In the “DVD extras” at the back of my recently-acquired paperback copy of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, the author makes a very important point about literature:

A book can give you the inside of a person: all other media can only give you the outside.

Diana Wynne Jones

This observation is admirably succinct, and worth clipping simply as yet another case of someone finding a neat sentence with which to say something that usually takes me a few thousand words.

On being confronted with it stated so plainly, however, it occurred to me that this fundamental difference in media also perhaps explains something about the world we live in: the postmodern condition of hyperreality is a function of that ubiquitous access to the outside of characters which is provided by visual (and, in a somewhat different way, audio) media, and a drifting away of the more reflective and psychological relationship to imagined interiorities that comes from reading.

That relationship was of course never at all universal, and fairly recent: hardly some lost arcadia of the intellect, then, but rather the base certainties and assumptions of the world (or rather the class) that the Enlightenment made of itself. But there was surely a peak of that literary-interior sensibility through the 1930s to the 1960s, and I think its demise might go some way to explain the confusion and in some cases terror experienced by mid-C20th intellectuals.

While it is still in some circles considered blasphemous to mix McLuhan with the “true” social theorists, I am drawn time and again to what seems to me the glaringly obvious synthesis implicit in McLuhan and Debord in particular. The content of a medium is always another medium, said McLuhan, and the beauty and the horror of “the internet” is precisely the way in which it has simultaneously bundled and unbundled all of the media by which it was preexisted: not just the sociotechnical assemblages (or forms: video, newsprint), but the genres, too (content: fiction, fact, news).

As many have observed before me, the use of the word “content” is extremely telling in this regard, because it’s an explicit acknowledgement of the situation by everyone, from funders and producers to audiences and critics, even if they’re not quite aware of what they’re acknowledging: it’s all just packets of data, undifferentiated at the level of distribution.

The internet is the eversion of the Spectacle: what was once the distributive inside of infrastructure has been unfolded in such a manner as to make a screen which covers every possible surface—a thing whose very ubiquity is its main message, in that McLuhanesque sense.

The message is that there is no longer any Outside to the internet-as-medium; it’s the very same inversion of relations that was accomplished by enclosure and the spread of the early infrastructures in the physical-spatial world, but this time it unfolded (quite literally) in the symbolic-narrative world. There are still pockets of “Nature”, reservations and manicured parkland simulating what has been lost, but their dwindling exceptionalism is increasingly their dominant characteristic when it comes to their representation: “last chance to see” goes almost instantly from being a warning to being a marketing slogan.

This may all seem very grim, and from certain angles I suppose it is. But I don’t see it is being final, the slamming of a door on something gone forever: my sense of the enantiodromia implicit in the present moment is strengthening, and the repressed may yet return to our media landscape as well as the physical landscape. But we have to be ready to run through that door at the moment of its reopening…

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(Transcribed mostly verbatim from my morning pages, so if it seems incoherent—or, I suppose, more incoherent than usual?—that’ll be why. Nonetheless, if this seemed interesting to you, you should probably read that chapter of mine that was published recently.)