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Just a shining artifact of the past
Nov. 9th, 2007 11:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. High today: 8.
Sign above a water fountain in the York Student Centre: "Please do not place food in the fountain."
Went to talk to the university librarian about the upsetting library yesterday. As I expected, we lamented the deaths of kings and she said they were trying to make things a little better here and there but that what's really bad will only get worse--nothing you can do about it--and it was very depressing. And later I thought maybe it's better to do what most people do, which is to not talk to each other and just resent each other from afar. That way, you can maintain your righteous hopeful fantasies. (No, it's not better, but it has its attraction.) ((I also wondered whether I might show up as an example, in something she says to someone somewhere, of someone who just doesn't get it. Probably not, but I have to wonder. The thing I wanted to impress on her, for all the good it wouldn't do, is that the general run of things is rapidly closing off the spaces where I can do what I think I should do. But there are certainly plenty of people around these days who think that nobody should do what I think I should do--not just that it's not important, but that it's wrong. A fair number of them, apparently, are in the library business. This particular librarian is apparently not one of them. Not enough not one of them to do me much good, but if you really deeply love libraries, these days, libraries the way libraries have always been and could still be until just these last few years, there's hardly any space left for you in the library business, either. Certainly not at a place like York.))
Saw a student production of Rhinoceros tonight. Didn't know anything about it until today, except that it's by Ionesco and therefore weird. The blurbs I read about it today, saying that it was about conformity and fascism, didn't inspire a lot of hope, but, eh, it's a classic, and it's nice to Support The Scene, Man.
The "Director's Note" in the program says, among other things, this: "We looked at the actual definition of 'fascism', coined by Mussolini, and found something very surprising: 'the merging of corporate and state interests'." If this is very surprising, well, I have to say, you sure didn't know much about fascism, and that really doesn't inspire a lot of hope. Anyway, given that, fascism, in this production, is, not reduced to corporatism, but translated into consumerism. The rhinoceroses march around the stage with large stylized UPC codes on them, and eventually pseudo-Starbucks coffee cups. It's interesting in how it doesn't work. For one thing, you can go along with the assumption that rhinocerism=consumerism for a while, but then something comes up in the play that really only works for fascism--for instance, it's a scandal to the main character when each of the people around him becomes a rhinoceros, which doesn't make sense when being a rhinoceros is being a consumerist like it does when being a rhinoceros is being a fascist. More generally, the politics of it just aren't right. The consumerist rhinoceroses are dressed in matching khakis; they're supposed to be homogeneous and anonymous. The Republic's depiction of democracy, the consumerist society where all appetites are equal and free, is a much better reflection and a deeper critique--it captures the diversity of an epitome of cosmopolitan consumerist society like Toronto, and you can't adequately criticize consumerism without taking account of what is not only attractive but actually good about it. (Plato apparently acknowledges that democracies are the only possible societies in which philosophy is possible. Socrates was over seventy before Athens got around to killing him; in Sparta, he never would've had a chance.) The consumerist society is the Athenian democracy; this Rhinoceros gives you an impossible cross between Athens and Sparta.
What's most disturbing about it, though, is that a play against fascism is put on by and performed for people who are not (but might become) fascists. But in this production, it is a play against consumerism put on by and performed for people who are (and will not become no longer) consumerists. The identification of consumerism with fascism, the misrepresentation of consumerism as fascism, allows you to dissociate yourself from what's being criticized. The consumerists are conformists; you identify with the hero, the last holdout, the guy who maintains his individuality. The thing that's most disturbing of all for me is that I identified with him, too, in particular ways--some of his problems are the same as some of the problems I grapple with a lot (like, is it best to just ignore everyone else? Again, this is a real problem where the issue is consumerism; it's not where the issue is fascism: if it's fascism, then the audience knows, no, dude, you cannot take that second-last guy's advice and ignore the rhinoceroses!) Now, you know, I'm not a consumerist like practically everyone else is, but I'm still enough of one that I shouldn't be complacently dissociating myself from the object of a critique of consumerism. So this is the point where the director would say to me, "there ya go, I got ya, eh?" But I doubt the intentions went that far, and I certainly doubt the effects would generally go that far.
