T&T Clark 2003 AJM Oct 03
4
essays on aspects/themes of life which have been undermined by cultural change. Not an easy read, although he doesn’t use
particularly complex vocabulary – but worth it.
Introduction
Book maybe is a
sort of journal of the 90s. Icon as understood in common parlance – part of the
code of a community, an image that binds people together, provides a common
point of reference. In art - not a reproduction of reality, but the
significance of what it shown against the background
of a source of illumination independent of it. Here – verbal and moral icons
are patterns of reading and understanding human behaviour and relationship that
represent some of the basic constraints on what human beings can reasonably do
and say together. Not universally the same. Eg conventions to
do with death, with sex, kinship, understanding of common history. Book
chooses a limited number of areas in which some kinds of discourse are getting
more and more laboured, inaccessible to our culture: childhood, charity,
remorse; and concludes that what we are losing is language of the soul. ‘Soul’
he understands as ‘a religious style of talking about selfhood’, p8; question
is, can a wholly secular language for the self resist trivialisation and
reduction?
Educational
writings no longer make use of the words ‘childhood’ or ‘play’; they reveal a
profound impatience. Education now seems to be about pressing the child into
adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible. Children used to be carried by
society as passengers, with initiation rituals to mark transition to adulthood;
we no longer have the patience for that. But childhood needs to be a period
where we can make mistakes, try things out, explore projects and identities,
without having to be bound by the consequences. Hence role plays, fantasies,
playground rhymes; stories that sit light to realism/moral tidiness; magical
and mythological and frightening worlds; moral exploration. We don’t want
children not to be children – hence our outrage at child soldiers, prostitutes,
murderers, street children. Bu we ourselves are
turning children away from the traditional grounds of childhood and making them
into consumers: which has the same effect.
Child as consumer
– link between films and the consumer goods marketed with them, designed to
stimulate further consumer desires. Child becomes an economic subject, subject
to advertising, treated as a pseudo-adult, but lacking the adult awareness of
cost and risk, how economic activity commits and limits you. Child also becomes
a sexual subject; advertising suggests this is unproblematic, that sexual
opportunity is, like economic opportunity, riskfree. So the task is to learn what
it is to be desirable; and then what things you need to make you desirable.
Results seen in children’s talent competitions and fashion shows, where sexual
stereotypes are thought cute. We no longer safeguard a space where identities
can be learned and tested in imagination before commitments have to be made.
Child as erotic and economic subject cannot learn to choose. It’s worst in
areas of poverty, where the environment is one in which material poverty sits
beside the pervasive images of consumerism, and there are few ways to gratify
the desires they nurture. It’s least marked in middle
class children’s literature, for it was the middle classes who from the
Industrial Revolution onwards gained the time to protect and prolong the space
which is childhood.
The result is
often a situation in which adults revert to childlike behaviour, uncommitted
and fantasy driven, and children and adults may become rivals, bidding for the
same space; eg single parent leaves child alone and goes on holiday. A society
which is disabled in its ability to make choices will produce childish adults
who in turn do badly at nurturing children, because they are not secure in
their adult freedoms. Choice in our whole society is more varied and more
pressured than ever before, often spilling out into a cycle of violence and
powerlessness where the powerless, childish male adult abuses still more
powerless woman, and she the still more powerless child; need for feminist
analysis of cycles of violence and powerlessness, and work on male self-perception.
Often the assertion of right becomes a less than adult claim to access to an
open market – an assertion of the right to compete.
If children are to
be allowed to be children, we need to ask what prevents adults being adults.
Nouwen on Prodigal Son – it is easy to be the younger son; but do we want to be
the older son, the father?
Our society claims
to maximise choice. But take schools. Parental choice is everything. Sounds
good – but which parents choose the ‘failing’ schools? Choice is competitive;
those who choose remove choice from the others. Everyone competes in a market,
schools and parents alike. And effectively the language of choice sets aside
questions about our corporate responsibility to induct children into a social
environment with common values; and masks the morality of an unseemly scramble
for a share of limited resources. Is competition the best framework for the
moral education on which a society depends? Or is it a system whose methods
already communicate the moral message of conflict and rivalry, which covers up
the truth that choice for one group is preserved at the cost of the freedom of
others? So even in education choice reduceds us from agents to consumers. Or
take not schools but the right to abortion – ‘choice’ turns out to mean the
freedom to protect your own interests at the expense of other makers of choice
(the child, the father).
