Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2019

This article is a celebration of Laing, Phillipson and Lee’s Interpersonal Perception and a staunch critique of Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots. It explores how relationships with others mediate self-understanding and interpersonal interaction. Furthermore, by appropriating relevant insights from Laing and his colleagues and re-contextualizing them within a larger media ecological framework, the article seeks to reveal the deep challenges and complexities faced by those who would engage in ‘interpersonal relationships’ with ‘sociable robots’ and/or ‘artificial intelligences’.

Douglas Rushkoff describes the condition of digiphrenia as a ‘digital order’ where technology splits us off from ourselves and requires us to simultaneously be in multiple places and times simultaneously. He focuses on the temporal trauma of the digital split. In this article, I argue digiphrenia creates a ‘divided self’ – in multiple places and yet nowhere. This digital split is a technological version of what R. D. Laing would refer to as a ‘schizoid world’.

This article links Marshall McLuhan and R. D. Laing based upon their common emphasis on relationships as environments. In contrast to the classic psychiatric understanding of diagnosis, Laing proposes a much more environmentally – or relationally – focused definition, which echoes McLuhan’s discussion of the changes from print to electric culture. I argue that both Laing and McLuhan would agree that psychoanalysis’ emphasis upon the individual fails and must be replaced – precisely because it attempts to retain the culture, logics and values of print culture, even while reflecting the symptoms of an electric age. However, I conclude, Laing fails to recognize ways in which his own way of seeing is blind to the power imbalance in his recasting of the therapeutic situation. Therefore, there is a need to account for the unequal relations implicit in Laing’s approach, better connecting it, again, to the electric ‘global village’ that McLuhan described so well.

In this article, I offer a detailed examination of R. D. Laing’s oft-disparaged book, The Voice of Experience. Drawing on archival materials I highlight the debt this book from 1982 owes to Jane Ellen Harrison’s studies of Greek mythology and ritual. Although Laing missed the full import of Harrison’s work, I argue that the combination of Harrison and media ecology helps unlock the unrealized potential lurking within Laing’s book. By developing and correcting Harrison’s writings on language, I suggest that we can see a vital resonance between her studies of archaic Greek life and media ecology’s emphasis on the transformations in experience wrought by both symbolicity itself and alphabetic literacy. Bringing these lines of argument together, and connecting them to Laing’s notion of ‘mythologems’ allows us to generate unexpected insight – not into individual birth experience, but into our wrenching emergence into symbolicity, and, even more traumatically (in the West), into literacy.

It is possible to derive a cybernetic approach to what the concept of ‘power’ might mean, an approach which illuminates and critiques both that concept and the relations it is used to describe. Selected quotes from a short article Michel Foucault wrote late in his life, entitled ‘The subject and power’, are juxtaposed with a demonstration that aspects of his view, particularly as he was formulating it in this article, prefigure some elements of what might be developed into a cybernetic approach to what might be meant by ‘power’. I propose that such an approach can be developed from basic cybernetic and systems principles including system capacity, (structural) coupling, the relationship of an organism to a niche or environment, and the hierarchical organization of adaptive systems. A resulting concept of power, or rather, of the domain in which we talk about power, can help reanimate our theoretical discussion of what we mean by such a concept and what such a concept inevitably obscures.