Masks appear in our lives in many ways.
For some, the mask is associated with the Carnival. By putting on a mask, the carnival-goer sheds his inhibitions and comes into greater unity with his tribal or animal side. For example in Walcott's 'Mass Man', a clerk becomes a great lion; within a "gold-wired peacock", a man; Boysie with mangoes on his chest is Cleopatra! The mask thus serves to transform and reveal an alternative side of our being. Halloween, with its emphasis on witchery and supernatural beings, is perhaps the most recognised white/Western version of this.
For others of a more saturnine character, a mask is a means of social control, of displaying authority in new forms. The fun playful side is the Venetian style masked-ball, which is contiguous with the previous version of masks. But the darker side is the mask of authority, of officialdom: - the teacher who disciplines his students; the policeman who kettles the protestor; the lawyer who stops illegal downloading; the neighbour who, needing a good night's sleep, asks for the party to be shut down. Maybe each of these figures has some empathy with the forces of revelry and freedom; none wants to attract resentment; but each recognises the greater loss that comes with encroachments on civility and order in the public domain. Suppressing their fun-loving side, they impose restraint.
I've recently become fascinated by the theme of masks. I am currently acting with a drama club - something new to me. Unlike my fellow English students at Catz, many of whom were somehow involved in drama, I was never drawn to the stage at Oxford - it didn't chime with my sense of self. This self always sought authenticity in people. It is this same reverence for truth and accuracy that has drawn me to the profession of the law. But in my role as tutor I have come to see that professionalism entails wearing a mask. Sometimes to act in the best interests of my tutees I cannot show them my honest feelings - of anger and disappointment - or must do so only by flashes of lightning that wake them up - and then control those emotions so as to steer them towards a successful course of action. And in applying to become a solicitor, promoting myself as a solicitor, I always found it difficult walking that line between being myself and selling myself as an accomplished professional with whom clients will want to work. I have found participating in the club useful for welding together these sides of my persona.
In the process I have come to realise that any person of ambitions must try on numerous masks before they succeed in life. It is part of growing up. Infants play at fort-da - will mummy pick up my bottle if I push it off? In doing so they take authority of their needs over their carers, and initiate that great process of command-control that ripples throughout our lives in a range of situations where the hierarchy or horizontal relationship between two people is being established. The teenager muses on their future - and plays at being a lover, a public-speaker, a writer, a party animal, a sportsman - each with their own narratives and rules of command-control. The profit-motive instantiates a relationship of procurer and provider: the procurer says I want this and the provider says - of course your wish is my command; the provider must forbear and suppress any rebellious feelings they may have to satisfy the needs of the procurer and obtain their money. In an ideal employment environment, people would move into those jobs which cause them most pleasure and least suppression into a mask; but numerous discussions with friends and familiars shows that this is not always possible, and many end up in jobs they despise and careers they hate. I have made the utmost endeavours to avoid this situation for myself but it has come at some cost to other aspects of my life.
Indeed throughout my life I have tried on masks. My oldest brother made it a habit of his in my pre-teens to make up a seemingly infinite and inescapable variety of names for me (he mellowed as he got older, and I later saw that this obsession of his was a strange sort of brotherly love). Each corresponded with a different aspect of my being; the moment I transcended one flawed vision of myself, he would make up an account for another. It was carnival for him, but somewhere between a strange dream and a nightmare for me. It drove me to excel intellectually, to outmanoeuver others with the quickness and variety of my thoughts, to escape entrapment in a narrow form of thinking. But it came at some cost to my self esteem in other areas of my life. With such bewildering belittlement it could be hard to see myself as having a singular authority. Rather the forms of authority within me existed on a contingent basis in conversations with friends, family, and other familiars, and in my academic achievement.
In my literary, musical and cinematic tastes, I have always had a taste for personae. My brother also introduced me to the joys of underground hiphop. Having been hooked on Eminem, I came to see that there was a whole tradition of adopting personae within hiphop that led to an extraordinary imaginative richness. In film I loved Bergman's Persona, and never fully understood those who dismissed the film with - it's so obvious the nurse and the actress are becoming the same; that's not the point; it's about how relationships change and mould us so that we form new rigidities of character with new people, and form identities shaped within that relationship such that two people can almost become symmetrical. And in teen years in poetry, I loved Browning's dramatic personae and Donne's satirical and romantic masks as urbane parasite or meta-physician to a dawning relationship - their musings on desire and being desired.
I also have a strong taste for satire - this year I have been reading and re-reading the major works of Swift, some poems of Gay and the Musil's The Man without Qualities ('TMWQ'). Each takes it as given that the singular authority of the self does not exist in a fixed state, but rather various drives towards power and greatness, or love and desire, shape the outward forms of ourselves.
In TMWQ, there is Moosbrugger, the serial killer who may lack the neccessary mens rea to have murdered so often; he in turn raises questions about the persistence of intentionality in man; for instance about the philosopher-businessman Arnheim who is by turns lover, industrialist, intellectual, hidden oil-man, military propagandist and peacemaker. The incompleteness of these personalities raises larger questions about history - about how the first world war could have come about when noone anticipated it, and noone intended destruction on that scale.
Thus the masked dimension of our personality calls into question the very stability of society and civilisation; that the humanist mask of authority we all present is not just a fashion and a phase that will eventually go the way of the Roman empire. After all, post-Renaissance European-style civilisation has only been around for what 600-700 years, and the Romans managed a similar slice of time.
