The dialogue continues. My friend's latest reply, followed by my response:
3. Forget skill building and role playing, etc.. This assumes good intentions. I'm wondering more about actors as pretenders. Liars. Sociopaths, even. People who are good enough actors to fake their way through a process like T group. Who can fake authenticity. Who use language to manipulate and take advantage of people committed to candor and self-discovery and disclosure. Iago. Or just people who are seeking their own advantage at the expense of the group.
I wonder what happens to the "arrangements to support authenticity" if you do not, or cannot, assume that everybody comes to the party with good intentions. Because I think you cannot.
4. A sentence in a later chapter of The Kindness of Women focuses the television point and might be a place to start talking about the internet. Ballard is again talking about the 1960s: "The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet and then redefined reality as itself."
My response:
First, briefly, I wasn't so much talking about "role" playing, I was talking about "playing" with different modes and levels of expression. But on to your main stuff.
What happens if you fake, pretend, lie in t-group? Well, if you are a good enough actor to fake your way through, then you fake your way through. That's totally okay and permissible, if that's the way someone wants to go. If someone pulls the wool over everyone's eyes, congratulations. But let me tell you that person would have to be a really, really good faker. And, the self's intentions aside, no matter how pure someone's intentions are when that someone says something, no matter how authentic he or she is being, there is likely someone in the t-group who is going to be suspicious of that person and their intentions, at least or especially early on in the group's life. That's an interesting discovery in t-group. Intentions don't really matter for anything until people have satisfied their criteria for trust (and people typically need to keep resatisfying those criteria over and over as a group changes and new topics and levels of intimacy are plumbed). Whether good or bad, a person's intention is only part of the equation* -- each of the other dozen or so participants also carries a part of the equation, that is, in how they receive that person's words or actions. (To recur to your example: Iago needn't have been much of a problem had Othello only received him differently.) Part of what's so cool about t-group is that it's not just two perspectives dealing with this sometimes insoluble issue of trust in a world where intentions can't be known for sure, it's 14 different perspectives.
[*The equation for what, you might ask? The equation of wordly reality. That is a part of what's going on here for me: we are working with the presumption, what if the determination of what is "real" were a wordly standard and not a subjective or objective standard? We can't know your intention. We achieve (or do not achieve) trust; we live in a state of trust, or we do not. The world comes into being through our interactions and the dynamics of our emotioning and through the assumptions that we knowingly and unknowingly share. Iago's intentions and actions were something. Othello's intentions, assumptions, emotions and actions in response were something too. The lived reality that came about as a consequence of the resulting actions is not reducible to the intentions by any means.]
I have considered "pretending" in t-group as an experiment (being very consciously false and "acting"), but I have never done it nor seen anyone try it that I'm aware of. I would need to think more about why I've so far decided not to do it. (Maybe I will bring the topic up overtly in a t-group sometime). Mostly, I think, I am afraid about breaching trust -- but it's a very interesting topic. It's important I think that t-group is all talk and relating, with no extrinsic reward beyond that. Thus there isn't really any "advantage" to be gained by faking or lying. It's not really necessary to lie in order to hide, because one can always set boundaries, openly or privately, in deciding what to reveal or not reveal. What motive would one have to fake, lie and pretend one's way "through t-group"? It seems the only possible motive would be a desire to be liked, loved or admired, and so it would be a self-defeating proposition. The t-group itself wouldn't need to care, really, if someone were, as you say, to try "faking authenticity." You get to do whatever you want in a t-group, and then you suffer the consequences in yourself and in your relations with others, whatever those consequences might be.
So what I'm realizing is that, contrary to your assertion, good intentions need not be assumed at all -- and, in fact, in the way the theory of the course is taught, they are explicitly not to be assumed (or rather, the key is to become more aware of when people are making assumptions, and more aware of the status of assumptions as such). Part of the model that the t-groups are based on says that intentions and motivations are known only to the individual (and even then sometimes not clearly so). All each of us has to go on to make sense of the actions and words of others are our own observations of extrinsic behavior, our own emotional responses to such behavior, and the thoughts and judgments that come up for us. You cannot really know someone's intentions.
