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.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Holy Fools: Normativity, Existentialism, Place
"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: 'He catches the wise in their craftiness.' " (1 Corinthians 3:19)
"In this film it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it." (Tarkovsky interviewed in "A Poet in Cinema")
"Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it." (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pg. 47)
Recently, watching some classic Soviet films, I was struck by the character of the holy fool. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a holy fool is ignorant of worldly ways, and has been struck by dumb by God's grace. This sort of ignorance is a good ignorance, as these fools are blind to the corrupting ways of fallen man.
Unsurprisingly, scholarly work on the holy fool seems to be most prevalent in theology. I found research describing early Christian ascetics and how they trained to be ignorant (of corporal temptations) before God. Updating these discussions, there was an attempt to bring the holy fool before Foucault's theorization. Here the holy fool-ascetic learns a technique of self-discipline and self-control in their task of self-mastery before God.
These discussions are all very interesting, and I wish I had the time and the faculty to closely read them. In my own time, I got to thinking about the holy fool in a certain brand of Kiergaardian and Heideggerian existentialism and the relation of the holy fool to normative place. I discuss several theories on normativity and the individual in the face of society. Then I look at several holy fools from Russian cinema and their tactics (indeed, their lack thereof) in normative and emotive situations . Finally, I conclude on the relation of the holy fool to place.
Important to the power-knowledge theorization of Foucault is the bottom-up enforcement of normativity in society. An individual learns their place, or disposition, through the configurations of any given society. From their social disposition, they will appeal to a certain assortment of mentors - in family, church, education, literature, etc., who aid them in a particular moral cultivation. Eventually, this cultivation is turned inward, and thus we have the voice of God speaking directly into the mind of the Catholic of Protestant individual. This is governmentality writ large, or better yet, writ diffusedly and pervasively. The religious subject is both subjected and before the Subject of God - Althusser's dual subjectivity.
Now stepping back to Kierkegaard, we can see the individual as subject not only to a religious subjectivation, but also subject to a secular levelling. The modern age, with its press and Public, enacts a sort of secular-normative levelling on an individual, distracting and depriving them of a relationship to God. The reduction of the singular individual to the mass, of the religious subject to the civil subject, is a very sinister abstraction, as it leads one to in fact bow before the variegations of secular living. The best one can do is live an ethical life - a normative life - and re-utter the most complacent doxa about good living. The religious life, the life that a holy fool must live, before God and in awe of God at the expense of a human morality is cast aside.
For Heidegger, and perhaps in extension, Sartre, we find the normative individual living an inauthentic life, a life of bad faith. Making no significant decisions, a normative subject is resigned to a life, and a world, designed and controlled by others - by the averageness of the abstract mass. An authentic individual makes all the decisions that matter in the face of, and perhaps despite of, normativity.
What exactly is the role of a holy fool? A trained ascetic would be a subject to a discipline of asceticism and therefore a particular religious orthodoxy. The ascetic makes a conscious decision to assume their religious role, beginning the necessary regimen of preparation, and living out the conditions of hermetism. This would seem an authentic position, a singular turn to the eternal life before God, yet the decision is still adopting a normative orthodoxy. Indeed, following in the footsteps of other in any religious practice, could be taken as a move of the mass: reacting to religious opinions through particular religious conditions as any abstracted subject would: "... we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back." (Being and Time pg 164)
The sort of holy fool to whom I was initially drawn is the fool that cannot speak, as madness is forever relegated to silence - to being unheard. The holy fool has no voice and therefore no direction to share with others, as their life is indeed a silent singularity before God as others never moulded them, and they themselves have no intention or possibility of pedagogy. In distinction to the ascetic, the true holy fool has made no conscious decision to be authentic before eternity, but have been thrust by God onto the world as truly ignorant beings. They don't need to make a decision to be anything, as they are deprived of the decision altogether.
