context matters

Original

Parody

art in an age of mechanical reproduction

"What's appropriation art? It's when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotation."

why we need friends

Most of us value the opinion of our friends more than the opinion of some stranger off the street. This is true especially when it’s a question of who we think can offer the best account of our character. Unlike strangers or occasional acquaintances, we know our friends and they know us. Indeed, friends tend to know each other better than anyone else. It is my contention that friends know each other better because of the sort of relationship they have. Our friends know us so well not only because we disclose our identities more fully to them, but also because our identities are more closely linked to our friends. Though we have usually developed a sense of self by the time we enter into most of our friendships, once they are entered into these friendships—and typically alter—that understanding.

Like other close relationships, friendship is a relation that exerts a special influence on the self. This relation’s unique capacity to affect personal identity results from the level of intimacy it encourages and the security that it offers the individuals involved. Though the effects of friendship on personal identity may not be as dramatic as the effects of the relations that individuals have with their parents or care-givers during their formative years, the friendships that individuals have in childhood and over the course of their lives do serve to shape their selves. As relational theories like Sartre’s explain, a sense of self not only emerges within a social framework, it is something that is affected continually by social relations. Though our sense of self tends to achieve an increasing degree of stability as we move toward adulthood, our selves are never fixed. Rather, our selves are always evolving. As we grow and change through the course of our lives, so too does our conception of self. Our selves change subtly but constantly in response to our relations to others and the information these relations provide.

Friendships are especially influential when it comes to the self because we let ourselves go with our friends. Unlike in other situations in which individuals may feel that they need to be on guard or otherwise forthcoming with respect to personal information, individuals tend to tell and show all to their friends. Individuals are less reserved in their speech and behavior with friends than they are with others generally. Individuals tend to be more open with their friends because they feel safe with them. The open and honest communications that friendships encourage are important to the formation of self because selves are formed relationally. As Sartre argues, a self is an idea that an individual forms reflexively in response to the information she derives from her social relations. Our relations with others allow us to see ourselves. In order to show us ourselves, others need information. Without ample and accurate information, others cannot do that effectively. Without a reasonable degree of openness, the understanding of self that an individual can derive from her relationships is at best a superficial one.

Real friendships however are not superficial. We trust our friends and tend to be open and honest with them. We are able derive a dependable sense of ourselves from our friendships because we share ourselves more fully with our friends and because we trust the information they offer. Our friendships contribute to the shaping of our selves because of the unique closeness and camaraderie that they promote. Unlike with other individuals, we share our deepest thoughts and dreams with our friends. The trust and closeness implicit in the relation makes it possible for us to tell our friends our most embarrassing secrets. Often without knowing what will result from the activity, we spill our hearts out to our friends. Often to our surprise, the relations we have with our friends make us to realize things we never knew about ourselves. The conversations we have with our friends commonly compel individual insight. The unexpected arguments we engage in often expose deeply held personal principles. The experiences we share disclose to us interests and dispositions that were hitherto unknown. Ultimately, giving ourselves over to friendship gives us a fuller sense of ourselves. Friendships inform our sense of self because the journey to self is one of mutual discovery. Selves are forged through our associations with others. The structures of our selves are affected by each successive relation. Friendships influence the shaping of self more than other sorts of relations because we are so deeply invested in them.

- Jennifer McMahon

belief is absurd, but necessary

The "real self", that is, a coherent, unified subject underneath the show, is a fiction. There is nothing but the show itself.

Man is nothing in himself. Without the narratives, the clothing and the “things that make life the way we wish it were,” there is no one. That’s why we need to buy a life story. The nothingness is all the more apparent if we consider the impossibility of our autobiography. An autobiography is the history of one’s life written by oneself. The “I” is experienced by us as emptiness and as desire. In other words, as dissatisfaction. It is this constant dissatisfaction that creates what Marx identifies as “the proliferation of needs.” Rather than recognizing that we lack, we constantly strive to “make our lives as we wish they were.” The clothes in this case really do make the man. The narratives give us the sense of being the main character in a story far more interesting than the one we live. Now all I need to do to be that character is to buy the costume. I recognize the absurdity of it, but, ironically, I am still committed to the fiction. In fact, recognizing the absurdity only makes me more comfortable buying, as I at one and the same time recognize and refuse to recognize that there is nothing to me but the narratives. Kierkegaard, taking up a dictum attributed to the early Church Father Tertullian, said “I believe because it is absurd." Now we buy because it is absurd, but we have to if we are to maintain that fiction that gives us coherence, and we have to believe that it is absurd to avoid recognizing the lack of coherence, to avoid recognizing what reality shows us: that there is no unified subject beneath the appearance, that beneath the appearance there is no one at all.

