Venice
Carnevale/Masks
Beginning
on the day after Pentecost. Featuring parades and processions, masquerade and those
irresistible masks. Running for 10 days, up to Ash Wednesday, finishing on
Shrove Tuesday, Martedi Grasso (or Mardi Gras, which gives its name to many an
international festival, the most famous of which is the one in Rio de Janeiro).
Preparing (originally) for the fasting that comes with the beginning of Lent -
all part of the run up to Easter, taking place over a month later. The Venice Carnevale attracts up to 3 million
visitors a year.
Part
of the deployment of the tourist industry as a counter to the economic and
social entropy of a Venice with a declining population… Yet part of the problem
as much as part of the cure: at once medicine and poison. Of tourism as key
economic driver… a tourism which peaks at Carnevale
itself. Yet despite the massive influx of visitors, this is still a festival
which involves local people at every level; as players in the culminating
masques and processions centering on St. Mark’s Square, as well as part of the
festive street atmosphere, as the presence of a playful general public,
participants and consumers - so a part of the general atmosphere that is the
real treasure, the true gift of Venice at carnival time…
Traditionally
‘carnival’ is the period before Lent, part of the build-up to Easter, with a
final day which also amounts to a ‘spring festival’, a chasing away of the old
ghosts, the ghosts of the previous year. Part of the season of fun… to keep
spirits up in the long north European winter. Indeed in German-speaking
countries and Holland, perhaps most famously in the city of Vienna with its
ball season (the masked ball), this festival begins as early as November. If
humans cannot hibernate, snug as dormice in their nests, then they must move to
survive – find reasons to go outside and activities to be involved in. The
basic function of all of this: to survive the winter (therefore the ubiquity of
grainstacks… a profoundly symbolic and very practical storage of the sun’s
energy in the absence of adequate sunlight). To combat brute physical as well
as social forms of entropy. A festival to eat-up the perishables, then a fast,
awaiting spring crops and the return of other sources of food. Iron realities
of geography and climate turned to cultural adaptations, habits, rituals… an
old habit, older still ritual, surviving the winter of Christian feudalism,
carnival.
(In Carnevale time…
a hiatus in the everyday, everyday… the time of ritual).
Whilst
pretending to an ancient beginning, marking the spontaneous celebration of a
victory over another city, Aquileria, in 1162 AD, the current carnival is in
fact of recent introduction. After becoming established in the Renaissance,
gaining international fame in the Baroque and further notoriety in eighteenth
century, it was finally banned by King of Austria (1797) – who also forbade the
wearing of masks. The nineteenth century witnessed attempts at revival, but
usually on a private basis; it was only as late as 1979 that the festival
returned as part of a culture revival. If it is true that the return of
mask-wearing was originally due to some student private enterprise, then the
selling and wearing of masks has nevertheless blossomed into a major festival
feature - including a contest for la
maschera piu bella (the most beautiful mask). Mask, often accompanied by
costume wearing, has become the distinguishing feature of Venice at carnival
time. The private anthropological spice on the public architectural cake,
turning the city into a fantasy film-set peopled by actors in disguise.
Anonymous revelers, a mask-wearing public (private in their collective
concealment, in the occlusion of personal identity) take to the streets and
squares and transform the Gothic charm of the old city and its brooding canals
into a ‘gothic revival’ of another kind: as the ‘dressing–up’ we normally
associate with modern-day ‘goths’ and ‘punks’ (albeit on a rather different
cultural level) overtakes a cosmopolitan population which comes from all over
the world to take part.
But
the history of Venice and its affinity with masks does not end there; historically
they were worn between St. Stephen’s day, December, 26th and the end of the
carnival season on the stroke of midnight of Shrove Tuesday (the onset of the
fasting season). Furthermore mask wearing was permitted again on Ascension Day
and effectively began again as part of an extended festival season ranging from
October the 5th through to Christmas. If one so wished one might spend the best
part of five months being somebody else…
And
more, if you thought the mask was only a fun thing, linked to revelry and
permissiveness, think again, mask-wearing of the type known as the bauta, which permitted eating and
drinking whilst preserving the wearer’s identity, was once obligatory for
political meetings where the equality and independence of the participants was
guaranteed by their anonymity (as with the protection conferred by the secret
ballot). The wearing of a mask whilst armed was however banned (as was the
visiting of convents whilst so attired…).
