|
THE BONSAI AND THE SPECTACLE Text: Heidi Grönman Picture: detail from photograph, copyright 2001 FDNY Photo Unit The eldest of the Glass children, Seymour Glass, commits a suicide in a short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish. After an equally short contemplation, the reader no longer wonders why. Seymour, no longer, is capable to process meaning into the actual task of living. For that reason, there's not much point for him to continue living just because, for example, his siblings manage to mourn after him for the years to come, as the reader finds out from the few novels and short stories author J. D. Salinger has published from the Glass-saga. For Seymour, everything is indifferent, and still, his surroundings continue living, with artificial reasons, with illusory meanings, with nothing else, but insistence to be somewhere, existing somewhere, no matter what, where or how. Such an irrationality might be overwhelming, and Seymour, in 1948, at an age of 31, can take it no more. According to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, we humans are a meaning processing system. Processing meanings is something we cannot avoid doing - it is our existence and also the reason why we can possess and perceive something that is called "social." Correspondingly, we do not have social life as a result because we are creatures who are together. Instead, we have social life, because we cannot avoid processing our surroundings as a meaningful environment. However, such a processing does not install meaning into any given thing. In fact, according to Luhmann, we humans are living in chaotic reality that is a plain infrastructure of noise from where the living system constructs its phenomenal, meaningful world. Such a phenomenal world, naturally, refers only occasionally, if at all, to the reality. As a collective, we do have objective knowledge about our mutual reality, because we, as social creatures, are capable to negotiate about meanings. We mostly tend to agree about what our social reality consists of. However, according to Luhmann, it is the possibility of disagreement that generates the social meaning dimension. In a very profound way, our existence consists of possessing the knowledge about difference between this and something else, between moment and continuum and between consensus and dissent. Interestingly enough, Luhmann argues that morality is our way to cope with the ongoing social complexity. Human morality is an equipment that reduces reality into those that can be praised or blamed, about which statements we are constantly looking for consensus with our allies and dissent with our enemies. The Glass children are highly intelligent, and Seymour comes close to what conventionally is called a genius. He understands the poetry of John Keats and its context at an age of eight, and has his Ph.D. "at an age when most young Americans are just getting out of high school." However, it does not take a genius to realize the instrumental and therefore, in a sense, arbitrary nature of human morality. Tons of sociologists and philosophers (among others) have drawn the same conclusion as Luhmann, exactly because we manage to have disagreements about what, for example, is good and what is beautiful. Also, it does not take a genius to live according to such a knowledge. One is perfectly capable to live with a meaning structure and moral standards that are profoundly relative by having a common, ordinary sense of proportion. Granted, Seymour Glass is a New Yorker, and a sense of proportion is not exactly the most salient of the North-American features. In fact, it just might be ingenious to have a sense of proportion in a culture that for most of its parts doesn't prefer such an attitude. It should be noted, too, that by claiming that for Seymour everything is indifferent I do not mean the postmodern situationists' angst according to which now that everything is spectacle, nothing has meaning. The point is not whether spectacles are rare or common, but that although spectacles happen and have meaning, it still does not matter. For Seymour, and for us, living in- or outside New York, spectacles come and continue in forms of both individual and collective collapses of our socially constructed structures. What, then? Nothing. The meaning refuses to make sense. The notion that there is not any structure of absolute beauty, wisdom, good and so forth is in obvious conflict with individual perceptions that we, however, constantly generate about beauty and good. Although the truth might be out there, it is nowhere near the human phenomenal world (which is all that we have), and that notion, I think, explains how "the most kindest" genius decides to be around no more. Why should he bother, anyway? In following Luhmann, it can be argued that society resembles a forest that consists of trees who cannot avoid forming a forest. For a forest it is enough to be a forest but a society is not satisfied with pure existence - it is productive, and it produces mass that is mostly crap, far from perfection or excellence despite its statements and structures about good and beauty. And what the world surrounding Seymour seems to be doing about it? Nothing. According to Salinger, it is perfectly satisfied with the state-of-art, be it device, poem or habit to call someone by his name. In one casual evening conversation Seymour says that he would like to be a dead cat should the peace follow the war. For him, such a sentence refers to the teaching of Zen master, according to which the most valuable thing in the world is a dead cat, because "no one could put a price on it." People surrounding Seymour, however, are not familiar with Zen Buddhism and therefore think that a desire to become a dead cat is some kind of a sophisticated joke, cracked by a former and notorious Wise Child, although mother of his girlfriend thinks, with a support from her analyst, that he must be a schizoid personality. Being a dead cat is