“ 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 ”
McLuhan's Aquarium: The Fish in Water
McLuhan's aquarium captures Adorno’s insight that ‘all social phenomena today are so completely mediated that even the element of mediation is blocked by its totalising nature’. As the fish inside the aquarium of modernity our subjectivity is conditioned to perceive its structure and culture as an implicit, ambient and passive background rather than a contingent and changeable circumstance of history. The saving grace of this condition is that there is a way out: we can begin to 'see the water' around us and realise the radical freedom that we and society have to become something different. This is the real tranformative power of reflecting on our perceptual relationship within the life-world and the world-system.
A conceptual engineering by Max Ramsahoye derived from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, the commencement speech of David Foster-Wallace and the short poem by Dave Martin
Fool's Paradise
— Dave Martin
❝ Welcome to the American aquarium
Where life can be lived without care.
If you swim only in approved areas
You'll never know you're there.
But thanks to my curiosity
A strange thing came to pass:
I followed the trail of a mystery
And I discovered the glass. ❞
— Pink Floyd
❝ We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears. ❞
❝ Two young fish are swimming along and they meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a while. Then one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water? ❞
— David Foster Wallace This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
The Allegory
This is Water (Foster-Wallace): David Foster-Wallace's parable begins with two young fish swimming along who are greeted by an older fish asking, "How's the water?" After swimming on, one asks the other, "What the hell is water?" The concept illustrates the difficulty of perceiving the most ubiquitous and fundamental realities that shape our existence. It argues that the most critical freedom is the ability to consciously choose how to think about the mundane, ambient background of life, rather than operating on a "default setting" of unconscious reaction to an invisible environment.
The Fish Who Found the Sea (Alan Watts): This parable describes a fish who desperately seeks the "Great Ocean," swimming everywhere to find it, only to be told by an elder fish that he is already in it. The younger fish rejects this, seeing only water, not the Ocean. It illustrates the spiritual blindness of seeking enlightenment or divinity as something external or distant, rather than recognizing it as the immediate, all-encompassing medium of existence that one is already inseparable from.
Academic References
The Medium is the Message (McLuhan): Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism asserts that the form of a medium (e.g., the internet, print, television) embeds itself in the culture, shaping human association and action far more than the actual content it carries. The "content" is merely a distraction (the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind), while the medium itself works deeply to alter the scale, pace, and pattern of human affairs, effectively becoming the "water" we swim in but fail to see.
Mediation (Adorno): For Theodor Adorno, mediation refers to the process by which all social phenomena—culture, thought, relationships—are filtered through the totality of the capitalist system. He argues that direct, unmediated experience is no longer possible because the "culture industry" pre-packages and standardizes perception. We are not just fish in water; we are fish in a tank built by market forces, where even our "individual" thoughts are mediated products of the system we cannot see because it is totalizing.
Disney Stories
Nemo (Disney): In Finding Nemo, the young fish Nemo is taken from the vast ocean and placed into a dentist's aquarium. This represents the trap of the mediated, artificial environment. The tank fish have developed their own rituals and neuroses to cope with their captivity, mistaking their small, controlled world for reality. Nemo's struggle is the fight to break the glass—to escape the artificial, safe confinement of the aquarium and return to the chaotic, dangerous, but real "ocean" (reality)
Ariel (Disney): In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is a creature of the sea who longs for the world above (the land). She collects human artifacts (forks, pipes) but misinterprets their function because she views them through her aquatic cultural lens. She represents the yearning for the "anti-environment"—the sensing that there is another world outside the water that would give meaning to her current existence. She is the fish trying to perceive the water by seeking the air.
Related Philosophical Allegories
The Butterfly Dream (Chuang Tzu): The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about without knowing he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he was solidly Zhuangzi again. But he then asked: "Am I Zhuangzi who dreamt I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am Zhuangzi?" This questions the stability of subjectivity and reality itself. It suggests that our perceived "waking" state (the water) might be just as illusory or contingent as the dream state, dissolving the boundary between the perceiver and the perceived.
Plato's Cave (Plato, Socrates): In this allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall, seeing only shadows cast by objects behind them. They mistake these shadows for reality (the water). The philosopher is the one who breaks the chains, turns around, and exits the cave to see the true source of light (the sun). It illustrates that our empirical reality is merely a mediated shadow of a higher truth, and that "seeing the water" requires a painful, blinding ascent out of the comfortable illusion.