Just returned from a rather wonderful weekend at the Hay-on-Wye literature festival… or I would have done if I hadn’t realised that there was the “HowTheLightGetsIn” philosophy and music festival on at the other end of town. Despite Elinor and I both technically subscribing to the status of literary scholars, the call of reasoned debate trumped the megalomaniacal brain-farts of the likes of Martin Amis and philosophy, as ever, won over.
The most striking debate that I attended was that of Zygmunt Bauman talking about Utopias, Dystopias and society. The striking element was my sudden inability to grasp the word “society”. Used in every sentence, Bauman obviously knew very well what it was, as did the rest of the audience, yet I grew increasingly confused. It wasn’t, as was suggested to me, that some unconscious Thatcherism had revealed itself in a bout of free market solipsism – no, it was the very transcendental quality of the word and the resulting metaphysical warmness that it made me feel as a result. Like Bion’s Group Experiences, it suggests an unspoken, unified coherence of minds in such a way as to alleviate any possibility of existential anxiety; a charming prospect.
That the talk took place in the context of (U/Dys)topias was no doubt a helpful indicator of this transcendental quality of the “social”. Taking 1984 as an example – the “social” threat lingers in the dystopian ambivalence. The state apparatus itself (similarly with the book’s political ideologies) is indistinct, only to be pictured in the mythic figures of Big Brother and Goldstein. These figures are “social” where the state itself, be it legislature or particular representatives, can only be seen as what they are within that society. Society is like Room 101; we already know what is in it, and it is not Winston’s rats. The appearance of the rats (not particularly scary in itself) is purely an indicator of the potential of Room 101, just as any definable entity can only be a potential of society and not society itself.
The notion of the social and Utopia overlap in this capacity. William Morris’ late-Victorian anarchist utopia, News From Nowhere, is essentially a description of this transcendental field of society. Its great success in achieving this comes through a mix of two-dimensional characters and a total lack of any concrete politics or history within its established world. Utopian cohesion is “natural” unlike the individual or the state that, as definable entities, can never truly exist within the ambiguous melange that is “society”.
“Society”, like “Utopia”, appears to be an attempt to cross what can only be considered a truly “Parallax gap” as described in Zizek’s The Parallax View. Individual personality and politics, as is evinced in the hyperreality of “personality politics”, can never truly be attached together (perhaps Kant’s distinction of private and public reason is the case here?). Society is a useful bridge between these two that encapsulates both whilst placing itself “elsewhere” via a kind of theoretical Derridean “differance”. I would not consider myself to be society, nor would I consider David Cameron, a parking ticket, a 20 pence piece or a bacon sandwich to be society – yet they are all “part of” society. Zizek’s description of society as only existing in the “background”(Perverts Guide to Cinema) is not so much true as to say that society exists only in vignettes. We can never truly “see” society but by making a situation indistinct enough we can start to “feel” it.
Perhaps the ultimate description of a “society” can be seen in the second level (and title sequence) of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in which you are driven around the city, helplessly looking out upon countless scenes “symptomatic” of violent revolution. The marching soldiers, the massacred civilians, all are uniform and without individuality, signifying similar events without even truly signifying themselves. Even the moment when, driving down an alley, a man pops up from a rubbish bin, sees you, screams and disappears back into it to hide, seems faceless. He is the comedy of the human stuck within political engines as their most inhuman. A symbol of the social - not Barry or Jeff or Akhmed…
Perhaps this indicates something intrinsically reactionary, or at the least paralysing, within descriptions of “society”. Its general effect is that of reductionism without use; by stripping entities of forces in order to locate them in a transcendental social they lose autonomy within the social field. This is perhaps what Latour and the Actor-Network-Theorists are dealing with at the moment; there is a society outside of the individual and the state but it exists as a network of influences and not as a residue of trends and generalisms. That which takes place within the social can therefore never be passive, it must always be active – even if, like Pacifism, it is active towards passivity. For if society is to be thought of as a “between” and not as an “elsewhere” then only that which exerts influence can exist within its existential jurisdiction.
