Seeing in Termovision

Or: Nature as Disneyland

Still not my photograph

To wrap up something from earlier: we went on a camping trip where my camera died and my wife’s phone lost its charge (and wasn’t getting service besides).

The central metaphor in David Foster Wallace’s celebrated “this is water” address was less original than he and his boosters perhaps liked to imagine. Almost four decades earlier, Marshall McLuhan employed the same trope at some length in War and Peace in the Global Village to explain the relationship between human beings and their technological environment:

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in. It appears that they can hear pretty well but have scarcely any power of directional location for the origin of the sounds they hear. In some species they discharge electric shocks as a means of spatial orientation, much as bats use their high-pitched squeaks as the equivalent of flashlights. What fish are able to see bears a close analogy to that degree of awareness which all people have in relation to any new environment created by a new technology—just about zero. Yet despite a very limited sensory life, the fish has an essence or built-in potential which eliminates all problems from its universe. It is always a fish and always manages to continue to be a fish while it exists at all. Such is not, by any means, the case with man.

“Anti-environments” consist of situations that bring the prevailing environment into visibility. To my mind, the best example McLuhan cites when he first described the concept in his 1965 essay “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment” was the classroom, where the emphasis on chirography and literacy stands in sharp contrast to the public’s immersion in electric media outside of school. (Or at least it did in the 1960s.) Increasingly, writing on paper and reading from books psychologically displaces us from digital culture and thereby helps us to better perceive what we’re swimming in and the way in which its often impalpable currents influence our behavior and dispositions.

“Nature”—which in its demotic usage refers not to the cosmos on a fundamental level, nor to any relations and processes involving the sun, the Earth, and trophic systems per se, but to places where there’s no asphalt underfoot—has long been considered the ultimate anti-environment for the city-dweller or surburbanite seeking to “get away from it all” for a little while.

To someone of my father’s age, “roughing it” meant spending some time sleeping in a little tent, squatting in the woods to relieve oneself, and eating Spam, subsiding for a time without electricity, refrigeration, plumbing, television, and all the other ubiquitous amenities of modern life. But when he went camping with his Boy Scout troop or with his college buddies, “internet” wasn’t on the list of things he was voluntarily relinquishing for a long weekend. Pocket-sized computers linked via cellular network or satellite didn’t exist, and left no absence that he could feel.

I’m sure it’s still normal to scoff when some provocative egghead remarks that we are all of us already cyborgs, but the truth of the claim grows disconcertingly clear when you’re out in the sticks and your device’s battery goes dead. See how many times during idle moments you reach into your pocket or bag without even thinking about it, and experience a moment of self-conscious puzzlement as you stare into a screen you already knew was going to be blank. The experience must be on par with the abrupt remembrance of a recently-amputated hand after casually reaching for something up on a shelf. An action so deeply ingrained as to be executed without aforethought or even much awareness has become impossible.

Or: imagine you’ve got an old car without a built-in GPS and you’re driving alone way out in a rural area where you’re not assured of finding a gas station, a diner, or a central thoroughfare if you just choose a direction and drive for fifteen minutes. Your phone just died, you can’t use Google Maps anymore, and you discover you left your charger behind. This is the stuff of modern nightmare, is it not? The capacity to move about the landscape with a bird’s eye view of your position and the foreknowledge of where to go next has become second nature to you, and the natural response to losing it is to panic like someone who’s been suddenly struck blind.

I sometimes presume to think there’s a culture gap between myself and my peers. I’m a Xennial who remembers life before the internet, who was once a very enthusiastic proponent of the digital revolution, and who decided a smartphone was a step too far for me. (I knew I’d never not be looking at it.) My sensibilities and habits drifted along a different path as I went about life without being able to check Facebook or Twitter at any time or place, look up walking directions on the go, or consult Google when I was away from home and couldn’t remember the name of the band that recorded whatever song I had inexplicably stuck in my head.

But I’m kidding myself: when all of your friends have smartphones, the paradigm shift pulls you along with it. I’m like one one of those guys in the 1980s or 1990s who patted themselves on the back for not owning a television, but were still watching it every time they visited a bar or dropped in at a friend’s house. And since I’ve been living and spending most of my time with a person who has a Samsung Galaxy with her every place she goes, I’m carrying around a Samsung Galaxy just about every place I go.

When my wife and I head out into the woods, we use her device to navigate our environs like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 character in the Terminator movies. What kind of tree is that, Leafsnap? What’s that bird I’m hearing, Merlin? What the hell are we looking at here, Google Lens? Spindle coral? Fascinating!

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

When her device powered down during our trip, the world became unknowable.

What’s the name of that flower? (I don’t know.) What kind of bird is that? (I don’t know.) What’s the name of that mushroom? (I don’t know.) Is that tree native to North America? (I don’t know.) What constellation is that? (I don’t know.) What’s the best time of year to pick teaberries? (I don’t know.) How far is this place from Batsto? (I don’t know.) Hey who sang the theme song from The Neverending Story? (I don’t know.)

