BarryTaylorBlog

plenty

"Do not ask yourself if you can or cannot cope. It is not about adaptation or choice. The Greek god of hunting and rustic music, pan, is a symbol of plenty and abundance and has never been stigmatized as a problem. Humankind was always impressed by the billions of stars shining in the clear night sky-and never was in a panic about its plentitude." Franco Berardi

I was impressed by the ideas drawn from Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, in one of the books I am presently reading--Geert Lovink's, Networks Without A Cause--which I am finding very stimulating. The book is a critique of social media, but it is also a critique of theories around social media and the way ideas or opinions get traded with little critical reflection on their holistic engagement with issues at hand. Berardi's quote at the top of this post comes in a chapter on the Psychopathology of Information Overload and I really appreciate the way Lovink tackles it--mainly by challenging the idea that too much information is the problem--again, quoting Berardi, "the problem is not in the technology. We have to come to terms with it. The killing element is the combination of info stress and competition. We have to win, and to be the first. The real pathogenic effect is the neo-liberal pressure that makes the network condition so unlivable-not the abundance of information itself."

This book is one of the first social media critiques that actually stimulates my own thinking about it. I have found many of the books on this subject just a little too confident of their own veracity and I haven't fully bought the arguments put forth. This one, however, is really working for me--I find myself generating a new resource pool in terms of thinkers, books and concepts---semio-capitialism/personal information autonomy/hedonic lassitude/soft narcosis/depressive hedonia--(just in one chapter).

It's a good read and may challenge some ideas already firmly ensconsed in your own reasoned reflections on this topic, but one of those books that should be included in any comprehensive reflections on this topic.

water

 

This past Thursday was World Water Day and on Friday I participated in a conference at Woodbury University. The Drylands Conference was a one-day gathering to explore design, sustainability and general issues related to water in the Los Angeles area. It was fascinating, opening me up to ideas (and a literal and conceptual dictionary of words I have never heard before) about how to think about water in the 21st century. I was asked to speak on different aspects of water--to bring a wider focus to the conference--my topic was Water Utility: Mystic rivers, sacred springs and primordial oceans. I spoke about the uses of water in lfe and religion--the way water becomes a metaphor and a symbol of so many things in our various cultures. I opened with the above video--just for a laugh.

culture madness?

I came across an interesting article on The Morning News site. It originally appeared in the Boston Globe and was about the DSM--The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness--it's like the Bible for the psychiatric field, a compendium of the more than 350 ways they have determined that our minds can fail us. The article focuses on a little compendium of illnesses catalogued in the back of the book, about 25 little-known illnesses. They are called 'culture-bound' illnesses and what is described are a number of conditions that up until now have been regarded as mental issues that are cultural--i.e. culture-bound. The article names a couple--susto — a distinctly Latin American fear that one’s soul has panicked and left one’s body. Or pibloktoq, also known as “arctic hysteria,” in which Greenlandic Inuit strip off all their clothes and run out into the subzero Arctic tundra. The argument that is laid out in the lengthy piece revolves around the desire, amongst some in the profession, to abandon what is considered by them to be a relic from a colonial age. At its heart the question is about whether or not it is time to view the West as a culture, as well as to consider how much culture plays in the manifestation of mental illness.

I have read many times that melancholy is a particularly British malady--something backed up by a number of books, and writings since the 17th century when a sort of cult of melancholy arose in Britain. What is also highlighted in the article is the fact that the 1994 edition of the DSM contains no British or American culture-bound illnesses--i.e. other cultures may or may not have them, but we don't. But off the top of my head I can think of any number of conditions--Chronic Fatigue for instance--that you would be hard-pressed to find in many other less developed environments and societies. I think culture influences us profoundly and deeply much more than we might care to realize. it is another argument I suppose between universality and particularity. Anyway, the article is well worth a read and I would be interested in responses to it.

Hovey Design

The Hovey sisters' have a keen eye for design and their blogs are frequent visits for me. They've just launched a design company and I love the room pictured above, right up my alley, I am a big fan of that old colonial with a hint of new thrown in-look.

composers as gardeners

Brian Eno in scintilating form in a talk he gave at the Serpentine Gallery on Composers as Gardeners. I put the whole thing here, it's not that long. Found it at Edge.

