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Prologue to Interology: In Lieu of a Preface Peter Zhang Grand Valley State University, USA [Peter Zhang. Prologue to Interology: In Lieu of a Preface. China Media Research 2015; 11(2): 57-67]. 6 ontology, Deleuze advocates “and… and… and…” or interology. One of his pet phrases, “zone of proximity,” has a strong interological overtone to it. His notion of assemblage constitutes a statement about interology as a way of being, or, to be more precise, interbeing. His wonderful little piece entitled “mediators” can be read as a statement about the creativity-inducing nature of mediators, which by definition are catalysts, boundary crossers, brokers of intellectual goods, or sources of inspiration. His collaboration with Guattari constituted a classic interological operation. When we come across a line in one of their collaborative works, it is hard to tell who is enunciating.1 The idea of tetralemma applies here: it is Deleuze; it is not Deleuze but Guattari; it is both; it is neither. What is most interesting is “it is neither,” which betokens ego-loss, becoming, involution, and emergence, and which always points in a perpendicular or oblique direction. A recurring motif in McLuhan’s work is the resonant interval – a notion he got from Werner Heisenberg, which seems to encapsulate the gist of the electric age – an age of fields, vibes, and acoustic resonances, as opposed to the mechanical age – an age of visually isolatable entities and objects. All of McLuhan’s work seems to be preoccupied with this distinction. For our purposes, the point is that the vast majority of people have entered the age of interalities with the mental equipment of the age of entities, with the exception of prescient artists and poets – those that Pound refers to as “the antennae of the race.” A sudden epiphany came to me when I reexamined A Thousand Plateaus in the light of the above distinction: it is an acoustic book, an antibook book. For the visual-minded, an acoustically organized artifact is sheer nonsense. It is no mere coincidence that both McLuhan and Deleuze are fond of commenting on Lewis Carroll, who offers us a parable, if not a detailed history, of the future. All of a sudden, a seemingly chaotic cultural scene seems to cohere into a holistic oneness. Each in their own fashion, the Cubists, Symbolists, Pointillists, Gestalt Theorists, field theorists, quantum physicists, jazz musicians, and inner trippers, all the way through William Burroughs, Claude Debussy, John Cage, seem to be making the same simple statement: interality is back. That is to say, this line of inquiry is not our romantic self-expression. Instead, it has been called into being by a larger cultural
Introduction A prologue needs to be a fast piece, to be written in strobe, or peripatetically (while pacing back and forth). A project on interology, to be true to the word, needs to be conceived in dialogue, with the attendant resonances and divergences. This is precisely what happened. When Prof. Geling Shang mentioned “interalogy” after a basketball game about three years ago, I heard it as “interology” in error. In his Oblique Strategies, however, Brian Eno teaches us to “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Maybe there is power or virtue in this falsity. I see a rhetorical reason to keep both spellings. “Interalogy” comes off as a rhetorical gesture of differentiation from other “-logies,” making it an unconventional or “minor” line of inquiry, after the fashion of a “minor” literature, as practiced by Kafka and espoused by Deleuze and Guattari. “Interology” has the merit of focusing attention on “inter” when pitted against “ontology,” thus marking a paradigm shift, which is perhaps the hidden intention in question. Keeping both spellings in circulation constitutes a statement about our age – an age of secondary orality, when the oral-aural is coming back. Standardization, after all, is an impulse proper to the age of print literacy, which witnessed the intensification of the ontological orientation. Keeping both names alive may also have the benefit of preventing this line of inquiry from becoming too sedentary or settled, thus helping to maintain its nomadic spirit. So far we have used the two spellings interchangeably. In a way, we cannot hear a word unless it is already in us. The idea of interology speaks to me for quite a few reasons. For one thing, my consciousness has been populated by Deleuze and McLuhan since graduate school, and even more so afterwards. I see an interological sensibility in both of them. The word “between” is not only a high frequency word in A Thousand Plateaus (coauthored by Deleuze and Guattari), but also a thematically significant one. I once told Cory Finkbeiner, a former student of mine, to pay particular attention to the word “between” when reading the book. He acted on the idea and found it to be a rewarding experience. Before I knew it, he had turned from an Aldous Huxley fan into an avid reader of Deleuze. Put in analogical form, the tree is to ontology as the rhizome is to interology. Instead of “to be” or
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mountain is to experience a specific mode of being, or interbeing. I have to admit that my receptivity to the idea of interology may also have to do with my Bildung, work experience, and life experience. This is no place for narcissism or nostalgia so I will keep it succinct. Growing up in China, I was easily fascinated with all the richly different dialects. Before going to college, Mandarin was no more than an artificial language we heard on the radio, in the movie theater, and in some classes but not others. We all picked up Mandarin in college but folks off campus either spoke the local dialect or were “bilingual.” Code switching or intralingual translation was a daily business. When we first went to Beijing toward the end of the 1980s, it was obvious that people spoke Mandarin with a different tonality, a somewhat higher pitch, more fluidity, and less enunciation. That is why when I came across Bakhtin’s notions of “heteroglossia,” “dialogism,” and “linguistic contact zone” later in life, they made total sense to me. Notice that these are all interological notions. There is no one Chinese language. Monolingualism is a nonissue in China. It is safe to say that linguistic interality is a big deal for the typical kid in China, perhaps even more so today since English has established a presence there. In college I majored in English and dedicated much of my time to mastering this medium and getting exposed to the cultures behind it. Studying English gives the Chinese speaker a linguistic double consciousness and creates a sense of play, a hybrid energy, and a peculiar interality in the psyche. An interesting thing this linguistic double consciousness does is that it turns every social encounter – whether with foreigners or with compatriots – into an intercultural encounter. English or Chinese, the whole point of language is to sort out, map out, make up, act out, and play with relations. Between the two, English is more heavy-handed when it comes to spelling out relations. More is put in the code. There is more redundancy and less ambiguity in English. Grammatically speaking, individual words enjoy less freedom and fluidity in English than in Chinese. In this sense, English is a more “striated” language. To wield English freely involves more discipline. There are more semantic intervals in Chinese. Context and situational context play a bigger role in sense making. Analyzing language is actually a good way to intuit the whole idea of interality. A word can never selfdetermine its pronunciation, form, and meaning. Instead, these are all a function of its interplay with other words. But there are interlingual differences. The interalities between words are more rigorously regulated in English than in Chinese, giving English sentences a degree of formal seamlessness and linear continuity