The ironist recognizes this, but, necessarily, lives in the fiction. The ironist is in a much better position, however, than the cynic. Cynicism leaves one in an endless loop wondering why everyone doesn’t understand the contradictions he sees. The ironist does understand this and also understands her own commitment to the fiction. The cynic is frustrated that it doesn’t make sense that we participate in the fiction. The ironist simply smiles at it. She doesn’t experience the lack of a coherent self and consistent world. If she did, she would be psychotic. Nonetheless, the ironist recognizes the necessity of the fiction and appreciates the absurdity.

- Norah Martin

the importance of friends for Self

Most people have friends. Friends are individuals with whom we share our time, our dreams, and even our insecurities. Friends are indispensable sources of support in our times of need. They are the ones whose company we seek in times of joy. We cherish our friends in large part because we feel we can be ourselves with them. It is my contention that we not only share ourselves with our friends, but that our selves are structured by our friendships. Our friends contribute to making us who we are. Our friends affect us in indelible ways. We would not be the same without them. Personal identity is established relationally.

In order to have a self, Sartre asserts that the individual needs others. He contends that corporeal and linguistic interactions with others “are the necessary condition of all thought which I would attempt to form concerning myself”. In Sartre’s estimation, personal identity is not something that exists independent of others. Rather, it is something that emerges within a social context.

The reason that the consolidation of self requires the input of others is because the individual is incapable of developing an objective sense of herself without assistance. Ultimately, a self is an idea, a concept that is formulated reflexively. What it means to have a self is to possess a sense of oneself as an object, or thing. To have a self is to apprehend oneself as an entity with concrete characteristics, definitive aims and aversions. A sense of self is essential to the individual because it makes it possible for the individual to make informed choices. Imagine trying to make a decision about a career if one had no sense of self, no sense of personal aptitudes and interests, no sense of personal dislikes and incapacities. It would be impossible. A sense of self guides an individual in her decision-making. Though individuals need selves, they cannot develop them in isolation.

Sartre asserts that selves are created frcm the internalization of information that social relations provide. He maintains that our selves are continually influenced and altered by our relationships. According to Sartre, from the time we are small children, we look to others to learn not only about the world, but about ourselves. We search others’ eyes and analyze their comments in an effort to glean information about who we are. Sartre believes that our interactions with others are the living mirrors that keep us continually informed of our selves.

We cannot escape the fact that we are social beings. Though we might want to, we cannot get away from the fact that we need others in order to have selves. In Sartre’s estimation, individuals exist in a position of uncomfortable and inescapable dependency when it comes to the consolidation of self. We can develop a sense of self only in relation to others, but all too often the assessments they offer are shallow stereotypes or demeaning characterizations that fail to recognize our intrinsic capacity for growth and change.

In conclusion, both Sartre and Seinfeld reveal that others are essential to the development of self. Both Sartre and Seinfeld demonstrate that we discover our identities with others. They reveal that subjectivity is predicated on sociality. What Seinfeld does more effectively than Sartre is illustrate the positive role that friends play in the development of personal identity. The sitcom reveals that our friendships affect our selves more than do other sorts of relations. It illustrates that friendship facilitates self-discovery. Instead of fostering apprehension about friendship, Seinfeld evokes an appreciation of the security that this relation provides. Seinfeld shows how much we depend on our friends for our identity. It makes us appreciate how much we need our friends to be ourselves.

- Jennifer McMahon

context matters, everything is relative

Let me start with a fundamental observation: most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context. We don’t know what kind of racing bike we want--until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don’t know what kind of speaker system we like--until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one. We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is relative, and that’s the point. Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we want runway lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels.

Can we do anything about this issue of relativity? The good news is that we can often control the “circles” around us; moving toward smaller circles that boost our relative happiness. If we are at our class reunion, and there’s a “big circle” in the middle of the room with a drink in his hand, boasting of his big salary, we can consciously take several steps away and talk with someone else. If we are thinking of buying a new house, we can be selective about the open houses we go to, skipping the houses that are above our means. If we are thinking about buying a new car, we can focus on the models that we can afford, and so on.

A few decades ago. the naturalist Konrad Lorenz discovered that goslings, upon breaking out of their eggs, become attached to the first moving object they encounter (which is generally their mother). Lorenz knew this because in one experiment he became the first thing they saw, and they followed him loyally from then on through adolescence. With that, Lorenz demonstrated not only that goslings make initial decisions based on what's available in their environment, but that they stick with a decision once it has been made. Lorenz called this natural phenomenon imprinting. Is the human brain, then, wired like that of a gosling? Do our first impressions and decisions become imprinted? And if so, how does this imprinting play out in our lives? Is religion imprinted?

