Focus points
July 13th 2007 01:54
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Ask someone why they think Nessie is interesting, and, assuming they do, it's normally only as a second thought that you're going to get a scientific value / practical use response.
It's almost as if practical, in this case, is post hoc justification -- like the way hypnotized subjects will give rational explanations for absurd behaviour.
As if there's no real stakes.
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Agnes Heller, in an interview with Csaba Polony (24 March 1997), gets asked about the issues that philosophy ought to address. And she responds, in part, by making comments on the sociology of philosophical communities:
| Now what has happened, due to the whole process of internationalization, is a criss-crossing across borders. There are no longer isolated national philosophies and there are no more schools. But there are books that you select as the "books of the year." This is not done consciously or unconsciously. In all the hundreds and thousands of meetings and conferences held each year, the participants know at the given moment which are the books they need to know and need to discuss. After the 60's there was a "Marx period," everyone discussed Marx. I'm only speaking about the leftists now. Then everyone discussed Max Weber, then everyone discussed Habermas, then everyone discussed Foucault, then everyone discussed Derrida, then everyone discussed Hannah Arendt. Now you can say that this is just fashion but it is a fashion that is not simply fashion, because in order to say something we need to talk about the same thing. You cannot discuss a concert with a friend if you didn't attend the same concert; you cannot discuss a book if you and your friend read different books. So the problem has become how to organize people so that they can get together and at least read the same books in order to be able to have a discussion about the same things. And fashion basically produces this, fashion selects the few books that become the center of discussion. So since there are no more schools because everyone is an independent thinker, there may be at least a few works to which everyone can turn in order to have a discussion, in order to be able to have a common language. |
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Agnes Heller (1929-)
Now, from my limited experience of philosophy conferences, Heller is correct. There really are only a handful of books and authors that people are talking about (although one factor is that conferences are almost always on particular themes or questions).
So, two speculative morals I want to draw.
The first is that functioning linguistic communities require a conversational bedrock. Perhaps every group, from the dawn of language, has had some text (or a small number of overlapping texts) that the community knew and could quote and could refer to -- whether oral (parables and sayings), or written (the Bible, Confucius, Goethe).
I wouldn't want to generalize to the extremes of what's possible or imaginable, but the claim might at least be historically true. For the Greeks there was Homer, and for us there's the Simpsons.
The second is the tendency, within human societies, for power and energy, when left unregulated, to concentrate, as if the system needs to express itself in focal points. There are practical reasons why market forces band together behind their JK Rowlingses, or why an American political party might only put up a single candidate for presidency.
Or, for more general examples, think of capitalism and aristocracies of wealth, and think of the way that Robert Nozick justified governments on the basis that, from a state of nature, humans will unavoidably form larger and larger associations.
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What determines the text? What determines the focus?
There's nothing particularly special about Paris Hilton and Big Brother. There's nothing that makes the Mona Lisa so much better than other Da Vinci paintings. And Shakespeare and Michelangelo weren't necessarily so much more talented than their contemporaries.
Out of all the events that occur each day, there needn't be a logic as to why some get media airtime, and others get buried, why some snowball into the big news stories, and why others are left to rot.
-- romantic glow in "the last dinosaur" (and some scientists suggest, light-heartedly, that, if Nessie exists, she needn't be a group of creatures, but could be freshly thawed and swimming solo);
-- interest in narrative and narrative closure;
-- presentation of Nessie as a challenge, a puzzle to be solved, with honour and glory to the winner: cryptozoologists concentrate on the animals least likely to remain undetected;
-- symbolic meanings attached to Nessie; and
-- sheer imaginative grip.
It's even possible (if unlikely) that somewhere, in a memory of a genetic memory, there's a plesiosaur, and that we have a reaction to purported images of its head.
But if you take a step back, and try to look from an outsider's perspective, and see that some people will die for soccer in the UK, and wonder what it is in the US, then, at this level of generality, it might seem that what interests a culture is pretty arbitrary.
And if this is how it appears, then the only pseudo-explanation you're left with, unsatisfying as it may be, is that some subject matter are simply "valorized", are held up as interesting, taught to be interesting, and that there's otherwise no common denominator between cultural focal points.
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Of the recent Nessie video, Wikipedia writes:
"On May 26, 2007, Gordon Holmes, a 55-year-old lab technician, captured video of what he said was 'this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water.' ... Holmes's credibilty has been doubted by an article on the Cryptomundo website, which states that he has a history of reporting sightings of cryptozoological creatures, and sells a self-published book and DVD claiming evidence for fairies."
Notes
-- Thursday 14 February 2008: Don't know if I've suggested this idea elsewhere, but, if so, here it is again.
Part of what fascinates me -- about the Loch Ness Monster, or Paris Hilton, or soccer -- is that you're fascinated. The facts then have a usefulness, because of the social context. This is information I can use to entertain, to acquire social standing, to bond with others, to not be excluded from water cooler discussions, etc.
And there is a bandwagon/snowball effect: if I'm fascinated, then other people become fascinated, and you yourself may become more fascinated. There is more now at stake.
Writes Andrea Burns in an article entitled "Our lust for fame, sex, lies and videotape" (Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne), 10/2/08, general news, p 106): "But mostly this is about celebrity and a public fascination that has reached fever pitch in the past few years. Suddenly, we cannot survive without the latest gossip on what bag Lindsay Lohan took to rehab or breathe out until we see those first precious snaps of Joel and Nicole’s baby, Harlow."
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
I never get sick of that classic Nessie footage.
Comment by Damo
I don't mind the odd Harry Potter film but I would not go out of my way to see it.
A giant lizzard on display.
Haven't you ever seen King Kong?
Will it go crazy down town New York or not?
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
Well, you could argue that it's the Mona Lisa's mysterious knowing smile that makes her stand out from the rest of Leonardo's paintings. But I don't believe there is a general pattern to how some things are selected for cultural dominance (this seems like it could be connected to Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, with its pre-selection of noteworthy texts). Different things appeal to different people and things rise to prominence for vastly different reasons.
I know exactly one person who is interested in Paris Hilton, but I know there that there is a huge community of people who are.
Epiphanie