Perhaps the ultimate A-N-T Utopia, then, is Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. The world of “Watermelon Sugar” is one of balance similar to Morris’ “Nowhere” yet each of the individuals within the anarchistic community differ in beliefs and personalities, even to the extent that some choose to live in a junkyard and drink themselves to death. No resident of Watermelon Sugar exists in order to represent wider trends. Even the lingering, evil genii Other of the “tigers” get their chance to explain why they killed the young protagonists parents (hunger, family needs, his parents long, full lives upto that point) and, as such, can be seen as Actors in a Network and not as a “social threat”. Morris’ “objectors” to “Nowhere” are passed off as fools that would soon die out – Brautigan’s “tigers” are active characters simultaneously to being a menace. Of the two situations, we can only truly understand (and thus think of ways to change) the situation of the tigers, whereas the “society” of objectors must be left to die out of their own accord, much as we’ve expected racists and fascists to do for the past however-long-it-is…
The most striking debate that I attended was that of Zygmunt Bauman talking about Utopias, Dystopias and society. The striking element was my sudden inability to grasp the word “society”. Used in every sentence, Bauman obviously knew very well what it was, as did the rest of the audience, yet I grew increasingly confused. It wasn’t, as was suggested to me, that some unconscious Thatcherism had revealed itself in a bout of free market solipsism – no, it was the very transcendental quality of the word and the resulting metaphysical warmness that it made me feel as a result. Like Bion’s Group Experiences, it suggests an unspoken, unified coherence of minds in such a way as to alleviate any possibility of existential anxiety; a charming prospect.
That the talk took place in the context of (U/Dys)topias was no doubt a helpful indicator of this transcendental quality of the “social”. Taking 1984 as an example – the “social” threat lingers in the dystopian ambivalence. The state apparatus itself (similarly with the book’s political ideologies) is indistinct, only to be pictured in the mythic figures of Big Brother and Goldstein. These figures are “social” where the state itself, be it legislature or particular representatives, can only be seen as what they are within that society. Society is like Room 101; we already know what is in it, and it is not Winston’s rats. The appearance of the rats (not particularly scary in itself) is purely an indicator of the potential of Room 101, just as any definable entity can only be a potential of society and not society itself.
The notion of the social and Utopia overlap in this capacity. William Morris’ late-Victorian anarchist utopia, News From Nowhere, is essentially a description of this transcendental field of society. Its great success in achieving this comes through a mix of two-dimensional characters and a total lack of any concrete politics or history within its established world. Utopian cohesion is “natural” unlike the individual or the state that, as definable entities, can never truly exist within the ambiguous melange that is “society”.
“Society”, like “Utopia”, appears to be an attempt to cross what can only be considered a truly “Parallax gap” as described in Zizek’s The Parallax View. Individual personality and politics, as is evinced in the hyperreality of “personality politics”, can never truly be attached together (perhaps Kant’s distinction of private and public reason is the case here?). Society is a useful bridge between these two that encapsulates both whilst placing itself “elsewhere” via a kind of theoretical Derridean “differance”. I would not consider myself to be society, nor would I consider David Cameron, a parking ticket, a 20 pence piece or a bacon sandwich to be society – yet they are all “part of” society. Zizek’s description of society as only existing in the “background”(Perverts Guide to Cinema) is not so much true as to say that society exists only in vignettes. We can never truly “see” society but by making a situation indistinct enough we can start to “feel” it.
Perhaps the ultimate description of a “society” can be seen in the second level (and title sequence) of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in which you are driven around the city, helplessly looking out upon countless scenes “symptomatic” of violent revolution. The marching soldiers, the massacred civilians, all are uniform and without individuality, signifying similar events without even truly signifying themselves. Even the moment when, driving down an alley, a man pops up from a rubbish bin, sees you, screams and disappears back into it to hide, seems faceless. He is the comedy of the human stuck within political engines as their most inhuman. A symbol of the social - not Barry or Jeff or Akhmed…
Perhaps this indicates something intrinsically reactionary, or at the least paralysing, within descriptions of “society”. Its general effect is that of reductionism without use; by stripping entities of forces in order to locate them in a transcendental social they lose autonomy within the social field. This is perhaps what Latour and the Actor-Network-Theorists are dealing with at the moment; there is a society outside of the individual and the state but it exists as a network of influences and not as a residue of trends and generalisms. That which takes place within the social can therefore never be passive, it must always be active – even if, like Pacifism, it is active towards passivity. For if society is to be thought of as a “between” and not as an “elsewhere” then only that which exerts influence can exist within its existential jurisdiction.
Perhaps the ultimate A-N-T Utopia, then, is Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. The world of “Watermelon Sugar” is one of balance similar to Morris’ “Nowhere” yet each of the individuals within the anarchistic community differ in beliefs and personalities, even to the extent that some choose to live in a junkyard and drink themselves to death. No resident of Watermelon Sugar exists in order to represent wider trends. Even the lingering, evil genii Other of the “tigers” get their chance to explain why they killed the young protagonists parents (hunger, family needs, his parents long, full lives upto that point) and, as such, can be seen as Actors in a Network and not as a “social threat”. Morris’ “objectors” to “Nowhere” are passed off as fools that would soon die out – Brautigan’s “tigers” are active characters simultaneously to being a menace. Of the two situations, we can only truly understand (and thus think of ways to change) the situation of the tigers, whereas the “society” of objectors must be left to die out of their own accord, much as we’ve expected racists and fascists to do for the past however-long-it-is…
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