For now I am content to develop my long-held dream of being a solicitor. An ancient profession - acting to structure people's relationships and dealings in a way that will ensure long term stability - in a way it is the craft of making acceptable terms on which people of different wants can continue, hopefully maintaining peaceful masks all the way through their relationship.
Saturday, 1 November 2014
Sunday, 4 May 2014
The conflict between human rights and environmental rights
In short:
Without decent
economic conditions, it is too difficult to incentivise people to uphold the
institutions that enforce human rights. Therefore, in order to have the same
human rights as us, other cultures must have our economic conditions and
technology. Yet the modern liberal human is dependent on a technology that is
anti-environmental. Moreover, even to get to the slightly cleaner technologies
of the developed world, it is hard not to go through a period of much dirtier
technology. Look at the environmental protests of China, and see the irony of
the growth-environment dilemma.
Human rights are preferable during my lifetime. Should I overcome my myopia?
Human rights are preferable during my lifetime. Should I overcome my myopia?
Long version coming
soon.
Sunday, 20 April 2014
What good is guilt?
You might say you feel guilty because you feel you wronged
others. Guilt encourages you not to wrong again or even to rectify that wrong.
So guilt serves to punish, to rehabilitate and to restore. It is your internal
penal system.
Also, guilt deepens our sense of belonging to others by
forcing us to consider others’ perspectives. Paradoxically, guilt bonds us together by forcing us to
confront the bitter loneliness of our own singular conduct.
But what if you were wrong to feel guilty?
Then you are inflicting pain on yourself unnecessarily. You
are a masochist. What’s worse, the sadistic pain-inflictor is also you,
yourself. Moreover, rather than binding you to others, your guilt is driving a
psychological wedge between you and them that need not exist.
So the questions remain:
Should I feel guilty?
Must I feel guilty?
The questions guilt asks of us are difficult to confront
directly. Consequently many view others’ ethics as perverse. If we err too much
towards guilt, we never take risks, or indulge in ultimately positive
behaviours. If we err too much away from guilt, we exonerate ourselves from
behaviour the reasonable man considers blameworthy.
From the banker to the mother, this dilemma faces us all.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4b0HYxOSvI
Saturday, 11 January 2014
Under Earth - the source materials of civilised life
The Russian Orthodox Church used to spread a superstition among the peasants. They would say -
Never dig down into the earth. The more you dig the closer you are to hell!
It was probably just a superstition. By making them afraid of the ground underneath them, the church reinforced peasant's sense of the cosmic order. God in the heavens, the devil below.
But a subtler thinker might realise that this injunction is anti-technological. The majority of materials of cities and modern living are made from materials extracted from under the earth's surface. If we had never been a digging species, there would have been no bronze age, no iron age, no industrialisation; no concrete, oil, plastic or computer chips.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Like a modern pilgrim I had an interesting conversation on the road to Jerusalem. My mind was already impressed by the sun's heat which beamed with the intensity that another age or person might consider divine; I was also impressed with the modern Hebrew in the airport, finally seeing the language of my religious upbringing come to life.
But this Englishman sitting next to me on the bus impressed me in a different way. He was an engineer who had come to analyse the ancient water systems under the Old City and elsewhere in Israel. He and his team believed they could be study the ancient technology and develop applications for modern supply. After all, water security is still an issue even in England (hose pipe bans, etc).
My researches reveal that these ancient tunnels are approximately three thousand years old. Back then another culture dug down and tapped a key source of life - water.
In a mutable universe, a reflexive, self-aware species would look to secure control over all the resources upon which its survival depends. Even less intelligent species, such as the beaver, control their environment to increase security. The beaver builds its dams; this creates a water barrier about their home and wetlands for a new ecology; the barrier prevents predators and thus secures the beavers. Yet whereas the beaver builds the dam instinctively, man digs with a purpose.
The earth promises water. With purposeful work, the earth yields water.
Our species takes dominion over all the things of the earth. This extends God's promise in the first chapter of the Torah "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Whether one believes in gods/God or not, one must acknowledge that gods'/God's presence reassures believers about the promise of things (and this could also be said of non-monotheistic religions); it reminds us that our attitudes towards materials is deeply infused with a sense of purpose. I believe that none of us can entirely get behind or beyond this underlying power to attribute our purposes to outside matter. Without it, we would not be able to survive in the way we do.
(We have stories about this. Moses in the desert striking the rock with anger and it yields water. And God is angry with his anger, at Moses's skepticism towards God's instructions and never allows Moses to enter Israel the promised land.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anthropologically, our digging is also significant. I learnt in Israel that studying burial rituals - are the bones carefully placed? - tells us a lot about the symbolic value attributed to death by cultures. In fact it is an early marker of culture.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Nowadays our digging is much more complex. Water is relatively cheap; we devote our most highly engineered digging for more expensive substances, such as oil.
I remember at one law firm an Australian associate showing this picture of a massive oil rig (a comparable image would be http://bit.ly/12hfuSC) and saying "Isn't that a thing of beauty?" And my initial reaction was, well, not my idea of beauty - kind of monstrous gargantuan construction. But then I thought about it some more - the amount of effort and ingenuity that went it that. The sheer human willpower and work and careful execution and planning; the astute advice necessary to put together such an intricate vast construction. What an impressive mass of material! How daring - to venture into the ocean and build this extracting machine upon which man can live. It was one of those duck/rabbit moments.
