In Progress

-- By GloverWright - 09 Nov 2012

“O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.” - Psalm 69:5

I.

The self, pardon the expression, is self-correcting. That the city has been the place where young people move “to make new ways of being” is a matter of record; the city has indeed been “the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living.” But I am reminded, occasionally, that maintaining anonymity in a city over any significant time period can be difficult, if not impossible. Regress to the norm, in some sense, may be unavoidable. One cannot always move again.

The possibilities presented by the city are the possibilities of sin. Fran Lebowitz takes especial umbrage at those contemporary city dwellers who delight in knowing their neighbors because, for her, the entire point of living in a city, of leaving where you're from, is that you no longer have to know your neighbors. And not knowing your neighbors relieves you from the responsibility of living a life in accordance with judgments by those who know you, watch you, and think they have some idea, however crude, about what is right for you. That she says, too, that the city is the place of sin is, I think, absolutely right: moving to the city is not strictly about escaping “the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm,” nor just about finding new ways of living, alone or with others. It is about sin and the potential for sin – a negotiation of the relationship between the self and that higher law, divine or not, that has to a certain point governed it – and about deviance.

II.

Academics concerned with privacy often cite Foucault, especially his work on surveillance, discipline, and punishment. More interesting, I think, is his later work on the art of the self, the process of creating and caring for the self, which looks to the Greco-Roman world, including early Christian writers. From this later work emerge powerful and perhaps troubling (though Foucault does not seem to think so) ideas about ways in which people who are endowed with privacy and anonymity seek to turn their privacy back on itself, to cede their anonymity and their freedom. Such attempts are premised on the individual act and process of writing, both to oneself and others. The care of the self is the cleansing of sin – in pre-Christian terms, of impulse – from the self via the written word. The trick is that such writing is not an exorcism but a kind of construction, a self-positing: the horror is that I am what I write, because I write what I think, and thus in order to bear what I read, I must live a kind of appeasing existence, thinking only appeasing thoughts.

In “Self Writing,” Foucault quotes the Vita Antonii of Athanasius:

Let us each note and write down our actions and impulses of the soul as though we were to report them to each other; and you may rest assured that from utter shame of becoming known we shall stop sinning and entertaining sinful thoughts altogether. Who, having sinned, would choose not to lie, hoping to escape detection? 207

So, says Foucault, “what others are to the ascetic in a community, the notebook is to the recluse.” The notebook reminds him that he must constantly be on guard against himself, that sin and shame have no recourse to privacy. Writing constrains “the inner impulses of the soul” just as “the presence of others” constrains conduct. Thus does writing – “a test and a kind of touchstone” – shed light on “the impulses of thought” and dispel “the darkness where [the Devil's] plots are hatched.” 208

More complicated is writing as correspondence, where, in the epistolary relation – the placing of “oneself under the other's gaze” – “the examination of conscience [is] formulated as a written account of oneself: an account of the everyday banality, an account of correct or incorrect actions, of the regimen observed, of the physical or mental exercises in which one engaged.” Conduct subjects itself to potential castigation.

III.

Marshall McLuhan? writes that, by the time of the French Revolution, “typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society,” homogenizing the French nation so that it was comprised of “the same kind of people from north to south.” The result was that “[t]he Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.” 27

Anecdotally, McLuhan? writes about an American solider serving in postwar Italy who was taken aback that all of the advertisements he saw were political and not commercial. The soldier, he says, probably rightly decided that Italy had much progress to make on the road to democracy, because – as the soldier conceived of it – “democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.” 308

That McLuhan? was being somewhat facetious doesn't mean that he wasn't also being serious. Whether “democratic freedom” really consists in the expeditious and maximal exchange of goods and services, which McLuhan? , via his soldier, suggest that it does, is beside the point; what is important is that any community seeking such an exchange “has simply got to homogenize its social life.” 308

Homogeneity “comes easily to the highly literate population of the English-speaking world” whose “special illusion” is that it is “highly aware and individualistic.” But “the lineal process has been pushed out of industry, not only in management and production, but in entertainment, as well. It is the new mosaic form of the TV image that has replaced the Gutenberg structural assumptions.” 308 And that mosaic mesh “compels so much active participation on the part of the consumer that he develops a nostalgia for pre-consumer ways and days.” 309

Thus “the Graphic Revolution has shifted our culture away from private ideals to corporate images,” so that “the photo and TV seduce us from the literate and private 'point of view' to the complex and inclusive world of the group icon.” This is, for McLuhan? , “what advertising does. Instead of presenting a private argument or vista, it offers a way of life that is for everybody or nobody.” 309

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