Ian Svenonius is an American vocalist for various Washington, D.C. rock groups including The Make-Up, Nation of Ulysses, Weird War, and Chain and The Gang. Svenonius is also a published author and an online talk show host known for his outspoken political agendas.
In ‘The Psychic Soviet’, comprising of nineteen essays, the preface of the book instructs that it "should clear up much of the confusion regarding events of the last millennium"[1] and encourages the reader to "refer to the book in case of ethical quandaries, arguments, and social feuds"[2] .
In the text, Svenonius makes a compelling argument that all cultures chose a certain beverage for their epoch, and that this drink represents the “blood of their vanquished foe”[3].
The entire book is written in a loose, informal manner with no use of footnotes or references, which increases the readability but makes some of his connections and related conclusions questionable. His mode of thought, at least on this subject, remains subjective, yet he relies on a range of historical examples to prove his point. In the reading, imperialism and all accompanying drinks are reassessed as “mass hysteria for the imbibing of a particular beverage or substance”. More importantly, it is pointed out in numerous instances that these products were instrumental in the continuation of the illustrated empire and in the servitude of the people of the newly conquered land that produces the necessary ingredients. Thus, Svenonius hints that the “taste still reflects the power imparted by the struggle”[4] and so the subconscious fratricide is embedded in a nation’s penchant for a respective product.
Though I find Svenonius’ concept interesting, and agree that it may well have been true for certain nations and time, the comparison to modern day, multi-national companies such as Coca-cola, does not abide to this view. Although certain products such as Starbucks coffee and Coke may well represent American empiralization in other countries, their spread across the globe, and their imitations, causes doubt as to whether new consumers are really metaphorically drinking the blood of their enemies.
Mass hysteria leads to embellishment and popularization of folklore legends, but arguably there must be some type of event to cause such rumors. Because Svenonius uses Vampirism in his chapter title, it is important to remember that the modern concept of such a creature was largely created in 1819 with the publication of ‘The Vampyre’ by John Polidori. This was then solidified by Bram Stoker's 1897 novel ‘Dracula’ that is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and established the genre. But tales of supernatural beings consuming the blood of the living have been found in nearly every nation around the world, and is largely due to the fact that this did actually occur in most cultures. Yet, almost every nation has associated blood drinking with some kind of revenant, demon, or deity; such as the Indian Goddess Kali, or the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. In any case, blood drinking and cannibalism has existed within humankind for millennia, and the notion of it (which includes inventing a malevolent presence who is primarily known for this, and which is made to disgust the cultured person) continues into contemporary settings. Thus, the cultured public is removed from this act, because it refers to a less civilized, gorier history. By attributing these deeds to an evil creature or a fearsome divine being, the culture positions itself away from such barbarous acts as being acceptable by that society.
“...while Stoker’s Dracula per se addresses the genetic concerns of the European upper classes, vampirism - an ancient legend shared by many different cultures - is also a mass movement, enjoyed by every conquering race.”[5]
What Svenonius compels the reader to realize, is that although humankind has largely purged this practice and given the literal act a sinister name, the instinct resides within popular culture and is acted out through an array of products that carry this residual urge. In much the same way that the legends of vampires became so pervasive, so too have certain beverages been adopted by cultures as a reflection of their identity, and by extension, their superiority over their acquired territories.
Starbucks has managed to make dark-roasted beans fashionable, though it sweetens its brew with steamed milk, blended ice, and various flavors to please American palates.
Several Starbuck cafes were vandalized during the WTO meeting held in Seattle in late 1999, and were due to the activist groups that actively criticize the company for their fair-trade policies, labor relations, and environmental impact. These groups perceive this company as a prime example of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism. Starbucks maintains their dominant market position by buying out competitors' leases, operating at a loss intentionally, and assembling several locations in one area. It is also alleged that Starbucks sends part of its profits to the Israeli military, and although Starbucks refutes this, these allegations began when Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was awarded "The Israel 50th Anniversary Tribute Award"[6] for "playing a key role in promoting a close alliance between the United States and Israel."[7] In response to these allegations Starbucks issued a statement saying “Neither Chairman Howard Schultz nor Starbucks fund or support the Israeli Army. Starbucks is a non-political organization and does not support individual political causes.”[8]
In January 9, 2009, Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi accused Starbucks of supporting Israeli education and the Israeli Army on Al Jazeera television. Then, on January 25th 2009, Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi claimed that the Starbucks's "siren" logo is a depiction of an ancient Jewish queen Esther, and then called for Muslims to boycott all Starbucks coffee shops in the Arab world.
Whether these allegations are true does not deter from the fact that Starbucks is an American multi-national corporation, and has the perceived notion of contributing to neocolonialism. By replacing existing food or traditional beverages with a new franchise, America is using their food and brands to not drink the blood of their enemies so much as perform a ‘blood diffusion procedure’ via food.
“The importance of food to the history of the early empire is incontestable. The English, and later British, penchant for sweet, hot beverages helped to fuel the empire’s expansion into Asia, transformed the ecosystems of large swathes of the Americas and doomed millions of Africans and their descendants to slavery.”[9]
Though Svenonius notes that “the drinks at this juncture of American history are indisputably coffee from Starbucks and the vodka of Absolut”[10] there is no denying the impact of Coca-cola. Infact, it is more interesting to realize it is has established itself more as an international drink than strictly American, even in ‘developing’ countries. Responses to Starbucks and Coca-cola are caused because of residual hatred toward similar products in former empires. Though they may not directly support the American government or the armies of its allies, they do rely on natural resources from other ‘periphery’ regions where labor costs are low, and sell these products to both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations that actually rely on this behavior.
Dependency theory assists in describing the concept of economic neocolonialism. This social science theory is based on the notion that there is a center of wealthy states and a periphery of underdeveloped states that provide the raw materials / resources and cheap labor. The profit from these products flow towards the center in order to sustain their wealth and economic growth. Also, the wealthy states restrict their peripheries access to advanced production techniques that could develop their own economies, thus remaining dependent.
"Underdevelopment', or distorted development, brings a dangerous specialization in raw materials, inherent in which is the threat of hunger for all our peoples. We, the 'underdeveloped', are also those with the single crop, the single product, the single market. A single product whose uncertain sale depends on a single market imposing and fixing conditions. That is the great formula for imperialist economic domination."
— Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary, 1961 [11]
Coca-cola is the top global brand. Of the top ten, seven are based in the United States; of the twenty-five biggest companies, thirteen are American[12] . Coca-cola is viewed as a symbol of American dominance and influence, like fast-food restaurant chains or cafes. More than any other artifact, coke has blended modern, popular culture with an emblematic, commercial product. The resonance of emotional significance coke has for Americans is comparable to their Bill of Rights: “Would it be rewrite the constitution? The Bible? To me, changing the Coke formula is of such a serious nature.” (Pendergrast, 2000: 356)[13]
Coca-cola is often referred to as an example of a ‘universally standardized global product’[14] in contrast to products that are tailored to specific market. But is it really ‘universally standardized’ if it contains different sweeteners in the countries where it is produced? The answer is that it is more brand than ingredients. What the brand represents is the same pillar to the North American empire that tobacco once held.
But if Svenonius is to believe that Starbucks coffee and Coca-cola really represent “the blood of their vanquished foe” from “recent conquests”, the model becomes problematic when strict enemies of that empire drink also from this “war booty”. Although it is obvious that this is advantageous to the empire in question, the spread of consumers for these markets could arguably be categorized as part of that empire. This of course has not gone unnoticed, and anti-American sentiment has led to what Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Like all world societies, Muslim societies have lived in an evermore co modified community since American products having entered the Middle East after the Second World War and various oil ventures in the area.
Boycotting of American brands, motioned by influential religious leaders such as Safwat Higazi, is a response to imperialism. The creation of a competing product, like Mecca-cola is a much more complex response than that of refraining; (ironically a common theme in Muslim religion). Upon realizing the impact of supporting a product such as Coca-cola, but admitting that it fills a niche market in certain growing cities (Dubai), Mecca-cola has created as a zeitgeist to the ‘McDonaldization’ of the region. Mecca-cola is an unabashed imitation of coke in taste and appearance, “fraught with Muslim symbolism yet encased in the insignia of American capitalism”[15] , but its real appeal is its political opposition. Ten percent of its profit goes toward charities in Palestinian territories, and another ten percent are dedicated to international peace-orientated non-government organization in Europe. The label reads: “Don’t drink stupid, drink committed”. Thus, the beverage distances itself from the ‘stupid’ authentic, imperialistic coke, while existing as both a substitution and a gesture. More importantly than anything else, by mentioning the causes it supports, it infers that Coca-cola represent and cause those very concerns.
This example does not fit well into Svenonius’ concept mentioned in ‘The Bloody Latté’ although it does apply to and explain other more socially scientific models such as Dependency Theory. Although Starbucks and Coca-cola represent cultural imperialism to many, and Muslim religious leaders believe they support military action too, the analogy that Svenonius makes only really conforms in a world before world-wide franchises, global markets and air freighted products. However, his concept does shed light on the distance all cultures have made from the vampirism, yet the substitution of this residual instinct is carried out by nation specific products. However, when these products spread, as Western dominance has in the past fifty years, to encroach on most of the globe, and when these products are infact more dominant than the culture they represent and originate from, the blood analogy must be reassessed. The spread of Starbucks and Coca-cola has been perceived as merely the repackaging of cultural imperialism, and so a challenging civilization defies its power by creating a proudly un-American product to replace it or at least draw attention to the politics surrounding the primary from what it is based. If Coke really is the blood of the enemies of the empire, these enemies have made every attempt to maintain the look and flavor of their own blood to defiantly drink.
But it is more likely that these products are no longer blood but their brands are infact symbols to denote faith, commitment and consciousness of the very concepts that Svenonious mentions that had more relevance in a former age.
[1] Svenonius, Ian The Psychic Soviet New York: Drag City Inc., 2006, p 1
[2] ibid, p 1
[3] ibid, p 35
[4] ibid, p 38
[5] Svenonius, p 43
[6] http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-starbucks.html
[7] http://web.archive.org/web/20010502093522/www.starbucks.com/aboutus/recognition.asp?cookie_test=1
[8] http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/starbucks-ceo-calls-himself-%E2%80%98an-active-zionist%E2%80%99-but-can-you-find-it-anywhere-on-the-web/
[9] Bickham, Troy Past and Present, no 198 (Feb. 2008) Oxford: Past and Present Society Publishing, 2008, p 2
[10] Svenonius, p 35
[11] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Che_Guevara
[12] http://www.interbrand.com/best_global_brands.aspx Best Global Brands, 2008 Ranking
[13] Ram, Uri “Liquid Identities: Mecca Cola versus Coca-Cola” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2007; 10; 465, p 471
[14] ed., Bonanno, Alessandro; Busch, Lawrence; Friedland, William H.; Gouveia, Lourdes; Mingione, Enzo, eds. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994, p 11
[15] Ram, p 468
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
In Response to Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression”: The Death of God through the Limits of Sexual Language
In ‘A Preface to Transgression’, Foucault translates the sexual revolution as the extension of sexuality to its absolute limits, instead of any perceived liberation.
He mentions how sex has, via Freud, been utilized to take us to the limit of our consciousness; and the limit of the law, as he regards sex the “sole substance of universal taboos”[1]. Foucault also saw the sexual liberation of the 1960’s taking culture to the restriction of communication too, yet hoping that it can “at last emerge[d] in the clear light of language.”[2] Foucault is directing his readers away from the illusion that sex had begun to be reassessed as a natural process, and rather as an inevitable process of extension to these confining extremes. This is a recurring theme of Foucault’s rhetoric: the denouncing of the liberation of nature; or rather, denouncing the belief that a natural process has been liberated during the sexual revolution. Moreover, Foucault did not even believe in any aspect of human existence even capable of true freedom, as “...no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating.”[3]
It is important to understand the rest of the text, in that he also saw the notion of the ‘true self’ merely a construct of power, established by authorities. In this response, I am attempting to equate that term with specific language utilized by the Church: the soul. In relating this to the text, Foucault claims that the ‘true self’ or personal life is not really political by itself, “...but that we need to analyze all the ways in which the conduct of government was linked to the government of conduct, ... such that the soul of the citizen is at stake in even the most mundane of governmental policies.”[4]
I must also mention that although I am attempting to connect Foucault’s theories on the infinite, the death of God with sexual language limitations, many still perceive his main correspondence with finiteness to space and power, not religion.
