Que sera’ sera’

Here’s an intriguing article about the psychology of self-examination.

I have only two comments: First, as usual for psych research still in the inchoate stages (…and let’s be honest, what psych research really isn’t anymore?), it’s a bit tendentious in how it frames its topic.  In this case, “complexity” comes across as a something of a virtue through its association with the process of psychological maturation and the tolerance/incorporation of multiple possible points of view in the construction of a narrative.  These things, however, may not necessary be such beneficial learned skills.

Which brings me to point two, the failure to comment on the importance of the context in which self-scrutiny takes place.  Granted, early studies will focus first on the individual and then branch out into larger, more involved cases and theories; nevertheless,  a decent awareness of the scientific process, especially as it applies to human psychology, ought to throw up the red flags around generalizations.  For example, while “elaboration on loss” and “search for insight” may be wonderfully mature and rewarding activities to engage in while surrounding by a stable, secure environment, those same activities might just be psychologically debilitating and destructive under other conditions, namely, conditions under which the exact opposite qualities (e.g., compartmentalization of loss, primary concern for practical matters) might be more useful.

And of course, the immediate retort is that the psychologically mature person is therefore the one who is aware enough of his environment to know when it is and is not appropriate to let himself slide into ruminations.  And upon a moment’s reflection, I suppose that that does makes sense…but then again, that merely throws the argument on to the word “appropriate”, which is very likely going to differ among involved parties with different perceptions of the situation in question.  And on and on…

A Further Point on Modernism

Earlier in this post, I posited a definition for Modernism based on an artist’s relative consciousness of how things in a given culture can be considered “new” or “old”. I was to partially retract that on the grounds that the consciousness and manipulation of such categories was manifestly in full operation in previous eras, particularly in Roman civilization. There’s an excellent article by Hines, I think, and I’ll get the reference here once I dig it out. The gist of the matter is that by the time the Romans came along literarily, Greek poetry had already been established as something of a gold standard for centuries. Once you’ve had a few generations of Latin poets come along and develop their language for poetry, you then get your Golden Age Latin literature (e.g., Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Aeneid, etc.). Well…what happens to the guys who come next, the so-called Silver Age writers, when Virgil’s already gone and written the Aeneid? In other words, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that any given generation of artists is somehow especially conscious of the fact that it has the weight and authority of previous artistic generations bearing down upon itself. Hines’ article does an excellent job of demonstrating conscious poetic innovation in successive epochs of Latin literature.

But I did say “partially retract”. I’m now thinking that instead of a “new vs. old” consciousness, perhaps Modernism might be best explained by a “part vs. whole” consciousness concurrent with the late 19th and early 20th century upheavals ultimately resulting in the more or less peaceful settlement we now look back upon as “Western Civilization”. In other words, whereas prior to Modernism the prevalent mindset might have been to draw sharp cultural distinctions among, say, French, German, and English art and literature, the Modernist movement marked the beginning of what we now more normally see as closely-linked subgroups of a more general “Western” phenomenon.

As for previous parallels, I repeat a point raised in a lecture on Late Roman Antiquity (ca. 200AD-400AD) that the art and literature of this period owed much to the idea of the Cento or literary patchwork (e.g., consider the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, a poem fashioned entirely from lines and half-lines of Virgil. Also, take a look at the Vergilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, which retells the life of Christ through Virgilian verse [I couldn't find the full text, but here's a helpful page]). If you try to interpret this kind of artistic movement in light of several other Late Antique cultural developments towards a far more inclusive definition of what it meant to be a Roman than had existed under the Republic and the Early Empire, then I think you come up with something that looks a lot like the Modernist movement in early 20th century Europe. Then take into account the fact that what is often considered the first Modern novel, Don Quixote, came from an area of the world that had already been struggling for a long time with the problem of juggling in one coherent work the artistic “vocabularies” from multiple cultural traditions, each in some sense “foreign” to the other–well, take that into account, and it throws the similarities in higher relief.

