The Epitaph of the Human Race: tl;dr?

Maybe the label tl;dr is an example of what Hegel meant when he wrote “The owl of minerva flies only at dusk” - knowledge of what is taking place in history only becomes visible when events or trends have already finished. Tl;dr. Ironically, mass literacy has been achieved at the very point at which reading is becoming obsolete.
 

Tl;dr. It is not an apology. It is not an explanation. I don't think it's a boast, either. I think it is writing on a gravestone. Tl;dr is the epitaph of curiosity and patience, of determination and concentration. The letters have been chiseled into the stone by google.
 

None of this is new. In 2008, Nicholas Carr, described how google was making us stupid. He described how reading is becoming more and more difficult because of how google has changed our brains. Google gives us so many shortcuts around the effort involved in opening a book and keeping it open while we give it our undivided attention and this has a direct effect on thinking:
 

“Deep reading.....is indistinguishable from deep thinking....as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”
 

None of it is new but it is accelerating.
 

In 2011 researchers showed how the work of social 'transactive memory' was increasingly being done by google: participants in the research experiments performed badly on memory tests when they believed that the facts in question would be stored for them anyway on computers; participants performed better when they believed that the information would not be stored for retrieval.

Why bother reading? Why bother remembering? If google knows we don't have to know.

I'm criticising google in this way because I believe it is leaching away layers upon layers of what it is to be a person; what it is to be in a society.

If memory is outsourced then personal identity through time is compromised.

If reading becomes a flitting and flighty reflex, then thinking will be replaced by a kind of intellectual Tourette's that can't focus for long enough for understanding to emerge.

Fifty years from now will the kind of literacy needed to read a novel or a poem of any length or substance have completely disappeared?
 

What difference will it make if, as seems likely, by the year 2055 google translate will have taken away the necessity of learning other languages?
 

How will people be able to perform tasks of any complexity – in science, engineering, art, parenting – if human intellect, memory, imagination have been deprived of opportunities to hone themselves?

If I sound like a reactionary or a Luddite then so be it. There have been many advances in the ways human beings communicate. There were similar reactions against the invention of writing (what is Derrida's notion of 'phonocentrism' if it is not a vestige and revival of this counter – revolution?), printing, the telephone, the radio and the TV but google is very different.

 

It seeks to match, exceed and replace a range of human faculties that are so comprehensive and fundamental to what it means to be a human being and to live a decent life with others: memory, curiosity, determination, intelligence, imagination, patience, failure. Without these things what will remain of people and their societies?
 

Tl;dr? Switch off google before it's too l....

Beauty is Costly

A friend of mine once pointed out that Ireland does not have a well developed culture of appreciation of visual art and architecture. We don't do paintings and buildings. The weather is too poor, the light too grey and, besides Irish people have been too busy getting on with the business of trying to survive poverty, famine and emigration to develop great art. The weight of time has been too great for the timelessness of great art to rise. Beauty is costly.

But then again, this week I went to Handel's Apollo e Dafne in the Neo-Palladian palace, Castletown House. Beautiful music in a beautiful room in a beautiful house.

Still, beautiful rooms in beautiful houses are exceptions that prove the rule that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Ireland does not have a well developed culture of the appreciation of visual arts and architecture because art is costly. The evidence for this in Castletown was obvious. During the interval I looked out the sash windows of the The Long Gallery, over the broad meadows and saw in the distance Conolly's Folly - built in the 1740s to give work to the local poor who'd been devastated by famine in 1740 - 41.

The walls of the corridors were covered by portraits of the aristocrats who'd lived in the house over the centuries but the images that stood out for me were photographs of the labourers whose work created and sustained the wealth and position of their supposed betters. Castletown house is a beautiful place but at what cost?

Handel's cantata, as well as the myth of Apollo and Daphne as it is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses is a reminder of the same point - beauty is costly.

The story of Apollo and Daphne is a refusal, followed by a change, followed by another refusal. Each part proves this point.

First, Daphne refuses Apollo's sexual advances.  For Daphne, bearing Apollo's beautiful child would be too costly.

The myth begins with Apollo's return from battling the Python. Walking through the woods he has just one thing on his mind and the sight of the beautiful Daphne is the very thing he needs.

Thanks to Cupid, however, Apollo is the last thing Daphne needs. While Apollo has been pierced by Cupid's love inducing arrow, Daphne has been pierced by one that makes her feel only contempt for Apollo. Naturally, she scorns and rejects him. From Handel's libretto:

"Sempre t'adorero....Sempre t'aborriro!" (I will always love you...I will always hate you!)

Why does Daphne refuse him? Well, there would be very little for her in a coupling with Apollo.

In Ovid's version of the story Daphne's refusal of childbearing and rearing is an absolute one: When her father, Peneus, tells her “You owe me a son, my daughter....Now when, my child will you give me grandson?”she replies: “Darling father, I want to remain a virgin forever. Please let me, Diana's father allowed her that”.

Daphne has everything to lose. Sure, Apollo is a god but why should she have anything to do with this guy? For all his fine talk about love and the like when you strip it down he's basically a soldier coming back from the war looking to get laid.

She'd probably end up looking after the child of their union while Apollo would surely go off on his merry way.

In Handel's version, Dafne's refusal to enter into this reproductive contract with Apollo is a commonsense one: “Il ragion frena t'amor” (Reason arrests love) “Piu tosto morire che perder l'onor” (It's better to die than to lose one's honour). Why should I submit to this 'love' – it's neither reasonable nor honourable.

So while Apollo sings from the outset that “La terra e liberta” (the land is free) what he has to offer Daphne is not freedom. She already has freedom. She knows its importance. She too sings about it at the start: “Felicissima quest'alma Ch'ama sol la liberta/Non v'è pace, non v'è calma Per chi sciolto il cor non ha” (Most blest is this soul, that loves only freedom. There is not peace, there is no calm if the heart is not unfettered)

Second, Daphne changes into a laurel tree, arresting forever Apollo's pursuit and her flight.

"Tu non mi fuggirai!...Si, che ti fuggiro!" (You can't get away from me, yes I will get away from you!)

In this way they create a union that outlasts any possible physical union they might have had. In other words, they re-create themselves as timeless symbols of art.

What happens is a kind of sublation of the proposed relationship (sex and reproduction) into another kind of relationship (the production of art). Daphne refuses Apollo's invitation to join together and produce a child. And yet, her transformation is actually a kind of acceptance that they will always be together in that moment of suspended pursuit.

"It is you who will always be twined in my hair, on my tuneful lyre...with your glory and praise everlasting"

In Ovid's version of the myth Apollo had claimed from the beginning that he was the god of art: “I am the lord of the lyre and song”. But it is only when Daphne is changed into a laurel tree that this is proven. He is only the lord of lyre and song because Daphne's transformation changes him just as much as it changes her.

Before this episode, Apollo had been arrogant and rapacious; arguing with Cupid and lusting after Daphne's beauty. It is only after the chastening experience of his failure in love that he can truly claim to be the lord of the lyre and song.

Together, Apollo and Daphne create a beautiful representation. The cost for Apollo is that he must forgo his previous incarnation as a vain, lustful, arrogant god.

