[This was written some days ago, in a dark mood... a mood partly generated by some of my experiences this last trip to Zürich; not because anything bad actually happened, but instead because of the combination of wrestling with certain concepts, and also working my way through unexpectly painful exercises where I wrote about things long past. Adolescence-long-past, in fact: the emotional and social frustrations that occur for most of us as we learn how to be gay; all of which feels even worse now, as the idiots of America play with varieties of social abuse, in the name of religion...
But all that became philosophical... admittedly, much philosophy really comes from personal experience, and not from some pure thought that is neither earthbound, nor bound to the past...]
Last week, Winston Rowntree published his two hundredth Subnormality comic. Much of his work is complex and overdetermined, in a sometimes funny, sometimes meditative way; but a few of his pieces have been startlingly existential. This one is of course fairly paranoid, and is about the disjunctions between meaning, knowledge, understanding and daily inanity...
… or, perhaps, about the disjunction between paranoia and sanity. But paranoia is often built over huge territories of skepticism, bewilderment and disbelief that we are forced to put away in our youth.... It is no surprise that the comic happens on the eve of the central character's university graduation – at those early junctures in our lives, we are aware of so many different things that are so subtle, so diffuse, so important; and then the world teaches us to forget them, to get a job, follow the available paths, stop paying attention.
(And yes, being older, being mature, also includes other kinds of awareness and balance: but that balance is achieved partially at the cost of forgetting or erasing certain questions, certain hopes or expectations, from consciousness. I suppose the fact that I can spend more time thinking about these lost questions is an advantage of having had a life where personal experiences and plans have gone so far wrong, where people have died, and a self-regulating social personal life, or even a real and concrete home tuft, simply doesn't exist; where one is, in fact, somewhat isolated and disoriented by living. People who are disoriented in this way may be sadder and more confused – but I suspect that they also remember more of the things that matter....)
This reminds me of one of the great disjunctions that appears throughout my academic field, and which I have sometimes highlighted in my work over nearly thirty years – the disjunction between the tiny, pedantically accurate knowledge of technical issues, as opposed to the complexity of what actually happens at the largest level, and how it is perceived or understood. Which is the same disjunction that exists between that which we know and can act on (including most of contemporary science), and that which we can, if only approximately, perceive: a huge gap, a truly, painfully enormous gap – one that is festooned with fragmentary wisps of speculation and wishful thinking, like old spiders' webs trailing across a vast cavern.
On the day this comic appeared, it was annoying to see a reference to the tiresomely boastful Roger S., an intellectually intelligent but distinctly unwise academic in my field, who has made a living trying to debunk everyone else – by pulling us back from that frustrating Gap, by insisting that no one say anything that we don’t know for certain can be known: a common, and deeply tedious, restraint in my small, admittedly rather tame field.
It recalled an experience I had as a postgraduate – I was student assistant and advisee to a psychoacoustician R., whose work on details of sound envelopes and timbral perception was considered radical, at least in a rather small subfield. And it was, perhaps still is, radical: it is quite astounding that we understand so little of how we perceive timbre, and how enormously our traditional methods of acoustically analyzing the difference between, say, a trumpet and an oboe break down in a precise experimental context.
But he and I would endlessly argue about my own research, not his: especially whether I could even be allowed to think about the larger things, the more difficult questions, all of which have their psychological sides: what does a symphony mean, what does a body of compositions by a person mean, what does an entire historical period, with all of its admittedly varied conflicts and changes that nevertheless seem to cluster around a handful of problems, mean? And note that our attitudes and judgments on these things have as much to do with our desires, our psychological complexes and hopes and frustrations, as they do with anything in the (supposedly) 'outside' world.
The Gap means that it is impossible to reach out and way from the details of the micro-event, where we might almost know what we are talking about (at least in technical terms) to discuss the macro-event – which is terribly important of course, which we dream about and wonder about – but which we don’t really understand at all, at least not in any detailed, concrete, technical way. I suppose it is sort of like the gap between the small, fantastic fields occupied by science and by religion... both so heavily hampered by what they want to be.
In these questions, I always remember some of the scientists I have known, and the huge difference between the small-minded lab rats who think that experimental data is both infallible and the only possible means to know anything, as opposed to the more brilliant and subtle-minded scientists who understand that we only do the best we can at the moment, who are happy to speculate to get past the limitations of their assistants.
