|
PatrickCroninThirdPaper 16 - 22 Jul 2009 - Main.PatrickCronin
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="ThirdPaper" |
|---|
| | | The base of a political theory has to, at base, join up with the way masses of people function. Thurman Arnold begins The Folklore of Capitalism with this premise: "Today, when sophisticated men speak of democracy as the only workable method of government, they mean that government which does not carry its people along with it emotionally, which depends on force, is insecure." The need to connect with the enthusiams of the body politic is a cold fact recognized by leaders across the political spectrum. | |
<
< | Since our institutions are built to respond to the enthusiasms of masses of people, it would help to understand a little about the dynamics of groups of people. Arnold argues that since individuals are full of contradictory drives and goals, then the groups they form are full of contradiction. Thus, at heart, we want our leaders to reflect the contradictions we all feel. Bill Clinton was such a successfull politician because of his foibles. Whole organizations have to reflect the full spectrum of forces acting between and through individuals: "Thus the American industrial organization is a hard-boiled trader, a scholar, a patron of modern architecture, a thrifty housewife, a philanthropist, a statesman preaching sound principles of government, a patriot, and a sentimental protector of widows and orphans at the same time." | >
> | Since our institutions are built to respond to the enthusiasms of masses of people, it would help to understand a little about the dynamics of groups of people. Arnold argues that since individuals are full of contradictory drives and goals, then the groups they form are full of contradiction. Thus, at heart, we want our leaders to reflect the contradictions we all feel. Bill Clinton was such a successfull politician because of, not in spite of, his foibles. Organizations need to reflect the full spectrum of forces acting between and through individuals: "Thus the American industrial organization is a hard-boiled trader, a scholar, a patron of modern architecture, a thrifty housewife, a philanthropist, a statesman preaching sound principles of government, a patriot, and a sentimental protector of widows and orphans at the same time." | | | Individuals have an infinite capacity to contradict themselves. This capacity is only amplified when lots of them get together. The bulls are actually women on roller skates. New Orleans is not Pamplona. There is no danger of goring. And yet everyone becomes what they are not and runs screaming down the street. Nothing is produced except enthusiasm. There is no ulterior motive. Por qué no?
Organization | |
>
> | A creed or a constitution. | | | The New Orleans running of the bulls as about as close as you can get to the abstract limit of pure-getting-together-without-an-ulterior-motive. In general the enthusiasm of groups is organized towards some end: "political realism about democracy was brought home to us by the success of the dictatorships in Russia and Germany. In these countries the revolutionary governments undertook deliberately to arouse the intense enthusiasm of their poples and to keep it at a high pitch. The method used was not rational; it was the rhythm of uniforms, salutes, marching feet, and national games..." As Arnold recognizes, an organized body can be formed out of a mob by using rhythm, music, and ceremony in general. The undetermined enthusiasm created by what William McNeil? calls "Moving together in time" -- marching, saluting, moving rhythmically with others -- is given content. Music, to take only one tool that can form a unified body out of a mob, works because, like drives that respond to rhythm, it does not know the law of non-contradiction. Whoever, or whatever, attaches himself to music can take on the ability to (temporarily) resolve the contradictions that run through a group.
The organization of a body of people by music is most clearly seen at a concert of purely instrumental music. There is no content to a Mozart symphony. The musicians are playing with pure organization. The anxiety and tension created by a piece of music is produced by the danger of it all "falling apart". A (classical at least) composer approaches the edge of what a listener can keep organized in their head, only to bring it back from the abyss. This pure organization creates a body politic without a goal, without a content. It can do this because it suspends the law of non-contradiction for a period of time. Sometimes, though, it can all "fall apart". Take the response to the first performance of Stravinski's The Rite of Spring as an instance of the composer leading a group of people to an organization that was just too foreign. Or for the reverse processs, take the end of Robert Altman's movie Nashville. During a concert sponsored by a political canidate the diva is killed. It looks like a riot is about to break out. The other star singer, who has political ambitions, grabs the microphone and yells: "This is Nashville, you show 'em what we're made of. They can't do this to us here in Nashville. Okay, everybody, sing!" And as a young woman steps into the fallen diva's shoes, everyone sings: "You may say I ain't free. It don't worry me."