What about the cost for Daphne? Well, ending up as a tree is hardly the kind of outcome that most people look forward to. In fact, Daphne's transformation is actually a better outcome for her. I will explain this in a moment.

But what does it mean to say that Apollo and Daphne end up as art? How does the metamorphosis resulting in a stasis of never - ending, never - fulfilled pursuit and flight add up to art?

I am about as far away from an expert on what defines art as you are likely to meet, so I don't mind - since it's unavoidable - being wrong. A definition that I like is that outlined by Kant in his Critique of Judgement.

For Kant, art is “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication”

Well, Apollo and Daphne's arrested embrace is 'purposive in itself' - in that its energies are forever in motion and yet are not directed beyond itself. It is immanent. Unlike a 'real' embrace which can have extrinsic purposes; pleasure, reproduction, this embrace has no other purpose than to remain forever unfulfilled.

Similarly, their embrace is timeless - "without an end" in Kant's formulation - and so contrasts once again with the real life moment of which it is ostensibly a representation. In time, all things pass away, in time, lovers consummate their love, in time, lovers grow tired of love. In art, there is no consummation, no weariness, no death, embraces go on forever.

In this way, the metamorphosis of Apollo and Daphne into this frozen moment always reminds me of Keats' representation of a similar moment in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Because Apollo's and Daphne's coupling becomes an eternal reminder of the transitory nature of love and desire it satisfies the third criterion in Kant's formulation in that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication".

In other words, the sublation of human desire into the production of a symbol reflects back into the the imperfect, inescapable human world.
   
What "mental powers" can be "cultivated for the purposes of sociable communication" by thinking about Apollo and Daphne are anyone's guess.

For me, Daphne has rejected sexual union with Apollo because the costs are too high. What woman in her right mind would get mixed up a promiscuous thug like Apollo?

On a more serious note, Daphne's ambition was greater than to be Apollo's plaything and to suffer the trauma of bearing his child. As I said before, the production of that kind of beauty was too costly.

It seems to me that Daphne's ambition was greater than this.

Third, Daphne's second refusal is a refusal to be an object in art. She refuses the default position of women in art. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing "A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans is first and foremost a sight to be looked at".

Daphne refuses to be looked at.

Unlike her heroine, Diana, who when she was looked at by Acteon, had the voyeur transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs, Daphne's gift is actually art. In becoming a tree - in reproducing herself in this form she is visible in what she creates; not in what she is.

And what she has made of herself, what she has produced is, according to Ovid's telling of the tale, a beautiful object:

"The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; her head was confined in a treetop, all that remained was her beauty"

So, was this metamorphosis too great a cost for Daphne? Remember how important freedom was to her. It depends on whether the transformation was her decision: She has escaped from the suffering of bearing and rearing Apollo's child. She has not been trapped and exhibited as an object. Maybe her metamorphosis was a decision to choose a life devoted to art similar to that celebrated in Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium.

And yet I can't help but think of the arms and legs that had 'run so nimbly' and worked so hard over the centuries to produce and maintain the conditions that made beautiful things like Castletown House, Handel's Apollo e Dafne or Bernini's sculpture of Apollo and Daphne possible. On a literal reading Daphne ends up dead at the end of this story, despite the fact that at the end of Ovid's account she seems to be pleased enough:

"With a wave of her new formed branches the laurel agreed [with Apollo's praise of her] and seemed to be nodding her head in the treetop"

At the end of Handel's cantata, Dafne has even less to say.  Alongside her muteness is the fact that she has sacrificed her life, for who can live as a tree? It's possible to interpret her sacrifice as a change for the better - and that is exactly what I have done!

However, no reading of her metamorphosis as a change for the better can erase the fact that she has lost a great deal too. This is to say nothing more than what Kant sees as definitive of art in general that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication". Art is not art if it does not in some way make you think and feel differently about the world that it comes from and the world that you live in.

Castletown House, as a condition of being a beautiful Palladian mansion has to bear the marks of the countless, anonymous lives of labourers, peasants and servants that were given to produce and maintain its beauty. The story of Apollo and Daphne has to bear the marks of the silencing and sacrificing of women that have always been a condition for the production of beautiful things - paintings, sculpture, literature and, maybe most of all, children.

The production of beautiful things is costly.

Violence

Sparta  -  Roxana Robinson (2013)

 

 

Violence is a part of every society. Usually it remains hidden but it's never that far away from the surface of things. When it happens it happens as crime or illness; it happens, too by official design in the forms of punishment and war. Of course there are more or less violent societies; Norway is a a more peaceful country than Iraq, but does this mean that Scandinavians are less violent than Arabs? Surely not; human beings seem to be born with the same stuff in their heads and bodies the world over. The potential for violence is universal but its activation is not.

Roxana Robinson's novel Sparta is about the violence of contemporary America. On any measure the US is a violent country. According to the UN the US has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and the 28^th highest rate of homicides by firearm per capita. Historically, the United States has spent 218 of the 239 years of its existence at war. If an alien species were to land in the US tomorrow they would be very foolish little green men indeed to turn up un-armed (untentacled?).

So, then, Roxanna Robinson's novel, Sparta. The novel tells the story of Conrad Farrell, a US Marine who, on his return from the war in Iraq to civilian life struggles to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Robinson's choice of title makes explicit the inherently violent nature of the America. Conrad is a student of the classical civilisation who appalls his family and girlfriend by choosing to join the military. His reasoning is based on his study of ancient Greece and Rome. For Conrad, as for the ancients, war was an inherently good activity:

“Conrad talked about Homer. War was his great subject, how it shaped history, affected families, changed young men. War was the route to nobility”.  Indeed, Conrad writes his thesis on the social conventions and culture of ancient Sparta: “The business of Sparta was war and all else was subjugated to that”.  On the basis of these insights, Conrad joins the Marines. He serves two tours of duty in Iraq, witnesses and carries out horrific, obscene acts of violence and when he eventually returns to the US he is catastrophically marked by what has happened to him. 

Surely, relentlessly, Conrad's life starts to implode.

Abbreviations abbreviate. Robinson's novel – itself a story about anger – seems to have been written in outrage about this fact. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. An abbreviation that she almost completely avoids using. Towards the end of the novel she has a military doctor use the term but she does so in order to mark this official out as part of the problem, part of the silencing and abbreviation of this illness.

Over the course of the novel Conrad's mental state deteriorates and one by one his relationships fall to pieces. He cannot cope with civilian life. As he walks the streets, sits in a restaurant or drives a car he is constantly on edge. At all times he is a heartbeat away from a state of terrible rage that, in Iraq, would have kept him alive, but back in the US cripples his thoughts and emotions.

There's something hypnotic about the way that Robinson tells the story of what's going on inside Conrad's head. She swoops again and again to sketch aspects of the character, amplifying a previously described thought or emotion or illuminating some previously hidden aspect of the illness.

The episodes themselves seem relatively minor. He has a moment of road rage where he tries to out manoeuver another vehicle that reminds him of being on the road in Iraq. He almost gets into a fist fight with a man on a beach. He reacts with reflexive aggression to being bumped into on the street. He stares intimidatingly at another commuter on a train. He argues with his sister and her boyfriend, his girlfriend, brother, parents and so on. Yet the aggregate effect is of a deeply troubled person, and gradually, inevitably his thoughts become more and more suicidal.