milieu. The time is ripe. In a sense, the word “interality” has willed itself into being, with Prof. Shang as the “medium” or outlet. Its birth was an infinitesimal but humanly significant cosmic event, the outcome of a moment of cosmic self-reflexivity. Reexamining McLuhan’s work through the lens of interality has been a revealing experience. His work is permeated with interalities, some of which are enumerated in the article, “McLuhan and I Ching: An Interological Inquiry” (Zhang, 2013, pp. 449-468).2 One thing that is worth mentioning here is that righthemisphere cultures tend to be interality-oriented, whereas left-hemisphere cultures tend to be entityoriented. The latter breed radical individualism, whereas the former may show inadequate respect for individual dignity, especially in the eye of the latter. The interality between these two types of cultures should be of great interest to the student of culture. These, however, are no more than analytic categories in the final analysis. Actual cultures always lie somewhere on a continuum. Generally speaking, oral cultures tend to be right hemisphere dominant and interality-oriented, whereas literate cultures tend to be left hemisphere dominant and entity-oriented. Protestant cultures tend to be more entity-oriented than Catholic cultures. The latter seem to have retained an inkling of acoustic sensibility and more interalities (say, through the suspension of time or the observance of sacred time) in their social life. Preliterate and postliterate cultures tend to be more interalityoriented than literate cultures. Print cultures tend to be more object-oriented than manuscript cultures. Imagebased cultures tend to be more interality-oriented than word-based cultures. Hieroglyphic and ideographic cultures tend to be more interality-oriented than cultures built on the phonetic alphabet. An unintended consequence of alphabet literacy is that it cultivates an attitude of detachment and objectification, which is a far cry from, say, the Chinese sensibility, for which a mountain is never simply an object for people to gaze upon in a cold, detached way. Instead, there is always affective investment on the part of the observer. Take this line by Liu Xie (刘勰): “登山 则 情 满 于 山, 观 海 则 意 溢 于 海” (When climbing a mountain, one suffuses the mountain with one’s feelings; when viewing a sea, one spills one’s affections over the sea). Byron has a similar line: “High mountains are a feeling.” But let’s not forget that Byron is a poet. The interality here is affective in nature. That is to say, mountains affect us in such a way that we care about them when we inhabit the fields or environments they create. Alan Watts (1962) has it right when he says, “The landscape I am watching is also a state of myself, of the neurons in my head” (p. 42). Deleuze’s notion of assemblage applies here: to form an assemblage with a http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
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ears were all ready when the word interology was brought up.
that, if found in a Chinese sentence, would make the sentence look tense, pretentious, and noisy, if not fussy. There is more ma (间) between Chinese words. The relationality, by virtue of being undefined, ends up being richer. To repurpose Flusser’s formulation, the Chinese sentence “harbors virtualities not yet realized: it is poor in realizations but rich in virtualities, whereas the English sentence “has effected a great part of its virtualities: it is effectively rich and virtually poor” (Flusser, 2013, p. 161). Comparatively speaking, English is the language of the engineer and the lawyer, whereas Chinese is the language of the poet, aesthete, and nature lover. That is not to say that English cannot be appropriated as a poetic medium, or that Chinese cannot be metamorphosed into a legalistic medium. As a matter of fact, contact with English and other European languages has made Chinese self-conscious, and has induced a becoming Other of the language.3 On the other hand, experimenting with English with a Chinese linguistic sensibility may end up cooling down the language, giving it a mosaic quality. Although theoretically speaking a mindset constituted by the English language would be out of place in a Chinese cultural milieu, at a practical level, this milieu has been shifting at an astonishing pace over the past thirty-strong years. As a cultural force, the English language has contributed to this shift. By the nineties, folk wisdom had already intuited the car, the computer, and the English language as the three mediums to play or interface with if one was to keep up with the times. Over the years, my life has unfolded in one liminal space after another. I have since intuited that the interzone or zone of proximity can be a space of transformation if one is ready for it, and that what we have to say about linguistic interality may also apply to social interality. When I came to the US for the first time, I sat in on Prof. Richard Bauman’s class out of curiosity. The topic of the day happened to be Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, which immediately resonated with me. In my intellectual adventures since then, I have paid particular attention to liminal figures, boundary crossers, mediators, frontiersmen, and the like. In my scholarly work, I repeatedly found myself bridging seemingly disparate fields or figures, such as rhetoric and theater, rhetoric and media ecology, syntax and ethics, photography and Zen, Deleuze and Zen, Deleuze and rhetoric, Deleuze and McLuhan, McLuhan and I Ching, Virilio and media ecology, Flusser and media ecology, media ecology and Chinese culture, and so on. At one point in time, it suddenly dawned upon me that there is a homology or profound oneness between poiesis, autopoiesis, and social poiesis, all of which are thoroughly interological in nature.4 All is to say that my http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