3 | |
<
< | Arnold is emphatic that no one person can by pure force of will or pure creative power change the organization of a group. "Men--even learned men-- cannot 'think up' forms of social organization." Thus if you want to get anything done within a group of people, you need to abandon the dream of changing them: "The politican does not attempt to change the mythology. He works with it unscrupuosly to get results." The interia created by a group of people is too great to move by pure force of will or intellect. So a lawyer certainly doesn't create things from nothing. The idea is that the contradictions that animate a body of people must be respected. They need to be both spiritually and practically satisfied. On a spiritual level the contradictions are temporarily resolved by cathartic ceremony. And more or less behind the scenes the contradictory practical needs must be met by effective institutions. Right now
| | |
--PatrickCronin |
|
|
PatrickCroninThirdPaper 15 - 22 Jul 2009 - Main.PatrickCronin
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="ThirdPaper" |
|---|
| | | This endless revision process feels like psychoanalysis -- there's something I want to write about and the last two versions of this paper have been more about barriers to writing about that subject than about the subject itself. I'm in the process of revising this paper a third time following my conversation with Anja at the bottom of the page. I'm trying to narrow my subject significantly. Once again, it'll look a little ragged for a while. I'm not sure what the schedule is for comments anymore (if there is such a schedule). | |
<
< | May 1968 | >
> | The Mob
This summer I witnessed the running of the bulls in New Orleans. A man dressed as a bishop with a bullhorn yelled from the balcony: "For he that drinks Sangria with me today shall be my brother!", and then hundreds of people dressed in white and red ran screaming down the streets of the French Quarter chased by roller-derby girls with curved horns and baseball bats. Men wore shirts that said "NOLA bulls 2009. Por Qué no?".
I've been fascinated by mobs, especially groups of people that get together seemingly for no other reason than just to be around other people. Pure groups. When large masses of people form, its not surprising that bizarre things happen. It's surprising when nothing abnormal happens.
The base of a political theory has to, at base, join up with the way masses of people function. Thurman Arnold begins The Folklore of Capitalism with this premise: "Today, when sophisticated men speak of democracy as the only workable method of government, they mean that government which does not carry its people along with it emotionally, which depends on force, is insecure." The need to connect with the enthusiams of the body politic is a cold fact recognized by leaders across the political spectrum.
Since our institutions are built to respond to the enthusiasms of masses of people, it would help to understand a little about the dynamics of groups of people. Arnold argues that since individuals are full of contradictory drives and goals, then the groups they form are full of contradiction. Thus, at heart, we want our leaders to reflect the contradictions we all feel. Bill Clinton was such a successfull politician because of his foibles. Whole organizations have to reflect the full spectrum of forces acting between and through individuals: "Thus the American industrial organization is a hard-boiled trader, a scholar, a patron of modern architecture, a thrifty housewife, a philanthropist, a statesman preaching sound principles of government, a patriot, and a sentimental protector of widows and orphans at the same time."
Individuals have an infinite capacity to contradict themselves. This capacity is only amplified when lots of them get together. The bulls are actually women on roller skates. New Orleans is not Pamplona. There is no danger of goring. And yet everyone becomes what they are not and runs screaming down the street. Nothing is produced except enthusiasm. There is no ulterior motive. Por qué no?
Organization
The New Orleans running of the bulls as about as close as you can get to the abstract limit of pure-getting-together-without-an-ulterior-motive. In general the enthusiasm of groups is organized towards some end: "political realism about democracy was brought home to us by the success of the dictatorships in Russia and Germany. In these countries the revolutionary governments undertook deliberately to arouse the intense enthusiasm of their poples and to keep it at a high pitch. The method used was not rational; it was the rhythm of uniforms, salutes, marching feet, and national games..." As Arnold recognizes, an organized body can be formed out of a mob by using rhythm, music, and ceremony in general. The undetermined enthusiasm created by what William McNeil? calls "Moving together in time" -- marching, saluting, moving rhythmically with others -- is given content. Music, to take only one tool that can form a unified body out of a mob, works because, like drives that respond to rhythm, it does not know the law of non-contradiction. Whoever, or whatever, attaches himself to music can take on the ability to (temporarily) resolve the contradictions that run through a group.