A particularly good example was a conference a few years ago where we talked about how we understood music, in a context that combined musicians, musicologists and scientists – the lower ranks of the scientists gave tedious papers on detailed subjects, and looked entirely blank when any larger questions were raised; but the brilliant ones, not coincidentally featured conference guests, could bat around complex aesthetic and psychological questions, using free and wild ideas and hopes: courageously willing to admit to the vast distance between what we understand and what we, only intuitively or hopefully, 'know'.
Consider one good and telling example, the particular epistemological/psychological problems of astrophysics: is it any wonder that we would be so endlessly entranced by distant galaxies and stars, and that science fiction would have spent so long focusing on space? It is far away, it is vastly complex, we don’t really understand it, we can’t even be in immediate contact with it – we guess and explore and try to figure things out, but (fortunately, given our psychological need for it to be this way) the system is so vast that we can guess for a very long time before we will get anywhere at all. Or, before it will even become clear that we can't get anywhere.
It seems obvious that astronomy and astrophysics are not merely technically and reasonably possible investigative endeavors for human beings, but that they also combine the aesthetic response to looking up, a certain amount of measurable data, and many sufficiently impossible, unknowable aspects, that we can elide our own epistemological follies – we can pretend that the constant accretion of detail will actually get us closer to some kind of real truth and understanding, especially because it is so impossible to cover all of those light-years that we can displace/externalize our abysmal ignorance into the metaphorical gulfs of space, and pretend that all that we need to know and understand is out there somewhere, rather than in here; and that someday, by traversing territory with our bodies, all will become clear. As though some external action, some predictable and logical progression, will cause everything to... to make sense.
I am undoubtedly disturbed by this at the moment partially because I have been studying Jung, and in what is becoming an increasingly professional context: and there are several levels and loci of particular epistemological disorientation. Because Jung actually liked to live in this Gap: which is both why he still remains interesting (for some people, anyway), and also why such a lot of his writings, and those of the people who come after him, are frankly speculations or wish-fulfillments: in fact, at times, they are almost like prayers.
For instance: the archetype? A transcendental, as well as vague and elusive and sublime, concept; but also really just a place holder for a vast field where we simply and truly do not know what we’re talking about. And we can't know what we're talking about, at this stage of history: we can’t even get near it – the sciences of the mind, and/or of the brain (they aren't, of course, the same by any means, not only because they frame the Gap itself) are doing such tiny work by comparison – unless they speculate as wildly and in as unfounded a manner as Jung did.
But that wild, unfounded, unprovable territory, where so much is undefined, fuzzy, possibly nonexistent, is where everything that matters lives... it's like the problems that existentialism tries to dynamite, it's like the grander musical interpretations Adorno sketched out that upset so many people in my field, it's like the psychic problems that Jung tries to acknowledge. And it is like the great field that religion tries to fill, either wisely with basic and contingent good-enough-for-now rules, or absurdly with the demented pull-the-covers-over-your-head restrictions of fundamentalism.
It is, unfortunately, like everything: small fragments of dogmatically achieved practical data, achieved through ridiculously limited means, that try to ignore the fact that they exist in an utterly vast conceptual space where we may seem to distinguish forms, causes, directions, but where they are always changing shape. Where we either stay on the near side of the Gap, and pretend that our dismally trivial little proofs mean something – and thereby define ourselves as minor cogs in a vast machine that may someday get somewhere; or we try to leap to the far side of the Gap, because that is where everything that matters to us lives – except, because the view is so blurred, it is also so full of our own reflections and incomprehensible illusions that our leaps cause us to fall. And while we fall, some of us – most of us, in fact, foolishly but understandably, tragically –pretend that we are holding on to something, that we are depending from some being, some concept, some set of rules: just as though they are concrete, as though they exist.
That Gap… I wanted to close it, at least a bit, when I was young. I know now that we live in the wrong era to do so: and I don't mean that we are too early by decades – more probably we are too early by centuries, possibly eons of various lengths. It is easy or convenient to label the epistemological problem as metaphysical, as existential, as religious, or quasi-religious – but of course it is also obviously real, in every way: we merely don’t understand how it can be real, and we don’t understand any single element of its reality.
But we are here, and we are here now: we can't turn off our imaginations or desires, we can't simply pretend that nothing is out there – or that some simplified, benevolent or punitive system is out there that cares about us (the most popular answer in my own stupid country these days); or in any other equally ridiculous dogmatism.
Because we don't know who we are....