Thinking is amateur
ontology taxonomy phylum genus species type kind sort class pigeon hole peg label Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom pipe smoke in rooms cigarettes cigar butts men seating ladies on their seats in Lyons cafés drumming on desks dads doodling in pencil rain light through a hall fanlight brass door bells
“The meaning of a word is its use.” (W) If a thing’s definition is provided by the context of its perception, then in the mass media what you have – the infotainment picture - is a context that is no context at all. A McDonalds on the Moon would be much the same as the McDonalds in Bluewater, which is the same as … Food without context. The food in a supermarket has no season. No locale defines it; no provenance is visible. This kind of experience resonates with us. Life becomes like a fantasy. Detached, dissociated. Fragmented. So with news items. Something akin to the supermarket experience might happen say in an aircraft hanger with a million post-it notes being blown in sundry directions by a wind machine, some of them occasionally sticking to your forehead or other part of your anatomy … You pick one off look at it - the news of dismay; for it says “REALITY TV” or - unluckier still - DARFUR – or BIRD EXTINCTION – or THE DEAD OCEAN - or (again to get back to the bland and blind) HELL’S KITCHEN.
Reality, context, disappears.
So we seek to replace reality with certainty.
Taking as our information eidolon Andy Warhol’s screen print cans of soup, as an icon key to the postmodern, we have an information technology that in tendency homogenises reality into a processed information soup - voila! Democracy soup is on the menu. Some of its effects could be seen in Vietnam. Politicians found themselves responding to a world made out of streams of videotape. The ‘information soup’ that Vietnam was ‘communist’ and that on the ‘domino theory’ (dominoes being a kind of information soup of dots, so to speak) everything else would go communist too derived its authenticity from the emulsion of grey grainy film. Reason operated through the logic of a merely visual mist! We have the same with the ‘war on terror’. That all ‘terrorisms’ are alike. The war is with ‘terrorists’ - the concept seems to need no further definition. It was hoped that by making Iraq ‘democratic’ (another kind of information soup concept) a reverse domino effect would transform the hatred.
Or another blueprint. Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint. I am thinking of the incident where Gumm comes across an ice cream kiosk that turns out to be not there. He discovers that what he thought was an ice cream kiosk is actually a kind of psychic construct … Compare the ‘communist threat’. The ice cream kiosk is actually just a small slip of paper with the words ICE CREAM KIOSK printed on it. Looking around, the same applies to everything else. What had been grass is a piece of notepaper saying GRASS. And so forth. Media reality has in perception become larger than reality itself. News banners fill our heads and seem to take on the very caste of the ‘things themselves’ in their banal concretisations of the imaginary. Reality is reduced to the status of a fantasy; a situation that by destroying all sense of limit as real, invites us to think about reality as black and white in order to rediscover those limits. The result is that we still think according to the categories; we still believe: “Exists” “Does not exist”, only in the impoverished terms of a gross metaphysical simplification.
In other words, if you still think that America was dealing with a real enemy in Vietnam, in South America, in the Middle East, that is because your mind set supposes that reality can and should be understood according to categorical opposites - rather than (say) according to the actual facts on the ground.
In other words, we find the ‘enemy’ by which the state defines itself rendered as an ever more abstract ‘other’. Good and Evil. Clear distinctions are understood! Yet conceived in categorically inauthentic circumstances.
Not much has changed, one could say. Greed, fear and arrogance: as of old, the political world remains chaotically imaginary. But I don’t think this has ever been quite so transparent. I don’t think there have been as many moments in history as there have recently where the protagonist picks up a piece of paper and realises that here is the reality of the ice cream kiosk he has just bought his ice cream from.
The significant buildings of a city, its churches, its cathedrals, that work as the icons of place, that make it recognisable, that are landmarks, constructed from beautiful local stone; that tend to be beautiful in themselves - there is a still further consideration in this, for there is no avoiding how they are also in their various ways unique monuments to greed. Houses of wealth, acquisition, goods, gold and silver. And politics. Transliterate the motives that built these buildings, these churches, into the present. What are their equals? The office block. The supermarket. Placeless things that stand in their stead like litter. Looking out at the City of London, visible from the Horniman Park away in the South, on an early soft summer evening, it is quite stunning, it is not recognisable but as a threat. Not ‘local stone’. No one is seeing the black interplanetary towers of a race in elsewhere’s sigil. Monumental shards of the mineral.
If I ask you how old the world is you should know the answer. If I ask you how long modern man has existed you should know the answer. If I ask you the unit of the measurement of light you should know the answer. But you don’t. The story of the modern world is not a story. Since the story consists in facts about the nature of reality, facts of physics, of medicine, biology and so on and a fact by itself is inert. No consequences are implied by it beyond a kind of take it or leave it indifference. If I don’t know how old the earth is, what difference does it make? 60 million years? 60 billion? Concerning the basic facts of the world about us then, why bother knowing their catechism if sense has to come from circumstantial need? What is the story of no story?
