Somebody, help me understand.

In January edge.org posed it’s 2010 Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” to 172 artists, technologists, and intellectuals.  Posing the question was John Brockman, the literary agent and impresario who has had a hand in bringing to the mainstream many of the house-hold scientific surnames of the last thirty years (Dawkins, Hitchens, Brand, Kurzweil, Dyson, Dyson…). In 1998, he picked up the idea of The World Question Center after the death of his friend and the project’s founder, the artist James Lee Byars.  Brockman wrote the following about the project in 1971, which did not come to fruition until 27 years later:

“James Lee inspired the idea that led to the Reality Club (and subsequently to Edge), and is responsible for the motto of the club. He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books. (In this regard he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.) This led to his creation of the World Question Center in which he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them behind closed doors, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves.

The expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee identified his 100 most brilliant minds (a few of them have graced the pages of this Site), called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him.”((http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wqc/index.html))

The 2010 iteration of the Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” has largely been taken up by technologists in terms of cognitive processes, and as the Internet and its information-sharing model, the WWW, mature, this has been one of internet discourse’s main focuses.  Some examples: Jaron Lanier has long been concerned with ‘Digital Maoism’ and the risks of horde mentality defining knowledge on the web, wikipedia in particular.  Nicholas Carr worries that the externalization of knowledge facilitated by the web might be making us stupid (similar is George Dyson’s stance).  Carr is also concerned with the cultural phenomenon of Nowness, as is David Gelernter, claiming that “We are choosing nowness over ripeness” (and he’s not talking about Art Fag City or Modern Art Notes). Frank Schirrmacher thinks we are becoming ‘informavores’. Playwright Richard Foreman thinks we might be becoming Pancake People, spread wide and thin over networks at the cost of a dense inner core of personality and selfhood.

An interesting conversation ensued when I posted the Question as recommended reading to a philosophically oriented discussion group on Internet Studies as part of the grad school I attend.  One of my colleagues remarked on the paucity of philosophers on Brockman’s list, given how front-and-center the Internet is for many contemporary thinkers; where were Badiou, Zizek, Zielinski, Ettinger, Ronnell?  I’ll preface that I am not quite clear how the lines are drawn between philosophy and other overlapping but different practices, other than that Heidegger gave up philosophy to be a thinker (Noga Arikha was on the list; is she not at all a philosopher?), but I too took interest considering that Edge is also supposed to be founded in service of a ‘third culture’ (a concept John Brockman developed after being inspired by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’), which would synthesize the ‘humanities’ and ‘sciences’ after their long period of communication breakdown and mutual ignorance/hostility (the fact that, for example, in the 1930s great mathematicians and physicists were not considered “intellectuals”).

However, it was explained to me that Brockman and the techie-culture contingent which he anchors seem to include the designation ‘philosophy’ in the territory of snobbish aloofness that for Brockman defined the literary world he witnessed the 1960s.  Artists, for Brockman, seemed much more attuned to the most relevant discourse, as when John Cage shared with him a book on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.¹

It seems, according to critics of Brockman, that much contemporary philosophy often does not share the entrenched techno-positivism and fundamental optimism and/or complicity with techno-industrial culture, and so gets occluded from the conversation.  But aren’t there heretical arguments going on in this discussion, outside of academic philosophy?  Would the censorship advocating right-wing, for instance, constitute a heretical philosophical contingent?

Also, I bring this argument up often when I’m less than permissive about the arrogantly complicit honorific way many people talk about art AS THE default (like that art owns creativity but occasionally mere scientists are capable of it), but I have read in a few books, most memorably Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’, that given the wild complexity of much modern science and mathematics, especially since the early twentieth century, philosophy (and yes, visual art) has been ‘unable to keep up’ – to paraphrase Hawking – with the technical developments in many fields, and thus there is a difficulty in sharing the highest levels of discourse other than as cargo cult.  Sometimes this yields influential results, eg. Alain Badiou’s modeling after mathematics.  Maybe this just another techno-elitist stance, but it bears weight considering how very much beautiful  philosophically oriented writing is produced today from within laboratory-research communities.

1. http://www.brockman.com/press/2000.02.21.derspiegel.html [↩]