I finished my philosophy paper!
Which is great. Because that shit was seriously putting the damper on my existence here at the villa.
- By I mean I wrote it in, like, 2 or 3 days, and I literally care so little about it that I felt bad staying up to work on it, even though I had nothing of the actual 6 - 10 page paper written 2 days before it's due.
And, as I keep reminding myself,
MY GRADES DON'T TRANSFER!
HOOha.
Now I can get back to my first love - mask making.
I finished my Zanni. - Without realizing until I was polishing off the last of the wax that his nose just looks like a penis.
Seriously. No idea.
Aside from that, I did a little shopping this weekend.
You know, hopped the train to Firenze and got everything I wanted in, like a half hour.
I also bought myself a mug.
Because - I LIKE mugs.
...alot.
And this one was so cute.
I saw it in the chocolate store. It is blue with stars, and was filled with Baci* (*this means kisses in Italian. Have I told you this before? Probably. It's my new favorite Italian word. Suck it up. If you're good, maybe I'll bring you some Baci.), and it says 'Perche parlare? Tutto l'amore se dice in un bacio.' Which means, roughly, 'Why speak? The entirety of love is spoken in a single kiss'. I thought - this would be such a cute present! -but, I don't have anyone to give it to... And I don't have anyone to receive it from...
So I bought it for myself.
Good purchase.
And now I am relaxing in the last 15 minutes before I go stuff myself again in the Mensa. I am done with final [sic.], and finished with my first day of "Ensemble" with Guissepe. We've already started working with our theme for our final project, namely, Love. Everyone had to contribute one phrase about love to the group's pool of text.
- And now, before I head off, here's my paper. Yes it's very long. No, it's not very good. Why am I putting it up? Cause it's my fucking blog, and I can post what I want!
(I strongly suspect that I simply didn't bother to explain myself and purposefully inserted philosophical/academic jargon to confuse my reader and camouflage this fact. Entertain yourself, perhaps, by drinking every time you notice a hole in the logic of the argument that I skip over.)
Spectacle As Consciousness
Consciousness, long held as an “asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs…. the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues are stored away” , is nonetheless, irrefutably essential to our current interactions with the world around us. More than simply using, or even depending on the sign systems we have, as humans, created in order to share our existences, consciousness is the most omnipresent of sign systems. Evolving, as it has, directly from the interactions between individuals and their world, consciousness both enables and necessitates understanding as such, since without these relationships, signs would be meaningless and unnecessary. As, however, human society fragmented, and man began to experience a collective (yet individual) alienation from the world around him, the consciousness produced in these altering relationships changed too. Consciousness became estranged from dialogue, it became a passive transmission of information from the world to the individual, and the focal point of this change is the Spectacle, as described by Guy Debord. Everything that man produces became for the purpose of the spectacle, and therefore everything that man consumes became spectacle as well, until finally, it is the spectacle that mediates all social and individual interactions, and it is the spectacle through which we analyze and understand. In the current, advanced state of cultural isolation, “the phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world”. Spectacle is the consciousness of the modern age.
Man, in his societies, has not evolved a solitary existence; he is constantly dependant on his ability to live with and be aided by those around him. This shared existence, in turn, is dependent on man’s ability to combine his efforts with another, which is effective only when two individuals can be sure to be dealing with the same experience. Given that it is impossible for two individuals to share the exact same experience even if they are standing side by side, sensorially perceiving the same natural phenomena, man developed systems of signs so as to compare and share experiences with one another. He developed a common ground, a world in which all are capable of sharing.
Simply put, a sign is anything that stands for something other than itself. A tree is a just a tree, contained and present in its existence, until other meanings are ascribed to it. Then, suddenly, this tree becomes a Christmas Tree, and serves to bring to mind winter, family, presents, etc. Through the creation of sign systems, man gains the ability to share his experience of life with another, and in this way to effectively live with and not just in proximity to other humans. Sign systems are, therefore, essential to our humanity as it has evolved, and since they are the medium through which communication is possible, an examination of a culture’s sign systems is crucial in understanding the workings of that culture in as much as it even is a culture. Karl Marx understood this and felt it incumbent upon him to deal, therefore, with our most pervasive system of signifiers, the means through which all interaction is made possible (namely language), before any progress could be made in the dissection of social interaction.
From even a cursory examination, the pervasiveness of language must be unmistakable. As a signifier which stands for nothing other than itself (having no true existence outside of signification), Language, and that all important base unit, the Word, are the epitome of sign systems. Language was created expressly to express, it is a product of our social needs and interactions, “language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well”. Without our interactions with other humans, we would have no use for language (or for any sign system). We would simply perceive the world around us individually, and signs would not exist. However, effective interaction depends on the ability to share the contents of one consciousness with another, and this depends on the existence of a sign system.
To take this a step further, not only is the sign system a product necessitated by social interaction, but so is consciousness – that which is considered to be the most individual of features. Marx states that “consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all”. Unfortunately, what exactly consciousness is, Marx never quite finds his way to explaining any more concretely then in terms that suggest that old, mystic asylum ignorantiae.
This question is, therefore, taken up by V. N. Volosinov in his essay “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”, wherein he posits that “consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs”. That is to say that, consciousness is not something which takes on signs as a language, some mysterious soul of the human intellect to which signs are a tool, but rather that consciousness is itself merely a tool, a sign system, created in the relation of one human to another. In Volosinov’s words, “understanding is a response to a sign with signs”. This is a compelling explanation when we consider both the form and function of consciousness; the former being entirely composed of signs, and the latter being the management of these signs so as to be able to rearrange and analyze these parts of experience, thereby gaining the ability to analyze and rearrange our actual experience.