"About the time when I first started making records, I was also starting to become aware of a new sort of organizing principle in music.  I think like many people, I had assumed that music was produced, or created in the way that you imagine symphony composers make music, which is by having a complete idea in their head in every detail and then somehow writing out ways by which other people could reproduce that.  In the same way as one imagines an architect working.  You know, designing the building, in all its details, and then having that constructed.

In the mid-'60s, there started to appear some music that really wasn't like that at all.  And in fact, it was about the time I started making music, and I found that I was making music in this same rather unusual new way.  So that the music I was listening to then in particular, in relation to this point, was Terry Riley's "In C" and Steve Reich's famous tape pieces, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out."  And various other pieces as well. 

Of course, I was also familiar with Cage and his use of randomness, and new ways of making musical decisions.  Or not making them.  What fascinated me about these kinds of music was that they really completely moved away from that old idea of how a composer worked.  It was quite clear with these pieces, for example "In C," that the composer didn't have a picture of the finished piece in his head when he started.  What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say.  And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece.  And they turned into a different version of that piece every time. 

So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing.  Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.  Now, I was sort of looking for support for that idea.  The term 'bottom-up' hadn't come into existence then.  Chaos theory, complexity theory, so on, they didn't exist.  I don't even think we had catastrophe theory then. 

Monsters

"There are monsters on the prowl whose form change with the history of knowledge." Michel Foucault.

In honour of Halloween we explored monsters in media yesterday. Zombies, vampires, aliens invaders--the monstrous makes it appearance in our world in any number of ways. What does our fascination with these creatures mean? Why do we enjoy being scared out of our wits? These and other questions were part of our class exploration. It's been said that monsters have their 'tentacles wrapped around the foundations of history', every age and culture seems to have them--the Middle Ages was fascinated with bestial humans, the Renaissance era with wolf-people and conjoined humans, the early modern world with Frankenstein and Dracula, on and on throughout our histories, these monsters and strangers appear again and again.

There are Biblical monsters and biblical roots for our western monsters--Leviathan and Behemoth--the Great Dragon--the Devil--an amalgam of any number of biblical images coalesced into that figure which is at the root of much of our monstrous imagination.

I talked a bit from Richard Kearney's remarkable book, Strangers, Gods and Monsters. He argues that these three figures are the backbone of our self-narration. Strangers operate as a limit experience for us as we try and identify ourselves over and against others--Greeks and their Barbarians, the Europeans their 'savages' etc. Gods are those figures whose power and mystery exceeds our grasp and monsters signal borderline experiences reminding us that we are never wholly sovereign. All of these ideas play out in our cultural imagination and story-telling. These creatures defy the accepted norms of identification and invite us to consider again and again what it means to be human. They are the expression of our fears and concerns, as well as our hopes and aspirations--they say the unsayable, says Kearney.

I quoted John Sallis--What if the truth were monstrous? But nobody really bit on that one, so I didn't explore it too far. I really like the Foucault quote--that the monsters change with the history of knowledge--you can trace their expansion and multiplicity as our world becomes more and more inter-connected and over-loaded---monsters and strangers multiply in our story-telling---a tale of Vampires coming out (True Blood) becomes a pluralized world of vampires, witches, shape-shifters, fairies, more and more strange creatures echoing and voicing our fears and challenges in the 21st century. As our understanding of the universe expands it is no longer just the Martians attacking, it is alien civilizations of all kinds (District 9, Alien etc, etc.) and even technology and technological aberrations (Bladerunner, I Robot etc) become part of our monstrous exploration of human self-understanding.

Lenten Journey

 

We are moving through the five senses and connecting them to spiritual life. From Diane Ackerman's marvellous book, A Natural History of the Senses, these words about the 'painter's eye,'

In his later years, Cezanne suffered a famous paroxysm of doubt about his genius. Could his art have been only an eccentricity of his vision, not imagination and talent guarded by a vigilant esthetic? In his excellent essay on Cezanne in Sense and Nonsense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty says: "As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of the body." Cezanne anxiously considered each brush stroke, striving for the fullest sense of the world, as Merleau-Ponty describes so well:

We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each brush stroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cezanne sometimes pondered for hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must "contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style." Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Opening up wide to the fullness of life, Cezanne felt himself to be the conduit where nature and humanity met -- "The landscape thinks itself in me ... I am its consciousness" -- and would work on all the different sections of a painting at the same time, as if in that way he could capture the many angles, half-truths, and reflections a scene held, and fuse them into one conglomerate version. "He considered himself powerless," Merleau-Ponty writes, "because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible, how the world touches us." When one thinks of the masses of color and shape in his paintings, perhaps it won't come as a surprise to learn that Cezanne was myopic, although he refused glasses, reputedly crying "Take those vulgar things away!" He also suffered from diabetes, which may have resulted in some retinal damage, and in time he developed cataracts (a clouding of the clear lens). Huysmans once captiously described him as '"An artist with a diseased retina, who, exasperated by a defective vision, discovered the basis of a new art." Born into a different universe than most people, Cezanne painted the world his slightly askew eyes saw, but the random chance of that possibility gnawed at him.