- Dan Ariley

fictions--money, religion

By "performative ideology" Zizek means a form of ideological consciousness in which we know that we are dealing with a fiction, but in which the fiction nonetheless regulates our actual real behavior. Although we know that we are dealing with a fiction, we regulate reality as though the fiction were real. Ironically, in doing this we make the fiction real. Money is one example. When people use it, they know that there is nothing magical about it. It is a simply a means of exchange that gives the one who has it the right to certain things. The problem is that people act as if money in itself is wealth.

Religion is another example. Faith makes a fiction--money, religion--real.

fake it till you make it.

If you're engaged in as many different types of relationships as me, you need to be able to be flexible, adapt to the particular type of people you are at that point engaged with. Then, which "self" is the real self? There is no one singular self. The self is the composite aggregation of all of these differing selves. Authenticity to oneself becomes moot when all of these differing selves or roles are you. Playing the role, acting the role--you become the role. Acting is living, as long as the actor and audience both believe the performance.

We are constantly acting. There is nothing new about this modern age where we seem to have multiple roles, multiple identities. The reason why it's obvious that we're acting in many different roles now is that the need for many different roles didn't exist before. In a pre-modern age where you only saw your family on a farm for most of your life only required one singular identity. And only with the invention of language and print, where you could formulate your own thoughts, did a conception of an individual self become possible. But with industrialization came modernity. Urbanization, transportation and communications revolutions that enabled one to meet and interact with many more people required one to have multiple identities--co-workers, friends, family, relatives, acquaintances, etc. Now with the Internet and with continued globalization, the opportunity to expand our networks grew exponentially and the need for multiple, often disparate identities.

I once thought that I needed to be true to myself when interacting with different types of people. Don't deceive. Don't say something you are not. Don't say you're Christian when you're not Christian. But why? When we're all performing, acting a role, what importance does authenticity to one's self have? Only when the performance is no longer credible must the show stop. But before then, play on and reap the benefits. Fake it till you make it.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts...

- William Shakesphere

the self as social construction

Identity is based on: consciousness/present awareness, memory, and relationships with other people and their memory and consciousness. Without these things, you have no identity. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Can something exist without it being perceived? Without an objective transcendental God, no. Perception is dependent on the perceiver. If you lose your memory, your past identity disappears. Only because other people remember who you were, does a former remnant of your past identity remain. But take away those people and your previous identity disappears.

In one sense, then without your memory or consciousness, your relations with other people constitute your identity. Your personal identity is the composite of relational experiences that make up your personal history.

When near death, most people reminisce about the experiences of deep connections they had with others--family, friends, and colleagues. It is the empathetic moments in one's life that are the most powerful memories and the experiences that comfort and give a sense of connection, participation, and meaning to one's sojourn.

Is it no surprise then that over and over again in happiness research and throughout the teachings of every religion around the world, that happiness is said to be fundamentally centered around the quality of one's relations with other people, especially one's close friends and family. These people know you best, they are your link to this current life. They provide connection, meaning, and most importantly, existence.

When one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist.

the pastiche personality

What does dramaturgical consciousness tell us about the psyche of the millennial generation? Many psychologists--perhaps most--agree that in a diverse, complex, interconnected world of increasing novelty and fast-changing contexts, with children growing growing up in both cyberspace and real space, and in both a parallel and linear temporality, multiple role-playing and myriad identities are becoming the norm. They disagree as to whether dramaturgical consciousness is necessarily leading to an advance in consciousness or possibly a disintegration.

Kenneth J. Gergen acknowledges that in a globalizing world that is connected at the speed of light, “we engage in greater numbers of relationships, in a greater variety of forms, and with greater intensities than ever before.” We are awash in relationships, some virtual, others real. Where privacy was the coveted value of a bourgeois generation which defined freedom in terms of autonomy and exclusivity, access is the most sought after value of the Millennial Generation, which defines freedom in terms of the depth and scope of one’s relationships. Exclusivity has become less important than inclusivity, and the competitive ethos is beginning to be challenged—albeit tentatively—by an ethos of collaboration.

In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, where one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist. Alone time—as distinguished from being lonely –continues to shrink and is already approaching near zero in a 24/7 interconnected world. In a time society, every spare nanosecond becomes an opportunity to make “another connection.”

We live in a world in which getting and holding one another’s attention becomes paramount, and relationships of all kinds become central to our existence. The old idea of “mine versus thine,” which fostered the sense of a predictable “one-dimensional self,” is giving way to the new idea of inclusivity and a “multidimensional self.’’ Gergen observes:

The relatively coherent and unified sense of self inherent in a traditional culture gives way to manifold and competing potenials. A multiphrenic condiction emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being.

Like improv artists caught up in ever-changing contexts and fast-moving story lines, each vying for our attention, we are forced to shift into new roles and switch back and forth between different sets and scripts so quickly that we risk slowly losing ourselves in the labyrinthine network of short-lived and ever-changing connections and experiences in which we find ourselves embedded. Gergen warns that:

This fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relationships. These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an “authentic self” with knowable characteristics recedes from view. The fully saturated self becomes no self at all.

