Media Events.

Virtual reality.
History refers to both the events themselves and to the telling of those events (Hegel); the term
equivocates events and their representation. This equivocation is sometimes the most cunning and
sometimes the most delusive ruse of (variously) nature, psyche and society. ‘Being is
unrecognisable unless it succeeds in seeming, and seeming is weak unless it succeeds in being
(Gorgias of Leontini, the earliest Greek theorist of the media).’ Think of those virtual realities
that, having been made up, have taken on a life of their own: genes, symbols, selves. And history.
Narrative art, the modern forms of which are small screen, cinematic, novelistic and dramatic
fiction, has always been history’s gadfly, reminding it that it is a mere shadow of its would be
self.

‘Life consists of propositions about life’ (Wallace Stevens).

History is about history. The empirical subject matter of history, the main historical events of
history, are accounts or images of history. The main events are media events. By empirical
subject matter I mean that its observation is observable (von Foerster, Luhmann). Sure, something
happened, there once was the past ‘as it actually was’, but after the gun has stopped smoking all
that is left of what happened are the selected words about it and the selected images, which are
usually only images of the aftermath. Images and words are things that happen too. They are
acts⎯communicative acts; they actually were, and some actually endure as things. What survives
and replicates matters. Persistence is a value for narrative animals in a temporal world. History is
what persists, that which prevails. Like gossip, myth, legend and rumour, the news⎯that topical
history of the just past⎯is about the news. That is, it is about media events.

Gay and melancholy science?

‘Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its concerns threatens to
disappear irretrievably (Walter Benjamin).’ History must pass through the selection bottleneck of
the present. The news is a gatekeeper of history. History is what prevails and ‘parades its own
arrogance (Cormac McCarthy); and, like Samuel Fuller’s Big Red One, it is dedicated to the
survivors.

Action, Disaster, War, Sci-fi, Drama, Romantic Comedy, Teen, Family, Art House
Whether historical events occur as tragedy or farce, their telling occurs as romance or satire: the
romance of telling the past ‘as it actually was’; the satire of showing it as it has been told so that it
may thereby convict itself of its untruth.

Warning: can of worms.

Sometimes the media refers as a plural to more than one communication medium. Sometimes
clarity is served by saying the mediums. Often the media is used as a collective singular term to
refer to the narrative industry generally, or in a more limited sense, to the commercial and state
owned news industry, and sometimes it refers to the system of communications transmitted by
this industry⎯a system of much replicated, much disseminated histories of the most recent past.
Like the term history, the term media is equivocal because that makes it useful. Ambiguity is
useful in cobbling together a consistent argument, particular one designed to hide certain aspects
of the media from itself

Navel gazing.

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The media has an unconscious for the same reason psyche does: to differentiate itself from what’s
‘out there’. It tries to escape from itself (the scene of the crime) by not acknowledging its
inescapable self-descriptive predicament. This is a kind of self-analysis by default, like the
tiptoeing child who covers her ears so she won’t be heard sneaking away. Any report on the topic
of the news that claimed to be news itself would be condemned as navel gazing. As this
confusing, recursive way of putting it should immediately demonstrate, the story will never get
up.

Journalists just report it.

Media commentary and analysis rarely deliberates on the media⎯unless someone blames the
media, and ‘the media’ is misinterpreted by journalists to mean ‘journalists’. People are always
happy to go to the trouble of misinterpretation just for the gratification of being offended.
Journalists are only human. They put their foot in it by using the poo-poo defence: journalists
don’t make the news, they just report it. The ‘media’ is not ‘journalists’. The first principle of
media analysis is: The media is social; journalists are only human.

The second coming

Don’t watch or read the news to find out historical background or significant analytical detail!
Driven by our obsessive teleological nous, most news commentary, most media analysis, most
social commentary, is about the news of the future. The fact notwithstanding, wisdom is the
seeming wise before it. Interpretation of events means what are the consequences. The meaning
is out there in the future at the end of the day where everything must be going to end up
happening. Nevertheless, it always sounds like the same thing again, a secular second coming. It
is just an allegory of the latest news, used as an advertisement for itself and sold as an
advertisement for that archaic rapidly changing world that other people are afraid of.