The organization of a body of people by music is most clearly seen at a concert of purely instrumental music. There is no content to a Mozart symphony. The musicians are playing with pure organization. The anxiety and tension created by a piece of music is produced by the danger of it all "falling apart". A (classical at least) composer approaches the edge of what a listener can keep organized in their head, only to bring it back from the abyss. This pure organization creates a body politic without a goal, without a content. It can do this because it suspends the law of non-contradiction for a period of time. Sometimes, though, it can all "fall apart". Take the response to the first performance of Stravinski's The Rite of Spring as an instance of the composer leading a group of people to an organization that was just too foreign. Or for the reverse processs, take the end of Robert Altman's movie Nashville. During a concert sponsored by a political canidate the diva is killed. It looks like a riot is about to break out. The other star singer, who has political ambitions, grabs the microphone and yells: "This is Nashville, you show 'em what we're made of. They can't do this to us here in Nashville. Okay, everybody, sing!" And as a young woman steps into the fallen diva's shoes, everyone sings: "You may say I ain't free. It don't worry me."
3
Arnold is emphatic that no one person can by pure force of will or pure creative power change the organization of a group. "Men--even learned men-- cannot 'think up' forms of social organization." Thus if you want to get anything done within a group of people, you need to abandon the dream of changing them: "The politican does not attempt to change the mythology. He works with it unscrupuosly to get results." The interia created by a group of people is too great to move by pure force of will or intellect. So a lawyer certainly doesn't create things from nothing. The idea is that the contradictions that animate a body of people must be respected. They need to be both spiritually and practically satisfied. On a spiritual level the contradictions are temporarily resolved by cathartic ceremony. And more or less behind the scenes the contradictory practical needs must be met by effective institutions. Right now
| | | | |
<
< | For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He dissolved the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic movement by a group of people, but more mundane examples exist. | | | | |
<
< | its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." | | | | |
<
< | There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires and inhibitions -- something like a practical understanding of Freud's super-ego, that institution that is at once intensely personal and collective. | | | | |
<
< | Something basic to human nature is happening here -- some herd-mentality that lies dormant in everyone. In searching for the mechanism to explain collective desire, | | | | |
<
< | Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the result of a collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that promises to answer the question "why do people most desire their own repression?". | | | |
|
|
PatrickCroninThirdPaper 14 - 17 Jul 2009 - Main.PatrickCronin
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="ThirdPaper" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Ok, this is my redo. | | | | |
<
< | The Key to All Mythologies | >
> | WORK IN PROGRESS | | | | |
<
< | "You don't have to change the world." -- Eben during one of our last classes | >
> | This endless revision process feels like psychoanalysis -- there's something I want to write about and the last two versions of this paper have been more about barriers to writing about that subject than about the subject itself. I'm in the process of revising this paper a third time following my conversation with Anja at the bottom of the page. I'm trying to narrow my subject significantly. Once again, it'll look a little ragged for a while. I'm not sure what the schedule is for comments anymore (if there is such a schedule). | | | | |
<
< | The Dream | >
> | May 1968 | | | | |
<
< | For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He dissolved the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic movement by a group of people, but more mundane examples exist. Take the substance of the entertainment industry, exemplified by the life and death of Michael Jackson. In both these examples its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." Millions and millions of people watched Michael Jackson's memorial service on the 7th, and new channels still spend all day reminding us that he's still dead. These people see or hear something that they desire in Michael Jackson. They're moved by him, but it would be hard to explain why. | >
> | For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He dissolved the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic movement by a group of people, but more mundane examples exist. | | | | |
<
< | In each of these examples there are other people that, while they don't participate in collective desires, know how to control them. They destroy them if they become dangerous, or shape them so that they become profitable. They exploit the undetermined nature of the desire to their advantage -- either forcing it to define itself within a pre-existing political structure and thus diffusing the movement (in the case of May 1968), or adding their own content to the desire and profiting from the association (Pepsi or MTV in the case of Michael Jackson). | >
> | its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." | | | | |
<
< | Think of the power I would have if I could understand how mobs worked! There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires and inhibitions -- something like a practical understanding of Freud's super-ego, that institution that is at once intensely personal and collective. If I could understand how this process worked, then I could change the world. | >
> | There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires and inhibitions -- something like a practical understanding of Freud's super-ego, that institution that is at once intensely personal and collective. | | | | |
<
< | Black Holes | >
> | Something basic to human nature is happening here -- some herd-mentality that lies dormant in everyone. In searching for the mechanism to explain collective desire, | | | | |
<
< | Something basic to human nature is happening here -- some herd-mentality that lies dormant in everyone. In searching for the mechanism to explain collective desire, I've been drawn to what George Eliot would call "The Key to all Mythologies" -- grand-unified theories of everything. I tried to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the result of a collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that promises to answer the question "why do people most desire their own repression?". I studied Spinoza's Ethics, which promises a rational explanation for everything, and assures me that when I get to the bottom of something I will discover my own power to act. The idea is that since this herd-behavior is so fundamental, I simply need to get a handle on it and then the steps I need to take to harness it will fall into place naturally. And yet, I still don't know how to change the world. | >
> | Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the result of a collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that promises to answer the question "why do people most desire their own repression?". | | | | |
<
< | I can't blame my failure on these authors. The fault lies in the way I've been reading. I've been looking for a lever and a place to stand that will allow me to move the world with minimal effort. I've assumed that I could understand masses of people like Newton understood gravity, and that this knowledge would teach me how to act. Now I'm embarrassed to say that his theory is a variation of an old theory I adopted in high-school: 1) the world is made up of matter organized into particles; 2) there must be some smallest particle; 3) there must be some laws that govern this particle's movement. Therefore, if I knew what the smallest particle was and how it moved, then I could reconstruct and completely understand the world. I could master the entire world through knowledge.