Never dig down into the earth. The more you dig the closer you are to hell!
It was probably just a superstition. By making them afraid of the ground underneath them, the church reinforced peasant's sense of the cosmic order. God in the heavens, the devil below.
But a subtler thinker might realise that this injunction is anti-technological. The majority of materials of cities and modern living are made from materials extracted from under the earth's surface. If we had never been a digging species, there would have been no bronze age, no iron age, no industrialisation; no concrete, oil, plastic or computer chips.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Like a modern pilgrim I had an interesting conversation on the road to Jerusalem. My mind was already impressed by the sun's heat which beamed with the intensity that another age or person might consider divine; I was also impressed with the modern Hebrew in the airport, finally seeing the language of my religious upbringing come to life.
But this Englishman sitting next to me on the bus impressed me in a different way. He was an engineer who had come to analyse the ancient water systems under the Old City and elsewhere in Israel. He and his team believed they could be study the ancient technology and develop applications for modern supply. After all, water security is still an issue even in England (hose pipe bans, etc).
My researches reveal that these ancient tunnels are approximately three thousand years old. Back then another culture dug down and tapped a key source of life - water.
In a mutable universe, a reflexive, self-aware species would look to secure control over all the resources upon which its survival depends. Even less intelligent species, such as the beaver, control their environment to increase security. The beaver builds its dams; this creates a water barrier about their home and wetlands for a new ecology; the barrier prevents predators and thus secures the beavers. Yet whereas the beaver builds the dam instinctively, man digs with a purpose.
The earth promises water. With purposeful work, the earth yields water.
Our species takes dominion over all the things of the earth. This extends God's promise in the first chapter of the Torah "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Whether one believes in gods/God or not, one must acknowledge that gods'/God's presence reassures believers about the promise of things (and this could also be said of non-monotheistic religions); it reminds us that our attitudes towards materials is deeply infused with a sense of purpose. I believe that none of us can entirely get behind or beyond this underlying power to attribute our purposes to outside matter. Without it, we would not be able to survive in the way we do.
(We have stories about this. Moses in the desert striking the rock with anger and it yields water. And God is angry with his anger, at Moses's skepticism towards God's instructions and never allows Moses to enter Israel the promised land.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anthropologically, our digging is also significant. I learnt in Israel that studying burial rituals - are the bones carefully placed? - tells us a lot about the symbolic value attributed to death by cultures. In fact it is an early marker of culture.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Nowadays our digging is much more complex. Water is relatively cheap; we devote our most highly engineered digging for more expensive substances, such as oil.
I remember at one law firm an Australian associate showing this picture of a massive oil rig (a comparable image would be http://bit.ly/12hfuSC) and saying "Isn't that a thing of beauty?" And my initial reaction was, well, not my idea of beauty - kind of monstrous gargantuan construction. But then I thought about it some more - the amount of effort and ingenuity that went it that. The sheer human willpower and work and careful execution and planning; the astute advice necessary to put together such an intricate vast construction. What an impressive mass of material! How daring - to venture into the ocean and build this extracting machine upon which man can live. It was one of those duck/rabbit moments.
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Family History 4: My Last Visit to Susan Church, My Granny.
Entering the room at Walburton, I knew there would not be many chances left to visit her.
It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.
It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.
We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.
Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.
So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..
"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.
But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....
Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."
This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).
But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.
So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.
It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.
It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.
We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.
Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.
So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..
"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.
But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....
Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."
This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).
But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.
So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.
Friday, 4 January 2013
US Election Politics: Information Wars in the Digital Era
The Obama campaign had a lightning-fast recruitment method. Simply sign in to Obama's website, sign up to various action groups at the click of a button and, hey presto, you are recruited.
(Examples of personal data given: email address; password; gender; age [as I recall]; example action groups: local; Jewish; young.)
(Examples of personal data given: email address; password; gender; age [as I recall]; example action groups: local; Jewish; young.)
Want to enjoy the Obama battle bus to Ohio from New York? Why not? It would be fun.
You can now telephone folks in Philadelphia and Ohio.
Read the script, first, of course.
Second, elicit their electoral preferences to work out what you say to them; try and improv a little to give it a measure of reality.
Third, build support for the Obama movement so it becomes unstoppable.
Read the script, first, of course.
Second, elicit their electoral preferences to work out what you say to them; try and improv a little to give it a measure of reality.
Third, build support for the Obama movement so it becomes unstoppable.
Totally unreal.
- - - - - - - - - -
I tried this calling method on the night before election night. You dial the number on the screen, with a name attached. All four calls got no response - not unexpectedly, since receiving a random call on the night before elections is likely to mean an election call.
- - - - - - - - - -
I tried this calling method on the night before election night. You dial the number on the screen, with a name attached. All four calls got no response - not unexpectedly, since receiving a random call on the night before elections is likely to mean an election call.
Even such superficial impressions made me realise that Obama's campaign was an extraordinarily slick operation. It utilized the latest in digital technology and data-mining to mobilize the vote. Now UK politicians are clamoring to repeat the trick.
