Beauty and the Beast: Vanquishing Shadows At A Time Of Change

Kyle Altis

  
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked

good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get  
to,” said the Cat.  
“I don’t much care where –”said Alice.  
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the  
Cat.
“ – so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an
explanation.  
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you
only walk long enough.”22
 
Sartre urges us to be authentic, to be honest with ourselves “without seeking … true motivations in the reactions of others.”23 Although at the extremes of the gyres the falcon may be on the verge of snapping its sensory tether, has in fact escaped beyond the reach of the falconer’s unaided sensory summons, it cannot be authentic in its actions (and so cannot be free to define its own essence)24 so long as it continues to define itself in the reflective eyes of the falconer – as all human eyes reflect.
The Sphinx’s eyes, “blank and pitiless as the sun”, do not.
The Sphinx will never reveal something we do not ourselves bring. We will
find nothing there of reflective value. We look into those blank eyes seeking a falconer’s inverted justification – and do not find it. The Sphinx has no answers, only, ever, a question, the same question as ever it has posed of us: What is man?
We cannot know that answer until we choose to release ourselves from our
own reflections within the falconer’s eyes, until we act as we act, authentically, without externalising justification. Unlike Camus’ “only serious philosophical question”, Nietzsche was prepared with an alternative: what else could we ever fill void with, except ourselves?
Lacking personal authenticity, lacking the will to vanquish the gruesome
shadow of the Buddha,25 terrified of being condemned to freedom,26 we of the dark moon seek our image elsewhere. Without a unique sense of self, identity shatters, becoming a phenomenal function of perception fragmented into an infinity of external points, external reflections of self. Those eyes become not windows but mirrors: we look into them no longer to identify who we are, but who we should be. Hell is other people. We are bound by how we want to be perceived, being extrapolated into the gaze of other people – and increasingly existing solely in the gaze of other people: we do not exist except in the reflections of their eyes. Having learned that nothing which cannot be measured has value, we seek our justification through increasingly quantifiable external validation. We measure it against the percentage of time others devote to us, against test scores claiming to measure intelligence; especially against money (or potential earnings) and the perceived fiscal value of time.27 Money has become not only metaphor for28 but primary measure of personal value. The secondary conic focus has been pulled through the point of balance into a hyperbolic external.
The sensory technologies of mass media extend those reflecting eyes far
beyond the reach of the immediate reflection – and we have grown so accustomed to seeing our interpreted reflections that we grow uncomfortable in moments of its absence:
                                     
  When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. …        
My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed …29

 
 
… why do you think that Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now?
We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that … He can leave at any time. If it was more than just a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there’s no way we could prevent him from leaving. What distresses you, really … is that ultimately, Truman prefers his “cell”, as you call it.30
           
               
At the changing of the gyres, at the return of man to spirit, we seek guidance from the Weltgeist: only to discover that we have drowned out Spiritus Mundi
with infinite external reproduceable reflections of ourselves.
 
 
The gyres spiral around their
mutual centres without centring, a dynamic balance consisting of continual imbalance. Successive layers of technologies incorporate and amputate those preceding them in a continuing externalising gyre. Each level of technology embraces the previous one, supersedes it – and effectively amputates it. Symbolic representation of language amputates memory (and thus implicitly redefines the Body of Fate), moveable print amputates the need for direct contact between author and viewer on a mass basis, distance aural communication amputates the need for literacy.31,32 It does
not matter whether that previous “technology” happened to be our unaided senses, even direct aspects of individual personality: they, too, are subject to that amputation, for, unused, they atrophy. Each amputation creates a new monopoly, not of information but of dissemination of information, a type of technological theology33 built on precisely the same foundations as any colonising power. Imagination, too, becomes amputated: externalised by a series of media which increasingly do the work of interpretation for the human mind by extending the human senses beyond what mind can physically process. Shifts of image, of sound, of perspective, now occur more quickly than sensory pathways can incorporate and become whole substitutes for individual cognitive analysis.34 Rather, it is the human physiological body alone which reacts instantaneously to each shift with mind only later resolving dissonance by creating a rationale for physiological reaction after the fact.35 Thus the existential inference of essence from personal behaviour, psychologically supported by attribution theory of self-perception in ambiguous36,37 or challenged38 situations, is reinforced and even supplanted by inference on the sole basis of our bodies’ reactions. This in turn creates a collective, external, and very controllable imagination: not one born of the gyres’ Creative Mind but of a technologically incarnated Will served by a very rational aristocracy of experts and specialists who, as the new secular priesthood, have themselves internalised the faith in rational methodology and technology which defines Technopoly:
Technocracy does not have as its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique. Technopoly does. Society is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their techniques and technology, that human beings are, in a sense, worth less than their machinery.39
 
