I always take buses to campus. My bus route has changed several times over the last few years. I would estimate that I go to campus maybe three or four times a week by bus. This means that maybe every year I take the bus maybe 210 times to go campus. This means that I see the same scenery, from two different orientations, just as many times. I change my seat on the bus, and occasionally don't have a seat at all. The weather changes, the time of day changes, other passengers come and go, and, most of all, my mood changes. I am thinking of a certain broken clock tower, Holmby Hall, in Westwood Village; its copper dome greened from oxidization. Every bus route I have ever taken goes past this tower. Although I rarely notice the tower now, when I have, its meaning has been ambiguous.
Reading representation in geography is a difficult task. How should it be done? Is there one sort of cultural meaning that is attached to the tower that I can read? Sometimes I look at the tower and think of commercial place-making, other times I am thinking directly through theories from academia - the towers' historical citations, a performative landscape, elite ideology, post-modern capitalist transformation, Heidegger, feeling and affect, etc. Still other times the tower in its grandiose absurdity -its lapsed beauty and clock that only gets the right time twice a day- only remind me of not wanting to be in LA. Those thoughts have gradually subsided with time. A little over three years here, and I am finally content. So what does or did the tower mean?
The tower means only what one invests into it. One can argue either for a post-structuralist multiplicity of meaning, or a collapse of meaning itself. Perhaps the tower doesn't signify anything. I am the one always calling the tower to task - asking myself what it means. Of course, the historical chiasmus that brought Holmby Hall, or Westwood Village, into being is interesting for what it says about its creators and the larger milieu they operate within. Psychologically, it is noteworthy how changing lights and times inflect the phenomenon of the tower. For an anthropologist, my personal sojourn vis-à-vis this tower could be revealing of displaced peoples (though others' stories would be more interesting). All of these things are real and important, but they all depend on a post-representational subject, imbuing the world with contingent meanings that shift in and out of one's purview. Is nothing solid? Or at least temporally more persistent?
Maybe things with "meaning," with a semiotic anchoring outside of the self, whatever that is, must be distant. If I see something everyday, it will be subject to my whims and sea changes. One day I will be inspired, the next trodden down. Warm weather and a cheery mood make the tower a symbol of humans creating beauty. Stress and personal dissatisfaction cause me to turn my bitterness outwards, besmirching the "they" that erected this edifice at the expense of expropriated Indians and commercial pursuit, sowing an inauthentic, dissimulating landscape. Other times I don't even look up, only wait below it for the bus, it is place where me and two dozen others ignore each other and check our phones over and over.
Yet distance places are perhaps more secure. We can't subject them to our whims quite as easily. The opposite of a Utopia or Heaven is a caricature, a Dystopia or Hell. Even if one is cynical about these conceptions, they still persist. No one wants to subject their vacation spot to the vagaries of the mood of his or herself of that of a companion. That would be to "ruin" the vacation. Bad moods can certainly ruin everyday life as well, but we know that they are unavoidable. Distant places often avoid these "mooded readings" because they might only come up in one mood or another. When one wants to escape, anywhere else already in good personal standing can seem a utopian alternative.
But when one does become proximate to that other, rosier place, it will become subject to moods or disenchantment. Yurchak explains how the "Imaginary West" of late Socialist Russian youth lost its aura when the government finally allowed people to visit. It was a let down. A Norwegian explained to me how, in his youth, the land behind the Iron Curtain was always imagined as stark and overcast. When he finally visited Poland, he was surprised how beautiful and sunny it actually was. If he had stayed their longer, it would probably become cloudy and grey at least for a bit! Paradise only exists as a concept to aspire to as long as it is, in our mortal lives, inaccessible. For because of its distance, it may remain perfect.
So if representation breaks down in proximity, maybe it persists at a distance.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Invert Regret
On March 23rd, a New York Times piece reported on a survey of American adults. The survey asked respondents what their biggest regrets were. The answers largely centered on three regrets: relationships, education, and career. And what is regret? Longing, anger, self-criticism. Why didn’t I choose this path? Why wasn’t I more decisive when I had the chance to be? We hate regret, and we love stories of those with no regrets. In fact, it seems that perhaps the key to happiness is banishing the concept from our lives. If we have no regrets, then we are content, and therefore in a place where past regrets are resolved, present anxieties are clear from the doubt of the future regret of making the wrong decision, and therefore the future can be embraced without worrying about how to move forward. No regret is satisfaction. The regrets that the survey picks up on are directly related to perceived happiness: love, living standard, respect of one’s family and peers, etc.
