The Serpent's Wisdom

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what I've been naively calling iconic imagination. By this I mean the ways in which a story or narrative is broken up into bits which are conceptually iconic -- by which I mean they are immediately recognizable, are guaranteed to provoke a specific emotional response, and are meaningful. (My understanding of meaning is probably a bit controversial. There are other kinds of meaning, which I think are more shallow as they relate to the mechanics of language, such as the truth value and reference. I am much more concerned with the intent or reason behind an utterance.)

In the past I would have perhaps called them archetypes, but I think archetypes are special-case instances of iconic imagination. Archetypes are notable multi-faceted icons.

For a thorough education on what I mean by iconic imagination, spend a few hours on the TV Tropes site. Here you can see that a trope, which is an example of what I'm calling an icon, is a pattern that crops up in many different kinds of storytelling. And they vary widely in scope, from major character types to silly throwaway moments.

There's a lot of directions this has been taking me. For example, genre fiction vs. literary fiction. Genre fiction employs a lot of iconic imagination and so it's much easier to read (and to write). There's a sense among critics and academics that genre fiction is "lazy" because of this. Another way of phrasing this question is to ask whether or not the degree to which a work is iconic affects how artistic the work is.

Here I take art to be aesthetic reflection, or in other words a statement of some sort about harmonic proportion or beauty or the lack thereof. So I'll say naively that art does not come from iconic imagination.

Iconic works are "accessible" or "melodramatic." They appeal to our sense of play and fun. Art, on the other hand, moves in the other direction; it is contemplated solemnly or is considered "serious." It is not enjoyed, it is "appreciated."

I came to this by thinking about games, and game design, and child's play, and the question of what makes a game fun. Roger Ebert stepped into the fray not long ago when he wrote that video games will never be art. Insofar as games are necessarily iconic (in reaching for possible exceptions I came up with Nomic) I get what he's saying, though I'm not entirely convinced I agree. The difficulty may be that the human response to something iconic may preclude serious aesthetic reflection on it. So an iconic work which also has what would otherwise be recognized as artistic values is not typically appreciated artistically.

ETA: changing the "vs." in the title to "and," because I think the end result of all this is that iconic and artistic imagination are not necessarily opposites, though we act as if they are.

ETA 2: I tagged this "culture industry" because I do think the culture industry relies on iconic imagination in churning out its products. Products of the culture industry are often criticized as "derivative" which makes me realize that one of the effects of art on culture is the creation of new icons. This is potentially significant.

So, yes, i've seen it mentioned: "recession chic." It's stylish now to talk about how you're doing without some modern luxury that people had gotten used to. Cheaper clothing, cheaper vacations, keeping the car a year or so longer. More and more talking heads on TV telling us how morally satisfying it is when you save instead of consuming quite so conspicuously.

And while yes, Americans have badly needed to buy less crap than they can honestly afford, it feels like the mass media has decided now to sell the recession, just as when we had money and credit they sold us more crap than we could afford. They needed us then to be happy quiet content little consumer bots, and now they need us to be happy quiet content not-making-runs-on-the-bank bots.

It is interesting, though, how easy it is for the spell of marketing to unravel. It's like people are waking up to the realization, "Oh, hey, i don't need to have a new 4-in-one PDA/phone/GPS/MP3 player, the items i already have work just fine. Or, you know, i'll even go without, because somehow that's how i existed 10 years ago and i was just fine back then." It's like the echoes in the echo chamber are starting to die down and you can hear your own thoughts for once.

Once upon a time it was practically unpatriotic to suggest that people save a bit more and buy a bit less. Now we're hearing about the virtues of saving more and buying less, from the same people, pretty much. It's not that they can't make up their minds; it's that they care less about meaning than about what we need to hear to stay in line.

So, along comes "recession chic;" marketers selling us what we already have, which is a sudden decrease of abundance. It's to float us along until they get the echo chamber started again. We're roughing it! It's fun! It's an adventure! And doesn't it feel good to put money into savings instead of buying a piece of worthless crap? But soon the adventure will be over and we can go back to buying tons of useless crap on our credit cards again.

But if this goes on long enough, maybe the edifice will start to crack a bit. What do i mean? I mean this strange world order in which somehow many of us have jobs that do not relate even remotely to the core functions of survival: growing food, distributing food, making clothing, gathering resources, making tools, making shelters, maintaining shelters, curing illness, child care, teaching. Wait, what is all this other stuff we're doing? Well, some of it makes sense: research, development, energy, waste management; a lot of it doesn't.

If it goes on long enough, maybe more people won't be so eager to fall for low "introductory rates" on credit cards next time around. Maybe they won't so easily succumb to the allure of new gadgets.

Now is the perfect time to get the word out about how poisonous the flowers in this phony paradise really are. To make people aware, for example, that the sudden spike in demand for tantalum, which is used to make numerous electronic devices like the Playstation 2, incited a war in the Congo. People were dying and children were being enslaved in mines half a world away so that we can have a game machine, and most of us never even knew about it.

The goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

A while back, someone on my friend's list linked to an essay about art as misappropriation. I don't think it was linked approvingly, but the concept has stuck in the back of my mind, something to digest.