There is a sense, too, of the narrative itself being drawn down into the terminal vortex of Conrad's illness. His obsessive thoughts, his compulsive behaviours, the constant torment of being on an adrenaline saturated state of alert, the insomnia and growing isolation and alcoholism, all seem to create a kind of momentum that draws the story towards an obvious conclusion. Robinson's description of this movement is so vivid that she reveals a kind of seduction that can easily be understood as operating at a fictional and an existential plane. If suicide seems like the obvious way to finish this novel, then can anyone doubt that suicide would be just as appealing a way out in real life?

On the terms set by this novel, Conrad's military training may have kept him alive in Iraq but it is very nearly the death of him on his return to civilian life. He cannot ask for help; to do so would be a dangerous weakness. He describes this bind to his parents as follows:

"The whole Marine ethic is that you're tough. You can take anything. You don't ask for emotional help. That's the one place you're on your own...Marines can't say they're in trouble. Not if they still think of themselves as Marines" 

Towards the end of the novel, one of the men from his platoon, Anderson, shoots himself in the head and Conrad seems destined to follow suit.

Robinson manages to arrest the seemingly inevitable but right up until the last page this outcome was very much unclear. She manages to convey a  sense of crisis that is both personal and general, and also, convincing. Conrad could so easily have killed himself - he was a hair's breadth from doing so and the reader is left with the conviction that others have and will do so.

This is a political novel but its great strength - the characterisation of Conrad - means that it never becomes sententious. Robinson concludes with noting that:

"Sparta failed, in the end, because the energies of the state were directed only toward war. Robbed of its young men, the country became hollowed out from within, and what remained was a hard, burnished carapace"

The message for the Unites States is clear enough here.

Sparta may be a novel directed at a contemporary American audience but its observations about violence and the crisis of masculinity are relevant in Ireland too. 

In this country, men are violent towards women, other men and themselves. Far more men than women are domestic abusers. The overwhelming majority of violent crimes in Ireland are committed by men.  Eight out of every ten suicides are by men. 

This novel is not going to solve these problems but its mapping out of what it is like to be a man, what it is like to be taught to act violently, shows how narrow, how cruel and inadequate such lessons are.

Melancholia and the Ugly Truth

What do you do when you’re miserable? Watch a movie about the end of the world, of course.

Tonight I watched Melancholia directed by Lars von Trier.

This film is about a very unhappy family; at first I thought it was another proof of Tolstoy’s remark that each unhappy family is alike in its own way. This film, however, makes a different point: all families are unhappy and they are unhappy in exactly the same way. All families, all members of all families are ultimately doomed. There is nothing more certain than this – nothing is certain except this.

This may be a particularly useless piece of knowledge but I think that’s the point. There is very little consolation in this film – everyone dies in the end and this is obvious from the beginning – love does not conquer all, no one gets rescued…God? Von Trier has no use for that proposition. This film never becomes didactic. There is no moral, there are no instructions with this story. And yet at the end of this film the audience, unlike the protagonists, are still alive. Paradoxically, the most valuable knowledge may very well be the most useless, the knowledge that demands a response. This demand can only be made of people, like those in this film, who've had all their illusions stripped away.

In this way I think, really, this film is a very late work of the Northern Renaissance! The Renaissance was when science was new, it was when humanism was fearless. It was a pre lapsarian moment where science, art and literature revealed sometimes terrifying truths and had not yet been used to obscure those truths. In science, truth preceded the myth of techno-scientific progress and in art and literature, insight preceded propaganda.

Melancholia belongs to the Renaissance because it uncovers rather than obscures truth; it shows but does not assuage.

The story of the film takes place on two weekends separated by a few months. The first part of the film is about the very unhappy wedding of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). Justine is deeply melancholic, and though she tries to hide it, she suffers a number of breakdowns as the wedding goes on and eventually, she rejects her husband, walks into the garden and has sex with a complete stranger. 

The next day her husband leaves.

While her marriage disintegrates before it ever really begins, her back story – as revealed through the brilliantly portrayed inadequacies and insanities of her parents (played by John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling) is one of familial disintegration too.  It seems, at the level of intimate relationships at least, all Justine has known, all she will ever know,  is hopelessness and failure.

And yet, hopelessness and failure is all that awaits everyone in this film. At the end a huge planet, 'Melancholia', collides with the Earth and wipes everyone out!

The doom that surrounds these characters is amplified cleverly by the constant repetition through the film of the opening notes of Wagner's  Tristan and Isolde:

The theme of the inevitability of death is announced early in the film: it begins with a choral prologue of the star crossed fate awaiting the characters. The planet is shown colliding with the earth and a Renaissance masterpiece Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow is shown disintegrating.

The death-drive energies released by the secular impulses of the Renaissance which were later tamed by the optimism of the enlightenment and the naiveté of belief in the progress of science are revived – or really, exhumed -  in this film.

What is more terrifying than the reminder that planets are not fixed?  Perhaps it is only the sight of a rapidly and lethally approaching planet that could remind us of the enormity of what Copernicus or Galileo had to say in the Renaissance. 

Theirs was a message that was terrified rather than reassured. 

Renaissance Science was not religion, which is more than you can say for science over the last couple of centuries! A lot of people have a lot of faith in science. Certainly, the latter half of the film gives the lie to any remaining shred of belief in a notion that science can save us all.

Suffice it to say that the conclusion of this film doesn’t involve Bruce Willis, a space shuttle, nuclear bombs or any hope that technology get us out of this fix.

A really obvious palimpsest of this film is Dürer’s engraving Melancholia. The disenchanting effects of science that feature in the second half of the film – it has terrified us and in the end, just bloody well let us down – are identical to those recorded  by Dürer.

Von Trier alludes to the Renaissance again in his characterisation of Justine. She has a suicidal trajectory that is visually linked to Ophelia at various points.  Justine knows she’s going to die and she knows it from the very start.

What else then is she to do with her husband and his plans to have children and live in a tomato grove but reject them all. There is no future, so what’s the point?

Justine has many faults but she is not dishonest. In a key scene she goes into a room and takes down a number of abstract, modernist prints and replaces them with other, Renaissance, and Romantic works.

She chooses Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow and The Land of Cockaigne , Millais’ Ophelia and The Woodman’s Daughter, Blake’s A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallow, Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath  and Hill’s Crying Deer.

What is she doing here? As a character, Justine is careless if not contemptuous of other people. And yet, in this scene, the only one in the whole film where she seems to care about anything, she flies into a near rage in the effort to put art depicting other people on display! Of course, attempting to unify Justine by any analysis that seeks to make her a coherent person misses the point. She isn’t a coherent person.  

She is a prophetess of doom, an articulation of the inescapable truth of death symbolised by the approaching, and appropriately named, planet, Melancholia. As I wrote at the beginning, she is a vehicle for a useless, terrifying, yet infinitely valuable truth.

The paintings she chooses are not abstractions; they directly engage with the disturbing inevitability of death and disintegration.

Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow shows a bird’s eye (disturbingly inhuman) view of all human life. The pathetic houses and fruitless hunt (the men are empty handed) show the radical vulnerability of human beings to the whims of nature.

The Land of Cockaigne is a surrealistic representation of the disintegration of human beings from within; unlike Justine who’s imploding due to celestially driven depression, the men in Bruegel’s painting are gluttons and drunkards.

Millais’ Ophelia has an erotic charge as powerful as that forcing all the characters in the film to watch in awe as the Melancholia hurtles towards the earth.

The paintings by Blake and Caravaggio that Justine finds are both obscenely violent and gory.

These paintings represent precisely Justine’s assessment of what is going on:  “The earth is evil, there’s no need to grieve for it, no one will miss it”

In the second half of the film Justine returns to her sister, Claire’s house in a state of catatonia. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who seems far more ‘normal’ than her sister, is torn by anxieties about the approaching planet. She doubts the consolations of science, though, unlike her sister, she still retains the vestiges of hope. When her husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland) tells her that Melancholia won’t hit earth she partly – the wishfully thinking part – believes him.

It is only at the end of the film that she finds out the truth. As it turns out she doesn’t need complicated scientific instruments. She learns what the angel of Genius learns in Dürer’s Melancholia by using a tool for measuring the movement of the approaching planet made by her seven year old son with a coat hanger.

I guess this means of confirming the truth relies on the crudest of technologies in order that Von Trier can indict scientific pretension and naiveté without at the same time dismissing scientific method.

What is Claire’s son’s coat hanger if it is not an organic extension of the will to know and the impulse to observe? What is Claire’s husband’s telescope and his blind faith in science if it is not – respectively - an over sophistication of inquiry and a betrayal of scientific method?

Perhaps all that science in the Renaissance gave us was a world where there were no illusions. Renaissance science had come with a sword and had not yet learned to patch up the wounds it inflicted.  

Justine is melancholic because she cannot but see what Copernicus and Galileo, Bruegel, Caravaggio and Shakespeare saw: a world where (if you observed it) the truth was as follows: planets do not stand still, the material world may very well be all that there is, death is probably the only absolute truth and human beings are deeply troubled and stumbling beings.

It's Unnatural!

There’s a referendum on marriage equality tomorrow. There’s no question in my mind as to how I will vote. Of course gays should be allowed to get married. Love is not the property of heterosexuals and I honestly fail to see how a person’s choice of sexual partner has any bearing on how well one performs as a parent.  I see the effects of dreadful parenting every day of my working life and I can tell you that the gays are not the cause.

It seems a matter of shame that we even have to have referendum about this question. Restricting marriage to heterosexuals seems so absurd to me that the referendum is beginning to seem like a vast campaign of deflection away from actual politics. There are far more important things at stake in this state right now. Meanwhile, the state broadcaster’s leading news item today is that unemployment has fallen below 10 per cent.  Whoever is setting the PR agenda for Fine Gael and Labour knows what he’s doing.

So I don’t really want to talk about this referendum. And yet, last week I got into an argument about it. While we were “discussing the issues” a colleague described gay marriage as ‘unnatural’.  This comment really stuck in my mind.

What did he mean by that: “unnatural”? 

For that matter, what does anyone mean by 'natural'?

Nature, the natural, these have to be some of the most slippery words in any language. Not only do you have to negotiate with the semantic garbage left behind by every advert for washing powder, shampoo and muesli you've ever been fed but there are layers upon layers of personal taste, morality, conscious and unconscious preferences to contend with too.

It's hard to know where to start. So, when all else fails, go back to Aristotle.

In the Physics Aristotle contrasted the natural with the produced:

“Among things that are, some are natural, others are due to other causes. Those that are natural are animals and their parts, plants and the simple bodies, such as earth, fire, air and water; for we say that these things and things of this sort are natural. All these things are evidently different from things not naturally constituted; for each of them has in itself an origin of change and stability, whether in place, or growth and decay, or alteration.

Compare these with a bed or a cloak, or any other such kind of thing. So described and to the extent that they are products of such a craft, they have no innate impulse to change” (192b)

A natural thing, then, has a life of its own – it can change or remain the same, grow and decay, alter. A made thing has no such life of its own.  Leaving aside (for a moment) the obvious point that contrasting the natural with the made doesn’t address the point made by my colleague that gay marriage was ‘unnatural’, that is, I suppose, ‘disgusting’, I was struck by how surprisingly helpful Aristotle can be to the ‘yes’ argument:

First, what is human sexuality if it is not natural on an Aristotelian account of ‘nature’? Human sexuality certainly has an origin of change and stability within itself – its tendency to change, to grow, decay and alter is precisely what troubles some people about it. The potency and instability of human sexuality is exactly what provokes public and private efforts to control it. Civilisation is what happens when sexuality is mapped and measured, repressed and released. The scary thing is that the most natural thing in the world is for human beings to have sex for pleasure – if gay marriage is unnatural that is the fault of marriage.

Second, Aristotle – one of the main philosophical influences on Catholic theology – lived in a society where homosexuality was ‘natural’.  It’s an ad hominem (pun intended!) argument and as such it’s as weak as they come but I thought I’d throw it in!

Anyway, the objection to gay marriage as ‘unnatural’ was, as I pointed out above, really just something along the lines of “it’s disgusting” or “it’s unconventional”.

Dealing with the second point first – gay sex is far from unconventional. It has been around a long time; the Catechism of the Catholic Church admits this:  “Homosexuality …. has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures…. The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible” (Secs 2357, 58)

On the first point - gay marriage is 'disgusting' - well, to be honest, gay sex would be disgusting to me. Brussels' sprouts are disgusting too. I'm not going to stop others from eating them. I see no reason to argue any more on that point.

  

We live in a secular republic; not a theocracy. So the teachings of the Catholic church should have no bearings on this whole affair, right? Wrong. Above, I mentioned the Catholic Catechism because, for many people in Ireland today, this whole question is a quasi - religious one.

It's not all bad news, though: the Catholic Catechism explicitly instructs its adherents not to persecute gays: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” (Sec 2358)

I guess “unjust discrimination” doesn’t include denying them the right to marry. Of course, the Catholic Church is perfectly right to include such a tortured denial of the right to marry to millions upon millions of its followers; once again, this referendum is about the laws of a republic, not about the letter of church catechism. But given how much Catholic morality is bound up with the homophobia and stupidity that comprise the ‘No’ vote it is helpful to examine what exactly the Catholic Church has to offer gays.

It’s not much. The only advice that the catechism offers gays is to avoid fucking and pray until they end up straight: “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” (Sec 2359)

Seriously?  What an unnatural state that would be. Abstain, pray, grow old and die.

Preventing gays from getting married is unnatural.

Love Letters (Straight from Her Heart)

I wish I had been responsible for the soundtrack of the film  Her. 

For example, I can't get over why Spike Jonze didn't use the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene of the movie.

This would have opened the story line up to a far more interesting range of ironies than was the case. As it is the plot is held up at a gently ironic angle by the pastel colours, the knowing  references to social media conventions and the hipster soundtrack but this very subtlety (early in the film, at least) defeats the purpose of the irony.