The language of US elections is highly militaristic (campaign; mobilize; fighting an election), and for good reason. Politics arouses a lot of violent opinion, especially in the States. The election is a situation that invites people to pick sides; to swear allegiance to their leader and party; to battle with their friends, family and acquaintances for recognition of the party as representative of their values; and then to take action and vote.
Through utilizing military rhetoric, people are strongly engaged and personally connected to their campaign. (And the election wasn't the end of it because I've received emails since then, eliciting my support for Obama's actions.)
It reminded me of the computer games I used to play as a teenager. Except this time, the information and the overarching narrative of election conquest played out in real time and real human lives. Peculiarly, Obama delivered videos directly into my inbox, just like the instructions you received in (video game) Red Alert.
Despite the artificiality of my connection to Obama, the videos generated a sense of personal immediacy and directness that was unusual in our media-driven age. It also reminded me of TV speeches of Neville Chamberlain we watched in the Appeasement module of A-level history. As of yet, the internet has not been tarred by the same sense of inauthenticity, and mediation by video channel, that prevents directness on TV.
But looking at other sources of my political awareness - the newspapers I read; the newsfeed I got on facebook; the channels I watched; all the sources were designed to reinforce my opinion that Obama was a good choice. Divisions in the US would suggest that exactly the same belief-reinforcing effect was happening to Republicans. They may not have been as likely to be tech-savvy as Obama's supporters (generally younger and in better connected areas such as the two coasts), but Romney was surely playing the same tactics.
Looking back at the now infamous '47%' speech, it's clear that people were being fed completely different angles on it. Republicans got the 'victim psychology' lecture - without always realising this rested upon a false dichotomy (i.e. that people always think of themselves as victims or as achievers; whereas surely we think of ourselves as both at different times, and neither much of the time too). Democrats got the 'elite' Romney lecture, which was also a less-than-rounded characterisation of him. (In fact, Obama's campaign spent a huge amount tarring Romney as a candidate, which is pretty dirty as a tactic.)
There were massive differences in the information given by each side. The intent was to mobilize core supporters with a one-sided wall of information. This information divides the people into two warring sides. One could make a case for calling it 'information wars in the digital age.'
It's not entirely new - Orwell certainly wrote about it in 1984; and this thread of information distortion is a subject that surely goes back to the classical era; in works such as Utopia and Richard III, humanists such as Thomas More recovered the distorting effect of eloquence noted by ancient writers such as Tacitus. For example, Utopia captures the paradoxical quality of information distortion that occurs when any powerful entity tries to create an idealised image of itself in order to win over and mollify its subjects and proximate populace.*
However, the difference today is the quality of virtual interactivity made possible by modern technology. It creates greater opportunities for each of us to be remote agents, rather than full-body participants, in these 'information wars'.
I wonder what happens when this behaviour moves outside the military and political sphere. Surely, subject to regulation, this is already occurring in the world of commerce. At my last job at Little Pim, I was certainly aware of digital strategy, and ways of winning over potential buyers in order to sell our product. And as a start-up, we were far from the cutting edge of this desire to encourage other internet agents to actively promote our product.
Will there be information wars between rival companies in the future? Is this already happening? What kind of distortions will that create?
My feeling is that regulation will keep commercial information control from becoming dangerously distorting (in the way that politics can be), but my current knowledge is insufficient for a conclusive answer.
- - - - - - -
[*At many universities, people interpret Utopia as a depiction of an ideal society, where the semi-communist state intervenes to minimise people's working hours and prevent disorder in order to create social harmony. However, readings since the mid-80s have noticed that this coincides with chilling details of repression that exist within the text, suggesting that really this idealisation is a way of blinding people to the regime's flaws.
Example: "THEY do not make slaves of prisoners of war, except those that are taken in battle; nor of the sons of their slaves, nor of those of other nations: the slaves among them are only such as are condemned to that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing."]
It reminded me of the computer games I used to play as a teenager. Except this time, the information and the overarching narrative of election conquest played out in real time and real human lives. Peculiarly, Obama delivered videos directly into my inbox, just like the instructions you received in (video game) Red Alert.
Despite the artificiality of my connection to Obama, the videos generated a sense of personal immediacy and directness that was unusual in our media-driven age. It also reminded me of TV speeches of Neville Chamberlain we watched in the Appeasement module of A-level history. As of yet, the internet has not been tarred by the same sense of inauthenticity, and mediation by video channel, that prevents directness on TV.
But looking at other sources of my political awareness - the newspapers I read; the newsfeed I got on facebook; the channels I watched; all the sources were designed to reinforce my opinion that Obama was a good choice. Divisions in the US would suggest that exactly the same belief-reinforcing effect was happening to Republicans. They may not have been as likely to be tech-savvy as Obama's supporters (generally younger and in better connected areas such as the two coasts), but Romney was surely playing the same tactics.
Looking back at the now infamous '47%' speech, it's clear that people were being fed completely different angles on it. Republicans got the 'victim psychology' lecture - without always realising this rested upon a false dichotomy (i.e. that people always think of themselves as victims or as achievers; whereas surely we think of ourselves as both at different times, and neither much of the time too). Democrats got the 'elite' Romney lecture, which was also a less-than-rounded characterisation of him. (In fact, Obama's campaign spent a huge amount tarring Romney as a candidate, which is pretty dirty as a tactic.)
