The
Context of the Self
It
is a commonplace of modern linguistic methodology to say that words and
sentences take their meaning from contexts, are pragmatic, relational, that is
to say that the source of their identity is contextual; however it is another
statement completely to suggest that the self, our self, also takes on its hue
from its immediate environment, that its, our, identity, our felt identity,
also, behaves like a protective colouring, like the skin of a identity
chameleon, and changes according to the situation that envelops it. The
suggestion is that our identity too inflects like a verb; that we form our
cases, take our cues, become someone ‘different’, according to who we are with
and where; so choosing self (our feelings and self-image) and words to match.
The ‘who’ including parents, lovers, friends, peers, grand-parents employers,
those younger or older than ourselves, below or above us in the local
hierarchy, children, strangers and those we are unsure of - or even frightened
of… The ‘where’ includes actual space with its shape and significances, and
social space with its attendant role play and verbal nuances; all applies to,
or includes, inflects, the self in
space as such … whence the importance of art and architecture, urban design,
landscaping, gardens. Types of space determine types of consciousness…
A
consciousness which first of all is conscious of, and in, the present, a
consciousness, we might say, which is this
present; always is this present, is
always in this present (too much past and we become melancholic, too much
future and we become anxious – either way unable to cope with the exigencies of
the present situation). So the role of ‘contenting’ this present, the ‘filling’
of this ‘Eternal Present’, so to speak, falls to our past and our present input,
to our present experience allied to, or topping up, our past experience. The
space we find ourselves in… providing the potential content, or type of
content, for the Eternal Present’s ever-open sensorial and synthesizing frame…
and unless we are focused on some task, the quantitatively overwhelming mass of
data that we reconstitute (largely unconsciously) into the ‘world’ we perceive:
the time, our temporal sense, we provide ourselves. So, whilst conscious,
unceasingly synthesizing our present, the one in which we live (whilst we live)
eternally (and from which we generalize our useful but fictional ‘parallel
universe’ of Eternity)… This fixed mechanism gives us our frame with its
portable, automatically ‘updating’ background feed of memory; past memory allied
to future intentions, responding, sometimes reflexively, to the new worlds that
engulf it, that englobe it - so
constituting the ‘self’ that meets the space (which it has ‘made’ in its
nervous system) and by which it is made, in turn – perhaps to be made at home
in it, or not… (the negative reaction itself is a making of the surroundings in
question). A frame with an occupant. A genius
loci. Ourselves, self-personifying, the self-conscious ‘content’ of the
frame…
**The
frame on which we hang our clothes. Changeable; but not with the eager alacrity
which distinguishes the mutability of the self. As when our person adapts
itself to a new environment - but our clothes do not… and we -embarrassed- feel
the disparity acutely; under or over-dressed, now signaling that we are
somebody we were not (just) before…. (our mind, our identity has changed with
the physical or social context we find ourselves in – our clothes do not). The
cut of the clothes; accessories to what image… the cut of subjectivity. For clothes
also are a context for, as well as off, the self; costumes and make-up, a
matter of style; a portable environment (up to and including the mask, but an
extension of make-up, or that so-carefully chosen expression). All are
self-forming or self-supporting, with the stress on the first syllable (and in
both cases if we read as modified predicate rather than topic/comment, then
empty, the head noun, the subject is missing… invisible to the naked eye – no
‘self’). And all, in turn, give a self we have to live up to (as well as being
orientated around, an imaginary self-image as Ur-model of the moment). It would
be hard to gainsay the role of clothes, or our ‘look’, as determinant of
self-making… as what may incite a new self, or ‘appropriate’ self, as a change
of attitude… as ‘attitude’. But all just part of a disguise, hiding behind an
image, behind make-up (masks of course, are also a part of showing, or
becoming, a different self - but literal masks are now seldom worn…). Work
clothes, of course, emphasis the role at the expense of the person, that is
their function, a message to the viewer and to the wearer, both. Role model:
modelling a role, a reminder; the uniform as self… reduced (or bloated) into a
function. Work, place, family, position, clothing and activity… all involve
expectations… all evoke (insist on) a given role according to context (adopting
the is role may involve homo duplex,
a divided self, public and private, but part of us at least has the sense to
comply with the demands of the situation… and this posture is also an internal
one, a mental ‘position’). The self as recognition, as quest for self, is
strongly configured in our interaction with the ground floor strip lining the
city’s streets and squares, and of course their interior equivalent, the mall,
is often reduced just to this function. Rooting our recognition desire in the
shop window, conveniently with our reflection superimposed… The tall middle of
our urban space is the zone of our sexual curiosity (how do others live?), never extinct, always pointing the gaze. Finally,
when we look up; the rim of the skyline with its decorations and peaks; home of
sacred desire and nature’s original meta-frame and symbolic complement –the
heavens. Architecture as environment as shaped by us over the millennia;
symbiosis, of psychology and built environment; of self and material culture…).
