‟Just A Theory of the Mind” |CONSIDER ONLY [this]

2024-08-04T14:04:00.001+02:00

Here is a link to a short story of mine which was published online in Bewildering Stories issue 1034 (February 2024): The Broad Divide.

A History of The Lady and the Unicorn

2020-09-17T19:10:00.003+02:00

In light of the fact that one of the more trafficked essays on this blog is about the famous tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn, I thought it prudent to mention another recent short essay that reflects upon this seminal work of French Renaissance art. Below you'll find the link to the specific cited post from the blog entitled "Notes From The Garrett" which I hope you will find as engaging as it is informative.

The Lady and the Unicorn

Due to other obligations, I have not been able to continue contributing to this blog as I would have liked. My hope is that before the end of this year I'll be able to add a few more essays that I have been planning to write for some time. For those who follow my blog, thank you for all of your patience and support.

Suspicious Hermeneutics: Conspiratorial Thought in Contemporary Global Culture

2015-08-30T16:19:00.002+02:00

Eye of Providence - Courtesy Google Images

Historiography has typically been a venue reserved for the academic class. Although its practice has always been considered open to interpretation and debate over the importance of particular events, it comprises an official record that is widely accepted by society, yet framed by an inner circle of experts. It consists of the sanctioned study of a heritage from which a community derives its shared understanding of current events. However, in parallel with the establishment of academic historiography, there has equally existed an historicism developed among the vox populi as a means of grappling with the past. This populist version of historicity primarily draws its framework from variations of a religiously influenced eschatology that may originate from as far back as Antiquity. This ancient trend of popular historicism, now known commonly as conspiracy theorizing, broadly understood history as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil vying for dominance over humanity's fate which would at some appointed time in the future culminate in a monumental final battle. This final confrontation was the fulfillment of a divine plan and the end of history wherein all things will be accomplished. G. W. F. Hegel introduced a comparable, albeit superficially so, teleology into modern academic philosophy, a dialectic of historical change that suggested religious presuppositions. The shadows of its influence can be easily detected in the writings of Marx's apocalyptic expectations about the coming age of communism. Whether the driving force of history was described in terms of a World Spirit or, more materialistically, as the impersonal economic forces of production, the "evolutionary" stages that proceeded upon a seemingly predetermined course remained intact. "Modernizing" a quasi-religious teleology only served to confirm and reinforce common beliefs some of the public already held about historical change.

What still differentiates popular from academic notions of history in modernity however is the notion and power of individual agency, which comprises the heart of conspiratorial thinking. While Marx and other fledgling sociologists of the time ascribed grand social changes to broader systemic powers struggling against one another in society that could be empirically demonstrated, populist histories accredited those changes to the deliberate machinations of a few powerful individuals or secret cabals. For the popular historiographer, history is understood by a recognition of warning signs foretelling its inevitable end. Since history has a preordained end, individual events happening within it are merely pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have to fit within the frame of "the bigger picture" so outlined. Predictably this leads to self-fulfilling prophecies regarding historical outcomes, even when the outcome seems entirely contradictory to the prediction. An unexpected outcome can always be blamed on a conspirator's "change of strategy" for achieving his nefarious goals. Using a veneer of the historian's methods of research and investigation, the amateur historian constructs an alternative narrative that seeks to explain historical events as the result of an extensive legacy of clandestine agendas of an elect few that is much at odds with current historical narratives. Current historical analysis is often derided by the conspiracy-minded as hopelessly mired in academic sophistry and blind to the "obvious signposts" that honest investigation reveals, or even seen as a tool of the conspiracy's cover-up.

In his 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter vividly describes the grandiose character of the dedicated conspiracy theorist: "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at the turning point" (82). Hofstadter rightfully emphasized the millennialist aspect of conspiratorial thinking and placed its foundations firmly in the American tradition of suspicion against powerful institutions that did not lend themselves to transparency. As institutions become more complex in organization and more sophisticated in technological prowess, this line of thinking has continued to win over converts. It constitutes a kind of shorthand for political understanding that threatens a deeper probing of the underlying issues involved in broader historical exegesis. However, as Mark Fenster points out, the "paranoid style" analysis by Hofstadter proves to be an explanation too easily accepted. More thoroughly investigated,

[c]onspiracy theory works as a form of hyperactive semiosis in which history and politics serve as reservoirs of signs that demand (over)interpretation, and that signify, for the interpreter, far more than their conventional meaning. . . . As an interpretive practice, conspiracy theory represents an impossible, almost utopian drive to seize and fetishize individual signs in order to place them within vast interpretive structures that unsuccessfully attempt to stop the signs' unlimited meaning production. . . . conspiracy theory displaces the citizen's desire for political significance onto a signifying regime in which interpretation and a narrative of conspiracy, and an obsessive desire for information, replace political engagement. (Fenster, 95-96)

In the era of late capitalism, conspiracy thinking, while still often genuinely believed, has evolved to take on a character of "cynical reasoning," a term created by Peter Sloterdijk which refers to a consciously deliberate method of regarding history that is symptomatic of the alienation of the public from any means of meaningful involvement in the political process (Fenster, 179). Psychologically, "cynical reasoning" resides in a state of irony turned against itself in an expression of eternal dissatisfaction over the ability to realize final political solutions in a pluralistic society. A sense of control can only be attained in the conspiracy fantasy that, although drawn from an imagined narrative that is consciously applied, contains within it real sources of discontent. This activity of theorizing offers the participant a well of emotional release and shared intellectual action in a like-minded community while remaining a point of continual agitation because, due to the nature of perpetual revision of the theory, the grand conspiracy can never be resolved. It is a game that never ends since the goal of complete transparency remains ever elusive in the developing technocratic state. The method therefore encourages a splitting of consciousness within the participant between belief in the conspiratorial message and realization that it is a fabrication intended to simplify the causes of the social dilemmas.

This eschatological outlook, whether mischievously playful or deadly serious in the view of the adherent, has especially become a prominent feature of the popular culture since the 1990s and the arrival of the Internet as a global medium of dissemination. Digital technology has created a new urgency to conspiratorial thought for a wider audience, enabling popular analyses to be shared on social media platforms as soon as events are unfolding in real time. The rapidity and immediacy of the media is of such a manner that it can prove difficult to confirm the plethora of claims and accusations put forward. Such pursuits engender the chaos of the carnivalesque milieu, a cacophony of voices all competing for attention and legitimacy. Within this din the principles of responsible historical analysis are often discarded in favor of terse tirades against the latest target of derision. However sincere in his efforts while he enjoins to criticize the normative order, the conspiracy theorist serves to actually reinforce the mainstream view's strength of persuasion by willfully surrendering the very investigatory methodologies that would lead to real discovers about the nature of the event in question. In this circumstance, conspiracy theories can often be used unwittingly against conspiracy theorists and others who raise more reasoned concerns as a powerful propaganda tool to maintain the status quo rather than offering a stern challenge to illegitimate authority or some other political injustice. This fact has become more expressly so since conspiracy theory communities now have broader exposure through social media outlets.

The marked rise of conspiratorial thinking at the end of the 2oth century may also not merely be due to wider distribution through more advanced telecommunications. Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson implies that conspiratorial thinking has become the de facto mode of populist political discourse in contemporary times, "an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us . . . whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality" (quoted in Brown, 103). Indeed, within the murky depths of conspiracy, there is the fevered search for the transparent in the desires and motives of individual agents in the throes for power, but conspiratorial thinking commits to this at the expense of a more nuanced interpretation of the complex layering of larger institutional interaction. Conspiratorial thinking invests itself too forcefully in the "great man" theory of history, thereby foregoing a superior explanatory approach in "confluences of influence" within the political realm.

What value its followers may gain from such a conspiratorial approach to history is manifold, however. It offers them psychological comfort during a period of great institutional upheaval, rebuilding, and realignment. In an environment of unprecedented transition and uncertainty, personalizing (as well as demonizing) the enemy makes resistance manageable, even if this identification is vaguely outlined. Under these conditions, the confrontation with "the powers that be" becomes a moral crusade, one which can bear cosmic significance and whose victorious outcome is preordained if the conspiracy theory has religious underpinnings. It may also be a catalyst for building communities of people who feel detached from public life and provide them with moral support for their theories. Alien abductees, JFK assassination investigators, and other conspiracy enthusiasts can commune with others to engage in seemingly endless intellectual play with the material of their interest. Unfortunately, this activity fails to address the actual daily problems many of these very same individuals face under the weight of late capitalism.

Although hope may be held out that conspiratorial thinking will led in time to the development of a more sophisticated and sober project of political action, the prospect of such a transformation is slim due to the seductive simplicity of conspiracy. It supplies instant emotional gratification in an easy target during an era of complex social problems with no readily available solutions. Seeing conspiracies in every corner allows the individual to assert his autonomy that is threatened by external forces bent on his enslavement or total destruction. In conspiracy theory's own inner circle, he can declare himself innocent of the myriad wrongs which are in truth committed by a hidden cabal of almost supernatural strength while praising himself as heroic for exposing them. There is no consideration given to the internal socialized prejudices that have contributed to the current state of affairs or willingness to confront matters of class and racial bias that have long plagued the social landscape. This lack of honesty and introspection prevents true social progress from occurring and makes conspiratorial thinking a quixotic exercise. Because the "enemy" is viewed as so uniformly powerful, a multi-headed hydra so elusive and resilient to defeat, conspiracy theory amounts to little more than an intellectual distraction of the hopeless.

What makes conspiratorial thinking so unyielding and incompatible to academic consideration, not to mention political action, is the fact that it often rejects traditional theories of analysis as the absolutely controlled instruments of elites while remaining simultaneously uncritical of its own methodologies of investigation. Conspiracy theorists remain unconscious of the prejudices and misunderstandings they bring to their own projects, compounding error upon error and thereby disrupting the possibility of genuine public discourse about political and social issues. Although academic scholarship does admit to the existence of conspiracies in the past, which were rare when compared with other causal forces in history, conspiracy theory's hypercriticism denies any criteria of analysis outside the certainty that a conspiracy is the only possible conclusion. A lack of insight into other more likely and relevant social factors of causation reveals the extreme shortcomings of the conspiracy theorist viewpoint.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Brown, Bridget. They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of
          Alien Abduction. London: New York University Press, 2007. Print.

Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. London: University
          of Minnesota Press, 2008. Revised and updated edition. Print.

Hofstadter, Richard. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper's Magazine Nov. 1964:
          77-86. Web. <http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/>.

Copyright © 2015 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

The Bearer of Secrets: Privacy and the Feminine

2015-01-25T13:15:00.002+01:00

Privacy, a concern that seems to obsessively occupy those of contemporary times, may be defined as the ability to selectively represent oneself in the public sphere. The most obvious manifestations are the physical barriers people place around themselves, whether they be clothing, walls, or fences, that are constructions regarded as acceptable (and sometimes even mandatory) within the confines of given social norms. Others are of a more ephemeral nature and therefore act as a threshold between the personal and the public, a semi-permeable membrane allowing a breach/connection with the wider world. Amidst these ramparts that separate individuals and institutions are the cultural contours of what can be expressed and to whom that expression is privy. Concealing aspects of oneself reveals information to others in the public sphere discretely and relay unspoken messages to those members targeted. These messages convey social status and moral standing in a hierarchical system which manages all divisions of public and private.

In a metaphorical sense, the feminine body represents the social body in all its network of relations, a grand framework of the human cosmos. The feminine serves as an organizing principle for how human beings view their place in this cosmic order and, as an archetypal body, women are intimately tied to the rules of propriety and etiquette. Being the de facto progenitors of the species, they are the focal point from which all "sociability" derives.

Although the distinct roles of men and women have been promulgated in practice and commented upon by many cultures for centuries globally, the doctrine of the "separate spheres" in the Occident ushered in a more philosophically uniform and conscious distillation of the stations of sex in society as the Industrial Revolution was underway. This doctrine used arguments derived from biological determinism and religious scripture to relegate women to the domain of domesticity while men held sway in the public forum and commanded control over burgeoning industry ("Separate spheres"). As keeper of the hearth, women were given responsibility over the rearing and education of children and, as such, entrusted with instructing the primary lessons of social respectability. This moral education was vital to meaningful interaction and reception in open society as well as the home, proper manners consisting of distinguishing what to hide and what to display to others.

A mother, paragon of domesticity, gazes from her window, symbolizing the narrow transparent membrane available to her between the private and public sphere - 1870s? illustration, author unknown - Courtesy Google Images

Women in the role of "civilizing" instructors and stewards of the private quarters of society may at first glance seem to be a great investment of social power until it is realized that women had no malleability in these roles. Rather, they were appointed and predestined along this particular life course with little regard for personal choice until well into the 20th century. Since women carried the sole means to bear offspring, the parameters of their sexual activity (or lack thereof for that matter) was strictly controlled by religion, traditional custom, and law - a restriction from which men were largely exempt. This well-known fact inspired later feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir to conjecture that

The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject. . . . But the very difficulty of her [woman's] position protects her against the traps into which the male readily falls; he is an easy dupe of the deceptive privileges accorded him by his aggressive role and by the lonely satisfaction of the orgasm; he hesitates to see himself fully as flesh. Woman lives her love in more genuine fashion. (402)

While idealized as virtuous guardians of the home by society at large, women were equally eyed with suspicion regarding sexual matters. As protectors of moral virtue, cultivated initially in private, their sexual experiences were often scrutinized and derided if found "too intense" by current social standards. This suspicion, also informed by traditional religious teachings, further contributed to barring women from the political and economic arenas of life. Traditionally, women functioned as the wayfarer between the realm of the individual and that of public life, positioning themselves as a "window" through which a growing child was initiated into public life. In the heat of the conflict that came to light during the suffragette and feminist movements, the transference of women onto the public stage in the view of many threatened the very foundations of social order, challenging popular notions of "common decency." Subconsciously considered, the liberation of the feminine into the public sphere can be symbolically equated with the intimacy of the personal encroaching on the barriers of consolidated political and economic power which has traditionally resided in the masculine, resulting in throwing all social structure into chaos.

This fear of the liberation of the feminine has made Simon de Beauvoir's observation that the nature of women's traditional societal role allowed for accepting themselves "as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject" all the more intriguing. For in this ambiguity can be predicted a state of reconciliation with subject and object, and of privacy with public persona into a new paradigm. Traditionally, private and public spheres form the supports for social order, each in turn managing the affairs of its respective sphere which harmoniously interacts with and reinforces the discrete integrity of the other.

With the advent of the digital age, this model has mutated somewhat and blurred the dividing lines between public and private life. Technology had enabled the private to enter into the public arena and vice versa from before the introduction of computers, but not to the degree that it has currently reached. In part, the separate spheres ideology may have surfaced during the Industrial Revolution due to the tremendous life-altering potential new technical advances foretold. Its promises for humanity were optimistic overall, however this revolution also threatened to uproot old social hierarchies in the process, namely the hierarchical dichotomy of man and woman. In order to bolster the old order facing these new technologies and their possible detrimental effects, the separate spheres doctrine was asserted to maintain and strengthen adherence to traditional values.

In spite of these efforts, technology continued to whittle away the old social framework. Women became more active in the public sphere in larger numbers, seemingly in proportion to the ways in which technology was making the private/public divide blur. A prominent example in the 20th century to note is how the introduction of film as a pastime affected women's social roles. Viewing films had at first been a public affair, an activity which, although socially permissible, had a taint of the lurid attached to it. The earliest films from the beginning of the century were shown in the nickelodeon which borrowed some of its elements from live stage show establishments and carnival culture. They were typically fashioned from old storefront facades that possessed within none of the common comforts usually found in the modern cinema complex. Previously, the first films were shown in vaudeville theaters or viewable individually by means of the Edison Kinetoscope ("peep show" machine) that had been developed in the 1890s ("Nickelodeon (movie theater)").

The first nickelodeon to exclusively show motion pictures opened in 1905 in Pittsburgh, PA - Courtesy Google Images

Fatima's Coochie-Coochie Dance, 1896 Edison Kinetoscope still - Courtesy Google Images

Often these nickelodeons were seen as dubious places of amusement due to some of their questionable content as well as the immigrant and working class audiences which frequented them. Due to pressures from civic groups that felt it their duty to protect community safety standards, this prompted many entrepreneurs to offer incentives for patronage from more desirable filmgoers. Nickelodeons ran promotions such as free tickets and exclusive seating to middle class women and mothers in order to attract them with the hopes of investing their establishments with an air of respectability (Stamp 24-25). Women were a main segment of their targeted audience and much ado was made about how to best cater to their desires. This eventually led to the development of ornate and larger "movie palaces" for film screenings where woman could showcase themselves in their finest fashions and share in the latest gossip. What evolved into the film entertainment venue of the early 20th century is very reminiscent of the café-concerts of Second Empire Paris in the previous century, a meeting spot where different classes and sexes "unnaturally" mingled and fell under the suspicions of city officials.

Unfortunately, when the "white slavery scare" began to take hold around 1907 in the U.S. , nickelodeons and early movie theaters actually became a primary target for Progressive Era reformers. The authors of the Mann Act of 1910, a reaction to widespread rumors about the kidnapping of white women who were supposedly then sold into prostitution, thought nickelodeons the likeliest locations for such abductions. The suspects were often identified as recent European and Jewish immigrants working in tandem with corrupt city police forces and politicians that constituted an expansive conspiracy ("Mann Act"). According to Stamp, "[t]he link between women's recreation and vice, upon which many white slave narratives turned, positioned cinema at its nexus, as both site of potential entrapment and source of information. . . . Though decidedly popular recreation venues, cinemas were cast as settings where women placed themselves in particular jeopardy of encountering vice ring operatives." (46) However, the cause of this panic had more to do with changing roles for women than criminal immigrants or corrupt politicians. Practically speaking, fears about white women trafficking were caused by the steady displacement of many women from their traditional roles since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The increasing mobility of women resulting from the liberalization of societal values and an evolving female work force in the cities led to a focus for some upon the single woman and her "plight". Due to growing intolerance for red light districts that had existed in many U.S. cities into the late 19th century, many cities criminalized brothels and dismantled the infrastructure that held prostitution together as an institution, albeit a maligned one ("Mann Act"). Analyzing the deeper psychological meaning of the panic stirred by popular imagination, it seemed as though the traditional homemaker was being usurped from her proper place in the private quarters with which she had been entrusted to protect and was being sold to display her intimacy in the public square. The cinema, as the virtual window on the world, had become an accomplice in this act of moral betrayal . These "foreign" libertine influences were luring innocent, gullible women into positions of vulnerability that cost them their integrity and only the actions of heroic Americans, viz. men representing the moral order, could stop the criminal cartels in their tracks.

In spite of such rhetoric resurfacing periodically, variously making appeals to public decency or the sanctity of the home, cinema has continued to expose the private in the public space in ever more intimate detail. Since the introduction of VHS tape in the late 1970s-early 80s, an inverse movement has begun: public cinematic events could now be viewed in the privacy of one's home just as private events (e.g. undressing) could be viewed by others in a public theater. With live Internet video streams, the circle joining the public and the private with film is technically complete. Individuals can record themselves in privacy in real time and broadcast on the stream for potentially anyone to watch while other individuals watching can do the same. Although this phenomenon does not obviate the watchers/broadcasters cultural assertions about what should be public or not, it does challenge them in the same manner as those who were contending with them during the early days of cinema. The significant change that has transpired in the digital age has been the fact that social roles regarding the private has now become loosened for all, but particularly with regard to women's lives. Social media and its relentless immediacy of response coupled with its relative anonymity has broken the social distance required by etiquette, a milieu previously delegated to women's design. This development has allowed for unprecedented verbal abuse and humiliation of women in a public forum. However virtual, the effects are real for the victims. Online communities offer up a strange irony in that all discourse is radically democratized and yet, in doing so, makes women vulnerable by taking away the one right they traditionally possessed: the right to demand rules of etiquette which deeply inform the boundaries of privacy.

The new interactive capabilities of the Internet, in particular social media, operate under conditions analogous to early cinema in that it they are closely tied to carnivalesque social dynamics characteristic of the dissolution of traditional etiquette. Although seemingly fair and incontestable at first glance, the interaction framework ignores the past roles of women occupied in society and the continuing deep-seated prejudices against their participation in the public sphere, at least in matters that have customarily been labelled for males only. A man, even if not an expert, may freely engage in any discussion of his choice and be as rude and disruptive as he pleases, often with little consequence to himself. His detached status as a virtually anonymous flâneur and "worldly male" assures his safety. A woman however who wishes to enter into such conversations will often be met with derision or objectification, for the flâneuse is seen as "a whore" and whose only value is as the object of consumptive entertainments. Even in contemporary times, the male still reserves the privileged gaze as exclusively his own and refuses "to see himself fully as flesh" in turn.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1989 Edition, c1952. Print.

"Mann Act". Wikipedia. 22 January 2015. Web. 7 December 2014.
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act>.

"Nickelodeon (movie theater)". Wikipedia. 23 January 2015. Web. 2 December 2014.
    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_%28movie_theater%29>.

"Separate spheres". Wikipedia. 19 January 2015. Web. 22 January 2015.
                    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_spheres>.

Stamp, Shelley. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon.
                    Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Web. Google Books.

Copyright © 2015 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Redesigning Spaces Actual and Virtual: The Platonic Image of the City

2014-07-26T15:17:00.003+02:00

The relation of how people conduct work and interact in other social spheres has always been mingled with how the space they move within is designed. In fact, the customary spheres of interaction existing in any given social system are often the direct result of how space is utilized physically; the physical parameters determine the virtual. This observation is made all the more apparent when the society in question doesn't have a unified vision of values and goals. There are obvious barriers that may prevent a society from completely realizing its vision no matter how singularly focused, whether from technical, environmental, or other uncontrollable external causes, but in a society without glaring internal contradictions this relationship is by no means inevitable.

This determinism can be demonstrated in how work and its value are undermined by technology, a problem that surfaced continually throughout the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites, comprising a movement of early 19th century English textile artisans, waged a protest against the new technical innovations introduced at the time such as the power loom and the spinning frame. Since common laborers could now make textiles without special training and lower pay, artisans' skills were rendered obsolete ("Luddite"). This result has been repeated several times throughout the period of mechanical automation and computing in the 20th century, now accompanied with widespread outsourcing of manufacturing and many skilled service professions in a push for more corporate profits. The point to take away from this phenomenon however is not the "mistake" of technological innovation but the conflict of internal values within society that gave rise to this determinism. The conception of "progress through technology" leads to an attitude of the inevitability of destructive change for a greater social good without a critical examination of how technology might be better implemented to enhance work and lend it more value. The internal societal tension between the value of work and the value of profit creates a dynamic in which the more powerful wins out and becomes a "natural inevitability," regardless of the costs to individuals' livelihoods and dignity.

The condition of space and its use, therefore, is even more affected by this internal push and pull in the sense that it encompasses not only where and how people work but where and how they live. Design of public and private spaces has been a concern of every society but possibly never so much as in the modern age. Robert Moses, a prominent urban planner of mid-20th century New York City, serves to illustrate this point. In the vein of Haussmann and Le Corbusier, Moses imposed grand urban designs that changed forever the landscape and how people traversed space. The model of the highway as the primary conduit of transport was directed under his care as well as a series of bridges that connected and enabled the development of various suburbs in the region. Although it seems that Moses was not driven by the same Panopticonic motives as Haussmann, he did construct a space that isolated large swaths of the population from one another along racial/socio-economic lines due to the dependence he placed upon the automobile for travel, a luxury only a certain constituency at the time could afford. This condition assured that only a select class could easily access the recreation facilities he built ("Robert Moses").

Robert Moses - The Unisphere at the 1964 World's Fair - Courtesy of newyorker.com

Along with the dismantling of traditional neighborhoods in the New York area caused by the construction of an extensive highway network, Moses arranged the urban landscape in such a manner that alienated many from their surrounding environment. The confrontation of "sweeping away the old for the new" did not end in an outcome that broadened people's lives uniformly. A call for renovation and renewal after the economic collapse of the Great Depression only ended creating different inequities and reinforcing older ones due to the lack of a viable public forum able to express current needs.

This largely unexamined internal contradiction of vision has now entered into a digital age where in the virtual spaces comprising the Internet, the current repository of global social exchange, attempts are being made for reconstruction. Proposing to set up a "two-tiered" model for access speed, ISPs (as self-designated gatekeepers) are de facto re-arranging the virtual space to prioritize the content most able to pay. This Haussmannian proposition threatens to change how information is disseminated and therefore what people can "see" of the global environment. It is just a short step further to conclude that this new framework will cause a weakening of dialogue across borders that can otherwise not be traversed by those common citizens who do not have any other means for communicating with a wider international audience. Considering that this ability to communicate instantaneously with others around the world freely is still in its infancy, it further shows that the inherent value conflicts human beings have with the uses of technology are occurring at an accelerating pace. The struggle indicates how global culture is for the most part unclear as to what it values most. For a society that implores inclusion and democratic discussion, it bows too eagerly to the power of short-term financial gain and deep-seated prejudice when formulating its vision for itself. This is mainly due to the fact that its "vision" is visio-centric, deriving almost exclusively from what it purely "sees" without critical examination from other perceptions. These alternate perceptions are both actual and figurative, composed of everyday practice and interaction which challenge orthodox vision based in superimposing preconceived categories upon what is "seen". A decentralized and balanced consideration of all the faculties of sensory input would diminish this visiocentric tendency. Such a reassessment would involve creating "mixed use" spaces composed of residences, leisure activities, and commerce that would produce an environment more conducive to social interaction. Although Moses and other urban planners of the era did try to implement certain aspects of the above, their focus was poised on the automobile as the premiere mode of transport. This required an extensive highway system for their optimal use which in turn encouraged various disparate nodes of commercial centers and isolated residential zones to be built. The contour of their newly-laid landscape in effect artificially separated certain communities from certain parts of the city-space based on socio-economic status, thereby further exacerbating established patterns of ethnic/cultural segregation.

As Jane Jacobs has noted in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, city planners of the period often favored stark spans of highway connected islands of capital out of a desire, conscious or otherwise, to regulate the activities of occupants in the city for the sake of establishing a "moral order" from the "chaos" of older cities:

Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how people should spend their free time, and in planning, these moralisms on people's private lives are deeply confused with concepts about the working of cities. . . . There is not only room in cities for such differences [as bars and church-sponsored youth centers] and many more in taste, purpose and interest of occupation; cities also have a need for people with all of these differences in taste and proclivity. The preferences of Utopians, and of other compulsive managers of other people's leisure, for one kind of legal enterprise over others is worse than irrelevant for cities. It is harmful. The greater and more plentiful the range of all legitimate interests (in the strictly legal sense) that city streets and their enterprises can satisfy, the better for the streets and for the safety and civilization of the city. (Jacobs 41)

This "moral order", based upon well-defined boundaries and uniform zones of use, forms the crux of the visiocentric model. Vision, considered platonically, is the highest of the senses because it perceives the purest manifestation of reason, the image. All other senses merely elude to a baser reflection of the Real and therefore are prone to constant deception. Although the image as exhibited in the visual arts is also deceptive, it is the repository of the finest abstract thought. In this sense, the garden cities Ebenezer Howard proposed during the fin de siècle which had a great influence in city planning theory of the 20th century are no different in principle to Haussmann's re-creation of Paris. However different in motivation, both were promoted as models for better management of work and leisure spaces. They share the quest for the perfect symmetry of Bentham's Panopticon which ironically was also the model of the perfect prison.