Dancing In The Streets

I have been somewhat horrified at the fascination with ballroom dancing that seems to have over-taken the West(well UK and US anyway). Dancing with the Stars and all that stuff. It reminds me of claustrophobic nights in my youth stuck in the living room while my mum and grandmother watched ballroom dancing--(nothing drives a wedge between the young and their forebears than nights around a single telly). The fascination with talent shows in general is something of a phenomena that I should do more thinking about but I am sure that there are already enough people doing that. Anyway, in my travels around the webtoday I came across a story that I found so interesting. Apparently in 1518 there was an outbreak, a plague, of dancing! It began when a woman began to dance fervently in the streets of Strasbourg. She danced for six days straight. Within a week thirty-four more people had joined her and by the end of a month there were more than four hundred people dancing feverishly in the streets! Many of the people eventually died of heart attacks or exhaustion. Records for the time, including sermons preached from the Cathedral addressed the event. Rather than being diagnosed as a supernatural or astrological (the usual causes attributed to things in those days) it was regarded as a natural event caused by 'hot blood,' and the remedy? More dancing. They built dance halls and the city paid for musicians to provide accompaniment to the victims.

Dancing plagues were common in the Middle Ages, a symptom some say of the harrowing environment-wild weather, bad harvests, rampant diseases of all kinds, and , according to historian John Waller, "a spiritual despair on a scale unknown for generations"--a sort of mass hysteria response to the troubles and challenges of the times.

I have always drummed, and my mum always used to say I'd been hit with 'St.Vitus Dance.' Vitus was the patron saint of those afflicted with epilepsy, but was also the patron of those afflicted by the dance manias of the medieval period. There have been many explanations put forth to as to why these plagues happened, everything from ecstatic  heretical rituals to grain fungus poisoning to mass psychogenic illnesses but Waller had another view, that the causes were linked to trance states induced by the stresses of the times. This is what Waller went on to say about the phenomena, in an article for the BBC,

"We know that the trance state is more likely to occur in people who under extreme psychological distress, and who believe in the possibility of spirit possession. All of these conditions were satisfied in Strasbourg in 1518.
The city's poor were suffering from severe famine and disease. And, crucially, we also know they believed in a saint called St. Vitus who had the power to take over their minds and inflict a terrible, compulsive dance.
Once these highly vulnerable people began to anticipate the St. Vitus curse they increased the likelihood that they'd enter the trance state. And once in it, they acted out the part of the accursed: dancing wildly for days at a time. So the epidemic, I argue, was a result of both desperation and pious fear.
The dancers were taken to a shrine to beg for mercy
The dancing plague died out because the supernaturalist beliefs that fed it gradually disappeared. In the short run, cities like Strasbourg were no longer susceptible because they became Protestant during the Reformation and spurned the saint worship on which the dancing plague depended.
In the long run, the fervent supernaturalism of the medieval world had to make way for the rise of modern science and rationality. The dancing madness was effectively starved out of existence. Even so, half a millennium later it still serves as a reminder of the ineffable strangeness of the human brain."

A very interesting take on why these things happen. I was drawn to the comment, "the dancing plague died out because the supernaturalist beliefs that fed it gradually disappeared." Amazing what happens to us, what we are capable of, what can drive us to the brink of madness, drive us to dance ourselves to death. I wonder about our beliefs, how they shape us and allow us to experience things that in another time and place seem so incredulous, so unbelievably unevolved--but here we are, still dancing our sorrows away, filling our nights with celebrity skating and dancing, amateur singing, dance and talent shows. We might not be dancing in the streets anymore but the beliefs we hold about our world still drive and shape us in the strangest ways.