Moreover or nonetheless, people in the group do make assumptions one way or another regarding people's intentions. Some are more apt to assume than others - usually at their peril. Sometimes the people in a group do in fact assume that a person is acting from bad intentions. Then the group works with that and its consequences. Liars and sociopaths do show up in t-group. People with mental instabilities show up. I've heard of some fairly dramatic cases. T-groups agree not to permit violence or abuse - the facilitator's baseline job is to protect people from abuse, to make sure no one gets run roughshod over in a harmful way. In rare cases, people do get run over. I've never heard of physical harm happening to anyone in a t-group, but I have heard of rare cases where people have been psychologically traumatized. The worst a sociopath could do is to gain trust, find a person's vulnerable spots, and go for as much blood as he or she can; if a person doesn't have the psychological resources to brush something like that off, a person could get hurt pretty bad, I suppose. Good intentions aren't assumed. For my own part, I am interested in being real and authentic, and I believe in my own good intentions, and I am interested in finding out how I sometimes get in the way of what I most want -- which is probably more often a matter of poor assumptions rather than poor intentions. [And that is a very key point.]
[Yes - it's more often a level of poor assumptions rather than poor intentions. This may be where writing, print and mechanically-reproduced thought introduce or amplify dangers. The act of speaking and the act of trust-making in the moment are severed from one another. Wisdom is "received" without necessarily being relearned in the moment or giving space for the examination of assumptions and responses. We are invaded by propoganda. We are fed assumptions as if they were truth.]
But reconsidering what you were saying, I could see this issue of good intentions being pressed at another level. Now I'm thinking that you were right all along in one sense. For there is a way in which -- despite everything I've just been saying and without I think undoing any of it -- there is a way in which good intentions are in fact necessarily assumed. For me, this goes back to that thing I recalled saying to you in the BART station a long time ago [see first posting in this series], and it recalls Maturana's words about the necessary preconditions for the emergence of languaging: people have to want to hang around with one another, or they must in fact spend a lot of time together getting to know and experience patterns of being together and mutually-responding to one another and to shared circumstances and experiences, before language can possibly emerge. Similarly, for a group to sit together in a circle and agree to conduct themselves in the way prescribed by t-group -- that takes a lot of assuming of good intentions. For two people to agree to sit at a table together in striking distance from one another, that assumes a certain level of safety and trust. (In the genteel worlds of Stanford and the Bay Area, that's not all so hard to arrive at; what about in a world at war? You might not be able to bring people together in such a circle at all, and if you got them there, they might not be able to hold back from violence. I don't know.)
At some level, if you are to have a world at all, you must assume good intentions, at least provisionally, with no guarantees. Finally, you have to live with yourself as a person who assumes good intentions or a person who chooses to prioritize and live with fear and suspicion.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
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?
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?
Friday, June 20, 2008
Part 2: Face-to-Face Democratic Culture (see 6/19 post)
A very dear and good friend of mine had some reservations about my earlier posting (June 19, on needing local institutions to develop face-to-face democratic culture). It seems what I said about "authenticity" didn't quite sit wholly right with him. Here's part of what he said:
My resistance, skepticism, fear, call it what you will --centers on two things:
1) the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that? how can we be sure we are not being caught up in language even as we do that? etc. etc.); once we are already thrown into the world of language and history (once we are historical subjects) is there any going back? Any way out?
2) It's worth considering that history provides some cautionary tales about people trying to get back to or usher the authentic into the world. It is, or it can be, a Utopian impulse. That's where I start to worry about bloodshed.
Here was my response to him:
I am recalling once when you and I were in a San Francisco BART station together, many years ago, and I had a flash of thinking, that every single "word" in our language -- because its usage rests at some level on a mutual agreement and on mutual listening and understanding -- at some level represents an instance of love. You really liked the thought. In response, you talked about Augustine's notion of community -- I think it was "things loved in common."