“For Foucault, the experience of finiteness became a philosophical incitement. He viewed the power of contingency, which he ultimately identified with power per se, more from a stoical perspective than from the Christian frame of reference.”[5]
Foucault regarded power and knowledge, since the Enlightenment, as mutually beneficial and complicit. For him, even philosophy was guilty of domination over the public, by being respected as an ‘official’ knowledge that filtered, selected, prioriritized and censored. All institutionalized knowledge was an instrument of power that could categorize the criminal, mad or sexually abnormal. Foucault, like Jean-François Lyotard, questioned the progress of the Enlightenment and its ‘grand narratives’ that enabled power centres to label individuals as irregular. Surveillance is certainly a recurring matter of Foucault’s writings, but he regards faith in Christianity as a form of crowd control, that he refers to as ‘capillary’ like.
“But in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”[6]
Foucault applied Nietzsche’s concept of ‘genealogy’ to carry out his socio-historical analyses, such as moral prejudices, especially in regard to Christianity. Foucault has used this method of research in sociology to study histories of sexual ‘abnormality’ and appropriate punishment throughout history.
Foucault combines sexual expression through language and the power of institutionalized religion with the example of “the Christian world of fallen bodies and sin.”[7] He believed that language was never so perfectly matched to sexual crimes as during the domination of the Church during “... the middle ages [when] there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places...”[8] In other writings he has deftly compared modern surveillance with older forms of crowd control such as faith and fear, as these were “...more efficient and profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under the surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty.”[9]
These belief systems constituted by organized religion during the medieval, used biblical language to convey punishment in vivid detail, yet were surrounded in ambiguous mysticism. Georges Bataille was relatively ignored during his lifetime and scorned and labeled as an advocate of mysticism by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, (largely due to his concept of base materialism that defied strict definition). This theory likewise attempts to disrupt and explain hierarchies, but using atomist metaphors. Unlike Foucault, Bataille’s concept favors limitless possibilities rather than relying on causality.
Paradoxically, Foucault notes how desire and the erotic lead to a centre of “a divine love of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon itself.”[10]
It is through being ‘denatured’ by liberated language that modern sexuality has been characterized, utilizing the violence used by such dialect to denote it and decipher it. Thus, it is through its limits that it is re-established as modern and impossible of further extension or translation.
Foucault often referred to disciplines as inscribing forms in the body making use of a language of violence and imposition. These thoughts are arguably an extension of the Frankfurt School.
Therefore, a sexually freed language, does not tell of natural human urges, or anthropological truisms, but rather states that it can all exist without God - “the speech given to sexuality is contemporaneous both in time and in structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is dead.”[11]
Foucault urges the reader to equate the death of God, and freedom from damning religion, with the transgression that sexual language has experienced. Emancipated from obligation, yet taken to its extreme, sexuality had managed to assist in the death of God. This is primarily because God has eternally represented the infinite. Because sexuality expresses its own finiteness while destabilizing the influence of religion “...the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation that at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.”[12]
Foucault mentions Marquis de Sade as the beginning of modern sexuality, not only for his writings (sexual expression through language) but his pursuit of pleasure unrestrained by religion and law. Because he was imprisoned for his acts, yet wrote of them explicitly (and articulated the corrupt values of the elite) he became revered by many, including Bataille and Foucault, as a hero for artists struggling against censorship, and by extension, the Church.
Like most of Foucault’s writing, this text is based on the interrelation of power and knowledge, and specifically the language used by the medieval Church not only constructed an illusion of the ‘true self’ or soul, but used that concept through violent language to control the faithful. Much of this control was used to strengthen the Church’s revenue, and a common theme was the sin of what they deemed irregular sexual practice.
With the supposed sexual revolution, Foucault readdresses these issues, and translates the revolution rather as taking sexuality to its extremes. It is through this extension, that the very notion of infiniteness has been disrupted and therefore also God: the embodiment of the infinite. As well as Freud and Sade, Foucault has mentioned Galileo’s contribution to this death too:
“For the real scandal in Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space.”[13]
But, he notes that this death is not “the end of a historical reign”[14] but rather the heralding of a new age in the “now-constant space of our experience”[15] which is devoid of the limitless.
[1] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[2] Ibid, p 69
[3] ed. Rabinow, Paul Practices and Knowledge Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1984, p 245
[4] ed. Barry, Andrew; Osbourne, Thomas; Rose, Nikolas Foucault & Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government; Mitchell, Dean “For a Political Ontology of Ourselves and Our Present” London: UCL Press Limited, 1986, p 212
[5] ed. Hoy, David Couzens Foucault: A Critical Reader New York: Basil Blackwood Inc, 1986, p 103
[6] ed. Gordon, Colin Michel Foucault: Power / Knowledge New York: Pathenon books, 1980, p 39
[7] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[8] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[9] Gordon et al, p 38
[10] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[11] ibid, p 69
[12] ibid, p 70
[13] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[14] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[15] Ibid, p 71
He mentions how sex has, via Freud, been utilized to take us to the limit of our consciousness; and the limit of the law, as he regards sex the “sole substance of universal taboos”[1]. Foucault also saw the sexual liberation of the 1960’s taking culture to the restriction of communication too, yet hoping that it can “at last emerge[d] in the clear light of language.”[2] Foucault is directing his readers away from the illusion that sex had begun to be reassessed as a natural process, and rather as an inevitable process of extension to these confining extremes. This is a recurring theme of Foucault’s rhetoric: the denouncing of the liberation of nature; or rather, denouncing the belief that a natural process has been liberated during the sexual revolution. Moreover, Foucault did not even believe in any aspect of human existence even capable of true freedom, as “...no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating.”[3]
It is important to understand the rest of the text, in that he also saw the notion of the ‘true self’ merely a construct of power, established by authorities. In this response, I am attempting to equate that term with specific language utilized by the Church: the soul. In relating this to the text, Foucault claims that the ‘true self’ or personal life is not really political by itself, “...but that we need to analyze all the ways in which the conduct of government was linked to the government of conduct, ... such that the soul of the citizen is at stake in even the most mundane of governmental policies.”[4]
I must also mention that although I am attempting to connect Foucault’s theories on the infinite, the death of God with sexual language limitations, many still perceive his main correspondence with finiteness to space and power, not religion.
“For Foucault, the experience of finiteness became a philosophical incitement. He viewed the power of contingency, which he ultimately identified with power per se, more from a stoical perspective than from the Christian frame of reference.”[5]
Foucault regarded power and knowledge, since the Enlightenment, as mutually beneficial and complicit. For him, even philosophy was guilty of domination over the public, by being respected as an ‘official’ knowledge that filtered, selected, prioriritized and censored. All institutionalized knowledge was an instrument of power that could categorize the criminal, mad or sexually abnormal. Foucault, like Jean-François Lyotard, questioned the progress of the Enlightenment and its ‘grand narratives’ that enabled power centres to label individuals as irregular. Surveillance is certainly a recurring matter of Foucault’s writings, but he regards faith in Christianity as a form of crowd control, that he refers to as ‘capillary’ like.
“But in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”[6]
Foucault applied Nietzsche’s concept of ‘genealogy’ to carry out his socio-historical analyses, such as moral prejudices, especially in regard to Christianity. Foucault has used this method of research in sociology to study histories of sexual ‘abnormality’ and appropriate punishment throughout history.
Foucault combines sexual expression through language and the power of institutionalized religion with the example of “the Christian world of fallen bodies and sin.”[7] He believed that language was never so perfectly matched to sexual crimes as during the domination of the Church during “... the middle ages [when] there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places...”[8] In other writings he has deftly compared modern surveillance with older forms of crowd control such as faith and fear, as these were “...more efficient and profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under the surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty.”[9]
These belief systems constituted by organized religion during the medieval, used biblical language to convey punishment in vivid detail, yet were surrounded in ambiguous mysticism. Georges Bataille was relatively ignored during his lifetime and scorned and labeled as an advocate of mysticism by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, (largely due to his concept of base materialism that defied strict definition). This theory likewise attempts to disrupt and explain hierarchies, but using atomist metaphors. Unlike Foucault, Bataille’s concept favors limitless possibilities rather than relying on causality.
Paradoxically, Foucault notes how desire and the erotic lead to a centre of “a divine love of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon itself.”[10]
It is through being ‘denatured’ by liberated language that modern sexuality has been characterized, utilizing the violence used by such dialect to denote it and decipher it. Thus, it is through its limits that it is re-established as modern and impossible of further extension or translation.
Foucault often referred to disciplines as inscribing forms in the body making use of a language of violence and imposition. These thoughts are arguably an extension of the Frankfurt School.
Therefore, a sexually freed language, does not tell of natural human urges, or anthropological truisms, but rather states that it can all exist without God - “the speech given to sexuality is contemporaneous both in time and in structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is dead.”[11]
Foucault urges the reader to equate the death of God, and freedom from damning religion, with the transgression that sexual language has experienced. Emancipated from obligation, yet taken to its extreme, sexuality had managed to assist in the death of God. This is primarily because God has eternally represented the infinite. Because sexuality expresses its own finiteness while destabilizing the influence of religion “...the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation that at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.”[12]
Foucault mentions Marquis de Sade as the beginning of modern sexuality, not only for his writings (sexual expression through language) but his pursuit of pleasure unrestrained by religion and law. Because he was imprisoned for his acts, yet wrote of them explicitly (and articulated the corrupt values of the elite) he became revered by many, including Bataille and Foucault, as a hero for artists struggling against censorship, and by extension, the Church.
Like most of Foucault’s writing, this text is based on the interrelation of power and knowledge, and specifically the language used by the medieval Church not only constructed an illusion of the ‘true self’ or soul, but used that concept through violent language to control the faithful. Much of this control was used to strengthen the Church’s revenue, and a common theme was the sin of what they deemed irregular sexual practice.
With the supposed sexual revolution, Foucault readdresses these issues, and translates the revolution rather as taking sexuality to its extremes. It is through this extension, that the very notion of infiniteness has been disrupted and therefore also God: the embodiment of the infinite. As well as Freud and Sade, Foucault has mentioned Galileo’s contribution to this death too:
“For the real scandal in Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space.”[13]
But, he notes that this death is not “the end of a historical reign”[14] but rather the heralding of a new age in the “now-constant space of our experience”[15] which is devoid of the limitless.
[1] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[2] Ibid, p 69
[3] ed. Rabinow, Paul Practices and Knowledge Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1984, p 245
[4] ed. Barry, Andrew; Osbourne, Thomas; Rose, Nikolas Foucault & Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government; Mitchell, Dean “For a Political Ontology of Ourselves and Our Present” London: UCL Press Limited, 1986, p 212
[5] ed. Hoy, David Couzens Foucault: A Critical Reader New York: Basil Blackwood Inc, 1986, p 103
[6] ed. Gordon, Colin Michel Foucault: Power / Knowledge New York: Pathenon books, 1980, p 39
[7] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[8] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[9] Gordon et al, p 38
[10] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[11] ibid, p 69
[12] ibid, p 70
[13] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[14] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[15] Ibid, p 71
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Critical Response to Slotkin's Archetypal Western Concerns
Richard Slotkin is a historian and Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has been described as a cultural critic and has covered, in his books, traditions that shape contemporary American culture through mythology.
By romanticizing both the geography and history of the United States, the Western film had broad appeal and an attribute of being adaptive to project modern problems into its framework. The concerning aspect of all Westerns is their blurring of the division between truth and myth, while strengthening other boundaries concerning racial, social and political issues. “Through persistent association, these border signs have come to symbolize a range of fundamental ideological differences.”[1] By projecting these contemporary subjects into the genre of the Western, audiences were compelled by the notion of a single hero rationalizing violence. Despite the fact that “No one goes to the Western for a history lesson”[2] many audiences initial concepts of Westward expansion in North America are shaped by such tales. More historically correct versions that the public may later encounter must battle in their collective consciousness’ against the drama, action and simplicity that the Western had first provided.
Slotkin does not ignore the medium of television as “a medium for disseminating mass-culture mythology”[3] but concentrates mainly on the film industry in his examples because it dominated during the Cold and Korean War. Slotkin uses John Ford’s 1950 cavalry movie, ‘Rio Grande’, as an example to compare American foreign policy, (and by extension the attitudes that shaped that maintained / established that policy), with the “pseudo-historical narratives ”[4].
Strangely enough, ‘Rio Grande’ is one of the first movies where Ford raised questions about life after war, without questioning the validity of the war in the first place. In as much, this demonstrates the common attitude of all Westerns surrounding the need for ‘heroic’ violence. The preoccupation with necessary force that characterizes the Western were useful for a period of continual conflict. Always, it is implied that violence is essential and part of the process by which American society was created, the West won, and how its democratic values are defended and enforced. Meanwhile any “ideological problems of the Cold War era could be imaginatively entertained”[5] using a variety of familiar symbols.