This is entirely in accord with the increasing level of rationalisation as the gyres approach their extremities, and is further reflected in another principle of scientific management: the affairs of the common citizenry are best guided and conducted by experts, with the potential irrationality of individual judgement replaced by rules, laws, and principles which relieve the individual of any responsibility to think at all.40 Method replaces goal within the cause-effect model and indeed becomes its own end and its own justification, invisibly, without seeming to have changed anything at all:
   
 
Technopoly eliminates all alternatives to itself. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant. It does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions meet our new requirements. Technopoly … is totalitarian technology.41
   
The collective, external imagination is only one part of an increasing tendency to delegate to technology further aspects of our beliefs, attitudes, individuality itself. To some extent we have been doing this as individuals for likely as long as the existence of language, but now for the first time it is possible to create the same external identifications on a global basis without even the need of prior military conquest: an average of over 70% of people in the countries evaluated by Gallup polling had received their information about the attack on the World Trade Center by television within the first hour of its occurrence.42 Reporting (description) and interpretation of current events has become not only simultaneous, but synonymous.
     
TABLE 2. Comparison of poll results obtained by two different methods.43
NATIONAL SERVICE: PRO
NATIONAL SERVICE: CON
 1.
 Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?
 2. Do you think there is a lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools?
3.
 Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives?
4.
 Do they respond to a challenge?
5.

Might you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?
1.
 Are you worried about the danger of war?
2.
 Are you unhappy about the growth of armaments?
3.
 Do you think there’s a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?
4.
 Do you think it wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?
5.
 Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?

* Adapted from Lynn J, Jay A, The Complete Yes Prime Minister, London: BBC Books, 1989, pp.106-7.
       

Chomsky’s premise that everybody can know and everybody can judge a

given body of information44 has become undermined by the format of its presentation: a strange and largely invisible return to behaviourism. Headless of Arnold’s warning,45 the Weltgeist continues to be increasingly opaqued by the technological claws of a Cheshire Cat treated with insufficient respect by a
rationalist world, claws hooked into our own bodies and gradually reshaping our minds. Reluctant to face our own void, we find ourselves gradually in a senseless place as seemingly empty as the Sphinx’s eyes, wherein the only meaning to be discovered is that granted by control over others. We dare not look in the nightmare of nothingness in the Sphinx’s eyes but will instead make it bow its head, force upon it a thousand empty reflections to replace the Daimon we have lost, conquering the world within our Truman Show shell.
But infinite expansion is not sustainable. The
beginning of reading is the beginning of forgetting. The beginning of the printed word is the beginning of distance. The Gutenburg Bible spelled the end of

Roman Catholic monopoly in Europe – and the beginning of a publisher’s monopoly (echoed in literacy, echoed in the educator, echoed in the schools): not of information, but of the distributionof information. Now the Internet spells the end of the publisher’s monopoly – and the beginning of a technocratic monopoly, again not of the information itself, but of the distribution of information. The very technologies intended to serve us have enslaved us in an endless hell we have learned to identify as other people: while a “rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.