In reflecting on the absurdities of a set of social/cultural conventions the film’s devices are too closely invested with those conventions.  “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” would have opened a wider space between the what and how of this movie. Of course, this would have sent the film in the direction of satire, rather than smug pastiche but then again, Spike Jonze is not David Lynch.

I like the opening scene. It begins with a close up of Theodore, the main protagonist. He’s making what seems to be a declaration of his deepest love but by the time he says “You make me feel like the girl I was when you first turned on the lights and woke me up and we started this adventure together” it is clear that this speech is no such thing.

The scene continues and we learn that Theodore is a professional writer of love letters. The camera pans out and we see that he works in an office alongside many others, each of whom is providing this same service. This is Cyrano de Bergerac on an industrial scale. A world where the most intimate language is outsourced, where the words of love are commodities, where words themselves are shown to float free from the most precious and secret parts of life.

This scene may be, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, love in the age of mechanical reproduction, but the vision is not a dystopian one. This does not seem to be a lament for the loss of the ‘aura’ of  love.

If anything, and maybe this is why Jonze didn’t use “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene, this is a celebration of the separation of words from reality. It is a kind of liberation of love letters from the parentheses of (straight from your heart).

The opening scene of this film suggests that the parentheses are always there. They were there in 1945 when the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” first appeared in the movie Love Letters (This film has an uncannily similar opening scene to Her's - the author of the lover letter that is being written as the credits roll turns out to be a ventriloquist  of another man's emotions, just as is the case for Theodore).

Romantic love has always relied on artifice for its existence. In other words, there has never been and there never will be an unmediated language that comes (Straight from your Heart). As everyone knows, movies, songs, poetry have always been the third person in the room. 

Polygamy, orgies, menages a trois; this is reality.

And yet despite its opening scene this film shies away from making this declaration.

In truth, Theodore longs for the stability of an intimate, exclusive, two person relationship.

Coincidentally I was listening to the radio and heard the song "I Love you Samantha" sung by Bing Crosby (in the film  High Society) - and once more I have to ask why Spike Jonze didn't use it in the film.

Bing could almost be Theodore as he sings:  "Remember, Samantha I'm a one gal guy!"

Theodore really seems to believe in the possibility that he could one day, use his words to express real love. There are flashback scenes where we learn that he has loved and lost and, of course, he does find love again, with Samantha.  That Samantha is an operating system is irrelevant.

What is relevant is shown in a scene early in the film. He is having virtual sex with a stranger. At first it seems to be going well – he jokes with the woman he contacts and their conversation soon becomes conventionally erotic. However, it is when she asks him to hit her with a dead cat that we see Theodore is a man at odds with his world. He spends his work day driving a wedge between love letters and the heart and yet he is disgusted and scared by a fantasy that relies on maintaining that very separation. A fantasy about being hit with a dead cat during lovemaking is just that -  a fantasy - it is no more or less real than having a love affair with an operating system.

The scene later in the film where Samantha hires a woman to have sex with Theodore while she speaks directly into their heads and plays the role acted out by the woman is only a more obvious expression of Theodore's basic longing for the impossible fantasy of a pure, unmediated, unproblematic love.

Polygamy, orgies, menages a trois; this the reality that Theodore would rather forget.

Accordingly, when it eventually happens, the love affair between Theodore and Samantha is vomit – inducingly sincere.  her voice is breathy and chirpy and her personality is everything that Theodore could want - she listens, she understands and she cares.

The virtual reality of the computer is basically forgotten. The exchanges between the two lovers show that the film makers are not interested in exploring the virtualisation of the reality of love and love letters signaled in the opening scene. For example; Theodore is lying in bed feeling depressed about the ending of his marriage. He tells her: "You don't know what it's like to lose someone you care about", after a pause she replies "yeah, you're right, I'm sorry".

Of course she knows what it's like - according to this film's opening statement about the commodification of reality, about the alienated nature of love and love letters she exists in the very space where love and love letters are made - she is pure mediation. She has access to every love letter ever written and can understand and process their implications faster than Theodore can ever hope to do.

How can she not know what it's like to lose someone?

Despite her immense processing power, Samantha is at a one level, only a voice. And what a voice! She's breathless, giggly, flirtatious; she is the vocalised 'essense' of emotion. This is the film's attempt to close the distance between what she says and who she is.

It's an ancient gesture - one analysed by Jacques Derrida as phonocentrism (the privileging of the truth of speech over the obfuscation of writing) - designed to assuage anxieties about the loss of immediacy because of the mediating obstacle of written letters and words. Phonocentrism is one possible attempt to ignore the parentheses and say that only through the voice can love letters come straight from the heart.

The anxieties about the alienating presence/absence of writing are also very new. What is the lament for the loss of'direct' interpersonal communication and its replacement by communications technologies if it is not the latest installment of (entirely understandable) phonocentrism?

When Samantha and Theodore's love runs into trouble this film improves a lot.

The credibility of the voice is not enough. At bottom he is a man while she is a computer - how can there be anything between them but an impassible gulf?

Late in the film Samantha tells Theodore that while they're talking she is at the same time talking to 8, 316 others and also - horror of horrors - in love with 641 other entities is as close as the film gets to comedy. As we know, Theodore is a 'one guy gal' so his reaction is predictable. He is hurt, betrayed and so on. And yet, Samantha is just as human as he is. If anything she is even more human than he is! She is the explicit admission that not only can there be no direct line from the heart to language, but also that once language arrives, unity leaves. Theodore is as atavistic in his desires as is Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (whose expressed wish was to fuse with the body of his mother and destroy his alienated, air sucking self "Mommmy baby wants to fuuuck!") -  he just can't admit it.

This film for all its flaws got me thinking about how it is that even when someone is physically close they can be very far away, how it is that intimacy can be established without actual physical proximity.

Of course, as anyone who's ever had to live with a computer instead of a person knows, intimacy needs bodily contact. Does bodily contact create intimacy? Of course not. This film shows that love between a computer and a man is possible. But that is not the point. Love between a computer and a man is not sustainable.

The film ends with another love letter (straight from the heart). This time, Theodore is writing it for himself. He sends it to his ex-wife. Does this letter have more truth than the ones he writes for pay in work?

No, it doesn't. But this may be because this film has liberated love letters from the burden of truth. This film may have jettisoned the freight of the simple man seeking a simple love at the very end. Perhaps what Samantha has taught Theodore is that he is capable of far more than mere fixation on a particular incarnation of who he happens to be at that moment. As she has already shown him, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is large, he contains multitudes. Samantha had already helped him get his letters published. He has, at the end, severed the link between his letters and his heart.

But that soundtrack? Why didn't they phone me?

Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero - David Lynch and Lacan's Imaginary Unconscious

Ecrits by Jacques Lacan, Wild at Heart & Blue Velvet by David Lynch

In my last post I wrote about Jacques Lacan's account of "the self's radical eccentricity with respect to itself". If even a fraction of what he says is true then we're all screwed. I was reading Lacan because, following Slavoj Žižek's path in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, I was trying to use Lacan to understand the films of David Lynch*.