There were massive differences in the information given by each side. The intent was to mobilize core supporters with a one-sided wall of information. This information divides the people into two warring sides. One could make a case for calling it 'information wars in the digital age.'
It's not entirely new - Orwell certainly wrote about it in 1984; and this thread of information distortion is a subject that surely goes back to the classical era; in works such as Utopia and Richard III, humanists such as Thomas More recovered the distorting effect of eloquence noted by ancient writers such as Tacitus. For example, Utopia captures the paradoxical quality of information distortion that occurs when any powerful entity tries to create an idealised image of itself in order to win over and mollify its subjects and proximate populace.*
However, the difference today is the quality of virtual interactivity made possible by modern technology. It creates greater opportunities for each of us to be remote agents, rather than full-body participants, in these 'information wars'.
I wonder what happens when this behaviour moves outside the military and political sphere. Surely, subject to regulation, this is already occurring in the world of commerce. At my last job at Little Pim, I was certainly aware of digital strategy, and ways of winning over potential buyers in order to sell our product. And as a start-up, we were far from the cutting edge of this desire to encourage other internet agents to actively promote our product.
Will there be information wars between rival companies in the future? Is this already happening? What kind of distortions will that create?
My feeling is that regulation will keep commercial information control from becoming dangerously distorting (in the way that politics can be), but my current knowledge is insufficient for a conclusive answer.
- - - - - - -
[*At many universities, people interpret Utopia as a depiction of an ideal society, where the semi-communist state intervenes to minimise people's working hours and prevent disorder in order to create social harmony. However, readings since the mid-80s have noticed that this coincides with chilling details of repression that exist within the text, suggesting that really this idealisation is a way of blinding people to the regime's flaws.
Example: "THEY do not make slaves of prisoners of war, except those that are taken in battle; nor of the sons of their slaves, nor of those of other nations: the slaves among them are only such as are condemned to that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing."]
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
The Personal and the Collective 2: The Personal (poem) 2
How I Became Known as a Poet
In retrospect, one of the strangest turns my life has taken was becoming known as a poet in Oxford.
Here's how it happened: In November 2006 my classmate Sam C asked me what I'd been doing that day (we were waiting to enter The Bridge, a club). I told him I'd been writing a poem which, actually, I might be able to recite for him. The poem was The Personal.
I delivered it with a complex array of emotions - zipping between passion and angst, bitterness and zest, a fluid engagement and lonely monologue. Sam convinced me later that night to recite it to all my peers studying English at Catz. Some (Tom C notably) were so impressed, they would ask me to read it again and again over the year.
I must have recited it dozens of times that year, including twice in my packed-out room on my birthday. Some people looked on me like something of a legend, which was completely unlike anything I'd experienced before. I've never thought of myself as a star, or really as an artist, but people treated me as such; for which, I was grateful. Basically, most of my reputation as poet that year rested on that poem. I wrote a number of others in 06-07, but barring a line here or there, most of them were rubbish. It wasn't until 3rd year that I would write good stuff again.
It's particularly strange because The Personal is such an odd poem - fragmentary and sometimes so ambiguous as to lack real meaning. But I guess a lot of it - you can basically recognise the sentiment. So here I offer, as far as is recoverable, my commentary on what I meant by the poem.
It Only Makes Incomplete Sense.
The poem was inspired when a girl accidentally touched my hand in class. Though I wasn't attracted to her, I felt a frisson of sensual excitement. Reflecting on the sensation, I thought about how different my situation was from how I expected it to be. I had expected that by now I would be getting somewhere with someone, having more physical contact than I was. Clubbing was fine, but as JM Coetzee describes modern dancing in Disgrace, "she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode." Furthermore, men must have been feeling this way - missing physical contact even before they've experienced much - since Adam, since 'the dawn of man'.
Link to poem
Lines 1-2
Like my eczema, thinking about it only made the feeling worse. The more self-conscious about my inexperience I became, the less active I would be in seeking out and finding someone I could personally connect with. Applying this contraction of mutual desire to another, I wrote "I miss physical contact | we retract | " The odd punctuation | was a kind of wall of feeling. It emphasised the intransitiveness of the sensation. The demand for pleasure was impeded by the lack of someone else to be around - hence, "I demand but cannot."
Lines 2-8
At this point, I realised it would do no good to continue in this line of thinking. It was time to change direction. It would be better to imagine the mutual seeking out and finding of someone.
Yet I did not know how you find out enough about someone else to be sure of them. The process of discovering another was inherently incomplete, mediated through the senses and prone to false conclusions about what that other is like. Like a forest, some areas of another person are dark, some light. Lines 2 (+1/2) - 8 describe the mixture of sensual and mental imagining necessary to round out the incompleteness of another person.
The language of this mutual desire is exploratory. 'we' are exploring a mysterious landscape - it could be real or imagined. The boundary between inner and outer is left deliberately vague, reflecting the difficulty of sorting one's feelings about another person from objective facts about that relationship.
"Here" is different for both presences, but felt to be the same; this is visualised in the paragraph break "space inheres // the breath."
Metaphors of exploring places are mingled with metaphors drawn from bodily gestures - 'reaching' (hand/touch), 'sucking' (mouth), 'breathing', 'gasping', being 'shrill' (lungs). The bodily gestures move from out to in, even as the exploration moves from tight, dense places (forests) to more expansive and open places (crossing over a violent natural event, tugging oneself up out of the earth (little bit of rock-climbing imagery)). At the same time, the rhythm goes from long-syllable words to words with more, shorter syllables - increasing its pulse, becoming more heated and more suggestive of climax.