Either that, or it all becomes an incomprehensible pastiche…which thought, curiously enough, brings to mind the epigraph to “The Wasteland”, quoting the vacuously bombastic Trimalchio, who was so thoroughly (un)cultured that he had 3 libraries(Cf. XLVIII). Either you bring this all together in order to mean something larger and more profound (e.g., Roman Identity, Spanish Identity, Western Identity), or it all ends up consumed by a horrific banality. And thus the Sybil perishes.

A Brief Statement of Purpose: Unanswered Questions

I dislike the idea of raising broad questions without actually attempting to push the ball down the field a bit, as it were.  So, while I doubt that I’ll come to any definitive conclusions about many of the matters I raise in this blog, I’d like to think that I’ve at least made some kind of progress measurable in terms of more precise definitions of terms and/or sub-questions along with some footholds in the literature that’s out there.

This being a blog, however, I’m bound to leave a number of threads hanging in mid-air.  So I resolve to try not to leave too many out there at one time.  In order to enforce a check on this behavior, I’ll periodically post lists of things I’ve merely put out to the universe without really giving any real critical examination.  In other words, random bloviation may be useful from time to time as much for the pinpointing emotional fault lines as for general entertainment and steam-letting, but on the whole it’s useless for anyone who actually cares about the matters at hand.

Here’s a current list of things I need to get back to, along with a few potential prompts:

1-The status of myth and fact in the Information age

-C. S. Lewis on Myth become Fact

-Snopes

2- The definition of Modernism viz-a-viz Primitivism and Futurism

-R. Scruton’s “An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”

3-Language as Instrument vs. Language as Act

-Saussure

-Lacan

-Heidegger (Crap…this one’s going to take a while…)

4-Behavioral Mimicry in Child Development

-Um…not sure where to go on this one.  The sources I’m familiar with for child development are by and large for moral development and the individual’s definition personal need fulfillment (e.g., Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Gilligan, etc.), of which I’m now wondering whether much has taken into account the Behaviorist side of the coin, which is where the concept of mimicry seems like it might have got its roots.  On that score, start with Skinner and work upward.

5- Tolerance: Different approaches for different contexts.

-Hmm…another topic that’s way too broad.  Let’s see…I suppose I’ll approach this as a question of social ethics…which means philosophy in general…which means I’ve got my work cut out for me on this one…back to Plato and hit all the main stops on the way up.

Children’s Television

The other day, I was reading this article in the NYT about Sesame Street. The following passage in particular caught my eye:

“I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.”

I take it that the question underlying all of this is, How do we create television programs that will positively (or at least not negatively) influence children’s behavior? From the basis of this passage, I infer that the experts behind Sesame Street have concluded that children who watch the show regularly will tend to mimic the behaviors presented therein–hence, the gradual phasing out of all characters and/or character traits that may in some way be interpreted by children as appropriate models.

Now, I’m certainly not informed about cutting-edge developments in child psychology, and I’m sure that the good folks who bring us Sesame Street (in conjunction with all their alpha-numeric pals, of course) do keep abreast of this literature, much more so than I do at any rate. So the following is intended less as constructive criticism about how to run a kids’ TV shows, and more as a comment on how technology can and does influence the nurture side of nature/nurture.

Per the article, Sesame Street is now in the business of character models. I recall, however, reading something in a book about Sesame Street (I think it was this one) that part of the original rationale behind many of the character traits that are now perceived to be too negative for children to encounter, was that in the real world children will actually meet people who are grouchy like Oscar or boring like Bert. In other words, Sesame Street was meant to present children with a diverse range of personalities in order to demonstrate that all people were in some way lovable and in some way able to live together in a community. So Oscar may like trash and occasionally tick off Gordon or Maria with his negativity–so what? If I remember correctly (it’s been a while, though…), whatever conflicts did arise, were resolved along typical models of community politeness. I may be wrong, but it’s hard for me to imagine what could be so objectionable about that, especially given that that’s still a standard cartoon plot.