Prince Myshkin in Dostoevky's "The Idiot," and Vladimir in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are holy fools, but not to the logical extreme of the "true holy fool" I just described. These holy fools, in their regular practice, reflect the desire, designs, and moods of others. Myshkin can't distance himself from the partial loves he is implicated in, and can't deny himself the relations of cynical men. As a "positively good man," Myshkin is a product of the situations he finds himself in, never extending an ethical self outside of the ethical worlds others contain him in at a given moment. Vladimir covets what him mother, Efrosinia covets, but only during the radiant expression of coveting. Like the black body of physicists, Vladimir absorbs and emits the emotions and projects of others. Yet in moments of disjuncture, before others, usually his mother, react to a situation, Vladimir is clearly at a loss of how to react - he can't make his own decision.
Durochka from Tarkovksy's Andrei Rublev is a true holy fool. She exists in a state of eternal delight - playful in any setting, eats with the voraciousness of an animal, and can't discern or decide who ought to be friend or foe. Her innocence inspires the icon painter Rublev, she survives with him the sack of Vladimir, and is eventually led away by the very Tartars that have razed and slaughtered her community. Throughout the entire situation, she remains in a state of delight, and when the Tartars effuse more joy than the distressed Rublev, she follows them to her likely doom. Durochka's fate always lies in the situation, but she does not absorb and emit like Myshkin or Vladimir. Her childlike ignorance is a permanent disposition, the self-state of a being completely existing despite the levelling process and ethical situation of the world. She knows only the religious and the eternal, and is incapable of aesthetic or ethical pursuits (her pursuit of joy is that of joy before God and in spite of the world, and not joy in personal pursuit - note her animal-like unrefinements). Life is not a concern, and therefore when death does arrive, she will be completely unawares.
The position of the holy fool in a place as social milieu is that of complete detachment. The fool reflects the sentiments of others, or the mood of the world, but does not project their own designs upon it. Before God and outside of the world, the holy fool moves through the world without abiding by or contributing to its normativity. The true holy fool lives so despite the world that they are completely incapable of decisions within it, they simply go with the world. This going-with the world is entirely different from a normative inauthentic going-with the world because decisions, ends, and means are entirely irrelevant. No ethical dilemmas play out. One can imagine a society composed entirely of such fools and how quickly, and how without malice or even consideration of others, it would die out. Its death would be unimportant, however, because it was always and anti-society, a temporal arrangement of singular eternities.
"In this film it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it." (Tarkovsky interviewed in "A Poet in Cinema")
"Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it." (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pg. 47)
Recently, watching some classic Soviet films, I was struck by the character of the holy fool. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a holy fool is ignorant of worldly ways, and has been struck by dumb by God's grace. This sort of ignorance is a good ignorance, as these fools are blind to the corrupting ways of fallen man.
Unsurprisingly, scholarly work on the holy fool seems to be most prevalent in theology. I found research describing early Christian ascetics and how they trained to be ignorant (of corporal temptations) before God. Updating these discussions, there was an attempt to bring the holy fool before Foucault's theorization. Here the holy fool-ascetic learns a technique of self-discipline and self-control in their task of self-mastery before God.
These discussions are all very interesting, and I wish I had the time and the faculty to closely read them. In my own time, I got to thinking about the holy fool in a certain brand of Kiergaardian and Heideggerian existentialism and the relation of the holy fool to normative place. I discuss several theories on normativity and the individual in the face of society. Then I look at several holy fools from Russian cinema and their tactics (indeed, their lack thereof) in normative and emotive situations . Finally, I conclude on the relation of the holy fool to place.
Important to the power-knowledge theorization of Foucault is the bottom-up enforcement of normativity in society. An individual learns their place, or disposition, through the configurations of any given society. From their social disposition, they will appeal to a certain assortment of mentors - in family, church, education, literature, etc., who aid them in a particular moral cultivation. Eventually, this cultivation is turned inward, and thus we have the voice of God speaking directly into the mind of the Catholic of Protestant individual. This is governmentality writ large, or better yet, writ diffusedly and pervasively. The religious subject is both subjected and before the Subject of God - Althusser's dual subjectivity.