In Philip Tetlock’s article “Pre- to Postelection Shifts in Presidential Rhetoric” he covers the inconsistencies of candidate’s oratory comparing before and after winning office. A pattern of change from simplistic views to more complicated views and policies is obvious in all examples, leading to failure to fulfill their campaign promises. In his, ‘impression management explanation’ model, Tetlock regards “politicians [as] expert symbol manipulators who are prepared to say whatever they believe [to] attract popular support for their cause. To attract this support, politicians make sweeping generalizations and claims as far too crude and simplistic to guide actual policy making.”[6]
Peter Lewisch’s takes film theory, Identification in particular, and applies it to non-market choices, such as voting. Such voting can be explained as ‘expressive voting’ and can be explained in that the individual engages in an act of identifying “the attributes with which the voter identifies” and may be broadly defined such that “the voter may (also) identify with a candidate’s moral character, good looks or ethnic origin.”[7]
Theorists have employed Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts (such as gaze and jouissance) to explain mediated entertainment with sociopolitical content. They wanted to explain how Hollywood films hid the sociopolitical context of production. A psychoanalytical approach “explains that a sense of self displaces the recognition of the social construction of identity”[8] so that it feels natural to the audience to adopt the view of the filmmaker and protagonist / hero, but only if the mediated entertainment “masks the cultural construction and framing of that view.”[9]
Thus, combining the audience “confidently expect[ing] that it will find its moral and emotional resolution in a singular act of violence”[10] with the theory of identification, we can understand the concern of Slotkin: the application of attitudes shaped by myth into the political sphere.
Slotkin deftly exemplifies this by comparing certain elements of ‘Rio Grande’ with the accompanying government during the Korean War. More importantly, the apathetic public that ‘traversed the fantasy’, applauded his decision to use force; while Ford completed ‘Rio Grande’.
The reading shows that the Frontier myth is really about external historical forces, archetypal confrontations and external politics. Invoking these types of movies leads to a legendary version of the First Amendment: the right to rewrite history in the name of free mythopoeia.
“[What] apologists really mean by a “mythic” dimension in a Western film is that part of it which they know to be a lie but which, for whatever reason, they still wish to embrace”[11].
Slotkin covers the Native American dimension in ‘Rio Grande’, and while maintaining that they are portrayed as savages with no lines, he does not entertain the idea of the Indian becoming an empty signifier of the other that “could stand for the Negro when the implications are social, or Communist when the implications are political”[12]. Slotkin does not cover exactly who the Indian portrays in ‘Rio Grande” (though he does in other examples and chapters) but perhaps this is best to demonstrate how the myth is left empty and adaptable, with no specific content of its own. This way, the sentiment covered in the film are subjective enough to mean a variety of meanings, but there remains indubitable boundaries between peoples. Often the differences between them are emphasized, often leading to unavoidable violence. Slotkin persuades the reader to comprehend how such lessons from Cold War era Westerns were useful in illustrating the very same reaction on a much larger scale.
[1] Slotkin, Richard Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America New York: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 , p 351
[2] Brownlow, Kevin The War, the West and the Wilderness, London: Secker & Warburg, 1979, p 223
[3] Slotkin , p 348
[4] ibid, p 350
[5] ibid , p 347
[6] Tetlock, Philip E. "Pre- to Postelection Shifts"; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1981, Vol. 41, p 207
[7] Brennan, G., & Hamlin, A. Expressive Voting and Electoral Equilibrium, Public Choice, 95, (1998) p 149
[8] Saper, Craig A Nervous Theory: The Trobling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in Media Studies , diacritics, winter, 1991, p 33
[9] ibid, p 33
[10] Slotkin, p 352
[11] Tuska, Jon The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western Greenwood, Westport: Connecticut Publishing Company, 1985, p 2
[12] ed. Cameron, Ian & Pye, Douglas; The Book of Westerns, (“A Better Sense of History” by Richard Maltby), Dumfriesshire: Continuum Publishing Company, 1996, p 36
By romanticizing both the geography and history of the United States, the Western film had broad appeal and an attribute of being adaptive to project modern problems into its framework. The concerning aspect of all Westerns is their blurring of the division between truth and myth, while strengthening other boundaries concerning racial, social and political issues. “Through persistent association, these border signs have come to symbolize a range of fundamental ideological differences.”[1] By projecting these contemporary subjects into the genre of the Western, audiences were compelled by the notion of a single hero rationalizing violence. Despite the fact that “No one goes to the Western for a history lesson”[2] many audiences initial concepts of Westward expansion in North America are shaped by such tales. More historically correct versions that the public may later encounter must battle in their collective consciousness’ against the drama, action and simplicity that the Western had first provided.
Slotkin does not ignore the medium of television as “a medium for disseminating mass-culture mythology”[3] but concentrates mainly on the film industry in his examples because it dominated during the Cold and Korean War. Slotkin uses John Ford’s 1950 cavalry movie, ‘Rio Grande’, as an example to compare American foreign policy, (and by extension the attitudes that shaped that maintained / established that policy), with the “pseudo-historical narratives ”[4].
Strangely enough, ‘Rio Grande’ is one of the first movies where Ford raised questions about life after war, without questioning the validity of the war in the first place. In as much, this demonstrates the common attitude of all Westerns surrounding the need for ‘heroic’ violence. The preoccupation with necessary force that characterizes the Western were useful for a period of continual conflict. Always, it is implied that violence is essential and part of the process by which American society was created, the West won, and how its democratic values are defended and enforced. Meanwhile any “ideological problems of the Cold War era could be imaginatively entertained”[5] using a variety of familiar symbols.
In Philip Tetlock’s article “Pre- to Postelection Shifts in Presidential Rhetoric” he covers the inconsistencies of candidate’s oratory comparing before and after winning office. A pattern of change from simplistic views to more complicated views and policies is obvious in all examples, leading to failure to fulfill their campaign promises. In his, ‘impression management explanation’ model, Tetlock regards “politicians [as] expert symbol manipulators who are prepared to say whatever they believe [to] attract popular support for their cause. To attract this support, politicians make sweeping generalizations and claims as far too crude and simplistic to guide actual policy making.”[6]
Peter Lewisch’s takes film theory, Identification in particular, and applies it to non-market choices, such as voting. Such voting can be explained as ‘expressive voting’ and can be explained in that the individual engages in an act of identifying “the attributes with which the voter identifies” and may be broadly defined such that “the voter may (also) identify with a candidate’s moral character, good looks or ethnic origin.”[7]
Theorists have employed Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts (such as gaze and jouissance) to explain mediated entertainment with sociopolitical content. They wanted to explain how Hollywood films hid the sociopolitical context of production. A psychoanalytical approach “explains that a sense of self displaces the recognition of the social construction of identity”[8] so that it feels natural to the audience to adopt the view of the filmmaker and protagonist / hero, but only if the mediated entertainment “masks the cultural construction and framing of that view.”[9]
Thus, combining the audience “confidently expect[ing] that it will find its moral and emotional resolution in a singular act of violence”[10] with the theory of identification, we can understand the concern of Slotkin: the application of attitudes shaped by myth into the political sphere.
Slotkin deftly exemplifies this by comparing certain elements of ‘Rio Grande’ with the accompanying government during the Korean War. More importantly, the apathetic public that ‘traversed the fantasy’, applauded his decision to use force; while Ford completed ‘Rio Grande’.
The reading shows that the Frontier myth is really about external historical forces, archetypal confrontations and external politics. Invoking these types of movies leads to a legendary version of the First Amendment: the right to rewrite history in the name of free mythopoeia.
“[What] apologists really mean by a “mythic” dimension in a Western film is that part of it which they know to be a lie but which, for whatever reason, they still wish to embrace”[11].
Slotkin covers the Native American dimension in ‘Rio Grande’, and while maintaining that they are portrayed as savages with no lines, he does not entertain the idea of the Indian becoming an empty signifier of the other that “could stand for the Negro when the implications are social, or Communist when the implications are political”[12]. Slotkin does not cover exactly who the Indian portrays in ‘Rio Grande” (though he does in other examples and chapters) but perhaps this is best to demonstrate how the myth is left empty and adaptable, with no specific content of its own. This way, the sentiment covered in the film are subjective enough to mean a variety of meanings, but there remains indubitable boundaries between peoples. Often the differences between them are emphasized, often leading to unavoidable violence. Slotkin persuades the reader to comprehend how such lessons from Cold War era Westerns were useful in illustrating the very same reaction on a much larger scale.
[1] Slotkin, Richard Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America New York: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 , p 351
[2] Brownlow, Kevin The War, the West and the Wilderness, London: Secker & Warburg, 1979, p 223
[3] Slotkin , p 348
[4] ibid, p 350
[5] ibid , p 347
[6] Tetlock, Philip E. "Pre- to Postelection Shifts"; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1981, Vol. 41, p 207
[7] Brennan, G., & Hamlin, A. Expressive Voting and Electoral Equilibrium, Public Choice, 95, (1998) p 149
[8] Saper, Craig A Nervous Theory: The Trobling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in Media Studies , diacritics, winter, 1991, p 33
[9] ibid, p 33
[10] Slotkin, p 352
[11] Tuska, Jon The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western Greenwood, Westport: Connecticut Publishing Company, 1985, p 2
[12] ed. Cameron, Ian & Pye, Douglas; The Book of Westerns, (“A Better Sense of History” by Richard Maltby), Dumfriesshire: Continuum Publishing Company, 1996, p 36
Critique of Seib's Congratulations to Huntington
Philip Seib is the ‘Lucius W. Nieman’ Professor of Journalism at Marquette University and writes about political reporting, and the relationship between news coverage and public policy.
In the reading, Philip Seib questions the reality of an actual ‘Clash of Civilzations’ by first comparing world views concerning the relations between religion and politics, and then secondly by demonstrating how the media have simplified certain attributes to gain viewers’ understanding, and thus ratings.
The way inwhcih media companies shape collective consciousness is a central theme to the entire book; in particular, this chapter covers the ‘facile divisions’[1] that were utilized by the media throughout the Cold War, and how these boundaries have remained (due in no small part due to their ease in being comprehended). Seib writes without explicitely showing that he disagrees with Huntington, but far more importantly, demonstrates why the concept has appeal. As already noted, Huntington’s theory utilized already established, familiar divisions, and the news media industries were ‘receptive to a new geopolitical scheme’[2] that was identifiable to the gerneal public at the end of the Cold War.
“Essentialist and polarized scenarios such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Benjamin Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” belie complex real world realities. Nevertheless, in the wake of the Cold War there has emerged the notion of Islam as a primary Other.”[3]
How much of the present conflcit is related to the media seizing understandable boundaries and strengthening those divisions is an enigma within Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’; and hitherto, inscrutable.
As Seib notes, Huntington’s theory may have been validated by the 9/11 attacks, but more significantly, he seems cautious of that view being applied to all news coverage. When Seib mentions a number of critics of Huntington’s concepts, he reamins stoic in demonstrating the longevity of Huntington’s civilizational paradigm. Despite the number of critics of the theory, it is not only found its way into common parlence (apparently through the media) but those who support either side find it a ideology that is easy to identify with. Huntington retorts to his critics: “faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for.”[4] Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned against “generalized religious bias”[5] taking blame and attention away from the complex issues surrounding the Isralei-Palestinian conflict and U.S. support in the region. Brzezinski believes in reassesing the conflict “through a geopolitical rather than a theological prism”[6]. Unfortunately the support of Israel can only be appreciated in terms of religious fervour as “Christianity is the embodiment of the divine promises made to the Jews.”[7] Coupled with the concept of the U.S. as the leader of the New World Order, in the post-Cold War world, there is both an obligation to keep peace and strong relations within the region. It is important to remember that their tenacity relies not only on their elasticity, but also that they are idioms constructed in response to emotionally charged situations and religious fervour. As Huntington understands, if either side is to incite support it is through emotional language that pushes the conflict closer to the “theological prism”[8] .
My major criticism of the reading is how Seib attempts to celebrate Huntington’s definitions due to their easy assimilation into the global language, and forcing journalism to reconsider the fault-lines of the political world through religious indoctrination. I believe that the ideological framework that Huntington has helped establish has not forced the media to critically assess these definitions at all, because news companies thrive on both the public’s need for immediacy of knowledge, and the apparent danger that makes the speed of news gathering paramount.
