During the first semester of 2015 I was part of a reading group on the aesthetics and politics, which was facilitated by the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. It was while reading the required texts that I have become aware that we, young scholars, are joining age old debates somewhere in the middle, or sometimes at the end and then we exit again taking particular strands from these debates. Reflecting on the strands I took from each debate I am forced to ask the question: How do we know something is something? I always had this childhood problematic of how did “they” decide that one is one and blue is blue – could blue have been pink and one could have been three. After sharing this with my good friend Lorato her answer was simple yet profound. She said; “we convince others that something is something and then we act like something is something.” If we do not we will drive ourselves to insanity.
I reflected some more and asked myself what do I take from the reading group. I came to the following conclusion: I have become conscious of I. From a certain age I was aware of my existence but never conscious of myself as I. And since I have become conscious of myself I realised, after reading Deleuze’s text on Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Stiegler’s “Cinematic Time” and “Cinematic Consciousness,” that the most dangerous activity, currently, is watching television or anything related to the cinematic. It robs you of the realisation that “I am I” because it alters your subconscious, your emotions, your everything. The effect it has on you is very ‘real.’ Stiegler makes the argument that your conscious flux coincide with the cinematic flux and thus it is difficult for you distinguish between the two. Evidently, you become caught up in the cinematic moment and the moment something horrific happen [for example, the Jon Snow incident in season 5 of Game of Thrones] you experience real emotions such as fear, disgust and betrayal. It is only afterwards you realise it was fiction. Another phenomenon is the pornographic experience. When you are watching porn you have a ‘real’ stimulation even though it is based on a fantasy. For you it is only a fantasy but for the actors the sex was real. Likewise, when you are watching a horror movie you might get scared to the point that you find it difficult to fall asleep even though you know it was not real. However, even after the realisation that it was not real you will find yourself recalling images of your cinematic experience. The cinematic has the potential to evoke strong emotions and believes based on fiction. In many cases it is so strong it distorts the reality of people.
How do we explain this?
We find our explanation for this phenomenon in Bergson. Bergson argues that our consciousness interpret and relate to reality in terms of images. In cinema movement is reproduced in 25 frames per second. This mean that some device took 25 photos in very short succession and when you play it back at the right speed it produces a ‘movement’ on screen. The interesting part is when your conscious recall movement it is only one image. Cinema replaces and adds new images to your ‘real’ images of your lived experiences [my reading of Stiegler]. Thus, it is possible to recall distorted images that are mix with reality and the cinematic. The more you watch the more you are transformed by the cinematic. Horkheimer and Ardorno call this the effect of the culture industry. Thus, the more time you spent in front of the television the harder it becomes to distinguish between reality and fiction. For example, the followers of Keeping up with the Khardashians look like the Khardashians. Look at the Instagram accounts of their followers and you will notice their followers mimic the lives of the Khardashians closely. They alter their reality to become that of the cinematic.
So why does this happen?
The answer is found in the desire of the subject. In the second semester reading group I was introduced to the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Kristeva in her essay the Powers of Horror notes that you can only desire objects. The culture industry alters your desires. It makes you desire the lives of the people on the screen, an artificial live that are not real, and the people who benefit from this is the companies who sell those products. Your mind gets programmed to like a particular brand, a particular individual or a drink. We objectify the lives of celebrities and that informs our desires. When I say you desire something I refer to the subject’s desire.
Let me explain.
Let’s take Thabo as an example. Thabo as the subject has been created since birth. Thabo’s was given the name Thabo and his parents moulded him into Thabo. As Thabo grew up he loved watching cartoons. Cartoons started to alter his desires from ‘primary’ or basic to ‘secondary;’ from food to toys. Thabo soon learns that he is a ‘he’ and not a ‘she.’ He also learns that he is ‘white’ and not ‘black.’ He learns that ‘white’ people have a particular culture and that ‘black’ people have a particular culture. That ‘black’ and ‘white’ people are too different to mix. Thabo is now almost a teenager and is not watching cartoons anymore but television programmes such as Big Bang Theory where there is hardly any ‘black’ people in it. The culture industry programmes his mind to feel comfortable in an all-white world; where ‘black’ people are almost none existent. He watches movies where the hero is ‘white’ and the girl the hero saves is ‘white.’ Slowly the culture industry is programming him to desire only ‘white’ women. As a teenager he is forced to play sport and start to read his father’s Men’s Health magazines. He is so oblivious and comfortable in an all-white world that he does not notice that all the women who are portrayed sexually desirable in the magazine are ‘white.’ Thabo soon only desire ‘white’ women and what a ‘white’ world has to offer.
Now consider this, do you want your child to spent most of his or her time in front of the television, supervised or unsupervised. Television has become the babysitter so that you can spend time online with your fake friends; even if you are sitting next to your child on the couch ‘supervising’ what he or she is watching you are distracted by Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. No wonder children are naughty and constantly seek attention because when last did parents look up from their phones to see what their children are doing. And then we say children grow-up and mature too fast nowadays. This is not the case. Their consciousness are filled with images that are mature and they find it hard to distinguish between reality and fiction. Thus, even though they seem more mature they are not mature since with maturity comes experience. They can mimic maturity and not necessarily be mature. Children need constant attention and reaffirmation; the last thing you want is your child getting it from a fictional world.
Thus, manoeuvring through the texts of the 2015 reading group I became conscious of I. It is only now that I can put an experience I had a couple of years back in the Namaqualand National Park into context. It was away from the confined spaces of my room and office and in the open spaces of nature that I realise I am alive. It was away from the haste of everyday life and the mass media that I realised that I am alive. It was only in the open spaces of nature that I become conscious of my existence, that I am awake. It is only now I realise the way of living in rural areas is to understand the philosophy of living without; where you are satisfied with yourself in relation to the little that you have. Or as my friend Lorato puts it ‘you are also satisfied with yourself, knowing that you can acquire more if you want to.’ This philosophy is possible because most parts of their lives are far removed from the culture industry and the massification of consciousness. It was I who sat on the bench during my lunch time writing this.
I became conscious of I .
