Pay No Attention to the Man

Behind the Curtain.



A Valentine’s Day stint as visiting critic at a couple of classes at a local art college (I don’t want readers to get sidetracked by names just yet, bear with me) ended with me riffing on a post-class conversation with a student in which the professor declared The Wizard of Oz one of the masterworks among American movies. He named the many strands of political allegory and everything else you can name that made their way into it. “The Buddhists claim it as a Buddhist movie,” he said.

I have my own relationship to the film (as does Salman Rushdie, and I highly recommend his book on the meaning of The Wizard of Oz for the émigré). Thinking about it this time around, I was struck anew by the essence of its plot: that a rightly assembled coalition of those lacking in brain, heart, and courage, blundering through on an erroneously conceived pilgrimage, might nevertheless do the right thing. And that, having arrived at the promised City, they would find only a good man who was nevertheless a very bad wizard; who, after his fakery had been uncovered, would find pseudo-solutions to the group’s real deficiencies.

Because the world rests on shared social delusions, those pseudo-solutions would suffice to make up in fiction for what they lacked in reality. Including the fiction that you not only can go home again, you will be happier if you go back to living in a black-and-white universe; the pseudo-happy ending that Rushdie cites as perhaps the film’s greatest dishonesty. (We leave sexual stereotyping out of it, except to note that the archetypal quester who organizes the psychologically deficient males is as female as her archetypal antagonists and helpers. This is a movie in which the women either wield real power in the first place or compensate for male incompetence. The Wizard is no Sarastro or Prospero, in spite of the linkage of the three narratives in my oft-cited book about technology and the future, Frederick Turner's Tempest, Flute and Oz)

In other words, in terms of my earlier insight above, gather the right people at the right time in the right place, and you will have the makings of a group in which one person’s strengths will make up for another’s weakness. The personal talents of yet another will allow him or her to serve as a bridge that will connect the opposing individuals instead of letting them come to blows with one another. There is no need for an obviously superior leader so long as the group is working towards a clearly perceived goal that unites them; dominant personalities need not be dictatorial, and the nature of the goal itself will become clearer to all as they go along. (And if it does not, the sheer argument over what the goal is will still move the group further along than it had been.) And this is an insight that drives a good many collaborative ventures at this very hour.

I do wonder about how some of the fantastic elements in L. Frank Baum’s original book, as refined and reshaped for the film ever found their way so undistorted into an American classic. I don’t think it required a great deal of understanding of the sources; it only takes one storytelling emigrant or itinerant merchant to pass along some exciting themes that work quite well outside their original cultural setting and theoretical context.

I had hoped this joculum webjournal would become something of the group that would carry a particular quest forward, and it has, to some extent (so often a comment offered for one reason will contain exactly the piece of information that is actually needed for another reason) but the various specific questions I put forth that get no answer whatsoever indicates who is not currently lurking, for I do not think they could let the question pass without contributing an answer. (And I’m usually too preoccupied with, say, figuring out two hundred words to attract a general audience to an art show to call up Carol Thompson at the High Museum or Emily Hanna at the Birmingham Museum and ask them for the latest state of research on what Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic, or the chequered connections between West Africa and the African Diaspora. The silence on the topic indicates who’s absent from the web dialogue.)

Those of you who have been following along know that all my inquiries relate to a hypothesis that is usually stated so sappily and in such superstitious or supercilious terms that I hesitate to formulate it. But it does seem that we are at last poised for a reformulation of the nature of the human species and of human history. The problem, as I see it, is that everyone still has hold of their own specific part of the problem, and half the time they are holding that part the wrong way round.

And as we know from the real version of Murphy’s Law, if there is a way to stick the part into the overall assemblage the wrong way round, someone will do it.

I wish Walter Benjamin had written his materio-mystical re-reading or inversion of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology before the Nazis sent that philosopher careening to death from suicide drugs or simple heart failure in that hotel in the Spanish mountains. As it is, we may have better tools to attempt the job today, anyway.

If we go back to the summary of Daniel Lord Small's Deep History and the Brainof a few posts back, we can see that we have in place the biomechanical explanations for the operations of mythic projection. We probably have them even if Small's particular version is wrong.

We don’t have to buy into Jung’s description of the archetypes to see that they are, nevertheless, in operation. We don’t have to come up with our own names for unconsciously constructed images to see that this year’s presidential candidates in the United States embody the dreams, hopes and fears of immense groups of individuals The candidates whose personal stories and physical appearance and body language didn’t fill the aching voids in voters’ personal imaginations got nowhere. Those who filled those voids less well came up short, even when their political programs were better tailored to the real needs of the voters. This was partly a matter of media attention, which also is determined by, yes, the same tendencies towards projection, which tends to sell newspapers and attract clicks on online links.

What would be interesting would be to map the responses of potential voters in terms of personality types, and I am sure someone has done it. (As I’ve written before, Jung’s real inheritance has been the realization that personality types are mappable, even if Jung’s particular fourfold scheme suffered from his own need to project mythical quaternities on everything in the universe. A lot of cultures have had the same problem of creating crossroads and quaternities, for almost-countless centuries. So he’s excused for oversimplifying.)

Anyway, the folks who are least taken in by the mythic images that the candidates are projecting are also precisely the ones who are most inclined to take care of their own emotional needs and voids in almost childish ways…certainly in simplistic ones even when they have put away childish things. (It’s what Jung called the overdevelopment of one function in compensation for the underdevelopment of the opposing one, the one that needs to be changed instead into a conscious complementarity. Where unconscious helplessness was, there shall some degree of self-awareness be.)