Here I was borrowing Laurence Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy of suggesting sexual resonances to my language without being explicit. This technique brings the reader/listener in to wonder whether I'm talking about sex or not. The technique creates an emotional pull, a frisson of excitement from the incomplete suggestiveness of the sensual language. (At the same time, I protected myself from describing something I had not experienced. All the physical action refers to the upper body.)
However, there is intimacy without clarity. The audience is in the position of the voyeur, listening in almost to a relationship between people who have no identifying details. The aesthetic experience is borderline pornographic.
The surreal imagery, and ultimate unreality, of this collective voice is further suggested by the fact it is contained in quotation marks. What do these signal? A speech bubble? A speculation of the mind?
Physical presence and mentalness
In the opening line 'I miss physical contact'. What other kinds of contact are there?
Firstly, mental contact e.g. through reading. When you read about people, you imagine them. You mentally connect with the world being written that contains or describes them, and the way in which they make contact with that world. The textual sensation of frisson is an example of a writer recreating contact in the mind instead of in the world.
Secondly, virtual contact. My year at Oxford was one of the earliest Facebook generations. Online you create an image, an impression of yourself that is distinct from you as a physical presence. Sometimes, in creating this online presence, you can become a bit detached from your real-world existence - ignore the pressing need to find love. The poem begins in complaint about our mutual dematerialisation, and ends in affirmation of being "in person" - physically present.
The opening line is also a complaint about the dehumanising effects of technology of which Descartes wrote so eloquently. Descartes dissected a cow's eye, and discovered an image on the back of the retina, demonstrating that the operation of the eye was mechanical. Nothing divine about the soul's action there. If my eyes deceive me into believing an image is reality - if my eye is just a machine for translating images - how do I know the other is there?
Lines 9-15
Lines 9-10 make fun of the senses. The Shakespearian, grandiose "O" creates a loud noise but signifies nothing. The world is compared to an eye - "stuck in its gelatinous orb." Both world and self are bounded by mechanical limits.
The solitary 'I' is announcing his skepticism about the meaningfulness of our bodily experience. In lines 11-15, he exaggerates the fleshiness and self-indulgence of physicality. In doing so, he attempts to affirm the vanity of experience with others, to deny that his integrity can ever be enriched by love. Loftily, he pours scorn on mutual feeling. For him, the language of the collective voice is a 'pact' between body and mind to delude us into ignoring our mortality. Better to be alone than to give in to false desire.
Lines 16 - 21 Flaws and performativity
This stanza is very unclear. Explaining it is difficult because it contains the weirdest, most ambiguous ideas in the poem. I don't blame any reader who gets lost with this next section.
Two half-formed ideas underpin the stanza: -
1. In order to become personally close to someone else, to reconcile your self with the self of another, you must give up something in yourself and become like the other.
I had been reading about JL Austin's and Judith Butler's notion of performativity: - that performative expression involves acts of expression that transform the world. For instance, a novel brings into being characters and their actions, ideas, concepts, things which it names and communicates. A classic example: 'I do' performs becoming married.
Butler suggests this produces gendered-ness - through feminised performative acts, a person becomes more of a woman. Hers is a much more radical version of performativity than Austin's relatively acceptable ideas about, say, 'I do.'
My idea was that, by being with another person, you occupy the same performative space as them. It becomes harder and harder not to act within the rules of performative expression that that person abides by. I myself felt under transition due to all the new people I was engaging with, and finding it harder and harder to reconcile my changed self with my former self.
2. In order to enliven a poem and give it imaginative richness, I had to make my language almost new - in the same way language is new to the developing child or teenager. I did not want to give up the sense of creative language acquisition that comes with youth.
To comment on these lines proper:
The 'I' has a change of heart. He concedes that there is intimacy; but intimacy always depends on an 'estranger.' The 'estranger' is a third person (who either exists within oneself, or theoretically exists as a kind of nemesis to your personality) estranging you from who you had been before.
This loss of self is an exotic experience, wild and terrifying. I tried to convey this through coining strange words with gendered connotations - "unwovenly ganders." 'Unwovenly' - Penelope perpetually unweaving her shroud; 'ganders' - a male goose made verbal; the act of the sexual gaze. [I'm the first to admit the ludicrousness of these solecisms. How was anyone meant to guess what they meant?] Sex is the drive for overcoming this fear of losing yourself, of becoming someone for the other. Sex is both the pleasure-giving exchange between the sexes that reconciles you, and the act of exchanging personality between you.
Line 18: "'s" is either a contraction of 'his' i.e. the estranger, or a reference to the genitive tense, to the possessive aspect of human personality. By claiming another, you foray into who they are as a person. In a way, this describes the action of the first and second stanza from the skeptical position of the "I." Where lines 2-8 had used exploration as a metaphor for mutual desire, here this metaphor is critiqued as a tool for effectively dismantling the integrity and identity of any particular person.