I like how Humberto Maturana talks about some of the preconditions of languaging in the loving relations of human animals. He has a wonderful piece about mother and child reflecting one another's movements and expressions, developing what he calls "consensual coordinations," and he talks about how it was necessary for human beings to live together a long time in groups in stabilizing consensual coordinations before languaging could emerge -- on top of that, as it were, as a basis -- as consensual coordinations of these consensual coordinations. I.e., our shared knowing of shared patterns of experience is a necessary precondition for talking, and talking itself is a consensual coordination relative to such shared experiencing.
As to the difficulty of finding or discovering the authentic -- first, it's not something difficult; not in the way I mean it. It's in fact the easiest, most natural and most ordinary way of our being. We are not talking about something esoteric to be arrived at. I am not talking about anything more difficult than being a baby, or being an adult and having a good laugh or a good cry or a fear -- and when did anyone need to "be sure" he or she was "not being caught up in language even as we do that"? My interest has little to do with fear of being caught up in something or in somehow getting out of or away from language. My dad said "be a doctor or a lawyer, so you get respect." That was language. I was aware at some point I didn't feel good about accepting that advice. You could say, I suppose, that the "not feeling good" came from some perspective "outside" of my dad's languaging. Bush says "they want to kill us because they hate our freedom." That's language too. Sure there are cautionary tales and it's possible to construe any talk about authenticity (or about anything else) as something scary and worrisome. A utopian impulse, I take it, signifies a mismatch between ideal and practical, with potentially dangerous consequences. Yes, that can be very dangerous. Sounds like authentic fear. So where if anywhere is there room to talk about love and community?
My response to your question -- "the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that?)" -- is what I was writing about in the first place. My talk about "how we do that" has had to do with the importance of orality and face to face relating in a culture of "mechanical reproduction" (to use Benjamin's term), in an age of mechanically-reproduced and promulgated words and images. So I am making specific proposals about arrangements to support authenticity.
"Authenticity" is a word popularized in philosophy by the early Heidegger of Being and Time. It also happens to be a big t-group word. 14 people sitting face to face in a circle, speaking and being present to one another, processing together their responses to one another, their feelings, their judgments regarding one another's purported authenticity, regarding involuntary outbursts, etc. I can never fully be "sure" of another's authenticity. I can never really be "sure" of my own. Simply raising the question, I know, introduces the uncertainty. But I also have known many moments where the question is not there and I am being in the moment, enjoying and loving being with others. T-groups are one place I have seen whole groups move over time from a place of anxiety and caution to an increasing sense of safety and intimacy, playfulness and love.
Are we naturally loving animals? Delight is natural and reactive, and opens us towards the other. Fear is natural and reactive, and we flee or fight. We want love. Do we desire fear? My sense is that we are drawn forward, all of us, by a desire for engaged concord.
My resistance, skepticism, fear, call it what you will --centers on two things:
1) the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that? how can we be sure we are not being caught up in language even as we do that? etc. etc.); once we are already thrown into the world of language and history (once we are historical subjects) is there any going back? Any way out?
2) It's worth considering that history provides some cautionary tales about people trying to get back to or usher the authentic into the world. It is, or it can be, a Utopian impulse. That's where I start to worry about bloodshed.
Here was my response to him:
I am recalling once when you and I were in a San Francisco BART station together, many years ago, and I had a flash of thinking, that every single "word" in our language -- because its usage rests at some level on a mutual agreement and on mutual listening and understanding -- at some level represents an instance of love. You really liked the thought. In response, you talked about Augustine's notion of community -- I think it was "things loved in common."
I like how Humberto Maturana talks about some of the preconditions of languaging in the loving relations of human animals. He has a wonderful piece about mother and child reflecting one another's movements and expressions, developing what he calls "consensual coordinations," and he talks about how it was necessary for human beings to live together a long time in groups in stabilizing consensual coordinations before languaging could emerge -- on top of that, as it were, as a basis -- as consensual coordinations of these consensual coordinations. I.e., our shared knowing of shared patterns of experience is a necessary precondition for talking, and talking itself is a consensual coordination relative to such shared experiencing.
