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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
From a recent interview with Tom Stoppard:"The citation mentions Travesties, Stoppard's play based on the fact that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin all lived in Zurich during the First World War; Arcadia, featuring a Cambridge contemporary of Lord Byron; The Invention of Love, which took for its subject the poet AE Housman; The Coast of Utopia, about the roots of political radicalism in 19th-century Russia; and his latest stage hit, Rock'n'Roll, which travels between Prague in the spring of 1968 and the present. "I'm attracted to the past," Stoppard says. "It doesn't necessarily have to be the distant past, and I certainly didn't think about it, but looking back on it, the truth of the matter is that for about 15 years everything I've written has got at least one foot in the past."
What he fears most about this new world is the drive towards homogeneity. "The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority."
Individual freedom was central to Rock'n'Roll, in which Jan, a young Czech V C lecturer at Cambridge University in 1968, returns home as members of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, invade Czechoslovakia. In contrast to Jan's increasing politicisation against the forces of Communism, back in England, his mentor Max Morrow refuses to abandon his communist principles. Stoppard sees Morrow as "a rather moving, strangely sympathetic figure. To me he was an idealist with a strong sense of natural justice and social justice and all these things are admirable." But the attitude of many on the left who persisted in their support of communist ideals irked him. "
Like Stoppard, I do seem to see myself becoming a comparatively young fogey, and can easily understand the allure of the historical to the present day. It doesn't seem especially difficult to understand how writers from Eliot to Woolf and Tolstoy to Pasternak could see the individual in relation to a wider narrative in a way that is considerably more fraught at this time. One of the paradoxes of modern society is that in one instance it is highly individualistic, with a general loss of social cohesion leading to a prevalent state of alienation and anomie. As Robert Putnam put it, social capital is in decline. In another instance, the prevailing political ethos has been a frequently coercive communitarian one, which has been essentially disinterested in the individual and at best dismissive of individual rights. Restrictions of civil liberties that would have been fiercely resisted by previous generations are acquiesced to with barely a murmur now. Governments have gone from treating migrant communities as monolithic blocks of racial categories to regarding them as monolithic blocks of religious categories, with scant regard given to the possibility of individuals having multiple forms of affiliation. On a commercial level, large sections of the population are employed within large corporate organisations that tend to regard consumers as demographic segments rather than individuals. Modern society is in many respects a highly homogeneous one, whereby there may be more brands of shop and television channel than ever before but what they all tend to offer seems at best a case of variations on a theme. As Hal Niedzviecki puts it:"Individuality becomes a goal to be framed by rules and regulations and measured in predetermined plans and models. The paradox of “natural” is the paradox of having to follow a communal and well-travelled path in order to arrive at individuality. States Ulrich Beck: In modern life, the individual is confronted on many levels with the following challenge: You may and you must lead your own independent life, outside the old bonds of family, tribe, religion, origin and class; and you must do this within the new guidelines and rules which the state, the job market, the bureaucracy, lay down.
The Princeton professor of psychology Hadley Cantril noted as early as 1941 that almost every individual was born into a highly organized society. "Almost all the experience which constitutes his life are likely to be prescribed roughly for him by the particular culture within which his life happens to be lived." Cantril softened the blow, and ceded that some small changes to the way society operates were still possible: To be sure, the individual will develop the capacity to select alternate courses of action. He may also set about changing some characteristics of his culture which are by no means to his liking. But still this selection and this desire to alter certain practices are themselves bounded and determined by the original conditions imposed by a certain way of life.
What are the conditions imposed on us, what is the "certain way of life" that constitutes our particular existence in postmodern capitalist society? De Tocqueville’s 1835 travelogue/social study Democracy in America points us in the right direction. The author’s primary observation concerned the way the political and economic system of the United States was creating a new kind of individuality. As he saw it, freedom American-style was forcing everyone into their shell, their social framework reduced to immediate family and friends, their only interest personal success. De Tocqueville wrote of an "innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest." If we depend on anything, it is the largely bureaucratic structure that shapes our increasingly atomized, solitary lives. So it is that the appearance of independence is underscored by a vast world of regulation and restriction. "Labels: England, Individuality
posted by Richard 12:34 pm