So why do we worry about regrets, and why do we constantly regret the decisions that we “should have made?” Any answer to this is complex and invites sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical explanation. Indeed, much research and many writings have endeavored to shed light on regret.
But what if we made a simple moral inversion? What if we embraced all of the moments of indecision and of mistake that form the crossroads of the regretted event, and affirmed all that has slipped through our fingers? Instead of wallowing in could-of-been formulations of our lives, we can happily accept the contingencies of it all. Indeed, we can find pleasure in not being decisive. I often return to moments of my life when I did say the correct thing, when I shied away from being the decisive being I ought to be. And I regret this. I regret the missed opportunities for friends, love, and experiences. At the moment I failed to make the proper decision, I was, if not consciously aware, sure that this was the safest thing to do. The hesitation and turn down the safest road assured my preservation. Other sorts of regrets are formed by glowingly accepted a route, safe or not, and later realizing that this road led oneself to miss a similar number of opportunities. In this case, decisiveness has damned the decider. So regret in the moment, and regret in hindsight both bring us to image of the crossroads, where one is about to take the unremarkable path, or takes the remarkable path, but realizes it was false. All paths lead to nowhere.
So the solution is to dissolve this entire life mapping, this concern about proper paths, challenging paths, and the image of the fateful departure, where one embarks on a path towards later regret in reflection. Embrace life’s basic indecision. Or more precisely, embrace the infinite and unavoidable potentialities of what we do, and reconcile with the inevitable fact that doing necessitates decisions and regrets. All decisions necessarily exclude others, and in the infinite combination of possible paths, no way can’t lead to some sense of loss. This entire metaphor of the “life course,” with its pathways and routes, is corrupted: it implicitly posits a correct route, and guarantees regret. If we inverted this emphasis on doing – and doing things correctly – then we can arrive at acceptance of not doing. Thus, at every moment when a decision is made, and others aren’t, we can accept the falling away of what didn’t happen. This demands a moral inversion of the connotations of slipping through one’s fingers, so that the slipping through is no longer experienced as loss, but instead is the process that we will affirm and relish. Because of the infinitesimal count of not-done things, it is more fulfilling to simply accept what can’t be done, and glory in imaginings of what could have been done as one would enjoy a fine drink or nice smelling flowers or paintings in a gallery. Instead of regretting not owning the paintings, we can simply enjoy the moment we spend watching them in the museum of imagination. What greater hope is their for happiness than accepting that we can’t consume or consummate all, and that affirming this, instead of regretting it, may bring us a more realistic and possible happiness.
So why do we worry about regrets, and why do we constantly regret the decisions that we “should have made?” Any answer to this is complex and invites sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical explanation. Indeed, much research and many writings have endeavored to shed light on regret.
But what if we made a simple moral inversion? What if we embraced all of the moments of indecision and of mistake that form the crossroads of the regretted event, and affirmed all that has slipped through our fingers? Instead of wallowing in could-of-been formulations of our lives, we can happily accept the contingencies of it all. Indeed, we can find pleasure in not being decisive. I often return to moments of my life when I did say the correct thing, when I shied away from being the decisive being I ought to be. And I regret this. I regret the missed opportunities for friends, love, and experiences. At the moment I failed to make the proper decision, I was, if not consciously aware, sure that this was the safest thing to do. The hesitation and turn down the safest road assured my preservation. Other sorts of regrets are formed by glowingly accepted a route, safe or not, and later realizing that this road led oneself to miss a similar number of opportunities. In this case, decisiveness has damned the decider. So regret in the moment, and regret in hindsight both bring us to image of the crossroads, where one is about to take the unremarkable path, or takes the remarkable path, but realizes it was false. All paths lead to nowhere.