Selection or drift?
Just as history is about history, politics is about political communications: the accusation; the
declaration; the vote; the act (of parliament); the decree; the impeachment; the inquiry; the
resignation; the interview; etc. It is mainly when communication becomes non symbolic⎯we
might say non communicative⎯when it becomes war, violence, torture, that history finds itself
concerned with a past-as-it-actually-was that is no longer empirical. Violence is about the
destruction of ‘the past as it actually was’. In the selection of media events, violence is like
sampling error. Kindness must live on, so it must speak. Speech of course left no empirically
observable documents. It was so fleeting that first prosody and later writing were acts of
technological innovation against the violence of the past⎯‘the nightmare of the past’ which
‘weighs on the brains of the living’ (Marx). Herein lies the Utopian character of those
technologies that employ adaptations to society that are designed to make communicative acts
survive.

The real world vs what they teach students.

In the everyday self description of society, particularly in media analysis and commentary, the
selected concepts⎯the terms, propositions and arguments, whether linguistic or visual⎯are
readily communicable (easy to generate and interpret), are adapted to their social environment of
other terms, propositions and arguments, and they are ambiguous enough to be cobbled into
consistency at the first hint of any contradiction. They have to be, because otherwise they would
not find a suitable environment for their replication and selection and they would become extinct.
(Note: in film and video, shots are propositions, montage or editing is argument). These concepts
and what they refer to are not, to use the old Platonic term, ‘natural kinds’. They do not carve
social nature ‘at its joints’. Even in instrumentalist terms, their adequacy is questionable.

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However, they do become reified, and then, failure to discourse in them is immediately
inadequate, because in the ‘real world’ no-one listens. In the self-descriptions of society⎯in
politics, in media analysis, in everyday sociology⎯inability to engage in discourse and inability
to be heard is death. It is said that what they teach students of communications and journalism is
not about the real world. The real world has already been selected over at the main game. All the
disciplines of everyday sociology make up a discourse that is about itself.

Archaeology of virtual reality.

Sociology has long had a name for the way society’s self-descriptions conjure up their own
reality: reification. Reification is a natural consequence of the reflexive predicament of social
evolution. Reified things are virtually (i.e. effectively) real⎯and no less real for that. Virtual
reality has been around since humans have been describing themselves⎯since nature invented
the animal technology of language and humans ran with it. Like ‘Australians’, humans have long
been keen to take up new information technologies.

Invasion of the body snatchers.

What if we reported events as media events? We would report the mountain coming to the media;
otherwise it would disappear. We would report its use of vision, celebrity, issues, conflict, and
violence to replicate itself in stories and images. We would report the plots, terms and images
using the brains of journalists, editors, producers and the people out there as nests for their
reproduction. We would televise the same question stalking every interview: ‘How do you feel?’

How do you feel?

‘The distinctions of feeling are wholly abstract…they are not distinctions which apply to the
subject matter itself (Hegel)’. Feeling is supposed to be about concrete experience, and the
hallmark of authentic individuality⎯hence its value as a way of hiding individuality from psyche
and society. Its use as a term is a sign of the pernicious and unacknowledged reductionism of our
everyday sciences of self-understanding. Strange that what makes news is smarmy questioning
about such an abstraction, reducing everyone to ciphers so that they can be parasitised and
humiliated by the same response. Who would have thought that popular culture (in this case the
news) was more abstract than metaphysics. Like the cinema-going public, I prefer fiction to
documentary. This is mainly because too much documentary is biography⎯especially on TV.
Everyone’s got an Australian story. Truth is not as strange as fiction. Truth is true⎯that is its
strange fascination. The fictive predicament of biography, and worse, the delusive misuse of
fiction’s licence are the chronic problems of biography. Biographers, screen or literary, cannot
avoid this fictivity. We might call it the narrativity of biography, the fact that events have to be
selected and an argument (story) constructed. We have the art of fiction to make a virtue of this
narrativity. One way it does this is by inducing wonderful orgies of feeling to ruthlessly scrutinise
them. As for true biography, there may never have been such a thing. The epitome of bad
biography is the schmalzy answer already selected for subjects by the question: How do you feel?
The more guarded among us have always suspected that, like its congeners in sport and reality
TV, a news appearance was humiliating, fictive and 15 seconds to be avoided if possible.

Devil’s dictionary
Examples of some handy terms that use us in society’s self descriptions: the media, the
community, society, culture, image, issues, real issues, deal with issues, public opinion, voter
feeling, in touch with, ordinary Australians, take offence, out there, low socio-economic,
generation, young people, listen to, send the wrong message, sell, take on board, look ahead, what
we need, leadership, work towards, manage change, at the end of the day, etc. Francis Bacon

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(Novum Organum) complained about the ill-defined reference of the terms of physical science,
terms (if I remember rightly) like density, friction, weight, mass etc. He complained?