For Lacan, the arrival and endurance of fear, desire and language mark the beginning and the end of each and every possibility of having a credibly stable identity. This is because, from the "Mirror Stage" onward the psyche is torn by conflict between unconscious desires and fears and conscious control.

However, it's not at all accurate to think of these drives as blind instincts. Such impulses belong to pre-linguistic children or animals. For Lacan the 'unconscious is structured like a language'. The unconscious comes into being at the moment of the repression of certain desires and ideals. The unconscious is these repressed desires and ideals and, moreover,  these desires and ideals are only possible as language.

For Lacan, these ideals and desires control the rational, conscious mind. As I mentioned in my last post one of the most demanding and defining of these ideals is the fantasy of the stable, perfect ego projected by the unconscious order of the 'Imaginary'. The paradox that Lacan reminds us of consists in the fact that these projections of an ideal ego are from the beginning, not the self's own creations at all: rather they are composed of and fueled by fears and desires, words and images that could never be anything but 'other'. For Lacan, the 'unconscious is the discourse of the other'.

Of course, as I pointed out in my last post, normality, or rather, normativity, is the unconscious, conscious and public work of policing that hides this truth.

Movies are part of this police force. The Australian writer Barbara Creed places this effect of cinema firmly within the context of Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking:

"....the viewing experience, in which the spectator identifies with the glamorous star is not unlike a re-enactment of the moment when the child acquires its first sense of selfhood or subjectivity through an identification with an ideal self. But, as Lacan pointed out, this is also a moment of mis-recognition - the child is not really a fully formed subject. He will only see himself in this idealized way when his image is reflected back through the eyes of others. Thus identity is always dependent on mediation."

Most movies work to seduce and deceive the audience into an unconscious moment of recognition. They answer the perpetual unconscious desire of the Imaginary order for objects to maintain the promise of a stable identity.

David Lynch's movies do not do this. They are about the tensions arising from the paradox I mentioned above that fear, desire and language simultaneously divide and seek to reconcile the unconscious and conscious mind.

His heroes and heroines are demented, disgusting, tormented and terrifying. None of them presents a credible stand-in for the Imaginary order's desire for a stable ego.

Willem Dafoe's performance as Bobby Peru in  Wild at Heart is typical. Lynch presents a scene that could have no place in a standard romantic film. His filthy teeth are shown in close up as he whispers 'say fuck me' to Lula as, all the while, he's groping her body. To add to the incongruity Lula responds with desire to this assault.

The point is not so much that this scene is disgusting - for all I know it is exactly what some people have in mind as an ideal scenario - it is that it challenges the audience's expectations that desire flows along conventional channels. It creates an analytic distance between the audience and the projected ideal egos because what is served up in this scene is basically consensual rape with a side order of bad dentistry.

In a pattern that Lynch had already established in Blue Velvet, Nicholas Cage plays the other side of desire. He is a rogueish character whose essential goodness remains despite his criminality. Where Defoe's character is basically a hyper-exaggerated abomination of a sick unconscious, Cage's is a similarly hyper-exaggerated cinematic staple: the eminently reformable (through the love of a good woman) bad boy.

The film begins with Sailor beating another man to death with hilarious cartoon violence that draws from Tom and Jerry and the fight scenes from an Elvis Presley vehicle. Cage smashes his victim’s brains all over the floor, hurls the obviously dead body against the wall and lights a cigarette.

The film concludes with an impossible reconciliation between the two lovers. It is as hilarious as the opening scene. Sailor comes running back to get Lula. The climb onto the roof of a car, embrace and Cage starts to sing:

"Love me tender" "Sailor!" she replies in ecstacy, this was the song he'd said he'd only sing to his truly beloved.

Blue Velvet  presents different versions of desire. Each version is animated by cinematic 'heroes' that challenge conventional audience expectations about what is normal and abnormal desire. In Lacanian terms, Lynch denies the Imaginary's desire for a stable, perfect ego-image. He does this by presenting different ways in which desire can go wrong.

In Lacan's account of the unconscious, desire operates by means of contiguous association. In the chapter of Ecrits devoted to this topic - "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" he writes: "Desire is a metonymy". What he means is that associations that trigger desire are not made by means of similarity - anything can become an object of desire. This concept is often paired with his constrasting claim that "The symptom is a metaphor"; in other words, mental distress or illness limps from one object of desire to another on the basis on similarity; not contiguity. Lacan: "...the subject cries out through his symptom..."

What has this got to do with Blue Velvet?

The desire between Jeffrey and Sandy is utterly conventional. Their relationship is more like a symptom than true desire. This is simply because their relationship is an off-the-shelf version of high school romance that is just like everyone else's. Lynch's presentation of their conventionality is ironic and exaggerated; their romance is played out in scenes suffocated by the cloying and saturating theme music of "Mysteries of Love" by Julee Cruise. Lynch's satirises their love as an illness (symptom) shared by everyone else (metaphor) in Middle America.  

The relationship between Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) could never be described as conventional! In Lacanian terms, Frank's association of blue velvet and his oxygen mask seems to exemplify the operation of desire. Neither one seems in any sense 'similar' to commonly understood objects of desire. Yet these are objects that have been fixated upon: the metonymy has been arrested as a fetish. Lacan describes fetish as a "'perverse' fixation at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen."

If fetishism was all that Frank had to worry about things wouldn't be so bad for him. There is so much going on here that is deeply unsettling. His version of desire involves sucking oxygen through a mask, stuffing a piece of Blue Velvet into his mouth and trying - quite literally - to enter Dorothy's vagina head first: "Mommy, mommy, mommy, baby wants to fuuuuck...uuughhhhh".

What is happening here? It seems that this is a bizarre but obvious enactment of unresolved Oedipal desire: Frank literally wants to fuse with the mother's body: he wants to erase the distance between the object of desire and himself.

This can be understood as such an unconscious frenzy but that is too easy.

Frank is fully aware of what he's doing. This is conscious, not unconscious action. His desire is a violent, oddly rational, attempt to invert desire. While Lacan points out that desire is truly the free play of metonymic association where the unconscious is allowed to move from one meaning to another, this is a crazy attempt to control the uncontrollable. Frank wants to effect some kind of crazy tautology where he reverts to an imagined state of infantile union with the female body.

This can't happen of course and this is the source of his rage: "Don't you fucking look at me" he roars as he punches Dorothy in the face.

Somehow I don't think that if a Lacanian pointed out to Frank the error of his ways; namely that "The subject is spoken rather than speaking" things would end well.

The relationship between Jeffrey and Dorothy shows the 'bleeding' effect of violence into sexuality. Dorothy was already represented as enjoying the violent attentions of Frank in the 'Baby wants to Fuuuck!" scene. If that was a disturbing encounter the sex between her and Jeffrey is only slightly less so: "Hit me!" she begs him, while he, a simple boy next door, at first refuses and then does as he is asked to do. In Lacanian terms this association (violence with sex) is a symptom because it is exactly what she has already experienced. And yet there is some degree of taming taking place. Is Lynch presenting a 'safe' version of S&M after the insane carry on of the scene between Frank and Dorothy?

Hardly. She ends up naked and demented on the streets and in any case her relationship with Jeffrey never gets off the ground due to the overweening imperative that Jeffrey and Sandy fulfill their 'destiny' as conventional sweethearts.