(In Carnevale time…
a hiatus in the everyday, everyday… the time of ritual).
Atmosphere
at Carnevale time, our mood, our
sense of place, our subjectivities, our collective presence as a kind of
Collective Subject at this place and in this time, is made up of the collective
mummery of masks and masquerade (and by Venice itself, the contrast of narrow,
twisting passages with restricted light and sudden open views with bright
expanses). Proceeding along a narrow alley, at once exposed and hidden by the
mask one oneself wears, made conscious of oneself, even as concealing oneself,
one comes across a troupe of masked and colourfully attired individuals
(perhaps accompanied by music), individuals further individuated by their garb
and mask, made individual even as concealing themselves, their individuality – providing
license and lure, the invitation to be looked upon, to be seen, yet remaining
unseen… anonymous. The rest, the noisy pageants, drum-led processions and dense
crowds, are not so enticing… In all the experience of Venice at Carnevale is not so much Rabelasian,
Saturnalian or even ‘carnivalesque’ (after the modern Bakhtinian misreading of
the function of ritual transgression) even less resembling the desperate
hedonistic outpourings of a ‘Saturday night out’ in many (mainly Northern)
cities. Rather we find a rather polite pleasure-seeking, and a never-ending
delight at the complementarity of architecture and adornment; of milieu and
mask; the canals and dark arches and the gowns, cloaks and masks…
On the other hand, that
hungry looking (and probably drunk) boy (or girl) comes with mask on face and
condom in pocket… Desire advertised
and desire concealed… Two examples of barriers that exist to enable, to permit…
Indeed
most of the work done here, most of the experiences undergone, are not
primarily physical (well… eating and drinking apart) or even given over to
physical desires as such; but rather the work of the imagination, the workings
of interior experience… and (again, gastronomy apart) the visual senses. For if
the sounds on offer are background music and the smells refer back to
gastronomy or local geography, then for most, I suspect, Venice is, and not
least at the time of Carnevale, a
feast of the visual and of the images in turn aroused, the thoughts so aroused…
(‘those images that fresh images begat/that dolphin torn, that gong tormented
sea’…) the storms so aroused in the sea of the human imagination. (And so
perhaps of a desire abstracted, of
desire pure and … simple?) The
collective imagination is always stimulated by the sights of Venice to be sure;
but at Carnevale time it is rather
the hidden, in reality, the partly hidden, that stimulates the imagination (and
we remember the comment of that consummate visual analyst and connoisseur,
Roland Barthes, on the lure of the partly hidden, partly revealed…). Above and
beyond the hidden end of the ally-way or bend in the canal (we know that
eventually the narrow passage, whether negotiated on foot or by water, will
widen into a broad blue vista) above and beyond these givens, the everyday
gifts of Venice, we have the incitement due to what is hidden behind the mask…
And indeed, whether
on path or canal, the nights are still and black, the sounds only those of the
lapping of dark water on stone… the light only that of an occasional star in
the dark sky above - reflected glint on the surface of the salt waters below.
The revelry is all in the mind.
The
Venice of the imagination. Venice at Carnival time… Chaotic images… masked
revelry, kaleidoscopic fragments of drunken vision, or vision obscured by a
mask; the bifurcation of vision by route, the division of space by alleyways,
and passages, and stairs and bridges… all tearing attention into multiple
directions… the delirium of the divided self, torn apart into multiple
focalities… multiple lines of flight, originating in the self, and scattering
it even as it (the self) returns to begin again the process of distraction, of
dissemination and ecstases. The ecstasy which is the going beyond (of) the
self… as the self (or selves)… Un-stopping, going beyond; un-stopped, the flow
of the self. So an intense intuition of the de-passing of our constitutive
limits, of passing beyond our selves, is, in reality but a more limited version
of our condition of consciousness in time, of ourselves in the Eternal Present.