The problem with this explanation arises when we consider that foggy area of consciousness often called Intuition. To see where Volosinov’s argument needs clarification, we must start by examining the birth of consciousness in man as Marx did, for it cannot be fully explained as a sign system which evolves from the interaction between two individuals. To begin with, there is Perception – the raw, unprocessed, sensory input. This is the information we receive from our senses, which it is possible (or, at least was possible, at some point, for prehistoric man) to receive passively, without connecting it to a past experience, or including a projection of it in his future. In order to survive, however, man, like the animals, must develop some way of processing the data he receives, and some way to learn, to connect the tree he sees in front of him to the tree he saw in front of him yesterday and the day before, so that he is able to eat things which will not poison him, to avoid animals which might do him harm.
When man can identify that one instance of shape and color and smell and feel is in fact a tree, and, more then that, that a certain tree is of a similar type as one he has seen somewhere else, and that some types of trees provide food, while others do not; when he becomes capable, in short, of learning, he must be said at some level to have started the arduous process of analysis of the world around him. Marx himself calls this “animal consciousness of nature”, and describes it as a “consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness concerning the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual”. Volosinov argues that consciousness is the all-important form of our analysis, but at the same time, he insists, this is a consciousness which has arisen from interaction between man and man, not man and nature. Volosinov asserts that “signs emerge, after all, only in the interaction between one individual consciousness and another”, that “consciousness cannot be derived directly from nature”, and so we find a small hole here, in the beginning of man’s ordering of perception, but before the start of his serious dependence on other men. In short, that oft debated realm under whose purview falls the “consciousness” of animals, which is not, by either Volosinov’s or Marx’s standards, true consciousness. Still, it is an awareness, and even, undeniably, some primitive analysis of the world; for how else did we make the jump from unprocessed sensory input to an organization of sense data which can be recognized as something particular outside of the self which needs to be shared with another individual?
The point of these particular arguments, I believe it is safe to assume, is to stress that consciousness is not something that we possess inherently, but which, rather, we evolve in the course of our social interactions. As the stored energy in the sign systems of previous generations changes each successive generation of man, so too is the interaction between one generation and another changed, and as interaction evolves, along with it evolves consciousness.
What is important enough about this point to justify semantic quibbling, is that consciousness evolves in a relationship, although not necessarily a relation between one person and another. The relevance of my critique lies in the fact that, should we accept a definition of consciousness which is born of any relation, and not simply that between two humans, it paves the way for the idea of the evolution of consciousness in a society where the “primordial unity”, the relationships between the various members, has crumbled. When coupled with Volosinov’s point that consciousness is also something that evolves, it allows us to assess what consciousness has become now, in an age which is characterized by fragmentation and fractilization. Man, who’s very existence, and the entirety of his evolutionary tract have been based on creating a relationship with those around him, has become alienated from his world. As Eric Fromm points out, “alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself”. Alienation has changed places with the unity that was once one of the defining characteristics of man.
How then, could consciousness have gone unchanged?
As all of man’s relationships have become indirect (his relation to what he produces, what he consumes, to his desires, to his body, to those around him, to, in fact, his very life) the unity of his society has deteriorated. Society has become fragmented. The very process of communication, of analysis and dialogue, has taken from man the unity of his individual life. In an effort to unite with his fellows, he subjects himself to the rule of abstract concepts like Time and Nation, he collects the experiences of others – not just as the experiences of others, but as though they were his own experiences. His alienation blinds him to the difference between his own reality and the reality being pressed upon him by the constant influx of signs, and he becomes separated from himself as he actually exists, in search of the self he believes that he can create from the experiences around him.
At the same time, in an attempt to counteract this, man “shares” more of himself, so as to reaffirm his reality by relating it to others. Language, and therefore consciousness, change to express this – all men are experiencing this isolation at the same time, and since they are all talking about it, a strange new society starts to take shape, a society that collectively experiences individual isolation. Consciousness now, evolves from the relationship between man and object, not man and man, for man believes himself to be isolated. Objects have long been the mediators between men if we consider, as Volosinov does, that “signs are also particular, material things”, but the signs through which men communicated before (like language, ritual, and art) were created for the express purpose of communicating between two individuals, and along with being specific signifiers for some experience or emotion, they signify a knowing exchange between two people. Today, the objects with which we interact preserve the illusion of alienation, thus furthering its reality – “it is the sun that never sets on modern passivity”. Somewhere between sign and commodity, Debord calls these modern phenomena Spectacles, and instead of engendering dialogue, the Spectacle allows us to “passively” receive.
If we take for truth the definition of consciousness posed by Marx and Volosinov (namely that consciousness is that which evolves in the “interindividual territory” as a means of processing the societal signs) then it is no great leap to posit that Spectacle had not only become the language of our isolation, but the very consciousness through which we perceive and interact with the world around us. After all, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” – a relationship between the individual and his world made possible by some sort of relationship and the use of signs. In further agreement, Debord describes spectacle as something which is “not… added to the real world”, but “the very heart of society’s unreality”, occupying, as it were, the very same throne upon which consciousness sits.
Our alienation complete, we have managed to remove ourselves even from our own inner thought, putting it into an outward show from which, by the aid of mechanical reproduction, we then remove ourselves before it even reaches its intended audience, and that same audience, free of the presence of the being from whom the spectacle originated, has been deceived into thinking that they can receive passively the meaning contained therein. Our language, our ideas, are altered not by interaction with other men, but by the imposed tyranny of the spectacle, and man remains blissfully unaware of the disconnect.
- you actually read to the end? Or did you just skip down? Ah, well, either way... here's your prize: my phrase from class.
'a heart doesn't break, it implodes'