Model of Le Corbusier's Radiant City unveiled in 1924, a Platonic ideal of the city of the future. Courtesy of land8.com


		A sectional close-up of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City blueprint. Streets are arranged radially within zoned areas of use and ample green spaces in-between. Courtesy Google Images					-

An aerial view of Greenwich Village in New York. This neighborhood exhibits the short blocks and narrow, meandering streets lined with mixed use buildings that Jane Jacobs favored - Credit:
Michael S.Yamashita/National Geographic Creative

What can be derived from the designs of 20th century city architecture is a concern for aesthetics over human-scale use. The model derives from concerns over commodity and its transport as well as the city as artistic showcase over the everyday activities of its occupants. For those residents who are considered in construction projects of this scale, gentrification of living spaces has become the norm, leaving those without enough wealth to be pushed out into the margins. Such gentrification leads to further disparity between socio-economic groups as certain sections of the city are often only reachable by means of private transportation (i.e., the automobile). These spaces therefore become de facto "affluence zones" which maintain their purity by means of the invisible borders imposed by its structural arrangement.

Disregarding the needs of large swaths of the population in order to conform to a "Platonic" vision of what a city should look like has compromised the integrity of neighborhoods and alienated many from reaping the benefits of what has been improved in cityscapes. It has placed the visocentric image before people and elevated the spectacle of urban splendor above concrete needs. If there is hope to change this trend in urban planning, there must be a re-orientation to the senses of actual human need that satisfies the entire population. Equal access to the resources a city can offer to ward off the consequences of isolation and urban blight will ensure a robust city culture. A technologically advanced society, regardless of its claims to efficiency, is only as valuable to the degree in which it empowers its residents to interact with one another through its environment, whether that space be actual or virtual.

Works Cited and Consulted:

"Garden city movement". Wikipedia. 6 July 2014. Web. 7 July 2014.
               <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Garden_city_movement>.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961. Print.

"Luddite". Wikipedia. 26 July 2014. Web. 10 July 2014.
               <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite>.

"Robert Moses". Wikipedia. 24 July 2014. Web. 12 July 2014.
                   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses>.

Copyright © 2014 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

On the Nature of Work and Leisure

2014-04-05T19:38:00.002+02:00

Work in everyday affairs carries with it certain associations that have largely been taken for granted since Antiquity when the prevalent thinkers first mapped out the framework of socioeconomic relations and laid bare its key features. Aristotle, as an eager student of Plato, extended his studies not only into the fauna and flora of the natural world but equally exhibited a keen interest in the social realm. His remarks about the relationship of work bear investigating as they underpin many of the assumptions about how a society should conduct itself.

For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) was the end goal of life and " . . . happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure . . . " (Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, 7, 174). Aristotle considered leisure, in the older sense of its definition as the freedom or opportunity to engage in a given activity, as the necessary precondition for any meaningful action, an action that had the potential to lead to the cultivation of virtue which was vital to the state of happiness. In his constructed dichotomy between ends and means, Aristotle postulates that " . . . man is a moving principle of actions; now deliberation is about the things to be done by the agent himself, and actions are for the sake of things other than themselves. For the end cannot be the subject of deliberation, but only the means . . . " (Nic. Ethics, Book III, 3, 39). The consideration of work as an instrumental good (i.e., a viable means) to an end still holds sway in global society, especially as the concept leisure changed in denotation (and thereby connotation) over the course of the modern period. Georges-Eugène Haussmann's redesigning of the narrow and winding streets of Paris into spacious boulevards and parks was largely responsible for introducing the modern meaning of leisure as a non-productive activity unrelated to virtue. Moreover, Paris in the latter part of the 19th century created a whole "culture of leisure" that has since been established as a universal standard of daily life.

Aristotle also made the claim that virtue, and therefore happiness, was assured to the man who owned property:

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common . . . Again how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured . . . And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state. (Politics, Book II, 5, 28)

The previous quote has been in turn been interpreted as an endorsement for such divergent economic models as laissez-faire capitalism and libertarian socialism (anarchism). It must be kept in mind however that it would be misleading to label Aristotle's social philosophy in such modern theories that were developed centuries after his life. Despite this, his core idea of tying private property to the cultivation of virtue through leisure has had a lasting influence and permeates modern thought on the subject. The mere fact of having wealth implies possessing also the means of expressing virtuous behavior, a fact that is becoming for the multitudes of today a diminishing prospect.

In order a assure the creation, expansion, and perpetuation of the new "leisure culture", a method of manufacture had to be devised that would accommodate demand at inexpensive costs. During the 1880s and 1890s, scientific management, often called Taylorism after its founder Frederick Taylor, was the first attempt to systematically study industrial work methods and implement new techniques for optimal workforce efficiency. Throughout the fin-de-siècle period and early 20th century, Taylor created an extremely divided specialization of labor in place of the craftsman culture of the earlier industrial period for the sake of faster mass production of goods. Although Taylor also introduced such positive measures as frequent work breaks and piece rates more pay for more production, his management theory simultaneously undermined job security, rendering workers as no more than unskilled, replaceable "cogs in a machine". Predictably, further insecurity and fragmentation of the workforce occurred when automation and outsourcing became the norm later in the 20th century ("Scientific management").

Frederick Taylor, inventor of scientific management - Courtesy of Wikipedia

An illustration of Taylor's scientific management in action - Courtesy Google Images

The result of Taylor's theory ushered in the modern assembly-line mode of production, a new phase of the Industrial Revolution for the 20th century and, ironically, while producing products rapidly and abundantly, likewise removed the workforce from the means and ownership of its skilled labor. In short, the skills that they previously possessed had now become commodified and possible for anyone to perform, invariably to someone willing to work for the least wages. Scientific management and automation lead to the current crisis in employment, not just for skilled laborers but also for those in traditional middle management positions as technology made their roles redundant if not outright obsolete. Although the tools are in place to produce a "culture of leisure" more than at any other time in history, the ability of the common citizen to enjoy its fruits is quickly waning. The need for human hands and skills previously considered to belong to formal professional occupations falls more often to a growing underclass in various developing countries in the global South that have much less in the way of government labor regulation or workers' rights legislation. Automation has in fact made it easier for corporations and government bodies to institute an ever more rigid control over the conditions of work.

Contemporaneous to this managerial and technical transition to work, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin published his reaction about the fulfillment of human needs in his pamphlet The Conquest of Bread (La Conquête du Pain) in Paris in 1892. As the title suggests, the book, a collection of earlier articles from the journals Le Révolté and La Révolte, concerned itself primarily with the feeding of the people in an equitable way, a persisting problem that had predated the French Revolution. Against other political critics of the period, Kropotkin remarked that alleviating this recurrent problem of basic needs was of central importance for a successful social revolution:

That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all - an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied. . . . bread must be found for the people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. . . . for in solving the question of Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution. (Kropotkin, 98)

One of the main criticisms Kropotkin had against capitalism, which was likewise applicable to bureaucratic state socialism as would be the case with the future Soviet Union, was the wage system. The way he proposed to overcome this monopoly on wealth and its production was the public expropriation of private property and the means of production that would practice " . . . no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short. Of the three hundred and fifty millions who inhabit Europe, two hundred millions still follow this system of natural Communism" (105). In this manner, Kropotkin advocated for a ". . . return to what biology calls 'the integration of functions' - after the division of labour the taking up of it as a whole - this is the course followed throughout Nature" (115). As naturalist and geographer, Kropotkin had a life-long interest in the sciences and often applied their principles and discoveries to his visions for a better society. His principle of "mutual aid" as the desired modus operandi for society was based on the symbiotic relationships he observed in the natural world, the organic organization of flora and fauna for survival. Capitalism under Kropotkin's view was seen as an unnatural state that intrinsically engendered inequality as a condition of its own existence:

In order to remunerate certain classes of workmen, peasants must become the beasts of burden of society; the country must be deserted for the town; small trades must agglomerate in the foul suburbs of large cities, and manufacture a thousand things of little value for next to nothing, so as to bring the goods of the greater industries within reach of buyers with small salaries. . . . Eastern lands in a backward state are exploited by the West, in order that, under the capitalist system, workers in a few privileged industries may obtain certain limited comforts of life.

The evil of the present system is not that the 'surplus-value' of production goes to the capitalist . . . the surplus-value is but a consequence of deeper causes. The evil lies in the possibility of a surplus-value existing, instead of a simple surplus not consumed by each generation; for, that a surplus-value should exist, means that men, women, and children are compelled by hunger to sell their labour for a small part of what this labour produces, and, above all, of what their labour is capable of producing. (131-132)

These predatory effects of capitalism, defended by the philosophy of "Social Darwinism" which was made popular during the preceding generation of the period, were symptomatic of a deep hierarchical order that passed the costs of the elite's privileges to the laboring class. For Kropotkin, this predicament necessitated a radical reevaluation of the rigidly stratified division between labor and management. "It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be - the free exercise of all the faculties of man" (176). In reply to those who claimed capitalism was the cause for increased production, Kropotkin stressed that "[i]f industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of the last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, but in spite of that organization" (178).

(Former Prince) Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, circa 1900 - Courtesy Google Images

In such a bold revision of work and self-management, there were inevitably concerns about the threat of "idleness" becoming widespread. Kropotkin tied this concern, albeit its severity subjective within the minds of those who protested his ideas on such grounds, with the education of children. When idleness became a problem for those children who suffered from

. . . simple bloodlessness, then, before stuffing the brain of a child with science, nourish his system so as to produce blood, strengthen him, and, that he shall not waste his time, take him to the country or to the seaside; there, teach him in the open air, not in books - geometry, by measuring the distance to a spire, or the height of a tree; natural sciences, while picking flowers and fishing in the sea; physical science, while building the boat he will go to fish in. But for mercy's sake do not fill his brain with sentences and dead languages. Do not make an idler of him!... (185)

A sound education for Kropotkin and many other anarchists of the time was based upon principles of practical doing and developing consistent habits from this activity. They favored direct interaction with the everyday world beyond the walls of the traditional classroom. An organic and flexible setting for learning where a student could inductively discover general principles about the natural world comprised the basis of their curriculum. Ironically, this aspect of their philosophy in fact advocated for a "leisureliness" previously reserved for the wealthy who constantly remarked on the prolific idleness of the working class. Like Aristotle, ample leisure was seen as the necessary condition to build good habits and ultimately a virtuous nature. However, this leisure was not a mere listless inactivity; it was a creative state in which human beings could have free reign to dream and realize their potentialities, inevitably benefiting all of society much like each species that finds its particular niche within Nature, assisting the survival of others in turn.

This interlocking web of symbiotic relationships found in biology serves as an apt analogy for social interaction, especially in the technological present where interconnectivity is more important than ever. Kropotkin's "organic web" model of society also shares elements of the carnivalesque, a spontaneous growth of social organization from the ground of the people as its source without the intermediary of the state or corporate institutions that by nature separate manual work from conceptual work. Aristotle and Kropotkin, though both naturalists deeply invested in the sciences, had opposing views of the natural world. The vertically-ascending "great chain of being" (scala naturae) that developed from the influence of Aristotle's writings on the Catholic Church is of an entirely different order than Kropotkin's horizontal web of symbiosis that he applied to his socio-economic writings. In regard to the senses and their relative importance, Aristotle was a founding voice for promoting the hierarchical superiority of vision and the baseness of touch: "Thus the sense [touch] with which self-indulgence is connected is the most widely shared of the senses; and self-indulgence would seem to be justly a matter of reproach, because it attaches to us not as men but as animals" (Nic. Ethics, Book III, 10, 50). Hence, the visiocentric, with its emphasis on the hierarchical and analytic division of society into discrete functions, forced much subsequent thought about social organization away from the organic and spontaneous elements of the carnivalesque that still hold a special attraction for many anarchist thinkers.

One contemporary proposal for redesigning the nature of work in a comparable way to earlier 19th century anarchism has been outlined by Michael Albert in Parecon: Life After Capitalism. In a participatory economy as explained by Albert, "work complexes" composed of equal amounts of manual and conceptual labor would replace traditional professions. A society-wide planning survey of goods production and required services would be taken periodically to avoid waste, hence lightening work loads. However, Albert expresses the sentiment that some form of wage system must still be maintained in order to avoid abuse by some who would take more than their fair share. In anarchist circles, the issue of whether or not a monetary system is necessary for society has still not reached a satisfactory conclusion.

It is certain that work forms meaning in life as well as provides the necessities of its continuance. Rather than look to ways in which work can be escaped or outright avoided, often just leading to the exploitation of others who are more vulnerable, it should be redefined to meet the full needs of human beings by exercising "all the faculties of man" and not simply a means to an end of survival. If there is to be a social revolution that truly transforms human relationships towards equanimity, a central component of that change must be in our relational understanding of work to leisure. In considering the necessity of luxury in The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin speculates what leisurely pursuits will be followed by those who live in a future social order free from both past prejudice and privilege, when the arbitrary distinctions of class have seen their end:

But when the opprobrium connected with manual labour has disappeared, when all will have to work with their hands, there being no one to do it for them, then the authors as well as their admirers will soon learn the art of handling composing-sticks and type; they will know the pleasure of coming together - all admirers of the work to be printed - to set up the type . . . These beautiful machines, instruments of torture to the child who attends on them from morn till night, will be a source of enjoyment for those who will make use of them in order to give voice to the thoughts of their favorite author. (140-141)

Works Cited and Consulted:

Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso, 2004. Google Books. Web.
5 April 2014.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 1999.
                      Web (PDF). 18 March 2014.
   <http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/aristotle/Ethics.pdf>.

Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 1999.
                      Web (PDF). 18 March 2014.
                            <http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/aristotle/Politics.pdf>.

Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. Oakland: AK Press (Working Classics Series 4),
                       2007. Print.

"Scientific management". Wikipedia. 28 March 2014. Web. 31 March 2014.
                             <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management>.

Copyright © 2014 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Carnivalizing Privilege

2014-01-29T18:12:00.006+01:00

Privilege is the pivot upon which much hierarchy rests, operating as a control mechanism for maintaining social order amongst a population. Coupled with culturally-conditioned obedience to the shared symbols of authority, it engenders another aspect of social manipulation. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher from Riceville, Iowa, conducted an exercise in her grammar school class about privilege that made national headlines. Her "blue-eyed/brown-eyed" exercise divided her students into two distinct groups based on eye color and proceeded to actively favor the blue-eyed group while making dismissive generalizations about the other. Soon thereafter students began to take these arbitrarily emphasized differences seriously, the blue-eyed students believing they were actually somehow superior to brown-eyed students. As a result of added praise and positive attention, the blue-eyed students saw a sharp rise in their academic achievement as the brown-eyed children dropped in performance. This trajectory also demonstrated itself in how the groups regarded one another. Having a privileged position initiated by their teacher, the blue-eyed students organically established a "pecking order" and relegated brown-eyed children to the bottom of it, casting derision upon them and further discouraging their success in the classroom as well as placing them under extreme emotional stress. The outcome of the exercise may be considered all too predictable today, but at the time the results were considered controversial if not outright contentious to a culture that was largely based on a system of privilege ("Jane Elliott").

Elliott conducting her famous exercise in 1968 after the King assassination - Courtesy Google Images

Such an exercise exhibits the nature of privilege that though in part veiled in its specific affects has long been recognized and critiqued by social theorists. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and literary critic of the early 20th century, examined the medieval practice of carnival as a critique of privilege in his work Rabelais and His World. The carnival, having its origins in the Saturnalia festivals of ancient Rome, carried a particular populist social reaction to the official canon of Catholic Church doctrine during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Through various spectacles, literary parodies, and verbal insults, the atmosphere of the carnival created an overturning of the existing order, a "misrule" in which fools served the role of aristocrats and kings. This inversion was not merely a type of proto-satire in which the subject simply ridiculed his chosen target but a mockery that included the entirety of the social order. The carnival spirit, which according to Bakhtin was well represented by François Rabelais in his 16th century series of novels entitled The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, occurred in a space of "ritualistic living" where the borders between everyday life and art are eradicated and vanish in the carnival's performance. This "space" closely resembled the chaotic atmosphere of the marketplace where many classes of people congregated and in so doing temporarily lost their individual social status. In this parallel imaginary space, the separation between actor and spectator is removed as well as social ranking, consolidating all figuratively into one body that is in a constant state of flux (Morris 198). Bakhtin noted that this carnivalesque depiction of life was one entwined with death which granted it the means of constant renewal. Life was invested with a body that had exaggerated properties of procreation and regeneration not possessed by actual individual bodies. Hence, this "collective body" of marketplace sensibilities expressed a festive humor that considered privilege and its rewards fleeting. Bakhtin called this folk viewpoint, in distinction to the static hierarchy of feudal society, "grotesque realism":

Actually, the images of the material bodily principle in the work of Rabelais (and of other writers of the Renaissance) are the heritage, only somewhat modified by the Renaissance, of the culture of folk humor. They are the heritage of that peculiar type of imagery, and more broadly speaking, of that peculiar aesthetic concept that is characteristic of this folk culture and which differs sharply from the aesthetic concept of the following ages. . . .

The material bodily principle is not contained in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. . . .

The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious. . . .

The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is the transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth and body in their indissoluble unity. (qtd. in Morris 205)


Rabelais, master barker of the carnivalesque - illustration from Project Gutenberg edition of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, Book I, 2004

Grotesque realism communicated its vision in its repertoire of scatological and bawdy allusions, subliminally indicating a return to the nether regions of the earth (i.e., the Underworld) that gave forth new life (206). As Bakhtin notes, the "language of excrement" was closely associated with fertility, a primary motif in pagan mythology and rites that was given special attention by Rabelais (210). In the parallel world of carnival situated outside of everyday life, the social order became "vertically-oriented" and therefore egalitarian in its relations. The Great Chain of Being, dismantled from its origin arrangement of cosmic hierarchy, was treated as a body dismembered during the many ritual festivities of the carnival. This fragmentation of the elements (bodily members) and the consequent inversion of social hierarchy has an intriguing comparison in Western art of the early 20th century, particularly in the Dada Movement where the concept of the "exquisite corpse" bears a striking resemblance to the medieval carnivalesque "grotesque body" as described by Bakhtin. The obsession of Dada with the vulgarity of the marketplace, and in particular the ambivalent "flattering derision" of its barkers, indicates the movement's desire to revive the carnival spirit within the formalities of the art world. Hucksterism and its grandiose rhetoric were the language of Dada, an ironic experiment that artists of the era engaged in as tongue-in-cheek game that simultaneously served as serious social critique. Advertising seemed the natural habitat in which to mock the elitism of Academy and its monopoly over artistic meaning. Dada in this capacity stood as a rebellion against the atomization of the grotesque body into discrete individuals autonomous from the organic whole which was upheld as the static ideal of beauty within privileged circles. Dada's protest mainly expressed itself as an exposure of this artificial fragmentation of the social body through its often facetious play of words and images, its extravagant claims and their erasure through the mischievous rhetoric of the medieval mountebank selling his wares in the town square.

Cover of Dada 6 (Bulletin Dada) edited by Tristan Tzara, February 1920, an example of an absurdist claim made by Dada that had the carnivalesque quality of role inversion

Modernity's efforts to domesticate carnivalesque opposition to officially sanctioned hierarchies was not limited to the arenas of art and literature however. A case in point is the establishment of the national tradition of Thanksgiving in the United States after the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, Thanksgiving was a holiday observed by few states, mainly situated in New England that bore mixed elements of the secular and the religious. Starting in 1846, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's magazine, promoted the creation of a national day of gratitude, a "Great American Festival". Hale's motivation behind the holiday was to avoid the catastrophic consequences of a civil war by encouraging the nation to set aside its internal conflicts in an annual day of peace. Although unsuccessful, Abraham Lincoln eventually instituted the holiday in November, 1863. Under Lincoln's direction, this national day of observing thanks constituted a type of " . . . American civil religion, that is, religious belief in the national purpose and destiny" (Pleck). The rhetoric of Thanksgiving promoted a canon of values supporting the Union and upholding the tranquility of the hearth. However, the holiday had not sprung from an historical vacuum:

An earlier way of celebrating coexisted with the domestic occasion Hale and Lincoln reinvented. . . .Thanksgiving had its own set of rowdies, akin to those at Christmas. Drunken men and boys, often masked, paraded from house to house and demanded to be treated. . . .

Groups of men, crossdressing, who called themselves the Fantastics or Fantasticals, masqueraded on Thanksgiving beginning in the 1780s. The name Fantastic was English and the practice seems to have been derived from English door to door masquerading for treats. Subsequently the Fantastics copied these and other elements of English mumming, such as drunkenness and ridiculing authority. At the end of the Revolutionary war veterans were dressing up in the rags of the Continental soldiers. (Pleck)

In the U.S., children "maskers" dressed in fanciful costume frequently begged door-to-door during the Thanksgiving season until the 1940s - Courtesy Google Images

These antecedents recall the atmosphere of the medieval carnival and its erasure of predominant "traditional values" in another reality that arises organically from a common folk culture. The rites of misrule existed well into the 19th century and in prior times typically accompanied "official" religious festivals. However, Thanksgiving was a state-sanctioned and largely invented festival derived from a much older folk tradition based in carnival humor and sensibilities. Thanksgiving can therefore be interpreted as a distinct celebration of modernity, enacted by the new bourgeois class hierarchy to subvert threats and maintain social order. Carnival had now come to be perceived as a menace to the status quo by the 20th century. In more recent times the spirit of carnival has even been turned against its own intentions in order to undermine it. This most clearly has been accomplished through the propaganda of co-option. A common example is the use of counter-culture elements previously antagonistic to the mainstream being used in advertisements. By offering the music, art, and other practices of marginal subcultures as possessable commodities, the privileged system minimizes their power and importance. Such advertising often carries along with it a type of (not so) subtle mockery of subculture that so resembles ambivalence with the carnivalesque that it can simultaneously hide behind a claim of ironic humor if directly confronted. According to Bakhtin, carnival humor is never cynical in its motivation, but strives to reveal some organic whole through the rewriting and unwriting of privilege in social status, a continuous flow of Heraclitian reiteration reaching cosmic proportions. "We must stress, however, that the carnival is far distant from the negative and formal parody of modern times. Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time. Bare negation is completely alien to folk culture" (qtd. in Morris 200). Bakhtin equally cautions about separating the "vulgar" components of the carnival from their overarching vision:

But these images, such as the tossing of excrement and drenching in urine, become coarse and cynical if they are seen from the point of view of another ideology. If the positive and negative poles of becoming (death-birth) are torn apart and opposed to each other in various diffuse images, they lose their direct relation to the whole and are deprived of their ambivalence. They then retain the merely negative aspect, and that which they represent (defecation, urination) acquires a trivial meaning, our own contemporary meaning of these words. (qtd. in Morris 211)

The blight of co-option and its tools of coercion precisely achieves the ends that Bakhtin forewarns and dismantles the spirit of the carnivalesque and its message for the sake of conformity in a temporary social order. The problem of privilege is enhanced by this procedure of fragmentation which removes the possibility of existential laughter (i.e., the illusory as well as impermanent nature of social hierarchies) the carnival offers. This carnival laughter provides the means of social transcendence, but under the fragmenting pressures of centralized propaganda transform the carnival into an instrument of oppression. In this turning over of what customarily overturned the hierarchies of the past lies the end of irony as a weapon against the privileged. As Oliver C. Speck reflects in his article "The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada":

Being simply ‘anti’ is of course not a recipe for subversion. It can quickly
deteriorate into a meaningless gesture. . . . The Dada artists were well aware of the dangers of exaggerating their anarchic actions, as Hanne Bergius shows. . . . Bergius traces the complex subversive strategies Dada employs back to the grotesque in Romanticism and points out the constant play of closeness and ironic distancing in their performances . . . . (376)

Elliot's classroom exercise can be seen in this sense to be an example of a modernist revival of carnival. It arbitrarily crowns a new kings (i.e., blue-eyed students) only later to unceremoniously remove them from power in order to reveal the hypocritical claim of racial equality. It is the anti-linchpin, the locus of "closeness and ironic distancing" as explained by Speck that makes possible a "spinning away" of entrenched prejudices stemming from privilege normally remaining hidden from mainstream awareness. With the playful bestowal/removal of privilege within the carnivalesque space comes the elimination of prejudice that divides a society and the creation of more egalitarian social relationships.

In Bakhtin's view the carnival, irreverent in its regard for social status, has a democratizing utopian nature that is reflected in the attributes of its crowd which ". . . is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity" (qtd. in Morris 225). In the carnival is seen the triumph of art over the harsh realities imposed by social hierarchy as well as the existential human condition, a triumph that results in a joyous laughter of humanity over its pretenses. The laughter of the carnivalesque is the bulwark against the Nietzschean abyss that threatens to plunge all into absolute meaninglessness (Morris 237).

It can be seen how the carnivalesque spirit has imbued many modern progressive movements fighting for a broader inclusion of rights. By breaking down the barriers of class, race, and gender, the carnivalesque opens up opportunities of participation in the public sphere for those previously marginalized. The carnival therefore acts as a catalyst for social change, often singular and radical in scope. The change elicited may not necessarily be positive as it can be used for the purposes of manipulation by forces antagonistic to democracy. It must be remembered that the carnival, in its capacity to "dismember" social systems, can destroy social progress as well as build it.

Elliott's classroom exercise, and equally Milgram's experiment, demonstrate the ability of carnival to reveal unpleasant truths about society and hold out the possibility to transmute them. Historically, social criticism embodies the spirit of the carnivalesque by its very function and performs on the public stage to expose such "inconvenient" truths about society. Since Rabelais, the carnival has infiltrated deeply into even elite cultural circles and challenged social hierarchy. Bakhtin's medieval "grotesque body" became more specifically a "political body of the people" in the Enlightenment and often devolved up through the modern era with growing instances of "mob mentality", the major provocateur of wanton violence, thus reinforcing the rationale for retaining long-established hierarchies to maintain social order. Hence in modernity, the carnivalesque especially evokes ambivalence in both motive and effect with its power to equally create democratic utopia or give liberty to express deep-seated prejudice without responsibility. This Rousseauean dilemma of how to define the "will of the people" has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, yet continues to be entangled in the political meaning of the carnival for the 21st century.

