*'Everybody Has Become Porous'

Marshall McLuhan, re-enchantment, and the demolition of the buffered self

(This will be a No-Trump, No-LGBT edition. You’re welcome.)

Hey all, rough weekend here. Shoulder pain, and bad dreams. I slept through as much of it as I could. Since returning from my unhappy short trip to Louisiana, there has been a disturbance in the Force, so to speak. I find it harder to concentrate, and just want to sleep. This is, alas, normal. Things had been going pretty well post-divorce, I thought, but returning home (“home”) proved a setback.

One good thing happened, though. I visited the storage unit where I keep my things, and thought to bring back a book on Marshall McLuhan and religion that my son Matt gave me for Christmas in 2020. As you may recall, I’m now revising the first draft of my re-enchantment book, and it’s frustratingly slow going, because I’m trying to think through sludge (the meds I have to take for the broken bone pain don’t help; fortunately I was able this weekend to start halving the dose). But reading McLuhan has been really helpful. I’ll probably need two posts to say what I want to say, so you may get to have second day free of the culture war in this space.

Have you ever heard the phrase “buffered self”? It’s from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Here’s an explanation from 2008, by Taylor himself:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition; we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility; one is open to different things. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world.

Disenchantment in my use (and partly in Weber’s) really translates Weber’s term “Entzauberung,” where the key kernel concept is “Zauber,” magic. In a sense, moderns constructed their own concept of magic from and through the process of disenchantment. Carried out first under Reforming Christian auspices, the condemned practices all involved using spiritual force against or at least independently of our relation to God. The worst examples were things like saying a black mass for the dead to kill off your enemy or using the host as a love charm. But in the more exigent modes of Reform, the distinction between white and black magic tended to disappear, and all independent recourse to forces independent of God was seen as culpable. The category “magic” was constituted through this rejection, and this distinction was then handed on to post-Enlightenment anthropology, as with Frazer’s distinction between “magic” and “religion.”

The process of disenchantment, involving a change in us, can be seen as a loss of a certain sensibility that is really an impoverishment (as against simply the shedding of irrational feelings). And there have been frequent attempts to “re-enchant” the world, or at least admonitions and invitations to do so. In a sense, the Romantic movement can be seen as engaged in such a project. Think of Novalis’s “magic realism;” think of the depiction of the Newtonian universe as a dead one, shorn of the life it used to have (as in Schiller’s “The Gods of Greece“).

But it is clear that the poetry of Wordsworth, or of Novalis, or that of Rilke, can’t come close to the original experience of porous selves. The experience it evokes is more fragile, often evanescent, subject to doubt. It is also one which draws on an ontology that is highly undetermined, and must remain so.

Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding. Latin Christendom has tended more and more to privilege belief, as against unthinking practice. And “secular” people have inherited this emphasis, and often propound an “ethics of belief,” where it can be seen as a sin against science or epistemic decency to believe in God. So we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.

More Taylor:

So it must have been for the Celestine, in Birgit Meyer’s Translating the Devil, who “walked home from Aventile with her mother, accompanied by a stranger dressed in a white northern gown.” When asked afterwards, her mother denied having seen the man. He turned out to be the Akan spirit Sowlui, and Celestine was pressed into his service. In Celestine’s world, perhaps the identification of the man with this spirit might be called a “belief,” in that it came after the experience in an attempt to explain what it was all about. But the man accompanying her was just something that happened to her, a fact of her world.

We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours. We make a sharp distinction between inner and outer, what is in the “mind” and what is out there in the world. Whatever has to do with thought, purpose, human meanings, has to be in the mind, rather than in the world. Some chemical can cause hormonal change, and thus alter the psyche. There can be an aphrodisiac, but not a love potion, that is, a chemical that determines the human/moral meaning of the experience it enables. A phial of liquid can cure a specific disease, but there can’t be something like the phials brought back from pilgrimage at Canterbury, which contained a miniscule drop of the blood of Thomas à Beckett, and which could cure anything, and even make us better people; that is, the liquid was not the locus of certain specific chemical properties, but of a generalized beneficence.

Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times.

What if the electronic media world has recreated the porous self, in the sense Taylor means? That is, what if the experience of electronic media has stripped away the buffers? Take a look at this short clip from a 1977 interview with the visionary media theorist Marshall McLuhan. It’s on Twitter, so I can’t embed it here. A screenshot:

That line I highlight — “everybody has become porous” — was a Eureka moment for me. What McLuhan was saying is that in the electronic media age, disenchantment goes away, whether we want it to or not. But we do not necessarily become Christian again. That is one possibility, of course, but it seems to me that the far greater likelihood is that we become subject to forces we cannot control, and can barely understand.

Let me explain. First, let’s have a look at the entire McLuhan interview. This man was such a genius that if he turned up on television today, nearly half a century later, saying these same things, it would still seem smarter and more prescient than 99 percent of what’s on television.