The "I" argues that this creates gaps in your personality, and exposes flaws in you ("clefts in nooks"). As you grow closer, the person you were when you first desired the other person ceases to exist - so that both of you are receding from your mutual starting point. Who you believed you were at the start of your relationship will exist in each of your memories, but the present reality with a person will no longer match up to what you had thought at the start. You'll see more of the cracks and flaws. Neither of you will live up to your early dreams of an ideal love. This idea is reinforced through reflection on the vertiginous extremes of the emotions ("up" "down").
It's a pretty bleak view of relationships - elevating the idealistic highs and lows of a new relationship over the mellow pleasures of becoming comfortable with each other; saying that retaining your individual integrity is more desirable than the strength gained from the shared bonds of loving. It's also the last thing we hear of the "I."
Third part of this post
As you can see above, the poem becomes more complex as it progresses. For reasons that will become apparent, I am going to start afresh commenting on the last lines, which will be a forthcoming blog post.
Apart from the preceding section and the 'Intro', most of this post was written well over 2 months ago; but I was so busy and content in New York that I didn't want to complete the difficult work of commenting on the last fourteen lines. In the meantime, I did rewrite The Personal and the Collective 1, (see below).
In retrospect, one of the strangest turns my life has taken was becoming known as a poet in Oxford.
Here's how it happened: In November 2006 my classmate Sam C asked me what I'd been doing that day (we were waiting to enter The Bridge, a club). I told him I'd been writing a poem which, actually, I might be able to recite for him. The poem was The Personal.
I delivered it with a complex array of emotions - zipping between passion and angst, bitterness and zest, a fluid engagement and lonely monologue. Sam convinced me later that night to recite it to all my peers studying English at Catz. Some (Tom C notably) were so impressed, they would ask me to read it again and again over the year.
I must have recited it dozens of times that year, including twice in my packed-out room on my birthday. Some people looked on me like something of a legend, which was completely unlike anything I'd experienced before. I've never thought of myself as a star, or really as an artist, but people treated me as such; for which, I was grateful. Basically, most of my reputation as poet that year rested on that poem. I wrote a number of others in 06-07, but barring a line here or there, most of them were rubbish. It wasn't until 3rd year that I would write good stuff again.
It's particularly strange because The Personal is such an odd poem - fragmentary and sometimes so ambiguous as to lack real meaning. But I guess a lot of it - you can basically recognise the sentiment. So here I offer, as far as is recoverable, my commentary on what I meant by the poem.
It Only Makes Incomplete Sense.
The poem was inspired when a girl accidentally touched my hand in class. Though I wasn't attracted to her, I felt a frisson of sensual excitement. Reflecting on the sensation, I thought about how different my situation was from how I expected it to be. I had expected that by now I would be getting somewhere with someone, having more physical contact than I was. Clubbing was fine, but as JM Coetzee describes modern dancing in Disgrace, "she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode." Furthermore, men must have been feeling this way - missing physical contact even before they've experienced much - since Adam, since 'the dawn of man'.
Link to poem
Lines 1-2
Like my eczema, thinking about it only made the feeling worse. The more self-conscious about my inexperience I became, the less active I would be in seeking out and finding someone I could personally connect with. Applying this contraction of mutual desire to another, I wrote "I miss physical contact | we retract | " The odd punctuation | was a kind of wall of feeling. It emphasised the intransitiveness of the sensation. The demand for pleasure was impeded by the lack of someone else to be around - hence, "I demand but cannot."
Lines 2-8
At this point, I realised it would do no good to continue in this line of thinking. It was time to change direction. It would be better to imagine the mutual seeking out and finding of someone.
Yet I did not know how you find out enough about someone else to be sure of them. The process of discovering another was inherently incomplete, mediated through the senses and prone to false conclusions about what that other is like. Like a forest, some areas of another person are dark, some light. Lines 2 (+1/2) - 8 describe the mixture of sensual and mental imagining necessary to round out the incompleteness of another person.
The language of this mutual desire is exploratory. 'we' are exploring a mysterious landscape - it could be real or imagined. The boundary between inner and outer is left deliberately vague, reflecting the difficulty of sorting one's feelings about another person from objective facts about that relationship.
"Here" is different for both presences, but felt to be the same; this is visualised in the paragraph break "space inheres // the breath."
Metaphors of exploring places are mingled with metaphors drawn from bodily gestures - 'reaching' (hand/touch), 'sucking' (mouth), 'breathing', 'gasping', being 'shrill' (lungs). The bodily gestures move from out to in, even as the exploration moves from tight, dense places (forests) to more expansive and open places (crossing over a violent natural event, tugging oneself up out of the earth (little bit of rock-climbing imagery)). At the same time, the rhythm goes from long-syllable words to words with more, shorter syllables - increasing its pulse, becoming more heated and more suggestive of climax.
Here I was borrowing Laurence Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy of suggesting sexual resonances to my language without being explicit. This technique brings the reader/listener in to wonder whether I'm talking about sex or not. The technique creates an emotional pull, a frisson of excitement from the incomplete suggestiveness of the sensual language. (At the same time, I protected myself from describing something I had not experienced. All the physical action refers to the upper body.)
However, there is intimacy without clarity. The audience is in the position of the voyeur, listening in almost to a relationship between people who have no identifying details. The aesthetic experience is borderline pornographic.
The surreal imagery, and ultimate unreality, of this collective voice is further suggested by the fact it is contained in quotation marks. What do these signal? A speech bubble? A speculation of the mind?
Physical presence and mentalness
In the opening line 'I miss physical contact'. What other kinds of contact are there?