Now stepping back to Kierkegaard, we can see the individual as subject not only to a religious subjectivation, but also subject to a secular levelling. The modern age, with its press and Public, enacts a sort of secular-normative levelling on an individual, distracting and depriving them of a relationship to God. The reduction of the singular individual to the mass, of the religious subject to the civil subject, is a very sinister abstraction, as it leads one to in fact bow before the variegations of secular living. The best one can do is live an ethical life - a normative life - and re-utter the most complacent doxa about good living. The religious life, the life that a holy fool must live, before God and in awe of God at the expense of a human morality is cast aside.
For Heidegger, and perhaps in extension, Sartre, we find the normative individual living an inauthentic life, a life of bad faith. Making no significant decisions, a normative subject is resigned to a life, and a world, designed and controlled by others - by the averageness of the abstract mass. An authentic individual makes all the decisions that matter in the face of, and perhaps despite of, normativity.
What exactly is the role of a holy fool? A trained ascetic would be a subject to a discipline of asceticism and therefore a particular religious orthodoxy. The ascetic makes a conscious decision to assume their religious role, beginning the necessary regimen of preparation, and living out the conditions of hermetism. This would seem an authentic position, a singular turn to the eternal life before God, yet the decision is still adopting a normative orthodoxy. Indeed, following in the footsteps of other in any religious practice, could be taken as a move of the mass: reacting to religious opinions through particular religious conditions as any abstracted subject would: "... we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back." (Being and Time pg 164)
The sort of holy fool to whom I was initially drawn is the fool that cannot speak, as madness is forever relegated to silence - to being unheard. The holy fool has no voice and therefore no direction to share with others, as their life is indeed a silent singularity before God as others never moulded them, and they themselves have no intention or possibility of pedagogy. In distinction to the ascetic, the true holy fool has made no conscious decision to be authentic before eternity, but have been thrust by God onto the world as truly ignorant beings. They don't need to make a decision to be anything, as they are deprived of the decision altogether.
Prince Myshkin in Dostoevky's "The Idiot," and Vladimir in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are holy fools, but not to the logical extreme of the "true holy fool" I just described. These holy fools, in their regular practice, reflect the desire, designs, and moods of others. Myshkin can't distance himself from the partial loves he is implicated in, and can't deny himself the relations of cynical men. As a "positively good man," Myshkin is a product of the situations he finds himself in, never extending an ethical self outside of the ethical worlds others contain him in at a given moment. Vladimir covets what him mother, Efrosinia covets, but only during the radiant expression of coveting. Like the black body of physicists, Vladimir absorbs and emits the emotions and projects of others. Yet in moments of disjuncture, before others, usually his mother, react to a situation, Vladimir is clearly at a loss of how to react - he can't make his own decision.
Durochka from Tarkovksy's Andrei Rublev is a true holy fool. She exists in a state of eternal delight - playful in any setting, eats with the voraciousness of an animal, and can't discern or decide who ought to be friend or foe. Her innocence inspires the icon painter Rublev, she survives with him the sack of Vladimir, and is eventually led away by the very Tartars that have razed and slaughtered her community. Throughout the entire situation, she remains in a state of delight, and when the Tartars effuse more joy than the distressed Rublev, she follows them to her likely doom. Durochka's fate always lies in the situation, but she does not absorb and emit like Myshkin or Vladimir. Her childlike ignorance is a permanent disposition, the self-state of a being completely existing despite the levelling process and ethical situation of the world. She knows only the religious and the eternal, and is incapable of aesthetic or ethical pursuits (her pursuit of joy is that of joy before God and in spite of the world, and not joy in personal pursuit - note her animal-like unrefinements). Life is not a concern, and therefore when death does arrive, she will be completely unawares.