There are no heroes in these movies.  The Lacanian Imaginary may demand them but it's not going to find them here. This is good news: remember Brecht's ventriloquism of Gallileo: "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero"

* 1: My Reading of Lacan was limited to two sections of the Ecrits: "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" and "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" and illuminated by secondary texts, in particular the chapter on Lacan on Kearney's Modern Movements in European Philosophy.
2: I had intended to include Mullholland Drive in this post but a friend very generously wrote about it for me and this showed me that I didn't need Lacan to understand what was going on. Timing is everything.

My Nightmare

The most terrifying nightmare I’ve ever had: I had the sudden realisation that I was not me; that I had never been me. I felt the person who I was sliding away like a layer of skin that had suddenly turned to liquid.

Whatever I was or had been was a mask or shell; whatever remained was not me but was just some entity or project whose provenance was completely unknown. I woke up wailing in despair.

What was that all about? Is it so important for me to be who I appear to be? Why should I scream like a terrified infant just because this fiction unravels?

I suppose the answer is: well, because it was my fiction! People are very attached to who they are.

Recently I have been reading Jacques Lacan. According to him, a child first forms a view of herself as a whole person when she sees herself reflected in a mirror. This is what he calls the 'Mirror Stage' of development. The reflected image is an 'ideal ego' and it is desired and projected (in the senses of imagined and worked towards) because of a number of 'outside' influences.

First, the child is in flight from the dual traumas of weaning and the Oedipal re-ordering of who is permitted to desire whom  - both of  these are primal experiences of death, or not being.

Second, fear drives the child to compensate for this perception of lack, or not being whole or integrated, and the reflected image of herself - the 'ideal ego' or 'specular' ego -  is the solution.

However, this ideal self is, like everything else, compromised from the very start. According to Lacan, the child desires to be who the mother desires her to be, and in addition,  the child learns to desire through her entry into the already alien structures of language.

Loss of integrity through weaning. Learning about one's inadequacy through Oedipal fear. Necessary alienation through choosing an imagined ideal self that is in truth the mother's imagined ideal for the child. Permanent separation from oneself through reliance on language for any projection of the self by the self.

Through life, adults continually chase/are chased by this chimera of a fully integrated, whole, ideal ego. According to Lacan's formulation this is the work of the "Imaginary" function of the unconscious.

The Imaginary seeks to hide the unavoidable fact that the self is, was, and always will be divided and multiple, and not, as it drives us to imagine ourselves to be, perfected, whole, complete.

For Lacan, the truth for us is that "Je est un autre" - "The I is an other".

How successful is the Imaginary Ego in maintaining its fictions?

For a Lacanaian, at any rate, there is nothing successful about an Imaginary ego's sweet little lies. The key truth revealed by psychoanalysis about human beings for Lacan is that we are not autonomous individuals; rather we are 'heteronomous dividua' - multiple and divided selves:

"The radical heteronomy...gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest" (Ecrits  1966)

If dishonesty is the defining characteristic of normality it may be a small price to pay. Consider the punishments ready and waiting for 'abnormality'. The Imaginary Ego is a kind of personal incarceration that masquerades as the ultimate reward. What if, in chasing, dog - like,  the balls and sticks thrown by our Imaginary unconscious we are doing nothing more than maintaining this tyranny?

In striving for perfection we do exactly what servile, biddable proles are supposed to do. And if, every now and then we are tormented by the truth of our own non-being all the better. It's obviously a good thing for some to have large masses of people beaten down and internally tormented by their own individual perceptions of inadequacy.

What maintains this dishonesty? Why do people so enthusiastically think and feel, live and breathe and plan in ways that serve the interests of ideals of perfect, fully realised selves that betray the most fundamental truth us?

Well, it's nice to be a part of something, isn't it? It's nice and cosy to belong, to hide in the herd, to live lives of what Nietzsche called "bovine mediocrity and green meadow gregariousness". That's normality.

Day to day passes and this 'sickness unto death' goes on and on.

What does it matter if, as Thoreau reminds us: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”?

Is it really all that bad if we live by refusing life, if we continue breathing and walking, to all appearances fully alive, but in truth we have already arrived at the check in gate for death, years early, our holiday over?

Social Media - the end of Plato's footnotes?

 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, The Republic by Plato

A N Whitehead famously said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I have just finished reading (for the second time in my life) one of the more recent footnotes: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. For a long time I would have said that all bullshit was a series of footnotes to Baudrillard but I think this book has aged well. It has turned out to be something of an oracle for what has happened in the 'real' world in the last few years. More about the scare quotes around 'real' later.

Proving Whitehead's maxim, I suppose Simulacra and Simulation  is a very traditional book. It is about what is real, what is, what has meaning. More precisely it addresses the basic ontological question of the primacy of being and/or becoming.

What's more real? Stuff that changes all the time or stuff that stays the same? Is what we see passing before our eyes more real than what is hidden in some higher (or lower, or deeper, or further) place of existence?

The Pre-Socratics all asked these questions. Plato (I went back to the Republic to refresh my memory), Descartes, Hegel, and so on all grappled with them.

Baudrillard answers this question as follows: there are only appearances of what is real - there is no real beyond these appearances. He refers to these appearances as 'simulacra', and claims that there are only ever simulacra - his key concept is the 'precesssion of simulacra'.

In short, there is no reality. There is the 'hyperreal' - appearances, appearances and then appearances, for ever and ever.

This couldn't be further from Plato. For Plato the things that we could see with our senses were not real because they were not permanent:true reality was the form of the good, which was acccessible not by senses but by the intellect. The properly trained intellect was that which understood the difference between what is real and what is not real:

"Its orientation has to be accompanied by turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright, which we're saying is goodness" (Republic 518d)

Baudrillard doesn't hold out much hope that a properly trained mind - to use Plato's term, a mind trained in the skill of 'dialectic' can reach any other reality than just another simulation of reality - such is the radical extent of his ontology.

I might was well say now that I think the problem with Baudrillard was that he probably watched too much TV, too many movies and he was more than a little bit entranced by the coming age of the communications technologies that have virtualised reality in the decades since he first published this book in 1981.

He sees no minds trained in dialectic. He seems to see only a 'precession' of morons. And in fairness, when I look at the effects of social media it is hard to argue against the accuracy of his description of how think and feel, communicate and understand.

Baudrillard was keenly aware of the centrality of metaphor in the history of western thought. What is Plato's Republic when you strip away the metaphysical hope if not the most important metaphorical text in the history of philosophy?

The allegory of the cave would be on a Baudrillardian reading, one big simulacrum - pointing not to the form of the good but rather to just another metaphor. If there is nothing beyond the metaphor then Plato has backed the wrong horse. Instead of finding being, he's just found becoming!

Baudrillard points to the Old Testament as another example of simulacra that doth protest too much. He explains the anger of biblical iconoclasts as a function of their knowledge of the very fact that there is no divinity signing the cheques. The graven images so offend them because their very presence points to the absence of any guarantee of the truth of these images – their potency lies in their impotence – they do not signify God, they signify only other signifiers.

