It's OK to Suspend Your Judgment (But Not Forever)

On Katherine Dee and her critics.

Oct 15, 2024

In 1968, Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan, two mid-century legends, faced off in a televised debate about media and culture. At first blush, the encounter (which has enjoyed a second life on the Internet since at least the late 2000s, when I first saw it), is hard to follow. There seems to be little clash between the two men; Mailer tries aggressively to find something to disagree about.

McLuhan was a scientist; Mailer, a chronicler of empire. Today, McLuhan still commands followers, while Mailer might not survive the passing of the Boomers. Setting aside Sixties lore, Mailer’s lasting work are his nonfiction reports of some of the great events in American history: the rise of JFK; the moon landing; the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the elevation of the Pentagon; the rumble in the jungle. On the other hand, McLuhan was an English professor whose first books dealt with 17th century pamphlets and 20th century advertisements, whose thought blossomed into a method for analyzing media, one that is still useful today. “Media,” goes a typical statement, “by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception … When these ratios change, men change.”

The ways that media changed men in the twentieth century were comprehensive and dramatic. But Mailer cannot get McLuhan to lament these changes, much less condemn them. Towards end of the show, Mailer throws down the gauntlet:

MAILER: Now the reason I keep hitting this note of good or bad is because in all of McLuhan-land you’d never find the words “good or bad.” […]
MCLUHAN: […] I wouldn’t know how to value the Western world which we’re demolishing by our new technology or the Oriental world which we are Westernizing. We are demolishing the Oriental world and demolishing the Western world. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad because I wouldn’t know how to make a value judgment on such a scale.

Seeing his words in print reveals a hint of irony that, on video, McLuhan’s severe deadpan conceals. How is it possible that someone who believes that the West is “demolishing” the East, and then destroying itself, refrain from making a value judgment about these things? Who does McLuhan think he’s kidding?

On a smaller scale, Katherine Dee and her critics are replaying the Mailer-McLuhan debate. Consider Ted Gioia’s reaction to Katherine’s recent WoC essay: “Last week, a highly touted essay announced that, hey, it’s okay that the novel and film are dying, because (wait for it) … we now have cooler online stuff, like Instagram twerking videos and Twitter shitposting.” He continues: “If this is the good news on culture, I’d hate to hear the negative take.”

But Dee’s take isn’t primarily positive or negative. It’s mostly descriptive. “Culture isn’t stagnating,” she writes, “it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate.” Her approach is empirical. Dee voyages into Internet parts unknown — unknown to culture critics, that is — and reports back. She talks about the new cultural forms she has seen there: new spins on fiction, comedy, and music. She agrees that the old forms are in actual decline — the “complaints are more than just ‘old man yells at cloud,’” she says. And while she enjoys much of what the new Internet provides, her tone is primarily scientific, a-moral, nary a “good” or “bad” in sight.

The lover of literature and film and ballet and orchestral music will reply: How can you not make a judgment here? How is it not a bad thing that the arts are being replaced by their digital imitations?

But because Dee is approaching things in similar to the way McLuhan was, her technique requires a temporary suspension of judgement. The “technique of suspended judgment,” which McLuhan learned from Bertrand Russell, is “the discovery of the process of insight itself, the technique of avoiding the automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes that so easily results from any given cultural situation.” This approach is, McLuhan continues, a “technique of open field perception,” that positions you to absorb data without prejudice.

This is what I see Dee’s project to be, even if she does appreciate online cultural forms more than someone like Ted Gioia. Her first goal seems to be objective description: getting you to see things you haven’t seen before. Without the new data, there is nothing to judge, anyway.

Eventually, however, we do need to make some sort of judgment. Both Dee and her critics (and all of us) have to decide whether the new cultural forms native to cyberspace have the same potential to enrich human experience that the old forms do.

For Dee’s critics, the question must be: what is it about (for example) the novel that seems fitting to, or appropriate for, the human person? If it’s merely a matter of taste or consumer preference, then who cares if the form of the novel dies. But if there’s something in human experience that is captured and explored via the novel, something that would be lost without it, then we should fight to keep the novel alive.

But you have to make that case. You have to go deep and give an account of human nature that proves the point.

For Dee herself, the question is the same, only reversed. Are we losing something — or maybe, forgetting something — about our own humanity as we enter into the brave new world of cyberspace culture?

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.