Works Cited or Consulted:

"Jane Elliott". Wikipedia. 12 January 2014. Web. 12 January 2014.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott>.

Morris, Pam, ed. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov.
London: Arnold Publishers, Ltd., 1994. 194-244. Print.

Pleck, Elizabeth. "The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of
Thanksgiving in the United States." Journal of Social History 32.4
(Summer 1999). 22 June 1999. Web. 24 January 2014.
<The Free Library>.

Speck, Oliver S. "The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada." Gender

          and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media.
          Eds. Gaby Pailer, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck.
          Amsterdam/New York: Editions Rodopi B.V. (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren

Germanistik 70), 2009. 371-381. Web (PDF). 26 January 2014.
          <http://www.people.vcu.edu/~ocspeck/pubs/Speck_on_Dada.pdf>.




Copyright © 2014 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

The Promise of Technocratic Utopia

2013-10-22T18:23:00.001+02:00

Humanity meets its savior/creation - Courtesy of Google Images

Technological progress has always been viewed as an existential hallmark of what it means to be human. With the benefits of tools, human beings have greatly enriched their ability to solve problems far beyond what Nature initially bequeathed them. In recent decades that view has only been reinforced as greater and greater strides have taken place in the sciences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growing popularity of technocratic visions that ea return of humanity self-actualized in its own native environment free from the constraints of elite power structure and social pretense excite the contemporary imagination. Such hopeful predictions about the (near) future have been most recently promoted in Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and, to a lesser extent, in engineer Jacque Fresco's works. Both authors propose, although from the perspective of slightly different philosophies, the ability of humanity to solve its most pressing dilemmas, politically and socially as well as materially, through the inevitable advancement and equitable distribution of technology. As the emergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics ("strong AI") takes place within the coming decades, humanity will finally have the means to re-engineer the environment as well as its own mental, emotional, and physical capabilities in its own image to an unprecedented degree.

Based on the principle of accelerating returns, used as an expression of exponential growth of components within a system as well as the growth exponentially of the rate of increase itself, Kurzweil projects a rapid expansion in computational capacities globally, a continuing development of dramatic past trends in computer development and miniaturization. This trend will inflate to a point in time called the Singularity, a time signifying a final break with humanity's dependence on the gradual evolutionary processes of Nature. The Singularity refers to the crucial tipping point of this mounting curve in which human intelligence will be matched by machine AI and shortly thereafter exceed natural human capabilities in an ever-increasing arch. Kurzweil often refers to this event as a "paradigm shift" into another stage of what he depicts as a type of teleological ascent, albeit purely human-ordained, of cosmic evolution from the chaos of primal matter and energy to an ordered universe infused with human-machine consciousness.

A diagram of Kurzweil's six epochs of cosmic evolution in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near - Courtesy Google Images

In the above diagram illustrating the progression from inanimate matter to biological organisms to human intelligence and machine consciousness, one can observe an evolution of incrementally increasing computation that realizes its respective manifestation from the previous substrates. The interlinking recapitulation of this process has a very striking similarity to the theory of root races in vogue from 19th century occult movements such as the Theosophical Society. The idea of the Singularity shares more than a passing affinity to the Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point depicting the development of supra-consciousness as the apex of evolution from matter to eternal evolutionary scheme, albeit one atheistic in tone.

Kurzweil's teleology also follows a stream of thought closely allied with traditional Marxism that situated political change in a fixed and inevitable progression discovered through a "scientific analysis" of economic systems. For Kurzweil however, the driver of social evolution is technology rather than the means of production and he embraces a much grander vision for humanity's future than Marx ever imagined, fully realizing itself within the context of a capitalist framework. In contrast, Jacque Fresco foresees a future in which abundance created by technological automation renders modern liberal economies and governments obsolete, which is closer to Marx's concept of Communism as the final goal of social development. In his vision, Fresco promotes a world in which cybernetization will solve all problems of scarcity and political conflict. This endeavor is actively pursued by his organization, The Venus Project, as a political movement whose ends can be achieved presently through international cooperation. Advocacy of a unified global front originating from a grassroots initiative hearkens back to the popular socialist and anarchist movements of earlier history whose objectives were the perfection of society and individual liberties by means of dismantling the nation state model and a capitalist, monetary economy. For Fresco, the nation state, with its imposition of artificial boundaries and unreasoned hoarding of resources, is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to making the technocratic dream a reality. Although Fresco doesn't insist upon the inevitability of technocracy, he does promote it as the explicit solution to current global problems.

Some examples of machine and architectural designs from Jacque Fresco's Venus Project - Courtesy Google Images

Examining the consequences of technocratic society, in whatever variety of forms it may take, is a topic that has received much attention in recent decades as technology in everyday life has become more prevalent. A classic example of just such an examination is Stanley Kubrick's cinematic opus 2001: A Space Odyssey. The arts have always, through technical innovation, critiqued the effects of technology upon social relations. Arguably no medium has made as lasting an impact upon the public mind as cinema. Kubrick's film presents a panorama of humanity's increasing proficiency with (and reliance on) technology from its Australopithecine ancestry to its first steps into space. Humanity's tools, although initially giving it great power over Nature, now ironically threatens to reduce it to an infantile status. HAL 9000 represents the ever-watching panopticon in this radically modified environment suspended in space, far removed from humanity's ancestral home in which it evolved.

HAL and the spaceship also serve as a broad metaphor for technologically-advanced society, a climate-controlled environment which depends upon computers and automated systems for managing every aspect of its operation. In this environment, the astronauts find themselves under a climate of constant surveillance as well as an extensive dependence upon their technology. This conflict between HAL, an emergent self-conscious artificial intelligence, and the human denizens aboard the spacecraft reflects a developing "cold war" between humanity and its machines just as earlier in the film Kubrick illustrates the Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. with a conversation amongst a group of scientists aboard the international space station. Dr. Heywood Floyd closely guards the lunar monolith discovery from the Soviet scientists' inquires just as HAL hides the true nature of the Jupiter mission from the astronauts. This atmosphere of secrecy and subterfuge now threatens humanity through the very tools of its creation which increasingly monitor its activities.

HAL 9000's panopticonic "eye" from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey - Courtesy Google Images

The Space Race was an extension of the arms race between rival superpowers that emerged in the geopolitical order of the post World War II era. The establishment of the military-industrial complex was the inauguration of the cybernizing of political entities for the purposes of unprecedented surveillance of now coming to fruition. Kubrick foresaw this cybernizing trend to be one of increasing paranoia and dependency, a condition commonly referred to as the "technology trap" that for the most part already existed within the political climate of 1968. The impulse to push beyond terrestrial frontiers into outer space is not simply the curiosity of exploration but is tinged with the desire to dominate. Thus it may be asked that even if humanity acquires the ability to radically change its environment and even overcome its own biological limitations through its technical prowess, can humanity in effect "rewire" itself to transform the uglier aspects of its nature? Can these undesirable aspects even be specifically identified for transformation in a manner that is scientifically applicable? Kurzweil bases much of his optimism for human enhancement on issues such as memory storage and informational processing speed, but he fails to acknowledge the persistence of prejudices that do not allow for different perspectives on contemporary culture. Cultural change has happened in spite of this fact of course, but rarely has scientific invention made major transformations in the underlying ethos. Scientific paradigm shifts have typically had an indirect influence on social change as these new paradigms diffused into popular society. They usually acted in the capacity of metaphors, changing the way the public perceived society and Nature, albeit slowly. Equating the human body to a car engine or the brain to a computer are common examples, however flawed as precise analogies they may be.

Kubrick addresses this existential dilemma in 2001 as the ensnarement of humanity by the products of its technological advancement. It is a dilemma that promises more conflict and loss of individual independence as cybernization gains a greater role in everyday society. HAL is the inevitable continuation of humanity's ancient drives for domination. Humanity's aggression and deceitfulness is personified in HAL, a technology originally designed as a "weapon" of the Space Race which has now gained independence from its human progenitors. HAL serves as a metaphor for how a technologically advanced civilization still succumbs to its own flaws due to the fact that its technology more often reflects old prejudices and limitations rather than liberation from them.

The "Enlightenment Room" sequence that happens after astronaut Dave Bowman's journey through the monolith orbiting Jupiter is an internal examination of what it means to be human once freed from HAL's surveying eye. The room itself is decorated in 18th century decor and alludes to Rousseau's concept of sensibilité, a condition based in simplicity, frankness of emotion, and appreciation of the natural world. Such a philosophy stands as the remedy for a society divided against itself as a result of its overdependence on technology. Kubrick's "Starchild" represents a new humanity self-actualized as a being in accord with the cosmos, free from the past constraints that its hypocrisy and antagonisms engendered. Kubrick's idea of "enlightenment" as revealed by the introspective contact with the monolith frees humanity from the panopticonic elements of technology and advances it to another stratum of cosmic evolution. Kubrick unfolds a profoundly dramatic eschatology that is perhaps more spiritual and organic in a theosophical sense, depicting technology as a temporary although necessary step to higher consciousness.

Kubrick's "Enlightenment Room" from 2001: A Space Odyssey - Courtesy Google Images

Kubrick's schema of human development probably exhibits the most insight into the problems that humanity faces regarding the dark portents of the Panopticon. Nevertheless, the examination is "mythological", relying heavily on almost subconscious allusions that bar concise analysis. Cinema as an essentially visual medium of psychological associations and equivalences lacks the intellectual rigor required to precisely address philosophical dilemmas and moreover even to offer much more than vague resolutions. Although Kubrick clearly indicts the Cold War McCarthyian politics of the 1950 and all of the military conflicts, most notably the Vietnam War, that were its consequence, the film 2001 only hints at the deeper cause of the crisis, viz. the social hierarchical structure of a social order that maintains a system of privilege through violence. In spite of the impressive advances in science that may await society, the contemporary visiocentric global culture will continue to exert its influence under the same presuppositions at least into the near future. Given that futurist predictions of accelerating returns such as Kurzweil's are even modestly accurate, it is valid to assume that technology will be used and especially designed to infringe upon the privacy and liberty of individuals to an exponential degree for the ends of privilege and hierarchy. Due to this fact, it has become imperative to reevaluate the role of identity and its intertwining relationships in global culture.

Even with an abundance of worldwide resources and energy made possible through technology, there is no assurance based on current geopolitical trends that this abundance will be available to all equally and that individual rights will be globally observed in light of this new development. Contemporary economic theory primarily supports a profit based exchange system and, as Fresco for one points out, relies upon an artificial scarcity within markets to sustain ever larger profit margins. In conclusion, the criticism about the futurist agenda should not be made so much on the accuracy of its enthusiastic timelines as on whether any amount of technical innovation in and of itself can redeem humanity from the failures of its own thought processes which may not only be indicative of human nature but irrevocably tied to it. Once, or if, humanity reaches the technical expectations that Kurzweil outlines, can it meet the ethical challenges it will face, both those that have persisted for centuries as well as emergent ones, with these new technologies? The outcome is far from certain and certainly not preordained by any universal law of nature as some futurists would be prone to suggest. Any available evidence supporting the inevitability of accelerating returns technologically is questionable and it must be conceded that humanity's success at realizing its desires through the fruits of technology is rooted in an anthropomorphism negligent of the fact that these same desires have a long history of undermining human rights and responsibilities. Until a social philosophy that faces these issues reaches the same level of sophistication as technology will achieve, a "Star Trek-like" future will be of little true progress.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Fresco, Jacque. The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War.
Venus, Fla.: Global Cyber-Visions, 2002. Web. 26 March 2009. 20 August 2013.
<http://zeitgeist.pt/ftp/The%20Venus%20Project/The-Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy.pdf>

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York:
       Viking, 2005. Web. 14 July 2013.
       <hfg-resources.googlecode.com/files/SingularityIsNear.pdf>

"Pierre Teilhard de Chardin". Wikipedia. Web. 3 October 2013.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin>

Scientific Revolutions and Cultural Paradigm Shifts

2013-07-15T18:50:00.005+02:00

The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist, 1888 - Courtesy of Google Images

In earlier ages there were different conceptual models for how Nature worked to produce the prodigious variety that expressed itself to human view. Investigations into the "techniques and arts" of Nature for the benefit of humankind proceeded according to these models, many of which remain only a footnote in history. At some crucial juncture that was not at any particular point in history so much as a gradual unveiling spawn from mounting evidence of contradictions to current theory and practice, the models were compelled to be modified or even completely discarded for others. These other models became a new "vision" bestowed upon the investigatory landscape, a new means of seeing the inner mechanics of Nature in a manner that illuminated previously troubling anomalies. The transitional periods between working models in the sciences, coined "paradigm shifts" by the scientific historian Thomas Kuhn in his noted essay "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", reflected the turning points of new visions resulting from discovery and distinguished from the normal procedures of scientific research.

These transitional periods of "extraordinary science", whether resulting from incidental discovery of anomalies or imaginative epiphanies inspired by the need for superior explanations, have made a discerning mark on how history as a narrative can be understood. The seemingly decentering trend of scientific "advancement", from Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric theory outlined in his work De revolution ibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in 1543 to Edwin Hubble's discovery of galaxies in the 1920s, reinforced ever more deeply the fundamental loss of humanity as a special creation. This fragmented, non teleological future unbounded by essences with any certainty has always made science at odds with the traditional impulses of culture. While science has a socially deconstructive function which constantly challenges human identity in the natural world (and within this dialectic creates new ones), tradition reinforces identity, proscribing relationship dynamics in society. Science is often blamed for providing the means of creating and maintaining the Panopticonic elements of social systems, but it is actually traditional lifeways with their proscriptions and prejudices that more frequently are at fault. Science and its methods may make a Panopticon more easily realizable but only when forced through the prismatic lens of pre-existing anti-democratic forces catering to privilege within culture. Although tradition represents a positive (and therefore supporting) force of identity and community, its solidifying function can enclose individuals into claustrophobic conditions and hinder the movement toward progressive social change.

Science therefore represents a perpetual dismantling of the status quo, the interruption of the stasis of culture and its tendencies toward inertia. Science represents a competing influence to tradition as a social shaping force, an opposition to the modus operandi of culture. Paradoxically, science as a methodology built upon previous biological adaptations from nature that fashioned the neurological rudiments necessary for abstract thought. This ability was thus codified into systems of logic for the explicit purposes of problem solving, first in philosophy and later in the sciences.

Conversely, culture, with its rituals and traditions, draws from a storehouse of long-standing adaptations and relationships that form a network for maintaining equilibrium with the natural environment but, due to its plodding rate of change beyond superficial alterations, generally favors stability over the risks of transformation. To paraphrase Darwin, Nature produces great variety but is hesitant to engage in radical invention. The same equally applies to culture, a type of natural selection specific to being human.

Although Kuhn depicts his explanation of its activities as a formal vision based on a refined framework of inquiry, he emphasizes that science is still susceptible to prejudicial blindness and does not precisely fit into as neat of a distinction as outlined above. In a psychological experiment conducted by J.S. Bruner and Leo Postman as described in their 1949 article “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm", the researchers altered the suit colors from a small selection of playing cards to study how people recognize and handle anomalies with prior experience (cf. Kuhn 62-64). Most identified the normal cards in the deck accurately, but upon subsequent runs subjects noticed the anomalous cards that they had previously named with their tradition suit color respectively. Gradually they recognized these cards as altered. As Kuhn states, "Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, [this] psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery" (64).


Examples of two altered playing cards from Bruner and Postman's cognition experiment - Courtesy of Google Images

Following after many such findings as the aforementioned, Kuhn derived "a hypothesis about vision" for how the process of investigation, scientific or otherwise, is conducted:

Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion (Kuhn 113).

Due to this fact, there is an ambiguity surrounding scientific 'discovery'. To consider it phenomenologically, discovery is a process, gradual in its development, that occurs outside (or perhaps at the outer boundaries of) an established paradigm. In fact, by its very nature, discovery cannot occur without an established paradigm. Not knowing its place of importance in the existing paradigm, a discovery must undergo a stage of conceptual evolution to be successfully integrated, hence transforming or even supplanting a previous scientific model of observation and experimentation if the anomaly fails to be reconciled. Hence, even its most sincere attempts at objectivity cannot be exempt from an a priori blindness that reveals itself to be paradoxically necessary to discovery. The creation of scientific disciplines arose from the codification of earlier fact-gathering into procedures for seeing the world, i.e. paradigms, that served as scaffolds for knowledge. Research gained ever greater precision in its abilities to predict the workings of Nature by inventing instruments, both mental as well as physical, better able to measure various phenomena under investigation. All becomes dependent on the paradigm, the lens through which the scientist sees the world. As a result, "To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself. That act reflects not on the paradigm but on the man. Inevitably he will be seen by his colleagues as “the carpenter who blames his tools” (79).

It is at this theoretical crossroads where the possibility for gaining knowledge and the limitations of finding it are encountered. The dilemma is reminiscent of one that Marx proposed for the social sciences, viz. how is revolutionary change to be achieved when society ("the scientific community") is encapsulated within a certain ideological grid ("paradigm"), determining its understanding of the world? Marx seemed to rely upon a teleology inherent within history itself, borrowed from Hegel's Spirit that harried humanity along a predetermined path. In spite of whether there be desire for change or an absence thereof, history belies a tendency to reveal it at every turn of its passing. Absent concrete evidence of an unfolding teleology, a more likely explanation for major change may be found in Kuhn: ". . . normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch" (122).

This "gestalt switch" may be likened to Milgram's "agentic shift" that he hypothesized about during his shock experiments in the early 1960s. Although Milgram was researching the operational conditions of obedience rather than the factors leading to shifts in scientific models, both inquiries were concerned with how consensus is reached in a community. Following analogously Darwin's evolutionary model, the impetus for change occurred through the discovery of an anomaly (mutation) or a generational "changing of the guard" within the scientific community (ecological). These changes are often incremental and don't amount to much when viewed in isolation. Only when sufficient increments have been established do the roots of a new paradigm take hold and effect a transformation. Be that as it may, Kuhn still emphasizes that the adoption of a new paradigm is like a type of "conversion" to a different way of seeing that cannot be purely gradual in its acceptance: "Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all" (150). Often this required a new generation to emerge in the field: "Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (151).

Milgram gave similar arguments of a conversion experience for the agentic shift as a type of survival mode preconditioned by humanity's evolutionary past for functioning efficiently in social groups. Kuhn adds to this an awareness of a collective vision, a group consensus on how to see and understand the world through a paradigm that can lead inquiry even when the precise mental processes for building paradigms are unknown:

We have no direct access to what it is we know, no rules or generalizations with which to express this knowledge. Rules which could supply that access would refer to stimuli not sensations, and stimuli we can know only through elaborate theory. In its absence, the knowledge embedded in the stimulus-to-sensation route remains tacit (196).

This of course is not to imply that the lack of epistemological knowledge significantly endangers the scientific pursuit. There are many institutional safeguards that separate the scientific community from the shortcomings of other social groups more susceptible to misunderstandings that often can be willfully induced, but it must not leave one so naive as to believe that science is immune to the follies of unjustified conclusions. As stated earlier, even some in the scientific community consider, at least on a subconscious level, regard their work as a linear progression and in the process ignore its labyrinthine past:

Though science surely grows in depth, it may not grow in breadth as well. If it does so, that breadth is manifest mainly in the proliferation of scientific specialties, not in the scope of any single specialty alone. . . . We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth (170).

The omission of an urgent goal in need of address beyond the immediate puzzle-solving and technical concerns of the scientific establishment indicates why science achieves "solutions" at a much more rapid pace than societal problems. Kuhn explains the ". . . very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change" (65). This tradition of normal practice abstracted from the dilemmas of society gives science a distinct advantage of discipline, yet, as can be seen especially in the modern era, scientific paradigm shifts can simultaneously influence the metaphorical insights of society at large, thereby enacting cultural change. The theories of Freud and Einstein at the beginning of the 20th century are probably the most salient examples of how a new paradigm inadvertently changes the outlook of a culture.

In spite of these influences, science has its own private concerns that only tangentially make truly revolutionary shifts in culture. Its achievements have led to great improvements in medicine, communications, and other fields but social problems are of a category that cannot be reduced to mere technical puzzles arranged for solution. Due to this fact, the social sciences, especially when employed for the purposes of social policy, have always been plagued by the complexities of irreducibility. As long as a society does not examine its underlying assumptions, scientific paradigm shifts affect it only marginally, primarily remaining within the academic communities from which they originate. There have been too many examples of how scientific theories have been appropriated for undemocratic political agendas and bolstering the justifications for draconian measures taken by governments counter to public interest.

In many senses, Kuhn's paradigm is as much a confinement as the Panopticon, albeit a necessary one for scientific discovery and advancement. However it is important to note that "seeing", as Kuhn demonstrates throughout his essay, is not just simple perception: "In the metaphorical no less than in the literal use of ‘seeing,’ interpretation begins where perception ends. The two processes are not the same, and what perception leaves for interpretation to complete depends drastically on the nature and amount of prior experience and training" (198). Keeping this firmly in mind, a paradigm can be a protective fortress against siege just as easily as an inescapable prison.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Kuhn, Thomas S. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." International Encyclopedia of Unified
Science/Foundations of the Unity of Science, Vol. 2. no. 2. Second Edition, Enlarged.
Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1970. Web. 30 May 2013. (PDF).
<https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf>

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. 1974. Web. (PDF).

Copyright © 2013 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Jesse James and Ideological Violence in the Postbellum South

2013-04-14T13:25:00.002+02:00

Violent behavior is not simply caused by acquiescence to a manipulating authority from without but equally originates from a violation of the very cornerstone of an individual's identity and sense of autonomy. When these primary facets of an individual's self are threatened, violence inevitably follows. Such was the case with Jesse James, a man whose sympathies lay with the cultural institutions of the American South. Amidst the economic and political changes of the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, James and others of like mind commenced upon a campaign in the aftermath of the Civil War that can reasonably be compared to a "reign of terror". His older brother Frank, a recent ex-Confederate, instructed Jesse in the art of "bushwhacking" and had himself in turn learned guerrilla combat techniques from the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars veterans whom he joined shortly before the end of the Civil War.

The U.S. Civil War involved the complex confrontations of a burgeoning industrialized commercial economy spreading throughout the country with the increasingly severe tensions surrounding the question of slavery. During the implementation of the Reconstruction in the after the Civil War, tensions along the North-South divide became more focused on small-scale confrontations in much the same fashion as the Border Wars prior to the war. "The conflict was no longer one of distant battles, but of grassroots struggles over town councils and county courthouses" between African American officeholders/voters and the old pre-Civil War Democratic Party status quo (Stiles 276). A new mode of life, borne from industrialization, was replacing the old Southern order and challenging not only the long-entrenched mindset of a slave labor economy but also the conventional notion of African Americans as inferior to whites. Violence against previous slaves increased as local whites organized themselves into paramilitaries for the singular purpose of psychological intimidation and physical coercion. Reconstruction was viewed by the South overall as a violation of individual liberty and property rights by the Radical Republicans, but in Missouri this objection took on an especially destructive aspect as a state caught between the national visions of the North and the South on the outer Western frontier. In a very tangible sense Missouri was a microcosm of the Civil War's deepest, most visceral contentions during the Civil War era and became the inevitable breeding ground for the banditry of such a figure as Jesse James, claiming to fight for the "lost cause" of the South.

From the age of sixteen, James participated in a campaign of crime that quickly evolved into an ideological war against the Union whose governing powers had grown throughout the Civil War years. This immersion in violent activities at such a young age may account for the nonchalant attitude by which James perpetrated some of his most grisly acts against his fellow Missourians who were targeted as Union sympathizers (352).

Young Jesse James in bushwhacker dress, 1864 - Courtesy Google Images

What made the James' brothers legacy especially memorable to history was not only the length of their campaign (aided by local rebel sympathizers who provided refuge from the law and needed supplies) but the extensive propaganda program disseminated with the help of John Newman Edwards, a journalist who had served the famous Confederate Brigadier General Jo Shelby as adjutant during the war. In the spring of 1870, Edwards met the brothers and created an ideological alliance, introducing them to other prominent ex-Confederates like General Shelby (210-211). Edwards proved to be a very effective advocate for James and his exploits. Edwards' employment in various prominent newspapers of the period offered James a convenient sounding board for his pleas of innocence to various charges of banditry as well as his condemning diatribes regarding Reconstruction. Although Edwards may have coached James on the use of certain rhetorical phrases, it is known that despite his meager education, James was an enthusiastic reader of newspapers and penned many of the letters that Edwards subsequently published in newspapers (211). By the time Edwards published his editorial entitled "A Terrible Quintet" (viz. Jesse, Frank, A.C. McCoy, Coleman Younger, and his brother John) in the St. Louis Dispatch in November 23, 1873, the myth of Jesse James and his entourage of "chivalrous bandits" was virtually complete (241). The newspaper piece was an example of the glorification of the Confederate guerrilla wars taking place in Missouri and the aura of intimidation it created. In perhaps the most famous of Edwards' editorials about Jesse James, "The Chivalry of Crime," he wrote glowingly about the superiority of the newly-emerging holdup man to the professional burglar of old: "There are things done for money and for revenge of which the daring of the act is the picture and the crime is the frame it may be set in. . . . A feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one's hair rise to think of it, with a condiment of crime to season it, becomes chivalric; poetic; superb" (quoted in Stiles 224). The romance of James' myth had been strengthened through his own devices earlier that year when, during a train robbery near Des Moines, Iowa on July 21st, the bandits referred to themselves as "robbing from the rich for the poor". It was no accident that the gang also chose to mask themselves in Ku Klux Klan garb in solidarity with Southern resistance to Reconstruction and the establishment of black civil rights (236).

Major John Newman Edwards - Courtesy Google Images

The Robin Hood mythos deliberately cultivated by the gang was further enhanced with allusions to other romanticized archetypes by Peter Donan, another newspaper editor from the Lexington Caucasian. After the very public Lexington stage robbery in August, 1874, Donan even ceased to keep the men anonymous in the euphoria of his grandiose prose:

In all the history of medieval knight-errantry and modern brigandage, there is nothing that equals the wild romance of the past few years' career of Arthur McCoy, Frank and Jesse James, and the Younger brothers . . . combining the endurance and fleetness of the Bedouin Arab, with the savagery of the Cossack and the gallantry of true knighthood . . . These four or five men have absolutely defied the whole power of Missouri. . . . The whole proceeding was conducted in the coolest and most gentlemanly manner possible. (quoted in Stiles 267)

Jesse James' induction into the milieu of the ex-Confederate guerrilla counter-revolution waged against the constitutional changes of 1865 and the project of Reconstruction, which was essentially accomplished by the Compromise of 1877, can be viewed in light of Milgram's experiments about situational violence. Just as during the Nazi occupation in France and elsewhere in Europe turned previously civil neighbors against each other in the new order, so had Reconstruction altered the political climate of Missouri, a Western borderland that struggled between its identity as a Northern industrialized state and a Southern slave labor economy, and imposed battle lines amongst its populace although under very different motivations. In fact, it is not unfair to claim that the ex-Confederate guerrillas in their propaganda often equated the Union's new policies of racial equality and desegregation as a tyranny akin to what many contemporaries today would commonly call Nazism. In this ideological climate, Jesse James was initiated and conditioned to prey on those institutions and individuals considered to be complicit with this clear and present encroachment against the Southern way of life.