“However the end of the Cold War and the resulting “threat vacuum” have endangered these structures of power and wealth. Faced with the loss of their raison d’étre, some of the military and intelligence -gathering establishments began searching for new enemies.”[9]
The hegemony of dominant discourse that the United States endorses includes the belief that terrorists alone attacked and destroyed both World Trade Centre towers, and that Islam is anti-American. These thoughts connect anti-American sentiment to a religion, and thus re-identify U.S.A. as pre-dominatly Christian as a default antithesis. But to align all stereotype characteristics into simplistic groups denoting civilizations is where I personally find fault and fear in both Huntington’s concept and how Seib can congratulate such redundunt apprehensions. Especially so when it is remembered that only the Bush Administration took advantage of these ideas and their connections.
“I think most of us would agree, and some of us have indeed said, that the clash of civilizations is an important aspect of modern international relations, though probably not many of us would go so far as to imply, as some have done, that civilizations have foriegn policies and form alliances.”[10]
It must be rememberred that two of the states created immediatly after World War Two (Israel and Pakistan) are religiously inspired and the centuries old conflict between Christians and Moslems has extended into hundreds of civil wars in the third world (Nigeria, Chad, Uganda, Sudan). Such boundaries take attention away from political motivations and closer to theological and emotional thoughts, often to incite support for war. After all, the United States is still scared by the ultimate terrorism: a repeat of the 1973 Arab oil boycott, leading to a decade of slow growth and inflation. In such a disaster for the American people, even the media would suffer from lack of religion, emotion and intriguing coverage.
[1] Seib, Philip Media & Conflict in the 21st Century, New York: Palgrave, 2005, p 218
[2] ibid, p 218
[3] Karim, H. Karim Islamic Peril: Media & Global Violence, Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2003, p 3
[4] Seib, p 221
[5] Zbigniew, Brzezinski The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, NewYork: Basic Books, 2004, p 59
[6] ibid, p 59
[7] Lewis, Bernard I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go To Hell, May 2003, Atlantic, p 2
[8] Zbigniew, p 59
[9] Karim, p 17
[10] Lewis, p 2
In the reading, Philip Seib questions the reality of an actual ‘Clash of Civilzations’ by first comparing world views concerning the relations between religion and politics, and then secondly by demonstrating how the media have simplified certain attributes to gain viewers’ understanding, and thus ratings.
The way inwhcih media companies shape collective consciousness is a central theme to the entire book; in particular, this chapter covers the ‘facile divisions’[1] that were utilized by the media throughout the Cold War, and how these boundaries have remained (due in no small part due to their ease in being comprehended). Seib writes without explicitely showing that he disagrees with Huntington, but far more importantly, demonstrates why the concept has appeal. As already noted, Huntington’s theory utilized already established, familiar divisions, and the news media industries were ‘receptive to a new geopolitical scheme’[2] that was identifiable to the gerneal public at the end of the Cold War.
“Essentialist and polarized scenarios such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Benjamin Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” belie complex real world realities. Nevertheless, in the wake of the Cold War there has emerged the notion of Islam as a primary Other.”[3]
How much of the present conflcit is related to the media seizing understandable boundaries and strengthening those divisions is an enigma within Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’; and hitherto, inscrutable.
As Seib notes, Huntington’s theory may have been validated by the 9/11 attacks, but more significantly, he seems cautious of that view being applied to all news coverage. When Seib mentions a number of critics of Huntington’s concepts, he reamins stoic in demonstrating the longevity of Huntington’s civilizational paradigm. Despite the number of critics of the theory, it is not only found its way into common parlence (apparently through the media) but those who support either side find it a ideology that is easy to identify with. Huntington retorts to his critics: “faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for.”[4] Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned against “generalized religious bias”[5] taking blame and attention away from the complex issues surrounding the Isralei-Palestinian conflict and U.S. support in the region. Brzezinski believes in reassesing the conflict “through a geopolitical rather than a theological prism”[6]. Unfortunately the support of Israel can only be appreciated in terms of religious fervour as “Christianity is the embodiment of the divine promises made to the Jews.”[7] Coupled with the concept of the U.S. as the leader of the New World Order, in the post-Cold War world, there is both an obligation to keep peace and strong relations within the region. It is important to remember that their tenacity relies not only on their elasticity, but also that they are idioms constructed in response to emotionally charged situations and religious fervour. As Huntington understands, if either side is to incite support it is through emotional language that pushes the conflict closer to the “theological prism”[8] .
My major criticism of the reading is how Seib attempts to celebrate Huntington’s definitions due to their easy assimilation into the global language, and forcing journalism to reconsider the fault-lines of the political world through religious indoctrination. I believe that the ideological framework that Huntington has helped establish has not forced the media to critically assess these definitions at all, because news companies thrive on both the public’s need for immediacy of knowledge, and the apparent danger that makes the speed of news gathering paramount.
“However the end of the Cold War and the resulting “threat vacuum” have endangered these structures of power and wealth. Faced with the loss of their raison d’étre, some of the military and intelligence -gathering establishments began searching for new enemies.”[9]
The hegemony of dominant discourse that the United States endorses includes the belief that terrorists alone attacked and destroyed both World Trade Centre towers, and that Islam is anti-American. These thoughts connect anti-American sentiment to a religion, and thus re-identify U.S.A. as pre-dominatly Christian as a default antithesis. But to align all stereotype characteristics into simplistic groups denoting civilizations is where I personally find fault and fear in both Huntington’s concept and how Seib can congratulate such redundunt apprehensions. Especially so when it is remembered that only the Bush Administration took advantage of these ideas and their connections.
“I think most of us would agree, and some of us have indeed said, that the clash of civilizations is an important aspect of modern international relations, though probably not many of us would go so far as to imply, as some have done, that civilizations have foriegn policies and form alliances.”[10]
It must be rememberred that two of the states created immediatly after World War Two (Israel and Pakistan) are religiously inspired and the centuries old conflict between Christians and Moslems has extended into hundreds of civil wars in the third world (Nigeria, Chad, Uganda, Sudan). Such boundaries take attention away from political motivations and closer to theological and emotional thoughts, often to incite support for war. After all, the United States is still scared by the ultimate terrorism: a repeat of the 1973 Arab oil boycott, leading to a decade of slow growth and inflation. In such a disaster for the American people, even the media would suffer from lack of religion, emotion and intriguing coverage.
[1] Seib, Philip Media & Conflict in the 21st Century, New York: Palgrave, 2005, p 218
[2] ibid, p 218
[3] Karim, H. Karim Islamic Peril: Media & Global Violence, Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2003, p 3
[4] Seib, p 221
[5] Zbigniew, Brzezinski The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, NewYork: Basic Books, 2004, p 59
[6] ibid, p 59
[7] Lewis, Bernard I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go To Hell, May 2003, Atlantic, p 2
[8] Zbigniew, p 59
[9] Karim, p 17
[10] Lewis, p 2
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Critical reading of Derrida’s “Tout autre est tout autre” (Chapter Four, of “The Gift of Death”)
Jacques Derrida is a postmodern philosopher and writer. His beliefs about modern life, the crisis of language and the arbitrary nature of signs has led him to be categorized as a post-structuralist, along with Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. All of these writers have been influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure (first structuralist), and caused philosophy to be reassesed as a formal type of discourse. In particular, Derrida founded the stratergy of deconstruction, revealing multiple meanings of the same word, which are unconsciously in combat with each other in the text they are found. Like Foucault, Derrida strongly believed that present “meanings” are those that are stablized and enforced by dominant cultures which take advantage of the fixed meaning.
“One pole of the binary...is usually the dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of operations.”[1]
The single meanings that favour these political ideologies form logocentrism which postmodernism opposes. Postmodernism is also the newest form of Skepticism, (a rejection of Relativism) that began in the Western world with Cartesian Doubt.
In “The Gift of Death” (in which, “Tout autre est tout autre” is found) Derrida mentions his opposition to Kant’s conept of deontology and Sophists concept of contract theory. Using many examples, many taken from modern life experiences, Derrida writes with sophistication; if a slightly repetitive nature. Like many postmodern thinkers, in their writings they usually cover familiar ground within the first section, and then distance themselves from their influences and their contemporaries. For example: Barthes and Derrida both disagree with Saussure’s belief that linguitsics would evolve into a general science of signs, or join semiology fully; but in “The Gift of Death” Derrida finds himself facing an inevitable conclusion of dubiosity.
The motivation for certain dominant cultures to strengthen the link between some signs and the thing signified is obvious, and is therefore not really arbitrary. It is gravitated by forces of empires that fix meanings for political / monetary reasons. Barthes and Derrida conclude that as language is constantly evolving there cannot possibly be a final, strict, definitive translation. Perhaps an authoritive one, but this is doubted as being definitive due to the bias of the strongest political power.
This concept, in “The Gift of Death” separates Derrida from his colleagues. As Derrida writes about authority, he persuades the reader to accept that there actually is a final authority that can decode what that final translation is, but it is hidden from us. While his associates determined that there is no authority other than forced ideologies from strong political motivations, accordingly there can be no meaning attatched to any sign. Derrida believed that there was a definitive meaning that an authority higher even than governments knew, that may be established, but impossible to check. This authority is God.
Because many concepts rely on this untestable condition, there is a consistent mention of “as if”’s within alot of his books. “A ‘fictional’ condition, an imagined and therefore phantasmatic possibility that is not a lie, but which either has not happenned, or which, more significantly, cannot be experienced as such.”[2]
Derrida uses this unreachable jurisdiction as a type of asymptotic sublime that allows his other concepts to be aligned with. In this universe model, various concepts in “The Gift of Death” can exist unchallenged by previous ideas covered by Barthes, Saussure and Strauss. One such example can be found covered in the final chapter, “Tout autre est tout autre”, as one half of this tautological equation can be substituted by the constant of God; the infinitely other or wholly other.
Talking of equations, Roland Barthes also suggested language was neutral, not unlike mathematical symbols, and constants that could be applied to translate for things utilising signs. My personal frustration with this mode of thought is that it follows that some form of result should follow, after dutifully plugging in signfied objects, to allow a meaning to occur, (even if it is not wholly definitive). All the more reason to observe how different that meaning can vary depending on the ‘equation’.
Tom Stoppard covered a similar perspective of mine that he mentioned in his 1982 play “The Real Thing”:
“Words are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other; so that if you look after them they can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos.”[3]
This outlook of interchanging signs like mathematical symbols may seem simplistic and nieve, but it does point toward accessing comprehension, whereas I see postmodern thinkers revelling in the hopeless unravelling of language.
Thus, while connotation and context can direct meaning to a closer approximation of its intended meaning, relying on these external factors only points out the slipperiness of its own free-floating signs. More importantly, the role of the observer is central to understanding the intended translation. This belief is taken from scientific discourses, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics. Yet science attempts to find definitive truth through extremely thorough precautions against prejudice, in order to find and then describe how nature operates. Can this be applied to language? Is it possible to use formulae to alleviate the crisis of knowledge / translation? Derrida believes so.
The important distinction in Derrida’s stratergy of deconstruction is that while there may well be multiple meanings for a word, some of these meanings are paradoxically opposing. Which of the two opposing sides is privilged and stablizied by politics create hierarchies of power. Derrida not only views the meanings as not fixed, but deferred; as in they are not yet decisively known, but hypothetically can be.
“Difference can never be wholly captured within any binary system. Any notion of a final meaning is always endlessly put off, deferred.”[4]
In fact, with skepticism pushed to its extreme, the only pure fact that any one person can be totally sure of is not even Descrate’s Cogito, but merely x=x.
This is exemplified by “Tout autre est tout autre”; a tautology. Tautologies seem to be one dimensional, but infact can mean anything. ‘It is raining or it is not raining’, and ‘pigs exist or they do not exist’ are tautologies. Neither sentence is wrong, and neither sentence has anything to do with pigs or rain. Propositions alone can be tautologies. Not all propositions are tautologies, but all tautologies are propositions. “A proposition is what is expressed by a declarative sentence in some language; it is either true or false.”[5]
Herbert Spencer described Darwin’s theory of evolution with “the survival of the fittest”. this has been labelled by many creationists as a tautology, and by extension, used to challenge evolution in general. Who survives? Those whom are fittest. Whom are fittest? Those who survive. The general concept of the derision of this phrase comes directly from the fact that “evolutionary theory is untestable because fitness is defined in terms of actual survivorship.”[6]
Even Derrida concedes that “Tout autre est tout autre” could be “so isolated and capable of being transmitted out of its context, too much like the coded language of a password”[7] that it can risk meaning nothing. But like Derrida’s quest for absolute meaning, there are elements of the eternal at play.