Sign above a water fountain in the York Student Centre: "Please do not place food in the fountain."
Went to talk to the university librarian about the upsetting library yesterday. As I expected, we lamented the deaths of kings and she said they were trying to make things a little better here and there but that what's really bad will only get worse--nothing you can do about it--and it was very depressing. And later I thought maybe it's better to do what most people do, which is to not talk to each other and just resent each other from afar. That way, you can maintain your righteous hopeful fantasies. (No, it's not better, but it has its attraction.) ((I also wondered whether I might show up as an example, in something she says to someone somewhere, of someone who just doesn't get it. Probably not, but I have to wonder. The thing I wanted to impress on her, for all the good it wouldn't do, is that the general run of things is rapidly closing off the spaces where I can do what I think I should do. But there are certainly plenty of people around these days who think that nobody should do what I think I should do--not just that it's not important, but that it's wrong. A fair number of them, apparently, are in the library business. This particular librarian is apparently not one of them. Not enough not one of them to do me much good, but if you really deeply love libraries, these days, libraries the way libraries have always been and could still be until just these last few years, there's hardly any space left for you in the library business, either. Certainly not at a place like York.))
Saw a student production of Rhinoceros tonight. Didn't know anything about it until today, except that it's by Ionesco and therefore weird. The blurbs I read about it today, saying that it was about conformity and fascism, didn't inspire a lot of hope, but, eh, it's a classic, and it's nice to Support The Scene, Man.
The "Director's Note" in the program says, among other things, this: "We looked at the actual definition of 'fascism', coined by Mussolini, and found something very surprising: 'the merging of corporate and state interests'." If this is very surprising, well, I have to say, you sure didn't know much about fascism, and that really doesn't inspire a lot of hope. Anyway, given that, fascism, in this production, is, not reduced to corporatism, but translated into consumerism. The rhinoceroses march around the stage with large stylized UPC codes on them, and eventually pseudo-Starbucks coffee cups. It's interesting in how it doesn't work. For one thing, you can go along with the assumption that rhinocerism=consumerism for a while, but then something comes up in the play that really only works for fascism--for instance, it's a scandal to the main character when each of the people around him becomes a rhinoceros, which doesn't make sense when being a rhinoceros is being a consumerist like it does when being a rhinoceros is being a fascist. More generally, the politics of it just aren't right. The consumerist rhinoceroses are dressed in matching khakis; they're supposed to be homogeneous and anonymous. The Republic's depiction of democracy, the consumerist society where all appetites are equal and free, is a much better reflection and a deeper critique--it captures the diversity of an epitome of cosmopolitan consumerist society like Toronto, and you can't adequately criticize consumerism without taking account of what is not only attractive but actually good about it. (Plato apparently acknowledges that democracies are the only possible societies in which philosophy is possible. Socrates was over seventy before Athens got around to killing him; in Sparta, he never would've had a chance.) The consumerist society is the Athenian democracy; this Rhinoceros gives you an impossible cross between Athens and Sparta.
What's most disturbing about it, though, is that a play against fascism is put on by and performed for people who are not (but might become) fascists. But in this production, it is a play against consumerism put on by and performed for people who are (and will not become no longer) consumerists. The identification of consumerism with fascism, the misrepresentation of consumerism as fascism, allows you to dissociate yourself from what's being criticized. The consumerists are conformists; you identify with the hero, the last holdout, the guy who maintains his individuality. The thing that's most disturbing of all for me is that I identified with him, too, in particular ways--some of his problems are the same as some of the problems I grapple with a lot (like, is it best to just ignore everyone else? Again, this is a real problem where the issue is consumerism; it's not where the issue is fascism: if it's fascism, then the audience knows, no, dude, you cannot take that second-last guy's advice and ignore the rhinoceroses!) Now, you know, I'm not a consumerist like practically everyone else is, but I'm still enough of one that I shouldn't be complacently dissociating myself from the object of a critique of consumerism. So this is the point where the director would say to me, "there ya go, I got ya, eh?" But I doubt the intentions went that far, and I certainly doubt the effects would generally go that far.