Our constituting of time in the Eternal Present. The Eternal Present as
‘eternal’ delirium…
So the apparent
paradox, to visit an old place for the sake of memory, for history, yet
Carnevale is an event for the restricted present, an Eternal Present with
imagination full-on, past and future frames or windows turned off; less blur,
more clarity for the present; less conscious influence of the past... and the
future; one, the former, ‘restricted’ to unconscious or preconscious habit and
influence : and the future -but how can we be freed of the future when it
hasn’t happened yet- freed perhaps of the past as repeating in the future, as
constituting the future as a continuing cycle or intention… repeating forwards
(so freed from the past as future). But not freed from desire… Not from desire
as future intending, even if future implications are forgotten. For the aim and
end, the ultimate gratification of desire, lies in the future… Yet this is the
realm of short range, fantasy, gratification, rather than the action-intending,
plan-inducing, temporal lunge for the absent object of desire. Nor is it a case
of deferral: short range, but not immediate… the expectation of gratification,
a delicious disorder of the mind, and not the expectation of an imminent
release of pleasure… The pleasure is all in the present (including the pleasure
due to anticipation, where it is the anticipation, a foretaste, that is
sufficient to feed the fever of the present). Rather with desire as a permanent
background, the music and scents of desire as food for delirium… Living in the
moment (without the ghosts of past and future present...)
And
all to the accompaniment of church bells, the bells of so many church towers
ringing out the reminder of the easily forgotten Christian back-drop of the
festival, its limits and its ends… And with the morning come the bells calling
the faithful to prayer (although in Venice more tourists come to church to view
Tintoretto than attend Mass).
All
in all Carnevale is a good example of
the modern day union of ritual and the market; of identity exchange and of
commodity exchange; of spirit and matter, the barter of selves and objects,
their unity and means of co-ordination. The co-ordination or unity of the two
sides of a fundamental ‘ontological difference’ (subject and object, mind and
matter, etc.), the crossing of two fundamental levels, at the ‘same time’, a
simultaneous translation. Two different temporalities, two different cycles,
the making of selves (the consumption of objects) and the making of objects,
united; the ever-present immediacy of self, and the spending of the past for
the future (the anti-entropic renewal of identity). Also two different methods
of accounting; unequal and equal exchange, (subjective) and rational
(objective) equivalence, the gift and the commodity; irrational and rational
time (the felt eternity of the present and the world viewed from outside of the
narrative, where past, present and future all sit on one line. Effectively the
position of the Eternal Present in between past and future… and as model for
‘eternity’ as such… Narratives of belonging, of group identity, cemented by the
time ‘outside’ time (as we see in Christmas, Spring Festival, and other
mega-‘commodity’ festivals). But actually inside us: part of our constituted
and constituting consciousness (the phenomena of the ‘foundation outside’:
gods, heavens, immortals, Myth, Dream-time, Nature, universals, abstractions
and axioms). Venice itself acts as both commodity and gift (like the historical
marketplace established outside of the church or mosque; the ‘Christmas market’
or ‘temple market’). A place that has become a commodity festival in itself,
that has forgotten its metonymic existence, its origins… in religion, in a
collective identity (but still focused at Carnevale
time); place as gift, time specnt( time bought) as gift when translated into
identity, as traveler, tourist, art-buff, connesier, the ‘implied reader’ of
the object and event, proud bearer of so much ‘cultural capital’. The reminder
of tourism as a mass industry also reminder one of the ‘island thing’ the
similarities with those other famous island attractions (Manhattan and Capri)