Gergen worries that in the new world unfolding,

the self vanishes fully into a stage of relatedness…One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relationships in which he or she is embedded…thus placing relationships in the central position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of Western history.

Most postmodern thinkers welcome the new sense of a relational self, suggesting that by breaking down the barriers of “mine versus thine,” we open up the possibility of a more tolerant, multicultural approach to socialization in the twenty-first century. Jean Baudrillard, for one, sees an unfolding globalized society in which “our private sphere has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects is played out.”We no longer exist as subjects at all, argues Baudrillard, but, rather, “as terminals of multiple networks.”

Robert J. Lifton has another take on the shift in consciousness. Lifton believes that dramaturgical consciousness–having multiple personas is a coping mechanism, a way for the psyche to accommodate the escalating demands being placed on it in the emerging hyper-real global society. Lifton argues that playing roles and having multiple personas, far from representing the disappearance of self, is really a more plastic and mature stage of consciousness in which a person is able to live with ambiguities and complex and often competing priorities. Being able to live and experience as many potential realities as possible, sometimes even at the same time, says Lifton, requires a protean consciousness.

Gergen seems to share some common ground with Lifton, but with reservations. It’s not that Gergen is pessimistic about where human consciousness is heading. He would agree with the philosopher Martin Buber’s analysis of human nature. Buber believed that “in the beginning is the relationship.” Gergen sees a complex globalizing world in which human beings are becoming increasingly embedded in relationships of every style and kind. His concern is that the relational demands on our attention and psyche could overwhelm our individual and collective consciousness and plunge identity into chaos.

Gergen raises an important qualification that dramaturgical theorists often ignore or skirt. That is, that the dramaturgical way of thinking is unique to the modern age. He notes that,

The sense of “playing a role” depends for its palpability on the contrasting sense of a “real self.” If there is no consciousness of what it is to be “true to self” there is no meaning to “playing a role.”

By the time Shakespeare wrote that “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players,” the self was already developed enough to understand when it was playing a role—the mind could separate itself sufficiently from its behavior to consciously take on a persona or mask and know that it was doing so. Today the self has to take on so many new roles and continually shift from role to role so quickly that it runs the risk of withering away altogether.

As the dramaturgical self becomes even more plastic and thespian, and such behavior comes to be thought of as normal, the very idea of authenticity recedes in importance. To be “authentic” presupposes an immutable core self, an autonomous psyche. In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, however,

the pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation.

The dramaturgical self, then, is open to two very different interpretations. Sociologist Louis Zurcher suggests that if we abandon the idea of the self as “an object” and think of it more as “a process,” then the self is open “to the widest possible experience” and becomes truly cosmopolitan.

But Zurcher also warns that the mutable self can just as easily lead to a more pronounced narcissism, as individuals lose a sense of an authentic self to which they are beholden and accountable and become mired in deceit after deceit—a Machiavellian existence—where role-playing becomes instrumental to advancing endless self-gratification.

Gergen, in the final analysis, appears guardedly optimistic about the future of human consciousness. He holds out hope that in an increasingly interconnected and collaborative world, made up of ever more embedded relationships that transcend traditional boundaries that separate “mine from thine,” that “we can move from a self-centered system of beliefs to consciousness of an inseparable relatedness with others”—I and thou. That’s possible, but only if we retain a sufficient sense of self as an “I” to allow the empathic impulse to grow.

While each of us is a composite of the relationships that makes us up, it is the unique constellation of relational experiences that separate one person from another. There is no in inherent contradiction in believing that the self is made up of the sum total of experiences that an indivdual is embedded in over a lifetime, and the idea that those same embedded relationships and experiences make one a unique being, different from all others. It is only by keeping that distinction in mind that empathic consciousness can continue to grow and become the psychic and social glue for a global consciousness.

If the sense of self as a unique ensemble of relationships is lost, and one becomes only a “we,” empathy is lost and the historical progression toward global consciousness dies. That’s because empathic awareness is born out of the sense that others, like ourselves, are unique, mortal beings. When we empathize with another, it’s because we recognize her fragile finite nature, her vulnerability, and her one and only life. We experience her existential aloneness and her personal plight and her struggle to be and succeed as if it were our own. Our empathic embrace is our way of rooting for her and celebrating her life.

If we fall prey to an undifferentiated global “we,” we may find ourselves back to square one, when we lived in an undifferentiated mythological fog, with little sense of self and only a rudimentary sense of empathic distress built into our biology. Maintaining a dialectic balance between an ever more differentiated sense of self, embedded in an ever more integrated relational web that encompasses the world, is the critical test that might well determine the future prospects for our survival as a species.