And it is better to have folks like that, the reasonably lucid, making policy, the ones who are least likely to project their own myths and passions onto rationally analyzable situations. But it also helps if the policymakers are aware of their own particular set of deficiencies, including the habit of never reaching a conclusion because there is never quite enough information.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” As I like to quote from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” ‘cause I’m one of those old-fart modern guys like that, who grew up being taught the stuff their teachers experienced firsthand thirty years previously.

We are always being taught the stuff that was new when our teachers were young or even younger. Happy are those who find a teacher (outside the sciences, where of course the immediately contemporary is a requirement) who knows how to connect the present day with the lessons that history teaches—lessons that are different in every generation because history itself is different in every generation.

Politics, as I was saying previously, is all about elevating oxytocin levels. (I see there are MP3 downloads quoting oxytocin's role in sexual arousal and states of generalized bliss, so I doubt I have to gloss this for readers.) The voters have to be kept in a state of passion favorable to your side until they mark their ballots, unless of course you run a state where the voting machines make this unnecessary.

Thus the side with which voters are not in a state of elevated passionate attraction will have to try to raise the stress levels about the proper issues instead. Perfect fear casteth out love.

All of this is understood on a pragmatic level by today’s political organizers. Those who compile computer data to create voter maps not just neighborhood by neighborhood but block by block (and soon enough, house by house) know far more about the human condition than they know they know.

They know the functions of language in shaping personal opinion, and why the shape of the frame matters more than the logic of the argument. They know the shape of collective stories, and how those stories vary with generational experience, personality type, and place in the socioeconomic pecking order. They know what makes people alike, and what makes them different, though they know it only for the particular society they have to influence, and are very bad at it when they have to extrapolate to other cultures. They don’t know much about biochemistry, but once they do they will probably be handing out different specific types of hot beverages or energy drinks to the voters standing in mile-long lines in the cold. (Or in the case of the South Dakota primary or the November polls in the subtropics, probably cold drinks in the heat.)

And of course philosophers and literary critics and art critics were writing about a good many of these aforementioned perceptions long before the data was in place from reasonably constructed experiments, because human beings have long known truths about themselves without knowing the why and wherefore of the perception. Those who know and do not know that they know: they are asleep. Wake them.

It would be nice to think that the species is awaking from a long slumber, to learn who we really are and where we are going, but the evidence is still otherwise. The most intelligent debate of the day is still so primitive that, as one of my graduate school professors said of a debate between two pre-eminent scholars in his discipline, if they had been college freshmen he would have sat them down and explained why they needed to start over and learn the underlying basics.

And that is part of what the joculum blog is all about.

I wish I could explain why this particular post took the shape it did because of a specific passage in Brian Murphy’s book about carpets, but each of us finds the book we need just at the moment we need it, just as we find the teacher we need at the right moment. Even if we then blunder along for decades somewhere between the raw and the cooked, trying to figure out the meaning of what it was we have been taught.

There is more to be said. Always.

How to Talk About Books One Has Not Read

One of the side effects of posting from a wi-fi coffeehouse-+-bookshop (and I just realized that substituting the currently fashionable plus sign for the ampersand, or as here for the unintended double-entendre of "cum," results in a plus sign flanked by minus signs. Hm.)...

...anyway, I have just now looked into Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics on the shelf a few feet away because Badiou is one of those guys whom we gotta know or else not be with-it and au courant and all that good stuff. And this book was translated in 2005 though some of the essays are a few years older. And...

And Badiou is quarreling snidely with the right guy, viz. Czeslaw Milosz, and deploying Pessoa (excellent choice) and later on explicating Mallarmé in terms of the contrast with Baudelaire and explaining the conceptual confusions of calling poems hermetic or self-enclosed, and obviously Badiou is going off in directions that I have to pursue because they are opinions that overlap with topics with which I deal and even writers with which I deal. He too is trying to reshape topics for the twenty-first century.

And yet, as with David Edwards' Artscience discussed in an earlier post, I have the feeling to which I refer in another context in the previous post, that Badiou has got hold of the right object and is looking at it the wrong way. And his disciples can be relied on to remodel the whole damn apparatus to make the part fit and the machine work.

But this sort of observation is just meaningless gassing until one has actually read the book closely, and as utopyr reminds me, I am more usually referring to books I "must get around to reading" than to books I have actually read.

So I hope to return to why I find those three travel narratives so singularly illuminating when they are read closely in the right context. (I keep discovering new strategies and new piece of useful theory, embedded explicitly by the author in a story that is seemingly about something else.)

But to do that means that I put the Badiou back on the bookshelf and go do my own thing, just as Walter Benjamin kept on explicating the conceptual implications of cast-off capitalist detritus, instead of the unattempted project of reading and creatively refuting Carl Jung, in those last years before the catastrophe of World War II.

Benjamin gave us his theses on the philosophy of history as a result, and the great unfinished edifice (I first typed "artifice"....) of The Arcades Project. I doubt that the joculum blog will leave anything nearly as consequential. Eh bien, alors, c'est la vie, c'est la guerre. La vie en rose. Le après-midi d'un philosophe, peut-etre. (Newbies may need to know I often make fun of my complete monolingual failure to master any of the dozen languages I have tried to learn over the course of a lifetime. As my failure to remember the third declension neuter in Latin will serve as shorthand. I engaged in this adolescent tomfoolery because to end at "nearly as consequential" gave this post a sense of literary finality that is against the spirit of joculum. "Don't be deceived. What is this?")

I don't know how to put the accent mark over the "e" in "etre."