Stand Tall

Contrary to what people might think, Nuts was staffed by left-leaning middle-class family men (and women) who were smart, funny and talented. The office would usually be found picking apart last night's Newsnight, rowing about politics or discussing house prices.

 [...] They were the funniest, brightest group of people I'd ever had the pleasure of working with.

[Terri White]
"My success was built on other women's boobs", Observer Magazine

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The people who can lead must lead.

The people who know better must act better.

There is a tendency in our culture for those of us who know better to indulge in things that we do not truly like or believe in whilst justifying our actions through irony.

We stand at the threshold of some sinful place and delight in its sights, whilst assuring anyone that passes by that we think it is terrible and depraved.

Yet we stay and watch.

We can see this clearly in the overarching nature of popular culture. There are those of us who may not see any problems in a programme like Jeremy Kyle for instance. We may see it as harmless entertainment, and may even think of it in a positive light.

But there are those of us who, if we think deeply enough, will find many things about it problematic. Yet we continue to watch it regardless of our reservations.

We watch with two sets of eyes. We delight in its base appeal - its cheap thrills and cheap laughs. Yet we also see beyond these shallow attractions. We see its problems, and the problems that it poses and reflects on a larger scale.

Irony is often a refuge for those of us who know better, because it allows us to have our cake and eat it. It allows us to split in two; to speak of principles, whilst acting in a manner that is contrary to them. It is a form of detachment; part of us breaks off and floats free above us, able to see and comment upon what we are doing without being tied down to our body and our acts.

Whilst irony may distance us from the consequences of our actions, it does not protect us from them. It is like a painkiller: we may not feel the pain but it is still there.

Irony finds its natural home in a culture of appearances; in a culture where we are judged by what we seem to do, rather than what we actually do. By what we seem to believe in, rather than what we actually believe in.

Our free floating culture has floated far enough. We are in danger of becoming entirely detached from what is real. We are losing sight of the consequences of our actions. We are getting lost in the fantasy world of words and images that we have spun around ourselves and have started to believe that it is real; that our dreamworld can replace the real world, if only we believe in it enough. We tell ourselves that there is no such thing as real, and are led to the conclusion that if there is no real then there is only what we imagine there is. And so we float further into the clouds; further away from the ground.

We are like a person who imagines themselves to be a bird. They may be able to maintain the fantasy for a while but eventually, and inevitably, they will find themselves on a rooftop ready to fly toward the heavens. Soon enough their body - that undeniable anchor - will remind them of who they are; and soon enough they will come crashing back to earth.

There is only so long that this kind of fantasy can continue before we come collectively crashing downwards; before reality begins to assert itself upon us, regardless of our posturing.

That time is now.

These times demand an end to irony. They demand that we become attached. That we become reconciled to what is real, and that we become responsible for it.

We can no longer afford to shelter within irony in order to avoid the reality of our actions. The only way we can create a more balanced and healthy environment is to be led towards it by those who are able to lead. If our leaders shrug their duty, then what hope do we have?

It is acts that convince, not words.

In any collective, there are those who have the strength and vision to lead the way. But it seems that our current culture is so unhealthy and unbalanced that even these people - our guiding spirits - have lost their way. By indulging in cheap and unhealthy habits they make themselves cheap and unhealthy. Instead of leading us to great things, they lead us further and further into an abyss.

Base culture has become so pervasive that it has become acceptable for anyone to indulge. Taken with a pinch of irony, anything becomes acceptable. Where do we draw the line? How much of ourselves are we willing to let go of? How low are we all willing to sink?

There will always be those who live in holes, who see only darkness and depravity. But these people must be balanced by their opposite. If, as we are doing more and more, we all decide to crawl down into these holes, then what hope can we have for our future?

Base culture is like junk food. We know it is bad for us, but it offers a quick and temporary appeal. It does not nourish us, but it tastes good whilst it lasts. It stimulates our taste buds with exaggerated flavours, giving us an instant hit.

