This article was supposed to have another subject, but I wrote it offline
and the post I'm replying to has passed away into the ether, so I don't
know what it really ought to be Re:. You'll have to fit it into your
threads manually. Actually the argument as a whole seems to have passed
away, but I'm going to stick this in anyway. I was BUSY, all right?
Jeez. Anyway, I think it was Townsend vs. Nickie on TV shows with slack,
with Lynch shoving his oar in over something or another. No big deal,
really; this is kind of a tangent.
David Lynch (eraserhead@iglou.iglou.com) wrote:
>Yeah, all TV does is insidiously program your mind. Also, stop reading
>books. Think of what staring at that print for hours at a time must do
>to your mind. Anyhow, everyone knows most books are just mouthpieces for
>con dupes to subliminally influence your thought processes and make you
>like all the rest. In fact, don't listen to anybody else at all; if it
>doesn't come directly from your own brain, it's got to be a tool of the
>Con, and it's not valid.
Curious that this should come up just now. I recently had a
revelation, of sorts, that I was intending to write up and probably
post here (the only newsgroup fit for such powerful insights),
concerning just this sort of thing. I was in the shower, just
getting started, engaged in a little personal ritual that I always
indulge in when bathing. If you commonly use a bath or shower that
relies on waterproof curtains to keep your warm water in the bath and
not on the floor, you have probably discovered that most curtains,
whether due to innate design flaws or because of poor installation,
do not do a particularly good job in their assigned role. Most of my
bathing in the last few years has been in shower/tubs that are built
against walls on three sides, with a single curtain along one of the
long sides shielding the exposure on the rest of the bathroom. These
curtains, when kept inside the tub, do a reasonably good job of
keeping water from spilling out over the sides, but fall down at the
corners, especially the corner aside the shower head itself; I find
that a lot of water tends to escape there. Long ago, however, I
noted that shower curtains, no doubt due to some property inherent in
waterproof "fabrics," adhere strongly to smooth surfaces when wet. If
you start a shower with acurtain hanging loosely to one side, when
you finish you will find that the curtain has managed to stick itself
to the wall or to the bath in a number of places, held by a thin film
of water (surface tension, I suspect, is the explanation). Having
seen this, and particularly noted how the adhesion develops along the
edge of the curtain next to the shower head, where the most moisture
escapes, I realized that a bit of work at the start of a shower would
do a great deal towards improving the water-retention capabilities of
the shower enclosure. To be specific, I developed the habit of
taking a minute or so at the start of each bath to run some water, to
coat the walls by the edges of the curtain with same, and to manually
ensure that the edge of the curtain is well-stuck to the wall at that
point. The habit has served me well; I'm very confident that it has
significantly reduced the amount of spillage.
So I started to take a shower two weeks ago and began with this
little task. It usually involves a bit of awkward crouching (I run
the water first through the bath spigot, if possible, to avoid
spillage during the process) and splashing, while naked, of course,
and, I assume, presents a pretty ridiculous spectacle (me naked alone
probably presents a pretty ridiculous spectacle). It struck me,
during an extra-fumbling moment while the curtain was expressing
particular recalcitrance, that my actions were something I had never
*heard about* in any way. I'd never been told of it, read about it,
seen it in a picture, seen it in another person--it was a wholly
idiosyncratic, in the purest sense, experience. I began to consider
other similar aspects of my life, and, further, the less personal,
more public elements that still share this characteristic of being
things I know *only* through direct experience, never through
representation. When you start thinking about this, you realize
almost immediately how absolutely your personal experience surpasses
in breadth and depth the secondhand "world" of communicated
experience--experience communicated via *any* medium. Look around.
How much do you see that you've never seen on TV? How much *could*
you never see on TV? I don't necessarily mean things that would
never be on TV because they're shocking or dangerous, but simply all
the details, the little things, the *mundane* things that don't get
shown because they don't serve the purpose at hand or just because
they're trivial, not worth the effort.
There's nothing really new in this, but the idea came to me with
particular force and clarity. Later that day, walking down the
street, I was fascinated by how unlike anything from film, books, or
TV the plain old *sidewalk* is. The cracks, the marks, the stains,
the spills, the weeds, the curbs--wholly unique. Getting back to my
shower, though, the *next* feeling was a sudden alienation. The
realization that, as far as I know, no one else in the world does, or
has ever done, or has even thought about doing this little thing that
Ido produced a strong sense of difference, a distinct separation from
the rest of the world. It didn't bother me--I've already got plenty
of alienating traits, and I'm used to them--but it brought another
not really new, but newly clear and powerful, lesson: representations
are isolating. Your experience, if only because of its richness, can
never be fully reflected in any representation. You will always have
your secret habits, your idiosyncrasies, your unique circumstances
that are known to you alone. Any representation, then, that purports
to tell you something about other people, or even about just another
person, inevitably carries the message: you are different; this is
not you; this is not your life. And this goes not just for bad movies
and cheesy TV, but for documentaries, propaganda, the evening news,
the morning paper, thoughtful essays, incisive criticism, biting
humor, blistering satire, sculptures, paintings, comics, classics.