So the solution is to dissolve this entire life mapping, this concern about proper paths, challenging paths, and the image of the fateful departure, where one embarks on a path towards later regret in reflection. Embrace life’s basic indecision. Or more precisely, embrace the infinite and unavoidable potentialities of what we do, and reconcile with the inevitable fact that doing necessitates decisions and regrets. All decisions necessarily exclude others, and in the infinite combination of possible paths, no way can’t lead to some sense of loss. This entire metaphor of the “life course,” with its pathways and routes, is corrupted: it implicitly posits a correct route, and guarantees regret. If we inverted this emphasis on doing – and doing things correctly – then we can arrive at acceptance of not doing. Thus, at every moment when a decision is made, and others aren’t, we can accept the falling away of what didn’t happen. This demands a moral inversion of the connotations of slipping through one’s fingers, so that the slipping through is no longer experienced as loss, but instead is the process that we will affirm and relish. Because of the infinitesimal count of not-done things, it is more fulfilling to simply accept what can’t be done, and glory in imaginings of what could have been done as one would enjoy a fine drink or nice smelling flowers or paintings in a gallery. Instead of regretting not owning the paintings, we can simply enjoy the moment we spend watching them in the museum of imagination. What greater hope is their for happiness than accepting that we can’t consume or consummate all, and that affirming this, instead of regretting it, may bring us a more realistic and possible happiness.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The Digital Age?
During the State of the Union address on Tuesday January 25th, President Obama spoke of the need to usher in the Digital Age.
Obama presents the Digital Age as a social and economic epoch. Social because of the urgent necessity to bring Internet technologies to those without them, and economic because digital tools enable advancement to the next stage of industrial growth. Beyond the coffin of Fordism lies the hope of capturing and domesticating the IT contributions of international engineers, transnational financial institutions, and online sales. The Digital Age is imminent, and we must face it with our heads held high and our eyes alert, so that we may master it before others learn to master us through it.
A few months ago I read an article in the BBC that similarly spoke of a lack of access to the Internet not only as an infrastructural shortcoming, but as an educational shortcoming. Those lacking continuous private access to the worldwide web are presented as being at worst impoverished and at best unwittingly ignorant. The Internet now represents the crux of education in the 21st century, and once the population is wired, a basic necessity of the Digital Age will be satisfied. A society well connected to the Internet is a society predisposed to success in the 21st century.
When Obama speaks of the coming Digital Age I feel a tinge of excitement and a surge of apprehension. The politics of ambition may lead to a nation with a purpose, and purposes can unite a scattered society under one narrative. The narrative of the Digital Age is both heroic and modernistic, presenting a teleology of world affairs that overcomes postmodern cynicism through a Darwinian economic struggle. Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt both spoke regrettably of the slow dawn of the Modern Age and the arrival of the Technological Age or modern world, respectively. For both of these thinkers, the Modern Age was marked by a steady disenchantment of the religious world and the arrival of rational explanation. What set them apart from other thinkers was a perceived notion of the instrumentalization of not only the natural, and what present itself to humans in an undisclosed form, but also of the human. If the world is what humans make of it and how we relate to it, than an excessively rational and instrumental view of the world isn't simply progress, but actually dehumanizes our worlds and ourselves. People become cogs in a machine world, used and discarded as any production material. The natural world itself is no longer beautiful in its mystical beauty but is seen statistically as something to be exploited to an end.
For Arendt, the nuclear bomb and Sputnik both represented the extreme alienation of man from nature. The nuclear bomb is the uncontrollable transubstantiation of nature into a pulverizing unearthly force, and Sputnik was man's flight away from the hearth of the earth. Both Heidegger and Arendt have been accused of conservatism in the ways they nostalgically speak of the home, the private, and the earth, yet their somewhat mystical characterizations of these elements betrays the very human anxiety of imminent undeterminable change.
What changes does the Digital Age promise? Does it bring further instrumentalization and dehumanization of the human condition? Do technologies such as Facebook and Wikipedia further disclose our privacy and level knowledge into trivia? In a world dominated by the private made public and the public made unavoidable, do we lose an essential and important element of what humans need? Or is such apprehension simply situated (as it must be), conservative (it certainly is), and therefore reactionary?
The nuclear bomb and Sputnik were earth-threatening events. They hinted at a possible destruction of the globe as we knew it.