Reflexive causality; cumulative. Sequence of reflecting mirrors.
Interior as mirror,
a co-ordinated light and sound show, picture of the world as the place of the
self, in the world, and in the head… a spatial reconstruction in time (the
effect of the present, with the slightest of time lags for neurological
processing) our input, with awareness of such, of our position at the centre of
such, as (the) self…
Frame
reframed. Whereby ritual as a time-space intensity is at once a repetition of
the basic unit of our existence, our experience, and a setting apart… The brute
fact of repetition is identity-confirming, renewing; the second time insists –
we add emotion as the glue. Setting a part; part of a whole, a whole which
includes our preconscious self and our physical corporality (our body) – as
well as our real (or imagined) community of identification. Our sense of
belonging, our sense of a whole. The part, our consciousness alone. A part
apart. A part and its input…
Input providing
space, ordering by the brain providing, past, present (and future) human time…
(human) temporality. Our life in the Eternal Present; us in the ‘now-moment’…
all we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, our ‘picture’ (including of ourselves)
is given… We live the giving. Are its product… Past habit configures how we
respond… and even what we see… (the very ability to see something, separate it
from its environment; recognition as a function of prior experience).
Which
is precisely why we seek out certain types of space, for the quality of time we
can spend in them (for the quality of the time we can spend in them – the
quantity exchanges for quality). For the sense of self that we seek from them,
from being in them. The translation of the filling of the cup of the self from
the font of our content, our environment - our input. But a special input. A translation from space to place. Place
as the ritualisation of space. The place of renewal. A special case of space as
we experience it (reflexive… doubly so, always implying an extra fold in the
warp and woof of the process of personal identity). Its unceasing giving of
itself to us, and our ability to receive this gift… and our unceasing giving back,
our self as what is given back. As what is given. A gift. And our attitude to
this gift… shown in the manner of our return of gift…
(The
Calligraphy of the Other). Writing the self; righting the self; riting the
self: phonetic coincidence apart, these three have no connection. Yet the
fantasy of the transformation of the self by change of environment still
remains, a moral expansion, a utopian hyperbole, product of the false belief
that we are a tabula rasa – an
absorbent white page on which another’s desire may be written in words of wet
black ink. Product of the forgetting that we all have a past, that we all have
sets of habits, of action and response, as of thought and memory, which are us
(which give us) our form in time, the frame o groove, which guides further
input; a change of content, if I may put it this way, is not a change in form,
or better, frame… To leap from the contingency of the self to the miracle of
the self-redeemed (according to whose dream?) is not self-knowledge (knowledge
of limitations and liabilities and range) but wish-fulfillment, religion of the
most febrile kind (the clutching at straws by those who have already drowned…).
Desire writ large: desire de-contexualisd. (The Other Calligraphy).
Moral
persistence is often a case of inner insistence against a changing environment…
The range of the
self… (desire may be infinite… but life is finite – and possibility limited).