So the question remains, At what point does exposure to negative characters result in behavioral mimicry? Again, I may be wrong, but I find it awfully hard to believe that one character on a children’s show can lead to all sorts of profound physio- and psychopathologies, like Cookie Monster promoting childhood obesity or Oscar the Grouch encouraging Sartrean existensial malaise or Big Bird and his unseen Snuffleupagus prompting paranoid schizophrenia. Or actually, I find it hard to believe in a causal relationship *IF* we’re dealing with an otherwise healthy family in which the children watch a reasonably limited amount of TV and interact regularly with family members and other children. So it boils down to a situation similar to the whole violence and video games correlation/causation debate, only with younger, more impressionable minds. There’s the rub, as it were.

So, if my hypothesis is correct, and if the only cases in which we really have to worry about negative character models having a significant effect are those in which TV is used as a surrogate parent, then I wonder about the degree to which all of these restrictions actually have an effect. When you think about it a bit, it is a very sad case to consider that the only place a neglected child may hear the words “I love you” with any certitude and regularity is when they come from a television character like Elmo; it’s in no way my desire to deprive anyone of that. But the next thing I wonder is how what happens when that child takes the next step into maturity and begins to divide the world into the real and the fictional. In other words, we’re all supposed to “grow out of” many of the trappings of childhood, and I to some extent think that we’re able to do that because we have a supportive environment to get what we need elsewhere on a deeper level. But if that environment isn’t there, and if it never was except in the shape of a fictional character, then how should that fictional character be in order to best provide for the neglected child? Is Elmo the ideal surrogate parent? Is that even the role he’s expected to fulfill? Should it be? If so, to what extent and how?

This discussion is, of course, all very tenuous. But maybe I’ll follow up on some in greater detail on some of the psychological development themes later on.

I knew this would be a problem…

I clicked “Publish” on the previous post last night and was just getting into bed, when it struck me that the following sentence could not stand without further comment: “The spoken word is the ultimate Either/Or.”  You can’t just toss something off like that, at least not without mentioning Kirkegaard and somehow accounting for the patent problems of linguistic ambiguity in communication.

Anyway, I don’t have time this morning to go into it, but the tack I’ll stick with now is that I’m drawing a distinction between speech as an instrument for communication and speech as a definitive act.  Or to put it another way, I’ll posit a difference between “Language” on the one hand and “Speech” on the other…ok, now I’ve gone and done it…oh well, I’ve been meaning to review Saussure and Lacan anyway.  Stay tuned.

Exile

My favorite Spanish poet has to be Rafael Alberti, and my favorite of his poems has to be the following, from his first volume, “Marinero en Tierra”, “Sailor on Land”:

[Untitled]

El mar. La mar.

El mar. ¡Sólo la mar!

 

 

¿Por qué me trajiste, Padre,

A la ciudad?

 

 

¿Por qué me desenterraste

del mar?

 

 

En sueños, la marejada

Me tira del corazón.

Se lo quisiera llevar.

 

 

Padre, ¿por qué me trajiste

acá?

-Rafael Alberti

It’s a rather simple poem, but it’s virtually untranslatable into English on account of the gender manipulation. Generally speaking, the sea is normally masculine in Spanish, but it can also be feminine according to well-established poetic usage. In any event, that’s only one of the reasons I like it, namely, the insight that mere word choice encodes so much. The way we choose to speak is the way we choose to live. Heidegger once wrote, “Language is the house of being”. Now, I certainly can’t claim to understand all of what Heidegger meant by that. But based on what I have read, I’m fairly certain that part of what he mean has to do with the relationship between the shared experience of individuals in common society as reflected by a common tongue. As we still say of people who display an instant mutual comprehesion, “They speak the same language”.

Even beyond that, though, I read the poem partially as a statement on the tension between chosen meaning, imposed meaning, and the difficulty of discerning between them. The sea can normally be either masculine or feminine, but for Alberti it is only feminine, it is only romantic, it is only visionary, it is only poetic because there can be no other way for him.  There is no intermediate ground to language choice.  The spoken word is the ultimate Either/Or.