Indulging in base culture ironically - with a degree of self-awareness and separation; with conflicted intent - is akin to eating junk food ironically. Regardless of your stance, it is going into your system and wreaking the same havoc as it is with anyone else.

The pattern of indulging in something that we know is bad for us is one of addiction.

The things that we are addicted to will ruin us in the end. The things that our society is addicted to will ruin us all if we are not careful.

If you can do better then you must.

Be honest about your dependencies.
Be strong.
Fight your addictions.

Just as those who are tall must stand tall and avoid slouching or stooping lest they risk problems in later life; those who are morally tall must also strive to stand at their full height.

Our culture vulgarizes us and encourages us all to stoop down. We must fight against its influence and stand at our true height, whatever it may be.

We must stop pandering to a culture that is beneath us. By engaging in it, even if only ironically, we are propping it up and ensuring its existence.

Do it not only for yourself, but for those who are relying on you to show them the way.

Do what you can.

Those who know better must act better.

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In the Mysteries, celibacy is reserved for those who have reached a certain degree of spiritual unfoldment. When advocated for the mass of unenlightened humanity, however, it becomes a dangerous heresy, fatal alike to both religion and philosophy.

[Manly P. Hall]
'Qabbalistic Keys to the Creation of Man', The Secret Teachings of All Ages, p.378

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Related posts:-
Sailing the Turbulent Seas
Only Playing
You or The Work
Sell Out
Perils of Radical Subjectivity
Life Amongst the Rubble

Only Playing

Distanced               -                  Close
Detached                -                  Attached
Unlimited               -                  Limited
Playful                    -                  Serious
Ironic                      -                  Earnest
Safe                        -                  Dangerous
Empty                     -                  Full
Light                       -                  Heavy
Conscious               -                  Unconscious

To be able to play the games of culture with the playful seriousness which Plato demanded, a seriousness without the 'spirit of seriousness', one has to belong to the ranks of those who have been able, not necessarily to make their whole existence a sort of children's game, as artists do, but at least to maintain for a long time, sometimes a whole lifetime, a child's relation to the world.

(All children start life as baby bourgeois, in a relation of magical power over others and, through them, over the world, but they grow out of it sooner or later.)

This is clearly seen when, by an accident of social genetics, into the well-policed world of intellectual games there comes one of those people (one thinks of Rousseau or Chernyshevsky) who bring inappropriate stakes and interests into the games of culture;

who get so involved in the game that they abandon the margin of neutralizing distance that the illusio (belief in the game) demands; who treat intellectual struggles, the object of so many pathetic manifestos, as a simple question of right and wrong, life and death.

This is why the logic of the game has already assigned them rôles - eccentric or boor - which they will play despite themselves in the eyes of those who know how to stay within the bounds of the intellectual illusion and who cannot see them any other way.

[Pierre Bourdieu]
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.54

[...] one may question the bourgeois paradigm, only not in any way that is effective or has results;

one may play with the symbols of radical politics, but one must not act on them; anyone can say the emperor has no clothes or even scream it within the closed walls of a gallery, but no one may cut off his head.”


[Gene Ray]
Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War, chap. 2, para. 8

Daughter: Daddy, are these conversations serious?

Father: Certainly they are.

D: They're not a sort of game that you play with me?

F: God forbid ... but they are a sort of game that we play together.

D: Then they're not serious!

--

F: Suppose you tell me what you would understand by the words "serious" and a "game."

D: Well ... if you're ... I don't know.

F: If I am what?

D: I mean ... the conversations are serious for me, but if you are only playing a game ...

F: Steady now. Let's look at what is good and what is bad about "playing" and "games." First of all, I don't mind - not much - about winning or losing. When your questions put me in a tight spot, sure, I try a little harder to think straight and to say clearly what I mean. But I don't bluff and I don't set traps. There is no temptation to cheat.