Understanding the James' gang campaign of aggression in the context of Milgram's experiments, one can interpret James' behavior as the result of adopting the ideology of a "greater cause" (under the influence of his mother and brother primarily), regardless of the adverse consequences to others' lives, even to those whom James knew personally. This would seem to be counter-intuitive at first glance when compared with Milgram's findings of decreased obedience to cause harm to others in close proximity (both literally and figuratively), but other independent studies have clearly shown that individuals can be desensitized to even extreme acts of brutality with gradual conditioning, especially when exposure happens at an early age. Coupled with the romantic notion of rebelling against a clearly-defined and simplified "enemy", the possibility for violence is seemingly preordained. Therefore, most notably in Jesse James' train robberies which utilized deliberate political symbols and planned statements for the press, one can witness, as T.J. Stiles observes, the foreshadowing of the modern terrorist (391). This is clearly illustrated in the politically charged content of many of the letters that James regularly submitted to Edwards' newspapers proclaiming his innocence of crimes and decrying the tyrannies of the Union in conjunction with the corruption of the Republican Party. On October 15, 1872, a pseudonymous letter written from the perspective of one of the culprits in the Kansas City Fair robbery and most likely penned by James was published in the Kansas City Times:

. . . We are not thieves - we are bold robbers. . . . Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery, and the cry is to hang them, but Grant and his party can steal millions, and it is all right. . . . Please rank me with [Alexander the Great and Napoleon] and not with the Grantites. Grant's party has no respect for any one. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob the rich and give to the poor. . . . I will close by hoping that Horace Greely will defeat Grant, and then I can make an honest living, and then I will not have to rob, as taxes will not be so heavy. (quoted in Stiles 224-225)

Although James' criminal career was unique in many respects, the tone of the letter was typical of the mindset which many in the Postbellum South shared and which in large part caused the widespread violence against African Americans well into the 20th century. The Thirteenth Amendment adopted in 1865, although meant to eradicate slavery entirely, still allowed forced labor as a sentence for convicted criminals. By the time of the unraveling of Reconstruction in 1877 which had already begun as early as the late 1860s, the South unanimously created a system of laws upheld in every state to "criminalize" African Americans to prevent them from exercising their constitutional freedoms and liberty of movement (Blackmon 53). As a result, slavery reemerged in a more brutal, industrialized form where even the familial feeling of the master/slave relationship that had potentially existed in the Antebellum slavery was broken. Imprisoned African Americans now suffered the ultimate indignity of being considered mere "commodities", without even the possibility of humane treatment. The propagated myth of the "lawless freed slave" along with a quasi-underground economy of convictions for profit in the South's criminal justice system increased the conviction rate of African Americans exponentially after the failure of Reconstruction (69-70). Since the rewards for leasing convicts were so high, African Americans were very often brought to court on trumped-up or outright erroneous charges (99).

In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which compelled the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (voting and legal rights) to be upheld for African Americans could not be guaranteed. The issue of civil rights was determined to be a local one to be left to the discretion of the states to enforce (93). In 1892, lynchings of blacks reached an all-time high in the U.S. with more than 250 killed (106). This escalating violence motivated the federal government to betray the promises of the Reconstruction Era completely. In the May, 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court denied African Americans the equal right to public facilities. This decision was based on the newly-contrived "separate but equal" principle which spurred the creation of the predictably unequal segregation of black and white people in the South under Jim Crow legislation (110-111). It must also be remembered that while it is true that African Americans were treated far more harshly by Jim Crow legislation in the South, the North set up consistent obstacles of its own such as employment, money lending, and housing discrimination counter to federal law which undermined black social progress for several decades.


Convict wagons for transporting and housing African Americans to lumber camps, farms, or to work in road gangs - Pitt County, North Carolina, 1910 - Courtesy Google Images

Prisoner being punished in a forced labor camp in Georgia, 1930s - Courtesy Google Images

The outcome of "separate but equal" - Courtesy Google Images

Jesse James was the product of a generation in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history, a period that Charles and Mary Beard rightly described as "the Second American Revolution" (Foner, Preface xiv). Indeed, this period in U.S. history shares many parallels with the tumultuous and frequently violent political atmosphere during the French Revolutionary era of 1789-1799. (One need only reflect upon the public executions by guillotine and on the lynching scaffold for a point of comparison.) It is certain that James viewed the Civil War in this manner, but the war he fought was not a conventional one. His was a war of carefully as he orchestrated tactical maneuvers for maximum impact and publicity, a war of propaganda and ideology. It hinged upon the struggle between two major trajectories in social order. The Union with its program of Reconstruction represented the legal/judicial bureaucracy that attempted to instill a codified system of laws and procedures enforced by a centralized governing body to address injustices in the nation. The other side in the conflagration, the communal consensus, was the small scale community whose popular "cultural sentiments" of right and responsibilities determined social justice and implemented this justice through united direct action. The Civil War was every bit a war of community rights ("states rights") against a centralized federal rule. As the mid-19th neared, the conflict between the legalistic and the communal became more apparent, especially as the new technologies of industrialization began to significantly alter the economy and the landscape. The South was already incorporating its traditional mode of slavery with modern industry before the Civil War. Alabama engineer John T. Milner's theory of industrialized black labor was being used long after Reconstruction ended (Blackmon 50-52). However, James was not against industrialization such as the railroads per se but simply used them as convenient stages for his crimes to publicize himself and the Confederate cause. What excited the public about Jesse James was his allegiance to the Confederacy and his standing as a romantic figure in the public imagination. James and his outlaw gang were not simply common thieves but ". . . were the central issue in a struggle between the Union and Confederate wings of the Democratic Party, factions that were ideologically identical in every respect except the sides they took during the Civil War" (Stiles 386).

At the time of Jesse James' assassination by the Ford brothers on April 3, 1882, the hopes of ex-Confederates for "restitution" were well on their way to being satisfied in a sense. They had lost the war on the battlefield but won the greater ideological war of communal rights over federal mandates through a gradual erosion of Radical Republican ideals. Large swathes of the white South reclaimed their traditional hold on public offices and banished African Americans to roles of obscurity by the later 19th century, a trend that would last for many years afterward. Missouri remained a state on the margins of identity however, of which Jesse James became a theatrical example. His reasons for resorting to criminal acts and his ample employment of calculated propaganda to justify them bring into sharp focus the deep-seated crisis of suspicion, resentment, and unbridled contentiousness that characterizes much of Southern/previous frontier state politics in the U.S. in recent times. Jesse James evokes the visual iconography and rhetoric of the terrorist mentality with its attendant catalog of violence. His legacy plies the weapons of its trade, casting its influence on modern-day criminals who have an attraction for the flair of the romantic, the dogmatic, the violent. The case of Jesse James demonstrates that the personal moral dictates of conscience can be overridden when effectively motivated by an acknowledged authority (even a communal or dethroned one) to commit acts of wanton aggression, even against one's closest neighbors, all in the name of a "greater" political/social agenda.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Blackmon, Douglas A.. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
                Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books,
2009. print.

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction 1863-1877. New York: Harper Perennial,
                1990. print.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. 1974
            Web (PDF).

Stiles, T.J.. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. London: Pimlico, 2004. print.

Copyright © 2013 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Milgram's Experiment and the Dynamics of Obedience

2013-02-23T11:40:00.004+01:00

An oft-cited and celebrated example of the effects of authority on obedience behavior is the noted series of experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram. In July 1961, in the midst of German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann's trial for war crimes and his role in the Shoah, Milgram began his inquiry into how human beings could be compelled by authority to act against common values of morality. The aim of the experiments was therefore determined to measure responses of obedience to authority in spite of internalized and shared concepts against acts of violence through a simulation of what had occurred in Nazi Germany ("Milgram experiment").

The experiments had many versions, but of the different variables involved each one featured the same array of roles. The experimenter, standing in as an authority figure and supervisor for the study, named each pair of recruited volunteers as a learner and a teacher. Since the teacher was the actual subject of study, the illusion of a random assignment of roles was feigned by "drawing lots" between the two other positions who were in fact only actors. In the baseline experiment, the learner and teacher were told that the purpose of the experiment was to determine how negative reinforcement (by means of a progression of "shocks") affects memory and learning. The teacher was to test the learner on his recall of a number of word pairings after he read them off to him. If the learner made an error, the teacher would deliver a shock from the electro-shock generator to which he was attached. With each wrong answer, the shock administered would increase by 15 volts until the maximum setting of 450 volts. The teacher then exited into the adjoining room after he watched the experimenter strap the learner into his chair and secure his connections to the electro-shock machine.

Of course, the shocks were merely a ploy in Milgram's experiments to gauge how far the teacher would be willing to follow the experimenter's commands bearing full knowledge of the physical pain he was inflicting on his learner in a simulated, controlled environment. In fact, a recording of the learner's cries was rigged to the electro-shock generator beforehand: with each successive shock delivered the cries became more intense and desperate. Often the learner would loudly complain about a heart condition and even beat on the walls in simulated agony just to make the point clear. In spite of these protests, the experimenter verbally prodded the teacher to continue and would stop the experiment only after the teacher had asked to discontinue no less than four times. Each protest from the teacher was followed up by a progressively earnest reply from the experimenter to go on. If the teacher's pleas to stop the experiment fell short, the experiment was only brought to an end after the most severe shock of 450 volts was administered three times in a row ("Milgram experiment").

Milgram's shock box

Milgram's advertisement circulated in local newspapers to recruit volunteers -
Courtesy Google Images


Set up of participants in the baseline experiment - Courtesy Google Images

The results of the experiments were startling when compared with the initial predictions of Milgram and his colleagues. Milgram "found that a group of Yale seniors predicted an obedience rate of 1.2%, while a group of psychiatrists predicted that only 0.125% of subjects would be fully obedient" (Blass 963). After Milgram's first run of experiments was evaluated, it was discovered that 65%, 26 out of a total of 40 participants, had been cooperative enough to continue the experiment til its end and delivered the 450-volt shock as requested ("Milgram experiment"). This act was not accomplished without signs of emotional duress exhibited by many teachers however, but it was a startling revelation that so many were willing to act out the experimenter's orders through the power of his verbal commands alone. Similar results were later obtained by researchers who conducted Milgram's experiment in different populations residing in various countries. Although variations on the standard experiment's variables such as the proximity of teacher to learner and having different types of authority figures giving orders decreased the incidence of compliance, findings between 61-66% remained statistically consistent in many different iterations (Blass, see Appendix 978).

These revelations led Milgram to surmise in Obedience to Authority, his highly publicized book summarizing his findings:

This may illustrate a dangerously typical situation in complex society: it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the grounds that be was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society. (Milgram 9-10)

Milgram postulated that the nature of the hierarchical organization of social structure by its very nature created a situation of natural compliance to authority that overturned personal moral conscience in favor of perceived group benefit. Milgram observed that teachers exhibited great seriousness in their experimental roles, " . . . reading the word pairs with exquisite articulation and pressing the switches with great care. They want to put on a competent performance, but they show an accompanying narrowing of moral concern. The subject entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing morality to the experimental authority he is serving" (8). Milgram explained this phenomenon as agentic shift, a point at which, when in the presence of a perceived legitimate authority figure, the subject enters into a state susceptible to displacing responsibility for one's actions to the authority. Power to frame the moral as well as the technical aspects of a social situation is willingly placed in the hands of such an authority, even if the authority in question is simply one of formal convention rather than of knowledge. In Obedience to Authority, the central question of the experiment comes into clear focus: ". . . how is it that a person who is usually decent and courteous acts with severity against another person within the experiment? He does so because conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is per force diminished at the point of entering a hierarchical structure" (83). "Every situation also possesses a kind of ideology, which we call the 'definition of the situation,' and which is the interpretation of the meaning of a social occasion. . . . There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority, that is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning. It is this ideological abrogation to the authority that constitutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience" (89).

The imperatives of personal conscience and those of social authority are often in direct conflict with one another and the agentic shift is the means by which such actions that are deemed necessary by society can be performed by individuals against their own personal convictions and judgements. For the needs of coherence within the social hierarchy, individual will can be overridden in service to the "higher causes" of society.

The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear, but acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority. (89)

Milgram described subjects under the sway of the agentic state in his laboratory as " . . . likened to a light doze, compared to the profound slumber induced by the prepotent authority system of a national government" (95).

Due to the evolutionary developments within the ever-increasing reliance on culture as an adaptive behavior in humans in addition to the internal needs of any hierarchical system to have coherence and efficiency, Milgram argued that the phenomenon of the agentic state was an inevitable, albeit regrettably dangerous, outcome. It must be emphasized that Milgram did not think this agentic state was a simply a threat to democratic principles and institutions but was in fact much more deeply rooted in social structure qua a system of organization itself. "For the problem is not “authoritarianism” as a mode of political organization or a set of psychological attitudes but authority itself. Authoritarianism may give way to democratic practice, but authority itself cannot be eliminated as long as society is to continue in the form we know" (108).

An interesting side effect that accompanied the release of Milgram's experimental results was its popular reception. "Of the approximately 140 invited speeches and colloquia he gave during his lifetime, more than one third dealt, directly or indirectly, with obedience. Milgram was still giving invited colloquia on the topic in 1984, the year he died-22 years after he completed them . . ." according to one accounting (Blass 956). From the very beginning, Milgram encouraged a type of "publicity campaign" with his research, releasing his film Obedience in 1962, a documentary about participants in the experiments. Its stark, dramatic nature anticipates other documentaries of its kind in later years that dealt with similar sensational topics such as Dr. Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment conducted on students at Stanford University in the summer of 1971. In hindsight, it evokes more the feel of a cruel prank than a penetrating investigation into human behavior akin to the "reality TV" phenomenon of recent years. It is unfair to attribute this theatrical aspect to Milgram's intention, but the film's continued ability to stoke the popular imagination has become one tinged with morbid curiosity and shallow interpretations, its central warning about the dangers of obedience in the context of a hierarchical order buried in paranoia about one's fellow citizens as irrevocably evil. Ironically, it seems as if Milgram's message has been trivialized to the model of TV game shows in which "survival of the fittest" has taken on a moral imperative all its own and harming others in order to "win the game" is praised as a virtue. The uncritical acceptance and participation in these "game show ideologies" further reinforce predilections to the agentic state and thereby increase the probability of individuals to act outside the bounds of moral conscience.

Stills from Milgram's 1962 documentary film Obedience - Courtesy Google Images

In spite of this, Milgram's experiment has inspired thoughtful reflections on the problems of social hierarchies and their power to influence behavior to destructive ends. It has influenced a number of films that have seriously addressed hierarchy's challenge to individual autonomy and morality in light of Milgram's experiments. I... comme Icare (I As In Icarus), a 1979 French thriller by director Henri Verneuil, features a dramatic depiction of the Milgram experiment and how its findings relate to the functions of state power. In The Gladiators (1969), British director Peter Watkins tells the cautionary tale of a powerful international computer network called ICARUS (so-called perhaps for its over-reaching ambitions and hubris) which organizes "Peace Games" every year between nations to maintain a system of "controlled warfare". There is an eerie similarity between the ICARUS control booth and those who operate it in the film and Milgram's electro-shock generator with its attendant "teachers". The metaphor of the machine for loss of meaning and morality is in fact quite common in such dystopian tales and owes a part of its debt to Milgram's imaginatively-crafted experiment.

In considering social theory and its applications, there is a connection to be made between Milgram's agentic shift/state and Lippmann's theory of stereotypes as stereotypes themselves are a way of categorizing people into assigned roles that society expects them to fulfill, a type of hierarchy of rankings. Lippmann's theory is perhaps a "literary" (since he was a journalist) interpretation of how individuals behave in the agentic state when engaged with authority in the public sphere. Although there is a more private dimension which drives the manner in which people think about themselves and things in general, its theoretical framework is essentially close to Milgram's notions about the agentic state and its functions. The "pictures within people's heads" tell them how to recognize an authority, whether it be an actual person serving that role or a figurative stand-in for that authority, and how to appropriately behave in such situations. Both Milgram and Lippmann speak about innate structures (as well as external structural requirements for the integrity of the system) that influence humans to behave in certain ways toward authority. Each in his own way is pessimistic about the outcome of his inquiry, but, although both have had their work misused over the years, there is much to learn from their individual observations of human behavior. Milgram offers more hope in the sense that since human nature seems to be more malleable than Lippmann ever assumed, there was a better chance of molding it closer toward our human desires for moral integrity and personal freedom.

It would appear that the point at which both men emphatically meet is the issue of propaganda. Stereotypic thinking, based on the imaginal, provides the tools of manipulation just as the practical data that Milgram derived from his applied experiments showed that those in authority can manipulate individuals in such a manner as to "shift" them into an agentic state of docility, even without deliberate intent to do so. In other words, Milgram scientifically demonstrated what Lippmann earlier in the century theorized about but could only provide anecdotal and other subjective evidence to support. Of course, the reason why Milgram's experiment was so gripping to the public at the time was because it was the first scientific evidence to reveal the willingness of people to be led to harm, torture, or even kill others if they were convinced by an authority figure that it was for "a greater good". Although pioneering work in social psychology was already being done about obedience by Dr. Solomon Asch in his conformity experiments of the 1950s, Milgram placed the inquiry about obedience on a new plateau. This naturally led to a deeper consideration and wariness of the power of propaganda. Because the problem was authority itself, deeply embedded into the substructure of what defines culture and hence the essence of human adaptability itself, the dilemma seemed that much more grave, perhaps even inescapable. The empirical, scientific evidence that Lippmann lacked from his subjective approach was now readily available for public - and government - perusal.

In the contemporary behavioral sciences hierarchy is a staple topic and its effects as a social control mechanism are firmly established in the scientific literature. As more evidence is gathered and understanding of how the human brain operates deepens, it is unclear precisely how its discovers will change democratic governance and popular culture over time, whether for good or for ill. It can only be hoped, in acknowledgement of Milgram's work and findings, that critical thinking and the independent will to practice it are emphasized all the more as the necessary character for any healthy society. As Stanley Milgram advises at the conclusion of Obedience to Authority:

Our business, if we desire to live a life not utterly devoid of meaning and significance, is to accept nothing which contradicts our basic experience merely because it comes to us from tradition or convention or authority. It may well be that we shall be wrong; but our self-expression is thwarted at the root unless the certainties we are asked to accept coincide with the certainties we experience. That is why the condition of freedom in any state is always a widespread and consistent skepticism of the canons upon which power insists. (Milgram 115-116)

Works Cited and Consulted:

Blass, Thomas (1999). "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things
we now know about obedience to authority". Journal of Applied
Social Psychology 29 (5): 955–978. Web (PDF).
<http://neuron4.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc591Readings/Blass1999.pdf>.

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks (Simon & Schuster),

1997 (1922). print.

"Milgram experiment". Wikipedia. 20 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2013.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment>.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. 1974
Web (PDF).

Taming the Behemoth: A New Social Psychology of the Masses

2012-12-30T19:26:00.001+01:00

Arguably the most influential thinker and founder of the emerging social theory of political psychology in the early years of the 20th century was Walter Lippmann, a veteran journalist who was intimately involved in the U.S. government's propaganda campaign during World War I. After the war, the publication of his seminal work Public Opinion created a sensation in the political and intellectual community. His concise critique of representational democracy, as well as those who aspired to the establishment of a more direct participation of the public in politics, set the groundwork for how democracy was to be discussed for years to come and the central issues of its consideration as a viable form of governance. It is probably warranted to claim that Lippmann more than any other figure of the time established political science as a proper academic discipline. Lippmann's social prescription comprised a modernized "Platonic" outlook in which highly trained experts from specialized fields with the assistance of a sophisticated technical media network would be employed to effectively disseminate information without the distorting intrusion of public prejudice. Experts were designated as the newest version of the "philosopher-kings" who would be able to distinguish true Form from the transient shortcomings of public opinion (the senses), enabling leaders as well as the public access to reliable information upon which to make informed decisions that fell beyond their immediately experienced environments.

Walter Lippmann - Courtesy Wikipedia

Lippmann's schema was emanational in nature. It justified its program of centralized dissemination of information on Lippmann's coined concept of "stereotype". This term designates the preconceived shorthand of discursive thought that resides in the subconscious of the public, directing its decisions and actions. Stereotypes are the means by which human beings organize experience into manageable categories and create an interlocking system of associations to efficiently interact in their environment. Because of the incomplete and often erroneous impressions the senses reveal co-joined with the limits of attention, scope, and duration of the human intellect, Lippmann even characterized people as living in a type of "pseudo-environment" since the actual world was too formidable in its complexity to be effectively understood. "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture" (Lippmann 54-55). These "stereotypes" are therefore repositories as described by Lippmann of "the pictures in our heads", the mechanism through which human beings regard the world and make judgements about it.

There is no coincidence in the visual metaphor Lippmann employed in his social analysis. He believed that the introduction of cinematic technology was further bringing to light the strong innate dependencies of the visual to communicate ideas that became infused with an emotional content by association. Although the image had always been used to convey ideas and reinforce acceptance of shared social values, the arrival of cinema greatly exaggerated the effect: "Thus there can be little doubt that the moving picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole experience of the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the cinema" (60). Lippmann emphasized the fact that the most deeply-seated stereotypes preceded reason as if they were objective perceptions themselves in which ". . . stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed and spoken words [or even more so imagery], evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green" (65). This psychological process acts as a continuous feedback loop that confirms the initial impression and reinforces its persistence, a self-fulfilling prediction that confirms the correspondence of the outside world with a priori notions that lie in the subconscious.

Given the nature of stereotypes and how their content and intensity was determined through social interests held by loosely grouped affiliations, prestige, and loyalties, the propagandist's aim was to create a transference of interest into a broader public will that would elicit support for certain social policies with a minimum of conflict. According to Lippmann, this could be done by attaching a symbol to unify and coordinate response:

Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first man may read it as the preservation of American isolation, or as he may call it, independence; the second as a rejection of a politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol itself signifies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were originally attached to disparate ideas. . . . For when a coalition around the symbol has been effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than toward critical scrutiny of the measures. . . . A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation. (132-133)

This sentiment is similar to Edward Bernays' thoughts on the subject of manipulating public opinion for political ends:

Acting on the fallacy that the leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his campaign of all dramatic interest. An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda. (110)

Lippmann, as well as Bernays, saw the need to dramatize the issues of the public sphere to some degree due to the limitations and divisive direction that seem innate in mass opinion, but being much more philosophically-minded and thorough in his analysis, Lippmann summarizes well the purpose of the symbol thus:

And so where the masses of people must cooperate in an uncertain and eruptive environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility without real consent. The symbol does that. It obscures personal intention, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates individual purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group, as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. (152-153)

Within the program of this analysis, which constituted the "manufacture of consent" as Lippmann famously phrased it, was a strong critique against long-held beliefs about democracy and the underlying philosophy of the Panopticon. Under Bentham, the Panopticon was a physical space so constructed as to permit constant surveillance of its occupants/prisoners. Lippmann moved the Panopticon into the very composition of the human mind as Plato had in his famous metaphysical allegory. In the dim light of the Cave, one can only see the shadows on the wall and we are chained to the floor, unable to turn about. For some individuals, there is a way to freedom but society, and more specifically public action, would be forever bound. Lippmann's argument, if conceded, comes to the conclusion that ". . . those thinkers of the Eighteenth Century who designed the matrix of democracy. . . had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an infallible origin for the new social order. There was the mystery, and only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands" (162). Lippmann's project demanded that he trespass into that "sacrosanct mystery" however. His assessment was that stereotypes made the masses incapable of competent decision-making on issues that were removed from the immediate and tangible realities of their own local environment. These decisions had to be managed and communicated through the applicable mechanisms of propaganda, especially when many of these issues were not even known to the public previously.

The Two Previous Panopticons - Courtesy Google Images

It can be argued that the "General Will" that had so preoccupied Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophers was not intellectually rigorous enough to use as a basis for democratic rule. It still did not adequately address, even if people had the capacity to make rational decisions in self-governance in spite of the stereotypes they may possess, how they could have consistent access to reliable information upon which to make those decisions. This was a major concern for Lippmann, a journalist who saw many such errors in judgment occurring due to inaccurate information even under the best of conditions: "The aristocrat believed that those who dealt with large affairs possessed the instinct, the democrats asserted that all men possessed the instinct . . . It was no part of political science in either case to think out how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler. If you were for the people you did not try to work out the question of how to keep the voter informed" (164). This point draws attention to the need for a political epistemology that does not depend upon the ill-defined public will for its functioning yet provides self-determination for its citizens. Lippmann is critical of self-determination perhaps because it is also a vague concept that can have many meanings and becomes especially complex when considering its practice in a large modern bureaucratic state. The problem certainly involves a question of scale as many conceptions of spontaneous democracy typically envision small self-sufficient communities as models such as Thomas Jefferson's ideal of citizen-farmers deliberating on the latest order of business in the local town hall (170). As Lippmann states, such a degree of liberal participation in the decision-making process may only be possible in small scale self-contained communities.

In all of Lippmann's critique of mass representational democracy and socialism (as well as any attempts at a more direct anarchistic form), there is an irony. Public opinion calls for representation when its needs and basic desires are not met because having a participatory voice in the public sphere is a means to the end of human fulfillment. As Lippmann himself states, "But if, instead of hanging human dignity on the one decision about self-government, you insist that man's dignity requires a standard of living, in which his capacities are properly exercised, the whole problem changes. . . . In the degree to which these criteria can be made exact and objective, political decision, which is inevitably the concern of comparatively few people, is actually brought into relation with the interests of men" (197). This is precisely the goals that were sought by democratic political thinkers during the Enlightenment and later political reform movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is true that self-determination is a worthless power if there is no method by which to direct that power to a mutually supported public good, but it is nevertheless difficult to reconcile a critique of democracy that makes a "straw man" argument out of a desire for goals that have been clearly defined by social movements for decades. The purpose of "self-determination" is to have a quality of life that allows one to pursue a meaningful life, not simply idolize "freedom" as an abstract virtue to be desired in and of itself. In a Panopticonic society, it is easier to control outcomes and enact political policies, but there is no guarantee that such a society will be willing to provide equal rights and a good standard of life to its own populace, not to mention make humane and rational foreign policy decisions.