As Derrida carefully dissects, he points out the former “Tout” can only be an indefinite pronominal adjective: (someone), while the latter can only be an adverb of quantity: (absolute, radically infinite). This I agree with, making the second “tout” referring to God and the sublime.
When Derrida elaborates and states that the “autres” used must be a noun and an adjective respectfully, the fog of confusion clouds over once again. If we are to believe Derrida, then the sentence is structured like so: “[adjective] [noun] est [adverb] [adjective].”
Is there a sentence that can be substituted like Stoppard implies?
I will attempt a theoretical newspaper headline: “Frustrated Reader is Gently Frustrated”.
Does this really denote x=x? Obviously the reader is getting frustrated gently, but surely Gently Frustrated is NOT a Frustrated Reader. Or is this just a malfunction of the English language that we cannot observe that the other way does actually make sense?
Another example: “Tired Student is Very Tired.” Mirrored, the sentence only needs some extra baggage from pronouns to make it: “(He is) very tired, (this) tired student” (which French often has a remarkable way of requiring or not requiring depending on context and who the speaker is). But what of the “est” and its movement? Is it important to note where it now lies in order to make any kind of sense, or is it pointless to even worry about this? The point that Derrida is making is that there is one side of this equation that depends upon a wholly other, absolute infinite side, just as much as the whole equation has inexhaustible, infinite readings. I see this as an aspect of religious faith, accepting truth without need for evidence nor a lackm of doubt. Therefore, because it requires lack of doubt (faith) in order to utilize an equation so deeply drawn from skepticism, the equation is obsolete.
But perhaps this is the point. Which powers decide what it can mean is where Derrida takes us when he writes of complacency and the glossy functioning of societies that can overlook murders and crimes because of how it can be advantageous not to notice. Where Derrida finally applies this apparently useless formula is when he connects mass murder to singular murder; sensing a single crime in the same level of importance as many. This is done by the infinite, inexhaustible nature of the equation.
Derrida then questions the subtle differences between individuals being allowing to starve, and individuals being put to death. This is linked by the sacrifice and effort a single person may contribute, to save many people, when the safety of the single person is put in jeopardy by doing so. Derrida uses Abraham as an example of an excused murderer, (not really through complacency, but by faith). But the effect and the undeniable facts are the same, Abraham is a murderer “however, is not the spectacle of this murder, which seems untenable in the dense and rhythmic briefness of its theatrical moment, at the same time the most common event in this world?”[8]
This inexhaustible equation, when reversed, shows that perception of many people can be made “infinitely singular”, and this is certainly done by media that attempts to downplay certain statistics, such as number of people killed by war or natural disaster. It is easier to deal with a single death, emotionally and economically, and by concentrating on the plight of one individual the event seems more personal, more understandable and also more digestible. It also downplays the amount of money required to fix the entire problem and directs the viewer to see the circumstance as an event that occurred to an individual. Sympathy and rapport are obtained, and in doing so, the illusion of a singularity is achieved.
In every media driven, and media covered politically based war there are “countless victims, each of whose singularity becomes each time infinitely singular - every other (one) being every (bit) other”[9]. The “smooth functioning”[10] of highly mediated countries is what allows people to die due to its “mechanisms of external debt”[11], and in the interests of upholding their own position of power.
[1] Hall, Stuart Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices: Culture, Media and Identities, London: SAGE Publications, Ltd, 1997. p 235
[2] Wolfreys, Julian Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed New York: Continuum Books, 2007. p12
[3] Stoppard, Tom The Real Thing, 1982
[4] Hall, p 42
[5] Sober, Elliot “Philosophy of Biology”, 2nd Ed., Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. p70
[6] ibid. p70
[7] Derrida, Jacques The Gift of Death, Chapter 4 (of 4), 2nd Ed., Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008. p 82
[8] ibid. p 85
[9] ibid. p 82
[10] ibid. p 85
[11] ibid. p 86
“One pole of the binary...is usually the dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of operations.”[1]
The single meanings that favour these political ideologies form logocentrism which postmodernism opposes. Postmodernism is also the newest form of Skepticism, (a rejection of Relativism) that began in the Western world with Cartesian Doubt.
In “The Gift of Death” (in which, “Tout autre est tout autre” is found) Derrida mentions his opposition to Kant’s conept of deontology and Sophists concept of contract theory. Using many examples, many taken from modern life experiences, Derrida writes with sophistication; if a slightly repetitive nature. Like many postmodern thinkers, in their writings they usually cover familiar ground within the first section, and then distance themselves from their influences and their contemporaries. For example: Barthes and Derrida both disagree with Saussure’s belief that linguitsics would evolve into a general science of signs, or join semiology fully; but in “The Gift of Death” Derrida finds himself facing an inevitable conclusion of dubiosity.
The motivation for certain dominant cultures to strengthen the link between some signs and the thing signified is obvious, and is therefore not really arbitrary. It is gravitated by forces of empires that fix meanings for political / monetary reasons. Barthes and Derrida conclude that as language is constantly evolving there cannot possibly be a final, strict, definitive translation. Perhaps an authoritive one, but this is doubted as being definitive due to the bias of the strongest political power.
This concept, in “The Gift of Death” separates Derrida from his colleagues. As Derrida writes about authority, he persuades the reader to accept that there actually is a final authority that can decode what that final translation is, but it is hidden from us. While his associates determined that there is no authority other than forced ideologies from strong political motivations, accordingly there can be no meaning attatched to any sign. Derrida believed that there was a definitive meaning that an authority higher even than governments knew, that may be established, but impossible to check. This authority is God.
Because many concepts rely on this untestable condition, there is a consistent mention of “as if”’s within alot of his books. “A ‘fictional’ condition, an imagined and therefore phantasmatic possibility that is not a lie, but which either has not happenned, or which, more significantly, cannot be experienced as such.”[2]
Derrida uses this unreachable jurisdiction as a type of asymptotic sublime that allows his other concepts to be aligned with. In this universe model, various concepts in “The Gift of Death” can exist unchallenged by previous ideas covered by Barthes, Saussure and Strauss. One such example can be found covered in the final chapter, “Tout autre est tout autre”, as one half of this tautological equation can be substituted by the constant of God; the infinitely other or wholly other.
Talking of equations, Roland Barthes also suggested language was neutral, not unlike mathematical symbols, and constants that could be applied to translate for things utilising signs. My personal frustration with this mode of thought is that it follows that some form of result should follow, after dutifully plugging in signfied objects, to allow a meaning to occur, (even if it is not wholly definitive). All the more reason to observe how different that meaning can vary depending on the ‘equation’.
Tom Stoppard covered a similar perspective of mine that he mentioned in his 1982 play “The Real Thing”:
“Words are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other; so that if you look after them they can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos.”[3]
This outlook of interchanging signs like mathematical symbols may seem simplistic and nieve, but it does point toward accessing comprehension, whereas I see postmodern thinkers revelling in the hopeless unravelling of language.
Thus, while connotation and context can direct meaning to a closer approximation of its intended meaning, relying on these external factors only points out the slipperiness of its own free-floating signs. More importantly, the role of the observer is central to understanding the intended translation. This belief is taken from scientific discourses, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics. Yet science attempts to find definitive truth through extremely thorough precautions against prejudice, in order to find and then describe how nature operates. Can this be applied to language? Is it possible to use formulae to alleviate the crisis of knowledge / translation? Derrida believes so.
The important distinction in Derrida’s stratergy of deconstruction is that while there may well be multiple meanings for a word, some of these meanings are paradoxically opposing. Which of the two opposing sides is privilged and stablizied by politics create hierarchies of power. Derrida not only views the meanings as not fixed, but deferred; as in they are not yet decisively known, but hypothetically can be.
“Difference can never be wholly captured within any binary system. Any notion of a final meaning is always endlessly put off, deferred.”[4]
In fact, with skepticism pushed to its extreme, the only pure fact that any one person can be totally sure of is not even Descrate’s Cogito, but merely x=x.
This is exemplified by “Tout autre est tout autre”; a tautology. Tautologies seem to be one dimensional, but infact can mean anything. ‘It is raining or it is not raining’, and ‘pigs exist or they do not exist’ are tautologies. Neither sentence is wrong, and neither sentence has anything to do with pigs or rain. Propositions alone can be tautologies. Not all propositions are tautologies, but all tautologies are propositions. “A proposition is what is expressed by a declarative sentence in some language; it is either true or false.”[5]
Herbert Spencer described Darwin’s theory of evolution with “the survival of the fittest”. this has been labelled by many creationists as a tautology, and by extension, used to challenge evolution in general. Who survives? Those whom are fittest. Whom are fittest? Those who survive. The general concept of the derision of this phrase comes directly from the fact that “evolutionary theory is untestable because fitness is defined in terms of actual survivorship.”[6]
Even Derrida concedes that “Tout autre est tout autre” could be “so isolated and capable of being transmitted out of its context, too much like the coded language of a password”[7] that it can risk meaning nothing. But like Derrida’s quest for absolute meaning, there are elements of the eternal at play.
As Derrida carefully dissects, he points out the former “Tout” can only be an indefinite pronominal adjective: (someone), while the latter can only be an adverb of quantity: (absolute, radically infinite). This I agree with, making the second “tout” referring to God and the sublime.
When Derrida elaborates and states that the “autres” used must be a noun and an adjective respectfully, the fog of confusion clouds over once again. If we are to believe Derrida, then the sentence is structured like so: “[adjective] [noun] est [adverb] [adjective].”
Is there a sentence that can be substituted like Stoppard implies?
I will attempt a theoretical newspaper headline: “Frustrated Reader is Gently Frustrated”.
Does this really denote x=x? Obviously the reader is getting frustrated gently, but surely Gently Frustrated is NOT a Frustrated Reader. Or is this just a malfunction of the English language that we cannot observe that the other way does actually make sense?
Another example: “Tired Student is Very Tired.” Mirrored, the sentence only needs some extra baggage from pronouns to make it: “(He is) very tired, (this) tired student” (which French often has a remarkable way of requiring or not requiring depending on context and who the speaker is). But what of the “est” and its movement? Is it important to note where it now lies in order to make any kind of sense, or is it pointless to even worry about this? The point that Derrida is making is that there is one side of this equation that depends upon a wholly other, absolute infinite side, just as much as the whole equation has inexhaustible, infinite readings. I see this as an aspect of religious faith, accepting truth without need for evidence nor a lackm of doubt. Therefore, because it requires lack of doubt (faith) in order to utilize an equation so deeply drawn from skepticism, the equation is obsolete.
But perhaps this is the point. Which powers decide what it can mean is where Derrida takes us when he writes of complacency and the glossy functioning of societies that can overlook murders and crimes because of how it can be advantageous not to notice. Where Derrida finally applies this apparently useless formula is when he connects mass murder to singular murder; sensing a single crime in the same level of importance as many. This is done by the infinite, inexhaustible nature of the equation.
Derrida then questions the subtle differences between individuals being allowing to starve, and individuals being put to death. This is linked by the sacrifice and effort a single person may contribute, to save many people, when the safety of the single person is put in jeopardy by doing so. Derrida uses Abraham as an example of an excused murderer, (not really through complacency, but by faith). But the effect and the undeniable facts are the same, Abraham is a murderer “however, is not the spectacle of this murder, which seems untenable in the dense and rhythmic briefness of its theatrical moment, at the same time the most common event in this world?”[8]
This inexhaustible equation, when reversed, shows that perception of many people can be made “infinitely singular”, and this is certainly done by media that attempts to downplay certain statistics, such as number of people killed by war or natural disaster. It is easier to deal with a single death, emotionally and economically, and by concentrating on the plight of one individual the event seems more personal, more understandable and also more digestible. It also downplays the amount of money required to fix the entire problem and directs the viewer to see the circumstance as an event that occurred to an individual. Sympathy and rapport are obtained, and in doing so, the illusion of a singularity is achieved.
In every media driven, and media covered politically based war there are “countless victims, each of whose singularity becomes each time infinitely singular - every other (one) being every (bit) other”[9]. The “smooth functioning”[10] of highly mediated countries is what allows people to die due to its “mechanisms of external debt”[11], and in the interests of upholding their own position of power.