D: That's just it. It's not serious to you. It's a game. People who cheat just don't know how to play. They treat a game as though it were serious.

F: But it is serious.

D: No, it isn't - not for you it isn't.

F: Because I don't even want to cheat?

D: Yes - partly that.

F: But do you want to cheat and bluff all the time?

D: No - of course not.

F: Well then?

D: Oh - Daddy - you'll never understand.

F: I guess I never will.

F: Look, I scored a sort of debating point just now by forcing you to admit that you don't want to cheat - and then I tied onto that admission the conclusion that therefore the conversations are not "serious" for you either. Was that a sort of cheating?

D: Yes - sort of.

F: I agree - I think it was. I'm sorry.

D: You see, Daddy - if I cheated or wanted to cheat, that would mean that I was only playing a game with you.

F: Yes, that makes sense.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious'), p.14-15

'[...] But there's no reason to be surprised if we can't convince the majority of people. They have never seen our words come true. They are used to carefully matched phrases, not the kind of spontaneous argument we are having now; and as to a man who will live up to our ideal of excellence and do his best to match it both in word and deed, and who rules a state as good as himself - that, surely, is a thing of which they've never seen a single instance.

[...] Nor have they heard enough free and fair discussion, which strains every nerve to discover the truth out of sheer desire for knowledge, and gives a wide berth to subtle tricks of argument whose only object is to make an effect or contest a point, whether in law-court or lecture-room.

[...] I think a lot of people fall under it quite unconsciously, and fail to see the difference between scoring points in a debate and arguing seriously. They are unable to draw the distinctions in kind needed for the discussion of a subject, and so get sidetracked into purely verbal contradiction; they aren't really arguing, but only scoring points.

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.163, 221-2

Among the Qabbalists of the Middle Ages were a great number of black magicians who strayed from the noble concepts of the Sepher Yetzirah and became enmeshed in demonism and witchcraft.

They sought to substitute magic mirrors, consecrated daggers, and circles spread around posts of coffin nails, for the living of that virtuous life which, without the assistance of complicated rituals or submundane creatures, unfailingly brings man to the state of true individual completion.

[Manly P. Hall]
'Ceremonial Magic and Sorcery', The Secret Teachings of All Ages, p.293

‘Man plays only when he is on the full sense of the word a human being, and he is a perfect human being only when he plays.’

It is through the experience of beauty, Schiller argues, that one reaches the experience of freedom. The reason is that in every other activity one is under some degree of constraint.

[…] play is one’s own pluralism, a release from the orthodoxy of discourse.

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.

The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who […] throughout his entire history has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”

Derrida’s main authority for play is, of course, Nietzsche, ‘the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.’ This affirmation ‘then determines the noncentre otherwise than as loss of the centre’; and plays without security.

What does Derrida’s distinction between interpretation and play amount to? It accords with Nietzsche’s distinction between responsive, receptive woman and productive man; between consumer and producer. 

Derrida wants to retain of words nothing but their primordial gesture: he regards as so much dross the discursive commitment of words. He is a Manichee, not merely a Nietzschean; for him, the bourgeois domain of good and evil is enforced by language in its logical, discursive, semantic character. Play is what is left; it corresponds to the primordial cry, the speech before the fall into words and the sin of grammar.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 64-7

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.

While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested.

This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:

• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.

• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.

Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.

Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

[Eric Weinstein]
'Kayfabe'

Related posts:-
A Familiar Story | Post-script
A Safe Distance 
Nobody knows, and nobody can ever know
The Perils of Radical Subjectivity 
The Real Thing
Battles and Challenges
High Stakes
Tasteful Distance
You or The Work
A Higher Power
Childish Rebellion 
Leaving the Vessel
Structural Integrity
The Role of Charities 
The Game Goes On
Taking the Rough with the Smooth

The Aesthetic Life

Artist / Citizen

Commitment