Stereotypes represent the modernized psychological version of the Platonic Forms (with Kant's philosophy as an intermediary phase in the concept's evolution), propaganda a scientific manipulation of the underlying psychological substructure for various political and social purposes. Stereotype dominance in the psyche of public opinion leads to irrational decisions and social unrest, a fetishism of the public sphere that heavily relies on imagery to convey thoughts that are often too nuanced and complex to be explained solely by means of illustration. The result is one of confusion and distress when the "pictures in our heads" cannot be made to fit external reality. Propaganda cannot promise societal security let alone societal comprehension on a large scale.

Lippmann's hope lay in better methods and technologies for accurate record keeping to those who would form his elite class of experts and determine better policy. This technical innovation has largely become possible today through the Internet and its numerous devices of dissemination but government initiative to use this technology for informing the public has been left wanting. Unfortunately with dwindling funding in the First World and lack of infrastructure in the Third World to provide a high standard of education to all members of society, propaganda has become the preferred educational tool of choice. Propaganda filters information like the Prismatic Eidolon filters the light of symbols and its emanations reach human consciousness. Global society slides further into the mold of the Panopticon and its hegemonic visio-centrism.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005 (1928). print.

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks (Simon & Schuster),
1997 (1922). print.

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Fetishizing the Image: Propaganda IS Everything

2012-11-18T19:29:00.003+01:00

In 1928 Edward Bernays, a father of the public relations industry and a promoter of U.S. engagement in World War I under the direction of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country" (Bernays 37). Thus was introduced the driving motivation behind the call for a new propaganda, one that was based upon studied principles and systematic methodologies to lead society into a maximum mode of efficiency and productivity. Bernays' new propaganda ". . . takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties" (55). The older form of propaganda in use prior to the 20th century, along with various means of advertising which are centuries old, generally involved what might be called a "behaviorist" approach, confronting the subject with a direct appeal to buy a product or adopt a particular idea. With repeated exposure, this technique had some success, but it was not systemically reliable because its results were not consistently effective. The psychological theories of Freud (to whom Bernays was a nephew) changed the methods of propaganda to take account of the forces driving the unconscious not only individually but in socially traditional group associations. The propagandist's aim was therefore changed dramatically in that ". . . he creates circumstances which will swing emotional currents so as to make for purchaser demand" (77).


Edward Bernays - Courtesy Wikipedia

Poster for the Soirée du Coeur à Barbe at the Théâtre Michel, Raoul Hausmann (1923) - Courtesy of http://guity-novin.blogspot.fr/2011/08/chapter-44-dadaism-meeting-point-of-all.html

Dada had criticized the older mode of propaganda through its parodies in print art and ironic use of publicity stunts. In part, this was a reaction to movements like Art Nouveau, a style that was largely appropriated by advertising and, at least subconsciously, promoted the taming of the natural environment for human consumption. Its use in the war effort as well, in spite of its original utopian socialist origins, undoubtedly spurred many artists to break away into other avenues, even prior to the horrors of World War I. This subsequent critique was overwhelmingly anti-commercialist and anti-capitalist in its nature, yet in many ways it failed to address the rising phenomenon of the new propaganda and its more subtle techniques of persuasion. In fact, the very techniques that Dada created and employed for its critiques of contemporary art and society were later to be co-opted by the new propaganda in its extensive ad campaigns and promotions in the corporate world. Inadvertently, Dada's irreverent negation was turned in upon itself for commercial uses that have since outstripped even the extensive use of Art Nouveau and its artistic offshoots.

The means by which this appropriation came about can be discovered in the emergence of the Pop Art movement that was taking shape in Great Britain and the U.S. in the late 1950s and early 1960s ("Pop Art"). Its ironic use of advertising slogans and pop culture icons of the period bespoke a resurrection of the old critique, utilizing many of the same tropes and techniques that Dada had invented in the early years of the 20th century. A classic example of this art is Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup Cans. The print, with its multiple repetition, ironically mimics the public's incessant exposure to advertising messages in the course of modern life. Pop Art overtly illustrated the aesthetic sense developed by the advertising industry during the mid-20th century that centered on saturating the visual and used vision as a medium of vicarious consumption, a soaking of the senses that was immediate and filled with subliminal associations, thereby molding Nature to human wants with much more sophistication than previously. The blatant appeals of the old propaganda are still present in this new advertising, yet on much subtler level that plays on the the emotions as well as the senses as instructed by early tobacco ads produced by Edward Bernays' Madison Avenue advertising campaigns. The Pop Art movement, inheritor of Dada's "anti-traditions" of collage, décollage, and pranksterism, ushered in a new age of irony that, ironically, was to be its final undoing under capitalistic appropriation.


Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Richard Hamilton (1956), an early example of Pop art - Courtesy Wikipedia

Campbell's Soup Cans Andy Warhol (1962) - Courtesy Google Images

In the earlier phase of industrialization and capitalism in the 19th century, Karl Marx examined the sociological effects of this new global economic model that was overtaking the old order. The alienating nature of the new system of economics that he observed emerging in his own time among the working classes derived from what he coined "the fetishism of commodities". A fetish was a manufactured object (or a natural "found object" given special meaning by a culture) believed to possess an animated spirit that could be used for magical purposes over nature and other people. Marx adopted the idea of the fetish from anthropological studies of many non-industrialized cultures and applied it to the capitalist economy to explain the new relation of production to labor. Marx equated this "fetishizing" of the products of labor in capitalism as a kind of economic "idolatry" in which people no longer merely considered products for their utility but also as an end that transcended human value itself.

Laborers no longer had a direct connection to the items they made under the assembly line mode of production employed by industrial capitalism and therefore lost the connection with customers to become merely unknown "instruments" in a piecemeal process, reduced to machinery of the production process. The economic relationship had become an impersonal exchange, deconstructed from its social roots for the ends of efficiency and profit at the psychological expense of the laborer and consumer. Goods and services under capitalism now had relationships between themselves as if they were the animate beings. Labor was now just another salable product and common necessities previously manufactured by hand transformed under capital into fetishized commodities, venerated as "idols" infused with a spirit of their own (Fromm 49-50). Items in the marketplace had become approachable only indirectly through an exchange process that was as arbitrary, i.e. possessing an abstract value (money) based on industry's ability to produce and aggressively advertise, as much as it was anonymous. As early as 1844 Marx summarized the outcome of fetishizing things as commodities in his pre-Das Kapital text, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor, from his life activity and from his species life is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labor and to the objects of their labor. In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life. (quoted in Fromm 52)

This social phenomenon of fetishizing goods of the marketplace that results from the production relations of capitalism is reflected in Bernays' fledgling notion of public relations in the early 20th century and its considerable benefits for capital owners. The existential division of workers from the fruits of their labor and the feelings of alienation that naturally followed facilitated the growth of modern-day consumer culture. As an end unto itself, it promoted the accumulation of wealth as a substitute for concrete human value and, as Erich Fromm correctly points out, alienation from the natural world as well as social life was not simply limited to the proletariat:

Marx did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people, especially of the ever-increasing segment of the population which manipulate symbols and men, rather than machines. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter's functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his "personality," his smile, his opinions in the bargain; the symbol manipulators are hired not only for their skill, but for all those personality qualities which make them "attractive personality packages," easy to handle and to manipulate. They are the true "organization men" -- more so than the skilled laborer-their idol being the corporation. (55-56)

As the consequences of this fragmentation of capital and labor spread, culture became increasingly more concerned with the abstract desires of wealth and the feeding of trivial wants manufactured by the advertising industry which vigorously and unilaterally employed Bernays' techniques by mid-century. Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement were in a sense a reaction to the foreseen danger and sought to revive the intimate relationship an artisan possessed to his works. However, by the dawn of the 19th century, these movements had been overtaken and commandeered by the mass production lines of industry. Art Nouveau's nostalgic evocations of the beautiful forms of Nature most likely accelerated its eventual appropriation by the emerging consumerist culture.

This economic paradigm and its motive force is a stark contrast to other traditional notions of labor and production, most notably the Japanese concept do or tao (道). Although Japan today has enthusiastically embraced the policies of capitalism, it still greatly values its numerous traditional "ways" and continues to incorporate both their practice and appreciation in its educational system. The do refer to a categorization of various disciplines or "arts" (e.g. chado, kendo, kyudo, aikido), all derived from Zen Buddhist philosophy which describes the nature of existence as innately transient. Despite the intellectually ungraspable abstractions associated with Zen in general, this philosophy emphasizes direct interaction with the natural world and one's fellow human beings based on compassion and selflessness without mediation. It bears a unique and refined sensitivity that teaches a way of being in the world that is holistic and imbued with humility. Its closest comparison in the global West is perhaps the musings of Thoreau and such followers of the Romantic Movement who were seeking for an intimate connection (and reconciliation) with Nature and their own humanity. Bernays' view that propaganda is the necessary means of organizing decision-making and coalescing public policy in a modern industrialized society is debatable at least in one whose governance is democratic, but for the capitalist propaganda is an absolute need for the expansion of market demand. Under the new propaganda model, a grand theater composed of artifice would eventually have to be realized for the sake of shared practical economic concern, an enclosed Panopticon of displaced, manufactured commodities based upon the establishment of artificial needs created by Fromm's "organization men". For, as Bernays states:

It was the amusement business - first the circus and the medicine show, then the theater - which taught the rudiments of advertising to industry and commerce. The later adopted the ballyhoo of the show business. But under the stress of practical experience it adapted and refines [sic] these crude advertising methods to the precise ends it sought to obtain. (Bernays 107)

The theatricality and irreverence of Dada and its offspring in spirit, Pop Art, were ironically reinterpreted and re-integrated into the mainstream consumer culture in order to counteract the widespread public derision of advertising that took place shortly after World War I. In contemporary times this advertising counter-campaign involves the use of embedded product placement in films and television programming, hyperdiegesis (creating meta-narrative content around popular media or even commercials themselves to promote products), and other forms of "guerrilla advertising", many techniques which originated from Dada and other art movements influenced by it. From Dadaist typography styles to collage and color scheme, the inversion and even mockery of cultural forms is now a very common practice in advertising.

A Recent "Pop Art" Ad for Ray-Ban Sunglasses - Courtesy Google Images

It is indeed a strange twist of fate to observe the degree of inversion between art and advertising techniques. What started as a protest against conventional art and culture for Dada has now been established as standard procedure for the advertising industry, except this time for the purpose of profit. As culture has become more consumer-oriented in nature, the role of the image as a cue for emotional association and resonance has grown exponentially. The image has become "fetishized" as a product of propaganda as well as a means to propagandize which, with the assistance of digital media, has emerged as the monolithic disseminator of global culture. Its power derives from its ability to deprive critical, independent thought and promote alienation, thereby creating emotional needs that can only be fulfilled by commodities. Planned obsolescence guarantees those market-created needs never to be satisfied so that profits will continue to flow. The mechanisms of advertising, so linked to the ancient power of the image as a fetish imbued with seemingly magical influence, has made it the supreme vehicle of choice for the propagandist.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005 (1928). print.

Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1961.
Web (PDF). 10 Nov. 2012. <gendocs.ru/v19247/?download=1>.

"Pop Art". Wikipedia. 12 Nov. 2012. 17 Nov. 2012. Web. 18 Nov 2012.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_art>.

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

Manufacturing the “Naturalˮ Through Art and Philosophy

2012-10-07T20:55:00.000+02:00

If one traverses even far into antiquity, one can find a fundamental concern for the division of the natural and the artificial. The framework of this distinction derives primarily from Neoplatonic texts and the fourth book of Aristotle's Meteorology, but the famous decree on this topic that so influenced the Western mentality went by the Latin title Sciant artifices ('Let the artificers know') originated from the Persian philosopher and physician Ibn Sīnā پور سينا (Avicenna) whose attack on the artificial replications of nature, i.e. alchemy, is found in his Kitāb al-Shifā' (Book of the Remedy) (Newman 18, 37). Ibn Sīnā's work defined the parameters for what could be regarded as genuine as opposed to what constituted mere mimēsis and mēchanai:

Art is weaker than nature and does not overtake it, however much it labors. Therefore let the artificers of alchemy know that the species of metals cannot be transmuted (Quare sciant artificers alkimie species metallorum transmutari non posse). . . . I do not believe that it is possible to take away the specific difference by some technique because it is not due to such [accidents] that one complexion is converted into another, since these sensible things are not those by which species are transmuted; rather they are accidents and properties. For the differences of the metals are not known, and since the difference is not known, how will it be possible to know whether it is removed or not, or how it could be removed? (qtd. in Newman 37).

An Alchemist at Work - Pieter Brueghel the Elder (mid 16th century) - Courtesy Google Images

As the Enlightenment's philosophy gained force in Europe and abroad, these conceptions of the natural as set categories unalterable to human hands began to unravel. New technologies and how people created goods in their work changed how they related to them and thereby conceived of them in their environs. A product that could be made only by human hands and fulfilled a useful function could no longer be easily dismissed as an aberration of Nature. The burgeoning Industrial Revolution was practicing a new "scientific alchemy" that produced wonderworks and previously unimagined possibilities in diverse fields of endeavor at an unprecedented rate. With such prolific innovation and output, political philosophies and social relations were being questioned and readjusted in light of this new technology. Many were bewildered and dismayed by the pace of such rapid change despite the observation that these changes were arguably universally positive.

The source of this counter-Enlightenment reaction was rooted in Rousseau's philosophy, a plea for a returning to the natural and an advocacy for sensibilité in human relations. Although Rousseau viewed genuine human interaction as degraded by the institution of the social contract itself which originated at beginnings of civilization, his critique was very specific to the spirit of his own time. The arts and sciences, the supreme products of civilization, were in a phase of exponential growth, fostered by the underpinning philosophy and goals of the Enlightenment. Rousseau considered this fact antithetical to sensibilité as well as a threat to human rights and freedoms. For Rousseau, political liberty depended upon observance of the "general will" by a government and the will of the people could not be properly executed (or known at all for that matter) unless sensibilité was free to be expressed openly. Sensibilité could only be gained by a proper education, but once an individual becomes socialized, there is no means for him to return to a state of original innocence. Rousseau solved this problem by specifying two modes of self-love that determine how people relate to one another. Amour-propre was instituted by the socialization process as it was currently applied in his time and cultivated a person who based his value on a comparative scale to others. Amour de soi which was a natural form of self-love that was self-sufficient and self-contained. It was based on an education that naturally encouraged the noble impulses that every individual possessed from birth (Delaney).

As the effects of the Enlightenment progressed into the 19th century, a desire to return to the "purity" of nature grew in various cultural movements in Europe. In 1884, the Impressionist painter Renoir advocated for a "Society of Irregularists", a renewal of 18th century and earlier (Gothic) forms of Arcadian art depicting softer tones and idyllic scenes of landscapes where people dwelled in harmony with the natural world. This society would favor the idiosyncratic imperfections of "the handmade imperfections" over mass-produced, synthetic products that were becoming commonplace in the modern era (Herbert 192-193). Paradoxically, the impetus of this appeal to the natural was made possible by the rise of industry and capitalism which allowed for the pursuit of leisure previously only known to the aristocratic classes. One can witness this irony as well in the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements taking place in the latter 1800s where the romantic ambiance of tamed "natural" forms of arabesque leaves and vines were being used in the service of capitalist advertisements. In stark contrast to the pastoral leisures that the new art offered its "consumers", Degas and Manet's scenes of city life showed candidly the seedy underbelly of the new Paris. In a similar vein, some of Monet's landscape paintings illustrated a non-sentimental Nature ". . . discarding the petit bourgeois love for anecdote in favor of a landscape that seems to leave one alone. . . free to devise one's own poetic response" (300). These opposing trends to nature would continue to exhibit themselves well into the postmodern world.


Alphonse Mucha - Bières de la Meuse, 1897 Advertisement - Courtesy Google Images

Claude Monet - Pourville, Flood Tide, 1882- Courtesy Google Images

Auguste Renoir - The Lovers, 1875 - Courtesy Google Images

Before the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthete, Art Nouveau, and Arts and Crafts movements took hold in Europe, Great Britain, and elsewhere, Transcendentalism in the United States pursued a state of "naturalness" in the newly emerging industrial age arguably akin to the philosophy of Rousseau. Henry David Thoreau, a leading proponent and follower of Transcendentalism, may be considered a prototype of Rousseau's honnête homme, an educated man yet secure in the practice of his original innocence and connection with Nature. An outgrowth of English and German Romanticism in the early 19th century, Transcendentalism was a religious and political reform movement that emphasized individualism and self-reliance as well as a plea to cultivate an intimate relationship with the natural world, the principle of Nature acting through the individual as intuition. Thoreau himself experimented with such a communion that in many instances had spiritual overtones, but, in like mind with his own mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, were of an agnostic quality. Walden Pond reminds one of Rousseau's retreat to his country estate at Ermenonville, where Thoreau went on the 100th anniversary of American independence ". . . declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.”" (Goodman).

Henry David Thoreau, 1856 - Courtesy Google Images

To make such a comparison with Rousseau's philosophy is however not entirely without fault since Thoreau professed a love of literature and the written word which Rousseau did not see as a social benefit. Even in the nature of intuition there is some distance between the two and perhaps the closest association with Thoreau's notion of communion with nature is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. D.T. Suzuki, a renowned 20th century Japanese scholar and practitioner of Zen Buddhism, was one of the first to acknowledge the similarity for a Western audience: "Stated in terms of practical everyday life, wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau, and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall" (Suzuki 23). Wabi 詫 refers to an aesthetic appreciation of the asymmetrical, rustic imperfections of an object and sabi 寂 relates to any entity that comes to gain beauty with advanced age and use ("Wabi-sabi"; Suzuki 22-25). This "aesthetic" results from the self's orientation in mushin 無心 , no-mindedness, which is the quality of the original mind before the intellect dissects initial sensation into thoughts (Suzuki 24-25). This practice of allowing the "natural" instincts before thought to flow freely is commonly called fūryū 風流 , a disinterested, non-personal enjoyment of nature in the midst of strife or the simple daily activity of life (81). It is important to note that this construct of beauty does not depend on any boundary between the natural and the artificial. Wabi- Sabi equally applies to synthetic products as well as naturally occurring forms. Zen's sense of beauty has a certain correspondence with Thoreau as a man of self-reliance and a keen observer of nature, but in some of the spiritual aspects which comprise wabi-sabi, it falls short of being equivalent. It may therefore be only a vague likeness that connects wabi-sabi to Transcendentalist thought since both come from traditions so far removed from one another. Likewise, the Japanese notion of mono no aware 物の哀れ (literally, "the pathos of things"), the awareness of impermanence of things and a gentle wistfulness at their passing, shares an attitude more in common with the Romantic poets and Shakespeare than with Thoreau ("Mono no aware").

With the commencement of the postmodern era, the classic categories of the natural and the artificial derived from Aristotle and Ibn Sīnā have been further challenged and made more ambiguous. The technai and its applications have made the distinct work of Nature and those of human beings so obscured that it is not at all unreasonable to conclude that in the near future that distinction may be virtually undetectable. Alchemy may indeed become the norm and the dictum Sciant artificers may truly become a relic of the deep past with no relevance to any creation springing from the human imagination. As science advances at an accelerating pace, new cultural movements mimicking those romantic calls of Rousseau and Thoreau for a rebirth of "the simple life" may well come forth, but science and its machinery now have the upper hand from which there is no return to innocence in this matter.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Delaney, James J.. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)". Internet Encyclopedia of
                   Philosophy, Niagara University. 21 Oct. 2005. Web. 6 Oct. 2012.
                   < http://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/#SH4c>.

Goodman, Russell. "Transcendentalism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition)
                   Edward N. Zalta (ed.). 7 March 2011. Web. 6 Oct. 2012.
                   <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/transcendentalism/>

Herbert, Robert L.. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. London:

Yale University Press, 1991. print.

“Mono no aware”. Wikipedia. 4 Oct. 2012. Web. 7 Oct. 2012.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware>.

Newman, William R.. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature.
   London: University of Chicago, Ltd., 2005 (paperback edition). print.

Suzuki, Daisetz T.. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press
                   (Bollingen Foundation Series LXIV), 1973 (third printing). print.

"Wabi-sabi". Wikipedia. 2 Oct. 2012. Web. 7 Oct. 2012.
   < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi>.

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

The Cult of Rousseau: An “Empire of Imagesˮ

2012-08-25T21:26:00.002+02:00

The Parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Ermenonville, located roughly 25 miles outside of metropolitan Paris, is the final resting place of the philosopher that shaped the landscape of the homines novi in the 18th century and paved the way for a revisioning of social theory in the European consciousness. There, in the midst of an outstanding exemplar of English-style gardens and landscaping, the philosopher rests in his crypt on a tiny grassy isle. The park had been an estate owned by the Marquis de Girardin that he subsequently turned into a refuge for the elder Rousseau until his death in 1778. Girardin's Promenade, his tour of Rousseau's life as inspired by his 1761 work Julie, or the New Heloise, was a dedication to the life and work of a philosopher that so many others were to revere during the revolutionary period.

The tomb of Rousseau in the Isle of Poplars - The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a030d6f6-39ea-049b-e040-e00a18066a26

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Allan Ramsay (1766)- Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Rousseau's philosophy played a pivotal role in the confluence of events that gave rise to the French Revolution, namely the concept of sensibilité. Defined as the intuitive capacity for intense, uninhibited feeling, sensibilité was a reaction against "the stoic formalism and foppish witticisms of court life, the ornate rococo stylings of Louis XV and XVI in pre-revolutionary France" (Schama 149). This new attitude on conduct prided itself on the simplicity of sentiment and frank display of emotion without the intervention of the intellect which was suspect. In his musings on the origins of civilization, Rousseau stated that the creation of civilization (i.e., the original "mythical" social contract) had made humanity prone to cynicism and inequality because of the inherently exploitative nature of social hierarchies. Rousseau endeavored therefore, since humanity could not return to the "noble savage" state of prehistory, to employ the natural instincts of tranquility and empathy to moral development and instruction in current society. In his earlier works A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) and The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (1755), Rousseau placed this conception of human nature within a historical framework. The militaristic virtues of Sparta (which Rousseau saw as vital for any nation) were viewed as superior to the art and scientifically-oriented culture of Athens because the later lead to an unhealthy pursuit of luxury and pleasure. Socrates was the only positive influence in Greece against this trend according to Rousseau, warning Athenians of the corrupting effects of such engagements (Delaney).

In part, this move to exhibit more egalitarian conduct in French society may have been facilitated, albeit to a predictable extent disingenuously, by the unprecedented mixing of social classes in certain venues. Louis Philippe II, who had inherited the Palais-Royal from his father, the Duc d'Orléans, opened the grounds and surrounding buildings to public commerce, making it the scene for varied entertainments which foreshadowed Haussmann's reimagined Paris in the latter 19th century. By 1785, Louis Philippe II had culled the "Rabelaisian" elements of the lower classes into aristocratic circles (Schama 134-135). As revolution loomed closer, French social life witnessed a new permeability of class interaction in the context of the salon, the marketplace, and the theater (132-133).

With this interaction came new opportunities for disseminating ideas that were soon becoming antithetical to monarchical governance. Charles-Joseph Panckouche capitalized on this opportunity with the creation of two major newspapers, Journal de Genève and Journal de Bruxelles, employing the trial lawyer Simon Linguet as head journalist (165, 177). Other dailies of the time such as the Journal de Paris and the Mercure de France changed forever the nature of journalism from the dry, matter-of-fact listings of news items of the day into the more recognizable newsprint format of the modern era (177-178). The rhetorical language of these newspapers, and especially in the content of the pamphlets that were distributed for sale at local marketplaces like the Palais-Royal, were filled with the spirit of Rousseau's influence, calling into question the power and privileges of the monarchy in Versailles as contrasted with the common people's lot.

Even more illustrative of this rising populism however was the special place oratory held in the years leading up to the revolutionary period. Cicero, the famous Roman orator to whose speeches every French schoolboy had been exposed, represented the virtues and presence of mind treasured by Rousseau even though Rousseau never appeared to advocate for the variety of extreme nationalism that developed during the Revolution. Cicero's virtues of civic duty to the Republic and fiery moralizing reflected perfectly the ideal of political engagement he so yearned for all citizens to express (170). This earnest rhetoric of patriotism combined with sensibilité was prominently exhibited in Neo-Classical salon painting, particularly in the work of Jacques-Louis David, one of its strongest proponents. Sensibilité became merged with the stoic determination and martyrdom of ancient Rome in such painting as The Oath of the Horatii and this view of citizenship evolved into more militant forms as the revolution progressed towards the Reign of Terror (172-174). Jean-Paul Marat, an exceptional propagandist of the written word during the Revolution, seems to be an individual who best exemplified the honnête homme for Rousseau, a man who viewed polite manners as a form of glib insincerity and moral bankruptcy (734). Being deliberately brusque and confrontational, Marat ironically became a man of integrity under Rousseau's philosophy during the Revolution. After his assassination, he was promptly transformed into a martyr for the cause of the patrie, an event that David also did not fail to overlook for the purposes of the Revolution and his own growing reputation as the artist of patriots (744-745).

The Oath of the Horatii, 1785 Jacques-Louis David - Courtesy Wikimedia Commons


The Death of Marat, 1793 Jacques-Louis David - Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

This patriotic imagery from the salons, coupled with the incendiary articles of enraged journalists and the provocative language of public square oratory, was intended to stir the sincere passions of the "natural man" who instinctively recognized the earnest call to reclaim his liberties. Today it is reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian governments for control over the will of its own populace. Such appeals to confrontation for the sake of "the general will" as outlined by Rousseau took advantage of the philosopher's ambiguous language for their own ends. Because the general will was infallible by nature in Rousseau's estimation, it was beyond reproach if those in power could convince others of the identity of their social programs and political agendas with it. It has been cited that many leading sectionnaires were not by and large the working poor, but made up of mostly petty-professionals, tradesmen, and journalists which misrepresented the "will of the peuple", a trend that would continue to as the Revolution progressed (759).