- Jermey Rifkin

different selves

“Your mom and your boyfriend are rarely in the same room,” she said, “and that’s why Christmas and Thanksgiving are such a stressful time for people, because their worlds collapse. On Facebook you’re in a long extended Thanksgiving dinner with everyone you ever knew, and people find that difficult to deal with.”

Meanwhile, people’s offline social lives have evolved to become more segmented and specialized, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. In recent decades, real-life social networks have changed, he said. People now turn to one group of friends for financial advice and another for political or spiritual discussions, for instance.

- Claire Miller

the self as performance

Dramaturgical consciousness becomes almost a necessity in a complex, interconnected, high-speed civilization. If life is the acting out of countless personal and collective social dramas, then the more complex the economic and social networks in which one is embedded, the more diverse roles each person is called on to play.

In the dramaturgical way of looking at human behavior, the self is no longer a private possession of an individual but, rather, a sense given to a person by the very people he wishes to share it with. The self then, is not an entity, but rather a kind of fictional, constructed, consensually validated quality that results from the interaction and communication between people. If so, then one’s very being in the world depends on acting out scripts onstage with other players, each of whom validates a part of one’s selfhood. This view is quite different from Hegel’s notion that each person’s unique self is both imprinted in and manifested by the possessions he or she acquires over a lifetime.

The dramaturgical perspective places communications at the heart of human activity, redefines the self in relational terms, makes experience itself a theatrical affair, and transforms property into symbols that help people act out their many dramatic roles as they flit in and out of networks of lived experiences, each representing a different aspect of their life story. The dramaturgical perspective is, in the final analysis a vivid description of the state of mind that accompanies a generation that is continually shifting identities, roles, scripts, and stage settings, as it toggles between social and commercial networks, both in virtual and real space.

Dramaturgical consciousness raises the troublesome question of authenticity. Whenever the question of performance comes up, it inevitably leads to the related question of pretending versus believing.

In the age of mythical consciousness, being heroic was the measure of a man, while in the age of theological consciousness, one was expected to be pious, and in the age of ideological consciousness, men of goodwill were expected to be sincere, rational, and of good character. In the age of psychological consciousness, being personable and open-minded became an obsession. For the generation growing up in a dramaturgical consciousness, however, being authentic becomes the test of a man or woman.

If human beings are, by their very nature, dramaturgical, then how do we establish the idea of authenticity? If everyone is always consciously, or even unconsciously, playing out multiple roles with different scripts and on different stages, how do we know who the authentic person is behind all of the masks?

The question of authenticity is brought up whenever the dramaturgical theory of conscious behavior is used to describe how people act in social situations. Quite simply, there is the disquieting feeling that human behavior, if it is truly dramaturgical, is not very honest. After all, in one sense, theater without deceit is an impossibility. In another sense, however, taking on different masks—personas—in different situations might be an authentic expression of one aspect of a person’s identity. That is, if each of us is in fact a composite of multiple personalities, then the question is if we were true to the specific role we played at the moment.

Again, the theater offers a way to distinguish between pure deceit, on the one hand, and active imagination on the other hand. While deceit is universally disparaged, active imagination is lauded as essential to creating a sense of self and world and forming mature bonds of empathy. Theater theorists like Constantine Stanislavski talk about surface acting versus deep acting. The first relies on the art of deceit, the second on the art of imagination. Surface acting is form over substance, while deep acting emanates from deep inside the performer’s subconscious.

With surface acting, the performer uses grand gestures, modulated tones, and exaggerated movements to “portray” a character, but puts nothing of his own life into the part…it’s all technique. Stanislavski says of surface acting,

[its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you…Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself.

In other words, with surface acting, the actor is acting as if he had feeling but not really feeling as he is acting. True deep acting, by contrast, which Stanislavski terms method acting, comes about when the actor reaches into his own subconscious and semiconscious memory and searches for an analogous past emotional experience that he might draw upon that would allow him to feel as if he were experiencing the emotional state of the character he is playing.

Stanislavski cautioned actors not to simply try to evoke a feeling de novo, saying that is not the way emotions are generated in real life. He writes,

On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake…Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer for its own sake.

Stanislavski points out that all feelings have a history—they are the result of past embodied experiences. Therefore, deep acting requires the actor to induce his own subconscious and remember how he felt and the emotions he conjured up in similar situations.

The aim of the actor’s preparation is to cross the threshold of the subconscious…Beforehand we have “true-seeming feeling,” afterwards “sincerity of emotion”.

Remembering experiences emotionally is important in calling them forth in the future. Stanisiavski asks his actors to train themselves to think of their feelings as an object as well as an experience, with the thought that they might be called up and used at a future time.