The position of the holy fool in a place as social milieu is that of complete detachment. The fool reflects the sentiments of others, or the mood of the world, but does not project their own designs upon it. Before God and outside of the world, the holy fool moves through the world without abiding by or contributing to its normativity. The true holy fool lives so despite the world that they are completely incapable of decisions within it, they simply go with the world. This going-with the world is entirely different from a normative inauthentic going-with the world because decisions, ends, and means are entirely irrelevant. No ethical dilemmas play out. One can imagine a society composed entirely of such fools and how quickly, and how without malice or even consideration of others, it would die out. Its death would be unimportant, however, because it was always and anti-society, a temporal arrangement of singular eternities.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Usefullness of Epochal Divisions
If in the beginning there was only one time, then that era would likely be referred to as A. We can also safely assume that no one who has ever thought of themselves as living in the one and only epoch of history would bother to cleave it from another epoch. If there was to be a division, it would likely only be made in juxtaposition to the past, and would require some sort of a clean break with it. The Christians broke with the Judaic calendar, itself fixed upon a starting point, before which there was simply nothing. A would have pre-A from which to define itself in opposition.
I want to interrogate a concept a bit more complicated then the BCE/CE split. Since perhaps the Enlightenment, writers have been writing of a break with the past, the era before people could fathom enlightenment and were groveling under the oppression of ignorance. We might consider this the Medieval/Enlightenment split, or A/B. As time goes on however, thinkers and writers begin to conceive of a modern era, an era built around the exacting forces of capitalism, international standards, the foreseeable death of primitivism, and a new dawn for human freedom and potential. Now we have a Medieval/Enlightenment/Modern split, or A/B/C. Such a division has been pursued in many literatures as the dark times before reason was known, the beginnings of rational thought and positivistic science, and when rational science matured and hit its stride ushering in “true” forms of modern science beyond mere rationalistic thought. Now, experts among us have identified yet another split, that of metastasized modernity: post-modernity is the condition of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, hyperspace, multiple identities, the death of scientific truth, plurality, and irony over earnestness. So we have A/B/C/D.
Is it all settled now? How can we move forward from this point? Historians and cultural critics have identified problems with these categories. World historians argue that medieval is not a suitable category for the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Westphalian system, neither in Europe nor outside of it. However, much of the world has exhibited a feudal system of some sort. Perhaps it would be best to insert a “pre-modernity” category before modernity to compensate for this discrepancy. This is an era marked by hunter-gatherers, advanced organic economies (AOEs), and capitalists anticipating industry. Now we have A/subB/B/C/D. By this point, A just means pre-rational, or pre-European rationality, which may or may not occur at the beginning of the Enlightenment or the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps with Thomas Aquitaine (that would be a stretch). In any case, it starts to get messy when you try to figure out the exact extent of any of these global or local epochs.
So now we are in the era of post-modernity that is endorsed by many in the social sciences. Solid identity, permanent dwelling, the traditional family, and the worker/capitalist system were so very modern, and have come to pass. The shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods accord if you are a political economist, or simply to the new domination of America if you just want to look at politics. Though you would have to disregard the decades of the 40s and 50s and 60s (except for the bit at the end), as they still belong to the modern era. During the modern era, most people believed in the power of modern art, the TV, and the infallibility of science. But then came the terror of the Atomic Age, the art of the Dadaists, HG Wells “War of the Worlds,” the Bloomsbury group, and Hip-Hop with its self-conscious appropriation of random bits of the past. But these things didn’t all happen at once, so maybe a new category should be added to meld these two latest epochs together. A/subB/B/C/CD/D.
Already, I feel that this description isn’t enough. Think of all the alternate cultures to ours in the world. In fact, in post-modernity, “ours” is unstable. I don’t know you any better than I know myself. And surely, I can’t agree with you, because to agree with you would be to approve of you, and to do that, I would likely have to judge you, which requires cognition of your acts. An inseparable gulf lies between us and within me. Schizophrenia. Multiplicities. Let’s scatter the categories. Everything is now contingent on particular cultures and societies which themselves are contingent on the whims and fancies of those reading them. However, to keep things partially clear, it would be good to try to redefine at least the last two of these categories (and their modifications) for the colonized world. So we might as well restate the equation as preC/Cm/CDm/Dm. No one is beyond Dm because it hasn’t been theorized yet, and likely, only turning into a vaporous ether could possibly describe this state.