and the role of the commodity in these gifts of place - a good compromise (a
good exchange). In the case of Venice, we have the survival of a gem, the
possibility of employment, of continued residence, of a valued life-style…
Aided and abetted by the intensifications (in all things) attending the time of
Carnevale; like many fairs,
processions and parades, and all manner of spectacles - or like the ‘pulling
power’ of the Grand Prix or the Loch Ness monster…
Day
for night. As we have seen today’s Carnevale
is the site of more refined, more sedate
pleasures, not quite the excuse for the transgressive romp (or
minority-baiting) of old. Of night as the time of illicit pleasures (or the joy
of pretended illicit pleasures). Of pleasures that tempt one to approach the
limits of life itself. Carnevale as
Death. Death of the self, of the old self, of the old ghosts of the past year,
selves gone, released, sent-off… replaced… Of the ego in ecstasy or delirium,
with the myth of loss, of total abandonment as release, as one key, one path to
the ‘authentic’. Death as figure, as symbol, as trope, as close to release, the
off-switch of the ego (metaphor and metonymy), but also as a challenge to death
as order, as routine (irony) as a stimuli to transgress (metonymy again) and as
a part of life or another part of the whole brought to the fore, as
fascination, as exotic (synecdoche). But only as a fantasy of death (no
Thanatos, or Freudian ‘Death Drive’, based on the projection of the idea of
entropy into the unconscious, a desire which is anti-desire - an idea which one
strongly suspects comes from Nietzsche). It’s only for fun…! Only the symbolism
of death (like the plague doctor mask). Risk as minimal. Unlike the casual or
bought sex of Renaissance London or Baroque Venice or Victorian London, or the
1970’s bath house scene, all including the risk of death by disease (Foucault,
in this respect Bataille’s top ‘student’ died precisely of this, of his rising
to the challenge of the philosophy of transgression, of ‘desire unto death’ -
and with AIDS this form of desire was to become again very real). And as
always, regarding the discourse of the death of the self, the ego, as in all
cases of the denial of the self, we find, seemingly in all coincidence, the
complete contrary: the assertion of the self, of a new self, whether as
identity claim, as maintenance or extension of self, as the beyond of the
‘everyday’ self the construction in ritual, in repetition, of a new self, an
identity exchange (rather than an abolition of the supposedly offending
entity). Risk too (and money) for a new sense of self… The ‘drive’, or better,
desire for the self (‘recognition desire’), is also behind Durkheim’s notion of
‘altruistic suicide’, where the loss of the recognition proper to the ‘self’ is
too much to bear. Death as the barrier to pleasure, as the limit to pleasure,
to desire, to life… and the escape route for the failure of such, for ‘to be’
is ‘to desire’… to challenge the every limit of death (even at the price of
death). Otherwise put: life is finite: but our desire is infinite… And
sometimes that infinite needs a space (and a time) to express it and for it to
express itself, for its performance, its symbol or manifestation, its
‘totemisation’... Venice. Carnevale.
(‘Carne…
avale’; eating… meat. A food that requires the act of killing. The act of
ritual slaughter. The etymology a gentle reminder of the fasting and the
refraining from one kind of culinary pleasure, one also based upon death, which
is a part of Christian and other ritual rhythms - again we remember the German
festival season, beginning in November… feast before fast… A long, long build
up to the sacred festival of Easter, high point of the Christian calendar…
filling the slot of the fertility rites of the archaic past, also a matter of
life and death of death followed by life… the ritual sacrifice followed by the
ritual of re-birth, extracting a promise from the future, from the heavens, as
from ourselves, the promise of faith, the resurrection of the hope of renewal…
the return of life… rituals are always subjunctive…).
(In Carnevale time…
a hiatus in the everyday, everyday… the time of ritual).
