Part 3: Face to Face Democratic Culture - My Friend's Challenge

My friend challenges what I said in the prior post (June 20th) - my reply follows below:

1. I'm not sure why "human beings are born as loving animals" has anything to recommend it more than "human beings are born in sin." The former is probably meant as a corrective to the latter; but in my mind they have the same status as assertions about the human condition. To Maturana's example of the mother and child in consensual coordination, I suppose, you could set up Augustine's description of the child sucking enviously and jealously at the breast. Interesting to think about the two together.

2. Discovering the authentic: nothing more difficult than being a baby. Or laughing or crying...but beyond that? That will only suffice for a moment, or a little while. Unless of course we are talking about achieving some state of bliss in which human purposes and intentions, etc., stop mattering. The difficulty, as I understand it, is establishing or creating or finding authenticity beyond that -- in language. Which is where we have human purposes and intentional actions and so on, in that other level of consensual coordination; and these purposes and actions sometimes conflict. So one way people have found around conflict is persuasion, rhetorical artifice, language that is usually slippery and has been problematic for philosophy/ontology since Plato.

3. I bring up Plato also because I wonder: what room is there in all this for rhetoricians, or actors, or people who pretend, or theater? What do you do with an actor in a T-group? Would he be a disruptive presence, as long as he was acting? What about a talented rhetorician, who talked in carefully balanced sentences, or employed elaborate figures of speech to lead people away from their own convictions and to his? There were good philosophical reasons for Platonic hostility to these types -- and to rhetoric and theatricality in general.

4. Your point about mechanical reproduction. What is the status of television in all this? Television, it seems, is incredibly problematic in this context. And you remind me of a passage I read just the other day in J.G. Ballard's The Kindness of Women. The main character is out for a walk with his children to a place they call "Magic World": it's a film and television lot, where the kids find big, oversize props to play in, etc.

The rectangular stages of Shepperton film studios rose above the trees. Their presence dominated the town as much of the marine world of the reservoirs. Many of the programmes we watched on television were filmed in
the streets of Shepperton, and its leafy avenues stood in for locations all over England. In Henry's intense four-year old mind, Shepperton had begun to colonise the whole country.

These confusions of image and illusion gave Shepperton its special charge, as if true reality rested in the merging of the two. Next door to us lived a married couple whose daughter was a minor television actress. Twice a week the children watched her appear in one of their favourite series, and sometimes would turn from the screen to see her in Charlton Road, stepping from her car on a family visit. Henry and Alice would rush out to greet her, taking for granted that her real character lay somewhere betweeen her fleeting street self and the far more solid broadcast figure on the screen.

And so on...This is set in the early 60s. Nowadays we all live in Shepperton, don't we? A TV set that has "colonised the whole country", where the "street self" is "fleeting" and the "broadcast figure" is taken to be
"more solid." TV validates and confers the status of reality on to things. Which, if you think about it for more than a second or two, makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

My reply was as follows:

1. The Augustine comparison works for me. I would say that both envy and jealousy originate with loving (I'm not envious or jealous of things I dislike). Augustine I believe views sin as "original" and (I think) more or less Platonically subjects the world to judgment relative to posited ideals. I would say instead that "sin" would begin with actions based on suppression or denial of the originary love -- this is basically Nietzsche's position on "ressentiment"; Nietzsche, though, seems to embrace animal instinct and make languaging secondary in a way that comes up short for me. (For me the whole orientation I'm taking is congruent with a post-Nietzschean, pragmaticist, Heideggerean or whatever-you-want-to-call-it turning away from metaphysics, i.e. from Platonism and traditional western rationality.)

2. Also coherent with this: Ong locates Plato in the transition from oral- to chirographic- (writing-based) thinking, suggesting that Plato idealizes "essence" on the model of writing: it becomes "as if" the words were there first -- i.e., for Plato, otherworldly ideas rather than experiential relations are posited as the origin and locus of the real (cp. Plato's own metaphor that represents the "ideal" realm's relation to the mundane as like the relation that the carpenter's "blueprints" have to the actual material bed that is produced from them). Mere worldly experience is subjective, second-rate, emotion-laden,etc.

I didn't intend a dichotomy between emotioning and languaging as you seem to have understood me. Languaging always occurs in and comes out of a context of emotioning - the baby, the body, the biology, is always there behind anyone's words, laughing or crying or otherwise, nor does it disappear in the languaging.

3. I've seen the acting and performance come up in t-group in interesting and productive ways. Whether it's a disturbance or not depends on the group and circumstances, I suppose. I've seen group members play with "performance" as a way of trying to expand and intensify their communicative repertoire - perhaps a useful skill-builder for inhibited, self-damping types.

4. I like the take on TV and Ballard's Shepperton story, which seems on point and right on the money. The world we experience is everywhere mediated by these television images coming in from on high, "colonising the whole country" and, now, even world. (The analphabetics above all are felled with shame over their simplicity, leaving their "old" world and "primitive" traditions of orality behind, aspiring to these wesetern images.) Television is huge here, and then there is the internet - how does that play in?