Finally, a suitable set of categories for analysis within the social sciences has been established. Now we can discover meaning on the borders between or within these multiplicities. Like a merchant from subB Venice, we can again encounter the Other in a fashion that will not inspire us to wonder not about origins, but only [micro-]evolution, because we are no longer burdened with the staged [macro-]evolution of time and the oppressive weight of place. Home is nothing. The Highway is everything. We can dispatch with the abusive categories that reasonable thinkers have erroneously established in the past so that we can again analyze them using similar vocabulary, but devoid of anything but political economy and distrust. And we are back in the Medieval Era, looking only to our redemption by the cynical forces of post-modernity.
I want to interrogate a concept a bit more complicated then the BCE/CE split. Since perhaps the Enlightenment, writers have been writing of a break with the past, the era before people could fathom enlightenment and were groveling under the oppression of ignorance. We might consider this the Medieval/Enlightenment split, or A/B. As time goes on however, thinkers and writers begin to conceive of a modern era, an era built around the exacting forces of capitalism, international standards, the foreseeable death of primitivism, and a new dawn for human freedom and potential. Now we have a Medieval/Enlightenment/Modern split, or A/B/C. Such a division has been pursued in many literatures as the dark times before reason was known, the beginnings of rational thought and positivistic science, and when rational science matured and hit its stride ushering in “true” forms of modern science beyond mere rationalistic thought. Now, experts among us have identified yet another split, that of metastasized modernity: post-modernity is the condition of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, hyperspace, multiple identities, the death of scientific truth, plurality, and irony over earnestness. So we have A/B/C/D.
Is it all settled now? How can we move forward from this point? Historians and cultural critics have identified problems with these categories. World historians argue that medieval is not a suitable category for the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Westphalian system, neither in Europe nor outside of it. However, much of the world has exhibited a feudal system of some sort. Perhaps it would be best to insert a “pre-modernity” category before modernity to compensate for this discrepancy. This is an era marked by hunter-gatherers, advanced organic economies (AOEs), and capitalists anticipating industry. Now we have A/subB/B/C/D. By this point, A just means pre-rational, or pre-European rationality, which may or may not occur at the beginning of the Enlightenment or the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps with Thomas Aquitaine (that would be a stretch). In any case, it starts to get messy when you try to figure out the exact extent of any of these global or local epochs.
So now we are in the era of post-modernity that is endorsed by many in the social sciences. Solid identity, permanent dwelling, the traditional family, and the worker/capitalist system were so very modern, and have come to pass. The shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods accord if you are a political economist, or simply to the new domination of America if you just want to look at politics. Though you would have to disregard the decades of the 40s and 50s and 60s (except for the bit at the end), as they still belong to the modern era. During the modern era, most people believed in the power of modern art, the TV, and the infallibility of science. But then came the terror of the Atomic Age, the art of the Dadaists, HG Wells “War of the Worlds,” the Bloomsbury group, and Hip-Hop with its self-conscious appropriation of random bits of the past. But these things didn’t all happen at once, so maybe a new category should be added to meld these two latest epochs together. A/subB/B/C/CD/D.
Already, I feel that this description isn’t enough. Think of all the alternate cultures to ours in the world. In fact, in post-modernity, “ours” is unstable. I don’t know you any better than I know myself. And surely, I can’t agree with you, because to agree with you would be to approve of you, and to do that, I would likely have to judge you, which requires cognition of your acts. An inseparable gulf lies between us and within me. Schizophrenia. Multiplicities. Let’s scatter the categories. Everything is now contingent on particular cultures and societies which themselves are contingent on the whims and fancies of those reading them. However, to keep things partially clear, it would be good to try to redefine at least the last two of these categories (and their modifications) for the colonized world. So we might as well restate the equation as preC/Cm/CDm/Dm. No one is beyond Dm because it hasn’t been theorized yet, and likely, only turning into a vaporous ether could possibly describe this state.