*
How
does it work? Our relationship with the places we visit, the spaces we come to inhabit…
(The context of the self). If we first imagine the self as something re-formed…
continually reformed… by its context, by any context… any given context, in the
abstract, in and by any particular situation; then by a special context for a
special purpose, for a particular (type of) self; a context chosen, even
ritualized… So our environment, or context of being, may be read as
(experienced as) functioning as our final determinant – the stage that writes
the script of the play. For even as we ourselves are the final determinant of
meaning, the final context of words and phrases, images and views – all of
which take their (final) meaning, their identity, from their context of
occurrence, their co-occurrence, with ourselves, so we too are meaning (identity)
in context… ‘Final’ because the
last word is ours, the user, reader, receiver… in situ… in terms of interpretation, of understanding, of use… But
we too are made, are constructed according to the influence of this present
context, a product of our present (as well as past) environment; our context,
our environment. So not only is it the word, or sentence -utterance- that gets
its meaning from use and context; as also too, the meaning of things, for us,
from poem to image, from novel to landscape. So too do we… And I do not mean
for or through others’ eyes (this we already know) I mean from out of ourselves
we find that we ourselves, are influenced, moved, shaped, fashioned by our
context: by space and sight and sound, our moment in time taken by our surroundings,
taken by a book or poem, or picture in a gallery, filled by their input,
ourselves now something other than before; and then, with the return of self,
the return of memory, or rather with the return of memory, the insistence of
the past, our past, our ‘selves’ too return, in their new form as present
experience in re-combination with our memories, a past self which I lost
momentarily, but utterly. (And so it is that we choose our environment
carefully, choose our context of being, in order be someone of a certain type…
a certain manner of self…).
Influx… tidal.
…others unknowing that to find us they too must be abandoned, rewritten,
re-inscribed, only then (with the return of their consciousness) to be able to
imagine… to find us all at sea, lost in space, lost in time, not knowing who or
where we are, overwhelmed…
(…and
if the past insists, or is summoned by our new context, or the future
interferes, called up by our anxiety, or its own urgency, perhaps prompted by something
in our present situation, then, ’I lost myself for a second’ becomes, ‘I forgot
where I was for a moment’… ‘I was just somewhere else…’, as our other two main
temporal modes of being assert their right to consideration in the present).
For
‘it’ fills us, fills our Eternal Present, eternally, always, a water tank
re-filled, a river flowing, the past receding, the present splashing us on the
face (’in your face’) and so we swim on (the ‘direction’ is the future, but
this is never present, we can but imagine, and must, this temporality being at
the mercy of desire…). The present, we are… always drowning in it, swimming in
the midst of a shoal, a current at once with us and against us. A drowning in
life in which we often gasp for air; an on-going event, a drowning in the
present; and so a present which requires a receding tidal flow, or better, a
recess in the quantitative flood, a hiatus, in which to still the waters, find
a shaded backwater and float unconcerned or rapt – but no longer bothered… filled
with a different in-flow. So also a qualitative change in input… (the function
of gardens, the function of the quiet space in our lives).
(We
are) a function of our sense receptions, held together by the fact that we
remember who we are, our proper name and history and a (fluctuating) set of
identity propositions some of which we would desperately defend because felt as
close(est) to our-selves. As sacred (as in the rhetorical question: ‘Is nothing
sacred?’). Self as made by environment - our immediate environment - in
co-action with our past; and that self as, in turn, giving the final meaning to
things… that is identity, oneness, a final ‘unity’ to things as they appear to
us, so unifying us, in turn, offering identity, a self… Is this too radically contingent?
Self and its judgments as always… too fresh… too ‘now’, always changing in the
Eternal Present (within the frame of the Eternal Present)… both self and
constructing self, both self as constituted and self as constituting meaning… (And so is it a case of… No longer
‘who’… but what, or… where, has the last word?).
Self
via context; self, made out of context (‘self-made’… only out of context). The
question is redundant: we ask ourselves: why seek out such places? Yet we
always (already) know; know what self are we after… (or the ‘self’ we are is
always already made, freshly minted and blissfully unaware of any change). We
choose the place to match, to call out, to invoke, to summon ourselves; to prosopopoeia ourselves (a prosopopoeia of the self; self-summoning),
summoning our absent (dead) selves within the pentacle of a chosen context, the
selves we want to be(come)… Our rationale for visiting the places of the dead.
A Lazarus reawakened…
And
so to a very particular context; the (absent) object (the ‘thing’ under
taboo….).
The
memory of our-selves, our past self (semi-present) in a new context, a new
present (the last word). And so, the self in context, most deliberately in
ritual context, may become other selves. Indeed, the selves of ritual would
include the following: spirit possession, being taken by the spirit, being
mounted by the spirit, becoming medium, a medium for another’s voice, speaking
in tongues, the possession of the shaman, the witchdoctor, the ecstatic monk or
nun. And if the form of the ritual context in its ending, or completion (its
exit rite), does not recall or release or exorcise the new self, the ‘visitor’?