[1] Hall, Stuart Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices: Culture, Media and Identities, London: SAGE Publications, Ltd, 1997. p 235
[2] Wolfreys, Julian Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed New York: Continuum Books, 2007. p12
[3] Stoppard, Tom The Real Thing, 1982
[4] Hall, p 42
[5] Sober, Elliot “Philosophy of Biology”, 2nd Ed., Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. p70
[6] ibid. p70
[7] Derrida, Jacques The Gift of Death, Chapter 4 (of 4), 2nd Ed., Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008. p 82
[8] ibid. p 85
[9] ibid. p 82
[10] ibid. p 85
[11] ibid. p 86
Monday, May 11, 2009
Critical Reading of Crary's "Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory"
Johnathon Crary is a professor of Art History at Columbian University, and historian writer who has written of the media, cinema and subjectivity within twentieth-century modernity.
In ‘Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory’, Crary attempts to determine the origin of the “spectacle”; not merely situationist related, (as a response to modern art and contemporary capitalism), but also the term used by Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, and to its wider implications in mass media, particularly television.
Early in his writing, Crary clearly points out the varying, typical meanings and uses found for the word, and how they may have changed dramatically since the turbulent and challenging 1960’s. But what interests Crary is how and why they have changed to “designate a certian set of objective conditions”[1] and has become part of a complex power establishment, a “constellation of forces and institutions”[2] that is strengthened by the abilities the spectacle offers and compells contemporary society. More importantly, Crary questions what can be done now to resist such impact, and thus begins his writing about the disparate ways that this understanding of “spectacle” has operated in different political methods, in order to subvert its different approaches. But, in all the examples given, the spectacle remains a word for describing the act of coercing belief from the general public in order to either scare them, subdue them or turn them into consumers like Benjamin’s concept of the ‘phantasmagoria of equality’. As already noted, Crary concentrates on attempting to connect spectacle with the history of television, which allows the finding of a specific date more focused.
The science historian, Bruno Latour has written extensively about the need for visual display (such as a covert graph) in order for the public to believe, so long as it is accompanied with an ‘inscription’ to translate. In Walter Benjamin’s case, the visible world is where a sence of hapiness can be adhered to with the “measurable...terms of signs and objects”[3] , but it is the act of copying and the “capactity to produce equivalences”[4] that the new classes initially subverted the power of the spectacle. Thus, the nineteenth century classes challenged the importance of originality by counterfeiting. The flow of Crary’s writing is suave, as he allows this response to lead us to the industrial revolutiuon and its explosion of the ‘unessential sectors of capitalism’ (according to Marx). The author defines the newly emerging meaning of spectacle, which I believe it has not wavered far from since, at this historical point “when sign-value takes precedence over use-value”[5].
T.J. Clark offers a reversal view, that instead, it was the “construction of an observer who was a precondition for the transformation of everyday life.” but I find it less consequential to exactly denote whether it was conditioning of market niches or conditioning of consumers, because in either case the spectacle has been utilized to first define and then continually strengthen coveting in western countries (and fear in communist states). Moreover, any resistance in these western markets is suitably digested by “converting them into objects or images of consumption”.[6]
Crary continues after briefly covering the history and operation of the spectacle, to finding exactly when it began. In this writing he persuades the reader to believe that it can be designated to an exact date, and furthermore that the date is 1927. This concept is aligned with Crary’s attempt to marry spectacle to television. The synchronic acts of the beginnings of monoplies in the United States by the division of control of television, with its actual invention (or at least, its perfection) demonstrates how much control the state, coporate, military sectors believed how useful this new technology would be with its “speed, ubiquity, and simultaneity.”[7] Above all, this new form of entertainment garnered attention more than its ancestors, due to synchronized sound. Now with more commanding authority, this new technology’s hypnotic abilities were fully realized.
But not all western countries that made use of Diffused spectacle shared the United State’s questionable subjectivity. Britian’s BBC and France’s RTF (Radio-telediffusion française) are state sponsored and regulated. There is a healthy tension between “opting boradly for more entertainment, and the pressure to provide public service information and eductaion”[8] is more heated in Britian than in the United States, where “broadcasting was commercially dominated from the start”[9] which Crary points out, was 1927. Nevertheless, they have to exist in a commercial environment. For example, the BBC supplements it’s revenue from licence fees by the sale of books, recordings and DVDs and also selling programmes to other countries. Yet even in this way they still squarely operate within the system supported by capitalism utilizing coveting and conveying an illusion of need for products. The BBC’s voice, personalized by it’s announcers and newsreaders “has evolved in a populist direction, claiming common ground with audiences, and often adopting a cynical, challenging and even aggressive stance to a variety of official institutions and personalities, including government ministers.”[10] But the common sense that these characters are based on contain “basic design features of contemporary capitalist society and its consumerist values.”[11]
In American movies and television soaps, products themselves are subtly added or become the main article of the narrative so as to be overlooked.
“For decades, ‘product placement’, the surreptitious but visible inclusion of consumer items in films and television, has made people around the world aware of the American way of life. Notice how emails and mobiles are taken for granted in these films (‘One Fine Day’ and ‘You’ve Got Mail’), not simply clever new technology but integral to the plots, integral to the clever and up-to-date lives that Americans apparentlt lead.”[12]
The most popular constituent of television, that relies heavily on what Crary refers to as the “reign of the perpetual present”[13] is, of course, news coverage. The subjects a news network covers, (and their order), determines what becomes most important to a nation. The news language, who is said to ‘demand’ and who is said to ‘offer’, are some of the struggles that Crary refers to as “cultural-institutional formation with a suspicious structural autonomy”[14] . The language favours certain dominant classes and operates as mild social control. Even in the most useful of all types of programmes, coveting and capitalism still influence the larger sphere of activity.
“News is also a commodity. It is expensive to gather and distribute, and must produce an audience that is of the right size and composition to be sold to advertizers. In a cynical but productive phrase, news has been defined as “that which is printed on the back of advertisements.”[15]
The expense of news networks are almost exclusively tied to the emphasis on speed and the illusion of ‘nowness’ that is actively portrayed. Inbetween being startled by violence, informed by accounts, subdued by human interest story or shocked by sensationalism, the news is presented not only as unbiased, but also as fresh, undiluted truth. Often these aspects work against one another, as time and money dissipate and executive decisions are made in favour of ratings and prestige.
“News is as conventional as any other form of television; it’s conventions are so powerful and so uninspected because of the tyranny of the deadline requires the speed and efficiency that only conventions make possible.”[16]
“Most mass media are in the hands of big companies and are subject to the same sort of influences as any other capitalist enterprise. Media organizations can be subjected to a variety of commerical influences. In the west the majority of media organizations are themselves commercial undertakings....the need to maintain profitability is likely to be an influence on their activities.”[17]
However, I remained unconvinced that the year 1927 was truly the beginning of the spectacle, merely a landmark year in its continuing influence. Nations had persuaded thousands of citizens to believe in the causes of higher classes in the name of glory and honour only ten years prior, and the seeds for propaganda to start a new world war were already being spread through radio, and spectacles such as parades, violent protests and rallies. True, television most definantly dominated the remainder of the twentieth century as a ruthlessly used and powerful tool for mass control in terms of strengthening consumerism and creation of niche markets. But in terms of social control, effective forms existed before 1927. One example, given by Crary is Goebbels mailing 50,000 phonographic records of his speeches to potential voters. The difference lies in attention and guarantee of absorbability. But the Nazi party was conscious of the advantage of television, and led the world in developing broadcasts. They favoured group reception, also adopted in USSR, in a mass viewing environment, perhaps echoing similar emotions felt in rallies or parades. Yet, this proves that the spectacle existed before 1927, as the Concentrated spectacle relies upon quoting and improving already existing types of public persuasion. Even its western counterpart, Diffused spectacle, is based on modernizing older forms of spectacle, such as printmaking distribution of the Church and its enemies. Other forms of spectacle which the Diffused spectacle is based on are news heralding, church sermons, papal addresses, royal decrees, and commissioned art pieces.
Printmaking assisted control and domination of provinces far from centres of power, and also helped promote dialects. From 1468, with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, (slightly altered from wine-making) and metal type-faces, Europe became better connected but not necessarily better informed. The Reformation and the spread of bibles translated into the vernacular caused Latin, (and influence from Rome), to quell over the sixteenth century. The spread of bibles, fearful “picture-sermons”, psalms and religious tracts spread faith in Europe, and in 1519 directly assisted Luther in destroying the “constellation of forces and institutions”[18] that it had initially glorified.
“The invention of printing hastened the exchange of ideas without which the Reformation might have never come about.”[19]
Was 1927 the beginning, or just a point of increased acceleration like almost everything else in the twentieth century?
[1] Crary, Johnathon “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory “, October, Vol. 50, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1989. p 98
[2] ibid, p 98
[3] Baudrillard, Jean La Société de cosommation: ses mythes, ses structures. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. p 60
[4] Crary, p 98
[5] ibid, p 98
[6] ibid, p 100
[7] ibid, p 101
[8] Fairclough, Norman Media Discourse New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1995. p 44
[9] ibid, p 44
[10] ibid, p 44
[11] ibid, p 44
[12] Armstrong, Richard Understanding Realism Trowbridge: Cromwell Press, 2005. p57
[13] Crary, Johnathon “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory “, October, Vol. 50, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1989. p 106
[14] ibid, p 96
[15] Fiske, John Televion Culture Cornwall, TJ Press, 1987. p 127
[16] ibid, p 128
[17] Barrat, David Media Sociology New York: Tavistock Publications, 1986. p 59
[18] Crary, p 98
[19] Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art London: Phaidon, 2004. p 285
In ‘Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory’, Crary attempts to determine the origin of the “spectacle”; not merely situationist related, (as a response to modern art and contemporary capitalism), but also the term used by Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, and to its wider implications in mass media, particularly television.
Early in his writing, Crary clearly points out the varying, typical meanings and uses found for the word, and how they may have changed dramatically since the turbulent and challenging 1960’s. But what interests Crary is how and why they have changed to “designate a certian set of objective conditions”[1] and has become part of a complex power establishment, a “constellation of forces and institutions”[2] that is strengthened by the abilities the spectacle offers and compells contemporary society. More importantly, Crary questions what can be done now to resist such impact, and thus begins his writing about the disparate ways that this understanding of “spectacle” has operated in different political methods, in order to subvert its different approaches. But, in all the examples given, the spectacle remains a word for describing the act of coercing belief from the general public in order to either scare them, subdue them or turn them into consumers like Benjamin’s concept of the ‘phantasmagoria of equality’. As already noted, Crary concentrates on attempting to connect spectacle with the history of television, which allows the finding of a specific date more focused.
The science historian, Bruno Latour has written extensively about the need for visual display (such as a covert graph) in order for the public to believe, so long as it is accompanied with an ‘inscription’ to translate. In Walter Benjamin’s case, the visible world is where a sence of hapiness can be adhered to with the “measurable...terms of signs and objects”[3] , but it is the act of copying and the “capactity to produce equivalences”[4] that the new classes initially subverted the power of the spectacle. Thus, the nineteenth century classes challenged the importance of originality by counterfeiting. The flow of Crary’s writing is suave, as he allows this response to lead us to the industrial revolutiuon and its explosion of the ‘unessential sectors of capitalism’ (according to Marx). The author defines the newly emerging meaning of spectacle, which I believe it has not wavered far from since, at this historical point “when sign-value takes precedence over use-value”[5].
T.J. Clark offers a reversal view, that instead, it was the “construction of an observer who was a precondition for the transformation of everyday life.” but I find it less consequential to exactly denote whether it was conditioning of market niches or conditioning of consumers, because in either case the spectacle has been utilized to first define and then continually strengthen coveting in western countries (and fear in communist states). Moreover, any resistance in these western markets is suitably digested by “converting them into objects or images of consumption”.[6]
Crary continues after briefly covering the history and operation of the spectacle, to finding exactly when it began. In this writing he persuades the reader to believe that it can be designated to an exact date, and furthermore that the date is 1927. This concept is aligned with Crary’s attempt to marry spectacle to television. The synchronic acts of the beginnings of monoplies in the United States by the division of control of television, with its actual invention (or at least, its perfection) demonstrates how much control the state, coporate, military sectors believed how useful this new technology would be with its “speed, ubiquity, and simultaneity.”[7] Above all, this new form of entertainment garnered attention more than its ancestors, due to synchronized sound. Now with more commanding authority, this new technology’s hypnotic abilities were fully realized.