As to the difficulty of finding or discovering the authentic -- first, it's not something difficult; not in the way I mean it. It's in fact the easiest, most natural and most ordinary way of our being. We are not talking about something esoteric to be arrived at. I am not talking about anything more difficult than being a baby, or being an adult and having a good laugh or a good cry or a fear -- and when did anyone need to "be sure" he or she was "not being caught up in language even as we do that"? My interest has little to do with fear of being caught up in something or in somehow getting out of or away from language. My dad said "be a doctor or a lawyer, so you get respect." That was language. I was aware at some point I didn't feel good about accepting that advice. You could say, I suppose, that the "not feeling good" came from some perspective "outside" of my dad's languaging. Bush says "they want to kill us because they hate our freedom." That's language too. Sure there are cautionary tales and it's possible to construe any talk about authenticity (or about anything else) as something scary and worrisome. A utopian impulse, I take it, signifies a mismatch between ideal and practical, with potentially dangerous consequences. Yes, that can be very dangerous. Sounds like authentic fear. So where if anywhere is there room to talk about love and community?
My response to your question -- "the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that?)" -- is what I was writing about in the first place. My talk about "how we do that" has had to do with the importance of orality and face to face relating in a culture of "mechanical reproduction" (to use Benjamin's term), in an age of mechanically-reproduced and promulgated words and images. So I am making specific proposals about arrangements to support authenticity.
"Authenticity" is a word popularized in philosophy by the early Heidegger of Being and Time. It also happens to be a big t-group word. 14 people sitting face to face in a circle, speaking and being present to one another, processing together their responses to one another, their feelings, their judgments regarding one another's purported authenticity, regarding involuntary outbursts, etc. I can never fully be "sure" of another's authenticity. I can never really be "sure" of my own. Simply raising the question, I know, introduces the uncertainty. But I also have known many moments where the question is not there and I am being in the moment, enjoying and loving being with others. T-groups are one place I have seen whole groups move over time from a place of anxiety and caution to an increasing sense of safety and intimacy, playfulness and love.
Are we naturally loving animals? Delight is natural and reactive, and opens us towards the other. Fear is natural and reactive, and we flee or fight. We want love. Do we desire fear? My sense is that we are drawn forward, all of us, by a desire for engaged concord.
Mistaking My Hats for My Mind - Part 2
Optional title: "The Skewered Self's Friendly Jesters"
My friend who lost her mind and then found it again wrote me a note saying she liked my post about minds and hats. This was my response to her:
Just as, when you were recently expressing a knowing that your recent dark period would pass -- even while you were in the midst of it -- and I appreciated the power of that knowing, so I find, in allowing that there are many minds that take me up at different times, a certain relief — a freedom from the impulse schooled in me to point to and evaluate a presumed singular self. Instead, I start to entertain a new image, of selves and perspectives as stepping stones I can skip among, maybe ever more deftly and with wider and wider freedom of movement and dance.
How often I paralyze myself when asked a question: what are you feeling, why did you say that? Gasp. I presume a singular self that must or should have a singular response: I presume a why that will pin me to a place like a bug or butterfly in a box. When and if I shake the paralysis, I begin to see all the many layers of self and feeling always that are there, and that seem to appear in the instant I look for them, and I feel relief to discover my own plurality, that every self skewered by a pointing finger is accompanied by a merry bunch of open-armed jesters.
My friend who lost her mind and then found it again wrote me a note saying she liked my post about minds and hats. This was my response to her:
Just as, when you were recently expressing a knowing that your recent dark period would pass -- even while you were in the midst of it -- and I appreciated the power of that knowing, so I find, in allowing that there are many minds that take me up at different times, a certain relief — a freedom from the impulse schooled in me to point to and evaluate a presumed singular self. Instead, I start to entertain a new image, of selves and perspectives as stepping stones I can skip among, maybe ever more deftly and with wider and wider freedom of movement and dance.
How often I paralyze myself when asked a question: what are you feeling, why did you say that? Gasp. I presume a singular self that must or should have a singular response: I presume a why that will pin me to a place like a bug or butterfly in a box. When and if I shake the paralysis, I begin to see all the many layers of self and feeling always that are there, and that seem to appear in the instant I look for them, and I feel relief to discover my own plurality, that every self skewered by a pointing finger is accompanied by a merry bunch of open-armed jesters.
