Anti-Environments are not anti-environmental

Media environments, particularly the most current, may be invisible via envelopment, or paralysing with info-overload (anesthesia as form of in-visibling). Mcluhan stressed the importance of anti-environments to balance out one’s sense of place. Anti-environments are not anti-environmental but a means of understanding connections. Latent are conduits that lead to other spaces, if at once accessible and restricted. They are beyond allotted intervals of error (the errors needed to inform operation of various control mechanisms). Beyond known realities. Like the unforseen things glimpsed in H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction. Generally, Lovecraft’s tales included recluse adventurers tinkering at the limits, uncovering irrational or non-euclidean modes or reality. Everywhere around us are revealed interdimensional access points to forbidden knowledge. Between life and death, this world and that.

“Everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.” (The Call of Cthulhu)

One could argue that Lovecraft’s schtick was unfurling ever maddening cosmic horror to all those who were too curious. Still, there’s a trace of symmetry in the sort of curiosity and courage needed to operate under the daunting global networks of control that gird our non-fictional world. Foucault described heterotopias as counter-sites to the impracticalities of Utopia/Dystopia. Heterotopias are anti-environments, counter-sites waiting in the margins of error. Previously imperceptible swathes of knowledge are revealed in accessing and/or being restricted. Heterotopias and Anti-Environments are simultaneously real and imaginary, mythic and mundane, dangerous and compelling.

Differently Functional Spaces

Heterotopias are simultaneously physical and cerebral spaces. Relatedly, Mcluhan contended that new media environments are as invisible to their inhabitants as water is unthinkable to fish. This is because one is so enveloped in au currant media that it’s impossible to find an outside space from which to reflect. Residual, or differently functional media environments are otherwise invisible. Invisibled by means of underexposure and/or marketing ploys that steer desire towards tech-utopia atop the growing mound of media that have been buried alive.

Living dead media. “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth,” reads the poster for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, a zombie-laden critique of consumption. Another Mcluhanism: “Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.” Obsolescence is often enough an arbitrary label external to actual usefulness of a thing. There is then an excess of accessible technologies glimpsed in liminal spaces, if all too quickly damned by the powers that be. The strategies of planned obsolescence are like a dark art, but the psychological sort centered around fashionability is most abominable—more so than any snow man. Residual, or, differently functional media environments are not so much about inevitable invisibility, but anti-environments that exist in contradiction to the enforced laws of time, space and mind. Neurobiologically speaking, heterotopias are “collections of normal neurons in abnormal locations…caused by an arrest of migration of the neurons to the cerebral cortex.” (Medcyclopedia ) They are bad news, often leading to seizures or developmental anomalies. Re-contextualized they do provide, as Foucault describes, a means of contesting the “no place” of Utopias with real, if dangerous, “other spaces.”