Remember: all art is LIES.
There's nothing wrong with this; it's just the way it is. But it
seems obvious to me that here we have at least one of the roots of
Media Victimization. The issue is, does this piece of art, or
whatever, integrate you with or dissociate you from your own
experience? If you can identify the elements of a representation that
do and do not accurately reflect your own *real* life, you are
relatively safe from this dissociation (though if you pay attention,
you may find yourself *overwhelmed* by the difference you discover).
But do people do this? Can they? It doesn't seem so. For most in
this information-age society (the first, probably, about which this
can be said), "the rest of the world" is a vast cloud of humanity
invisible to the naked eye, observed only through the instruments of
secondhand experience. Yet they attribute to this vague population a
degree of reality equal to or even greater than that granted the
people they actually *see* and deal with in person. This has two
effects: first, it reinforces rather than dilutes the pervasive
signals of separation; second, it encourages people to integrate
themselves with the secondhand world rather than the immediate one
(under the mistaken impression that the latter is merely a tiny facet
of the former). The necessary inaccuracy of any attempt to represent
to someone that person's own experience dooms this effort to
integrate; the only result is dissociation from one's actual world,
and the product is a Media Victim. The Media Victim attempts through
emulation and self-caricature to place himself in what he perceives
as the real world, unaware that his goal is unattainable. A media
culture is inherently and unavoidably a *mediated* culture;
representation forms an inviolable barrier between what is
represented and whom it is represented to. The Media Victim's
failure to abolish this barrier exacerbates the sense of difference
and exclusion that the barrier produces, which may lead in turn to
feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, shame, or guilt. These tend, of
course, to further stimulate the urge to fit oneself to perceived
normality, creating a vicious circle whose ultimate product is either
a paranoid isolate or a mind-controlled, media-manipulated zombie.
So after all this I was wondering, why is it that people are
susceptible to this? What is it that encourages the critical mistake
of choosing the represented world over the experienced one? Plain
human nature seems to be the explanation. Though the Media Victim
described above is a contemporary phenomenon, the basic problem is
not a new one. You have probably heard of the traditional Moslem
law, laid down in the Koran some twelve or thirteen centuries ago,
against representing reality in art. This is usually explained as an
injuction against idolatry, a preventive measure discouraging the
identification of divinity in the material world rather than in an
ineffable God. The same principle has been advanced in other
religious contexts, as part of the Reformation and other iconoclastic
movements, for example, and of course in the story of the golden
calf. What does this point to but an innate human tendency to invest
with exaggerated significance the abstractions, stylizations,
representations that humans create? (And what is God but the highest
abstraction of humanity itself?) "Idolatrous" religious practice
itself suggests this, of course: the fetishes, totems, idols, icons,
and other trappings that have adorned religion for millenia have all
been foci of worship. Perhaps this tendency is at root a testament
of respect for the creative force, the uniquely human power to
perform these acts of representation. Whatever its origin, the same
habit accounts equally well for Media Victimization as for popery--we
may properly say that the Media Victim actually worships the images
on the TV screen and the words in the magazines. Is it any wonder
that the Information Age has seen the rapid disintegration of
traditional religious practice as it spreads its ever-rising tide of
sights and sounds over more and more of the world?
Well, that was a long ramble. Some shower, hm? I could go on--I was
intending to bring this back to the original topic by explaining why
books are better than TV, but I don't quite remember the connection.
This has already taken too damn long anyway. I hope it was
worthwhile for someone. Looking back over it, it seems a bit more
dull than it did initially. I wish I could write better; I'm not
sure I really got it out correctly. If anyone cares, I'll keep
thinking and add some more if I come up with anything good. The real
point, I guess, was the question: does this representation integrate
you with or dissociate you from your own experience? Try to keep it
in mind, and live in the real world.
Beats that kibology crap, anyway.
anarch@cse.ucsc.edu +-+-+ Just because it's a JOKE doesn't mean it's not TRUE
D I S C L A I M E R : E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
Up one level
Back to document index
Original file name: SCI.37
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.