Liberty in the television age - part three
Flattery will get you nowhere
It will, if you are so minded, win you the adhesion of the biddable, and with their money, it may take you all the way to "the biggest mansion in mansion-land". Of course, flattery is an effective tool in the armoury of the manipulator, but it cuts both ways. We have a tendency to solidify our thought patterns in behaviours, to literally embody the things we say and think and feel. Thought, being largely a form of inner speech, leads to speech itself, and therewith to emotion, tissue memory, posture, gait, gesture and conduct at large. Of all the work I might cite in support of this bold assertion, that of Francisco Varela is most accessible and recent. His work consists chiefly in investigating the relationship between thought, speech, and cognition as a systemic entity giving form to the 'personality'.
Flattery, or its bedfellow, pandering, are corrosive habits that devours one's dignity and ability to reason. To flatter oneself is to lie to oneself or to others, to exaggerate desirable traits, to posit clear reasoning or rational agency where none exists, to posit a thinker, a decider in 'control', who is, naturally, wise. To pander is to recognise, to acknowledge one's shortcomings or those of others, and to deliberately manipulate these vulnerabilities through flattery. The first often leads to the second.
Flattery, often so well and frequently practised as to be as automatic and invisible as feeling itself, is the means by which we account for our shortcomings when we lack the courage or integrity to confront them. Pandering is, arguably, more developed, inasmuch as there is some recognition of the 'way one is' - but this in itself is used as an excuse. Consider how often you have heard yourself or others offer as a final defence 'I'm just like that'. This is a common instance of pandering to the weaknesses or undesirable aspects of one's character that allows the speaker to dodge agency in the face of some fatalist 'truth' about themselves, and thus appear insightful as they so do.
These mechanisms may be seen as part of the defences of the personality. Flattery helps to modify experience, to bring the shambolic personality more into line with the Image of the Self. After the fact, one can say 'I willed it thus', 'It happened for a reason', 'it turned out for the best because...'. Perhaps you did, it did, but more likely is the case that you have failed to come to terms with the fact that it is you the psychoanalysts mean when they say mankind is ruled by irrational urges. It is your fear and hope that is the prey of the advertiser. Your agency is deliberately, expensively, intricately limited as a result of your being in the developed world, in a fashion far more effective than that practiced in even the most extreme of authoritarian states. This is because you still believe that you make your own decisions. As long as you cleave to this flattery, you are going nowhere.
Pander, then. Pander to the partial insight of your diminished agency by saying 'I am powerless in this degree, I might as well enjoy myself'. Pandering is a more sophisticated defence, and it mirrors the Image game's chief trick in allowing the subject a sense of freedom, of insight and control. Saying with a mock sigh something like 'what can I do?', reifying the cartoon character of your 'choice', the TV antihero on 'your' favourite sitcom is nothing more than a shallow irony masking despair. There is no way out other than to demand control of your own emotions, and to begin to understand how they have been wrested from your control.
The extent to which these insights will change your life is determined only by the depth of your interest. You may be a fashionable bore, who delights in repeating grand-sounding ideas to impress or silence your friends with your 'knowledge'. Here is a new and impressive word for you; "Sciolist". Let us hope that one day your friends learn this word. It describes a person who speaks with authority of things beyond their experience.
I hope that at some point you have decided to read on despite the 'arrogant' tone, or the attempts to insult or alarm you. If you have, you may congratulate yourself on having overcome a few printed words. In the next section I will explain this third rate enigma together with the portrayal of your freedom as a more effective prison than the Lubyanka.
Where is my mind?
First in imagination, then in will, then in reality. Ideally, yes. Practically, it goes a little more like this:
morass of emotions - static, interference, memory, censure, censor
stream of verbal 'thoughts' - background chatter of the mind
tension, low-level anxiety, awkwardness/boredom/detachment
Of course this picture is incomplete, this map does not even pretend to a substitution of itself for the territory. However, these sentences would be helpful to refer to as we discuss the nature of human cognition.
Our experience of the world is never immediate. Each sense has its roots in feeling. Light has weight, the ears transmit vibrations, the throat, tongue and teeth generate them. Sense data is not 'directly apprehended' by the brain. It is mediated, first through the organs of sense, then further, given structure by the brain itself to render this array of impressions into sensible order. The purpose of including this data here is to remind the reader that at every level of experience some mediation or interpretation is involved.