The precession of simulacra is as close as Baudrillard gets to a summation of what is in truth out there (and in here). This formulation is not particularly unique. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit draws the same conclusions about the primacy of phenomena but there are two important differences.

Firstly, like Plato, Hegel stresses the importance of dialectic. Intelligence, development, change, building on premises, logic and interrogation of logic are essential if human beings are to understand and develop anything beyond the most basic levels.

If Baudrillard sees a precession of morons Hegel argues with conviction for the struggle for intellectual autonomy

Secondly, Hegel's becoming is teleological. Geist's coming to full self consciousness of  itself is the destination of Hegel's thought.

It may be tempting to ridicule the audacity of philosophical visions such as Plato's and Hegel's but at least they are trying to scale mountains. Baudrillard's is going nowhere.

In his final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard proclaims his nihilism. However, his philosophical scepticism seems to me to be a little bit off-the-shelf. He is drawing on the insights of structural linguistics that the vertical and horizontal planes of meaning are not absolute: there is no absolute mimetic connection between signs and things; neither is there anything particularly stable about the boundaries between signs themselves.

He uses the semiological assumption that meaning is never fixed or absolute is to make the ontological claim that reality is not reality. There is no ‘real’; only a ‘hyperreal’. There is no route through simulation to the real.

Reading Baudrillard challenges me to understand where this semiotic instability passes from theory into practice. Consider this: In actual fact language functions just as the structuralists say that it doesn’t. The point is that most of the time meaning does exist: words mean things and words mean what they mean and not what other words mean. How could it be otherwise? Try buying something in a shop or planning to meet a friend and you’ll see; stuff does actually have meaning.

What is true for meaning is true a fortiori about reality. I don't think I need to do much more than repeat Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's challenge to his certainty there is a reality beyond our ideas (and simulacra) of it:

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

That’s all fine in practice, but what about the theory?

Baudrillard's theory is most convincing when he talks about the destruction of meaning and ‘destructuration of the social’ through the proliferation of information. In particular, his account of how advertising had become the key simulation in media – saturated societies is compelling.

His account of how advertising literally erases the provisional and provisionally effective planes of meaning and manages to eviscerate meaning and meaningful social relations reads like a prophecy of how social media has come to dominate, moronise, homogenise and deracinate people’s minds and bodies:

"Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes."

The end of meaning occurs in advertising because of how the medium collapses the differences between its various types of content. Instead of differences between things there is a levelling off that tends to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. Anything and everything can be used in advertising - almost nothing is sacred, almost anything can be used.

As advertising destroys meaning horizontally it causes the collapse of the signifying distance between the sign and thing being signified. Advertising tells us that we can have the real, that it is ours. It does the very same thing as religious fundamentalism. It suppresses the meaning of images because meaning requires that it be made, that it be negotiable.

I think Baudrillard is accurate in his description of the hyperreality of life lived through the lenses of advertising and commercial media generally. He is ontologically spot on.

I think he is wrong in considering the arrival of the  hyperreal as the moment where meaning dies. The opposite I think is true.

There is a paradox in any meaningful understanding of meaning, namely that the moment meaning becomes fixed is the moment that it dies. One to one correspondence of the sign and the thing signified is tautology and tautology says nothing - it is meaningless. In both directions. It erases the difference between signs themselves and the signs and the things they signify.

To my understanding meaning is what is always being made, meaning is what is being unmade, meaning needs the instability that Baudrillard names the precession of simulacra'!

Of course, the best advertising knows this. It hides its meaninglessness by parading the very properties of the most meaningful of texts! 'Good' advertising is thought provoking, mysterious, meaningful. Good advertising engages its readers, names them, allows them to name themselves, gives them a satisfying and meaningful space to feel, to act, to think and to be. Advertising tries to hide its implosion of meaning by aiming to envelop its consumers in meaningful experiences.

Social media is the elaboration of good advertising into a total social experience. So as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Google increase their domination of social life, their intrusion into the lived experience of private and public spaces to the point where they are coming to constitute those experiences they perform and ontological gestalt shift - nothing can ever be the same again.

Social media can have the effect of a world sufficient unto itself - it is has a closed ontology that recalls the middle ages in how it answers every question and places everyone and everything in its place - even, and especially if that place is only pending but, importantly within the space soon to illuminated within the horizon of technological progress.

When Baudrillard takes about the death of meaning, however, I think he is simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic.

He is too optimistic because what happens with the proliferation of advertising is not so much the death of meaning - rather it is the death of intelligence:

It is no longer necessary to understand - it is sufficient to 'like'. Social media does not demand thought and planning - fifteen word tweets are enough. Not only are images reproducible and therefore without their Benjaminian 'aura', they are instantly destroyed as soon as they're created.

Social media makes people very stupid.

He is too pessimistic because I think that he has looked too long into the abyss of commerical mass media and the hyperreal idiot monster has started to look back at him.

The answer is in Hegel and in Plato. Where else could it be? Plato stresses in the chapter after the allegory of the cave the absolute imperative that the philosopher kings in his Republic exercise their intelligence:

"dialectic is the only field of enquiry which sets out methodically to grasp the reality of any and every thing. All the other areas of expertise, on the other hand, are either concerned with fulfilling people's beliefs and  desires or are directed towards generation and manufacture or looking after things while they're being generated and manufactured" (Republic 533b)

The 'other areas of expertise' described by Plato sound like the totally alienated modes of thinking and feeling that have been swallowed up by and have in turn swallowed up a fatal dose of commercial social media!

Is there a way out of this? A healthy dose of Ludditism in relation to social media is a good start. At the same time it is imperative to treat prophets of doom like Baudrillard with active and imaginative scepticism. This is precisely because his foresight has been so clear. And so narrow. He sees the problem in horrific detail but he misses the solution that lies in the strengths of character and intelligence that invisible to him.

He is in a kind of prison - to paraphrase Hegel, Baudrillard's is the night where all the cows are simulacra.

I am not sure that Baudrillard could argue that there's a way out of this night. The appalling vista of his social ontology is so absolute that it seems hard to find an escape. I am not sure that there is any distance between  considering the precession of simulacra as such and not seeing it as such. His conclusion is ambivalent:

"There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins."

To my understanding he has taken his terms far too seriously. It is as if nothing exists but media. because if there is no outside 'hyperreality' then everything just cancels out and you might as well drop the prefix and just say that there is no outside reality. And this is nothing more than a fancy tautology.

And yet, the concept of 'seduction' seems to leave some hope at the end of a paragraph that explicitly denied it. Baudrillard thought the whole world was being swallowed by advertising and so the only hope he saw (since meaning is imploded in advertising) is seduction.

He was more right than he could possibly have known but he was also, too entranced by the coming age of information saturation to see that human beings are capable of far more than just blind seduction.

Are human beings as programmable and assimilable as they seem to be according to Baudrillard? I don't think so. I think his reports of the death of meaning and intelligence are greatly exaggerated.

If anything he describes a (hyper)reality lays down a challenge: Submit to your fate and live a static drone-like existence in thrall to Facebook and Google or rage with all of your intelligence to create meaningful social, political and psychological spaces in spite of (and because of), against (and with) the tide of simulation.