The language of
selfhood has to be learned as we grow. Children have to be equipped to exercise
power, and this can only happen if they are not simultaneously treated as
subjects who have it already. The reluctance to think about nurture and the
learning of choice is fundamentally a reluctance to think about the role of
time in the formation of identities. We live in a society which suggests that
identities can be purchased and discarded; but people are formed in both
biology and psychology by the passage of time. A world of timeless consuming
egos is a social and philosophical shambles.
Education is
suffering a steady attrition of resources and imagination, is under pressure to
give priority to narrowly functional concerns; it is treated politically as a
consumer good to be marketed to parents or students. The protection of the
imaginative space of childhood needs a background of security, adult
availability and consistency. Instead we offer a shifting environment of
divorce. Conciliation services help; but we need a process
which will challenge the sovreignty of individual will, so that a potentially
endless spiral of competitive struggle is checked and negotiation becomes
possible.
Middle Ages –
universe is a system of cross-references, resemblances and continuities.
Charity meant Christian love, that which binds people together in context of
relationship with God. Sense of integration, belonging more widely than own
natural loyalties based on kinship or affliations of interest; the worshipping
community. It was secured by public festivals, esp
We no longer do
this. We can’t play in this way. When we play, play is loaded with the hopes
and terrors of non-play. Our play (sport) is competitive, it’s what
professional others do. They win not just in terms of the game, but in terms of
the rewards that publicity confers, the ‘goods’ that go with celebrity.
Or take monarchy.
Monarchy used to be part of the social game, a ceremonial representation of
social cohesion; monarch as icon. Then they became, here since Victorian age,
an icon of ordinary secular and familial life instead – they are now meant to
be publicly what everyone else is privately; hence the interest in the Royal family. But they turn out to be just
that, depression divorce and all. When Diana died there was a public call for
the return to the ceremonial role; Queen required to be
in
Where does charity
linger in our society? Dance culture, perhaps – the rave. The offer is to
become no one in particular, attractive to those who’ve not managed to shape
much of an identity in other ways, by sexual bonding and entry into a
lifetime’s job. It offers a mix of tribalism and a quest for anonymity. With it
goes an under-25s politics of charity – centred around
one-off issues such as veal calves and bypasses. But it often ends up as a
politics of extended childhood, with no real negotiations. A politics based on
charity, in sense of egalitarian transcendence, non-competitive communion, etc,
fails to be a politics at all, because it fails to deal with the conflicts of
interest and desire, the unavoidability of loss, which the non-charitable world
habitually deals with. But as the institutions and rituals of charity decay, we
lose the controls on rivalry and give way to the picture of social life as
primarily conflictual. More and more people are excluded from decisions and are
left with no stake in their social environment.
Language is a part
of charity. Le Guin distinguishes between ‘father tongue’ – the lang of getting things done, the lang of analysis – and
‘mother tongue’ – the lang of conversation, of network, exchange. Philosophy of
govt in the 80s was based on a minimalist picture of the state as a mechanism
for getting things done; and a strong commitment to family values, the
expression of kinship bonds – with not much in between. State is detached from
local concerns; and a whole structure of rights and claims is spawned as people
try to protect their interests in the hinterland between the state and the
kinship group.
One thing that
should live in the hinterland is the arts. We should be aware that the
processes of art as well as its content enlarge the imagination of social
belonging by insisting on patterns of relation drastically different from those
that prevail in a context where goods are competed for. Public subsidy of the
arts recognises this.