Mistaking My Hats for My Mind
A friend told me she had lost her mind again. I told her that I keep misplacing mine as well, over and over, and am glad then to keep finding it again, as seems to happen if I'll just agree to take my turn waiting for it to show up once more.
However, there has been a new awareness of late. As I've lost and rediscovered my mind on recurring occasions over recent weeks, I have been remarking a note of lingering puzzlement -- this is a note that may have always sounded in the past, but that I haven't really bothered to pay attention to. The puzzlement is that, having refound my mind enough times after sinking into confusion and sometimes despair, I am no longer sure that it's my mind that I've found. Am I this happy and engaged one, or am I the despairing one? Am I the one engaged in this way, or in one of the other ways? Is it my "mind" that I am occupying? Or perhaps it's that I have several minds that I take up in alternation. It's all rather confusing. Then I start to ask myself, how do I know that any of these minds I occupy is mine?
Oliver Sacks wrote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. I am the man who mistakes or takes -- I'm not sure which -- my minds for hats. I wonder which hat most suits me? I certainly look better in some than others. I would say that I change minds like hats, except that on further reflection it seems to be the minds that do the changing, not me. I don't take up my mind, it takes me up. I don't find it, it finds me. I simply seem to suffer the consequences of looking differently. (Whether "looking" is here active or passive seems to be part of the question).
Now I wonder: either this means that I'm a hat being tried by different minds, or it means that the hats are the ones in control.
Goodness me. Look at this. I don't know if I'm a mind or a hat, or whether any one of one belongs properly to any one of the others, or whether this is all a wondrous game of shapes and colors at play.
However, there has been a new awareness of late. As I've lost and rediscovered my mind on recurring occasions over recent weeks, I have been remarking a note of lingering puzzlement -- this is a note that may have always sounded in the past, but that I haven't really bothered to pay attention to. The puzzlement is that, having refound my mind enough times after sinking into confusion and sometimes despair, I am no longer sure that it's my mind that I've found. Am I this happy and engaged one, or am I the despairing one? Am I the one engaged in this way, or in one of the other ways? Is it my "mind" that I am occupying? Or perhaps it's that I have several minds that I take up in alternation. It's all rather confusing. Then I start to ask myself, how do I know that any of these minds I occupy is mine?
Oliver Sacks wrote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. I am the man who mistakes or takes -- I'm not sure which -- my minds for hats. I wonder which hat most suits me? I certainly look better in some than others. I would say that I change minds like hats, except that on further reflection it seems to be the minds that do the changing, not me. I don't take up my mind, it takes me up. I don't find it, it finds me. I simply seem to suffer the consequences of looking differently. (Whether "looking" is here active or passive seems to be part of the question).
Now I wonder: either this means that I'm a hat being tried by different minds, or it means that the hats are the ones in control.
Goodness me. Look at this. I don't know if I'm a mind or a hat, or whether any one of one belongs properly to any one of the others, or whether this is all a wondrous game of shapes and colors at play.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Part 1: Face to Face Democratic Culture -- Another Take on Why We Need Local Institutions to Develop Face to Face Democratic Culture
I’m going to go on a a thought-riff here and thought I would share – don’t know if you will be able to make it through, though.
I just now finished a delicious read about the transition from oral cultures to writing- and print-based cultures. (It’s my second book on the subject – this one is “ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind” by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. I have a third in line: “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,” by Benedict Anderson. The first was “Orality and Literacy,” by Walter Ong.)
I love this stuff because it is deeply related to how I understand my own vision and work, and touches on why I deem it of such central importance to our world that we create institutions for the development and cultivation of face-to-face local democratic culture.
In part ABC is about how the establishment of State power required the invention of print and how, with the standardization of writing that print was able to enforce and which (in the form of “grammatical correctness”) won the culture over as a shared “value,” the “nation” itself first becomes possible as a political entity. (Benedict Anderson will call the “nation” an “imagined community” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion [through the nation]. ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are (and perhaps even these) are imagined.”