The memory of a past feeling, however, only becomes valuable to an actor if he can harness it with his imagination and act as if that feeling were happening again in the execution of his role. He must feel the role he is playing as if he were that person. With deep acting, an actor becomes transformed for a brief period of time and emotionally becomes what he is portraying. But when his performance ends, the part ends as well. In real life, we all engage in deep acting as well, but with a different modus operandi—affecting the reality of our relationships with others. In real life, deep acting has real-life real consequences.

In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild reports on her study of Delta Airlines flight attendant training courses, where personnel were instructed in the proper emotional engagement with passengers. While the flight attendant training was purely instructional and did not involve attendants in deep acting, the attendants themselves reported that they often did so, on their own, when on the job.

A flight attendant might psych herself up before putting on the “happy face” by conjuring up past experiences that made her feel happy and bring those feelings to the job. One flight attendant told Hochschild that conjuring up a happy feeling and taking on a happy demeanor invariably has a positive feedback effect.

If I pretend I’m feeling really up, sometimes I actually get into it. The passenger responds to me as though I were friendly, and then more of me responds back.

Another flight attendant said that when she’s dealing with a passenger who’s been drinking too much or getting obnoxious,

I try to remember that if he’s drinking too much, he’s probably scared of flying. I think to myself, “He’s like a little child.” Really, that’s what he is. And when I see him that way, I don’t get mad that he’s yelling at me. He’s like a child yelling at me then.

Hochschild raises the very legitimate concern that acting is increasingly being used as a training technique to prepare a service workforce on how to manage their feelings to optimize commercial relationships in an experiential economy. That’s true, but it is also true that deep acting provides a theory and technique to help train individuals to be more mindful of their own feelings, to keep a firm memory of them, and to improve their ability to conjure up those memories from their subconscious and to harness them to their imagination when the occasion arises, so that they might experience another’s plight as if it were their own. Deep acting, when used for the appropriate pro-social ends, is a powerful mental tool to stimulate empathic feelings. And empathy is the means by which we participate in deeper realms of reality, for reality is the shared understandings we create about the world by dint of the relationships into which we enter.

Deep acting, then, can prepare people to extend the empathic bond and, with it, deepen one’s sense of reality--a far cry from surface acting, which conjures up only facsimiles in form and deceit in execution.

Meryl Streep, arguably the world’s greatest living actress and a master of deep acting, once remarked that “the great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.”

- Jeremy Rifkin

reality as fiction

Why is that we have emotional responses to fiction when we know what is happening isn't real?

Part of the problem is that we don't believe that what we are watching is true.

The point doesn’t seem to be that we don’t believe what is happening is real, but rather that the way the story is told (and now the special effects which influence the realness of the way the story is told) seems to be more influential over how we respond to the story.

Some of the new fictional media even threaten to blur the line between the real and fictional worlds that we experience--some of it may have even made that line irrelevant. That is, we have not come to any conclusions as to whether or not we are able, imaginatively, to enter into fictional spaces in the same way that Neo enters the Matrix. And as Neo is told repeatedly, “you can’t be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it yourself.” Neo has to choose the red pill in order to experience this very different reality for himself. This is similar to the fact that I will never have the same experience or emotional response when someone tells me about a movie or a novel as when I see it or experience it for myself. Is it even possible that we, as viewers, could have the same sort of access to our fictional spaces that Neo had while he was in the desert of the real? Kendall Walton suggests that we experience fictions psychologically, in similar ways as children do physically when they play their games of make-believe. That would imply, however, that we really are able to enter into a fictional space in a way that is relevantly similar to the way Neo enters the reality that is the Matrix. Although we do not physically enter into another space, being able to explain the resulting emotional effects by saying that it is a cognitively similar experience would relieve us of the burden of explaining why we respond to things we believe not to be “real.” That is, if the experiences are cognitively similar, a “belief in the reality of” or the clear distinction between “real” and “unreal” becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.

Don’t misunderstand however. It is clear that we do not have to believe what is going on in the film in order to be affected by it. In fact, we cannot believe what is happening if we are to have an emotionally appropriate (aesthetic) response. This is especially true when it comes to tragedy or horror. Generally, we are not amused by others’ tragic lives nor do we derive pleasure out of watching people chased, stalked, or murdered. But in the context of a fiction, we often enjoy these things. We can enjoy them, however, if only we do not believe they are happening. We can enjoy watching Neo fighting Morpheus, after Neo has learned through a programmed computer simulation of a combination of martial arts, only if we know that neither of them is really being hurt. This goes even further with the kinds of special effects that The Matrix employs since what the viewer sees is what it would be like if time slowed down or even stopped. Since we know that this can’t happen, or it at least isn’t part of our experience we can still allow it to influence our response to the movie. (The bounds of these situations are also being stretched by the media with a new genre of voyeuristic television shows like Surivivor, Real World, and Big Brother. We may even get to the point where we do want to know the presentation is “real” in order to derive aesthetic pleasure out of it.)