But not all western countries that made use of Diffused spectacle shared the United State’s questionable subjectivity. Britian’s BBC and France’s RTF (Radio-telediffusion française) are state sponsored and regulated. There is a healthy tension between “opting boradly for more entertainment, and the pressure to provide public service information and eductaion”[8] is more heated in Britian than in the United States, where “broadcasting was commercially dominated from the start”[9] which Crary points out, was 1927. Nevertheless, they have to exist in a commercial environment. For example, the BBC supplements it’s revenue from licence fees by the sale of books, recordings and DVDs and also selling programmes to other countries. Yet even in this way they still squarely operate within the system supported by capitalism utilizing coveting and conveying an illusion of need for products. The BBC’s voice, personalized by it’s announcers and newsreaders “has evolved in a populist direction, claiming common ground with audiences, and often adopting a cynical, challenging and even aggressive stance to a variety of official institutions and personalities, including government ministers.”[10] But the common sense that these characters are based on contain “basic design features of contemporary capitalist society and its consumerist values.”[11]
In American movies and television soaps, products themselves are subtly added or become the main article of the narrative so as to be overlooked.
“For decades, ‘product placement’, the surreptitious but visible inclusion of consumer items in films and television, has made people around the world aware of the American way of life. Notice how emails and mobiles are taken for granted in these films (‘One Fine Day’ and ‘You’ve Got Mail’), not simply clever new technology but integral to the plots, integral to the clever and up-to-date lives that Americans apparentlt lead.”[12]
The most popular constituent of television, that relies heavily on what Crary refers to as the “reign of the perpetual present”[13] is, of course, news coverage. The subjects a news network covers, (and their order), determines what becomes most important to a nation. The news language, who is said to ‘demand’ and who is said to ‘offer’, are some of the struggles that Crary refers to as “cultural-institutional formation with a suspicious structural autonomy”[14] . The language favours certain dominant classes and operates as mild social control. Even in the most useful of all types of programmes, coveting and capitalism still influence the larger sphere of activity.
“News is also a commodity. It is expensive to gather and distribute, and must produce an audience that is of the right size and composition to be sold to advertizers. In a cynical but productive phrase, news has been defined as “that which is printed on the back of advertisements.”[15]
The expense of news networks are almost exclusively tied to the emphasis on speed and the illusion of ‘nowness’ that is actively portrayed. Inbetween being startled by violence, informed by accounts, subdued by human interest story or shocked by sensationalism, the news is presented not only as unbiased, but also as fresh, undiluted truth. Often these aspects work against one another, as time and money dissipate and executive decisions are made in favour of ratings and prestige.
“News is as conventional as any other form of television; it’s conventions are so powerful and so uninspected because of the tyranny of the deadline requires the speed and efficiency that only conventions make possible.”[16]
“Most mass media are in the hands of big companies and are subject to the same sort of influences as any other capitalist enterprise. Media organizations can be subjected to a variety of commerical influences. In the west the majority of media organizations are themselves commercial undertakings....the need to maintain profitability is likely to be an influence on their activities.”[17]
However, I remained unconvinced that the year 1927 was truly the beginning of the spectacle, merely a landmark year in its continuing influence. Nations had persuaded thousands of citizens to believe in the causes of higher classes in the name of glory and honour only ten years prior, and the seeds for propaganda to start a new world war were already being spread through radio, and spectacles such as parades, violent protests and rallies. True, television most definantly dominated the remainder of the twentieth century as a ruthlessly used and powerful tool for mass control in terms of strengthening consumerism and creation of niche markets. But in terms of social control, effective forms existed before 1927. One example, given by Crary is Goebbels mailing 50,000 phonographic records of his speeches to potential voters. The difference lies in attention and guarantee of absorbability. But the Nazi party was conscious of the advantage of television, and led the world in developing broadcasts. They favoured group reception, also adopted in USSR, in a mass viewing environment, perhaps echoing similar emotions felt in rallies or parades. Yet, this proves that the spectacle existed before 1927, as the Concentrated spectacle relies upon quoting and improving already existing types of public persuasion. Even its western counterpart, Diffused spectacle, is based on modernizing older forms of spectacle, such as printmaking distribution of the Church and its enemies. Other forms of spectacle which the Diffused spectacle is based on are news heralding, church sermons, papal addresses, royal decrees, and commissioned art pieces.
Printmaking assisted control and domination of provinces far from centres of power, and also helped promote dialects. From 1468, with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, (slightly altered from wine-making) and metal type-faces, Europe became better connected but not necessarily better informed. The Reformation and the spread of bibles translated into the vernacular caused Latin, (and influence from Rome), to quell over the sixteenth century. The spread of bibles, fearful “picture-sermons”, psalms and religious tracts spread faith in Europe, and in 1519 directly assisted Luther in destroying the “constellation of forces and institutions”[18] that it had initially glorified.
“The invention of printing hastened the exchange of ideas without which the Reformation might have never come about.”[19]
Was 1927 the beginning, or just a point of increased acceleration like almost everything else in the twentieth century?
[1] Crary, Johnathon “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory “, October, Vol. 50, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1989. p 98
[2] ibid, p 98
[3] Baudrillard, Jean La Société de cosommation: ses mythes, ses structures. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. p 60
[4] Crary, p 98
[5] ibid, p 98
[6] ibid, p 100
[7] ibid, p 101
[8] Fairclough, Norman Media Discourse New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1995. p 44
[9] ibid, p 44
[10] ibid, p 44
[11] ibid, p 44
[12] Armstrong, Richard Understanding Realism Trowbridge: Cromwell Press, 2005. p57
[13] Crary, Johnathon “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory “, October, Vol. 50, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1989. p 106
[14] ibid, p 96
[15] Fiske, John Televion Culture Cornwall, TJ Press, 1987. p 127
[16] ibid, p 128
[17] Barrat, David Media Sociology New York: Tavistock Publications, 1986. p 59
[18] Crary, p 98
[19] Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art London: Phaidon, 2004. p 285
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Critical Response to Simon Critchley's "On Humour. Thinking in Action"
Simon Critchley is an English philosophy writer. He writes humorously about his subjects, from colonization to continental philosophy. Critchley states that philosophy starts with disappointment. His style relies heavily on philosophical beliefs, (some thousands of years old, such as Cicero and Plato), without regarding scientific reassessments or experimentation's on said subjects. This makes his writing more humorous because of the leaps in logic this allows, and assists his gaps in reasoning to be ignored.
In “On Humour” Critchley evaluates wit, satire and Beckett’s ‘mirthless laugh’, but closely aligns laughter specifically with humour in his 2nd chapter “Is Humour Human”. These two words (laughter and humour) are neither separated or defined, and this flaw motives my lack of enjoyment of the writing. Furthermore, Critchley does not mention Freudian notions, such as sexual repression or laughing being a release of stored psychical energy, but uses Plessner to illustrate that the gap between the physical and the psychical is in fact humans themselves. Critchley could have made use of a straightforward quote such as follows: “Thus the joke allows expression of the forbidden. Our yield of pleasure equals the psychical energy saved by our not having to repress. The joke beats the repression of the sexual and aggressive drives and is thus a mechanism of defence. It provides a release from tension. Beware the humourless and the solemn.”[1] and used it to introduce religious piety later mentioned, but instead he chooses to remain elusive. Even though Critchley has his “doubts about Plessner’s certitude”[2] the avoidance of science is obvious. This attitude of separating unique humanity from boorish animality dominates the chapter. When Critchley touches on anthropological subjects, distinctly avoiding the word ‘evolution’ and using instead ‘transformation’, it is only to illustrate the “distance of human culture from animal life.”[3] He attempts to “define the human as a dynamic process”[4] in the context of regarding “humour [as being] precisely the exploration of the break between nature and culture.”[5] It is in my opinion, this high self-esteem of humans that permeates early Western and Eastern philosophical writings, that makes Critchley ignore the various opportunities he has to direct his writing to the more important questions: “are all animals incapable of reflection?”[6] in light of Plessner’s views. Perhaps, like mentioning the word evolution, he might scare his audience so he politely skips to his next paragraph (‘A Small Bestiary’) quickly, beginning, bizarrely with “If humour is human, then it also, curiously, marks the limit of the human” as if anything had been proved previously, and then begins the adjacent paragraph (‘Outlandish Animals’) with “Humour is human.”[7] as if stating an obvious fact. The lack of Freudian or Darwinian accomplishments, chimpanzee communication, training and humour, is annoying enough without Critchley’s consistent praise for mankind that echoes ancient, obsolete philosophy.
It is within the first four sentences that Critchley questions, considers and answers whether animals are capable of humour, using the rhetoric of a remote philosopher who had never seen a higher primate, (except for other humans) and proudly illustrates from “Galen and Porphyry, through Rabelais to Hazlitt and Bergson”[8] that this thought has been ingrained in philosophical thinking. It is all the more reason to question something that has passed down the centuries unchallenged and, in my opinion, unfounded.
Plessner’s concept of an eccentric human capable of having a “reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself”[9] could be transferred and explained as mirror neurons, existing in the brains of dolphins, elephants, greater apes (orang-utans, homo sapiens, bonobos, gorillas, and chimpanzees). An animal that has mirror neurons is capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, and are prerequisites for any behaviour that can be described as humorous, but not necessarily including laughter. Even this thought is being challenged by neuroscientists Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burdorf of Green State University, who are searching for laughter (and by extension, [but not proof from the former,] humour also) in rats, and in neural circuits and more ancient regions of the animal brain that we share with small mammals like rodents. After all, human brain occupies 2% of body mass; in small rodents the relative goes up to 10%.
“The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observations and execution of goal-directed behaviour and is taken as evidence for the validity of the simulation theory, according to which human subjects use their own mental states to predict or explain mental processes of others.”[10]
If mirror neurons are present in elephants, dolphins and apes like humans, then they could all be capable of an eccentric position whereby they can have a “reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself.”[11]
Humorously enough, it is lying and deception that makes scientists aware of the consciousness of animals in test experiments.
“It seems clear that on many occasions animals communicate inaccurate information or intentionally avoid conveying certain types of information to others. In many cases the versatility of deceptive or misleading behaviour provides even more suggestive evidence of conscious intent than the transmission of reasonably accurate information.
de Waal has described other examples of somewhat deceptive behaviour in primates, along with intriguing patterns of friendship and reconciliation.”[12]
Critchely, who avoids evolution, addresses his chapter from postulating that “If, as ethnologists report, laughter originated in the animal function of the aggressive baring of teeth” without realizing that higher primate evolution took a turn from aggression to submission. Reflexive teeth-baring has been well proven by many scientists and primate specialists that our own smile comes from the “fearful or submissive expression. It has therefore been hypothesized that smiling evolved as an indicator of cooperativeness and altruism. In a phylogenetic analysis, van Hooff compared the way various primates employ the silent bared-teeth display and concluded that the appeasing and friendly qualities of the human smile are not unique.”[13]
If it is true that not all animal’s lives are zentrisch, that the smile originated from fear, and more importantly that it is not unique in humans, then perhaps humour is not unique either.
“Captive chimpanzees have been trained to signal “funny” in situations marked by incongruity, such as when they are representing incorrect signs. Some of these chimpanzees also signal “funny” when attempting to urinate on people.”[14] It would seem that even types of humour, (toilet humour) are not unique to humans.
But what of laughter, evolved from social signalling and having more in common sonically with animal calls than human speech? As for Critchley’s long list of philosophers through the millennia who have naively adopted Aristotle’s belief (“Galen and Porphyry, through Rabelais to Hazlitt and Bergson”[15] ) here is a longer list of scientists who have experienced, but also written peer reviewed reports about chimpanzee laughter.
“The opinion often repeated in the popular media that laughter is unique to humans is unfounded. From at least the time of Darwin (1862) there has been an awareness that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and other great apes emit a laugh-like vocalization when tickled and during play (Bernston, Boysen, Bauer and Torello 1989, Fossey 1972, Marler and Tenanza, 1977, Van Lawick-Goodall 1968, Yerkes 1943).”[16]
It is important to note that the chimpanzee laughter is breathy and grunt-like, but shares close acoustic characteristics (shapes, lengths, patterns) but is generated by a different pattern of neuromuscular activity. (Province and Bard, 1994) But even more importantly, laughter of both humans and chimpanzees occurred almost exclusively in social contexts.
Despite Critchley ignoring scientific research; discovery of the repressed mind; and chimpanzee laughter in the wild, and humour in captivity while communicating, the most annoying aspect of the chapter is his centralized view of religion coupled with his disregard for the appreciation of context. The glaring omission of other religions is never more evident than when Critchley writes “If laughter is essentially human, then the question of whether Jesus laughed assumes rather theological pertinence”[17] without even mentioning the extremely popular religion of Buddhism that is led and defined by a Messiah who laughs openly and eternally.