My sense is that all of this is profoundly connected to Heidegger’s characterization of the modern age as the era in which truth becomes identified with “the certainty of representation.” Illich and Sanders say something similar when they characterize the modern era as an age of “literacy,” an age that lives as though represented words on the page (e.g. of newspapers and laws and standardized texts, etc.) were primary and not secondary. Bush says there is a terrorist threat, and “ta da” there is — fear rises up everywhere in self-fulfilling response and the country and world are reorganized.
Such an age is one in which adequation to norms, standards and models (i.e. conformity to published standards of success, conduct, beauty, status, etc.) is strongly enforced, putting psychic pressure on the self — we are all judged by the centralized eye that has arisen thanks largely to trans-communal print culture.
This is particularly a disaster for many where the norms of conformance and privilege include biological features such as skin color — i.e. there is an inherent racism (which goes beyond skin color to the deepest unseen parts of every self) in the measuring of authentic reality according to artificial standards of value (which are presumed to be essential truths but are in fact socially constructed). What our culture lacks therefore are organized institutions for the celebration and surfacing of the ab- pre- or sub-normal, which is the ground out of which all norms arise and which is also the unspoken, living, fiery ground that keeps us aware of the artificial nature of all our norms and rules and languagings, which awareness is our opening into constant love and creation together.
All this is of a piece: economics and society got reorganized in conformity with the factory form and technological reproduction, both made possible on the basis of standardized models realized mechanically in productive machinery. Standardized reproducibility became the standard of scientific truth (reproducible experiments, reproducibly represented) and of technological progress — these notions of power and truth became the consensus around which thought and culture begin to reorganize themselves, leading however to something like what Nietzsche called nihilism: i.e., to a crisis of authenticity. The crisis of authenticity was fated, of course, due to the self measuring itself relative to promulgated models while having no forums for the individual to manifest or risk touching the extra-normal, for fear of being scapegoated. The uniqueness of the individual self’s experience has been put out of bounds, such that the authentic self has no opportunity to exercise influence and therefore no means of gaining unique identity through public action — the authentic self relying on upwelling, unwilled, “risky” experience in the presence of others. The channels must be reopened that allow and encourage the touch between the deep authentic unique self and the wider public and its thinking.
A few excerpts from Illich and Saunders, who talk about how there was no such thing as “correct” spelling until quite recently in history, i.e. after the promulgation of cheap printed materials and then of dictionaries, etc. -- a phenomenon that Sanders and Illich associate with the “bureaucratization of language.”
Mark Twain in Huck Finn, the authors suggest, intentionally reproduces Huck’s words with oral-dialect-like “misspellings,” e.g. “sivilization,” to thematize the coincidence of established power, privilege and “progress” with the enforcement of rules of correct writing and grammar. What do advertisements today do but ceaselessly promulgate norms, standards, aspirations to privilege and consumption?
A few excerpts from one passage of _ABC_:
“the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson ... Both set out to civilize Huck by teaching him the rules. ... In this emerging world of literacy, correct spelling offers the key to the correct look of literacy, the visual check on a person’s education, in much the same way that skin color is a key in this book to freedom or slavery.”
“Anyone who is able to read Huck Finn is obviously literate, literate enough to harbor the impulse to correct Huck’s mistakes, for the mistakes loom as boulders impeding the smooth and steady flow of the reader’s fluency. ... [Thus] this book forces us to read in an aristocratic way .... The inner self that sits in judgment, silently corrects Huck’s speech.”
“There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can’t, for ironic example, read this marvelous work .... And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters. ... By the end of the 19th century, very little territory remained. Only small pockets of orality still survive in the country—mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly black. The rest is literate in the most sweeping way.”
I just now finished a delicious read about the transition from oral cultures to writing- and print-based cultures. (It’s my second book on the subject – this one is “ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind” by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. I have a third in line: “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,” by Benedict Anderson. The first was “Orality and Literacy,” by Walter Ong.)
I love this stuff because it is deeply related to how I understand my own vision and work, and touches on why I deem it of such central importance to our world that we create institutions for the development and cultivation of face-to-face local democratic culture.
