Richard Sennett's The Conscience of the Eye; The Design and Social Life of Cities comes highly recommended by this blog. The frontispiece includes a quote from Goethe:
From early on I have suspected that the so important sounding task "Know thyself" is a ruse of a cabal of priests. They are trying to seduce man from activity in the outside world, to distract him with impossible demands; they seek to draw him into a false inner contemplation. Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world - the world which he only comes to know is himself and himself only in it.
The book is introduced with a discussion about how
"The ancient Greek could use his or her eyes to see the complexities of life."
The temples, markets, playing fields, meeting places, walls, public statuary, and paintings of the ancient city represented the culture's values in religion, politics, and family life. It would be difficult to know where in particular to go in modern London or New York to experience, say, remorse. Or were modern architects asked to design spaces that better promote democracy, they would lay down their pens: there is no modern equivalent to the ancient assembly. (p. xi)
He is using the ancient Greek experience to say something very important about our own experience of, and the way we "see", the modern city.
The divide between the inside and the outside and the struggle to concretize an inner life Sennett identifies in "our culture", the divide between subjective experience and worldly experience, so different from other cultural practices that connect subjective life to physical things, is something to consider in the context of live interactive dialogic inter-cultural activity.
Inside and outside! Connections and dis-connections becomes a major theme:
Inside and outside! Connections and dis-connections becomes a major theme:
The divide between inner subjective experience and outer, physical life expresses in fact a great fear which our civilization has refused to admit, much less to reckon. (p. xii)
So, what we, in late capitalism are making in the urban realm are bland, neutralizing spaces, spaces that remove the threat of social contact, coexist with the creation of technical capacities, as in this global information environment, for quite the opposite. However, we must accept that in public realm the fear of exposure still so deeply permeates our need for myriad protection zones, barriers, firewalls. This can be said to be true for most institutions, governments and the like, as well as our browsers and internet based social networks.
Sennett ends the introduction to this book by explaining how ancient Greeks (I guess he means the Athenians) were no sentimentalists, but that their encounters with difficulty and diversity
Sennett ends the introduction to this book by explaining how ancient Greeks (I guess he means the Athenians) were no sentimentalists, but that their encounters with difficulty and diversity
"was instead thought to be that through exposure to the world the individual gradually found his or her orientation, found how to keep a balance." (p.xiii)
This condition the Greeks called sophrosyne, which could be translated as "grace" or "poise". Today we would say such a person keeping his or her balance in the world is "centered". A city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life. Through exposure to others, we might learn how to weigh what is important and what is not. We need to see differences on the streets or in other people neither as threats nor as sentimental invitations, rather as necessary visions. They are necessary for us to learn how to navigate life with balance, both individually and collectively.
Sennett, still referencing the ancient Greeks, then connects the idea of seeing with acting, or making!
But for the Greeks, to balance oneself one had to act as well as look. The result of caring about what one sees is the desire to make something. The Greeks called this desire poiesis, from which we derive the English word "poetry," but their word was broader than one art in scope. the balanced person wants to make a speech, a battle, love, as well as a poem with the same qualities of grace and poise. As a result of his or her own engagement in making or doing things carefully, sophrosyne and poiesis were intimately related.
This introduction by Sennett to his book really helps the reader to understand the critique of Western European habits of thinking, representing and organizing the spaces we inhabit, the homes we live in as a refuge from the crowd (or a kind of coffin or tomb), and the cities we are creating that increasingly choke off the social impulse we may or may not have, to connect to the other, the stranger, as another actor.
Sennett references the ideas of St Augustine in particular, as representing this peculiar separation of the mental life from the way the senses and the body engage with the world in a constant dialogue. St Augustine's The City of God (Latin: De Civitate Dei) sets out a type of psychogeography that contrasts the the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem with the City of Man. Despite Christianity's designation as the official religion of the empire, Augustine declared its message to be spiritual rather than political. Christianity, he argued, should be concerned with the mystical rather than with earthly politics. He sees human history as essentially a conflict between the City of Man and the City of God. The City of God is marked by people who forgo earthly pleasure to dedicate themselves to the eternal truths of Christian faith and is in heaven, or if it is on Earth, it is built in the spiritual dimensions of the living church.
What has all this got to do with streaming video? or the screen environment?
Answer:
For this blog the connection of seeing with acting. or making is vitally important. How we conceptualize a personal engagement with the world, if the divide between an inner and outer life operates, is going to imprint a boundary where perhaps it does not really need to exist. Defining spaces in this way is very different from imagining thought processes, like the so called "interior monologue" in literature or the "inner struggles" of an "inner life" that characterize a certain psychological anatomy of the individual's existence in the world, as essentially examples of how we are constantly connecting to a diversity of spaces and times. Dreamtime is the necessary purging of the huge amount of psychological material generated in the wake-a-day world of day dreaming, and seeing, and acting, and making.
Just like the ECHOLAND of James Joyce.
Marshall McLuhan's take on ECHOLAND is
Sennett references the ideas of St Augustine in particular, as representing this peculiar separation of the mental life from the way the senses and the body engage with the world in a constant dialogue. St Augustine's The City of God (Latin: De Civitate Dei) sets out a type of psychogeography that contrasts the the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem with the City of Man. Despite Christianity's designation as the official religion of the empire, Augustine declared its message to be spiritual rather than political. Christianity, he argued, should be concerned with the mystical rather than with earthly politics. He sees human history as essentially a conflict between the City of Man and the City of God. The City of God is marked by people who forgo earthly pleasure to dedicate themselves to the eternal truths of Christian faith and is in heaven, or if it is on Earth, it is built in the spiritual dimensions of the living church.
What has all this got to do with streaming video? or the screen environment?
Answer:
For this blog the connection of seeing with acting. or making is vitally important. How we conceptualize a personal engagement with the world, if the divide between an inner and outer life operates, is going to imprint a boundary where perhaps it does not really need to exist. Defining spaces in this way is very different from imagining thought processes, like the so called "interior monologue" in literature or the "inner struggles" of an "inner life" that characterize a certain psychological anatomy of the individual's existence in the world, as essentially examples of how we are constantly connecting to a diversity of spaces and times. Dreamtime is the necessary purging of the huge amount of psychological material generated in the wake-a-day world of day dreaming, and seeing, and acting, and making.
Just like the ECHOLAND of James Joyce.
Marshall McLuhan's take on ECHOLAND is