The Matrix makes a number of clever and important references to Alice In Wonderland. Alice had many of the same problems in facing her strange new reality as did Neo. From the very beginning, Neo (still Thomas Anderson at that point, outside the rabbit hole) was told to follow the White Rabbit (tattoo), which ultimately led him to the reality. Once Neo arrived, Morpheus said to him, “I imagine right now you are feeling a bit like Alice--tumbling down the rabbit hole.” These explicit references make it clear that the kind of experiences the creators of the film were allowing Neo to have are parallel to the experiences that the viewers have of the film. As viewers, we watch and become increasingly more involved in the new reality that Neo experiences and we acclimate to the different reality at the same time Neo does. Since Alice in Wonderland is a fiction we are nearly all familiar with, we are taken (the viewers of the film and Neo at the same time) into a new wonderland of our own.

When we enter into a fictional world, or let the fictional world enter into our imaginations, we do not “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We cannot willingly decide to believe or disbelieve anything, any more than we can willingly believe it is snowing outside if all visual or sensory cues tell us otherwise. When engaging with fiction we do not suspend a critical faculty, hut rather exercise a creative faculty. We do not actively suspend disbelief, we actively create belief. As we learn to enter into fictional spaces (and I do believe this is something that we have to learn and that requires skills we must practice and develop) we desire more and more to experience the new space more fully. We want to immerse ourselves in the new world, just as Neo begins to immerse himself in the real world outside the Matrix. To do this we can focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our creative faculties to reinforce the reality of the experience, rather than to question it.

How does technologically sophisticated fiction, more and more like “real” events, produce emotive responses? Some argue that we have to understand the way emotions work in response to real events in order to understand how we respond emotively to fiction. This may not be the way to go, however, as it seems that the belief requirement that is missing from our interactions with fictional situations does not prohibit us from profoundly similar experiences physically and phenomenologically. If we feel the same and have relevantly similar emotional responses, why cannot the experience be said to be real? In many ways it can, but we are now getting into an area where fictional spaces and real spaces overlap and even unite. In the same way, the two worlds in The Matrix begin to overlap and unite. At one point, after Neo has been shaved and placed in his new digs, Morpheus takes him into an all white room. Neo is surprised to find that he is dressed the way that he would have been earlier. Morpheus explains to him that this is his “residual self-image” and that it is the “physical image of your digital self.” Neo’s old self-image crosses over from one world to the next. Similarly, Cypher can’t seem to give up the taste and texture of steak, even though he “knows” it isn’t real. Our knowledge of what is real and what isn’t real doesn’t necessarily change the way we behave or respond to these things. We may have to face the possibility that the line that divides appearance and reality (in the Matrix and in our own lives) is not as clear as we once thought it to be. We may even need to actively make that line disappear in order to make sense of our interactions with fictions.

In “reality,” we make judgments about people and situations without having full information all the time must do this just to be practical, since the time it would take to gather all the information we assume would he prohibitive to living our lives. We fill in the gaps of knowledge with guesses and prejudices of our own. Thus, reality may not be as “real” as we tend to think of it, since we do a fair amount of the construction on our own. We do the same with fiction, as we assume those we read about have had relevantly similar human lives, that they function as flesh and blood humans unless otherwise noted, and we assume that they live in a world that works physically in the same way as does ours. In both cases, in reality and with fiction, we are given a skeleton structure of what is happening, and we use our imaginations to fill in the details. With fiction, the structure is carefully constructed so we are given nearly all the relevant information. In reality, on the other hand, the information we use as a basis to construct a coherent understanding of a situation is not given to us in a carefully constructed way. Rather, we pick up certain details and make a comprehensible story of our own, using our own prejudices and biases, working necessarily from our own perspective, which is determined largely by our culture. If this is the case and we do have to create and fill in significant parts of our own realities, we are in a sense, making up our own stories these stories are our lives. Roger Schank explains in his book on narrative and intelligence that:

We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experience because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering . . . But telling a story isn’t rehearsal, it is creation. The act of creating is a memorable experience in itself.

We create meaning and memory through the hearing and telling of stories. Thus reality is more like fiction in terms of story creation than we originally thought, and the question of whether or not we must have a belief requirement in order to have a justified emotion seems now to be misguided.

Even if we do create our own stories to be reality (or our realities as stories) we still have a belief component missing from our assessment when we experience fictional simulations. If I believe that I am walking across the street, whether the cars are fictional or not, I am able to assess that I am in some mortal danger if I stay too long. If I make this assessment while playing a virtual reality game, I am not physically in any danger. Understanding how narrative undermines the distinction between reality and fiction does, however, make the paradox disappear in a certain sense. That is, the problem that we respond differently to fiction and reality no longer holds because the distinction between them has changed. If we put the fiction distinction aside and look to what it is that connects our understanding of both, namely how we comprehend narrative, we can begin to work with a more unified problem, one that will not always, ultimately, lead us to a paradox.