What Is Interology? Interology is an all-in-one term, which encompasses ways of being (I should say “interbeing”), ways of knowing, modes of operation, Weltanschauung, cosmology, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Its “object” of study is interality, which is a non-object. Depending on whom we think with, we may get different styles of interologies. Here is a Deleuzian take. If traditional ontology studies being, then interology studies interbeing and becoming. Being is interbeing. If every time we hear the word “ontology,” we have to remind ourselves to hear it as “interology,” we might as well discard the misnomer and adopt the right word. Interology is interested in the following key questions: With whom or what is a flux of life entering into composition? Does the resultant assemblage or milieu suit the nature of this flux of life? Does it maximize the potential of this flux of life or does it keep this flux of life from doing what it is capable of doing? How does the zone of proximity thus created transform the constituent elements of the assemblage, for better or for worse? This take on interology has everything to do with the pursuit of the good life, which is to say, it is indissociable from ethics. The ending of the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus can be read as the Deleuzian interologist’s manifesto. It is where wordings like “overthrow ontology” appear, where Deleuze and Guattari affirm interology without actually using the word. The following excerpt more or less conveys the sentiment: The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and… and… and…” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.”… American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25) Interology Deleuzian style is more interested in transformations and transfigurations in between, in 59
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itself as it is inside it. One thing Cage did was introducing chance to his composition. Instead of the composer writing the music, the music writes itself as a function of the quality of the cosmos in the moment. As far as the music is concerned, the composer’s ego is entirely emptied out, and no longer serves as the source of decision. A new interality kicks in – that between the music as figure and the cosmos as informing ground. If a medium is needed in between, nothing is more fitting than the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. For our purposes, music is a metaphor for interbeing and impermanence. The impermanence or transience is precisely what makes it spiritual. As the article, “The Human Seriousness of Interality” has it: “Music is a system of interalities in the service of a spiritual impulse.”
affinities, affectivities, alliances, and valences than socalled essences and filiations. It is more interested in pragmatics than semantics. It entails an ethics of vitalism, fluidity, insecurity, and affectability, as distinguished from essentialism and self-identicalness. Interology Deleuzian style is vectorial rather than docile, involutional, negentropic, and creative rather than conservative. It believes more in perpendicularity, thirdness, and ego-loss than egocentric transitivity. It is open to good encounters, raptures, and deliriums and seeks to unblock, unburden, and unbind elan vital. It implies a philosophy of intensity and becoming. What comes next is a set of probes on interality and interology. The idea is to illustrate the various ways in which the concepts apply. Music Music is interological through and through. Without interality, there can be no music. A chord is a union of two or more sounds, with an interval or intervals in between, heard at the same time. A melody is a succession of sounds, with intervals in between, so arranged as to produce a pleasing effect upon the ear. When we chance upon a Gershwin piece in the middle, we can recognize it is Gershwin because of a signature phrase of his, which is essentially an idiosyncratic sequence of intervals. There is interality between melody and accompaniment. Melody is to accompaniment as figure is to ground. The interality or resonance gives a piece its depth and richness. Duets, trios, quartets, quintets, and concertos, all the way to symphonies are all predicated upon interality. As Jakob von Uexküll (2010), the theoretical biologist, points out, “it is up to the composer to connect the tones of each instrument contrapuntally with the tones of every other instrument” (p. 187). In his work, he metaphorizes the word counterpoint and radically extends its applicability. The tune of the wasp, for example, has a contrapuntal relationship with the tune of the orchid. Our back has a contrapuntal relationship with the back of the chair. The spider’s web has a contrapuntal relationship with the profile of the fly. The tick’s percepts have a contrapuntal relationship with the smell and blood temperature of the mammal. Nature itself is an infinitely complex and elegant symphony. Claude Debussy, the French Impressionist composer, says, “Music is the space between the notes.” That is to say, Debussy sees ma as the essence of music. Compared with Bach’s music, John Cage’s music is a lot less self-contained. As a gesture of revolution, Cage’s music is to be deciphered in relation to the musical tradition of the West. That is to say, the meaning of Cage’s music is as much outside the music http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
Chamber Music, Jazz, and Dialogue Flusser concludes his book, Into the Universe of Technical Images, with a chapter on chamber music, the essence of which is play and interplay. He likens chamber music to jazz. Both are dialogic and negentropic, and generate the sensation of freedom. The key difference between the two, which Flusser does not touch upon, is that jazz is more democratic whereas chamber music is a bit more “aristocratic” or “elitist,” in the sense that the musicians have to be really virtuosic and that the audience does not play as big of a role as in jazz. Jazz enacts a democratic ethos. It is the soundtrack of 20th century America. As a preindustrial form of communication, chamber music is strongly reminiscent of the dialogic circles that emerged during the Renaissance. It is dialogic but relatively exclusive. Chamber music, jazz, and dialogue are all interological operations. The encounter between musicians or interlocutors creates a liminal space, a middle ground, which is the locus of creativity and the space for becoming. Co-players or interlocutors serve as mediators for each other. They affect and are affected by each other in the moment, triggering off, catalyzing, and channelizing each other’s creativity. In the art of dialogue, there is nothing like a good question. A wellposed, well-timed question often induces an upsurge of creative energy in the interlocutor. A question can always be answered with another question, which does not have to be answered to have an effect. The practice of questioning and answering is also a Zen practice known as mondō (“问答”) in Japan, the sole purpose of which is to induce satori, or sudden, total awakening (顿 悟). Compared with a monologic, linearly progressive thesis or a self-contained, seamless discourse, dialogue is unfinished, full of intervals, and therefore invites completion by the reader. As a genre of scholarship and 60