The argument here is therefore not over the authenticity of this 'truth' or that, but how we order the data we receive from the world. What do we include, and what do we reject? How do we automate these patterns of distinction between useful/useless, desirable/undesirable, interesting/uninteresting and so forth?
It is my view that the most common form of magic is everyday consciousness. I contend that experience is ordered though interwoven systems of symbol, interpretation, pattern-matching or tessellation, conditioned emotional response and subsequent verbal reasoning, as I prefer to term them, alibis.
We always speak after the event. Oftentimes in speaking we seek to alter, at least, tailor the event. But to whose design?
Again, events can be re-presented through description - a person's life may be villainous, heroic, tragic, pointless or amusing depending on the speaker's point of view. This point of view is itself rarely immediate, in the sense that what one 'makes' of experience in terms of translating impressions into language is dependent on an interface between memory, emotion, and verbal tabu.
Hostility to new ideas, or even to experiences that do not resemble former experiences, is rife. What governs this mechanism is what governs one's purchasing habits, 'opinions', choice of newspaper - fear and hope. We fear what we do not know, and we hope to find reinforcement of what we think we do. Composers of public media throughout the sales, news, and politics industries are aware of this, and make use of flattery and pandering to reassure the subject that what is one offer is all that there is; that to select between the deliberately limited options presented by the consumer model is a refreshing and invigorating exercise of rational free agency.
The undisciplined mind is like an echo chamber of suggestions, a self-referential and almost impregnable feedback loop. What one disremembers - the unflattering repetitions of obvious failures, for example, emerge as rumours behind the squall of the preoccupations in the foreground - faint echoes of a preoccupation partially displaced by that presently engaging the mind. As such, it may appear subtle, fresh, a new insight or direction - but is in fact just the dying echo of a familiar pattern of thought and feeling.
The same tricks work time and again to stimulate buyers, electorates and readers. Your favourite brands have a fixed identity, updated only in terms of finding new modes of articulation for their formulae of coolness or desirability. The political rhetoric employed at any given time by any party is a contention for the adhesion of your hopes and fears. You will find the same themes recurring in bestsellers, self-help books, strands of religious publications - for the most part these aspects of culture are fixed. They are fixed because they reflect the structure of the personality, and its tendencies towards word-totems in language and thought.
It will, if you are so minded, win you the adhesion of the biddable, and with their money, it may take you all the way to "the biggest mansion in mansion-land". Of course, flattery is an effective tool in the armoury of the manipulator, but it cuts both ways. We have a tendency to solidify our thought patterns in behaviours, to literally embody the things we say and think and feel. Thought, being largely a form of inner speech, leads to speech itself, and therewith to emotion, tissue memory, posture, gait, gesture and conduct at large. Of all the work I might cite in support of this bold assertion, that of Francisco Varela is most accessible and recent. His work consists chiefly in investigating the relationship between thought, speech, and cognition as a systemic entity giving form to the 'personality'.
Flattery, or its bedfellow, pandering, are corrosive habits that devours one's dignity and ability to reason. To flatter oneself is to lie to oneself or to others, to exaggerate desirable traits, to posit clear reasoning or rational agency where none exists, to posit a thinker, a decider in 'control', who is, naturally, wise. To pander is to recognise, to acknowledge one's shortcomings or those of others, and to deliberately manipulate these vulnerabilities through flattery. The first often leads to the second.
Flattery, often so well and frequently practised as to be as automatic and invisible as feeling itself, is the means by which we account for our shortcomings when we lack the courage or integrity to confront them. Pandering is, arguably, more developed, inasmuch as there is some recognition of the 'way one is' - but this in itself is used as an excuse. Consider how often you have heard yourself or others offer as a final defence 'I'm just like that'. This is a common instance of pandering to the weaknesses or undesirable aspects of one's character that allows the speaker to dodge agency in the face of some fatalist 'truth' about themselves, and thus appear insightful as they so do.
These mechanisms may be seen as part of the defences of the personality. Flattery helps to modify experience, to bring the shambolic personality more into line with the Image of the Self. After the fact, one can say 'I willed it thus', 'It happened for a reason', 'it turned out for the best because...'. Perhaps you did, it did, but more likely is the case that you have failed to come to terms with the fact that it is you the psychoanalysts mean when they say mankind is ruled by irrational urges. It is your fear and hope that is the prey of the advertiser. Your agency is deliberately, expensively, intricately limited as a result of your being in the developed world, in a fashion far more effective than that practiced in even the most extreme of authoritarian states. This is because you still believe that you make your own decisions. As long as you cleave to this flattery, you are going nowhere.