This was, however, a differentiated globe. When Kierkegaard wrote of the modern press in early 19th century Denmark he described it in terms similar to those I used to discuss Internet technologies. The current condition is more Kierkegaard's fear than Heidegger's or Arendt's. Instead of fearing the destruction of the earth, the fear is that of destruction of culture and the self, to be replaced only by a society sucking at the teat of the latest Internet meme.
When Obama speaks of our "Sputnik moment," he clearly suggests a heroic transcendence of cynicism and factionalism and ushers in a new age of meaning and purpose. "America does big things," he claims. This is certainly true. But what will be threatened by the Digital Age, this imminent, purposeful, and destructive paradigm. What will it change and what will we later regret about its arrival. A dawn that we certainly do desire, are creating and are already reeling from.
Obama presents the Digital Age as a social and economic epoch. Social because of the urgent necessity to bring Internet technologies to those without them, and economic because digital tools enable advancement to the next stage of industrial growth. Beyond the coffin of Fordism lies the hope of capturing and domesticating the IT contributions of international engineers, transnational financial institutions, and online sales. The Digital Age is imminent, and we must face it with our heads held high and our eyes alert, so that we may master it before others learn to master us through it.
A few months ago I read an article in the BBC that similarly spoke of a lack of access to the Internet not only as an infrastructural shortcoming, but as an educational shortcoming. Those lacking continuous private access to the worldwide web are presented as being at worst impoverished and at best unwittingly ignorant. The Internet now represents the crux of education in the 21st century, and once the population is wired, a basic necessity of the Digital Age will be satisfied. A society well connected to the Internet is a society predisposed to success in the 21st century.
When Obama speaks of the coming Digital Age I feel a tinge of excitement and a surge of apprehension. The politics of ambition may lead to a nation with a purpose, and purposes can unite a scattered society under one narrative. The narrative of the Digital Age is both heroic and modernistic, presenting a teleology of world affairs that overcomes postmodern cynicism through a Darwinian economic struggle. Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt both spoke regrettably of the slow dawn of the Modern Age and the arrival of the Technological Age or modern world, respectively. For both of these thinkers, the Modern Age was marked by a steady disenchantment of the religious world and the arrival of rational explanation. What set them apart from other thinkers was a perceived notion of the instrumentalization of not only the natural, and what present itself to humans in an undisclosed form, but also of the human. If the world is what humans make of it and how we relate to it, than an excessively rational and instrumental view of the world isn't simply progress, but actually dehumanizes our worlds and ourselves. People become cogs in a machine world, used and discarded as any production material. The natural world itself is no longer beautiful in its mystical beauty but is seen statistically as something to be exploited to an end.
For Arendt, the nuclear bomb and Sputnik both represented the extreme alienation of man from nature. The nuclear bomb is the uncontrollable transubstantiation of nature into a pulverizing unearthly force, and Sputnik was man's flight away from the hearth of the earth. Both Heidegger and Arendt have been accused of conservatism in the ways they nostalgically speak of the home, the private, and the earth, yet their somewhat mystical characterizations of these elements betrays the very human anxiety of imminent undeterminable change.
What changes does the Digital Age promise? Does it bring further instrumentalization and dehumanization of the human condition? Do technologies such as Facebook and Wikipedia further disclose our privacy and level knowledge into trivia? In a world dominated by the private made public and the public made unavoidable, do we lose an essential and important element of what humans need? Or is such apprehension simply situated (as it must be), conservative (it certainly is), and therefore reactionary?
The nuclear bomb and Sputnik were earth-threatening events. They hinted at a possible destruction of the globe as we knew it.
This was, however, a differentiated globe. When Kierkegaard wrote of the modern press in early 19th century Denmark he described it in terms similar to those I used to discuss Internet technologies. The current condition is more Kierkegaard's fear than Heidegger's or Arendt's. Instead of fearing the destruction of the earth, the fear is that of destruction of culture and the self, to be replaced only by a society sucking at the teat of the latest Internet meme.
When Obama speaks of our "Sputnik moment," he clearly suggests a heroic transcendence of cynicism and factionalism and ushers in a new age of meaning and purpose. "America does big things," he claims. This is certainly true. But what will be threatened by the Digital Age, this imminent, purposeful, and destructive paradigm. What will it change and what will we later regret about its arrival. A dawn that we certainly do desire, are creating and are already reeling from.
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