What the reader will quickly realize about Critchley’s use of the early Bible story is that the retort is amusing because of our knowledge of Jesus later becoming the messiah, and talking back to his mother in “messianic”[18] tones rather than modern childish ones, similar to the “sudden and incongruous humanity of the animal”[19] . The context that is not regarded when Critchley tries to persuade the reader to find hilarity of Jesus’ ministry beginning “with an encouragement to imbibe.”[20] is the mundanity of wine in the life of people in the middle-east two thousand years ago. Their methodology of drinking water without getting sick was using fermentation, as opposed to the far-east method of brewing tea. The humour aligned with finding drunkenness amusing due to its repression and being frowned upon in proper society is removed when we consider that wine was the normal beverage of choice.
But Critchley is correct in believing that those that do not laugh “invites the charge of inhumanity”[21] and is echoed by Cameron when he warns us to “beware the humourless and solemn”[22]. The very fact early christians had to “trawl the Evangelist fro evidence of levity”[23] proves that there was not a lot of humour already apparent within the New Testament anyway. But, perhaps, like Critchley’s example, we could find these funny in a new context. When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden in the Fall, God first made them “small leather garments” (Genesis 3:21) in order to hide their nudity. Even more cringe worthy is the way that early Christians distanced themselves from other Jews by specifically not practicing kosher laws, circumcision and Sabbath, and claiming in Paul’s words, to be “Jews inwardly” and circumcized “in the heart.” (Romans 2:28 -29)
[1] Cameron, Keith Humour and History. Oxford: Cromwell Press, 1993. p 156
[2] Critchley, Simon. On humour. Thinking in Action. London: Routledge, 2003. p 29
[3] ibid, p 28
[4] ibid, p 29
[5] ibid, p 29
[6] ibid, p 29
[7] ibid, p 34
[8] ibid, p 25
[9] ibid, p 28
[10] Stamenov, Maxim. I. and Gallese, Vittorio Mirror neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003. p 135
[11] Critchley, p 28
[12] Griffin, Donald R. Animal Mind: Beyond Recognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p 154
[13] Ekman, Paul; Campos Joseph J.; Davidson, Richard J.; de Waal, Frans B.M.; Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years After Darwin’s ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2003. p 14
[14] Maier, Richard Comparitive Animal Behvaiour: An Evolutionary and Ecological Approach. Chicago: Loyola University of Chicago, (Allyn and Bacon, Viacom) , 1998. p 292
[15] Critchley, p 25
[16] Heyes, Cecilia M., Galef, Bennet G. Jr Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture San Diego: Academic Press, Inc, 1996. p 196
[17] Critchley, p 25
[18] ibid, p 26
[19] ibid, p 30
[20] ibid, p 26
[21] ibid, p 25
[22] ibid, p 156
[23] ibid, p 26
[24] Griffin, Dustin “Satire: A critical Reintroduction” Univeristy Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1994, page 6
[25] ibid page 7
[26] Palmeri, Frank “Satire, History, Novel , Narrative Forms, 1665-1815” Associated Univeristy Press, Cranbury, NJ, page 121
In “On Humour” Critchley evaluates wit, satire and Beckett’s ‘mirthless laugh’, but closely aligns laughter specifically with humour in his 2nd chapter “Is Humour Human”. These two words (laughter and humour) are neither separated or defined, and this flaw motives my lack of enjoyment of the writing. Furthermore, Critchley does not mention Freudian notions, such as sexual repression or laughing being a release of stored psychical energy, but uses Plessner to illustrate that the gap between the physical and the psychical is in fact humans themselves. Critchley could have made use of a straightforward quote such as follows: “Thus the joke allows expression of the forbidden. Our yield of pleasure equals the psychical energy saved by our not having to repress. The joke beats the repression of the sexual and aggressive drives and is thus a mechanism of defence. It provides a release from tension. Beware the humourless and the solemn.”[1] and used it to introduce religious piety later mentioned, but instead he chooses to remain elusive. Even though Critchley has his “doubts about Plessner’s certitude”[2] the avoidance of science is obvious. This attitude of separating unique humanity from boorish animality dominates the chapter. When Critchley touches on anthropological subjects, distinctly avoiding the word ‘evolution’ and using instead ‘transformation’, it is only to illustrate the “distance of human culture from animal life.”[3] He attempts to “define the human as a dynamic process”[4] in the context of regarding “humour [as being] precisely the exploration of the break between nature and culture.”[5] It is in my opinion, this high self-esteem of humans that permeates early Western and Eastern philosophical writings, that makes Critchley ignore the various opportunities he has to direct his writing to the more important questions: “are all animals incapable of reflection?”[6] in light of Plessner’s views. Perhaps, like mentioning the word evolution, he might scare his audience so he politely skips to his next paragraph (‘A Small Bestiary’) quickly, beginning, bizarrely with “If humour is human, then it also, curiously, marks the limit of the human” as if anything had been proved previously, and then begins the adjacent paragraph (‘Outlandish Animals’) with “Humour is human.”[7] as if stating an obvious fact. The lack of Freudian or Darwinian accomplishments, chimpanzee communication, training and humour, is annoying enough without Critchley’s consistent praise for mankind that echoes ancient, obsolete philosophy.
It is within the first four sentences that Critchley questions, considers and answers whether animals are capable of humour, using the rhetoric of a remote philosopher who had never seen a higher primate, (except for other humans) and proudly illustrates from “Galen and Porphyry, through Rabelais to Hazlitt and Bergson”[8] that this thought has been ingrained in philosophical thinking. It is all the more reason to question something that has passed down the centuries unchallenged and, in my opinion, unfounded.
Plessner’s concept of an eccentric human capable of having a “reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself”[9] could be transferred and explained as mirror neurons, existing in the brains of dolphins, elephants, greater apes (orang-utans, homo sapiens, bonobos, gorillas, and chimpanzees). An animal that has mirror neurons is capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, and are prerequisites for any behaviour that can be described as humorous, but not necessarily including laughter. Even this thought is being challenged by neuroscientists Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burdorf of Green State University, who are searching for laughter (and by extension, [but not proof from the former,] humour also) in rats, and in neural circuits and more ancient regions of the animal brain that we share with small mammals like rodents. After all, human brain occupies 2% of body mass; in small rodents the relative goes up to 10%.
“The concept of mirror neurons postulates a neuronal network that represents both observations and execution of goal-directed behaviour and is taken as evidence for the validity of the simulation theory, according to which human subjects use their own mental states to predict or explain mental processes of others.”[10]
If mirror neurons are present in elephants, dolphins and apes like humans, then they could all be capable of an eccentric position whereby they can have a “reflective attitude towards its experiences and towards itself.”[11]
Humorously enough, it is lying and deception that makes scientists aware of the consciousness of animals in test experiments.
“It seems clear that on many occasions animals communicate inaccurate information or intentionally avoid conveying certain types of information to others. In many cases the versatility of deceptive or misleading behaviour provides even more suggestive evidence of conscious intent than the transmission of reasonably accurate information.
de Waal has described other examples of somewhat deceptive behaviour in primates, along with intriguing patterns of friendship and reconciliation.”[12]
Critchely, who avoids evolution, addresses his chapter from postulating that “If, as ethnologists report, laughter originated in the animal function of the aggressive baring of teeth” without realizing that higher primate evolution took a turn from aggression to submission. Reflexive teeth-baring has been well proven by many scientists and primate specialists that our own smile comes from the “fearful or submissive expression. It has therefore been hypothesized that smiling evolved as an indicator of cooperativeness and altruism. In a phylogenetic analysis, van Hooff compared the way various primates employ the silent bared-teeth display and concluded that the appeasing and friendly qualities of the human smile are not unique.”[13]
If it is true that not all animal’s lives are zentrisch, that the smile originated from fear, and more importantly that it is not unique in humans, then perhaps humour is not unique either.
“Captive chimpanzees have been trained to signal “funny” in situations marked by incongruity, such as when they are representing incorrect signs. Some of these chimpanzees also signal “funny” when attempting to urinate on people.”[14] It would seem that even types of humour, (toilet humour) are not unique to humans.
But what of laughter, evolved from social signalling and having more in common sonically with animal calls than human speech? As for Critchley’s long list of philosophers through the millennia who have naively adopted Aristotle’s belief (“Galen and Porphyry, through Rabelais to Hazlitt and Bergson”[15] ) here is a longer list of scientists who have experienced, but also written peer reviewed reports about chimpanzee laughter.
“The opinion often repeated in the popular media that laughter is unique to humans is unfounded. From at least the time of Darwin (1862) there has been an awareness that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and other great apes emit a laugh-like vocalization when tickled and during play (Bernston, Boysen, Bauer and Torello 1989, Fossey 1972, Marler and Tenanza, 1977, Van Lawick-Goodall 1968, Yerkes 1943).”[16]
It is important to note that the chimpanzee laughter is breathy and grunt-like, but shares close acoustic characteristics (shapes, lengths, patterns) but is generated by a different pattern of neuromuscular activity. (Province and Bard, 1994) But even more importantly, laughter of both humans and chimpanzees occurred almost exclusively in social contexts.
Despite Critchley ignoring scientific research; discovery of the repressed mind; and chimpanzee laughter in the wild, and humour in captivity while communicating, the most annoying aspect of the chapter is his centralized view of religion coupled with his disregard for the appreciation of context. The glaring omission of other religions is never more evident than when Critchley writes “If laughter is essentially human, then the question of whether Jesus laughed assumes rather theological pertinence”[17] without even mentioning the extremely popular religion of Buddhism that is led and defined by a Messiah who laughs openly and eternally.
What the reader will quickly realize about Critchley’s use of the early Bible story is that the retort is amusing because of our knowledge of Jesus later becoming the messiah, and talking back to his mother in “messianic”[18] tones rather than modern childish ones, similar to the “sudden and incongruous humanity of the animal”[19] . The context that is not regarded when Critchley tries to persuade the reader to find hilarity of Jesus’ ministry beginning “with an encouragement to imbibe.”[20] is the mundanity of wine in the life of people in the middle-east two thousand years ago. Their methodology of drinking water without getting sick was using fermentation, as opposed to the far-east method of brewing tea. The humour aligned with finding drunkenness amusing due to its repression and being frowned upon in proper society is removed when we consider that wine was the normal beverage of choice.
But Critchley is correct in believing that those that do not laugh “invites the charge of inhumanity”[21] and is echoed by Cameron when he warns us to “beware the humourless and solemn”[22]. The very fact early christians had to “trawl the Evangelist fro evidence of levity”[23] proves that there was not a lot of humour already apparent within the New Testament anyway. But, perhaps, like Critchley’s example, we could find these funny in a new context. When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden in the Fall, God first made them “small leather garments” (Genesis 3:21) in order to hide their nudity. Even more cringe worthy is the way that early Christians distanced themselves from other Jews by specifically not practicing kosher laws, circumcision and Sabbath, and claiming in Paul’s words, to be “Jews inwardly” and circumcized “in the heart.” (Romans 2:28 -29)
[1] Cameron, Keith Humour and History. Oxford: Cromwell Press, 1993. p 156
[2] Critchley, Simon. On humour. Thinking in Action. London: Routledge, 2003. p 29
[3] ibid, p 28
[4] ibid, p 29
[5] ibid, p 29
[6] ibid, p 29
[7] ibid, p 34
[8] ibid, p 25
[9] ibid, p 28
[10] Stamenov, Maxim. I. and Gallese, Vittorio Mirror neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003. p 135
[11] Critchley, p 28
[12] Griffin, Donald R. Animal Mind: Beyond Recognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p 154
[13] Ekman, Paul; Campos Joseph J.; Davidson, Richard J.; de Waal, Frans B.M.; Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years After Darwin’s ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2003. p 14
[14] Maier, Richard Comparitive Animal Behvaiour: An Evolutionary and Ecological Approach. Chicago: Loyola University of Chicago, (Allyn and Bacon, Viacom) , 1998. p 292
[15] Critchley, p 25
[16] Heyes, Cecilia M., Galef, Bennet G. Jr Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture San Diego: Academic Press, Inc, 1996. p 196
[17] Critchley, p 25
[18] ibid, p 26
[19] ibid, p 30
[20] ibid, p 26
[21] ibid, p 25
[22] ibid, p 156
[23] ibid, p 26
[24] Griffin, Dustin “Satire: A critical Reintroduction” Univeristy Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1994, page 6
[25] ibid page 7
[26] Palmeri, Frank “Satire, History, Novel , Narrative Forms, 1665-1815” Associated Univeristy Press, Cranbury, NJ, page 121
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