Pander, then. Pander to the partial insight of your diminished agency by saying 'I am powerless in this degree, I might as well enjoy myself'. Pandering is a more sophisticated defence, and it mirrors the Image game's chief trick in allowing the subject a sense of freedom, of insight and control. Saying with a mock sigh something like 'what can I do?', reifying the cartoon character of your 'choice', the TV antihero on 'your' favourite sitcom is nothing more than a shallow irony masking despair. There is no way out other than to demand control of your own emotions, and to begin to understand how they have been wrested from your control.
The extent to which these insights will change your life is determined only by the depth of your interest. You may be a fashionable bore, who delights in repeating grand-sounding ideas to impress or silence your friends with your 'knowledge'. Here is a new and impressive word for you; "Sciolist". Let us hope that one day your friends learn this word. It describes a person who speaks with authority of things beyond their experience.
I hope that at some point you have decided to read on despite the 'arrogant' tone, or the attempts to insult or alarm you. If you have, you may congratulate yourself on having overcome a few printed words. In the next section I will explain this third rate enigma together with the portrayal of your freedom as a more effective prison than the Lubyanka.
Where is my mind?
First in imagination, then in will, then in reality. Ideally, yes. Practically, it goes a little more like this:
morass of emotions - static, interference, memory, censure, censor
stream of verbal 'thoughts' - background chatter of the mind
tension, low-level anxiety, awkwardness/boredom/detachment
Of course this picture is incomplete, this map does not even pretend to a substitution of itself for the territory. However, these sentences would be helpful to refer to as we discuss the nature of human cognition.
Our experience of the world is never immediate. Each sense has its roots in feeling. Light has weight, the ears transmit vibrations, the throat, tongue and teeth generate them. Sense data is not 'directly apprehended' by the brain. It is mediated, first through the organs of sense, then further, given structure by the brain itself to render this array of impressions into sensible order. The purpose of including this data here is to remind the reader that at every level of experience some mediation or interpretation is involved.
The argument here is therefore not over the authenticity of this 'truth' or that, but how we order the data we receive from the world. What do we include, and what do we reject? How do we automate these patterns of distinction between useful/useless, desirable/undesirable, interesting/uninteresting and so forth?
It is my view that the most common form of magic is everyday consciousness. I contend that experience is ordered though interwoven systems of symbol, interpretation, pattern-matching or tessellation, conditioned emotional response and subsequent verbal reasoning, as I prefer to term them, alibis.
We always speak after the event. Oftentimes in speaking we seek to alter, at least, tailor the event. But to whose design?
Again, events can be re-presented through description - a person's life may be villainous, heroic, tragic, pointless or amusing depending on the speaker's point of view. This point of view is itself rarely immediate, in the sense that what one 'makes' of experience in terms of translating impressions into language is dependent on an interface between memory, emotion, and verbal tabu.
Hostility to new ideas, or even to experiences that do not resemble former experiences, is rife. What governs this mechanism is what governs one's purchasing habits, 'opinions', choice of newspaper - fear and hope. We fear what we do not know, and we hope to find reinforcement of what we think we do. Composers of public media throughout the sales, news, and politics industries are aware of this, and make use of flattery and pandering to reassure the subject that what is one offer is all that there is; that to select between the deliberately limited options presented by the consumer model is a refreshing and invigorating exercise of rational free agency.
The undisciplined mind is like an echo chamber of suggestions, a self-referential and almost impregnable feedback loop. What one disremembers - the unflattering repetitions of obvious failures, for example, emerge as rumours behind the squall of the preoccupations in the foreground - faint echoes of a preoccupation partially displaced by that presently engaging the mind. As such, it may appear subtle, fresh, a new insight or direction - but is in fact just the dying echo of a familiar pattern of thought and feeling.
The same tricks work time and again to stimulate buyers, electorates and readers. Your favourite brands have a fixed identity, updated only in terms of finding new modes of articulation for their formulae of coolness or desirability. The political rhetoric employed at any given time by any party is a contention for the adhesion of your hopes and fears. You will find the same themes recurring in bestsellers, self-help books, strands of religious publications - for the most part these aspects of culture are fixed. They are fixed because they reflect the structure of the personality, and its tendencies towards word-totems in language and thought.
posted by Fanshawe at 6:53 AM
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