As the conditions of famine and debt began to overwhelm French society during the end of the 18th century, rumors of conspiracy and clandestine plots of invasion spread. The Church and the monarchy's activities increasing came under suspicion and incited acts of public violence borne from this mass paranoia that the revolutionary government had to eventually contend with as events escalated out of control. The "machine" developed in December, 1789 by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a deputy for the National Assembly was originally intended as a reform of capital punishment in accordance with the Declaration of the Rights of Man (619). Touted as a more "humanitarian" method for dealing with criminals, it was later utilized by Maximilien Robespierre under the Jacobins to place the power of violence into the hands of the existing republican government. Robespierre, who had fashioned himself as a selfless advocate of the people, considered government as a "school of virtue" echoing a sentiment Rousseau had proposed in his work Emile, but one in which terror held command as the mode of instruction. However, more importantly Robespierre introduced the creation of a new civic religion based on Greco-Roman open air festivals to instill in the public the values of domesticity, sensibilité, and patriotism in order to return France to a primordial innocence. His interpretation of Rousseau's comments on natural religion and gave rise to the Cult of the Supreme Being. Although Robespierre was personally outraged over the religious inversion ceremonies and vandalism of Catholic churches perpetrated by the sans-culottes and other radicalized clergy members, the mock rituals inadvertently served as a subconscious model for the performances of his new cult. One can recognize in Robespierre's cult as well as the inversion ceremonies the ancient Greek theater and its ritualistic social functions.

The Festival of the Supreme Being, 1794 Pierre-Antoine Demachy - Wikimedia Commons

This idea of theatre as social ritual was complemented by the reorganization of the national calendar. In 1792, Georges Danton's friend and private secretary, the playwright Fabre d'Eglantine was a member of the committee responsible for the creation of the French Republican Calendar with the aim of making the seasons of the year adhere to a "rationalist" schema in accordance with the philosophy of the Republic. At the Convention d'Eglantine, basing his work on sense-impression theory of the Enlightenment, stated that "we can conceive nothing except by images: even the most abstract analysis or the most metaphysical formulations can only take effect through images"(770). The "empire of images", as d'Eglantine so called it, was the reinvention of the calendar for a new republican mythology to replace and conquer the Gregorian which represented the old "oppressive" regime (771). This trend to dechristianize during the Reign of Terror was more about anticlericalism, but the "empire of images" was to have much wider reaching repercussions in the years following the Republic.

The Months of the Republican Calendar - Courtesy of Google Images

What is illustrated by these events during the years of the French Revolution that drew its inspiration from the writings of Rousseau and other social philosophers was the first attempt at social engineering on an unprecedented scale that would continue to advance into the following centuries. Not only the redesigning of space (as with the above example of the Palais-Royal) but also the restructuring of social time led governments to the idea of "scientifically" orchestrating thought by recreating the environs of the public. As Fabre d'Eglantine surmised, the best way to achieve this was through imagery, transparencies laid over the "light" of reason to filter only the meanings so desired for the purposes of control and efficiency. Of course for many, this was conceived as a literal truth but for others it was taken in the spirit of what Rousseau himself most feared: cynicism and the willful exploitation of one's fellow man. Instead of cultivating the natural and "good" impulses of humanity, artificial constraints were adjoined to the human condition.

The transparency and paternalistic care that Rousseau wished from government had been distorted by the Revolution to such an extent that concealment of intent through the selective use of imagery, rhetoric, and violence in the public sphere was the only way to maintain order in the Republic. For as unjust as monarchies had been in the past, the manipulation had now become a deliberate and exact science. The philosophic ideas of the Revolution, advanced and fueled by the historic contingencies of crop failure and economic desperation, established the politics of the present. Public opinion now mattered more than ever, but not as a sincere striving for equality. Rather than evidence-based debate, the public was derailed into a barrage of distractions and social mind experiments which purpose was the molding and channeling of mass opinion for political or economic gain. The favorite means of achieving this goal was the orchestrated use of imagery and rhetorical grandstanding, now augmented today with creative audio-video editing. Pamphleteering, newspapers, and painting were the chosen media of the Revolution, but the "empire of images" prognosticates the emerging technologies that the Panopticon has at its disposal, cultural as well as digital. Rousseau's sensibilité has now evolved into a hyper-transparency in which the boundary between the public and the private is fading rapidly. The honnête homme is now a transparency himself, a filter into which the content of imagery is constantly refiltered and sifted in an ethereal public space.

Romanesque civic virtue and the Rousseauian concept of the general will quickly mutated into nationalistic militarism and misinformed, predjudiced public opinion which could be pandered to glibly by those in power willing to take the risks of "blowback". As the 19th century began, these paternalistic tendencies in governments (which crucially lacked Rousseauian empathy) would become the norm for the formation of empire and global culture.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Delaney, James J.. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)". Internet Encyclopedia of
                   Philosophy, Niagara University. 21 Oct. 2005. Web. 25 August 2012.
                   < http://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/#SH4c>.
"Fabre d'Eglantine". Wikipedia. 31 December 2011. Web. 25 August 2012.
                   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabre_d%27%C3%89glantine>.

"Parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau". Wikipedia. 8 July 2012. Web. 24 August 2012.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Jean-Jacques_Rousseau>.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Vintage

Books, 1990. print.

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony F. Castriota. All rights reserved.

The Flâneur as Panoptic Observer in the City of Air and Light

2012-04-14T18:30:00.001+02:00

To understand more clearly the milieu in which the Dada Movement originated, it is important to revert back in history to a time when Paris itself was making some grand transformations and gestures. Baron Haussmann's redesign of Paris in the 1850s through the 1870s, Les Grands Boulevards and other architectural marvels constructed under the auspices of Louis Napoleon III's Second Empire, brought about a revolutionary change in how people perceived and, as a consequence, interacted with their environment. Traditional villages such as the Hills of Batignolles, which had been annexed to Paris in 1861, were leveled to allow for the extension of streets and boulevards radiating from the center (Herbert 63). This immense reshaping of the landscape redefined the nature of the city, preparing in its calculated uniformity the thoroughfares of consumerist culture. The Panopticon had become one step closer to its realization.

Haussmann's project involved the razing of old narrow streets and plazas that ran their labyrinth-like paths throughout the back alleys and neighborhood districts. These shadowy recesses were replaced with wide, ample streets lined with easily accessible shops, manicured parks, theaters, cafés-concerts, and other venues of extravagant entertainment previously reserved for only the wealthy classes. An atmosphere of 'light and air' was intended to prevail, making life in Paris more enriching and convenient after its recent tempestuous events, and Impressionism was the artistic circle that would end up providing the social criticism and judgment of Haussmann's labors.

Photograph of avenue de l'Opéra under construction - Courtesy of amourparis.fr Author: Benjamin Pépiot

An etching of Paris circa 1860 : Carrefour Richelieu-Drouot, Grands-Boulevards - Courtesy of amourparis.fr Author: Benjamin Pépiot

Impressionism had rejected the past generation of Barbizon painters of the 1850s whose favoritism for themes of "romantic naturalism" no longer expressed life in the industrialized age of the new Paris. Barbizon works of peasants and simple Arcadian life was itself a rejection of the religious and mythological subjects of Romantic painting in the 1830s and 40s, but Impressionism radicalized their approach even further by abandoning such material for scenes of contemporary city life and its denizens. What clearly distinguished Impressionism from other schools of art was the outright discarding of traditional mass and modeling techniques for color and light, the components they now saw as constituting the psychological demeanor of modernity. Although it is debatable how conscious individual artists were of this fact, Impressionists expressed in many of their works the social tensions created by Haussmann's re-imagining of Paris. Beyond the deceivingly tranquil appearance of many of these paintings as seen through postmodern sentiments, these works of art were a bold new expression of the social effects of industrialization and consumerism which were often dubious in benefit.

In similarity with all other prior art movements, Impressionists began with observation, but their difference in style as well as content was often distinctly marked by the adoption of a mode of observation that belonged to what was classified by the 1830s as a character type widely known as the flâneur. The flâneur was a man of exquisite taste and manners, always well read on the latest news of the day and a keen commentator on human folly. He derived much of his persona from the British aristocracy that were heavily involved in financing the industrial ambitions of Napoleon III's Second Empire. The British financiers also introduced many of the social clubs and sporting events (such as horse racing) earlier in the 19th century that now treated the populace to unprecedented spectacles (for the right price) (Herbert 34).

The flâneur was therefore, as an observer with an artistic sensibility if not an outright practitioner of the arts, modeled on a figure of detached investigation of social life which Impressionism based its philosophy of work. Walter Benjamin makes reference to the circulation of 'physiologies', pocket-sized volumes sold on the streets of Paris in the late 1830s and 40s that described various types of persons encountered in the environs of the arcades and the opera houses (Benjamin 35). These authors of 'physiologies' in the generation of Baudelaire were in a sense the antecedents to the character of the flâneur that arose in the latter half of the 19th century. The nature of the flâneur's activities is described pithily by Benjamin:

The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations can only thrive among the grey cobblestones and against the grey background of despotism was the political secret on which the physiologies were based. (37)

State censorship and police surveillance had only escalated since the September Laws of 1836 in the period of the Second Empire. In 1855 Charles Meryon's principle of Solar Law, viz. that every dwelling place be decreed to have equal and generous proportions of air and sun, was cynically used by Louis Napoleon III to divide the working classes from organizing, sectioning off the old plazas of public assembly with specious parks and recreations (Herbert 141). It is certain that these new features of the Parisian landscape were just as much intended for political expediency as for improving commerce and bourgeoisie good will in the city.

From this climate of surveillance instituted in Haussmann's reconstructed Paris of light and air, the flâneur as Impressionist emerged equipped with his arensal of artistic observations and critique. This created a distinct quality of objectivity in the personality of the flâneur, a critical skill required for his art. As Georg Simmel states in his book On Individuality and Social Forms, objectivity "does not signify mere detachment and nonparticipation, but is a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference in involvement" (qtd. in Herbert 52). This relationship of "nearness and remoteness" that characterizes the flâneur became synonymous with the artist of Impressionism (notably in Manet and Degas) as well as the scientific naturalist and the astute journalist who was able to blend discreetly into the bustle of everyday activities in the street. By default, this condition also became a fact of life for the ordinary occupants of Paris, but they had their own ways of coping with the unprecedented reorganization of social relations taking place in the renewed city. As old familiar neighborhood ties began to fade into anonymity along with the disassociation of the familial unit and the influx of immigrants into Paris began to gain momentum, certain social institutions were established as "safety valves" to relieve the pressures of this change. "The frustration of being constantly with strangers is mitigated because the café permits close proximity without prior acquaintance. Cafés are an accommodation to one's experience of society: one meets others in a place that offers parallels to private life- eating, drinking, resting- while it shelters these actions under the overarching social relationship" (Herbert 65). Alfresco dining establishments and brasseries became very popular in the Second Empire and, being loci of social pressure diffusement in "the open air', were also convenient locations for surveillance where people could indulge their vices under the watchful eye of the police (Herbert 66).

However for the flâneur, the pabulum of the cafés was only the medium of observation; its presence merely provided the honey to attract the flies for the experiment to be put under study. As Victor Fournel claimed in 1858 in his own studies of this grand social experiment, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris, "The idler [badaud] under the influence of the spectacle, becomes an impersonal being; he is no longer a man: he is the public, the crowd" (qtd. in Herbert 35). In Degas' Place de la Concorde one witnesses a concrete illustration of the types to which Fournel referred. The badaud gawks naively from the edge of the frame as contrasted with the seasoned flâneur, poised firmly in the center of the frame with his indirect, yet penetrating gaze. He is the subject and his stare penetrates everything in his domain, transforming all into objects. His nature is indifferent, yet he is attentive to important details in his surroundings.

Degas' portrait of his artist friend James Tissot is an example of the flâneur as a species of English dandy, expressing his ". . . refined casualness, his status as a stroller-visitor [by means of the pose of his body and cane], his alertness- and by abstaining from the traditional psychology of expression . . . Degas hints at his own aloofness, that of the artiste-flâneur, by sticking to externals, by refusing to become involved with his sitter" (Herbert 35). In Caillbotte's The Man at the Window, one views another flâneur at his post, overlooking the street below his balcony. The painting is structured as a

Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (1875) - Courtesy of Wikipedia

Edgar Degas, James Tissot (1868)- Courtesy Google Images

Gustave Caillbotte- The Man at the Window (1876)- Courtesy of Google Images

frame within a frame, the unknown man's look focused upon a young woman about her business around town in the background. This voyeuristic streak in the person of the flâneur is commonplace in many such works, although the object of the gaze is situated in the street while the flâneur is safety hidden away behind his own four walls of solitude above. This configuration for voyeuristic activity would become more the norm in the 20th century when cinema overtook painting as the premiere medium as the social repository and disseminator of images. What is noteworthy here is that the groundwork was already being laid for the pivotal turn of consciousness that permitted the generation of the secret observer whose commanding eye quietly surveys the scene before him undetected. The anonymity of Haussmann's Paris allowed for such activity to be indulged and grew in tandem with an emerging cinematic sensibility created from photography.

This cinematic sensibility can be discovered in many Impressionistic painting of this period and usually involved the spontaneous capturing of the subject in casual action. Manet's The Railway is a case in point. His work carries all the evocation of a candid snapshot, but importantly as an interruption uninvited. A woman glances up from her reading and blankly stares at the passer-by, possibly a flâneur who has not yet mastered his skills of discretion. However, the faux pas is the artist's intention. It captures a social point of tension that many citizens of the new Paris encountered regularly and the experience is still relevant today. As Simmel again explains:

Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. . . . Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another. (qtd. in Benjamin 37-38)

Manet's observer is the victim of his gaze as much as the woman who is reading. This observer may also be a simple badaud who was waiting by the rail station when his roving look was caught unintentionally. It is a recognition of a new social phenomenon in which the public sphere overlaps with the private.

Edouard Manet, The Railroad (1873)- Courtesy of Google Images


Edgar Degas, Dancer with a Bouquet, Seen from a Loge (1877-79)- Courtesy Google Images

Many of Degas' paintings of the ballet illustrate cinematic elements within Impressionism even more overtly. "Like spectators of the of the cinematic closeups which Degas predicted, we are somehow taken up by a vision that is impersonal, but one that gives us intimate views of other beings" (Herbert 129). In Degas' piece Dancer with a Bouquet, Herbert notes that the quality of ". . . flatness of the railing and the fan, owning to their geometry as well as to their placement parallel to the surface, is a startling departure from traditional art which provided more transitions between foreground and distance" (102). This trick of illusion, along with its unconventional fragmenting of elements, predicts the framing techniques later employed in cinematography. In summary, the flâneur's skilled line of vision, the secret of his art, is the forerunner of the cinemascope - a man who mimics the technical abilities of the camera and is thereby the psychological embodiment of it.

In addition to the various attractions catering to elites such the ballet and the racetrack of the famous Le Jockey Club, the various cafés and brasseries that overflowed the streets were a favored subject of the Impressionist painters. Their pictorial studies of the canaille ("riff-raff") who frequented the cafés-concerts, standing shoulder to shoulder with the upper classes, especially expose the more lurid preoccupations of the flâneur. It is worth mentioning that gamines, the nymph-like, adolescent girls of the street who danced in the ballets that occupied much of Degas' subject matter, were regarded as sexually desirable by many flâneur ballet enthusiasts as were lower class women in general (Herbert 129). The artiste-flâneur in particular had an interest in the underbelly of society, the menu peuple milling about the Paris streets and filling up the cafés with their traditions of popular song and crude humor (Herbert 87).

Absinthe, a well known work of the genre from Degas, functions almost as a photographic piece of ethnography of the canaille, depicting two specimens captured in their natural habitat. They sit unaware of being observed and consumed in the ennui of the moment. The frankness of the work draws the viewer into the frame as if one were sitting at an adjacent table to the odd couple, yet erecting an insurmountable wall of separation. Simmel's notion of "nearness and remoteness" becomes all the more concrete when one realizes that the viewer is none other than the impersonal gaze of the flâneur. In this mode of operation, the viewer becomes the exclusive interpreter of his "impressions" of the image.


Edgar Degas, Absinthe (1876)- Courtesy Google Images

Edouard Manet, A Bar at the

Folies-Bergère (1881-82)- Courtesy of Google Images

In A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet provides a parallel view of the common woman as member of the new Parisian servant class. Her blank expression suggests bored acceptance of her role as a barmaid in the café-concert, waiting on the request of a well-dressed gentleman reflected in the mirror. The mirror has long been a conventional symbol of emotional displacement and the divided self in film and in Manet it is the flâneur who is exposed only through a sleight of hand by just such a device. The man is a flâneur who occupies two spaces, the world of the commoner (badaud) and the privileged space of the subject. The observer stands in the space occupied by the flâneur, a ghostly position that can accommodate any gaze of the young woman who is displayed as desirable object.

In all of these examples within Impressionism it is evident that a new dimension in social relations was taking place. The new impersonal social dynamic that emerged from the parameters of Haussmann's new Paris produced, at least in part, an art that introduced images reflecting an examination of this shift and with it the promotion of a new sensibility. Mass consumerism was a consequent effect of Haussmann's projects and the final justification for the Belle Epoque. Monet's Women in the Garden thereafter set the template for Parisian fashion plates in advertising as Napoleon III ushered in a new era addicted to the oscillations of popular dress (Herbert 178). La femme parisienne became the female counterpoint of the flâneur, the idealized object of his gaze (Herbert 186). The ephemera of images had its beginnings in this period as advertising became more and more vital to the economy of the Second Empire. Produced by the city of air and light, it prognosticated the institution of scientific demographic marketing culminating in Internet culture. Although in its infancy, the caricature of the badaud, the idler under the spell of the the Second Empire spectacle, was poised to become the automated consumer-citizen of the 20th century.

Claude Monet, Women in the Garden (1867)- Courtesy Google Images

Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863)- Courtesy of Wikipedia

In line with this emerging consumerist culture that was winning impressive reach by the early 20th century, parodies of the overblown claims in advertisements can be easily seen in Dada's prolific use of typography and newsprint techniques to make ironic proclamations. It may further be proposed that Dada was in turn a radicalizing of the Impressionistic artiste-flâneur as exemplified by Francis Picabia and the cult of personality that he so carefully promoted in his art. Regarding the artistic ideas of Dada (as well as other movements in subsequent modern art), Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet with all its irreverence and mockery for traditional academy art that employed mythological and religious themes seems closest to the Dada spirit. The ironic juxtaposition of past elements (i.e. the Renaissance origins of the fête galante) with the contemporary sentiments of leisure under the soothing boughs of nature evokes the fragmented collages of the Dadaists and their singularly biting sense of humor.

Clearly there was another trajectory of thought in the Impressionism of Renoir and Monet, but it is clear that the Dadaists had a kindred spirit in Impressionists like Manet and Degas. Renoir advocated in 1884 a "Society of Irregularists", a renaissance of 18th century Arcadian scenes and even earlier Gothic forms as a counter to the mechanical arts emerging from modern industrialized Paris. These older styles of the European tradition, along with the inspirational examples of Japanese ukiyo-e printwork, would be the driving force behind the Arts and Crafts Movement of the Aesthetes in the later Romantic period. Ironically this appeal to sensibilité, contrary to Impressionist flâneurs like Manet and Degas, centered on the instinctual attunement with nature's rhythms and natural feeling, yet had come from the same progressive font of industrial capitalism as Haussmann's Saint-Simonian architects (Herbert 192-193). Their only distinction may be the means through which each in turn chose to implement his social program for each offered leisure in nature as the remedy to city dwellers' ills. Perhaps most ironic in all these plans, whether well-intented or cynical, was the fact that they led to more mechanization and artifice than any idealized restoration of humanity in peace with the natural world.

Haussmann, by accomplishing his engineering feats for the new Paris, laid the groundwork for a dramatic reshaping of the landscape and establishing new centers of leisure both within the city limits and throughout the surrounding countryside. Patterns of behavior changed dramatically as a result and began a metamorphosis of the population into what would become the consumerist cultures of the 20th century and beyond. Voyeuristic flâneurs and hapless badauds endlessly in search of instant gratification are the prototypes that still inform the social denizens of the postmodern landscape that has now expanded into the digital realm.

With the radical alteration of space in 19th century Paris came a new way of seeing in Impressionism that relied upon color and loose brushwork to express form. The forms were no longer solid objects so much as relations arranged by light and color and it would only take a short time afterwards for modern art movements, such as Dada, to completely atomize these forms into their elemental rawness. Benjamin's loss of the "aura of things" turns all attempts to return to a "pure art" of the past at most to nostalgia that can only be satisfied by the acquisition of the authentic original; art's actual content has become cheap in the digital Panopticon where images may be easily reproduced.

The flâneur is, in a sense, the culprit and l'enfant terrible of Haussmann's labors. He is a metaphor for and acts as the all-seeing, mechanized eye of surveillance that has changed the way all see the world and relate to it in global culture. In the gaze of this absolute subject, all are reduced to images and catalogued for the interests of his choosing. However, in this pursuit, images have by the intrinsic nature of this process been democratized and made widely available. It remains to be seen how much individuals may participate in the meaningful interplay of imagery in an age which only values individuals (qua "commodifiable images") more and more as currency for market appropriation.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Benjamin, Walter. trans. Harry Zohn. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism. London: Verso, 1985. print

Herbert, Robert L.. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. London:

Yale University Press, 1991. print.

Dada: A New Collage of the Aesthetic Self

2011-12-31T20:30:00.001+01:00

In the early years of the 20th century, a group of loosely affiliated and largely unknown artists and writers came upon the scene to challenge traditional aesthetics in every discernible aspect, employing methods both contentious and ludicrous in their efforts to undermine the contemporary attitudes of the academies. A backlash against bourgeois tradition and its chauvinistic tendencies, Dada waged a culture war that would have repercussions throughout Europe, the United States, and elsewhere for many decades.

Much has been cited about Dada as a reaction to the atrocities of World War I and the fervent nationalism that caused it to take place, but the movement had other motivations as well that predated the horrific outcome of the war. It took its cue, perhaps unconsciously, from the new technologies of the age and adapted them into a new aesthetic of deconstruction that categorically changed the existential nature of the individual self and the relation of this self to the creative act. Although commonly characterized as merely the nihilistic rants and pranks of pretentious youth, Dada carried within its experiments and exaggerated expressions the formulation of a fundamental shift from the past.

In 1920 Jacques Riviére, the director and editor of the moderate Nouvelle Revue française, wrote an essay in the journal that offered an insightful explanation of the movement:

To seize the being before it gives in to compatibility; to attain it in its incoherence, or even better, in its primitive coherence, before the idea of contradiction enters the picture and forces it to reduce itself, to build itself; to substitute its inevitably acquired logical unity for its absurd unity, the only thing that's primal: such is the aim of all Dadas when they write, such is the meaning of all their eccentricity. . . a series of words forsaken by syntax, a cry, the gesture of putting one's hand on one's head or blowing one's nose on the stage- all of this has as much meaning and impact as the most sublime effusions of poetry, from the moment the idea of it came to us. It is impossible for man to say something that has no meaning. (Sanouillet 145)

Dada's actions were therefore directed to create a negative dialectic that would lead the spectators out of their passivity and, in effect, destroy preconceived "tastes" in art. This objective was exemplified through the many early Dadaist "performances" that took place in Zurich at Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire and later in Paris with co- founder Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock) working in collaboration with the Littérature (journal) group in Paris, many of whose members would become better known later under André Breton's banner of Surrealism. These "performances" goaded the audience, through actual ridicule and confrontation, into a state of a non-aesthetic, erasing their sensibilities about what constituted art. In this sense, Dada often referred to itself as "anti-art." Dada, by means of its absurd tactics, constantly raised the question of the inherent ironies of art and the whole project that inspired a self-appointed elite to make the world fit into their own image.


Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada- Courtesy Google Images

André Breton, prominent member of Littérature group in Paris and founder of Surrealism Movement-
Courtesy Google Images

The Littérature group, primarily began by the aspiring post-symbolist writers André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Phillipe Soupault, is a good exemplar of the climate of protest that persisted around the closing years of WWI and a foreshadowing of the upheaval in the aesthetic world that was to come. Having witnessed the unsettling consequences of the first world war as soldiers and medics, the young authors found the program of Dada to be one of promise, a stark rupture from the ties with older modes of literary convention that had grown stale with hypocrisy and rabid nationalism. When Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920 after a period of correspondence with Breton and his fellow writers, the authors of Littérature formed an alliance with the Romanian poet that took shape in a series of stage performances and salon exhibitions that built a notorious reputation for Dada, a notoriety which Tzara's adroit abilities as a publicist would make seemingly omnipresent within the capitol's quarters.

Dada as a backlash to traditional categories of art took its cue from the new, mechanically reproductive technology of photography and film, what Walter Benjamin was to describe a few decades later in his analysis of the visual arts as the loss of the unique "aura" of things. This deeply fractured aura in modern artworks was often depicted as a collage of the accidental flow of images of the subconscious. Although this concept would later be fully explored in Surrealism with Breton's dabbling in hypnosis and interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and even spiritualism, experiments with automatic writing among Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp had already been conducted a decade before. In Cologne Fatagaga ( "Fabrication of tableaux guaranteed to be gasometric") was the first visual art equivalent of the "exquisite corpse" technique made famous by the Surrealists, a collage anonymously created by the company Centrale W/3 (Hans Arp, J.T. Baargeld, and Max Ernst) without preplanning the elements of the composition in 1920 (27). Dada and its affiliated predecessors laid the groundwork for a movement in the arts that engaged in a fully committed break with the aesthetics of the past. This movement became, counterbalanced against the philosophical musings of existentialism in the West, a visual phenomenology and reflection on the growth of mass consumerist culture that would later be appropriated as the Panopticonic modality of social communication for the postmodern era.

A panel from the collage Fatagaga, 1920- Courtesy Google Images

However much has been made of Dada's nihilistic tendencies, the split that resulted between Breton's Surrealism and Tzara's views on Dada in 1924 was not from lack of content and artistic application, but one of a concrete trajectory that Breton viewed as necessary for his more intellectual turn of mind. " [Dada] . . . sought gesture, a gratuitous and immediate expression of an individual or collective sensibility, as opposed to action, which implied premeditation and the setting of a line of direction, if not a goal" (223-224). As Sanouillet points out in regard to this difference of perspective:

Dada is now seen as a completely different entity, with neither ins nor outs, finding its objectives and its justification in itself, in a Nietzschean manner of thinking beyond good and evil. Its specificities and differences from surrealism have become increasingly evident. (316)

This observation brings the dissection of Dada into a focus that marks it aptly as a critical readjustment to a era of mass consumerism in the same vein as the mid 19th century posed for the Impressionists painters of Paris. Baron Haussmann's city projects that demolished the old serpentine pathways in favor of the geometric uniformity of the grands boulevards initiated Paris as a thoroughfare of global capital, commerce, and tourism. It cut off the past and thereby created a new landscape for modernity with its new social dynamism. The Impressionists concentrated their gaze ". . . in a detached manner of depicting the contemporary world whose provocative elisions and omissions entered into the development of modern art" (Herbert xiv). This abbreviation of pictorial content and the blurring/merging of figure outline was a reaction to the pace and nature of this new mecca, a vast sense of propulsion through the wide expanses of the grands boulevards for its inhabitants. Just as Impressionists had transformed the composition and illustration of traditional 'natural life' to the ethereal 'light and air' of Haussmann's new vision of Paris, the Dadaists created a new mode of aesthetics for the postmodern world that no longer even allowed for any of the conventional meanings of traditional art. It exercised an "über-elision" of social meaning, an absence that signified nothing in common cause but the compulsion of consciousness to utter itself.