Finally, a suitable set of categories for analysis within the social sciences has been established. Now we can discover meaning on the borders between or within these multiplicities. Like a merchant from subB Venice, we can again encounter the Other in a fashion that will not inspire us to wonder not about origins, but only [micro-]evolution, because we are no longer burdened with the staged [macro-]evolution of time and the oppressive weight of place. Home is nothing. The Highway is everything. We can dispatch with the abusive categories that reasonable thinkers have erroneously established in the past so that we can again analyze them using similar vocabulary, but devoid of anything but political economy and distrust. And we are back in the Medieval Era, looking only to our redemption by the cynical forces of post-modernity.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
"Ruin Porn" in Detroit
I've done my fair share of "abandoned place" exploration. There is a special draw the decayed, which can be traced all the way back to the enjoyment of Roman ruins in the 15th century, and then to the medieval castles, and then to Eastern ruins, and so on and so forth. Besides reflecting nostalgia for the (mis?)remembered, they also live on in the landscapes of post-apocalyptical science fiction (eg. 12 Monkeys and Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles").
A whole host of websites have sprung up to follow Detroit's decline, and blog entries as well. It is easy to access many of Detroit's ruins, because there are too many of them for the police to evict you. Hell, it might even draw tourism these days. I was just thinking about what a cool photo trip it would be. Once you're in, the more the decayed, the better the photo. Abandoned photography has been around for years. But Abandoned Detroit has drawn quite a bit of media attention.
This writer thinks that "ruin porn" is just a cop out for "lazy" journalists. I've seen the same accusations leveled at journalists that explore chatroulette. Journalists devouring journalists? But there is a real draw to these places. I think it reflects an anxiety about the decline of America. The last 50 years has seen the first thinning outs of heavily settled places. As Rust Belters fled to the Sun Belt, the Midwest changed from the America's future to the ghost in the attic. Remember Horace Smith's Oxymandius:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[courtesy of Wikipedia]
Michigan is the Babylon of Midwestern manufacturing; Detroit and Flint are its neighborhoods. Perhaps the push to save Detroit's Michigan Central Station is more than civic pride, but the desire to rejuvenate America. An attempt to cover up a symbolic blight that speaks less about neighborhoods and cities and more about our civilization. To deny the relics that could one day speak of the beginnings of America's decline. But does destroying the past to prevent its future recovery really insure anything besides complete erasure?
Monday, August 10, 2009
Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction
I recently read Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and, unsurprisingly got to thinking about a medium of “art” close to my heart – photography. Over the past few years I have seen my own interest in photography shift along with its technologies.
When digital photography first started to break into the mass market (in a major way) about five or so years ago, my thoughts were those of a Luddite – the technology would never be good enough, the images would always be inferior, film would stay prominent. I was mistaken. Surely, I had a lot invested in the success of film, I had an expensive film camera and, most of all, was very proud of the fact that I had learned to use a film SLR through trial and error. Digital brought the threat of watering down a whole art so that anyone could do it, it was the equivalent of revealing all of the great secrets of the Master’s – no, it was more like grafting a Master’s hand onto your arm.
With digital photography anyone can cheaply (well, relatively) learn how to capture great images through trial and error. Versatile and easily usable consumer SLRs and new generation point-and-shoot/professional control hybrid cameras combined with intelligent imaging software have made the ability to produce great images available to anyone with an interest. Some would argue that little skill is now necessary to produce a good image, yet these days, little equipment is actually needed to create a great image and to cultivate good picture taking skills.
So, what is the status of photographic art in the age of digital reproduction? How has the art shifted? Some thoughts:
(1) No copy necessary.