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Regarding his collaboration with Guattari on AntiOedipus, Deleuze (2007) confided in a letter to Kuniichi Uno (宇野邦一): We began with long, disorderly letters. They were interminable. Then we started meeting, just the two of us, for several days or weeks at a time…. We worked independently, each one at his desk, developing this or that point in different directions; we swapped drafts, and we coined terms whenever we needed them. The book at times took on a powerful coherence that could not be assigned to either of us. [Paragraph break.] Our differences worked against us, but they worked for us even more…. Working together was never a homogenization, but a proliferation, an accumulation of bifurcations, a rhizome… Félix had these brainstorms, and I was like a light[n]ing rod. Whatever I grounded would leap up again, changed, and then Félix would start again, etc., and that is how we progressed. (pp. 238-239) A few things stand out to me. For there to be meaningful interality, difference is indispensable. It is not a problem to get rid of, but a source of productive tension and plenitude. An indicator of involutional collaboration is the emergence of a thirdness in between the collaborators. Collaborators modulate and sometimes falsify each other’s impulses, so that when an idea bounces back, it assumes a different shape and obtains a different vector. Their collaboration on A Thousand Plateaus was a different experience entirely. As Deleuze (2007) noted: Félix and I had developed such a good working relationship that the one could guess where the other was headed. Our conversations now were full of ellipses, and we were able to establish various resonances, not between us, but among the various disciplines that we were traversing… under Félix’s spell, I felt I could perceive unknown territories where strange concepts dwelt. The book has been a source of happiness for me, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s inexhaustible. (pp. 239-240) There are at least three interological motifs here. First, the ellipses in their conversations are not unlike what the Taoists call Voids, which have a generative function. In a different context, Deleuze said the following, which supports this understanding: “the lightest conversation is a great schizophrenic experiment happening between two individuals with common resources and a taste for ellipses and short-hand expressions. Conversation is full of long silences; it can give you ideas” (Deleuze, 2007, p. 384). The second interological motif is resonance, which is the organizing principle behind A Thousand Plateaus – the principle that gives the book an acoustic
a mode of pedagogy, dialogue is “cool,” dynamic, inclusive, impregnating, and fertile. Saul Steinberg remarks, “What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” A piece of work that is totally finished and flawless may well be totally irrelevant, if not Faustian. The best kind of dialogue is motivated by a desire to overcome one’s limitations, to experience ego-loss, to be carried away by the mind-opening remarks blurted out by one’s interlocutor in the moment, to be beside oneself with sudden epiphany. Vulnerability alone makes this possible. Eric Hoffer points out, “Minds copulate wherever they meet” (Hoffer, p. 84). A good dialogue is an intellectual adventure that culminates in a cerebral orgasm, or, better still, a thousand plateaus. The dialectical-minded Flusser takes account of dialogue in terms of synthesis, i.e., the interlocutors’ synthesizing of the information stored in each other’s consciousness to produce new information. What Flusser is not privy to is the possibility for involution, which entails the dissolution of the interlocutors’ egos, the emergence of a thirdness or neitherness from in between, the shooting off of the dialogue in an oblique direction, along a witch’s line. The latter understanding is Deleuzian, and is exemplified by the kind of collaborative writing between Deleuze and Guattari. The difference between the Flusserian interzone and the Deleuzian interzone is most probably a difference in kind. It takes significantly more to create the latter, which induces and is induced by nothing short of a Zen experience. Collaborative Writing Collaborative writing is an interological operation. Depending on the chemistry or dynamic, it may proceed differently. Put in mathematical form, these are some of the possibilities: 1+1=3 (which means there are synergies in between; the additional value comes from interality); 1+1=1 (which means a sense of oneness is achieved); 1+1=11 (interface without fusion – “11” is transformed from a number into an ideogram; or, one can say the binary number 11 equals 3); 1+1=x (x stands for uncertainty, originality, or a creativity that takes both parties by surprise; such collaborative work can be a source of rapture or ecstasy); 1+1=nil=infinity (this is a Buddhist insight; the notion of ego-loss applies here: ego-loss means not being blinded by oneself, openness to infinite possibilities, awakening, or satori; the other party serves as a mediator, a trigger for such awakening). One has to make a clearing for the other in the first place. Collaborative writing is about openness and interality through and through. It is a matter of chemistry, alchemy, magic, resonance, involution, or gazing into the abyss – anything but simple arithmetic. http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
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one of the most problematic interalities for humanity at this historical juncture. Guattari (1989) takes a step further and calls our attention to three ecologies, instead of one (pp. 131147). Besides the natural or environmental ecology, there is also a social ecology, and a mental ecology. 