I am not suggesting that fiction and reality are the same or even that they are at times indistinguishable. There is a clear distinction between the epistemologcal (knowing what is real) and the ontological (the existence of things as they are) that will forever differentiate those for us. But what I am suggesting is a much stronger emphasis on how we make sense of both--that is, through narrative and story-telling. The way the story is told, or how it is that we create the story and make sense of it is similar for both fiction and reality. If it is the narrative that we are ultimately responding to, then it does not matter how we construe the emotions to work in response to real experiences and fictional ones--this is a false dichotomy that will continue to leave us in a paradox.

Further, if it is the narrative that we respond to, and the narratives are getting better or at least more vivid through technological developments, then it would make sense that we have increasingly stronger affective responses even though we “know” what we see or experience is not “real.” With the current state of the technology, especially with the kinds of special effects The Matrix provides, we are able to more fully experience both worlds and respond emotively to both. By moving the focus of the debate away from the belief requirement needed for “justified” emotions and understanding the role of stories more fully we can connect the divergent spaces of the real and the representational. We can further see how it is that we function in similar ways to the characters in The Matrix. Neo experiences a new reality as we experience it along with him in parallel ways we never before imagined.

- Sarah Worth

schonberg

Modern composers such as Schonberg threw out the whole idea of expectation. The scales they used deprive us of the notion of a resolution, a root to the scale, or a musical "home," thus creating the illusion of no home, a music adrift, perhaps as a metaphor for a twentieth-century existentialist existence. We still hear these scales used in movies to accompany dream sequences to convey a lack of grounding, or in underwater or outer space scenes to convey weightlessness.

tension : resolution --> contentment

tension : no resolution --> meaninglessness?

narrative : collage

construct : reality

linear : simultaneous

form follows fun

Some people think architecture is on the verge of losing its function and becoming art. Consider the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Instead of following Mies van der Rohe (form follows function), many architects today are following Frank O. Gehry (form doesn't matter as long as it's creative and gets attention).

beauty as a sexist tool

Early on, I was in love with beauty. I don't feel less because I'm in the presence of a beautiful person. I don't go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], "Oh, I'll never be that beautiful!" What a ridiculous attitude to take!—the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don't go [crying], "Oh, I'll never be that fast, I'll never be that strong!" When people look at Michelangelo's David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, "Wow! That is fabulous." When you see a beautiful person: "How beautiful." That's what I'm bringing back to feminism. You go, "What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!"

- Camilla Paglia

authenticity vs performance

We live in a "cut-paste" culture enabled by technology.

- Lawrence Lessig

The concept of "academic integrity" presupposes wholeness, oneness, "ownness," an identity between the writer and what she or he has written, but this value is not dominant among today's youth. Moral judgments of plagiarism, as we shall see, depend on even more fundamental views of personhood and the relations among selves.

Those motivated by the ethic of "authenticity" insist that their words are theirs alone and that all utterances derive from their own, their singular, their individual, integral truth. Nothing could make them pronounce what is not intended as an expression of their own thoughts and feelings. These authentic selves would never plagiarize because they believe to their core that all they say should be theirs and theirs alone. Their key concepts are own, genuine, essence, integral, means, undivided.

By contrast, those motivated by the ethic of what I call "performance" accept that their behavior is mutable, depending on circumstances. All that matters is the effect of their actions, including their speech and writing. Thus they are not wedded to the notion of a singular relationship between their inner feelings and thoughts and their outer expression. They will say what is expected, whatever suits the occasion, whether it is their personal truth or not. Performance selves say and write whatever works for their practical purposes; it need not belong to them alone. They don't feel a tight connection between their words and their inner being, so they don't sweat it if others use their words or if they use the words of others. For them the notion of "self" is multiple rather than singular and unified. Their key concepts are efficacy, nimbleness, comfort, circumstance, ends, goals.

Technology plays a role in the generational transformation that has occurred between the emphasis on authenticity and the emphasis on performance, but it is not an entirely causal one. The shift from authenticity to performance—with all the accompanying desires for play and so on—has in turn led to the development of certain technological innovations.

The authentic self celebrates uniqueness, individual contribution, essence, fixity, and authorship. It is inner-directed. Its words are its own, and are always meant and sincerely believed. The performance self celebrates collaboration, incorporation, fluidity, appearance. It is goal-oriented. Its words are derived from many different sources and may be spoken or written in earnest or in jest, with conviction or just to get along.

- Susan Blum