Then not long ago i read about the iconic image of Che Guevara as now appears on tee-shirts and numerous other commercial products. I don't know as much as i should about Che, but i think i have already well expounded on my views that anyone who uses violence is no revolutionary at all but is a part of the system. Anyway, this bit stood out in my mind, a quote from Trisha Ziff, who has organized an exhibition on the Che icon.

"There is a theory that an image can only exist for a certain amount of time before capitalism appropriates it. But capitalism only wants to appropriate images if they retain some sense of danger."

Hmm, i have to back up a little. I call my views "meta-neo-Marxian." "Neo" because we have progressed quite a bit in the last 150 years, in understanding the sociology of oppression and the intricacies of economics, and "meta" because i am not a subscriber to a philosophy, but merely a critic whose views are inspired by the trajectory which Marx played a role in laying out.

I view our situation as less a matter of "capitalism vs. socialism" and more a matter of me-centered world-parsing vs. us-centered world-parsing. I take this view because (a) the same problems preceded capitalism and have also tended to plague socialist societies and (b) i believe a truly just and merciful society could function compassionately with almost any economic or political arrangement.

So let me re-write that quote into a version that more closely matches my current views:

"There is a theory that a subversive image can only exist for a certain amount of time before the power paradigm strips it of meaning and makes it a commodity."

For the political-socialist, the image of Che is a commodity in that it is a valuable emotional push-button; and for the political-capitalist, the image of Che is a commodity because it sells tee-shirts. Neither point of view is really interested in exploring the meaning of Che's life, words, and actions.

Now, for the principle i promised in the title of this post. To wit:

Images and text will lose their meaning over time, in part because meaning is anathema to the power paradigm.

The surest way to strip an image of meaning is to give it a dollar value or to use it as an emblem of demagoguery. But the principle works in other ways. Part of this is because each generation tends to create its own kinds of meaning, and so young people do not react in the same way to a creative work as earlier generations of people did.

I thought about this while reading recently about a Monet painting which was vandalized. Frankly, i found i could care less; some old painting who's time has come and gone was damaged. But i realize that the painting meant something to its creator; it meant something to the creator's contemporaries; and it means various things to various people today. Do those meanings resemble one another?

Who could do such a thing as vandalize a Monet? Someone to whom the work of art had little or no meaning. (Or, alternately, someone to whom the act of destruction meant more than the painting itself -- but... well, i have to reign in the scope of this somehow.)

But what is the meaning of a work of art? What is meaning? Without waxing too philosophical - i want to intentionally leave this a little fuzzy - i think of meaning as the reaction one has when contemplating something. But, additionally, the genuine meaning of a creative work is primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator. I emphasized that because there are theories of criticism which argue the opposite - that meaning is supplied by the observer of a creative work. Such theories can, in my opinion, be demonstrated to be apologetics for the power paradigm.

One way to reduce the meaning of an object is to directly misappropriate it - to use the phrase or image to advance a different agenda and then to use your superior numbers or budget to simply drown out all incidence of the original usage. A radical movement of any import can expect to see this happen to their language, and as a result the dissenters of each generation are pretty much on their own. Another way to reduce the meaning of an object is to surround it with approved, dissent-sanitized replicas: the culture industry.

However, it is not just subversive meaning which is distrusted by the power paradigm - ultimately, it is all meaning that is unreliable. Meaning is capricious, meaning is unquantifiable, meaning is unmarketable and unprofitable. Even meaning which has nothing to do with politics can inspire someone to question the status quo. This includes faith. "Spirituality," as i mean it when i use it in my journal, is a process of misappropriation by which the words used by people of faith and conscience to describe their experience is sanitized of any politically radical content in ways that turn it into icon-worship. In other words, "spirituality" (as defined by me) is the attempt to destroy meaning and faith and replace it with a religion industry.

I guess it's kind of silly that i get frustrated with young goths because they don't respect their elders.  We were wearing black lipstick and slamdancing to Bauhaus when they were still watching Sesame Street and now they sport around in $300 vinyl boots and $200 corsets snubbing us and laughing at us.  But then, it is a youthful form of rebellion, right?  Well, except for the fashion industry and professional modelling and high-profile porn outlets, i guess.

They stole my freakiness from me.  You know why ripped fishnets became a staple of goth fashion?  Because in the old days (before "goth" was even goth) we didn't have the money to replace them when they ripped.  Or, we lived in the Bible Belt where you could only buy fishnets in October.  Once they ripped, that was that until next Halloween.  Or both.

A lot of the older goths i know are queer and i half-suspect that the mainstreaming of goth was, to some degree, also the misappropriation by the dominant culture of yet another form of cultural dissent from moneyless queers.  Think i'm off my rocker?  Look at what the word "punk" meant before 1976.  Look at where "voguing" came from before Madonna made millions off of it.  Look it up.

(Ha, i almost talk as if i was penniless myself.  I was never destitute.)

I'm worried for queer youth and young people of color, and particularly young queer people of color, but i know they'll be able to create their own new forms of cultural dissent.  They're smarter than you think.  It won't look like goth and it won't look like punk and it will be promptly put down by the self-appointed guardians of cultural good-taste, but that's okay because it's not intended for them anyway.  Then when they're my age they'll vary between frustration that wealthy straight kids stole their clothing out from under them and large record companies snatched up their most prominent artists, and their memories, and the thought that, okay now, it's time to come up with something else.