Making up.
Mistakes, misapprehensions, inadequate concepts are all parleyed into ruses of reason, self-
identities, self-delusions, received wisdoms. Human psyche does this in its self construction
(Lacan). Society does it in its self construction (Luhmann). The reified misapprehensions of
psychic and societal self description⎯the makeshift fabrications whereby we make up our
psychic and social world, the ‘fictions’ that serve as our only purchase on these things⎯are a
good reason for fiction in the artistic sense to make a virtue of the necessity of this process of
reflexive reification of consciousness.

Absolutely!
Language, in order to be symbolic and linguistic, has always had to be able to be about itself.
Hegel appreciated the inescapable and defining reflexivity of consciousness, experience,
philosophy and modernity. Sociologists (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens) have insisted that
reflexivity is what characterises modernity, and particularly postmodernity⎯or ‘radical
modernity’ as Giddens called it. But doesn’t it characterise society (and psyche)⎯even in
societies (and psyches) that seem utterly unconscious of themselves? In fact, what characterises
postmodernity is the reflexivity of reflexivity. At last reflexivity has become a topic about itself.
There is now even a developing mathematical description of reflexive phenomena: e.g. the
mathematics of non well-founded sets (Barwise and Moss 1996). Does this portend adequate
reflexive sciences⎯adequate sociology, and adequate psychology? Absolute philosophy?
Absolutely!

Prophecy and mind reading.

Can a reflexive science that carves social nature at its reflexively generated, reified joints be said
to use categories that are natural kinds. No. Objects will always end up killing it off. But while it
lives it grows Self-description and self-representation of a self, from the evolution of organisms
to the self-description of linguistically (socially) mediated human psyche is a powerful force. For
example, one of the measures of a science’s success at describing the world in natural kinds is
prediction. Humans are very predictable⎯up to a point. They have to be⎯for themselves. And
for others. They are teleological animals and they are social animals. ‘To breed an animal with
the right to make promises⎯is not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard
to humans? and is it not the true problem of humans (Nietzsche)?’ Humans have been working at
an instrumental reflexive science of themselves for a long time. In doing so they have also been
using a technology for mind reading called language.

Non well-founded science of non well-founded objects.

Psyche describes itself using terms given to it by society⎯terms selected for their
communicability and for their adequacy for a working, everyday phenomenological description of
self and others, child and adult. As in the case of grammar (according to Deacon), the selection of
these self-descriptive terms involves their going through the selection bottleneck of children’s
minds. Everyone talks about believing, desiring, hoping, thinking, knowing, and feeling⎯using
terms from the devil’s dictionary of psychology⎯as if they know what they are talking about. Is
there really such a thing as belief? Or do we just believe there is? Or believe we believe there is?
Is the reference of the term belief just a kind fixed point in an endless recursion, a psychic reality
socially generated and selected throughout the history of an ongoing dialogue? Such terms
‘rescue’ and reify the phenomena they refer to, at the same time. By and large, society describes
itself using terms that have evolved in a similar fashion. These terms too refer to objects that are

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fixed points in the recursive toing and froing of dialogue. Many sociological terms have been
coined according to analogy with psychological terms and then taken on a life of their own.
Sociology supervenes on psychology; misapprehension is thereby multiplied by misapprehension.

It is said that…
To narrative art, the recursive function of symbolic communication has always been manifest.
Communication can, and in order to be symbolic and dialogue must, be about itself, and embed
its story in its story. This is not just some contrivance to enervate readers of ludic, postmodern
texts. It was the essence of narrative poetics right from the start. Narrative poetics consists in
showing images of language (Bakhtin), more generally fiction shows narratives of narrative⎯the
mimesis of narrative life (Aristotle). Every story, including the news, begins ‘The story goes
that…’

Originality
No science of psyche or society could predict an original work. Originality is what we cannot
predict. Whatever the mysterious workings of psyche in producing something original, originality
is only revealed after the fact, when it can look so obvious we wonder why we didn’t think of it
before. In this, originality is like many social phenomena⎯promises, an artistic canon,
friendship, memorability⎯phenomena whose actual natures are only confirmable by the future,
and never irrevocable.

Origins
Darwin answered the question of the origin of species by ignoring it. The title of his book was
ironic; he dispensed with the concept of origin altogether and replaced it with the description of a
peculiarly algorithmic narrative: evolution by repeated variation, transmission and selection. In
terms of social selection, all sorts of things are dreamed up, designed, and produced or made up;
and then they await what in the artistic sphere is called the judgement of history. This is why a
canon, however deserving of critique and revision, however it ‘parades its arrogance’, is simply
what survives.