Venice
as the context. We the word on its page. A word in its sentence. The sentence
its place: but in this case a place in parentheses; place set apart (that is
why it is ‘place’ and not just ‘space’). A place with its own time: the
temporality of a set of actions apparently reaching beyond time; a time set
apart (that is why it is ‘eternal’, and not just the eternal present). And an
ingredient, a trace of which is required, for somewhere to be place and not
just space. Whether as word, sentence or signal or event, the context for the
observer is all, final determinant of meaning (narrowing down from a range
possible); so too with the self, perhaps; for others, yes; but also for
ourselves... So perhaps a change of context is a change of self, as memory and
habit meet new information, new inputs, and new syntheses of past and present
are made… A new I (to see with a
fresh eye is to be a fresh ‘I’). The
place we are in, the spaces of Venice, more cogently, the time space of Venice
and of Carnevale create a new mood, a
new ego, a new self… at least for a while… the time–space of the hiatus, the
temporality of ritual, the while of a different self. (For a while…) but just a
while, least we become distracted by lures of utopia or other fantasies of
final completion or cure ‘this side’ of religious desire (and for some the
temptation is omnipresent); and which like the desire for novelty or
comparison, recognition, hierarchy or distinction (of which it is function),
never sleeps… And in the further context (or is it a prop?) the context of
wearing a mask? There we have become part of the context, willing participants
in the ritual process. Here we have given our assent to our role in a different
narrative. The mask wearer puts aside their old self; becoming complicit with
the ‘exterior’ context. With the canals and passageways of Venice. Or, in a
further twist. Bestowing the gift of being just as we are, ourselves in the
everyday - whilst hiding it; with no need for the work of self-image, the
presentation of self, the mask does it all for us (whilst providing us with the
perfect excuse for our excess, or just for being ourselves… for we can always
deny it: ‘it’s only a mask’…).
Carnevale as ritual
transgression; safer and commodified… but as with all ritual, the possibility
of private appropriations abound; the masks’…
Carnevale and
masks, pretty art form, artisan’s labour, collectors’ piece, tourist
bric-a-brac. On the serious side, a serious aspect … or face; the face, and its
hiding… the serious hidden, or the hiding as the serious… Privacy; denial. The
mask perhaps more than any other covering (except its near cousin, the veil),
covering so much by covering so little, speaks directly of what it conceals; so
inciting, covering, a broad range of meanings; showing by not showing; being
whilst not being; concealing the place of reason, the place we read the reason
in the face, are face to face with another’s reason (are face to face with
another’s emotions…). Masks: eliding the rational (Bataille again rears his
head, acephale, ‘headless’ as again
the figure for sexual license - at least in fantasy). But also concealing
emotion; short-circuiting response and recognition. Concealing desire? Or
focusing all (our desire) onto our most sensitive signaling system, the eyes,
we read, but more so, the others’ eyes... If you cannot read the face, you can,
you must, nevertheless, read the eyes… Read the mask: read the eyes… For in
them you will find…Venice’s history… the actual (accidentally reconfigured, the
product of repetition) and the fantasy. Our eyes, desire generators and the
ritual space time, the dream time, the surreal experience, which lies behind
them and which is the other temporality that animates our imaginations …
romantic fantasy on all fronts… Frightening, enormous (concealing or … enacting
the contents of the self).
Yet
the mask is the face in its materiality, it role as covering, the skin that
cloaks the thought, revealed only in the eyes, the eyes that still show, are
shown, behind the mask, the windows of the soul, foregrounded, re-framed,
accentuated - bypassing the barrier of skin and bone. Or augmented (the
barrier, the frame): we are reminded of the conflict between subject and
object, and subject and other, of our supposition of the subject that lies
behind the object, the other that lies in the object, and of our ability to
guess its meanings, to ‘know’ it. The eyes as the agency of this illusion, now
framed, by a second skin; the mask.
Like the eyes in a
portrait – but a-temporally: frozen for us to deliberate…
Masks,
in and out, to conceal and reveal, assert, propose; an elision or erosion, and
a proposition (in all senses of the term…). Like veiling, similarly to conceal
and indicate, but with a replacement self on the surface… (the veil ‘s outer
face is its message of concealment and its materiality, its texture, all too
often eroticising the shape of the face, of the mouth beneath…). We note how
the most interesting masks, in fact, we realise, with some shock (with some
pleasure), that most masks reveal,
reveal not only the eyes, but the mouth also. Either by framing the eyes and
leaving the mouth and nose uncovered, or by a heavier covering, which again
shows the eyes, but also leaves the mouth alone un-covered… (Roland Barthes’
comments on the erotic economy of the partly hidden, the gap, the cut, again
apply here…). A re-balancing of object and suggestion. Redundancy refocused.
