Strange Islands.

I’ve been tweeting long enough (3 years) to know that there is no necessary correlation between the interest generated by a post (in terms of retweets, likes or comments) and the interestingness of that post. Interests are subjective, vague, ever-shifting and, aside from that, it’s easy to miss stuff in our fast-flowing cyber streams.

Nevertheless, something I excerpted from and linked to on my tumblr a couple months ago has stayed with me, resurfacing in my thoughts like a childhood memory given a renewed light by the comment of someone who shared the experience with you from which the memory arose.

When apes experience human-rearing and are exposed to a human language they begin to display the human patterns of self-awareness and self-reflection by 6 months of age.

This is startling enough infomation though doubtless open to scientific debate. However it was what the author (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) proceeded to say in the next paragraph that resonated with something that i had long been trying to understand, like finding some of the lost notes to a melody:

The doer/viewer duality of consciousness enables the youngster to think about what it is doing, the appearance of its action, and/or how the action will be perceived by others — all at the same time. When this dualistic process begins to operate, there emerges, within a single brain and body, the capacity to consciously separate the imaged self into that of the doer of one’s actions and the viewer of those same actions.

The interestingness quotient of this observation was, I believed, as I posted it onto my blog, amplified by the nature of our contemporary cyber experience. Were not our online activities as tweeters, bloggers and status-updaters heavily biased towards the imaged self as viewer - primarily concerned with the perception (and reception) by others of what we posted?

Now, I believe, it is true that this is as much a feature of our “real-world” interactions with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers. We are always thinking as much about how others perceive what we say and do as about what we are saying and doing (indeed it can be difficult to differentiate the two) . This may be a natural process, even healthy, though not without its complications.

Unlike the “real-world”, our online world is a reflective surface through which we cannot step. It is easy enough for the people we meet regularly in the embodied world to see through many of our postures and to regard us warts and all. There may be a hard grain of truth in the observation that others know us better than we do ourselves. At play also, of course, is our habit of projecting our own postures atop the ones being projected at us. Much of this is certainly done unconsciously and generally, though not always, may be quite harmless.

The problem, however, faced by the online cybernaut is that they are in danger of falling into the Narcisissean pond because of the lack of feedback for them as a person regarding the degree to which it is easy or rewarding to “get-on-with” them - since the warts-and-all perspective gained, involuntarily, and reflected back from the embodied, social interactions of the “real-world” is often absent from the relationships conducted through this electronic mirror we hold up before us.

My intention here has been no more than to paddle into the shallows and kick about some water. I lack the qualifications, intelligence and, most importantly, the time to explore in depth the issues raised. The tide is coming in, the light is failing. I step down from my flimsy soapbox and return into the madding crowd.

- Jamreilly (2012)

Source article referenced: Human Language -Human Consciousness by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Hat tip to Amira at Lapidarium Notes through which I found it.

via Edge: Sherry Turkle

Winnicott called transitional the objects of childhood—the stuffed animals, the bits of silk from a baby blanket, the favorite pillows—that the child experiences as both part of the self and of external reality. Winnicott writes that such objects mediate between the child’s sense of connection to the body of the mother and a growing recognition that he or she is a separate being. The transitional objects of the nursery—all of these are destined to be abandoned. Yet, says Winnicott, they leave traces that will mark the rest of life. Specifically, they influence how easily an individual develops a capacity for joy, aesthetic experience, and creative playfulness. Transitional objects, with their joint allegiance to self and other, demonstrate to the child that objects in the external world can be loved.

Winnicott believes that during all stages of life we continue to search for objects we experience as both within and outside the self. We give up the baby blanket, but we continue to search for the feeling of oneness it provided. We find them in moments of feeling “at one” with the world, what Freud called the “oceanic feeling.” We find these moments when we are at one with a piece of art, a vista in nature, a sexual experience.

As a scientific proposition, the theory of the transitional object has its limitations. But as a way of thinking about connection, it provides a powerful tool for thought. Most specifically, it offered me a way to begin to understand the new relationships that people were beginning to form with computers, something I began to study in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From the very beginning, as I began to study the nascent digital culture, I could see that computers were not “just tools.” They were intimate machines. People experienced them as part of the self, separate but connected to the self.

from Sherry Turkle’s answer to Edge 2012 question: What is your favourite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?

“The narrative premise of The Unnamable, and of How It Is (1961), is held onto in these [later] short fictions: a creature constituted of a voice attached, for reasons unknown, to some kind of body enclosed in a space more or less reminiscent of Dante’s Hell, is condemned for a certain length of time to speak, to try to make sense of things. It is a situation well described by Heidegger’s term Geworfenheit : being thrown without explanation into an existence governed by obscure rules.

Starting out as an uneasy Joycean and an even more uneasy Proustian, Beckett eventually settled on philosophical comedy as the medium for his uniquely anguished, arrogant, self-doubting, scrupulous temperament. In the popular mind his name is associated with the mysterious Godot who may or may not come but for whom we wait anyhow, passing the time as best we can. In this he seemed to define the mood of an age. But his range is wider than that, and his achievement far greater. Beckett was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty - inexplicable and futile of attainment - is not to lie to ourselves.”

J.M. Coetzee, Samuel Beckett

Inner Workings: Essays 2000 - 2005

“The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism …

… Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious namely, that from each point on the surface of existence - however closely attached to the surface alone - one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life.”

- Georg Simmel - The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

” The distinction between the notions of self and others must have been a subtle problem for the first makers of language, and the complexity is illustrated by the abundance and ambiguity of terms defining selfness and otherness in the IE (Indo-European) family. The necessary lessons for the construction and endurance of a human community are embedded in the words used to elaborate the distinction. Self (Old English silf ) came from IE seu, also swe, (we our-)selves. From variants of these roots, we have a long list of words with se- as prefix, entities outside: separate, secede, seclude, secure and the like. Sure is almost the same word as secure (seure in Middle English, from securus in Latin.) Solus derives from seu, hence solo, solitude, solipsism and desolate. Swe led to suescere in Latin, custom, and to ethnos in Greek. Starting with ethnos we have important words for what we are up to in society, what our crowd thinks and does: ethics, also ethnic. Ethics is, in real life, an inclusive word for what we suppose ourselves to be, not jut our crowd or our village; we have it in the language as a set of assumptions about the whole species, the ethos of humankind. The language thinks well of us, regardless of our customs, even when, as happens, we don’t.”

from  Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word Watcher (1990) by Lewis Thomas.

(Image: Linear B tablet of Pylos)

” If one asks for the historical position of the two forms of individualism which are nourished by the quantitative relation of the metropolis, namely, individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself, then the metropolis assumes an entirely new rank order in the world history of the spirit. The eighteenth century found the individual in oppressive bonds which had become meaningless-bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and religious character. They were restraints which, so to speak, forced upon man an unnatural form and outmoded, unjust inequalities. In this situation the cry for liberty and equality arose, the belief in the individual’s full freedom of movement in all social and intellectual relationships. Freedom would at once permit the noble substance common to all to come to the fore, a substance which nature had deposited in every man and which society and history had only deformed. Besides this eighteenth-century ideal of liberalism, in the nineteenth century, through Goethe and Romanticism, on the one hand, and through the economic division of labor, on the other hand, another ideal arose: individuals liberated from historical bonds now wished to distinguish themselves from one another. The carrier of man’s values is no longer the “general human being” in every individual, but rather man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability. The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual’s role in the whole of society. It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation.”

from The Metropolis and Mental Life, by Georg Simmel, 1903.

(Pic : Lesser Ury: Hochbahnhof Bülowstraße)