Soap and grace.

Soap is a degenerated, unoriginal form of comedy. For want of originality and self-reflection, it is
comedy written down as drama. Long watching, insider jokes, shared and knowing affection for
its failings can redeem soap as cult. Viewers redeem its lost comic element. A lot of television
culture is like this: reality TV, bad sci-fi, sit com, etc. Such cults have a generationalist
pertinence⎯for example, when a ‘generation’ reminisces about shared experience of a film like
Star Wars. Such works suffer for not having recursively embedded their meanings in their own
monadic forms. They boast their formula but it’s the wrong formula. Occasionally, hopeless
artworks are redeemed by the grace of a kind of social selection that is greater than their works.
The films Ed Wood and American Movie are about this grace. More typically artworks use
recursion to objectify their own in imperfection and redeem themselves by their own grace.
Witness the comedic elements in modern tragedy, whether Hamlet’s wit and pretension, or the
vision in The Bad Lieutenant. All artworks have to anticipate more readings than they can
possibly imagine. Even so, even the best works must survive by the graceless grace of history.
Selection for quality is no more assured than the cruel fate of random drift through the vast
aesthetic landscape to artistic extinction. Consider the 90 lost plays by Sophocles.

Poetics of progress
Even if originality is only apprehended in retrospect, it describes a kind of historical moment that
has long been appreciated by narrative poetics. Aristotle said that poetic amazement was greatest

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when a plot went against expectation yet, in doing so, revealed a new kind of consequentiality.
Originality refers to just such a turn of plot in the history of art or science or some other social
system. Such plots are themselves given to us by social selection operating on endlessly
generated and transmitted variations. In the self-narrations of society, modernity is characterised
by highly self-conscious self-narrations with plots that go by names such as ‘progress’.
Reflexivity does not stop there: even ‘progress’ is recursively conceived, criticised and revised by
the modernity it plots. The evolution of the word ‘modern’ by selection of variational use of the
meaning of ‘mode’ indicates (as has often been noted) its affinity to fashion with its restless
process of self-differentiation from the most recent past (Benjamin).

The origin of originality

Did Aristotle really say something original here, something for the first time and so long ago?
Scrutiny of the originality of Aristotle’s formula for amazement reveals how originality, as a
characteristic of communications recognised after the fact, is generated in and by dialogue. As
Socrates said of writing: its inventor could not have foreseen all its uses. Nature could not have
foreseen the uses of the bones in a reptiles jaw: as the hammer, anvil and stirrup of the human ear.
Edison could not have foreseen the future of cinema in his action film about The Life the
American Fireman. What Aristotle said acquires meaning, and its originality, in a dialogue with
the future. Original works are not only indebted to the past; they are indebted to the future. Like
property, individual property and individual claims to creativity, and therefore to abstract
individuality, are kinds of theft. The greatest writers are the most indebted (Emerson). Selection
is selection for a function or meaning that might not have worked at the first appearance of the
work. Think of the evolving meaning of Oedipus, or all the interpretations of Hamlet! Attribution
of genius or creativity is a kind of uncomprehending bewitchment by this peculiar historical
process in which communication⎯unlike action films, but like Kubrick’s 2001, and like
biological evolution⎯dazzles us with its amazing slowness.

What we go to the cinema for is time (Andrei Tarkovsky).

Meaning cannot mean all at once (Luhmann). Getting through the long slow line of the text⎯be
it on film or video or in print⎯takes time. The meaning of an enduring (and therefore original)
narrative is a dialogue with the distant future. The desire to have every meaning link to every
meaning all at once is just that old animal desire that the philosophers inherited from wild nature,
the desire to see everything under the gaze of eternity, the same as the desire for speed⎯to escape
from time and narrative and history. Hence the static effect of action films and the awesome
motion of a circle of condensation that evaporates from a table in Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

Gratification
To gratify the desire for speed is one thing. But it is a harsh form of self-denial, a severe
limitation of the cinematic senses. Gratification is a name for the repression of sensuous
experience, for its limitation to just one sense⎯an assault on pleasure. Hence it is adapted for the
psychic and social functions of habit and self-deception.