5 As a species, we face threats on all three fronts. Paradoxically, the threats are of our own making. Seeing the natural world not as our body, but as an object to exploit, to dominate, we have been doing all sorts of violence to it, unaware that every act of hostility to the natural world is also an act of self-mutilation. Blinded by the ideology of efficient causality, we have singlemindedly sought to enhance our technological prowess, without regard to the subtle, ineffable, and oftentimes invisible interdependences, contrapuntalities, and dynamic equilibriums that make the world such a marvelous place. We have been disrupting one contrapuntal relationship after another, at an accelerating pace. In contrast, the so-called “primitive” peoples have displayed a much better sense of relationality, interality, or ecology in their attitudes and life practices. On the social side, technologies of interconnectivity allow us to relate to more people than ever before on any given day, giving us the sensation of hypersociality. Yet we pay a price for this sensation: we are becoming apparitions to each other. In person, we are either too awkward or too busy with our gadgets to strike up meaningful conversations with people around us. In reality, we spend a significant portion of our waking hours interacting with technical objects and being enslaved by digital megamachines.6 When I hold a rock in my hand, I feel it in terms of my own fingers. When I Skype people, what I see is no more than a metaphor of them. I can only grasp them in terms of pixels. The simple fact that we are doing little more than interfacing with a terminal when we are on the Internet is like Poe’s purloined letter, which is too obvious to see. The other day, I was taking a nap. My child came in and said, “Stop being a cocoon.”7 It was such an innocent remark. What a timely message for most people today, though. The Internet has turned our social ecology into a virtual parody of itself. Few people seem to remember that Arpanet – the precursor to the Internet – was originally invented by the military to help their communications infrastructure survive a potential nuclear attack. We need to recuperate a social interality defined by our presence to each other, or an embodied social ecology. On the mental side, the real choice is between a fascist circuitry – a closed feedback loop that collects information about people and feeds them disinformation to program their desires and behavior – and a dialogic circuitry – one that is open, interological, and
quality. Third, Guattari created a peculiar atmosphere or zone of proximity, which made certain concepts imaginable. The Three Ecologies There is a kind of tree seed in our neighborhood. I’m fond of picking it up and throwing it in the air, to see it twirl around in the wind, until it lands headfirst among the grass, like a dart, displaying an astonishing will to life with its posture. The elegance and intelligence of morphogenesis always get me to marvel and muse. There is a contrapuntal relationship between the shape of the seed on the one hand and the wind and the gravitational field on the other. People call the seeds maple-copters. Alan Watts (1962) has a very similar passage: A seed, floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch it by one hair between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this little creature actually wiggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get away. Common sense tells me that this tugging is the action of the wind, not of the thistledown. But then I recognize that it is the “intelligence” of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind. (pp. 63-64) As the hidden environment, the wind and the gravitational field have served as the formal cause of the thistledown and many other flying seeds. The idea that only animals bind space but not plants is wrong, after all. Symbiosis is a special kind of contrapuntal relationship, or a special kind of interality. Vilém Flusser (2003) points out in a conversation: A type of wild potato grows in Switzerland. This potato has a very specific and strange violet color. And then there is a butterfly that lives somewhere in the Bernese Oberland. And this butterfly has exactly the same color as that potato. In fact, the butterfly feeds exclusively on this potato. And the potato propagates purely thanks to the butterfly…. In this case I can say that the potato is the butterfly’s digestive apparatus, the butterfly is the potato’s sexual apparatus, and both have the same color. (pp. 100-101) Sensitivity to interality in nature bespeaks an ecological sensibility. Woe to us if someday we’ll have to design robot bees to pollinate all the flowers. McLuhan takes this understanding beyond nature to culture, and points out that humans are the reproductive systems of machines. Nowadays, most people are symbiotic with their smart gadgets. At a practical level, this is perhaps http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
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deserves to be seen. The above approach is precisely what McLuhan means by probing. Whether a probe makes sense or is sheer nonsense is not important, as long as it yields insight. Since real problems often feel like dilemmas or unsolvable conundrums, good probes precisely take the form of dilemmas or conundrums, so as to stretch the mental apparatus as much as possible so that it can encompass the problem as a non-problem. Not only does the DEW-Line deck offer an interological approach to problem solving, some of the cards also contain interaliy in their content. In discussing the following lines from the deck, I have far more interest in being provocative than being correct. “Learning creates ignorance.” There is ambiguity in this line. Figure/ground dynamics (which is a matter of interality) is one way to disambiguate it. Another possibility is to disambiguate it in terms of nonduality: the ignorance is in the learning or is at one with it; there is such a thing called “learned ignorance” (Buddhists call it “所知障,” meaning knowledge-based hindrance) or “trained incapacity,” just as there is such a thing called “the knowledge that does not know,” i.e., the superior kind of knowledge unhindered by “knowing.” These oxymoronic expressions all rest on internal tension, which is a kind of interality. Tetralemma is a good way to grasp oxymoron: “it is” learning; “it is not” learning because it is also a particular kind of ignorance which blocks other ways of knowing; “it is both” learning and ignorance at once; and finally, there is a flip into “it is neither,” which is to say, from the capacity to entertain “it is both” emerges a higher wisdom (formulated as “it is neither”), a sense of “throughness” (通), which is the whole point of oxymoron.8 Oxymoron is a matter of “perspective by incongruity.”9 “Blowing both horns of his dilemma.” This line comes from the expression “on the horns of a dilemma.” The idea is that it is undesirable to be caught on either horn of an animal. There is a pun in the line – a play between the two senses of “horn.” That is the first interality, which creates a rhetorical pleasure. Blowing both horns of his dilemma implies a tetralemmic way of thinking (the third moment of which is formulated as “it is both”), which is perhaps the best way to overcome a dilemma. That is the second interality. There is figure/ground interplay (which again is a matter of interality) in this line about the king: “Here comes everybody. He wears his people on his sleeve.” The king is a corporate figure, a stand-in for the body politic. This other line is also about figure/ground interplay: “The stripper puts the audience on by taking them off.” Clothed or not, the stripper is always about the audience. Similarly, when a fascist takes power, it is