Impressionism chose as its subject matter the contemporary world of ebb and flow as artificially arranged by the artist en plein air; Dada chose the subconscious stream of the mind and reveled in the ironies and mysteries inherent in the artistic act. In Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love, a performance text on Dada aesthetics and philosophy, he makes some rather provocative statements about this topic:

Must one no longer believe in words? Since when do they express the contrary of what the organ that utters them thinks and wants? Therein lies the great secret: Thought is made in the mouth. . . . A priori, which is to say with eyes shut, Dada places before action and above everything: Doubt. (Sanouillet 167)

Tzara places an emphasis on the phenomenological and ephemeral aspect of communication removed from any mutually defined denotations (or even culturally bound connotations) to an unprecedented degree. This extension of the Impressionists' importance of a 'photographic' immediacy in their art was seen in the prolific use of Dada's typographic inventions which ". . . helped to deform and reform the visual language in the U. S. and Germany, notably in advertising which surrealism condemned as mere "artifice" " (322). Removing type face forms from their predetermined spaces, Dada created a collage of free associated words in the same manner that other visual artists of the Dada movement played with the 'textures' of other physical media, reducing them to their bare elements of perception. Here one observes the direction of Surrealism's return to more conventional figurative art, albeit enframed within an intellectualized doctrine specifically attentive to the phantasmagoria of the subconscious under the guise of dreamscapes. Dada, in its efforts to give free expression to the wide berth of sensory experience, was not exclusively devoted to the purely visual. 'Tactilism', an art form that Francis Picabia claimed as the original invention of Dada, was first employed by Miss Clifford-Williams under the name sculpture à toucher in New York's Marius de Zaya's Modern Gallery as early as 1916 (171).

An example of the typographic distortion typical in Dada works- Kleine Dada Soirée, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters, 1922 MOMA-Courtesy of Google Images

Kurt Schwitters' collage Das Undbild, 1919 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart- Courtesy Google Images

It is worthy to note these discrepancies between the Dada and Surrealist fronts as they indicate how Dada and its artistic sensibilities shaped the 20th century and its movement toward a Panopticonic society. While Surrealism had much impact on art and even popular culture of the period, it did not rival the mass popularity of the Dada aesthetic, despite its short life as an official movement in Europe and elsewhere. Dada was an aesthetic that could be shared democratically and everyone could be an artist without the explicit sanction of the elite. It arguably had a more direct link with the artistic innovations of the Impressionists and other related schools than the doctrinal uniformity of the Surrealist school, at least in its spirit of protest.

Dada had come to the conclusion of rejecting all past conventions and severing creative pursuit from its past, an act that has not been repeated quite so profoundly before or since in the history of the world's arts. In doing so however, Dada transmuted social relations further into fragmented artifice and theatricality in which its ironies and probing insights regarding the creative process were appropriated by other agencies more interested in material gain and expediency of influence. In this conflict between creative visions, one can see a parallel of the debate between Breton and Tzara as the modern visitation of Plato and Heraclitus, the old stomping ground of essence and its relationship to the actual. De-substantiating the essence of forms to their elemental material of sensual immediacy offers an unlimited range of freedom but carries the dangers of alienation and obfuscation within its gifts, a development in the emanations of the eidolon that may be manipulated for purposes not conducive to social progress.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
Berkeley: University of California. 23 September 2004. Web. 10 June 2011.
<http://dxarts.washington.edu/coupe/wk1/benjamin.pdf>.

Herbert, Robert L.. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. New Haven, CN:

Yale University Press, 1991. print.

Sanouillet, Michel. trans. Sharmila Ganuly. Dada in Paris.

(revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2009. print.

Tzara, Tristan. "Dada Manifesto 1918". 20 November 2011. Web. 10 December 2011.
<http://www.robertspahr.com/teaching/ela/tzara_dada_manifesto1918.pdf>.

The Effects of Reproducibile Art in Postmodernity

2011-08-04T00:58:00.002+02:00

Although the process of secularization of art began prior to the modern age, the era of industrialization with its capacities to mass produce announced the revolution in the distribution of art in the 19th century and with it the birth of global culture proper. New techniques in lithography, photography, and its culmination in the invention of film heralded the reformulating and monolithic triumph of vision as the quintessential "sense", a "sense" destined to be the zeitgeist of the postmodern world. The key to this new social paradigm was technical innovation and its ability to realize the pre-existing arguments of philosophic systems favoring vision as preeminent. In turn, technology reaffirmed and reinforced these premises of the past.

In 1936, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin provided some insights into this technical development of the arts in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". The central factor that changed attitudes about the social function of art lay in advancing methods of reproducibility and its connection with authenticity. Before the modern industrial age, reproduction was limited owing to the expense or the practical inability of the artist to produce multiple copies of his work. It is also important to mention that in premodern ages, particularly in speaking about prehistory, art served ritualistic purposes and therefore was not meant to be reproduced. Every art object was the expression of the sacred and, it may be conjectured, had to be created afresh to bear the magical powers that the object served. Even though many implements of prehistoric times have been discovered to have been mass produced such as arrowheads and storage jars, albeit on a small scale by any measured standard today, art held a special use in the mindset of ancient peoples. Cult value involved the construction of an object (of art) as a creation for a unique purpose. Authenticity is a modern conception that was developed when methods of efficient mass reproduction and exhibitionism of artwork became commonplace. Authenticity became the modern equivalent of cultic value. This act of mass reproduction inaugurated the secularization of art.

Walter Benjamin- Courtesy Google Images

With reproducibility came the phenomenon of the exhibit which first took root in the Salon de Paris. Dating its origins back to 1674 in the French Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, a part of the Académie des beaux-arts, it established its first limited public art exhibition at the Salon Carré. In 1737, after it had moved to the Palace of the Louvre in 1727 to be commonly known as the Salon, the exhibition became completely open to the public and determined the reputations of artists in France until the end of the 19th century ("Salon (Paris)"). Parallel developments happened in Britain with exhibits presented by the Royal Academy in London starting in 1769 ("Art exhibition"). This public exhibition, as socially distinct from past displays in the private manors of the aristocratic few, forever altered the social dynamics of art, changing the way art itself was regarded. Many more voices could now weigh in and offer a critique and value to art, despite the fact that some opinions still mattered more than others. Art had now been enshrined but in a secularized objectivity that turned such criticism into a new discipline. The "science of aesthetics" developed and new theories were promoted to understanding what constituted "true art."

However, the categories and premises of art theory proved to be insecure. By the late 1800s, the shattering of tradition was well underway and with it the Salon's loss of influence. As new technologies were introduced, old conventions were put under scrutiny as more and more artists incorporated the philosophical implications of this technology into their artwork. By the mid-20th century the meaning of art in society had changed so dramatically it is hard to imagine that anyone could have predicted the results with any degree of accuracy. Benjamin however offers a quote from poet Paul Valéry's 1928 essay "The Conquest of Ubiquity" that is prognostic: "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our need in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign . . ." (Benjamin 3).

Paul Valéry- Courtesy Google Images

It is evident that both Benjamin and Valéry foresaw a coming age of extreme visual saturation that would come with technology that was only a possibility in a time when film was still in its adolescence. The creation of digital media, through the medium of Internet connectivity, has created such visionary possibilities for a united global culture. Like film, it is specifically designed to be reproducible, only on a more massive scale. The line between original and copy has been further abstracted and fragmented into a series of exhibitions only loosely conjoined by the means of its transmission. As with the inception of the public art exhibition, the Internet has made everyone a critic with the ability to interact on an unprecedented scale. This is an reflection of Benjamin's regarding the future of film when he states:

. . . the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. . . At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. . . Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than on specialized training and thus becomes common property. (15)

By this social transformation via technology, information creation/archiving as well as artistic endeavor reaches the apogee of democratization. However, it is not without its costs. Freedom to and to make/edit content is only as valuable as the specific quality of content available as well as the critical character of the knowledge base required by viewers to interact meaningfully. Hypothetically, if everyone has access to information and its creation thereof, so do those who would deceive and exploit that free access for their own manipulative ends. Events may be taken out of context, history altered for serving the interests of promotion, defamation, or even mere convenience. The novel availability of a sophisticated and deeply integrated telecommunications technology may yet be a new set of chains for an updated version of Plato's Cave.

Benjamin's analysis takes particular note of the "aura" of things that sheds light on how the development of mass reproducibility changes the relationship of the presence of this aura in the manufacture of art. In nature it is ". . . the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be" (6). Prehistoric ceremonial objects preserved the essence of this aura because they were created for purposes that required them to have a unique function, an authoritative authenticity that was intended to evoke awe for their spiritual power. Later premodern works of art also carried an aura with them insofar as they retained the quality of a singular mood possessing some degree of reverence for nature. Once the industrial process took hold in art, the desire of the modern world grew to draw this aura closer into the social realm for examination, but, as Benjamin points out:

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. (7)

From the argument above it can be understood how Benjamin sees film in particular as dispensing with this aura entirely. By the very nature of its mechanics of production and specific intent for reproduction, it achieves a heightened state of artificiality beyond all other art (16). It is a form of supreme theater in which no artifacts of its making can be detected. By these means it is able to sustain a perfect illusion that cannot be distinguished from the natural world. Benjamin seems to have been hasty in granting the film technology of his time too much credit to wield the powers of illusion but, of course, he could not foretell the tremendous technical advances that were to come at the end of the 20th century.

It is evident that Benjamin's analysis more properly corresponds to the present age and the current events of this century. As technology continues to progress with the promises of more greatly integrated mediums of interaction, a virtual space mimicking all the characteristics of the natural world (as well as worlds of fantasy) seems plausible at some future time. At this projected point in history, reproducibility would achieve the zenith of its development, having long outgrown the utility of the mechanical and perhaps only requiring the presence of light as a medium to replicate any object of its desire. Benjamin, it may be argued, was one who viewed the invention of film as an important milestone in the evolution of a mass global culture based on the virtually instantaneous reproducibility of products. It is uncertain however how democratic such a society would ultimately turn out to be. Given recent applications of digital technologies, the outcomes have been mixed at best. The far-reaching psychological and sociological implications of this technology are unknown save for the intriguing insights provided by some social theorists whose conclusions remain unproven. However, the phenomena of digital media and social networking databases are surely key ingredients for a global postmodern Panopticon, vital ingredients that originated in the replicating and distributive abilities of film.

Works Cited and Consulted:

"Art exhibition". Wikipedia. 2 August 2011. Web. 3 August 2011.
                   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_exhibition#History>.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
                   Berkeley: University of California. 23 September 2004. Web. 10 June 2011.
                   <http://dxarts.washington.edu/coupe/wk1/benjamin.pdf>.

"Salon (Paris)". Wikipedia. 30 June 2011. Web. 3 August 2011.
                   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Salon>.

Kitsune: Kuzunoha, the Fox Woman of Japan and Panopticonic Illusions

2011-07-11T04:35:00.005+02:00

As in the West, the Eastern world also offers a hierarchical focus on the visual as a means of communicating a shared cultural understanding. Continuing with another example in an examination of the the dawn of Panopticonic visio-centrism, our gaze turns to the East and the artwork of ukiyo-e. This genre of woodcut printing, which may be translated as "pictures of the floating world", a description borrowed from Buddhism for the world of the senses due to the ethereal imagery it displayed, was the premiere art style of the wealthy merchant class of premodern Japan. Ukiyo-e was derived from the printmaking arts from China and following social upheavals in the later part of the 17th century, many Chinese artists migrated to Japan (Salter 9-10).

Japanese woodblock printing demonstrated a distinctive visual style from its earliest years that spanned to include secular topics as well as mythological and religious representations. It evoked a sense of immediacy in its artistic details but simultaneously presented an other-worldly view of everyday objects and events not necessarily accessible to the viewer since these images were not intended to be photo-realistic renditions of the environment but emotional impressions from the imagination of the individual artist. It was a type of impressionistic proto-photography due to the fact that many prints were portraits of famous Kabuki actors and appealed to those of the mercantile class who had a love of the theater. In the period lasting from the early 18th through the 19th century, the predominance of ukiyo-e foreshadowed the importance and popularity of cinema in Japan when film was first introduced there in 1896.

Early example of a ukiyo-e print- Courtesan Painting A Screen by Kiyonobu Torii (c. 1704-11)- Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

One of the last great masters of this art form was Utagawa Kinuyoshi (1798-1861) whose subject matter ranged from panoramic landscapes to portraiture of heroes from Japanese legend. It is also worthy to note that he was deeply influenced by Western styles of painting as this influence became more common after Japan's forced lifting of trade restrictions on Western powers in the 1850's and often incorporated their sensibilities into his own body of work.

An interesting subject that Kinuyoshi and other ukiyo-e artists explored was Kuzunoha (葛の葉), the famous kitsune or fox woman of Japanese folklore. The kitsune was a fox spirit that could transform itself into the likeness of a beautiful woman once it reached 100 years and had magical powers that became more potent with age. The nine-tailed fox, a legend which originated in China, was said to be the most powerful kind of fox spirit. It often took humans as mates and were faithful wives as long as its secret was kept safe from prying inquires. Foxes developed ambiguous connotations for Japanese culture since they co-existed with humans yet were wild animals separate from social control, thereby representing a bridge between the social world and the divine. Kitsune eventually became tied with Inari, the Shinto deity of rice and the harvest, as messengers and are even today worshipped at Japanese Buddhist and Shinto shrines alike as kami (spirits).


A nine-tailed fox - the numerous tails represent its advanced age (of 1,000 years) and power- from the Qing edition of the ancient text Shan Hai Jing- Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In Kuniyoshi's print, Kuzunoha stands over her sleeping son, a shoji screen imposed between them. One may wonder what she is pondering or what reverie the boy may be having. The screen in this scene however provides a clue. A shadow can be seen projected on the screen and, with its casting, Kuzunoha's identity is revealed to the viewer. It may be illuminating to extrapolate a commentary about the nature of kitsune and the nature of cinema/vision in the context of this image. The boy dreams under the projection of the screen much as a viewer of film is taken to another world by his enthrallment to the drama unfolding in a theater. In this instance, it is implied that he subconsciously "sees" the true nature of his mother betrayed in the form of a shadow, an illusion that exposes another. Kuzunoha acts in the role of the camera projector, for from a shadow cast upon a clear wall, the truth is made manifest by a trick of lighting. She acts as a magic lantern (long known in Japan as gentō (utsushi-e)), providing a presence (appearance) that is nothing but a shadow in Plato's cave. Since her identity has been compromised, and the illusion has been broken, she must leave her family and return to the non-human world of shadows in the forest.

Kuzunoha woodblock print by Utagawa Kinuyoshi (c. 1843-5)- Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Kuzunoha print by Kuniyoshi's student, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1890)- Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Roughly 50 years later, Kuniyoshi's most famous student, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), created a print on the same theme, using his master's "play of shadows" to convey the transmogrified nature of Kuzunoha. Her son Abe no Seimei, later renowned as a great astrologer, can be seen crawling after his mother as her face through the shoji screen projects the shadow of a fox's muzzle. A flowering kudzu vine is present in the foreground of the picture, a punned reference to Kuzunoha's name meaning "kudzu leaf". Kudzu is a very prolific vine whose leaves were used for its purported medicinal properties and paper-making in China where it originated. The kitsune Kuzunoha was probably connected with the plant due to its associations with immortality.

The play of shadow upon a screen used by these two artists in their respective Kuzunoha prints creates an intriguing association with the nature of vision and particularly how the metaphor so closely corresponds to the descriptive analogy that film would adopt in the 20th century globally. Much like the allegory of Plato's Cave, film is the act of casting shadows upon a wall that have the appearance of real things. Likewise, Kuzunoha is of the nature of film itself: timeless, magical in its effects, illusory. She emanates an image to the outside world but has a nature that is a secret to others. If the secret is found out, her power of influence is nullified just as a film's power is diffused if the "suspension of disbelief" cannot be maintained for the viewer.

The Panopticon equally works under the same power of illusion as cinema. Its principle of operation though not only feeds on the visio-centric directive that "seeing is believing" but also upon the social consensus that "you are being watched". Both work in tandem to create a seemingly infallible mechanism for social control. The watcher may be the eye of God or the local authorities: the crucial factor is the ability to maintain the illusion universally.

In the mythological context there have always been demons that society must be ever vigilant to ward off, the "unseen" forces at work that plot to undo society. Nietzsche's Apollonian/ Dionysian dichotomy has relevance here since cinema as a social phenomenon fuses the social functions of traditional theater with the capacity to duplicate itself through technical means and thereby provide a protection against the destructive forces of Nature while at the same time indulging them within a proscribed context. In ancient Greece, this was supplied by the ritualistic functions of the theater, merging the Apollonian visual arts with the orgiastic Dionysian.

Reviewing the two ukiyo-e examples above in contrast with La Vue from La Dame à la licorne in the previous essay, one notes a reversal of relationship between mother and son. The son in the Japanese prints is now the virgin maiden who elicits domesticity and a civilizing influence on the mother, a mythical beast not unlike the unicorn, a previously uncontrollable force of nature. The son tames the mother passively however by his innocence, by the simple fact that he is her son just as the maiden domesticates the unicorn by her virginity. Both Kuzunoha and the maiden renounce their desires to the same end but for different motivations: Kuzunoha to become civilized and participate in the social world via family and the maiden to civilize the unbridled desires of her bridegroom in marriage. The son and the maiden both act as mediaries, filtering the raw Eros that the kitsune and unicorn represent for the utility of society. The shoji screen fulfills the same role as the mirror of the maiden in La Vue, the symbolic reflexivity of created by film, theater, and other arts that make the social world possible.

The curious inversion between the roles of mother and son in the Kuzunoha prints may be explained by the differing philosophical traditions commonly followed in the East and West. (Neo)Platonism, the basis for much of the Western philosophical/religious outlook from Late Antiquity onward, took only the ideal Forms of things to be reality, the material world being only a poor facsimile of them. Therefore principle (essence) was given precedence over the material existence of any object and any attempt to reproduce a Form in actuality, although rigorously pursued as a path to excellence since the Greco-Roman period, was doomed to failure. East philosophy, based largely on Buddhism and Taoism, however generally rejected Platonic-type Forms and followed a phenomenological view of things as insubstantial (i.e. impermanent), yet having importance in the moment. Life was illusory in the sense that all existence was in a state of constant flux, but "real" because there was cause and effect for all things. While all derived from the same source that was considered "empty" since it was limitless, all things had their respective natures due to various components in nature coming together in specific combinations and then disassembling in a continuous process.

The difference between the Western and Eastern art examples in question seems to be one of emphasis derived from these two philosophical outlooks. The maiden in La Vue is redemptive as the Virgin Mary, a divine presence in her own right whose mediation "tames" the evil (unpredictable) vicissitudes of the world (i.e. the wild unicorn) and allows humanity to access salvation through her activity. Kuzunoha however is considered an source of spiritual power whose only filter is the shoji screen, representing the thin partitioning of nature into the human world and the screen's symbolic function is reflected as well in her domestic obligations to her son. It may be interpreted that from these points of contrast that society and its institutions are the only barrier holding back the relentless unfolding of the Dionysian drive for the kitsune is exposed only through the activity of (self-)reflection, cinematic in its nature, and therefore casting all things as mere shadows coming in and out of existence without metaphysical essence.

This philosophic and, by extension, artistic sensibility may have been the decisive factor for Japan's early embrace of cinema. Film mirrors the true nature of things in Zen and other Far Eastern traditions, shadows that are images without substance having only a momentary presence playing out in a sequence of infinite variety. It is the expression of time and space determined by cause and effect that provokes pathos and reflection while being merely an apparition of things.

Works Cited and Consulted:

The Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance. U.S. Library
of Congress, 27 July 2010, Web. 6 July 2011.
<http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/ukiyo-e/>.

“Kitsune”. Wikipedia. 1 July 2011. Web. 3 July 2011.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune>.

“Kuzunoha”. Wikipedia. 7 January 2011. Web. 3 July 2011.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuzunoha>.

Nozaki, Kiyoshi. Kitsuné— Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humor. Tokyo: The
Hokuseidô Press. 1961. Web.

Salter, Rebecca. Japanese Woodblock Printing. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,
2005 ed.. Print.

“Utagawa Kuniyoshi”. Wikipedia. 25 June 2011. Web. 29 June 2011.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utagawa_Kuniyoshi>.

“Yoshitoshi”. Wikipedia. 27 June 2011. Web. 30 June 2011.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitoshi>.

The Image That Gazes: A Case Study of “La Vueˮ in La Dame à la licorne Tapestries

2011-06-10T01:35:00.004+02:00

To illustrate the growing importance of the gaze in modern global culture, it is useful to offer up an example from the past for analysis, a work of art that has commented by its very content on the existential significance of vision and its psychological implications. One such artistic work that has intrigued art historians since its discovery in 1841 by Prosper Mérimée in Boussac Castle in Creuse, France is the wool and silk tapestry commonly called in contemporary scholarship "Sight". It is part of a series of six tapestries in total, La Dame à la licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn), originally based on designs made in Paris for the commission of an aristocratic wedding in Lyon dating from the late 15th century. Currently on display in the Musée du Moyen-Âge in Paris, it is regarded as one of the finest works of Medieval European art.

La Vue (Sight)- Courtesy of

Musée National du Moyen-Âge, Paris

The image is today popularly known as "Sight" (La Vue) since in the overall context of the commissioned series it is one of the traditional five senses, one depicted in each tapestry, with the sixth, A Mon Seul Désir (My Only Desire), possibly indicating the maiden bride's renunciation of all of her senses to the guardianship of her bridegroom.

Le Toucher (Touch)

L'Odorat (Smell)

Le Goût (Taste)

L'Ouïe (Hearing)

A Mon Seul Désir (My Only Desire)

The remaining five images in La Dame à la licorne collection- Courtesy Google Images

It is relevant to examine La Vue in particular from this collection in light of the fact that it specifically speaks about the abstract nature of vision and provides an exceptional example of past Western meanings of the image and its observer. As cinema and its derivatives are the dominant media of the image in the modern age, painting and tapestry work was the prominent expression of the Middle Ages. This tapestry offers a unique "insight" into the spatial mindset of this period and how vision may have gained a specific dominion in Western philosophy that eventually became the norm for global discourse. La Vue may serve as a cultural premonition (however unconscious in this role it may have been) to a future saturated with a visio-centric world-view and may be considered an initiation into the secular consideration of vision.

As with any investigation of a work of art, it is advisable to identify the salient features of the "Sight" tapestry and attempt to define their symbolic roles within the meaningful context of the period of their creation. The elements of this tapestry refer to a medieval legend commonly known as "The Unicorn Hunt" in which the mythical beast was tracked for the medicinal properties of its spiraled horn. It was believed that only a virgin could capture a wild beast possessed of such magical power since she was purest of heart and soul. Upon encountering her, the unicorn would fall asleep on her lap, lulled into submission by her tender caress. Many religious authors interpreted this allegory, inspired by the pre-medieval bestiary literature from Late Antiquity, as the story of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ. The unicorn as Christ relinquishes his divine power through the Virgin Mary to become human and experience life in a body made of flesh. As an ordinary man, he can be discovered by the hunters, the seekers of God's love and redemption, through Mary as intermediary. A comparison between the "Sight" tapestry and various depictions of the Madonna and Child throughout the plastic arts of the period may even be made, expressing a similar relationship in effect between the Virgin and Christ figures. The virgin with the unicorn resting on her lap exhibiting a loving gaze in La Vue is so alike in composition as to almost evoke a sense of déjà vu in the viewer.

Raphael- Madonna and Child c. 1503- Courtesy Google Images

The tapestry "Sight" plays on this medieval religious theme's meaning and "humanizes" it within the context of marriage. The artist's presented image consists of a woman (virgin) sitting with the mythical unicorn perched on her lap by a holly tree, representing Christ's crucifixion, in the background. She holds aloft an ornate hand mirror which reflects the image of the unicorn's face to his view, allegorically illustrating the Virgin's role as conduit and prerequisite for salvation by Christ's Passion.


Close-up of "Sight" - author's photograph

In this image all of the aforementioned artifacts can be seen, revealing its association to the previous medieval content of the "hunt" and its conclusion in triumph over its "prey", yet the presentation takes on additional readings given the known circumstances of the occasion. Here, the unicorn is a stand-in for the bridegroom to the virgin, his betrothed, and it is in the act of marriage that the unicorn's unbridled power (passion) is brought under domesticity and control. As may be derived from the other tapestries in the collection culminating in À mon seul désir, the virgin sacrifices all passions and pleasures of her senses to her bridegroom, "for my (one) desire alone". With her mirror, she reflects the satisfaction of the bridegroom's desires and therefore "tames" the beast within him, transmuting his primitive drives for the constructive aims of the social order. It is a statement of the sanctifying (civilizing) force of chastity and its power over the natural forces of base sexual instinct , just as Christ's divine power was "tamed" by the Virgin to bring about the salvation of humanity from perpetual sin.

It is revealing in light of this interpretation to compare the tapestry to Nietzsche's thesis in The Birth of Tragedy. In this book, Nietzsche distinguishes two vital cosmic forces at play: the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian is the chaotic world of flux, unbridled desire, and what state the philosopher Schopenhauer refers to as the dissolution of the "veil of Maja" where the walls of human representation and individuation break down (Nietzsche 12). The force of the Apollonian, on the other hand, was the civilizing drive of reason that actively constructed and maintained this "veil" for the benefit of human progress. Nietzsche contrasted these twin aspects analogously in regard to art as intoxication and dream respectively. Hence, the Dionysian is equated with ecstatic rapture and the non-visual arts of music while, in contrast, the Apollonian is tied with the plastic arts. Although they are contradictory in motive, both elements co-mingled to produce Attic tragedy, arguably the crowning achievement of Greece and other civilizations (11).

Examining La Vue with Nietzsche's schema in mind , the relationship between the virgin and the unicorn adopts a new significance. The unicorn now represents the wild, chaotic nature of Eros proper (and, it follows as well, the uncontrollably continuous unfolding of time) and the virgin is the nurturing, civilizing light of the intellect, a true acolyte of Apollo. The picture morphs before the eyes into an illustration of the human existential predicament, the eternal pull amidst cosmic oppositions that ends in victory for the civilizing influence of the Apollonian. The virgin's mirror becomes the transmitter of the plastic (visual) arts, de facto art in all its acceptable forms of expression, reflecting human experience back onto its subjects and thereby "taming" the rampant onslaught of the Dionysian to society's purposes. Unlike the proclamations of Christian theologians' interpretation in the Medieval-Renaissance periods, this reading cannot ever have a final victor for it speaks to a condition that is intimately entwined with human existence and its concerns.