Another is
education. A good educational institution would be one in which conversation
flourished, where activities were fostered that drew students away from
competition as the norm. Competition is not
the sole guarantor of excellence; cp drama. Competitiveness erodes other
kinds or learning that occur through particular sorts of process. We should
foster collaborative creation. No use talking about communicating ‘values’ if
the whole style and pace of an institution allow no room for understanding the
experiences of learning in their diversity; or if the insitutition moves more
and more towards an understanding of learning as training, or if it sees its
job as the anxious passing on of information and skills at the expense of
reflection.
Where charity is
eroded, so is the freedom to question the self and challenge the mythology of
desire. Conversational models of social existence are withered or marginalised;
and social experience in the acquisitive-competitive mode corrupts our
awareness of our selves.
We no longer say
sorry, specially in politics; we get a combination of
unaccountable behaviour and individual scandals, all pounced on by the press.
Who do politicians answer to? To the imaginary public created by professional
image-makers, the iconographers of the media culture. Failure is failure to
sustain a visible style, a particular kind of presence, and reversals of policy
are to do with assessments of gains and losses in these elusive currencies of
style or presence. Individual scandal gets measured here, not in any moral
court.
Inhibiting factors
in expressing remorse : the language of right and
claim. Responsibility means liability, and the victim is then a competitor instead
of a partner in the work of restoring thinking. Tribunals where we discuss
right and claim can’t restore thinking –
What works against
all this? Comedy, satire. News presentations - our
media takes for granted that information means a succession of unrelated
complex images; the flickering image of modern media communication represents a
powerful bid to define what counts as knowledge. It leaves little room for
irony, imagination, sense of a slow unfolding of the consequences of acts and
choices. And so we come back to time. We are not timeless deciding mechanisms
with an abstract self that as no life in the lives of others. The self can be
formed only in time and relational space, in the uncertainties of language and
negotiation – this kind of self is what was once called the soul.
The postmodern
self thinks it can invent itself. It can’t: what I want now and how I feel now
and what I am capable of inventing are all grounded in language and culture.
What I feel is structured by how I have learned to talk; what I want is what I
picture to myself in the images I have learned to form. The chosen self is no
less formed by language and culture than the traditional model of a continuous
and reflective self.
Every telling of
the self is a retelling, and the act of telling changes what can be told next
time, just because it is an act. The self lives and moves only in acts of
telling, in the time taken to set out and articulate a memory, the time that is
a kind of representation o fthe imte my mateiral and metnal life has taken, the
time that has brought me here. We don’t notice it, but we are making a self by
constructing a story that is always being retold. What makes us notice it? Two
things: frustration and love.
Frustration means not conflict, but not having. I
desire peace, I desire to be at home with myself; but the edge and energy of the
desire comes from the knowledge that I am in fact dispersed in a multiplicity
of unstable feelings and changing relationships. The self I know is not at one
with itself, but always moving and changing, and we recognise it whenever there
is a gap between desire and reality. I can only be where I am by recognising
that there is no fixed place where I am innocently and timelessly alone and
incorrupt; and the recognition of how I negotiate is what gives me the material
for a telling of my self. The self is itself only in the act of
self-questioning; we develop not by escaping or resolving conflicts but by
deepening them.
It follows that
one of the most powerful enemies of the self will always be anything that
encourages us to imagine an environment without friction [which is what our
culture spends all its time doing; instant gratification and quick fixes is
what we are all about]. Steiner – no one has ever learned or achieved anything
worth having without being stretched beyond themselves,
till their bones crack. We find enemies of the self in styles and fictions that
erode difficulty.
Self? Soul? Subject? Needleman – Christian doctrine is meaningless in a
context where we have no idea of what sense of self such teaching is addressed
to. The soul is what happens when we attend to the moment of self-questioning
by holding on to the difficulty we are facing. Not dissimilar from
psychoanalytic thinking which regards the analytical relationship as a place
for planned frustration – patient expresses the needs, but analyst won’t meet
them. The self is what comes to birth in the process of experiencing frustrated
desire. My wholeness is a matter of recongising the error in the picture of a
buried self whose needs are met once they’ve been brought to light; instead, I
come to see that I cannot fail to be involved in incompletion – that no thing
completes me. My health is in the recognition that I exist in time (change) and
language (exchange). Only works if the analyst resists the pressure to become
necessary to the patient.
