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A couple of articles in this morning’s New York Times have clarified for me some of my more quintessentially obscure meanderings in recent posts. (A couple of articles in the last two days about the economy and the electorate have reinforced feelings and opinions I have held for years, too, but I don’t write about politics for reasons I have previously stated.)
Richard Foreman’s destabilizings of ordinary experience via multimedia theatre pieces on the one hand, and the Czech group Ztohoven’s latest incarnation of the Czech ironic response to powerlessness in the face of mildly unpleasant circumstances on the other, bring home the relativity of exactly parallel emotional experiences. (I would prefer to leave that obscure remark obscure, because it will derail the main thrust of my argument to clarify it just yet. Bear with me, this will be quick.)
This feeds back into the remarks I was making about the unfashionability of phenomenology: A New York theatre audience being introduced to thoughts and emotions they never before had experienced, or more likely ones that hadn’t consciously realized they had had, is “transported, at least fleetingly, to a place that was always within them, even if they never knew it was on the map.” The pranks of Ztohoven, like the direct confrontations of Czech and central European Actionism in general, are almost opposite in their disorientation of ordinary expectations: a fake atomic blast presented on Czech television via a sophisticated piece of hacking is more akin to Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds radio broadcast minus the prefatory warning. (The web address ztohoven.com at the bottom of the screen was the 21st century version of fair warning that you are watching a creative invention.) But the mystification that is part of Czech creative coping with dailiness spills over into literary and artistic endeavors that address some of the same existential and psychological issues as Foreman’s exercise in systematic mystification for Americans.
But we have no currently fashionable philosophy that will let us describe the different dimensions of inwardness among different cultures, except for the efforts of anthropologists who are under constant criticism for getting it wrong or engaging in cultural imperialism. Which is one reason I treat my own culture and myself as deeply alien; it ain’t colonizing if it’s your own self and culture you’re subjecting to anthropological analysis. (That is a bad-joke reference to someone’s recent remark, “It ain’t bragging if you really done it.”)
Many related digressions occur to me but I shall rush ahead on the topic of the lack of useful descriptive categories in contemporary thought when it comes to describing and categorizing inner experience.
The Foreman article contained an offhand reference to Last Year at Marienbad that reminded me that when I saw that film in college, it had the same emotional effect on me that Tolkien had for some of my contemporaries (or Harry Potter, apparently, for later generations). Tarkovsky’s films did something similar later: they opened up “a place that was always within, even if we never knew it was on the map.” And these days, it indeed isn’t on the map, although we find it in certain novels by many different authors I have written about previously.
It is possible that it isn’t even the same place, although I am more inclined to believe that we call it by many different names. Each generation has its own keys and its own interpretations; but more to the point, each person has his or her own key and interpretation, and the key and interpretation may change from year to year. The same films and books that I find to have opened dimensions not easily expressed in ordinary language are the ones that other people walked out of or quit reading out of sheer boredom. And vice versa, when it comes to my sharing the enthusiasms of many of my contemporaries for whom very different creative enterprises get them into that unmapped inner space.
Phenomenology was at least trying, and the Jungians were doing a sometimes totally erroneous but heroic job of trying to figure out the metaphoric geology and ecology of the territory that the phenomenologists were mapping. Today the general trend is to assert that the territory doesn’t even exist, we just think it does. (At least the metaphor-analysis part of the mapping has survived, courtesy of George Lakoff and company.)
Of course the territory is not ever what we believe it to be; one of the more pointed misunderstandings of our time was expressed by the poet Robert Duncan when he said, “People say, ‘What you call experience is pseudo-experience.’ I tell them, ‘You just try having a pseudo-experience.’” Yes. The experience is real and no illusion, but the conceptual value and analytical model you place upon it may both be wrong. To deny the reality of the experience itself is to get things ass-backwards. Hallucinations are real perceptions; they just don’t refer to anything actually going on in the world out there beyond the perceiver.
Hence my interest in how people from different generations and backgrounds see the same photographs, assuming they have all learned how to see. (Rather than generalizing to “That’s a picture of a tractor” whether they are looking at a Farm Security Administration photo, a piece of Stalin’s posed propaganda, or an ad in this month’s Farm Bureau magazine.)