not, apparently, part of the American understanding about what is the state-of-art concerning ambitious desires of post-war young men. For Seymour, it is not that nothing has meaning and nothing matters. Instead, for him, everything has meaning but, for that reason, cannot matter in conventional way because he is incapable to make differentiations between aims that are incidentally praised and blamed by his surroundings. Combined with the knowledge that everything (perfect, lousy or indifferent) is valuable, Seymour has moved into a conceptual level where it is quite difficult to find a company. And the lack of material and immaterial dialogue, I think, is what finally kills him. It is impossible to have dialogue when no one else has the concept of a haiku-like dead cat, with its diverse meaning without value with which one could measure, understand, own or observe. He ends up being misunderstood at a level where no amount of explanation could suffice, and especially so, as he does not want to continue as a full-time teacher, presumably because most of his human surroundings think he is just a freak. Without mutual statements about value, good and beauty, what there is left to speak about? The last day is perfect only to bananafish, and even about that we cannot be certain. The story is written, not by the author, but by his mouthpiece Buddy Glass, younger brother of Seymour's. Although I have implicitly claimed that Seymour's suicide is a sensible act of an intelligent person, I should also like to argue that it is possible to talk to each other (and even about beauty and good) although things around are indifferent and without making differentiations according to gender, age, size, rarity, importance, appearance and so forth. The claim is much concerned about the phenomenon according to which our perception unavoidably makes the differentiation but that we are capable of not to value an object according to established or existing order. On what grounds, then, would the discussion, collective negotiation or dialogue be possible and - perhaps more importantly - on what grounds could something appeal us? Basis of our knowledge about life is gathered before an age of 6. We learn what is romantic from the fairy tales and TV, what is adulthood from our parents, and what is stupid from our peer group. Due to this background of knowledge structures, most of our grown up opinions can be said to be interaction between the notions of a toddler and the perception of an adult - which explains why it is quite difficult to encounter objects as indifferent. Notions of a toddler are not objective but resemble more sort of surrender or acceptance that a kid does in front of stronger or new opinion or idea. The kid has no other choice, though. One has to learn somehow what the world is, and that can be accomplished only by consulting and observing those who already know and who already manage to behave in the world of a child. Later on, as an adult, one can consider the knowledge as ''good'' and accept such knowledge as an established order of the world, or one can treat it as ''bad'' and turn out as resistance-identity and join into any of suitable Liberation Fronts. Fortunately, one can also treat the knowledge as ''indifferent.'' With the latter option, the judgement is not based on established or existing order. Instead, one judges according to present situation. What is the present, then? It is not one's history. It is what one is doing. It can be argued that activity in itself is a manifest of meaning, because it is what we do, when we are those metaphorical trees forming a social forest. We cannot help the fact that individual activity composes that what is called individual life - and life consists of nothing else that lasts, because everything else but activity can be seen to be part of those cultural structures where opinions about good and beauty are, incidentally, constructed. Hence, it can be argued that although moral is arbitrary instrument with which society happens to be equipped, it still does matter what one does. What one does forms life and although no-one possess powers to judge morally others, the activity in itself can be said to be in the place where we easily think there is (moral) judgement. Therefore, acts of present constitute one's existence at any given moment despite the fact that one is also unable to completely know what one is. (Hence the postmodern angst about fragmentation of existence projected into the reality.) The profound nature of the present and the activity is perhaps easiest seen in a creative activity, where more or less notoriously the satisfaction follows from the excellence of the process and not that much from accomplished product. For that reason, for example, predicting the (consuming) future might turn out to be impossible in a level that the society has never encountered before, given the statements of the information economy that most of the working population will increasingly be creative knowledge-workers. We can only wonder what will choose a creative person, who does not shop anything because her mother states it's useful, because his father says it's beautiful, because the ex says it's ugly or because teachers claim it's reasonable but because the given object plainly generates his or her interest. When the object appeals because it happens to reflect the essence of something that one is working with, no amount of diversity could be predicted to be useless or invaluable. However, it might be difficult to put a price on something that gets its value individually, one at one time. In such case, the exchange of goods might happen with instruments that are individually valued, too. The VAT of a poem is easy (22%), but how about when the VAT is the poem? How should we calculate that? heidig@uiah.fi Berger, Peter L. & Luckmann, Thomas (2000) Todellisuuden
sosiaalinen rakentuminen. Trans. V. Raiskila. Gaudeamus, Helsinki. First
published The Social Construction of Reality, 1966.
|