Originality and freedom

In the experience of freedom we see the way that psyche experiences itself according to the
narratives selected for it by society. The predicament of individuals self-narrated according to the
plot of freedom is cognate with that of society as narrated according to the plots of originality and
progress. When someone (like Kant’s subject, or one of Beckett’s characters) self observes the
experience of freedom by sitting on a chair and deciding whether to stand up or remain seated it is
little wonder that the sense of absurdity is overwhelming. There seems to be nothing real to
observe⎯that good old existential nothingness. Who is telling this experience to whom using

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whose terms? What are the tense and aspect of the tale. Of course, the past tense is the classic
tense of narratives, and like originality, the true tale of a free act must be told after the fact. As
something in the present, as a condition of action, freedom seems to be a kind of baseless
pretence, a mere illusion, a fiction under which we cannot help but act. Hamlet experiences his
freedom as the alienation of all the available symbolic forms of personal agency, until, unable to
seize upon a symbolic form as his own, he himself is seized by the meanest of forms and thinks
he, as avenger, can just angrily and blindly stab a ‘rat’ lurking behind a curtain in his mother’s
chamber. After this fateful deed all hell breaks loose.

Creating freedom
In order for freedom to be a fact we have to make it up. Kant (1785) put the fictive, performative
character of freedom thus; ‘Every being that cannot act except under the idea of freedom is just
for that reason in a practical point of view really free.’ Freedom as such is something socially
convened by the long selection process of reflexive reification, something virtually,
counterfactually real. While it might pretend to occupy the obscure areas, the accidentality that
defies the principles that map out empirical causation, in fact, like fiction, it occupies the
performative, semantic opportunities that the temporality of reflexive meaning opens in the fabric
of history. Freedom only arises from the possible worlds our narrative arguments or teleology can
make for ourselves in nature. So freedom is the sublime telling of oneself and keeping on of
telling oneself for oneself and for others, the emotional and intellectual task of facing and risking
a narrative struggle imposed by the words and deeds one makes one’s own.

Virtual freedom
The immense cognitive labour and cunning taken to produce the virtually observerless
descriptions of the non-reflexive, predictive, empirical sciences also ended up producing the
notion that human freedom was inconsistent with the determinations of natural causation.
Freedom, which is always of and for self-describing psyche, only becomes antinomical if the
psychic self could actually be eliminated from situations of description rather than being merely
dealt with by its as if elimination at the hands of the powerful makeshifts of empirical scientific
methodology; or if psyche and society did not lack the immense computational power needed for
that merely imaginable, thorough-going determinate description of themselves. The possibility of
freedom arises from the aporetic predicament of reflexive descriptions. Freedom appeared
antinomical most poignantly at a time when it had, by social evolution, developed from its
phylogenetic origins in the history of individual, organismic, teleological self-determination, into
an affective and socially consequential concept with both a factual and a normative life. The so
called ‘bourgeois age’ was riven by this contradiction, dividing its spiritual project so that, while
the sciences ground out more and more ingenious predictive descriptions, art forms like the novel
churned out more and more affective counter examples to the all too thoroughly determined life.

Freedom and others

In my likeness with the other there lies, and I am struck by, that other attribute of the other⎯its
difference, its freedom⎯which reminds me of my own freedom, and my own difference from
myself. Something similar happens when we are struck by the arbitrary imposition of
unfreedom⎯the classic condition of the normative declaration of freedom.

Useful non sequitur: deriving a norm from a fact

Originality is not, as Malcolm McLaren tried to sell it, the art of concealing your sources. It is the
art of revealing, retrospectively, functions and meanings your sources never dreamed of.
Likewise, reality or nature is the retrospective revelation of possible realities that were accessible
by processes of mere copying⎯a kind of cosmic reification. The autopoiesis of nature⎯what

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Aristotle saw as its self-generating make-up⎯is a function of the poetics of copying. Such are the
cybernetics of replication. What is a new phenomenon is that the realisation has been transformed
from a fact of natural history into a norm of modernity. And that is a case of making a likeness
too: making a norm in the image of a fact.

Observing creation
People like to ask scientists about their experience of creativity, as if, when the light went on
these expert observers would have been expertly observe it. As with everyone who works
something out or makes something up, the answers reported from the frontier of creation are
empty and unsatisfying. Creators report having arrived at a destination that they did not know
about until their arrival, after journey that they have forgotten already. Creators are busy
observing their works not themselves. Indeed, in self-observation, the self is the work, and if not
made up, it is conspicuous by its absence.

The cutting room floor.