Masks,
traditionally, that is historically, anthropologically, offer the history of
men (and historically it seems to be largely men) pretending to be gods or
immortals, employed in a variety of ritual contexts, from big festivals to
rites of occasion, exorcisms, etc… anything requiring the aid of the supernatural,
or the sacred. Our playing, our performing, with the knowing compliance of
(all) the others, (well, almost all) a matter of homo duplex, or the ‘public secret’ (Taussig), all know but no-one
says… The mask indicates a role, indicates a tradition, a role in a collective
identity. But here the important thing is the pretending, the hiding and the
knowing that we are hiding, that everyone is hiding, a public contract, social
contract, we all agree that we are someone else, a space of freedom, license, imagination,
‘to be or not to be’ someone else… A space outside, but also a space, perhaps
primarily, inside our heads… A shared space. Complicit misrecognition… An
addition of mystery; an accretion of meaning; the gap between the face and the
mask, or that which the mask adds on… in this new context, the space time of
carnival, the mask ensures that we ourselves are our own new now, in our own
new context – our own new self… The ritual is one of a shift of identity, a
sideways slide, occasioned by the particular space time, so prefigured, (the
framing of ritual) and the exchange, time and gifts, expenditure on travel,
accommodation, food, drink, mask). For the occasion, this occasion is also a
repetition, a ritual repetition, of… a public ritual, and a repetition is
always also a remembering. So perhaps this occasion is even a kind of memorial
for the dead, their feast, their festival, our becoming them… in the present,
present again, by means of the mask (‘them’ again present in the place of their
past, existing still, remaining, their memorial, one of the places of the dead,
places we love to inhabit, context forming self, identities we come to inhabit…
rituals of remembrance always mean that a part of the self, that living the
memory or inhabiting the memorial, is in part, one of the confraternity of the
dead. So again, it would seem, life in the service of death, or so we say
(somewhat dramatically) another variation of ancestor worship: functionally, in
fact, death in the service of life… (for the memory trace is semi-present in
the present). Having the last word…
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…
The
mask as prop (continued). 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
all the ‘remembered’ pasts. The past selves, the memories recreated, 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. And so
to wearing a mask… a chosen context. Yet the choosing does not guarantee a
chosen self; on the contrary: the interaction of the masked self with its
environment is the author of the delirious self of Carnevale.
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 do
sentences, whether in text or in discourse, actually-used language, and as so
too do things, objects we use, become culture, become meaning, even too our
genes, through the mechanism of ‘gene expression’, so too do we, our very
selves, 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.
Quotidian
variation: ritual recognition.
*
Of which we all are
apart…
Part of…
The card game of
identity: ‘self’ in a crowd; self in Venice (masked); self in a garden…
Shuffling the pack of your identity cards (which will foretell the future,
which we use to ‘fix’ our… selves…).
Part of…
Others.
