Hopefully this essay has awakened readers to the reality of technological idiocy and exposed the dangers of discarnate technology to theology.
As we seek to understand the ways in which we might begin to create a church environment that affirms the reality of incarnation, we must begin to narrow our focus to the ways in which this can be done in individual local churches. Creating a church environment, a church culture, is not just the job of the pastors or staff members, it is the role of every participant in the congregation. Understanding the environments that our technologies create necessitates the input of each person who experiences those environments. And while each person’s input is valuable, input from people who are experienced in seeing past the content to the medium and message is especially valuable. Specifically, the church must value the input of its artists.
One thing most media ecology scholars have in common is their high view of artists. This respect for artists is not coincidental, it’s because of the extensive common ground and common goals shared by artists and media scholars. McLuhan himself said,
“Art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.”
One step the church can take to better understand the effects of technology is by partnering with artists who are already a part of the church. To do this, we must refine and challenge our misconceptions of who artists are and what art is.
Artists are trained perceivers. According to McLuhan,
“the serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”
Richard Cavell elaborates on McLuhan’s understanding of artists:
“McLuhan ‘s intention was to urge us all to take on the condition of artists… the condition of individuals critically engaged with the world around them. ‘In social terms,’ writes McLuhan in Through the Vanishing Point, ‘ the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the changing play of forces. So understood, the artist is not a peddler of ideals or lofty experiences. He is rather the indispensible aid to action and reflection alike’ (TVP 238).”
Artists are people who have been trained to understand human senses and how they work, which means they are especially helpful in understanding new technologies and the environments they create.
When technology creates a new environment, the old environment becomes seen as a form of art. According to McLuhan, “The history of the arts and sciences could be written in terms of the continuing process by which new technologies create new environments for old technologies. The old technology, as the content of the new, quickly becomes tidied up into an art form, such as is now happening to film since it has become the content of TV.”Environments are so difficult for us to notice because they are of low intensity or definition but all pervasive, making us fish who don’t know we’re wet. “Anything that raises the environment to high intensity … turns the environment into an object of attention. When an environment becomes an object of attention it assumes the character of an anti-environment or an art object.” Artists help us perceive technologies for what they truly are because they bring them to our attention in new ways.
Richard Cavell summarized McLuhan’s views well when he wrote,
“The object of such art has less to do with self-expression that it does with heightening perception. ‘The training of perception upon the otherwise unheeded environment became the basis of experimentation in what is called modern art and poetry. The artist, instead of expressing himself … turned his senses and the work of art to the business of probing the environment (EM 224). In probing the environment, the artist produces a counter-environment, or anti-environment.”
This is where art and media ecology meet, and it challenges many people’s perceptions of what art is. Art is not self-expression; it is anti-environment. By that we mean artists take what is too subtle or too pervasive to notice and place it in a different environment where we can see it and its effects. This could be a technology, a social system, or really anything. In doing this, artists offer us “artefacts as a means of creating new vision and new awareness.” Art doesn’t just make our lives a little more beautiful; it allows us to see our lives and the physical objects that act on us in ways we couldn’t have perceived them before. It offers us valuable insight into our technologies.
Anti-environment can include historical or intercultural studies in which we juxtapose our current society with a different culture. McLuhan writes, “Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown.” This is why many media and communications scholars are interested in studying communities like the Amish, because it gives us a chance to compare and contrast our societies to see how our technological differences affect us socially.
Lance Strate, founder of the Media Ecology Association, builds on the work of Hannah Arendt to claim that what McLuhan truly meant by “anti-environment” was the laboratory. He writes, “Seen from the perspective of the “real” world, the laboratory is the anticipation of a changed environment… We may further consider the art museum or gallery or library as a controlled environment, a laboratory of sorts, and note the parallel in the idea of art as the anticipation of a changed environment.” He continues on to say that houses of worship and other sacred spaces act as laboratories because they take us into an environment that is usually very different from our everyday lives. He says this of sacred spaces:
“They are in some way dedicated to making the invisible world of the spirit visible to us through the use of sacred symbols and objects, even for religions whose concept of God is one that is entirely outside of the world of appearances. Sanctuaries might therefore be considered laboratories used for moral, ethical, and sacred discovery, experimentation, and development, and places where changed environments are also anticipated…”
This idea of churches as anti-environmental (and therefore occupying a similar role as art) should challenge our ideas of what the physical environment of our corporate worship should be like.
Notice the phrase “the anticipation of a changed environment.” One of the ways in which art is anti-environmental is in its prophetic nature. It calls into existence (or at least imagination) the world as it should be, and, according to McLuhan, it can also foresee changes on the horizon: “the power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation or more, has long been recognized… This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression.” Art is a way of embodying the prayer, “May your kingdom come; may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Ellul speaks about modern prophecy as a revolutionary way of life:
“… the prophet is not one who confines himself to foretelling with more or less precision an event more or less distant; he is one who already lives it, and already makes it actual and present in his own environment. This, then, is the revolutionary situation: to be revolutionary is to judge the world by its present state, by actual facts, in the name of a truth which does not yet exist (but which is coming)–and it is to do so because we believe this truth to be more real than the reality which surrounds us. Consequently it means bringing the future into the present as an explosive force.”
Christians are prophetic artists when we live in anticipation, believing the promises of God that have not yet been fulfilled, and bringing the future into our present lives by the explosive force of faith. This is how our very presence is anti-environmental art in the midst a world of unbelief.
Art as anti-environment and prophecy forces us to ask serious questions regarding our lives as individuals and our collective life as the body of Christ. What reality will we affirm as truth by our intentional presence? What reality will we create? And do our physical artifacts affirm or deny this reality? What sort of paradise is there to be gained and lost by our technological choices? McLuhan saw the work of artists as something for everyone to participate in, which means that these questions are not just for our leaders and artists. They are for all of us, collectively and individually, to answer.