Tangents

The things I've been thinking about and reading since last week's lecture (Metaphor - the pictures embedded in our language) don't feel entirely relevant but then I suppose tangents often aren't. And I think generally you can wander off on one or two lines of thought, and circle back to the original trigger a month or two later, so I'll indulge these.

Baudrillard was mentioned a couple of times in the last two weeks, so I went book shopping. Got "Baudrillard and the Millennium" by Christopher Horrocks, which I suppose is a sort of starter on Baudrillard's thinking (particularly surrounding the advent of the Year 2000), and "The Condition of Post-Modernity" by David Harvey as a more generally useful thing. I'm most of the way through the Baudrillard, it's pretty interesting. He seems to pursues this idea that humans have always worked toward the 'end of history', but the world which we live in eliminates that possibility; that history is a fiction, a "culturally specific and constructed linear version ofevents liunked by causes and effects"; that the run up to the year 2000 saw us stuck in retro culture, humanity replaying everything that had gone before rather than progressing, caught in a kind of stasis, where even the major events of the era (e.g. the Gulf War) were simulations rather than truly real phenomena - events have no time to develop outside the media, and that which would have become "history" becomes nothing more than "current events". He also seems to be strongly interested in science, mathematics (particularly fractals and chaos theory, which is something I find interesting - don't know much about it yet but am aware of the idea that nothing is completely controllable, that every system develops "bugs") and technology - what role the latter has in our world, what effect it has on our philosophies, ideologies and perspective on ourselves; the idea that, as Horrocks puts it, "technoculture ensures that processes continue to unfold, but without meaning or sense . . . " the way chaos theory, singularities, etc, confuse and warp processes' original intentions, and the viral, "metastatic" (instant transferrence from one location to another) nature of the technoculture (including the media).

The effect of technology and the media upon 'history' is talked about; the way that events happen instantly before our eyes and are beamed around the world just as quickly, "exhausting our faith in reality" - "mass media accelerates events in all directions at once, escaping the space-time in which events make history". Horrocks, in his analysis of Baudrillard's thinking, says that "television breeds indifference, distance, scepticism and apathy. By making the world into an image, it numbs the imagination and produces adrenalin surges that simply lead to disillusionment."

There's an interesting quote by Nietzsche near the start of the book which is very reminiscent of what was discussed in the 4th lecture (metaphors): - "What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors . . . which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which wehave forgotten are illusions."

Interestingly Baudrillard suggests that "Television protects us . . . its immunizing, prophylactic use protects us from an unbearable responsibility." It's strongly reminiscent of Nietszche's ideas about art as a 'veil of illusion', protecting us from the unimaginable horror of complete truth and understanding (about the absurdity of existence), and "thoughts and words . . . save us from the unbrooked effusion of the unconscious will."

In television's case, I guess what's meant is that these enormous, 'world-changing' and 'historical' events occur but are relayed to us through glass and plasma; we are not THERE, and do not necessarily have to cope with all the resulting effects; we are given the license to be mere observers and consumers of events. Moreover, television news increasingly condenses and simplifies things for us; news programmes delight in giving us graphs and commentary on things, meaning we don't have to think for ourselves about the implications and meaning of what we're told; complicated events meanwhile are reduced to headlines; memorable, massively significant occurrences (like the Christmas tsunami and "9/11") get reduced to "iconic" images and brief buzzwords. We think of the terrorist bombs of July 2005, and think of the news image of the decimated bus in Tavistock Square. It reminds me of what was said in an earlier lecture, about icons acting as an interface between us and something we would otherwise have difficulty dealing with (be it the essence of God or the inner workings of a Pentium). Meanwhile, for Baudrillard, even the notion of AIDS-related death is reduced to a countdown, as is the approach of the millennium.

Going off on a further tangent, I found a Solzhenitsyn book I didn't know I owned - a play, "Candle In The Wind". Solzhenitsyn uses the narrative of a (wrongly incarcerated) ex-convict's restyling as an ambitious scientist, and the effect his scientific ambition has on a passive friend whose mind he irrevocably alters using new technology, to ask questions about whether science should be used to alter human personality, and about the hedonistic society he saw around him.

I'm about halfway through it so far and a couple of things have come up. First, the redefinition of identity - not merely formulated from person to person, but imposed en masse; national identity is swept aside in a light-hearted comment by an arrogant research assistant who declares that "People used to think in terms of their homeland in the seventeenth century . . . but there haven't been any hopelands for a longtime now, they're a gruesome anachronism. There is only our little planet, and even that, it seems . . . " - this uttered to an African who still feels a sense of pride and obligation to his homeland. Yet it's imposed on him that this is not a modern way of thinking. Earlier we're introduced to the protagonist's step-aunt Tillie, a worldly character who delights in instant gratification. She's a journalist, and embraces her role at a magazine which deals with "foreign problems"; she, again, talks about what one SHOULD believe; "Don't you realize that our age breathes democracy? One must act in accordance with the spirit of the age! Personally, at the editorial office I always understand the spirit of the age." It all rather reminds me of the way that television news operates; facts fed to us complete with bitesized understanding; ideas reduced to metaphorical and iconic images, which we are invited to absorb and repeat to each other, whether or not we really understand what we're talking about.

Second, the idea of acceleration of events, explored by Baudrillard, comes up in Candle In The Wind too, in the form of scientific progress - things occur almost instantaneously, before it can be decided whether they actually ought to occur. "Right now in the whole of science . . . any half-baked captain's ship in a dilapidated schooner could set out to sea in any random direction and return having discovered a couple of new straits, if not a whole archipelago! In the sciences kids who are still wet behind the ears tackle problems which Rutherford would have kept away from and in three months' time they've already found the solution." This idea of acceleration is really interesting; our lectures so far have brought up the idea of images taking the places of words once more; an image, as a metaphor, providing instant (if basic/malformed) understanding of a concept; Baudrillard's thoughts about the media sending information manically in all directions before the effects and consequences of this information have even happened (therefore news of a phenomenon exists even before the phenomenon itself completely exists - yet the news, not the phenomenon, is what we have access to; we cling to the illusion rather than the reality, and the metaphor rather than the complete meaning.)