Then a split personality, a multiple personality, results, also fruit of
another a ritual situation, the analysts’ chair or couch… selves created in
context, according to context… fruit of suggestion and disorder… selves created
in context, repetitions, like ritual, but not known as such, like the family,
or situations of pressure or denial. Selves created by order: selves created in
order, to prove a thesis, to prove a theory – to stop an endless gap. A procession of selves. The possession
of many selves; a form of self-possession… Possession: gift of the gods, or of
devils, of God or of the Devil, or the expectations of the other, the analyst;
possession as mark of the sacred, or curse of the supernatural, the professions
of the unprofessional. Possession of the possessors, (advantaged, insiders) and
for the dispossessed, the others - religion as bad. Or evil. The cults of the
poor. Because fact and material (possession as proof), and not, Christian or
other (State-) sanctioned monotheism. And the presence of ‘proof’, the
possession attested to by kinds of behaviours and witnessed by others,
therefore must be classified as ‘the devils’ work’. Ignoring the history of
dancing and shaking and gift of speech, the testifying, of Christian
communities, testifying to their connection with the heavenly powers, (unless
defined as the opposite, by Church or State) as well as the experience of
mystics across the centuries…
No right of exit…
(Self-modification):
the wearing of a mask as prop. The staged drama of the self: concealed…
Throughout the ages the mask has enabled ritual identity and spirit possession,
from ‘witch doctors’, shamen (tribal ‘mediums’), through religious possessions,
to modern ‘mediums’, ‘spiritualists’ (usually male with the exception of female
shamanism in Korea (their other selves, as if ‘ridden’ by a spirit…) - as also
the female spiritualists of 19th century Europe. Part of the age old
game of gendered self and ritual as manifested in the use of masks, dressing
up, masquerade - usually with the men as ‘gods’ and the women as the audience
(secret is, knowing that ‘the gods’ are really just men in masks… a ‘public
secret’, as in the case of Santa Claus and children). Masks enable myth in
ritual… (Like statues in gardens). Part of the long list of our identifications
(like watching a film and ‘becoming’ the person we identity with, hero or
heroine, active or passive, survivor or sacrifice…).
And
what of all the ‘remembered’ pasts; the ‘pasts’ before our pasts; the endless
anecdotes of ‘past lives’ remembered…. The past selves, the memories
re-created, memories that are the fruit of Hinduism and Buddhism in popular
aspect - reincarnation. The ‘proofs’ of religions very old and also very new…
Also the fruit of the religion of therapy, now turned to the therapy of
religion, now called meditation, or ‘going clear’, or being ‘under analysis’ or
some other form of counselling write large, supported by a cult, a religion, a
metaphysic… techniques of the self… produce self, regardless of the claims made
otherwise (whether to dissolve self or rediscover). Regarding production, I
mean this quite literally: ‘they produce self…’ Or rather, ‘selves…’ as at
times ‘they’ take on seemingly distinct identities… ‘chameleon–like’
personalities, mimics, responding to ‘suggestion’, creating out of the merest
suggestion – manifesting an extreme sensitivity. We might even go so far as to
pose a gradient of ‘self-production’, ranging from degrees of positive or
negative response, to mood swings to hormones, from the sweet-talker to the
giver of ultimatums, from the macho bully to the craven coward (all in ‘the
blink of an eye’). Then proceeding to interactional selves, ‘who we are when we
are with whoever’, who we are depends on who we are with (different roles for
different relations) the self to other relation as conditioned by gender,
generation, social class, education, cultural difference and religion, of
course all manner of hierarchy - ‘even’ appearance, fashion, mannerisms and
manners (as well attested to by the study of discourse) influencing and
influenced by… So what we have is the ‘person version’ of ‘context makes
meaning’ equation; ‘context makes meaning makes self’ you might say… Equally
true of work and ritual type roles; family, work, leisure, all the many
manifestations of the personal attunement to situations public and private… All
the way to ‘becoming the job’ (becoming, or not, the President… inhabiting the
role). And from the counselling that alters self a bit (from the chat that is
also a mood calmer) to the selves produced, and ‘split’ personality (but
somehow they still ‘know’ each ‘other’, that is, there is continuity… the
person(s) usually manage to carry on ‘as if’ they knew what their alter egos
had passed through). All in the context of an authority figure, the authorizer,
or real author, of the new self… or selves. Indeed in the case of
‘schizophrenia’ and multiple-personality disorders, these latter often appear
to have been produced - this time unwittingly - in the course of therapy
itself. From the couch to the clinical ‘production’ of identity in the
(post)modern epoch. All the way to our sense of ourselves in context; in a
cathedral, before a mountain range, hand in hand watching a sunset… Sublimity
is precisely another name for the washing away of one self with another.