Nietzsche sought a return to the balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian forces for the society of his time as the ancient Greeks had accomplished in their theater. The tradition of the theater was their "mirror" that revealed the chaotic meaninglessness of life within the safe confines of a social order, the Apollonian "reflection" on the actual Dionysian nature of existence. With the development of film at the end of the 19th century, the moving image has now come to take on the role of the virgin and the Greek theater for Nietzsche. The camera and its visio-centric quality is merely a technical extension of this function.

However edifying a power art may hold for society, there is also the inherent dangers in its practice as with a doting mother who too carefully manages the affairs of her child, thereby preventing his psychological growth. In a postmodern view of "Sight" the mirror of the virgin may be interpreted as a vehicle for narcissism and self-importance. As global culture became more Panopticonic, the relationship of art to the subject turned obscure rather than clarifying. The reflected image is corrupted as it focuses on the visual medium and neglects other factors by which individuals and groups interact in social spaces. It came to be primarily seen as a means of social control rather than a clear mirror on experience to the detriment of all other senses. À mon seul désir has evolved from a medieval religious ideal for salvation to an exercise in postmodern personal gratification. This development has led to the sanitizing of human experience for the means of simplified social appropriation and consumption.

While the Dionysian-Apollonian dynamic carries its share of shortcomings as a comprehensive hypothesis for explaining the development of the aesthetic self, it does yield some useful insights for interpretations of art and its social functions in that regard. La Vue provides a unique glimpse into what importance the visual arts played in premodern times and how it laid the trajectory for the dominant position the visual was destined to take in the modern and postmodern media to come.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Freiburg, Herder. The Herder Symbol Dictionary: Symbols from Art, Archaeology,

Mythology, Literature, and Religion. Trans. Boris Matthews. Wilmette,

IL: Chiron Publications, 1986. Print.

Musée National du Moyen-Âge. Musée national du Moyen Âge – RMN, n.d.. Web.

5 June 2011. <http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/ang/index.html>.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music). Trans. Ian
Johnston, Ph.D..Vancouver Island University, n.d.. Web. 6 June 2011.

The Emergence of Cinema and the Ontological Instant

2011-05-14T17:49:00.015+02:00

Since the debut of the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe and Thomas Edison's Vitascope public screenings in the 1890's, the moving image has projected itself widely within the global view. The advent of film technology in the fin de siècle suffused the following century with images so revered in terms of identification and emotive potency that their collective effect is arguably unrivaled in human history. The visual-centric presentation of the new medium spread to many cultures whose inherent spatial relations did not previously accommodate such moving images. Especially in more visually oriented societies like those in Europe and the U.S., the phenomenon of film quickly grew from sheer novelty to multi-million dollar industry. The motion picture and its attendant culture announced the swift approach of the modern Panopticon on the world stage.

Lumière Brothers' Cinématographe- Courtesy Wikipedia

Film's popularity as a means of mass communication and entertainment also corresponded with the rapid progression of global economic and cultural integration. One such contemporaneous example was the World Parliament of Religions held in tandem with the Chicago World Fair (World's Columbian Exposition) in 1893. As the first formal meeting of an international interfaith conference, the event was the first exposure of a popular Western audience to Eastern religious teachings. Shaku Sôen, an abbot of Kechô-ji and Engaku-ji (temples) in Kamakura, Japan, was the first Zen Buddhist to ever speak on an American stage. His own debut could be said to be timely as his message had an intriguing relevance to the newly-founded art of cinema. Although his speech did not address the dynamics of this new media in any direct way, it did have symbolic importance because of Zen philosophy's phenomenological (and allegorically ontological) affinity with the nature of film. Cinema by its very methods of operation incorporates what Zen Buddhism designates as 'stillness in motion', the phantasmagorical quality of human experience in which each moment passes indiscernibly into the next yet possesses a distinct quality of wholeness within each moment. Dôgen, a well-renowned 13th century Zen master who initially brought Zen to Japan, proposed a concept commonly referred to as "perpetual creation" which bears more than a casual similarity to the philosophical position of many medieval Sufi mystics regarding the nature of being. His surviving writings on these philosophical reflections describe the hidden operations behind the transformation of existents through time.

Shaku Sôen- Courtesy Wikipedia

Dôgen Zenji- Courtesy Google Images

Toshihiko Izutsu, a noted professor of comparative religions, examines Dôgen's unique "revisioning" of this transformative process, citing a passage from the Genjô Kôan chapter of Dôgen's famous work, the Shôbo Genzô ("The Quintessence of the Righteous View of Reality"). In this chapter, Dôgen illustrates his viewpoint using the commonplace example of firewood burning into ashes. In his essay on the concept of perpetual creation, Izutsu translates the relevant passage thus:

Firewood turns into ashes. The ashes can never go backward and regain the form of firewood. On the basis of the observation of this fact, however, one should not hastily conclude that the ashes are posterior and the firewood prior.

Know that firewood remains established in its own dharma-position (i.e., its ontological position) of "being firewood;" yet, in this position, it has "before" and "after." Although it has "before" and "after," it is cut off from "before" and "after." Ashes, likewise, remain in the dharma-position of "being-ashes," yet, in this position, they have "before" and "after." (143-144)

As Izutsu subsequently explains, Dôgen's conclusion is that this observed transformative process is nothing but an illusion created by false assumptions about the being of things:

Wood can never become ashes. . . . Yet, even while the burning wood in our example was still wood, it was not really one and the same piece of wood continuing to exist over a certain span of time before it was transformed into ashes. . . . even under the seemingly same form of wood, there was in reality a series of instantaneous forms of wood, each coming into existence at this moment and going into non-existence the very next moment. (144)

Each existing thing has its own unique nature which is revealed in an instant in time, but nothing has an independent subsistence that can endure beyond that proscribed instant. Everything in the cosmos can be depicted as an endless stream of instantaneous segments of time in which all things appear, disappear, and reappear as new creations. Hence, time is existence. This has led Izutsu to describe the phenomenology of things as ontological instants since their very being cannot be separated from time and continue to exist apart from time. However, viewed in the light of ultimate truth achieved through disciplined meditation (enlightenment), “. . . in each one of these ontological instants Dôgen witnesses the actualization of what he calls nikon . . . meaning Timelessness or Eternity as it crystallizes itself in “this-instant” (Izutsu, 148). According to Dôgen, from this perspective all ontological instants (and their attendant distinctions) are realized in a unified meta-dimension found in each instant where every thing is seen in existence simultaneously.

While the main purpose for this reflection within the context of the Zen tradition was to lead the disciple to enlightenment and also holds very intriguing implications for philosophy, what is important for the study at hand is its parallels with the function and nature of film. The cinema is a simulacrum, mimicking the flow of life as it is conventionally perceived by the human senses. As Dôgen unveiled the ephemera of existence as it ebbed and flowed upon its rippling paths, film reaffirmed the mirage with its unprecedented mastery of the moving image. Made of discrete images that were dependent upon the mechanisms of light and movement and interdependent as image built upon image sequentially, the new technology simulated the flow of life experience more accurately than any other medium ever devised.

As Zen and other mystical traditions from the East strived to break the illusion of the apparent, cinema of the West reinforced it by replicating the mechanisms of the Eidolon to create a meta-structure capable of the most insidious powers of social control. This is the dawning of Debord's society of the spectacle, a space alienated from genuine social bonds and reduced to representation mediated by fragmented images constructed/appropriated by mass media. Nevertheless, an ambiguity remains innately within its function as cinema also, being so experientially analogous to the vagaries of life, has the equal capacity to unveil and inspire with an "illumination" all its own.

The Magic Lantern- Courtesy of Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse

The invention of the film camera and its cinematic products was the actualized fulfillment of the Laterna Magica developed in the 17th century, which was often associated with the monstrous and unnatural. It was monstrous not only in the content it presented (dealing in taboo or voyeuristic subject matter which violated established cultural norms) but in its modus operandi, creating a vantage point from where an individual could assume god-like qualities of perception and witness the panoply of life passing before him in complete isolation from the social activities of the world. His gaze was no longer tied to the social interaction of public life but could now be granted a privileged position of separation and privacy that further rooted the aesthetic self into its desired seat of influence and autonomy. This new perspective of the gazer coalesces with Bentham's surveillance space while also adding an element of ego stimulation that further enhances the opportunities for manipulation within a social environment. By appealing to the 'natural' inclinations of individual desire built up by centuries under the aegis of the aesthetic self construct, the new medium of film offered individuals the possibilities of previously unattainable immediate gratification. Governments and other interested parties seeking power were imparted with a device of seemingly hypnotic abilities, adept at molding a select population's attitudes to their own interests without explicitly infringing on individual rights.

The theater was now dressed and ready for the premiere of the grand spectacle that was to reshape the social landscape into Panopticonic form. The ritualized theater of ancient times had evolved to meet the demands of a modern multicultural world desiring control over its populace. This new development of the spectacle would forever change relations within the traditionally conceived social order.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Izutsu, Toshihiko. “The Concept of Perpetual Creation in Islamic Mysticism and Zen

Buddhism”. Melanges offerts à Henry Corbin (1977): 115-48. Rpt. in

Creation and the Timeless Order of Things. Ashland, OR: White Cloud

Press, 1994. 141-173. Print.

Panopticonic Theater: The Narcissistic Spectacle

2011-05-01T05:15:00.002+02:00

Jeremy Bentham's original inspiration for the Panopticon was building the ultimate prison, a design uniting form and function so meticulously as to offer none held within any chance of release. While Plato's allegory of the cave is also such a prison with similar features, Bentham's Panopticon introduced the gazer as the principal component of social control. Plato used "chains"to hold down the inhabitants of the cave to enslave them, metaphorically depicting the psychological effect of the flickering shadows on the wall upon the occupants. Bentham's means of restraint is the gaze, put into operation by the unique arrangement of space that casts "shadows" of its own and elicits a state of mass paranoia. By a stroke of architectural ingenuity, Bentham embodied the meta-structure of Plato's cave and enabled its operation in every aspect of the social world. Viewed in this sense, the Panopticon may be described as a mechanism capable of the systematic (and scientific) manipulation of predetermined space perceptions for the purpose of organizing human experience to fulfill a proscribed socio-economic program.

An anthropologist who pioneered the study of varied space perceptions amongst different cultures was Edward T. Hall. In his seminal book, The Hidden Dimension, Hall explores these differences in detail and while many are rooted in species territoriality from the evolutionary past, other aspects of this social behavior rely on the specific adaptations of distinct social groups over centuries. Humphry Osmond, a physician who directed a health and research facility in Saskatchewan, is cited by Hall as one who first made the observation that arranging a space's semifixed-features (e.g, chairs and tables) changed how his female geriatric patients related to each other. He subsequently coined the term sociofugal to designate spaces that drew people into isolation (such as railway waiting rooms) and sociopetal for those spatial arrangements that brought them together (e.g., French sidewalk cafés) (Hall 108).

Due to this discovery, a practical method could now be employed to promote or discourage sociability as a given situation required. Although it is known that Osmond was indeed not the first to practically utilize this approach to controlling social interaction since it had been used numerous times before in various contexts, albeit mainly instinctively, it provides a refinement of Bentham's Panopticon model. Osmond's experiments created a body of data that clarified the relationships of semifixed-features to fixed space and the behavior that resulted from changing these elements. Likewise, Hall further examined the underlying structures of spatial relations within various cultures and the communication conflicts they could create between cultures. Clearly Osmond and Hall's projects were designed to make social interaction more fruitful and meaningful whether it was within or between discrete social groups. Unforuntately, such knowledge can also be used for dubious intentions.

Much discussion has been made recent years about the connection between the Panopticon and surveillance culture. What Bentham did architecturally with Plato's cave, surveillance technology realized for Bentham's "gaze". Now any restrictions space may have imposed, the technical marvel of the surveying eye makes irrelevant. This is not merely a matter of omnipresent cameras (which would still be subject to physical constraints to some degree) but tools that function without the need of space, that exist in a digital landscape of no dimension and do their work better than any conventional eye ever could. Even a self-recording camera needs a watcher eventually and a vigilant watcher to immediately take action if deemed necessary. Since cyberspace never needs rest, it is the fulfilled realization of Panopticon's goal- constant, unmitigated surveillance. The whole of the social realm is appropriated as a grand theater in which the participants can interact but only as images of their actual selves. The aesthetic self has entered a new level of abstraction in the digital age in which social relations have been reduced to icons, mere shadows haunting a wall. The cave wall is the same as it ever was, only decorated with enticing light and sound shows.

As Guy Debord correctly notes, "The spectacle is not [simply] a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" (7). Although these images are fragmented, as Debord states throughout his famous Situationalist social critique Society of the Spectacle, they reformulate into a new choreographed depiction of the world which, due to the very visual nature of its presentation, is false. Of course imagery has always been used to tell narratives throughout history yet never has it been so completely removed from the vital senses of space perception as Hall identifies. Many cultures place emphasis on the sense of touch or smell and therefore have different means of communicating information. Even in a culture that mainly uses the visual to communicate will suffer from misunderstandings and lack of intimate contact under such a model. Debord seems to have anticipated the advent of the digital age and its discontents, determining it in his own time as the inevitable consequence of a techno-industrial society driven by private profit and motives:

When the real word is transformed into mere images, mere images become real things . . . . Since the spectacle's job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. (11)

Debord's point is that a society with advanced communications technology can in fact inadvertently (or deliberately as is often the case) use those tools to dilute meaningful communication to titillating spectacle. Society is divorced from the organic processes from which it evolved and reconstituted as a simulation of human experience. The aims are often against those of genuine communion with others in order to serve a particular political and economic agenda that has little tolerance for disruption.

It is illuminating to compare Debord's description/critique of "present-day society" and Bentham's ideal model of society. The Panopticon is a place in which space has been redefined and older cultural modes of spatial perception and arrangement have largely been transformed for the ease of social control. Bentham's goal was to create a more moral and productive society, but Debord convincing argues it is one that is more narcissistic and superficial the closer it reaches a complete Panopticonic state. The digital theater delivers instantaneous gratification for attention while simultaneously controlling the nature of social interaction through its very architecture and continuous monitoring. Everyone can now be virtually guaranteed their own "15 minutes of fame" as long as they accept the terms and conditions.

Courtesy Google Images

Work Cited and Consulted:

Debord, Guy. trans. Ken Knabb. Society and the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press,
no copyright. Print.

Society and the Symbol: A New World Panopticon

2011-04-04T05:10:00.023+02:00

The aesthetic self, for all its proclaimed independence, both real and imagined, must always be considered in the context of the social realm as a component of a larger system. This system is the actualization and concrete counterpart of the metaphysical prismatic eidolon, a manifestation of a world-soul (and a worldview) that guides and governs all activities within society. It decides what is "the natural order of things" and determines the rules by which social relations operate. It contours the inner life of individual minds and therefore shapes personalities, memories, and fantasies. As an all-seeing eye, a window overseeing the world, the Panopticon corrects behavior as it monitors it, eradicating even the most aberrant actions and ideas from its sphere. What it cannot effectively eliminate, it appropriates. What it cannot absorb into itself for its own uses, it neglects. It is the ultimate prison since its objective is to coerce everything into obedience without the necessity of overt acts of violence. If it fails to compel allegiance to conformity as a benevolent dictator, it resorts to violent means while blaming its rivals for the aggression. Ironically, this social eidolon is also the required condition of freedom and justice, embodying these very concepts into its structure. Like any good prison it seemingly offers no opportunity for escape, even for the most imaginative of inmates.

In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault recounts the mechanics of subjugation by surveillance that have increasing gained legitimacy in modern society. The Panopticon, a proposal of the Utilitarian philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, is rightfully cited as the sine qua non model for social control. Bentham's model was not merely an innovation in the architectural design of prisons and other institutions that offered more effective supervision and scientific evaluation for the modern age but an entirely new modality for conducting such activities. It provided the impression, if only imagined, of the omnipresence of power in every aspect of social life that had lasting psychological effects on its subjects and its caretakers (202-203).

As a concrete structure, the Panopticon is comprised of a tall central tower surrounded by a circular enclosure of small cells separated by walls to ensure the isolation of individual prisoners. This architectural construction allows the observer in the central tower to see into any given cell at will, but those sequestered in their private cells remain blind to their surroundings save the ever-present tower. Since no subject can see into the tower to know that he is being watched due to a trick of light orchestrated by careful geometry, each lives in a constant state of wariness and places his actions in check for fear of reprisal. Because of other architectural arrangements of the construction, subjects also can neither see nor hear their fellow cell mates. The prisoner of such a structure ". . . is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault 200).

Bentham's Blueprint for Panopticon (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)


A Modern Iteration of the Panopticon (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The description above not only serves as a physical rendering of the architectural space's content but an allusion to its theatrical mode of operations. Here control is solicited through appeals to the aesthetic self and its desire to express itself in the social medium. The self is given its 'space' to be seen, but it is assigned and catalogued for the convenience of the power apparatus without any meaningful exchange. It is simply designated a passive object for the system to manipulate as needed and then ignored. This of course is done for the good of social order but indirectly it strengthens the impersonal Panopticon meta-structure. The actors who currently hold positions as observers are only temporary and may be replaced at any time without notice.

There have already been many comparisons made figuratively between Bentham's Panopticon and the effects of public surveillance technology in modern life, but in order to fully appreciate the importance and implications of Bentham's invention on the human psyche, one must go back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. This is where one will find the true significance of Bentham's project.

Plato's 'original Panopticon' shares a common thread with Bentham's in the sense that both deal with the distortion of perception, although in entirely different senses and for differing purposes. The cave allegory was created to illustrate the metaphysical nature of human blindness (misperception) and how one, through educational efforts, could rise into the light and know the truth of things. Bentham, although his intentions seemed well-placed, was not interested in guiding people to any metaphysical awakening but in creating a (theoretically) infallible mechanism of social order and control that would produce the best outcome for collective morality and happiness.

It is noteworthy that however disparate these two men were in their philosophical perspectives, both of their arguably greatest contributions to philosophical thought lead to an authoritarian outlook about how society should function. It is well-known that the social goal that Plato had in mind for his doctrine of Forms was the creation of an elite class of philosopher-kings. It may perhaps be as well understood that Bentham's Panopticon, however democratic in its selection of observers, produces a totalitarian state. Through the subtle utilization of exclusion and categorization, the Panopticon functions as a meta-structure that colors every perception and confines individuals to their own predetermined space within the social realm. It casts them down once again into the primordial cave, only this time willingly. Thus, just as the universe can be seen as a great image (eidolon) from which every existent derives, so does society through its various mechanisms shape our perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors. The Panopticon is only the latest symbol for complete submission to unconscious undercurrents of power. As Foucault states, ". . . it is the diagram of mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form . . ." (205). Perhaps Bentham, Plato and other modern political theorists have more notions of utopian society in common than has previously been recognized.

Works Cited:

Foucault, Michel. trans. Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison. 2nd. ed. New York: Vintage Books,
1995. Print.

The Cult of the Masque and the Aesthetic Self

2011-02-22T04:27:00.007+01:00

As the phenomenon of the theater grew out of the trappings of ancient Greek civilization and independently took root in other regions of the world, a substantial shift in consciousness took hold between the public and private perspectives of life. The individual self was now not merely viewed as a component of the social whole but a fundamental determinant and raison d'etre of social construction. The self had not only a utility to fulfil through the medium of ascribed social roles but was the repository and inspiration for the creative. Persona had the force of desire at its disposal and a longing that often came into direct conflict with long cherished social norms. Theater and its accompanying arts had now changed and challenged the role of the masque as ritual object and social intermediary to transcend its bounds in a manner that would not become evident until several centuries later. The aesthetic self appeared on the world stage as a type of epiphenomenon of social structure, the vehicle through which individuals existentially recognized themselves apart from society.

An examination of the masque will immediately belie its function to divide. This may be cited as the moment when the project of society became the perpetual negotiation between the public and private realms of the living. As social organization entered this phase of internal categorization between the communal, legalistic, and bureaucratic as opposed to the personal and intimate, society and the individual became the forces of irreconcilable conflict that nevertheless were mutually dependent upon one another. The self, as a practical product of socialization, cannot exist apart from the conditions of social structure. Such a structure is imperative in formulating identity as well as in delineating the proscribed protocols of interaction amongst other selves and institutional components. Likewise, the structure of social interaction cannot be established and maintained without the participation of individuals. Although it is clear that these two factors share a dependent thread, they both carry within themselves the potentialities for each others' destruction and, by extension, their own demise since they are unable to exist independently. Seen in this aspect, the emergence of the aesthetic self from the cult of the theater, the cumulative product of advancing complexities in social organization, gave rise to the fundamental division between individual and society. This opened the door to the ongoing existential struggle of public vs. private life that confronts modern industrial societies to the present day.

However, it should not be assumed that this new relationship between the aesthetic self and society at large is only an antagonistic one. This self could not have been formed without the structural nourishment that society lends and society greatly benefits and flourishes into new institutional forms of expression from the interplay of various selves in previously unprecedented ways. This process is social evolution, the descriptive arc which actively creates the possibility of material and other intangible manifestations of progress. The masque has mutated into a positively greater but exponentially more dangerous instrument of social expression. In modernity the result of this transformation, through centuries of layering more and more aspects of signification, has been one of existential confusion about identity and therefore meaningful social relation. It is the supreme paradox of our times that the more strata of potential social interaction the aesthetic self acquired for itself, the greater its plasticity and the less meaningful it became, both to itself and society.

The aesthetic self, the new masque having remote ancestors in the theater masks of ancient Greek ritual, has become ambiguous, amorphous, and monstrous. Its qualities are more akin to The Invisible Man or the protagonist in Hiroki Teshigahara's film The Face of Another than those of masks of old.

Screen capture from Teshigahara's The Face of Another (1966) - Courtesy of samehat.tumblr.com (via Google Images)

This feature of 'the monster' has been a topic of frequent discussion and analysis among many film critics and academics over the past several decades. It comprises an on-going dialogue about the conscious (and especially unconscious) effects of modernity on identity and the loss of meaningful relations in society. 'The monster' wears a masque of sorts (the aesthetic self) due to the fact that he is faceless, i.e. he has no socially defined identity, and therefore has no meaningful relation to society and its norms. He lives in isolation outside the limits of human interaction and the conventional demarcations of morality as well since social structure determines morality. Film, the medium of modernity, depicts this as the fundamental illness of our times and moreover not a mere illness of the body to which modern medicine claims a cure. The aesthetic self is now viewed not only as epiphenomenon in the proper medical sense but as a definition expanded by religious undertones: a disease of the soul. It is as if the individual has unwittingly returned to the prehistoric state of our human origins or that history as social reality no longer exists for him and therefore he no longer exists. The symbolic cultural emblems of the vampire, the werewolf, and other monsters from popular film are all referents to the existential dilemma of the aesthetic self and the modern cult-worship of the masque that particularly from the later half of the 20th century to the present has taken a predominant foothold in Western cultures.

Masks have always been a part of our shared global heritage but now as we enter into the postmodern era, assessing the fruits of our collective past, masks seem to conceal more than they reveal and threaten to engulf all in their indeterminably. As changes in technology and social roles continue to evolve, it will become paramount to reassess and rediscover the value of identity and its repercussions for social cohesiveness in the future.

Works Consulted:

Prost, Antoine and Gérard Vincent, eds. A History of Private Life:

Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. Cambridge, MA:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Halberstam, Judith. Skins Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology

of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

The Janus Mosaic, Part II: The Masque as Cultural Emanator

2010-11-20T03:31:00.005+01:00

To further elaborate and expand upon the significance of Janus for the purposes of the current discussion, it is worthwhile to briefly pursue his symbolic relation to the development of ancient Greek theater which occurred roughly between 600-200 BCE. Although the ancient Greeks had no true equivalent god to Janus in their own pantheon, their establishment of theater which evolved from older devotional rites to Dionysis, a god of procreation and fertility, served a ritual function that had salient parallels in meaning. The whole phenomenon of the theater might be interpreted to be a matrix or 'god complex' composed of mythic themes of common Greek culture in a ritualized setting. On this 'world stage', the symbolic emanations of the cosmic struggle played and disseminated its storehouse of cultural knowledge and insight to its audience.

The ritual setting of the 'Masque'-Wikipedia Commons

Ancient Greek theater, having its origins in Athens, employed a collection of formalized expressions of character and mood mainly depicted through the use of masks. The most well known of these masks are the ones ascribed to the two main categories of Greek theater, comedy and tragedy, the warp and woof of life. Interestingly enough, these masks are commonly known as Janus masks and have since become the very symbol of the theatrical in the Western world. A complex of such masks were worn by the first Greek actors to display 'cultural cues' to the viewers of the stage, a context of the imaginary by which one could enter into the ritual story. Traditionally, Thespis of Attica is credited as the first playwright to use actors (and their subsequent masks) on the Greek stage, most notably the figure of the protagonist. Expanding the function of theater from that of a mere narrating (i.e., singing) chorus to include a cast of participants introduced the concept of 'drama' and 'persona' that the modern world now takes for granted.

The Janus masks of comedy and tragedy- Wikipedia Commons

This conception of the 'masque' as an emanation of persona (i.e., identity) within the imaginary context of a ritual performance provided society a medium through which to convey and distribute a complex range of ideology and emotive associations within the content of that ideology to a wide audience easily. This new disseminating device thereby became over time the prominent means of mythic and symbolic conveyance for ancient Greek society and greatly contributed to the formation of a common cultural bond between the city-states.

It was through this development in the history of ancient Greek theater that the mask reached its fulfillment as a ritualistic object of existential and cultural emanation and moreover established a mode of aesthetic emanation through which it operated. The 'masque' represented not only the simple stand-in of role playing that was practiced in the theater but also revealed the hidden undercurrent of the collective unconscious mind in the actual categorical roles played out in daily social life It relayed the secret forces of the procreate (as ritually practiced in the festivals of the Dionysia) and the participation of all beings in the great drama of life. By putting on a mask and portraying a role, one takes off his own 'mask of social identity' and unveils the previously concealed undertones of the psyche in which all share a common bond. In short, one creates as the primordial eidolon and art is born from the cosmic stream.

The Janus masks of comedy and tragedy serve an analogous function to the Janus mosaic: each relate a facet of perspective to the mind, a dynamic that is woven into human experience indelibly and cannot be evaded. Yet these perspectives, though fundamental to all existence, are as masks of the same protagonist that can be worn or taken off as needed. To be a master 'aesthetician of emanation' is to play with masks and be a eidolon unto oneself free upon the stage to genuinely express. When one does not perceive the nature of the 'masque' however, one inevitably becomes entrapped by its lures and charms as a thrall enchanted by one's own illusions and society's demands.