Excreta & Tissue Culture

All language forms or media are "outerings" or externally manifest artefacts of an internal emotional and psychic state. The consensual binding of two or more sentient beings to the agreed upon meaning of these artefacts forms culture. Culture can also be viewed as being the agreed upon sets of tools/media of expression, known for their specific effects, that are employed in the task of bridging a telepathic gap.

A paradoxical tension exists at the core of culture that is played out in two antithetical processes. The process of consensually negotiating form and meaning of the binding tools is a process fixed on engendering stability and, naturally, leads to the formation of cliched modes of expression. This transposes otherwise chaotic forces onto an ordered matrix that seems to allow for greater control of the overall environment and confers a predictive capacity on all our activities.

Running counter to this ordering trend is a move to continually break through the limiting constraints of the language/media matrix in order to wrestle with novel, intractable problems. It would seem that media which are incapable of creative, adaptive responses are doomed to extinction. Like dinosaurs, faced with rapid environmental change, they are incapapble of adapting to and thriving in their new milieu. There is a fixity to these systems that rigidly opposes the buffeting waves of environmental change. It is their resistance as opposed to flexible absorbton of the energy of change that bears the impact of these erosive tides and results in their eventual demise. These "fixed" systems have an operative, hermetically-sealed nostalgic constitution that eventually fades from existence unless transmuted into a new form with a constitution of greater veracity.

Genetic mutational responses are a creative response built into living systems which are, interestingly enough, bent on homeostasis to ensure vitality. The Genetic response, however, is imperceivably slow (over millions of years) whereas cultural or media environments can be negotiated, constructed and inhabited in a significantly faster way. The paradox is further compounded by the fact that these new environments themselves create their own environmental pressures that, like self-fulfilling prophecies, call for their own obsolescence at the hands of new, secondary media that have evolved to respond to what McLuhan refers to as "irritations" caused by the effects of the primary media.

The cellular Homeostasis process is worth probing further from a language/culture perspective (Tissue Culture?). First consider the cellular metaphor with respect to the function of the exoskeleton or membrane.

The cellular membrane serves as what McLuhan would call the "Break Boundary"--the point at which one mode of existence, system or media separates from another. It is a turbulent limnal zone of two worlds in collison. This interface is where effluent material from one (let's say for arguments sake, the exterior) environment serves as the influent material of the internal environment. This influx of material from the exterior environment is absorbed, selected, sorted and constituted in the host environment which then processes its own effluent by-products of its incorporation and excretes these back into the exterior environment.

The constitutive elements are ordered and arranged according to an internal logic to form functional "Tissues" of the organism. These tissues are bound to a commonality of function and this function differs from one tissue region to the next. The tissue groupings or "organs" although differentiated according to specific functions, work integrally as a whole. In McLuhan's thinking, organizing these tissues into organs with specific functions, belies the sort of literary specialism of the mechanistic age. As a whole the organism strives to establish and maintain a relatively stable environment amidst a sea of chaos. This trend towards order requires significant amounts of energy to keep entropic forces in check. This is what biologists refer to as "homeostasis."

This move towards homeostasis--keeping a stable and predictable interior constitution--has the effect of changing both the organism and its environment simultaneously such that, as an organism empties the contents of itself into the environment, the environment, too, has been changed.

This environmental change then exerts a very different pressure on the organism. This echo, or feedback causes change in the organism which, in turn interacts with the environment in a different fashion. This loop of feedback has the distinct properties of turbulence found in fibonacci models of chaos. This is akin to the old model of distortion that likens this effect to a gramaphone needle picking up sound from the grooves of a record, projecting the music, then the music hitting the stylus. This is Feedback distortion. There is a form of rhetoric intrinsic to this process wherein clearly-defined notions of what is "IN" and what is "OUT" or "SELF" and "OTHER" evolves--a natural,living exemplar of a continually transmuting figure/ground dynamic. It would seem that the entire character of life is predicated on maintaining a high contrast between figure and ground (interior living system versus inert exterior environment). If the membrane fails in its duty to maintain this difference then osmotic and diffusionary forces require that the internal state equalize with that of the exterior in order for the system to reach maximum entropy. Life, then, is an ordering or a sifting out whereas death, it would seem, is a mixing. Life is the diversity of colours in the spectrum--each with their own unique characteristics and death could well be the mixing of all these wavelengths--white light! I digress, to be sure, but there might just be something in the recounting of near death experiences where the survivor describes a phenomenon of seeing a very bright white light! I appologize for pushing the metaphor well beyond its limits but it was worth considering.

The point is that discrete forms of life as we know them are highly ordered systems that crystalize, or coalesce out of the background environment or "primordial soup."
This order is maintained by the input of significant amounts of energy and must continually exert counter-force to defray the deleterious entropic effects that seek to disassociate those livning systems.

Unless the organism is able to reconfigure its constitution it will eventually be forced into reincorporating its own excreta! This curious form of self canabilization eventually leads to the organism's demise. A diverse environment, however, ensures that many organisms with diverse input requirements allows for one organism's effluent to serve as another's influent. As long as the disparate organisms that make up the ecosystem are capable of using one another's effluent as influent then the system is inherently stable ecological system!

The alternative to a transformation of the internal workings of the organism is the forging of a firewall of sorts--a buttressing of the cellular membrane to harden the rhetoric of inclusion/exclusion (us and them) as it were. Maintaining a highly impervious membrane comes at great cost in energy expended in shunting deleterious elements to the exterior faster than they can get in. A membrane must be semi-permeable to allow for incoming nutritive elements as well as for the expulsion of waste so "imperviousness" is a relative term that relates to the ratio of output rate to input rate.

This exterior "membrane" approach is akin to a technological/mediated response to buffering the human condition from the deprivations of its natural environment and this is what McLuhan refers to as "The Skin of Culture." A change in the outer structure (membrane) being a media/cultural adaptation, whereas an internal transformation is biological and evolutionary in nature. The evolutionary approach, as I have mentioned, is lengthy and haphazard where outcomes are concerned. The mediated response is more specific and cultural in nature. A rhetoric is used in helping to identify constituents and their place in the internal or external realms, or, rather, on which side of the wall they belong!

This form of shunning, shunting and selecting are consistent with defining relationality and identity in the larger organism. Organisms that share the same schemas for discernment are part of this larger tissue group referred to earlier who's cumulitive activities have the effect of collectively representing a specific function.

Further questions that pop to mind are:
What constitutes the "membrane" in our new wired environment?
Is it ideas that are being allowed to permeate this membrane? What is being kept out?