negentropic, that affords the creative upsurge of new ideas to sustain society. The former is a mechanism of control, whereas the latter brings about freedom and becoming. In all fairness, both tendencies are in sight. But there are reactive forces around us that seek to defuse freedom and block becoming, that sap society’s creative energy. Managerialism is just one nasty example. As much as we are getting the thrills of a global superbrain or a global cerebral orgasm, there is also creepy surveillance going on. The two are simply flip sides of the same coin. Meaningful interality may already have to take the form of interruptions. We need to invent circuit breakers so we do not get an intensified version of totalitarianism. A simple ethical question to ask is: if every answer that we need can be found instantaneously through a search engine, aren’t we tempted to give up the joy of musing and sudden epiphany? On all three counts, we aren’t as interological as we thought we are. How the ecology of media (the fourth ecology) is interfacing with, affecting, and redefining the environmental, social, and mental ecologies is a pressing issue in our age. The interality between these ecologies is an interality of a higher order. The ultimate good of media ecology, be it a discipline or a metadiscipline, necessarily lies outside itself. Absent addressing its interality with the other three ecologies, media ecology is ludic behavior at best. It can be practiced with maximum rigor but also maximum blindness and irrelevance. Interality in the DEW-Line Deck The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line card deck, co-designed by McLuhan and Harley Parker and released in 1969, is an artifact that embodies McLuhan’s way of knowing, which is playful and interological in nature. The cards can be used separately or in combination, partly to help the problem solver loosen up, partly to shed light on thorny situations. The rationale is that a problem is never a problem in its own right. Rather, it is always a problem in relation to our mental apparatus, which can always be lubricated or retuned. Being stuck with a problem means there is no play between the problem and our mental apparatus. By bracketing our habitual way of approaching things, randomly drawing a card from the deck, and seeing the problem through the lens of the card, we not only introduce a sense of play and an element of chance into the situation, but also get liberated from who we are, which is what makes the problem a problem in the first place. This “any approach but mine” attitude bears a resemblance to the Zen Buddhist notion of wuxin, or no mind. To achieve wuxin is to allow no mental rut to get in the way of our seeing a situation in a way that it http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
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narrow seriousness. The clown creates around himself a comic milieu, a light-hearted atmosphere so social business at the imperial court can be transacted with humor. In this sense, the clown is a medium, a mediator, a liminal figure between the emperor and his men. A field of energy is created thanks to the interality between the emperor and the clown. There is also polarity between the emperor and the clown: the one is to be taken seriously precisely because the other is not, in the same way that the rest of America must be real if Disney World is fantasyland. There are two lines about the mini-skirt, of which McLuhan seems to be fond of speaking. “High rise and mini-skirts, the end is in sight; i.e., instant slums.” “Fulton’s steamboat anticipated the mini-skirt. We don’t have to wait for the wind anymore.” There is a reverse zeugma in each. A zeugma is the linguistic equivalent of a fork in chess. It is interality in action.
probably because the majority of people desire him or her to be in power – to consummate the microfascisms on their part. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains the audience’s affective investment well in his essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” which can be read as a political allegory. The figure is always about the ground, of the ground, and for the ground. In a sense, we always get the kind of politicians and movies and everything else that we deserve. There is a synecdoche in this line: “The hand that rocked the cradle just kicked the bucket” (Hindu sage to professor at Cambridge). Literally, the hand does not kick the bucket. There is incongruity between subject and predicate, which violates the audience’s linguistic expectation but comes off as fun. In this incongruity lies interality. The oscillation between literal meaning and figurative meaning (i.e., between the hand and the person, between “kicked the bucket” and “died”) creates a sense of play. Therein lies another interality. The rhetorical effect relies on the coexistence of two levels of meaning. “The missing link was the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century.” Put otherwise, the West discovered the utility of interality in the nineteenth century. The missing link is synonymous with our notion of interality, and the Taoist notion of the Void, which has a generative function. McLuhan (2003) elaborates in a different context: “the missing link has prompted more participation and scientific endeavor than all the links that were ever made” (p. 217). Detective fiction makes a good example. Other “things” that have to do with the missing link include: cool media, suggestive writing, aphoristic writing, and all the art forms, techniques, and movements characterized by discontinuity, such as mosaic, montage, staccato, jazz, Symbolism, Pointillism, Cubism, and so on. Speaking of mosaic, McLuhan points out: “The mosaic is a world of intervals in which maximal energy is transferred across the gaps” (Stearn, 1967, p. 296). That is to say, interality attracts the influx of energy, including mental energy. “A Japanese wife never speaks irritably to her husband – she merely rearranges the flowers.” This line calls to mind an Oscar Wilde quote: “the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art.” Allegedly, a Japanese wife only insinuates, not even through words but through the manipulation of the ground. There is an interality or interface between figure and ground. The husband is supposed to get it by picking up on clues from the ground. This is indeed a very subtle and peculiar economy of communication. The Japanese culture, after all, is a high-context one. A line about the Joker: “The clown is the emperor’s PR man.” Without the clown or the court jester, life at the imperial court is easily plagued by a petrified http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