Reproduction of the image is now done on the computer screen. Not only no longer is there an original image with a mythical aura, there is neither an infinitely reproducible physical copy. There is only the visual trace of the image on the screen. The existence of the copy is reduced to the retransfigurable crystals of an LCD screen; it truly flits in and out of the present.
(2) Image sharing websites.
Sites such as Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and the various crowd-source stock photo collections provide for hundreds of thousands or millions of images to be available for viewing at any given moment. Thousands of photos are uploaded every hour and devoured by people across the world in seconds. Spatial differentiation in artistic style is consequently reduced. As another photographer, my influences pour in from all over the world and I am unable to tell who or where these influences originate. Photographers hide behind monikers like “Moann” or “ind67,” names that say nothing of identity. Images can be flipped through as fast as they load. A favorite image could be purchased and printed, but the likelihood of this happening is slight, as the image could just as easily be bookmarked or set as computer wallpaper or shared with a friend through a link. Again, as Benjamin reflects on the removing of recorded choral work from the auditorium to the home for private listening, personalization of the consumption of the work has occurred. The photographic image no longer has an original context beyond the moment and place it was snapped. Its whole life has been embedded in digital code.
(3) Mass production/consumption and its influence on the aesthetic
The eye sees a scene, the lens captures the scene, the internet hosts the image for all to look at. Image sharing sites host comment and ratings sections to mediate the consumers’ roles as critics. Is the image original? Interesting? What does it say about skill or art form? The mass provides answers. As more and more similar images are uploaded onto the internet, and people are normalized into what is a “good” photo, new forms of photography also arise. The High Dynamic Range photo and the heavily manipulated surreal image which restradles the line between reality and painterly fantasy are examples of a new photography allowed for digital photo processing. As the software and hardware to produce these images becomes more and more common, they are no longer the works of exceptionally skilled professionals, but the works of especially advanced technology. Hence, the “skill,” the aura of the ability to transmit the secreted flits of reality, of the photographer is diminished.
Where does this leave the art of photography? Is it now dying as an art form, or simply mutating? As technologies have improved, the traditional photograph has, for the most part, become an antique that conveys an era and aesthetic of limited technology - imperfect in comparison to the infinite perfectibility of the digitally manageable image. So it would seem that the art of photography would be pushed to a new level by necessity of survival, a level that would blur the line between photography and something new. So if this is the case, then the traditional professional photographer, artist or commercial, and even the skilled amateur have lost ground and been diluted by the proliferation of cheap cameras, computer sharing, mass judgment, and the outsourcing of their skill by technology. A new type of photographer has also been bred, however, one that is less a photographer and more of a computer wizard with another sort of creative skill, dealing with a 2D digital canvas and a whole palette of digital tools.
I am still unsure how I will fit into the new photography. My current temptation is to go retrograde and abandon the demands of the digital photographer. Yet there is another factor I haven’t yet discussed, and won’t go to deep into - the dilution of the identity of the photographer, of both the knack and the eye. Whose eye is it that pinpoints the image to be snapped? My eye or the eye of the masses that deem the image worthwhile? An old wizened man in an exotic country will draw the snapshots of a dozen tourists in a few moments. A majestic mountain landscape or a beautifully eroding factory could similarly draw a large amount of camera interest. Perhaps this is nothing new, but as the means and discourse around the art form falls into the hands of the masses, then does it become subject to too much cultural refereeing? Losing its ability to affect?
When digital photography first started to break into the mass market (in a major way) about five or so years ago, my thoughts were those of a Luddite – the technology would never be good enough, the images would always be inferior, film would stay prominent. I was mistaken. Surely, I had a lot invested in the success of film, I had an expensive film camera and, most of all, was very proud of the fact that I had learned to use a film SLR through trial and error. Digital brought the threat of watering down a whole art so that anyone could do it, it was the equivalent of revealing all of the great secrets of the Master’s – no, it was more like grafting a Master’s hand onto your arm.
