Dear Reader,
I hope you are having a good day. Lately, I’ve been taking long walks on my terrace. It is both liberating and constricting to be bounded by the skies, to watch life play out in distance and to feel the air pass through like tiny moments in time. I hope you get some time to spend under the skies.
Last week, as I was staring in the distance occupied in thought, I was reminded of a quote by Fernando Pessoa. I knew then, that the first essay that I wanted to share in this newsletter, had to be condensed in the dilemma of that quote.
I hope you enjoy reading the essay.
“To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.”
-Fernando Pessoa
Over the last few months, I could not write, not because I did not have words, but because I was always wondering the finiteness of experience. At what point does one realize that language has reached its sublimity? When I speak to you of a sky, how do I condense it into an absolute precision, or at least attempt to do so? There is an inherent imprecision to language. We reach the same word through different interpretations. Lev Vygotsky1, talks about it in Thought and Language, when he says,
“Identity of referent combined with divergence of meaning is also found in the history of languages. A multitude of facts support this thesis. The synonyms existing in every language are one good example. The Russian language has two words for moon, arrived at by different thought processes that are clearly reflected in their etymologies. One term derives from the Latin word connoting "caprice, inconstancy, fancy." It was obviously meant to stress the changing form that distinguishes the moon from the other celestial bodies. The originator of the second term, which means "measurer," had no doubt been impressed by the fact that time could be measured by lunar phases. Between languages, the same holds true. For instance, in Russian the word for tailor stems from the word for a piece of cloth; in French and in German it means "one who cuts."
From the beginning of the way we communicate with others and ourselves, we give into falsity of experience.
There is always an element of irony that lingers in everything I do. The self awareness that extends to a point of self paralysis would often make me wonder if there is an authentic portrayal of self. A point where I felt I was not performing, to fulfil a certain expectation of the reader (or the reader’s vision) or my own naivety at assuming an identity that was not mine. I was always looking at myself from the outside as both the performer and the performed. I wondered if my solitude in itself was a performance. The natural progression of thought was also one of alienation. The problem with infinite connectivity with the self was that the language of connectivity was self referential. There was a distrust induced against one’s own experiences that led to an experiential angst that had no resolve for the very induction of angst formed the structure of the resolve. The irony magnified in gargantuan forms, when while feeling this angst, I was also aware of its cause, and that generated further anxiety through the questioning of the very existence of the angst by terming it a fabrication. This self sustaining loop that played out in infinite regress would have me staring at blank screens for days, for the very language that contained my experience was imprecise. The want and the hatred of the want were contained in the same structure.
In an essay2, Susan Sontag writes, “The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art3 that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.
It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.”
When I first read this essay, I had the humbling realization of history coursing through my existence. What stood out to me was the conception of art as an experience and as a theory. The idea of experiencing life, while analyzing it was the cause of despair, for like the mimetic theory of Greeks, there was the constant ask of justifying experience. This experience of alienation was the natural progression of history. From the religiosity of expression, to putting it down in its reality, to understanding the limitations of experience and wanting to extend beyond it, our extensions of life can be seen as history repeating itself within our limited lives. The postmodernist4 angst of dismantling the very structures of expression through questioning of the media and the medium, through the identity of the reader and the one who is read, there was the realization that history had culminated into an epoch of irony, where the very realization of irony had been made ironical and performative.
Last month, in a conversation with a friend, she mentioned a similar sentiment. The feeling as if she is a character in her own life. That most sentimentality felt like a manipulation of experience, and all experiences are mediated by a meta commentary on the experience itself. While it did lessen the alienation I had felt, it also made me realize how most life, like art, felt like a performance to so many of us. On an evening, as I sat to think of this almost universal experience, I was reminded of Heidegger’s appeal to return to nature, and to restart philosophy from the scratch, how philosophy, and hence history which was built over it was a series of compounded wrongs. We have lost touch with the very essence of life. I kept wondering about Heidegger’s appeal, and how Plato had decried the arts for they were, at best, a facsimile of reality (which according to Plato was a shadow of the Platonic Forms5). While Plato’s definition of art seems simplistic and narrow, in its mimetic sense, history has been a progression of escaping reality.
Four works that traverse my understanding of the evolution of mediums of art are Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction6 (about books), Susan Sontag’s On Photography7 (about photos), David Foster Wallace’s8 E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction9 (about the TV) and anything Bo Burnham has to say10 about the internet. When I think about this evolution, there is an incessant need to contain reality at will by escaping and imitating it, yet losing the sense of exuberance that life or direct experience offers. In all of these successive mediums, there is also a palpable sense of increasing efficiency to lose yourself completely, a seduction that invites one to create an alternate identity which is at dissonance with the “authentic” reality, for the lack of a better word. While offering a customizable reality, there is a visible lack of free will, of being played by an author, a camera, the television crew and a huge monopoly, in each case. Yet, this search for a micro certainty by giving up the macro uncertainty seems like such a human trait, as we move towards a world where dissonance and irony culminates into an end point, as we develop a virtual reality which is exactly the shadow of the real world. If that does happen, I can imagine Plato sniggering in a corner, saying, “I told you so.”
However, mediums do not entirely dictate art. The debates around content and form have been played throughout history. Art has contained the essence of humanity, and hence interplays with life, if not imitate it. There is a visible disconnect between tying all the various lives into a single self referential language. Amidst all the irony, that reflects back on itself when an attempt to satirize it is made, we are here with our imprecise and unfaithful words. If language and life is a performance, we might as well sit back and appreciate the inherent beauty it has, before we develop a theory on it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter.
Thank you for being a part of the journey.
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psychological development in children. To read more click here.
To understand what postmodernism is, you can listen to this podcast which explains it in quite simple terms, or read this extensive entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is a philosophical theory, concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms", are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.
To read more click here.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly - and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. You can also read Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, which was where I first read the essay.
First published in 1973, On Photography by Susan Sontag is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society
David Foster Wallace and the Dangerous Romance of Male Genius
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-world-still-spins-around-male-genius/559925/
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction by David Foster Wallace, is his critique on television, fiction writing, and how postmodernity plays into the very irony that it mocks. It can be found in the collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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