But then why is it “del mar” in line 6 instead of “de la mar”, which would be metrically equivalent? That strikes me now as an indication that the poetic vision remains intact even when removed from immediate experience. For the sailor on land, the sea remains all it is…and perhaps more by virtue of the distance (cf. Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”).  While he may be removed from the sea (El mar), that is quite a different thing from being removed from the vision encoded by the sea (La mar).

All of that, however, fades into the background of the poem against the direct questions: Why did you bring me to the city? Why did you uproot me from the sea? Why did you bring me here? Why? Why? Why? The tempestuous image of my lover haunts my dreams, beckoning. Why have I been brought here, when I know I am wanted there?…or is it only that I desire to be wanted there…only in my dreams…? What am I doing here? The poem never directly reveals the speaker’s emotions, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that the desire the speaker expresses must be read into it on account of word choice. Does he really want to go back to the sea? Why does he want what he apparently wants, yet not enough to come right out and say it? Does he actually want that? What does he want? Why all this vagueness? The poem begins with a strong laconic statement of vision, of chosen meaning, but then trails off into a series of enjambed uncertain questions.

One of the more powerful moments of self-discovery is when one realizes that much of how has constructed oneself has been dependent upon circumstances. Exile shatters this illusion and forces us into deeper questions of who we are, what we believe, and what we want. But whereas exile is normally construed as expulsion from civilization, this poem turns that paradigm on its head by construing the “city”, the center of civilization and human contact, as the center of exile.

Insofar as the city has anything to do with the sea, though, it is practical, commercial, fungible. And if one’s current obligations are tied to the city, how does one retain a romantic vision of the sea? I’m not talking about the romantic vision of fantasy, which is merely a false escapist construct manufactured from discontent and imputed conceptual oppositions. It is not that because the sailor is a sailor. He has been to sea, he knows what is there, he knows it is difficult, he knows what it is worth. But he is no longer there. And now that he is no longer there…what then?

This type of question about what to do when displaced from what one once thought were one’s natural desires is characteristic of 20th century peninsular Spanish literature.  Another way to say that is that those Spaniards really like to plumb the depths of the fact that the world’s concreteness actually has an impact on us…but what kind of impact?  In a  world that is increasingly driven by ideologies and virtual experiences, how do we continue to be limited, embodied, contingent beings? There’s much more to say, of course, but I’ll save that for a later post on an excerpt of Unamuno or Torrente Ballester. Or Cervantes…it all goes back to him anyway.

“the underlying primitivism of modernity”

I’m an avid reader of the First Things blog, so I thought I’d share with you this post and a few comments on it.

Although I largely agree with the idea that much of “modernity” (whatever that really may be) is blind to the fact that it’s not actually as novel as it likes to think it is, there nevertheless was a fair amount of conscious “primitivism” in the work of “modern” and/or “modernist” artists. Just look at Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring”, for example, or Picasso’s remark upon viewing the prehistoric drawings in the Lascaux caves: “We have invented nothing”. One could also go down the route of philosophy and point out developments like Bergson’s Élan vital and remark further that a consequence of the Modernist era was the rise of sociological methods in which contemporary primitive societies were considered more favorable–more “pure”–than developed civilization.

In other words, instead of setting up a “new vs. old” dynamic as a definitional basis for Modernism, these days I’m toying more with the idea of “conscious vs. unconscious”. Pound may have cried out, “Make it new!”, but the even more fundamental assumption to that injunction is that one has become conscious of what the labels “old” and “new” mean and can therefore fashion objects accordingly.

But before I launch into another paragraph that completely undercuts everything I’ve just said…this seems like a good place to trail off…

UPDATE: Here’s a bit of of an elaboration.

ἥκω γὰρ ἐς γῆν τήνδε καὶ κατέρχομαι.