It follows that
the world is such that no thing will give the self a rounded and finished
identity; and that the self is dependent on the existence of the Other.
Love is not just the experience of desiring or
being desired, or the obsessional preoccupation with another, but the moment of
acknowledged conviction, shared by 2 people, that each is accepted, given time
and room, treated not as an object of desire alone but as a focus for attention
and fascination. In love, what prevents fantasies of wholeness and
gratification is the need to go on discovering the other as well as to have the
other as a listening presence for my own self-discovery. AS Byatt – ‘a kind of
storytelling that makes you coherent is part of falling in love’. A sort of
naïve pouring out of feeling and memory goes with an equally naïve absorption
in the other’s difference and need. Love offers the promise that I have a
solidity and complexity that demands time to be taken in exploring it, a
promise of being shown to myself in ways I couldn’t
have realised for myself. In simple terms, I am interesting. But how and why
can be discovered only by listening, somewhere in between egotism and
self-denial. It is an unstable state: I may mistrust the other’s capacity to go
on being interested when faced with my mediocrity, and cut back or edit what I
say (egotism end); I may lose the ability to see myself as solid, and get my
self-worth mixed up with the other, allowing myself to be invaded or exploited
(self-denial end). It can produce strong anxiety made up of both longing and
fear. But when love manages to escape obsession, terror and passionate hunger
as its dominant modes, it is because it is grounded in the knowledge that I can
be the cause of joy to another in virtue of something more than the capacity to
meet their needs. It has a gratuitousness about it.
If you want
frustration to be removed and love to satisfy – ie if what you want is
possession/gratification - then you lose what he now wants to call the soul.
This is because it is only in relation
that the soul can exist; it isn’t an immateiral and individual substance, as in
early modern philosophy, but a whole way of speaking, presenting and uttering
the self which supposes relation as
the ground that gives the self room to exist. Neither therapy nor love can be
reduced to a transaction between two desiring egos; there is always something
that is gift - and for a Christian the source of the gift is God. The models we
have inherited do not allow us to think through what it might be to be alive
and concrete only ‘in’ another, as we become aware of when we meet frustration
and when we fall in love. Our experience of being in language and in time
invites us to think through what it might be to be alive and concrete only in
another; but we don’t do it. Postmodernity argues for the self as a ‘site’ on
which speech, power, desire play themselves out. The
result is often addiction; and a loss of the codes which make it possible to
relate securely to others – codes of hospitality, courtesy, sexuality. But
these codes were not arbitrary; they were part of a mesh of ways of seeing the
self in relation to others. Violence and abuse is often the result of the loss.
Other trends: Why the cult of the body/sexual experience? Why the desire to
make animals seem human? Why the subject in search of an audience, prepared to
be self-obsessive on a chat show? Why the endless search for therapy (not a
problem that it’s available, only a problem that we don’t know what it’s for)? Because we have lost our relationship with the other, and we don’t
know what we’re looking for.
Lost souls – that
is what the lost icons point to. The skills have been lost of being present for
and in another, and what remains is mistrust and violence. Souls occur when
trust of a certain kind occurs, the trust implied in the invitation of the
perpetually absent Other. If it makes sense to imagine
the absent Other as analogous to the giver of a gift,
then it makes sense to give a religious construction. Contrast here between the
Buddhist and Christian answers. The lost icons of the book have been clusters
of convention and imagination, images of possible lives or modes of life,
possible positions to occupy in a world that is inexorably one of time and
loss. But the discussion has hinted more and more at a single focal area of
lost imagination: the lost soul. And this loss, he suggests, is linked with the
loss of what is encoded in the actual icons of Christian tradition and usage –
the Other who does not compete, with whom I can’t bargan, the Other beyond
violence, the regard that will not be evaded or deflected, yet has and seeks no
advantage. What has been culturally lost : the sense of being educated into
adult choice, the possibility of social miracle, the possibility of letting go of
a possessed and defended image of the moral self – all this will remain lost
without a recovered confidence in the therapeutic Other.