This probably clarifies nothing for most readers of this blog, but it clears things up for me. And there is still much to be said and thought about the Czechs and about Richard Foreman. utopyr could say much about Czechs who wouldn’t know a piece of irony if it came up and bit them on the proverbial body part.
Richard Foreman’s destabilizings of ordinary experience via multimedia theatre pieces on the one hand, and the Czech group Ztohoven’s latest incarnation of the Czech ironic response to powerlessness in the face of mildly unpleasant circumstances on the other, bring home the relativity of exactly parallel emotional experiences. (I would prefer to leave that obscure remark obscure, because it will derail the main thrust of my argument to clarify it just yet. Bear with me, this will be quick.)
This feeds back into the remarks I was making about the unfashionability of phenomenology: A New York theatre audience being introduced to thoughts and emotions they never before had experienced, or more likely ones that hadn’t consciously realized they had had, is “transported, at least fleetingly, to a place that was always within them, even if they never knew it was on the map.” The pranks of Ztohoven, like the direct confrontations of Czech and central European Actionism in general, are almost opposite in their disorientation of ordinary expectations: a fake atomic blast presented on Czech television via a sophisticated piece of hacking is more akin to Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds radio broadcast minus the prefatory warning. (The web address ztohoven.com at the bottom of the screen was the 21st century version of fair warning that you are watching a creative invention.) But the mystification that is part of Czech creative coping with dailiness spills over into literary and artistic endeavors that address some of the same existential and psychological issues as Foreman’s exercise in systematic mystification for Americans.
But we have no currently fashionable philosophy that will let us describe the different dimensions of inwardness among different cultures, except for the efforts of anthropologists who are under constant criticism for getting it wrong or engaging in cultural imperialism. Which is one reason I treat my own culture and myself as deeply alien; it ain’t colonizing if it’s your own self and culture you’re subjecting to anthropological analysis. (That is a bad-joke reference to someone’s recent remark, “It ain’t bragging if you really done it.”)
Many related digressions occur to me but I shall rush ahead on the topic of the lack of useful descriptive categories in contemporary thought when it comes to describing and categorizing inner experience.
The Foreman article contained an offhand reference to Last Year at Marienbad that reminded me that when I saw that film in college, it had the same emotional effect on me that Tolkien had for some of my contemporaries (or Harry Potter, apparently, for later generations). Tarkovsky’s films did something similar later: they opened up “a place that was always within, even if we never knew it was on the map.” And these days, it indeed isn’t on the map, although we find it in certain novels by many different authors I have written about previously.
It is possible that it isn’t even the same place, although I am more inclined to believe that we call it by many different names. Each generation has its own keys and its own interpretations; but more to the point, each person has his or her own key and interpretation, and the key and interpretation may change from year to year. The same films and books that I find to have opened dimensions not easily expressed in ordinary language are the ones that other people walked out of or quit reading out of sheer boredom. And vice versa, when it comes to my sharing the enthusiasms of many of my contemporaries for whom very different creative enterprises get them into that unmapped inner space.
Phenomenology was at least trying, and the Jungians were doing a sometimes totally erroneous but heroic job of trying to figure out the metaphoric geology and ecology of the territory that the phenomenologists were mapping. Today the general trend is to assert that the territory doesn’t even exist, we just think it does. (At least the metaphor-analysis part of the mapping has survived, courtesy of George Lakoff and company.)
Of course the territory is not ever what we believe it to be; one of the more pointed misunderstandings of our time was expressed by the poet Robert Duncan when he said, “People say, ‘What you call experience is pseudo-experience.’ I tell them, ‘You just try having a pseudo-experience.’” Yes. The experience is real and no illusion, but the conceptual value and analytical model you place upon it may both be wrong. To deny the reality of the experience itself is to get things ass-backwards. Hallucinations are real perceptions; they just don’t refer to anything actually going on in the world out there beyond the perceiver.
Hence my interest in how people from different generations and backgrounds see the same photographs, assuming they have all learned how to see. (Rather than generalizing to “That’s a picture of a tractor” whether they are looking at a Farm Security Administration photo, a piece of Stalin’s posed propaganda, or an ad in this month’s Farm Bureau magazine.)
This probably clarifies nothing for most readers of this blog, but it clears things up for me. And there is still much to be said and thought about the Czechs and about Richard Foreman. utopyr could say much about Czechs who wouldn’t know a piece of irony if it came up and bit them on the proverbial body part.