Memories of the Future

"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony." Fernando Pessoa

I went to a great Zocalo event tonight. Neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio gave a talk about his new book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Some of his thinking was a bit beyond me, neuroscience is not my expertise, but I figured going in that it would be a stretch, but the brain is fascinating to me and I thought that it be worth the brain stretch. He talked a lot about consciousness, where it comes from, how it develops and what the implications are. He talked about consciousness as being an instrument of both survival and well-being. My favourite idea, well one of the many favourite ideas, was that we live consciously, poised between our lived past and our anticipated future. He spoke about having memories of the future---we have memories of the future we hope to have! I am sure that I am not doing justice to his theories but they were challenging and inspiring. As his talk drew to a close he read the stanza from the poem quoted above by Fernando Pessoa, from his work, The Book of Disquiet. He expressed his love and respect for the work of Pessoa but then went on to say that where he differs in temrs of understanding the self and consciousness is that he believes unlike an orchestra, which has a score, a conductor etc. our mind is being "made is we go," and "there is no conductor either, because in and of itself, we made him up to." I wished that there would have been the opportunity to dig into that thought a bit, it seemed that he was essentially saying that we create our own conductors (read gods), that they are an invention of the mind. I dont think I disagree. For some time now I have been giving much thought to the idea that our conceptions of God might be some sense of collective consciousness, or deep consciousness, or something like that.

There was a lot to this lecture, so many threads to think about and pick up on. He referenced some interesting-sounding books, Jerry Edelman-The Mind is Wider that the Sky and Julian James' The Origins of Consciousness, and talked about Spinoza quite extensively. You can actually watch or hear the lecture for yourself on the Zocalo site and I would recommend you do.

Trendwatching

I spend quite a bit of time exploring consumer and trend watching sites, some of the exploration is for work-elated stuff but mainly it is out of general interest. Trendwatching publishes some really good information that you can sign up for and have just released their December trendbriefing that looks forward to 2011. The offer up a number of trends that they feel will define consumer behaviour in the next year. A couple stck out to me. Made For China, examines the gorwing number of products and services created by companies exclusively for the Chinese consumer, everything from Levi's jeans to BMW's M3Tiger, a limted edition orange-metallic car celenrating twenty-five years of BMW presence in China. This underscores the growing place of China in the world economy, and of course points to the pervasive power of consumption in our lives.Perhaps even more interesting is Generation(G)--for generosity, emerging generosity on a global scale is something that the report focuses on. They say that brands from emerging markets will be expected to do more than just 'sell and take.' According to the report they "will increasingly be expected to give, donate, care and sympathize versus just sell and take. And not just in their home countries, but on a global scale. It's a profound cultural change and a consumer demand that their counterparts in mature markets have had a few years to getting used to. Some fun stats:

86% of global consumers believe that business needs to place at least equal weight on society’s interests as on business’ interests.

78% of Indian, 77% of Chinese and 80% of Brazilian consumers prefer brands that support good causes, compared to 62% of global consumers.

8 in 10 consumers in the India, China, Mexico and Brazil expect brands to donate a portion of their profits to support a good cause. (Source: Edelman, November 2010.)
The number of millionaires in India in 2009 grew 51 percent, to 126,700. (Source: Merrill Lynch, June 2010.)
88-year old Yu Pengnian became China’s first billion dollar philanthropist in April 2010. The Yu Pengnian Foundation today has USD 260 million of bank deposits, and a Hong Kong and Shenzhen property portfolio worth just under USD 1 billion, which is expected to contribute USD 50 million of cash each year to the foundation. (Source: Hurun Rich List, October 2010.)
In September 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett hosted a dinner for China's ultra-rich to promote philanthropy. The event was similar to their efforts to get US billionaires to pledge to give away at least half their wealth, although the two denied that they were recreating the pledge or pressurizing people to give, merely using the event to answer questions and discuss issues around developing a culture of philanthropy. (Source: Washington Post, October 2010.)
In 2011, any brand or individual doing exceptionally well, will be expected to join GENERATION G.

This connecting between sales and philanthropy is something that has been gaining ground in the West for some time (think RED campaign etc.), and seems to becoming a defining charateristic of 21st century economics and consumerism.

I think there are lots of connecting points for churches and religion in these trend reports, clues as to where people are focusing their attention and desires and offer some strategic ideas for engaging them, not just for the brand-marketers, but for anyone interested in connecting with people in some meaningful way. They are like little temperature gauges.