Aphorisms by Watts Besides McLuhan and Deleuze, Alan Watts is another Western thinker who has displayed an unmistakable interological sensibility. The following aphorisms are from his 1974 book, Nothingness. The meaning of an aphorism lies outside and beyond itself. For our purposes, nothingness is a special permutation of interality. “To me, nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful” (p. 11). “The nothing is the force whereby the something can be manifested” (p. 23). “[P]hysics began as a quest to discover the basic stuff out of which the world is made…. What we have found is not stuff but form. We have found shapes. We have found structures… beyond atoms you find electrons and positrons between which there are vast spaces. We can’t decide whether these electrons are waves or particles and so we call them wavicles” (p. 27). “[W]e never get to any stuff for the simple reason there isn’t any. Actually, stuff is when you see something unclearly or out of focus, fuzzy” (p. 29). “[S]pace and form go together as the fundamental things we’re dealing with in this universe. The whole of Buddhism is based on a saying, ‘That which is void is precisely form, and that which is form is precisely void’” (p. 33). “[W]e can take the saying ‘Form is void, void is form’ and instead of saying is, say implies, or the word that I invented goeswith. Form always goeswith void. And there really isn’t, in this whole universe, any substance” (p. 35). “Most forms of energy are vibration, pulsation. The energy of light or the energy of sound are [sic] always on and off. In the case of very fast light, very strong 64
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nuggets. For those of us who already have an interalogical impulse, it is a source of joy. For those of us who do not, it is re-orienting. In this age of interconnectivity, the relevance, resonance, and necessity of interality as a philosophical concept are becoming increasingly self-evident. If we understand the essence of the cosmos to be energy and vibration, and the process of life as a matter of affecting and being affected while being in the world with others, human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, we will see that interality is the very subject matter of life as a curriculum (to borrow Prof. Rowe’s fitting metaphor), and that our mode of existence is more adequately encompassed by “interalogy” in addition to “ontology.” One salient element of the article is the conceptual affinity between interality and throughness (i.e., tong) – the one implies the other, and vice versa. Shang’s original interpretation of the two in relation to each other can be a source of inspiration for the yea-sayer to life. Prof. Rowe’s article, “Toward a Relational World from a Western Perspective,” makes philosophy indistinguishable from poetry. In writing and in person, Rowe is full of passion and compassion, virtue and virtuosity. One’s easily carried away with the rhythm or “eurhythmia” between the lines, for lack of a better word. The article is driven by a profound angst over neo-Cartesianism and its manifestation as managerialism in education but never strikes a negative note. It dispels cynicism by pointing to a commendable strand of educational praxis that is already emerging in the present. As such it belongs with affirmative criticism. The article is three-pronged but unified by an uplifting take on relationality, and a therapeutic vision of democracy. There is a palpable Zen quality to the article. The piece by Prof. Ivie and Prof. Giner, “Old Man Coyote and the In-Between,” is an article on the inbetween that has come to fruition by virtue of the inbetween. Old Man Coyote, the protagonist of the article, is a mythical trickster figure that mediates between the proper and the left out so a pure order does not die of its own purity, so our terministic compulsion as symbolusing animals does not evolve into a motive for exclusion, scapegoating, or war. As such, the ethos embodied by Old Man Coyote coincides with the spirit of a deep, inclusive, robust democracy. Thus apprehended, the Coyote ethos is no longer distinguishable from the Burkean attitude, or the rhetorical attitude, or the essence of democracy, which is about holding different voices accountable to one another and making the most of human interality in the process of collective voice finding, as in jazz. Compared with those critiques of US war culture that rest merely
light, even with alternating current you don’t notice the discontinuity because your retina retains the impression of the on pulse and you can’t notice the off pulse except in very slow light like an arc lamp. It’s exactly the same thing with sound…. In the low note you hear a kind of graininess because of the slower alternations of on and off” (p. 41). “[Y]ou cannot have the emphasis called a crest, the concave, without the de-emphasis, or convex, called the trough…. We must realize that if you had this part alone, the up part, that would not excite your senses because there would be no contrast” (p. 43). “[E]xistence is the alternation of now-you-seeit/now-you-don’t, now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t, nowyou-see-it/now-you-don’t. It is that contrast that presents the sensation of there being anything at all” (p. 45). “[T]he blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle. There’s a fundamental division. The Chinese call them the yang, the positive side, and the yin, the negative side. This corresponds to the idea of one and zero. All numbers can be made of one and zero as in the binary system of numbers which is used for computers” (p. 55). “[T]he unconscious is the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it’s really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don't know” (p. 57). “[I]t is just precisely this nothing which is always the source of something” (p. 59). “Nothing is what brings something into focus” (p. 61). About This Collection This special section is the first collective enunciation on interology or interalogy. There is a high degree of intertextuality, complementarity, and resonance among the articles. We’d like to thank Prof. Guo-Ming Chen for gracefully offering the space to make this project possible. I should say there is resonance between this line of inquiry and Prof. Chen’s own work, including his notion of “boundary wisdom,” his upcoming collaborative work on interculturality, and the focus of his research program, which is on intercultural competence. Prof. Shang’s article, “Interality Shows Through: An Introduction to Interalogy,” gives the concepts of interality and interalogy a definitive, systematic philosophical treatment. The article is full of intellectual http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
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for humanity may emerge. We welcome engaged responses, productive criticisms, and unforeseen uptakes on the part of philosophers, scientists, artists, scholars, practitioners, and activists operating in a wide range of fields. We also anticipate a series of follow-up projects in the near future, including ones that may have a more direct bearing on social, cultural, political, and ecological issues that plague our age.