All
manifestations of the production of the self, in context, to order, part of the
everyday rituals of life, as well as a feature of the intense rituality of our
sacred events… (as once was, now exiled from most peoples’ lives, apart from
the ritual consumption of alcohol or other chemical intoxicants, intoxication
as possession, as unwinding, the unwinding of the self, as loss of inhibition,
loss of self, as loss of possession). The possession by another. Possession by
the Other.
It would appear
that just as words ultimately take their meaning from their context, as
therefore do sentences, whether in text or in discourse, actually-used
language, and as so too do things, objects we use, become culture, become
meaning, at a particular time and place, even too our genes, through the
mechanism of ‘gene expression’, express themselves according to their
environment, so too do we, our very selves, the colours and clothing of the
naked pronoun ‘I’, our identity, also take meaning, change meaning, change
identity, according to our contexts…
As
we can see (as we can experience… as we have experienced…) in what is perhaps
the most extreme example of the radical contextuality
of identity: what happens when our collective being (the iceberg below the
surface of ‘individuality’) when the debt we owe our part/whole relationship is
made manifest in the crowd: as noted by Freud, in his Group Psychology, Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, and of course in Durkheim’s homo duplex, the diremption between the private and public self,
the individual when alone and when part of a collective event; an experience
described by Gustave le Bon in La Foule,
which indicated to what extremes people might go when in a crowd, when part of
a mob… Surely a limit case of extreme sensitivity to the Other. The apparent
total bypassing of the self. Such a being might more properly be called, homo contexualis…
So
again what we have the identity change gradient, the degrees and types of the
transformations of the self according to context and ritual… quality and
quantity, from moods, to role, to possession, to split personality… from mood
swing to membership of a mob… This gradient evokes another map of the self in
its ritual crossing with the identity exchange
gradient, also a ritual exchange, of matter, others, time and space, for the
renewal of self, for the affirmation of a given, normally collective, so
recognition-based, identity. And sometimes too the renewal looks more like a
rebirth; repetition more like a reinvention. All in part due to our physical,
social and mental entropy, as manifested in the weakness of the past, the
unreliability of memory, including even to remember who you are (who you were…) the constitutional weakness of
the self (‘strong’ only in brute repetition), ‘weak’ in its mutability, its
changeability, its utter capriciousness. Self-identity: contextual cuckoo.
*
Is
our identity really so contingent - contextual? The part in the whole.
Mimetically taking on the colouration of the whole (the place in which we find
ourselves, find a version of our selves). For otherwise do we not fall into the
trap of a (Neo-)romantic ‘authenticity’? An obsession with a ‘true’ self and
our quest for this chimera: as opposed to the context-bound passage of
consecutive selves, a succession of identities, each as ‘true’ as the others… a
succession of passing ghosts, of passing statues… The parts in the whole.
Caught between the lure of openings and being part of an opening. Between
perceiving and inhabiting. Between nature as desire for the object and Nature
as our ecology and home. Where else to situate the spirit of the place?
Locative spirit, earth-bound ghost, a foot in both camps; like nature, as once
(to us) suggesting specific beings and universal Being; at once here and now,
the matter of living things and the frame; geology too, with its near mythic
temporal periods, it too is nature: and Nature too (upper case) is the name we
give the universal that lifts ‘above’ the particular, the particular culture,
time bound and annoyingly, pitifully, real. ‘Nature’ as synonym for eternity,
trans-historical and a-temporal (home to axioms as much as gods). Nature as…
nature worship; for nature worship too is to be found here, the nature hidden
behind the historical culture of the park, tamed nature, hidden Nature... The Nature
of the Romantics and today’s Neo-romantics, the age–old ‘Nature-first’
philosophy continued (as old a philosophy as the first philosophers, East or
West) the Fall we love to fall for... The eternal truths revealed only in the
depths of the grotto, deep in the fissure, buried in the cave - and only to
those first driven temporarily insane… the possessed. Genius loci incarnate.
Space incarnate. The space of the self.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017