The other day I arrived and returned to my high school to acquire a transcript. I also took the opportunity to reconnect with a number of my former teachers, some of whom I encountered serendipitously in hallways and classrooms. The whole experience impressed up me the major differences between my time in high school and in college.

In high school I felt whole, as it were, and I only returned to that cognizance of being after two arduously satisfying (or satisfyingly arduous) years out of the country. College, on the other hand, was a time of significant personal fragmentation for me. As look back, I realize that in my attempts to adapt myself to the social circumstances and cultural milieu of a northeastern liberal arts college, I ended up shattering my own personality by setting up multiple different relationships and personas that were collectively doomed to failure. In the lofty hopes of being able to experience all sides of the world, I tried to be everyone, but ended up being no one and destroyed (or almost destroyed) a number of friendships in the process.

At college I learned to think in polarities, as it were. This wasn’t a completely bad thing, mind you. After all, the ideology of opposed distinctions is one valid academic tool among many and has its uses. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s a very useful life philosophy for someone who likes to span various social categories.

In any event, revisiting my high school gave me a bit of an opportunity to wander around in the idea space of self-definition, specifically the question of how far one can push the limits of one’s identity in society without violating sensibilities, and whether or not this leads merely to a bland lowest common denominator. In other words, to what degree are we constrained to self-define always and only “against”, and if we attempt to reject this constraint, must that inevitably result in social dislocation?

Two further points: First, I’ve filed this under linguistics since it is at some level a matter of definitions and meanings. I suppose there’s some kind of fancy word for this type of psycho-sociological application…probably has the lexeme “-semi-” in it somewhere.

Second, the title quote is the 3rd line of Aeschylus’ Choephoroi; I’ve chosen Orestes as something of an avatar to this discussion for one main reason and two ancillary ones. The main reason is that I remembered the line as quoted in Aristophanes’ Batrachoi (1128), wherein Aeschylus defends himself against Euripides’ accusation of redundancy by claiming that by both “arriving” and “returning” Orestes alludes to two different aspects of his identity in coming to Thebes. Upon reflection, I felt something similar the other day at my high school.

As for the other two reasons, well…in considering options for a decent model for the discussion of the coherence of multiple aspects of one personality, the traditional “everyman” in Greek myth is Odysseus (cf. Joyce: “No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a Jusqu’auboutist [bitter-ender]. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall”.) . But he’s a little *too* traditional for my purposes. Besides, he’s got Athena on his side, and that’s just not fair.

Moving on from Odysseus, one might consider Oedipus, especially given how all of us men are supposed to derive our problems from his…or at least we were at some point in the recent past. But again, he’s still too much of a ready-made archetype in that much of the action that set in motion the tragic sequence of events centered on him, by and large happened without his conscious knowledge. In other words, Oedipus is in some sense more the name of a social process than of an individual human being.

So instead, I thought I’d move on to Orestes. He doesn’t really get put up on the pedestal too often, even in spite of the fact that he’s such an important figure in the (drum roll) Oresteia. Moreover, Euripides’ play about him gets a lot of bad press. But when you get down to it, he doesn’t seem to have been anyone all too special. Just some guy trying to do the right thing in a tough situation. Maybe it wasn’t the best of ideas, avenging his father by killing his mother and all, but BAM…next thing he knows, the Furies are after him. Eventually, the story (as Aeschylus puts it) ends well with the establishment of a venerable social institution. Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?

1 point for Wikipedia

A bit earlier I mentioned that Wikipedia somewhat rubs me the wrong way academically in that it’s not really that great about citations. I’m about to blatantly contradict that. Just so you know…caveat lector.

I was reading the entry on the “Golem” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem) when I ran across the following passage:

“It is said that the body of Rabbi Loew’s golem still lies in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. A legend is told of a Nazi agent during World War II ascending the attic and trying to stab the golem, but perishing instead.^{[citation needed]} The attic is not open to the general public.”

I’m particularly tickled by notion that an urban legend requires a citation!

But upon further reflection, it provides fodder for the ponderings of another day. What kind of people would we be if we demanded the strict sifting of myth and fact?