In part ABC is about how the establishment of State power required the invention of print and how, with the standardization of writing that print was able to enforce and which (in the form of “grammatical correctness”) won the culture over as a shared “value,” the “nation” itself first becomes possible as a political entity. (Benedict Anderson will call the “nation” an “imagined community” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion [through the nation]. ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are (and perhaps even these) are imagined.”
My sense is that all of this is profoundly connected to Heidegger’s characterization of the modern age as the era in which truth becomes identified with “the certainty of representation.” Illich and Sanders say something similar when they characterize the modern era as an age of “literacy,” an age that lives as though represented words on the page (e.g. of newspapers and laws and standardized texts, etc.) were primary and not secondary. Bush says there is a terrorist threat, and “ta da” there is — fear rises up everywhere in self-fulfilling response and the country and world are reorganized.
Such an age is one in which adequation to norms, standards and models (i.e. conformity to published standards of success, conduct, beauty, status, etc.) is strongly enforced, putting psychic pressure on the self — we are all judged by the centralized eye that has arisen thanks largely to trans-communal print culture.
This is particularly a disaster for many where the norms of conformance and privilege include biological features such as skin color — i.e. there is an inherent racism (which goes beyond skin color to the deepest unseen parts of every self) in the measuring of authentic reality according to artificial standards of value (which are presumed to be essential truths but are in fact socially constructed). What our culture lacks therefore are organized institutions for the celebration and surfacing of the ab- pre- or sub-normal, which is the ground out of which all norms arise and which is also the unspoken, living, fiery ground that keeps us aware of the artificial nature of all our norms and rules and languagings, which awareness is our opening into constant love and creation together.
All this is of a piece: economics and society got reorganized in conformity with the factory form and technological reproduction, both made possible on the basis of standardized models realized mechanically in productive machinery. Standardized reproducibility became the standard of scientific truth (reproducible experiments, reproducibly represented) and of technological progress — these notions of power and truth became the consensus around which thought and culture begin to reorganize themselves, leading however to something like what Nietzsche called nihilism: i.e., to a crisis of authenticity. The crisis of authenticity was fated, of course, due to the self measuring itself relative to promulgated models while having no forums for the individual to manifest or risk touching the extra-normal, for fear of being scapegoated. The uniqueness of the individual self’s experience has been put out of bounds, such that the authentic self has no opportunity to exercise influence and therefore no means of gaining unique identity through public action — the authentic self relying on upwelling, unwilled, “risky” experience in the presence of others. The channels must be reopened that allow and encourage the touch between the deep authentic unique self and the wider public and its thinking.
A few excerpts from Illich and Saunders, who talk about how there was no such thing as “correct” spelling until quite recently in history, i.e. after the promulgation of cheap printed materials and then of dictionaries, etc. -- a phenomenon that Sanders and Illich associate with the “bureaucratization of language.”
Mark Twain in Huck Finn, the authors suggest, intentionally reproduces Huck’s words with oral-dialect-like “misspellings,” e.g. “sivilization,” to thematize the coincidence of established power, privilege and “progress” with the enforcement of rules of correct writing and grammar. What do advertisements today do but ceaselessly promulgate norms, standards, aspirations to privilege and consumption?
A few excerpts from one passage of _ABC_:
“the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson ... Both set out to civilize Huck by teaching him the rules. ... In this emerging world of literacy, correct spelling offers the key to the correct look of literacy, the visual check on a person’s education, in much the same way that skin color is a key in this book to freedom or slavery.”
“Anyone who is able to read Huck Finn is obviously literate, literate enough to harbor the impulse to correct Huck’s mistakes, for the mistakes loom as boulders impeding the smooth and steady flow of the reader’s fluency. ... [Thus] this book forces us to read in an aristocratic way .... The inner self that sits in judgment, silently corrects Huck’s speech.”
“There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can’t, for ironic example, read this marvelous work .... And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters. ... By the end of the 19th century, very little territory remained. Only small pockets of orality still survive in the country—mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly black. The rest is literate in the most sweeping way.”
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