After the initial frustration came the sobering realization that it didn’t really matter. All of this stuff is mere lore to us—and I mean lore in the same sense as the comic book backstory of a character with Marvel movie cameo. Information about flora and fauna absent from any urban setting is interesting to know, but there’s not much to do with it. It amounts to aesthetic garnish. Before long, we’re going to get back in the car and return to the city, where none of it will matter.

The things of “nature” confront us today as another occasion to enjoy using our devices. In the same way that social media effectuates the magic trick of convincing us that we’re interacting with people instead of with a digital platform, employing a smartphone to tell us about the mushroom, the weird beetle, or the egg we’re looking at isn’t to interact with any of these things, but with the smartphone—and the technology we place between ourselves and the objects is once again invisible to us.

At any rate, getting in back touch with nature during a hike or a short camping trip is like “reconnecting” with someone you dated in high school over a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Both of you enjoy catching up and reminiscing, but even as you agree to stay in touch, you know there’s nothing there anymore. You’re not going to be part of each other’s lives. Not really.

The nature preserve and the national park exist for the same reason that the universities, publishers, and cultured classes curate and reproduce a literary “canon” in the age of streaming series, TikTok, and video games. Undeveloped public lands and indices of virtuosic poems and prose pieces are all economically and culturally irrelevant (except as niche industries), and would vanish if there were no institutions protecting and endeavoring to glamorize them as useful anti-environments. Their most fruitful outreach efforts have been those targeting educated professionals.¹ Indeed, most of the vocal enthusiasm for things like urban farming and homesteading is coming from members of the creative class, and I’d wager that you won’t find a lot of people without college degrees camping in Yellowstone or hiking the Appalachian Trail.²

Fish aren’t much curious about the dry part of the world, and people aren’t inclined to wander into anti-environments without the incentives installed by education, advertising, and art.

Open spaces can only survive through deliberate preservation because they are not loci of human activity, and would be destroyed if they were allowed to be. The technology to work, raise families, and form communities in them without changing them into something entirely other than what they are is long lost to us.³

McLuhan again:

One of the peculiarities of art is to serve as an anti-environment, a probe that makes the environment visible. It is a form of symbolic, or parabolic, action. Parable means literally “to throw against,” just as symbol means “to throw together.” As we equip the planet with satellites and antennae, we tend to create new environments of which the planet is itself the content. It is peculiar to environments that they are complex processes which transform their content into archetypal forms. As the planet becomes the content of a new information environment, it tends to become a work of art. Where railway and machine created a new environment for agrarian man, the old agrarian world became an art form. The Romantic movement was born.

And the Romantics were not as intimate with the bucolic pastures and flowery meadows as they would have liked to be—which is why they spilt so much ink extolling it, whereas the peasant farmer of an earlier century, rooted to the land and extracting his subsistence from it, would be more inclined to comment on the weather and make a prognostication about the quality of that year’s harvest than to wax rhapsodic about daffodils to his neighbors.

Two centuries and seventeen years after Wordsworth published “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the penetration into the countryside by railroads seems like so much foreplay compared to the laying down of national highway networks, the rampant suburbanization in answer to explosive population growth, and the industrialized agriculture that enabled it—and we conceptualize “pristine nature” as a work of art more intensely than did the Romantics because we’re even further removed from anything resembling it. Most of us go on retreats to The Great Outdoors as we might visit the anti-environment of an open-air art museum. We break off from our usual routine, take a long drive, have an Aesthetic Experience, and then head back to Real Life.

Perhaps we pay an admission fee at the gate or purchase a few items at a gift shop. We definitely sniff out the selfie spots and scenic vistas, and upload our pics as soon as we’re in range of a cell tower.

I’m reminded of Baudrillard’s famous remarks about Disneyland:

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

Similarly, the art museum has come to function not so much as an anti-environment as perhaps it once did, but as a slight change of scenery in a world already saturated with aesthetic objects, and as a demonstration of economic and cultural power flexing its muscles in a spectacle of self-justification.⁴

“Nature” remains an anti-environment, and its use-value as such disproves our common notion of it. In making an aesthetic experience of it, it becomes not so much the opposite of an urban setting, but rather the 7 Up to the metropolis’ Coca-Cola.

We preserve “nature” to conceal from ourselves the nullity of our concept of it, and we visit it to deny to ourselves the depths of our estrangement from it.

1. My wife’s parents emigrated to the United States from rural China, and lived below the poverty line in Queens and Philadelphia for many years. She’s never told them about our camping trips because her mother (who doesn’t even like the idea of eating raw vegetables—they’re what you feed to pigs) would think we’re stupid and crazy for choosing to go someplace for the sake of depriving ourselves of all the comforts she lacked growing up.

2. From the 2018 master’s thesis of one Ryan P. Grisham, titled Demographics, Experiences, and Management Preferences of Backcountry Campers in Yellowstone National Park:

3. This is to say that the presence of indigenous “primitives” did change the ecology of those areas where they lived, but in the final analysis they were still living in the woods and had a vital interest in preserving its trophic systems.

4. I’ve said some words about this before, and am on the verge of becoming convinced that you’re more likely to find truly provocative (and far less cynical) art being made by weird anonymous NEETs on the internet than by Artists whom the market has set up to succeed.