“In the beginning was the word: and the word was God.”46
Beauty, beast: these are distinctions of perspective. Beauty, often, has a
strong association with the familiar, the comfortable; beast, equally, of what is unknown, vast, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. We cannot extrapolate personal perspective to that unknown. It is too far outside our familiar bounds. Every observation is an interpretation. What we observe, what labels we choose to apply, define, not what is observed, but ourselves. What we expect to see, we will find: not because it exists independently of ourselves – but because we ourselves see it so.
There is a natural tendency to observe the outside world through the lens of
our own paradigm. After all, we are the only persons whom we can more or less know and by whose standards we can to some extent attempt to impose logic upon the world around us. If we react in one way to a particular stimulus, it stands to reason that we might expect another to react in a similar fashion.
When they don’t, we become uncomfortable.
This is not quite the same thing as having been surprised by the reaction of
another. Rather, it is that the other seems to have jumped in an entirely inappropriate or extreme direction in our perspective. We may say to ourselves, “They are not me, there is no reason they should act as me” – but this is intellectual analysis, not gut reaction – and we still see no reason for the other’s reaction. Without that apparent reason, the other has become unpredictable, “unstable”, within the familiar paradigm.
We can pretend the aberration never happened, continuing to operate within
the familiar paradigm, without requirement to resolve the cognitive dissonance between what is seen and what we expect to see. Very rarely we attempt to redefine the paradigm so as to allow for the aberration: doubly difficult in that we begin by extrapolating from our own experiences, motivations, perceptions, often without appreciating the source of that extrapolation to begin with, and without guarantee of identifying the true cause of the perceived aberration, a cyclic empirical matching of observation to circumstance – but what after all is life, but a continually expanding paradigm?
It is easiest, however, simply to accept Beast qua Beast, and attempt to ring it
in comfortable if meaningless labels: “unpredictable”, “unstable”, “unbalanced”, “stupid”, “idiot”. They tell us no more about Beast than we knew before: but they also tell us there is no need to know anything more. In the true tradition of Technopolist methodology, the “aberrant” behaviour has become its own explanation: the Beast acts without apparent reason because it is unpredictable; it is unpredictable because it acts without apparent reason.
We have not yet developed a United Field Theory of self. The very term is
meaningless. To identify environment and implicitly essence and/or existence, we would have to step outside all environment, all individual nature – outside the endlessly whirling gyres themselves. The tools we create to examine from inside are shaped both by the perspective of the examiner and by what they examine: a Heisenburgian encircling of a forever unknowable – yet safely and rationally predictable – centre. Heisenburg’s circumferences are strictly defined, even where the exact point escapes strict definition. The Heisenburg tool, refined and adapted to a different genre by Foucault, Derrida, Beckett, Sartre, is itself a function of its environment.
New environments cease to become boundlessly encompassing the moment
they are identified. The new attempts at a United Field Theory of self must also necessarily be linear and temporal, since in the act of encompassing and amputating what has gone before they implicitly acknowledge that something has gone before. Our new millennium attempts at a United Field Theory of self are as old as thought within time. There is no innocent child running in, Newton-clockwork-predictable, with this new year. Our innocence – our ignorance – has been savaged by the unknowns, the quantum unpredictables, the uncontrollables.
                       


CHRISTOF: You can speak. I can hear you.
TRUMAN: Who are you?
CHRISTOF: I am the creator … of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
TRUMAN: And who am I?
CHRISTOF: You’re the star.
TRUMAN: Was nothing real?
CHRISTOF: You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch. Listen to me, Truman. There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. Same lies. The same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear. I know you better than you know yourself.
TRUMAN: You never had a camera in my head!
CHRISTOF: You’re afraid. That’s why you can’t leave. It’s okay, Truman. I understand. I was watching when you took your first step. I watched you on your first day of school. The episode when you lost your first tooth. You can’t leave, Truman. You belong here … with me. … Talk to me. Say something. Hell, say something, goddamnit! You’re on television! You’re live to the whole world!

   
     
TRUMAN [to the audience]: In case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.47
 
Click. The door opens – to the infinite, unimaginable, anguish of absolute freedom. There is unity – but one must be willing to abandon the falconer, to step beyond the bounds of the safe to achieve it. Yeats challenged Lady Gregory to “accept the baptism of the gutter”,48 to go beyond easy Cartesian dualities and embrace mind and heart, objectivity and subjectivity, beauty and beast: to return to the centre and erase circumference altogether. Yet how very easy it is to cling to innocence, to our caterpillar shells, and refuse to emerge …
 
     
  APPENDIX
PICTURE INDEX
BIBLIOGRAPHY
  
     

© 2003 Kyle Altis

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