The…
Degrees
of becoming other, of becoming… another self, and the degrees of resistance to
becoming other, to becoming… Both processes aided and abetted by our new
friend, the mobile phone, our digital prosthesis, more precisely its photography/video
recording function; the act of recording, of ‘selfieing’, may seem like an
assertion of self on holiday, and it is, very consciously so (putting oneself
often at the center of the universe, first but choosing the piece of reality to
cut out, to frame, then in the act of including oneself in the image too) But
this continuing control, this ‘hands-on’ assertion, actually is a resistance, a
forwards-looking recording to send and show (off), (one is thinking of how we
will look, to others, then from that (imaginary) place, looking back to the now
as already past as doubly imagined); a temporal manouvre which distances us
from the our object, the present, even as we seek to capture it; so avoiding
the ‘now moment’, even whilst attempting to ‘capture’ it… the now is only a
springboard, not there in a lasting sense of allowing it to alter one’s self, a
trace of fear of becoming, someone else… (often a feature of tourism, as when
confronted with the new we compare and find parallels with the old, of friendly,
familiar points of reference… like looking for similitude in rock formations,
or caves... anthropomorphising, or belittling, ‘like whatever kind of animal’…
the denial of the sublime in what we see - the negative aspect of our gift for
the personifications of genius loci). For the less one knows about a place the
more frightening it may be, the more one hides behind ones attitude of
superiourity, retreats behind another kind of mask, the certitudes of the ego
(certitudes of attitude, rather than of fact), ‘Oh but, I have this…, I have
that….’ (followed by a negative comparative) comparing to the possession of an
experience or object, so memory, from the past. Is it legitimate to ask why so
much money was spent getting to and sustaining oneself in such a place? Or it
the fact that others have been and
that one will have been there that is
important…. (So despite our stance, we are but the desire of others…). The act
of conscious putting into the frame and recording the result is an act of
controlling, an act of limiting ones senses and experience by focusing on
cutting out little squares from our perception (limited to the visual only) and
so foreclosing on the total experience which engenders a new self, a change off
mood, and attitude. Watching those who take and those who abandon themselves
(sic) to the surrounding scenery is the witness of those who give up their
previous self (gifted to their environment) and those who augment it (by
turning everything into an extension of their point of view) control it - by
capture of image, by reducing all to image… Even more evident in the desperate
attempt to capture all by ‘selfie-ing’ the 360 degree surround of the self: the
world with self at centre; an attempt which only confirms this desperation, to
capture-control-record without experiencing, without being one with the object
(changing identity and mood…). A speed of temporality measured by the rhythm of
moving between past and present, and future and present – and if the present is
there at all, rather only present as the facilitator of the presence of the
other two (normally less present) temporal planes. A case of ‘letting in’
(requiring a little time) versus ‘clipping bits’… Different speeds of
temporality, different degrees of imbrication in the eternal present… as again
the digital memory replaces the human memory as part of actual experience, as
indeed the ‘capturing of the experience’ replaces the experience… (And again
the art, the aesthetic construction of the shot, is not the lived experience of
that place… no matter how arresting, aesthetically pleasing, or evocative…).
The
fear of wearing a mask, the fear of letting go, the unfounded fear that unless
one is persisting, and asserting, one is one quite there, or may fall into
something, into (being) someone else… not one… or not the one we thought we
were (and how easy and logical it is to move from ‘one’ to ‘we’, from self to
‘self-with-others’, a synecdoche
facilitated by our ‘recognition organ’, psychological cement of the
Social?).,For we are haunted by a semi-conscious awareness of the fragility, or
better, mutability of the self, of the whirlwind masquerade of personal
identity, the carnival of succession that is the human self. In denial. So
fighting back against the inrush of reality. By stilling the flow, de-stilling
the ‘essence’ of the experience, (one choses), by making still, creating a
sequence of stills, or by choosing some few seconds as representative, an
edited chunk of the Real. Representing but not representative… (Against photography!)
*
Despite
being in some ways the embodiment of all the clichés, having become a cliché by
virtue of its endless quote-ability, its perpetual citation in the popular
imagination (now global), iconic image, nevertheless to experience Venice’s
actual beauty and mystery and the sheer day to day plenitude of these, is to
overrule the pettiness and perfunctionary commercialism that is perhaps what
makes its continuing existence in the modern world a real possibility. A small
sacrifice in the light of what survives, of what makes (its) life (and the
preservation of its architectural identity) possible…
Beneath
blue skies. Light dancing on blue waters.
The
division of sky and sea, a receding strip of stucco and stone.
A
line of ochre powder; the horizon sprinkled between two expanses of blue.
Self,
identity, a line of powder, between past and future, scattered points, the
pointillist horizon between past recorded (events stored) and habit repetition
(punctuation of time extending into the future, beyond the self, the self
thrown forward, imagined repetition (of the present self) forwards as ritual
repetition beyond the self (the projection of the ‘frame’ of the
self-forwards), a ladder on which we can climb, project ourselves…) with new content,
and new input, or a new ‘now’, our Eternal Present in perpetual (or so it would
seem – or so it always seems…) continuance…
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017