham Harman: Objects and the Arts"

and Tim Morton, both worth looking into.)  A side note--if I can find the thermal camera technology, I'm ready to start writing a few scripts that use this as a basic plot/identity device, but so far, I just get strange looks...   Maybe Mark will know.

Through all these ramblings, a key thread--what we can know, experience, feel, express, all these are limited, prevented, mediated or threaded through by various technologies.  So, is this just an alienation, as we were coached to think, back when, in lots of pop and too-serious books? [ok, I should generate a cool and critical list of these, and maybe someday, but I've had too much coffee to be that patient right now.]  Or are we working on some mind-shift?  some evolution? (cyborg, etc.) an 80-degree twist on poetry? a new ontology?

At some point, being stuck and not writing this post (which defeats the whole point, of quick and easy and not-anxious communication), I realized that I'm probably not using the term 'technology' the same way people usually do, so some more cheap beer, and I scribbled out these categories, during loud Saturday-night karaoke at the country bar ('Cos I ain't askin' nobody for nothin', / If I can't get it on my own. / If you don't like the way I'm livin', / You just leave this long-haired country boy alone"):

1.  Technology of extension.  Cars, planes, microwaves.  Laptops, light bulbs, nuclear bombs, super-villain lasers, flying saucers, gasoline, aspirin, polyester.  Hammers, broken or otherwise.  The regular stuff that shapes and is our physical presence.

2.  Technology of compulsion. Parking tickets, eminent domain, Supreme Court decisions, prisons (Foucault stuff).  Animal control. Drug laws. Dinner etiquette. Those slippery 5, 8, 3 yellow lines down the center of the road on Saturday nights.

3.  Technology of evolution.  Monocultures.  Farming.  Dolly.  All of Monsanto.  Dog-breeding.  Biological warfare.  The gods.  (N.b., not all gods are benign.)

4.  Technology of emotion.  Writing, poetry, novels. TV.  Movies. Social media.  Songs--which I think become a basis for identity in some times and places, especially country western songs in rural margins, where the songs seem to codify ethics/persona/behavior. (I'll write about that someday, when I'll have some commentary on tunes like 

  "Country Boys Can Survive," Hank Williams, Jr.

or by Little Big Town, or one of Lee Greenwood's songs.  Anyway, these technologies, which are the type I'm most interested in here.

The Saturday all this coalesced, there I was, home on a stormy night, after an afternoon of coffee, prepping for Brit Lit 2, a romp through Horace Walpole (which inspires me to go visit Strawberry Hill next May, when I'll be stuck in London), and excerpts from The Monk and bits from Ann Radcliffe, reading Aikin and Aikin's "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, and Sir Bertrand, a Fragment," (1773): 

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of "forms unseen, and mightier far than we," our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.

Hence the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstance of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it...

And I wind up captured by Svengoolie's presentation of The Bride of Frankenstein, back in those happy days before movie ratings, the Depression-bliss of 1935: 

There, terror was shown inside the movie, the villagers frenzied in alternate fear and outrage, though whether the original audience felt terror or our campy delight, not sure.

But what stood out that night was more the TV weather.  Oh, there was "real" weather outside:

Yes, I'd driven home through downpour.  And later, Darrell, at D&D, told me about being on a bus in town, when the call came through to "take shelter," and the buses stopped, and his bus shuffled people into a church (wind-threat, not War of the Worlds), and the power went down in places in town.  But TV weather, an incessant drone, voices that just say the same thing, live, on a hysteric loop, with no new info, only shifting, dramatic, vivid, violent graphics: 

Yes, there are real dangers, like Joplin disintegrating a few years ago... Here's the long version: 

 

And Oklahoma, frequently, is shredded by tornadoes. 

But what we get on local TV is not measured, and not, finally useful, not truthful.  It has taken on cheap sensation of pornography.  And pornography isn't harmless; per Ann Tolly, in "10 toxic side effects of pornography use," which I'll shamelessly select from, to shore up this analogy with weather coverage:

"When someone views [excessive weather-hysteria], they end up creating an intimate bond with an artificial, fake world and can actually lose the ability to bond with [the real world outside]."

Users/viewers "end up feeling emotionally empty and disconnected...," and "while pornography use [weather viewing] may result in a short term high, it eventually results in feelings of emptiness...and deep loneliness.  It ultimately creates emotional distance."

"Over time, [users'/viewers'] brain chemistry is altered and a full-fledged addiction occurs."  Further, "Sex [relation to the world] is no longer a wonderful source of connection between our deepest selves and a beloved partner; it becomes a commodity..."

And, as "an addictive substance, it creates an appetite for itself," which requires an escalation of the original thrill.  Overall, such encounters "will magnify each emotional wound from the past and cripple your ability to meet your essential emotional needs."

Here's another porn-critique that you might have fun reading in terms of weather-sensationalism:  "He's Just Not that Into Anyone."

Of course, the trouble with analogies is they only work so far, and then they miss the whole point.  I don't want to completely reject our tech-interfaces, these new faces of being.  Technology does matter in our new emotional constitutions, but weather hysteria simply alarms and misses the big picture, the many many things we should worry about, like, say, all the chemicals rushing through us, or dubious good news, such as guns finally being more deadly to us than cars.  Or the real threat, which is climate collapse, which weather-hysteria and bad media policy prevent us from seeing.  

Quick corrections?  Watch Bill McKibben's Do the Math, which is free on topdocumentaryfilms.com, or see the amazing documentary, Chasing Ice (it's on Netflix).

later, bob