But looking at what these theories actually do, rather than what they say they could do (if only I knew the secret formula!), it becomes clear that Grand-Unified-Theories that try to reduce the world to one fundamental process, be it the movement of an elementary particle, or the relationship between a group and the individuals that make it up – easily become black holes whose main function is to suck up intellectual energy that could be used for more modest projects.
Other People
The desire to change the world, all by myself that is, is a intellectual and spiritual heat-sink as well. As a practical matter, the weight of the way-things-are is just too great for me to lift by myself, no matter how much history or philosophy or law I absorb.
So how to think without trying to find a theory of everything? And what does it mean to not have to change the world all on your own? Let me start by rethinking the phenomenon I was trying to understand in the first place. The spontaneous desire formed in crowds is first of all a desire to be with other people and to feel that other people exist. It is also the desire to feel the inherent power that is present in a mass of people. So I don't have to change the world, but the world still needs to be changed -- and it is only going to be changed by a lot of people. The task then, is to participate in a movement, rather than to control one. | | |
--PatrickCronin | | | Hope you're having a good summer!
--AnjaHavedal, 14 July 2009
\ No newline at end of file | |
>
> | Yea, I see what you mean Anja. Thanks for the honest criticism. I've been really struggling with narrowing down my topic in these 1,000 word assignments. I'm going to cut out the "theory of everything" stuff. Although it was cathartic to write, after looking at it for a week I agree with you that the only thing that ties it to the first topic is a perhaps idiosyncratic personal issue. I'm going to do some research on a particular example of the mob phenomenon. That should produce a more focused and substantial essay.
-- PatrickCronin? , 16 July 2009 |
|
|
PatrickCroninThirdPaper 13 - 14 Jul 2009 - Main.AnjaHavedal
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="ThirdPaper" |
|---|
| | | Andrew, I'll take a look at that article. Just looked at Wikipedia on Flash Mobs. Looks interesting.
--PatrickCronin, 8 July 2009 | |
>
> | Patrick - While I really enjoyed reading this, and I think you've got some really interesting thoughts, I kind of feel like you have two essays going here - one on mob mentality, and another one on your realization that changing the world does not require you to first develop a theory to explain everything. In my opinion, you're not really doing either one justice. I think the connection is that your wish to understand the workings of collective desires has previously served your wish to change the world by yourself (right?) but this is not a self-evident connection. You lose me on the logical leap from mob mentality to theory of everything. Why does mob mentality have to explain everything? Is it not valuable to understand even if it only explains SOME workings of the world? At the end of your essay I am left a bit confused.
On a completely different note: I'm not sure that the Michael Jackson hysteria fits into your analysis - are you sure that this is an example of mob mentality, or is it rather just a bunch of individuals each mourning Michael Jackson because they feel like they have a personal relationship to him? (maybe you've read that study about how we care about celebrities because our brains are tricked to think that they are part of our "tribe")
I think exploring the "herd mentality that lies dormant in everyone" would be a valuable excercise. What brings it out? Under what circumstances does it spread? How do we prevent those who know how to manipulate it from using it for detrimental purposes (think Nazis or Pol Pot)?
Hope you're having a good summer!
--AnjaHavedal, 14 July 2009 | | | \ No newline at end of file |
|
|