on categorical reasoning, the Ivie-Giner style of critique has a peculiar mythical depth, rhetorical resonance, and heuristic value. In a moment of self-reflexivity, the authors lay bare the thought-generating function of the spatial, temporal, and conceptual intervals in between their fragmentary notes for each other. The section on collaborative writing in this prologue has been inspired by their collaborative work. The article by Prof. Zhang, “The Human Seriousness of Interality: An East Asian Take,” examines select East Asian texts and cultural practices, especially Chinese ones, through the lens of interality. The purpose is threefold: to put on parade the interological orientation of East Asian cultures; to imply the human seriousness of this orientation; to take stock of the plural senses of “interality” without bursting the bounds of the article. The textual strategy somewhat resembles that of Maurice Ravel’s one-movement orchestral piece entitled Boléro – the tune or theme stays the same regardless of what instruments are adopted. There is a strong complementarity between this article and Prof. Shang’s article. If the latter is the philosophy, then the former is the philology and culture. The devil, after all, is in the detail. The article by Prof. You and Prof. Zhang, “Interality in Heidegger,” sees Heidegger’s notions of clearing, opening, void, nearness, and nothing as permutations of interality, points to parallels and resonances between Heidegger’s work and Chan Buddhism, and suggests that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology may well be an interology in disguise. Prof. Cali’s article on Marcel, the French existentialist philosopher, spotlights presence and intersubjectivity, which are two interfused aspects of human interality. The kind of “ontology” the article presents is actually a permutation of what we mean by interology as a mode of existence. The second half of the article presents a picture of how technology impedes presence and intersubjectivity, or, to use our vocabulary, how technology potentially disrupts, dissolves, or defuses human interality. Read in dialogue with other articles in this collection, we can get a sense of how Marcel’s vision of existence, reflecting a Christian sensibility, overlaps with the Chan Buddhist vision as much as they differ from each other. We are aware that parallel explorations have been going on under other labels. Timothy Morton’s notion of interobjectivity, for example, can be read as a special case of interality. But interality is a more inclusive term, one that has been informed by an Eastern Asian sensibility as much as it has been called forth by the human condition in the post-everything age. One of the most significant interalities is the one between different cultural traditions. That is where worth-having futures http://www.chinamediaresearch.net
Acknowledgements The author thanks Prof. Robert L. Ivie, Prof. Stephen Rowe, and Blake Seidenshaw for their ongoing feedback while this prologue was being composed. Notes 1. These and numerous other hunches culminated in a presentation at the First Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference entitled “Deleuze and Interology,” and a section on interology in the article, “Deleuze the Media Ecologist? Extensions of and Advances on McLuhan” (coauthored with Eric Jenkins, presented at the Media Ecology Association’s Annual Convention in 2013). 2. This realization also led to a presentation at the Media Ecology Association’s Annual Convention in 2013 entitled “Media Ecology as Interology.” 3. More on this can be found in “The English Language as a Medium and Its Impact on Contemporary Chinese Culture: A Speculative Critique” (Zhang, 2012, pp. 39-53). 4. This is an allusion to the article, “Articulation, Poiesis, Occupy Wall Street, and Human Freedom.” 5. Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind is an obvious forerunner of the notion of mental ecology. 6. This is an allusion to a newly finished article, coauthored with Eric Jenkins, entitled “The Art of Jujitsu in the Age of Digital Megamachines, or How to Fight Facebook.” 7. The traditional Chinese ideogram, “繭,” which means “cocoon,” is astonishingly imagistic. It has both silk and worm in it. 8. A more detailed discussion of tetralemma can be found in the article, “Aristotle’s Fourfold Causality, Tetralemma, and Emergence” (Zhang & Guschwan, 2014, pp. 63-66). 9. Mad Libs, the game, offers an effortless way to produce perspective by incongruity. It also relies on the latter for its dramatic effect. The rationale of the game proves once more that interality, openness, and chance often go together. Correspondence to: Dr. Peter Zhang School of Communications
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http://www.chinamediaresearch.net McLuhan, M. (2003). Understanding me: Lectures and interviews. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Stearn, G. M. (Ed.). (1967). McLuhan: Hot and cool. New York: The Dial Press. Von Uexküll, J. (2010). A foray into the worlds of animals and humans, with A theory of meaning. (J. D. O’Neil, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Watts, A. (1962). The joyous cosmology: Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books. Watts, A. (1974). Nothingness. Millbrae, California: Celestial Arts. Zhang, P., & Guschwan, B. (2014). Aristotle’s fourfold causality, tetralemma, and emergence. ETC 71, 63-66. 4/11/2015
Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI 49401 Email:
[email protected] References： Bateson, G. (1987). Steps to an ecology of mind. London: Jason Aronson Inc. Deleuze, G. (2007). Two regimes of madness. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, V. (2013). Post-history. Minneapolis: Univocal. Flusser, V. (2003). The freedom of the migrant: Objections to nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Guattari, F. (1989). The three ecologies. New Formations 8, 131-146.
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