Firstly, mental contact e.g. through reading. When you read about people, you imagine them. You mentally connect with the world being written that contains or describes them, and the way in which they make contact with that world. The textual sensation of frisson is an example of a writer recreating contact in the mind instead of in the world.
Secondly, virtual contact. My year at Oxford was one of the earliest Facebook generations. Online you create an image, an impression of yourself that is distinct from you as a physical presence. Sometimes, in creating this online presence, you can become a bit detached from your real-world existence - ignore the pressing need to find love. The poem begins in complaint about our mutual dematerialisation, and ends in affirmation of being "in person" - physically present.
The opening line is also a complaint about the dehumanising effects of technology of which Descartes wrote so eloquently. Descartes dissected a cow's eye, and discovered an image on the back of the retina, demonstrating that the operation of the eye was mechanical. Nothing divine about the soul's action there. If my eyes deceive me into believing an image is reality - if my eye is just a machine for translating images - how do I know the other is there?
Lines 9-15
Lines 9-10 make fun of the senses. The Shakespearian, grandiose "O" creates a loud noise but signifies nothing. The world is compared to an eye - "stuck in its gelatinous orb." Both world and self are bounded by mechanical limits.
The solitary 'I' is announcing his skepticism about the meaningfulness of our bodily experience. In lines 11-15, he exaggerates the fleshiness and self-indulgence of physicality. In doing so, he attempts to affirm the vanity of experience with others, to deny that his integrity can ever be enriched by love. Loftily, he pours scorn on mutual feeling. For him, the language of the collective voice is a 'pact' between body and mind to delude us into ignoring our mortality. Better to be alone than to give in to false desire.
Lines 16 - 21 Flaws and performativity
This stanza is very unclear. Explaining it is difficult because it contains the weirdest, most ambiguous ideas in the poem. I don't blame any reader who gets lost with this next section.
Two half-formed ideas underpin the stanza: -
1. In order to become personally close to someone else, to reconcile your self with the self of another, you must give up something in yourself and become like the other.
I had been reading about JL Austin's and Judith Butler's notion of performativity: - that performative expression involves acts of expression that transform the world. For instance, a novel brings into being characters and their actions, ideas, concepts, things which it names and communicates. A classic example: 'I do' performs becoming married.
Butler suggests this produces gendered-ness - through feminised performative acts, a person becomes more of a woman. Hers is a much more radical version of performativity than Austin's relatively acceptable ideas about, say, 'I do.'
My idea was that, by being with another person, you occupy the same performative space as them. It becomes harder and harder not to act within the rules of performative expression that that person abides by. I myself felt under transition due to all the new people I was engaging with, and finding it harder and harder to reconcile my changed self with my former self.
2. In order to enliven a poem and give it imaginative richness, I had to make my language almost new - in the same way language is new to the developing child or teenager. I did not want to give up the sense of creative language acquisition that comes with youth.
To comment on these lines proper:
The 'I' has a change of heart. He concedes that there is intimacy; but intimacy always depends on an 'estranger.' The 'estranger' is a third person (who either exists within oneself, or theoretically exists as a kind of nemesis to your personality) estranging you from who you had been before.
This loss of self is an exotic experience, wild and terrifying. I tried to convey this through coining strange words with gendered connotations - "unwovenly ganders." 'Unwovenly' - Penelope perpetually unweaving her shroud; 'ganders' - a male goose made verbal; the act of the sexual gaze. [I'm the first to admit the ludicrousness of these solecisms. How was anyone meant to guess what they meant?] Sex is the drive for overcoming this fear of losing yourself, of becoming someone for the other. Sex is both the pleasure-giving exchange between the sexes that reconciles you, and the act of exchanging personality between you.
Line 18: "'s" is either a contraction of 'his' i.e. the estranger, or a reference to the genitive tense, to the possessive aspect of human personality. By claiming another, you foray into who they are as a person. In a way, this describes the action of the first and second stanza from the skeptical position of the "I." Where lines 2-8 had used exploration as a metaphor for mutual desire, here this metaphor is critiqued as a tool for effectively dismantling the integrity and identity of any particular person.
The "I" argues that this creates gaps in your personality, and exposes flaws in you ("clefts in nooks"). As you grow closer, the person you were when you first desired the other person ceases to exist - so that both of you are receding from your mutual starting point. Who you believed you were at the start of your relationship will exist in each of your memories, but the present reality with a person will no longer match up to what you had thought at the start. You'll see more of the cracks and flaws. Neither of you will live up to your early dreams of an ideal love. This idea is reinforced through reflection on the vertiginous extremes of the emotions ("up" "down").
It's a pretty bleak view of relationships - elevating the idealistic highs and lows of a new relationship over the mellow pleasures of becoming comfortable with each other; saying that retaining your individual integrity is more desirable than the strength gained from the shared bonds of loving. It's also the last thing we hear of the "I."
Third part of this post
As you can see above, the poem becomes more complex as it progresses. For reasons that will become apparent, I am going to start afresh commenting on the last lines, which will be a forthcoming blog post.
Apart from the preceding section and the 'Intro', most of this post was written well over 2 months ago; but I was so busy and content in New York that I didn't want to complete the difficult work of commenting on the last fourteen lines. In the meantime, I did rewrite The Personal and the Collective 1, (see below).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)