With digital photography anyone can cheaply (well, relatively) learn how to capture great images through trial and error. Versatile and easily usable consumer SLRs and new generation point-and-shoot/professional control hybrid cameras combined with intelligent imaging software have made the ability to produce great images available to anyone with an interest. Some would argue that little skill is now necessary to produce a good image, yet these days, little equipment is actually needed to create a great image and to cultivate good picture taking skills.
So, what is the status of photographic art in the age of digital reproduction? How has the art shifted? Some thoughts:
(1) No copy necessary.
Reproduction of the image is now done on the computer screen. Not only no longer is there an original image with a mythical aura, there is neither an infinitely reproducible physical copy. There is only the visual trace of the image on the screen. The existence of the copy is reduced to the retransfigurable crystals of an LCD screen; it truly flits in and out of the present.
(2) Image sharing websites.
Sites such as Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and the various crowd-source stock photo collections provide for hundreds of thousands or millions of images to be available for viewing at any given moment. Thousands of photos are uploaded every hour and devoured by people across the world in seconds. Spatial differentiation in artistic style is consequently reduced. As another photographer, my influences pour in from all over the world and I am unable to tell who or where these influences originate. Photographers hide behind monikers like “Moann” or “ind67,” names that say nothing of identity. Images can be flipped through as fast as they load. A favorite image could be purchased and printed, but the likelihood of this happening is slight, as the image could just as easily be bookmarked or set as computer wallpaper or shared with a friend through a link. Again, as Benjamin reflects on the removing of recorded choral work from the auditorium to the home for private listening, personalization of the consumption of the work has occurred. The photographic image no longer has an original context beyond the moment and place it was snapped. Its whole life has been embedded in digital code.
(3) Mass production/consumption and its influence on the aesthetic
The eye sees a scene, the lens captures the scene, the internet hosts the image for all to look at. Image sharing sites host comment and ratings sections to mediate the consumers’ roles as critics. Is the image original? Interesting? What does it say about skill or art form? The mass provides answers. As more and more similar images are uploaded onto the internet, and people are normalized into what is a “good” photo, new forms of photography also arise. The High Dynamic Range photo and the heavily manipulated surreal image which restradles the line between reality and painterly fantasy are examples of a new photography allowed for digital photo processing. As the software and hardware to produce these images becomes more and more common, they are no longer the works of exceptionally skilled professionals, but the works of especially advanced technology. Hence, the “skill,” the aura of the ability to transmit the secreted flits of reality, of the photographer is diminished.
Where does this leave the art of photography? Is it now dying as an art form, or simply mutating? As technologies have improved, the traditional photograph has, for the most part, become an antique that conveys an era and aesthetic of limited technology - imperfect in comparison to the infinite perfectibility of the digitally manageable image. So it would seem that the art of photography would be pushed to a new level by necessity of survival, a level that would blur the line between photography and something new. So if this is the case, then the traditional professional photographer, artist or commercial, and even the skilled amateur have lost ground and been diluted by the proliferation of cheap cameras, computer sharing, mass judgment, and the outsourcing of their skill by technology. A new type of photographer has also been bred, however, one that is less a photographer and more of a computer wizard with another sort of creative skill, dealing with a 2D digital canvas and a whole palette of digital tools.
I am still unsure how I will fit into the new photography. My current temptation is to go retrograde and abandon the demands of the digital photographer. Yet there is another factor I haven’t yet discussed, and won’t go to deep into - the dilution of the identity of the photographer, of both the knack and the eye. Whose eye is it that pinpoints the image to be snapped? My eye or the eye of the masses that deem the image worthwhile? An old wizened man in an exotic country will draw the snapshots of a dozen tourists in a few moments. A majestic mountain landscape or a beautifully eroding factory could similarly draw a large amount of camera interest. Perhaps this is nothing new, but as the means and discourse around the art form falls into the hands of the masses, then does it become subject to too much cultural refereeing? Losing its ability to affect?
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