Forget the psychic mysteries and the neurological imponderables. Answer mystery with the
mundane. Creativity is a selection process. It emulates in the psychic sphere what originality is in
the social sphere. The creator tries something and observes whether it works: the algorithm of
‘generate and test’. Human creations seem to be created rather than merely selected because they
can look like they have made great leaps of originality, but this is because the incremental
selection process goes largely unseen in the creator’s mind or studio. Witness the notebooks of
composers, the draughts of writers, the sketches of artists, the cutting room floor. The acts of
generation are deliberate variations. Too much variation from accepted truths, recognizable
symbols, or expected norms may result in extinction of the product⎯either in the creator or the
society. On the other hand, witness those works that fall on deaf ears until they eventually find
their times. Or those unexhibited sketches that now look like anticipations of the future of art, and
their artist’s best works.

Making up making up.

Technologies that make enduring, persistently observable works⎯prosody, writing, graphics,
video⎯allow an individual creator the generation of, and considered selection from, a great many
variations. Computation can rapidly simulate and enhance the whole or parts of this process,
although adequate simulation of a work’s selection environment requires, among other
imponderables, the simulation of consciousness. Of course such an inadequacy would just be
another stage in the reification of consciousness. Technologies that enable rapid replication and
dissemination⎯print, tape, telecommunications⎯link communications into the vast, functionally
differentiated systems that characterise modernity and postmodernity. These societies are known
to have induced their own forms of melancholia and elation in individual consciousness, at once
dwarfed by their alien might and elated at the sublime vista. Ever since nature selected the
technology that could make up that externalised representation of consciousness we call
language, separately, and as they have been successively combined through history, the
information technologies have selected and been selected by successive stages of society,
according to a narrative that reached the point where it told about itself under the category
‘modernity’, and told its self-differentiation-in-self-emulation under the category ‘postmodern’.
‘The whole race is a poet that writes down the eccentric propositions of its fate (Wallace
Stevens).’

White bread; or setting the VCR.

Children, weened on silicon, now play with ideas that taxed the creativity of Aristotle or
Archimedes. Childhood development recapitulates the history of science and technology. Sort of.

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Selection for infantile gratification preforms both adult consciousness, and society as a
constellation of infantile forms. The preponderance of white sliced bread, relieved only by the
adolescent afterthought of ‘multi-grain’ epitomises the infantilisation of society. But so too does
language. Social forms that can survive in the selection bottleneck of childish consciousness are
likely to be well-adapted to adult consciousness as well. Terrence Deacon has argued that
linguistic syntax and symbols are just such forms. Their seemingly makeshift ‘logic’ is eminently
selectable in the environment of the developing infant brain. Between these extremes of
selection⎯the former a social selection of infantile social forms, the latter a social and probably
also biological selection of a linguistic animal⎯lie selected social phenomena that might be seen
as adolescent forms of life. These include certain artistic and ethical forms (romance and comedy)
and scientific endeavours (mathematics).

Generationalism
Only recently the development of new information technologies began to proceed at a rate that
was commensurate with human generation. The biological fact of societal differentiation by
generations was reflexively fed back into society’s self-descriptions as social norms of
generational self-differentiation and allegiance, market differentiation, and stratification of
competence in information technology. Witness the invention of the teenager, the degeneration of
aesthetic Modernism into sixties pop culture, the developing taxonomy of generationalism,
cyberculture, and so on.
Norms made up from facts⎯and falsehoods.
People say: ‘That’s not a real word. It’s not in the dictionary.’ Lexicographers still blithely insist
that they are describing, not prescribing usage. But people don’t use their dictionaries that way.
Perhaps lexicographers should acknowledge this, and compile accordingly. ‘Any philosopher
who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his system in advance to see how it
will look … after adoption (Moses Herzog).’ Knowing artworks do this within themselves.
Despite what lexicographers (and philosophers) say, people will derive an ought from an is.
Better still⎯or worse⎯they will derive an ought from what’s not. Not on their own though.
Others have to run with it. We are talking about society here. Not about Humpty-Dumpties
making words mean whatever they like. Artistic norms are caught up in this kind of thing. They
make virtues of necessity. Think of what narrative art makes out of the temporal predicament of
narrative meaning. Or out of the necessary fictivity of a report’s selection of events. And think of
reification. Fiction makes a virtue out of this⎯making a spectacle of all this making up.

The eye of the beholder

Art is always accused of being merely subjective. Different people respond differently. In fact
one person can experience the same work differently, depending on such trifles as mood,
occasion, company, drug, etc. We are never the self same person twice. There are works we see
and suspect; and see again and begin to admire. (Much the same happens with our dawning
appreciation of a scientific work, or with the functions of a technology.) These experiences reflect
in the subjective realm what unfolds in social history. They are signs of originality’s indebtedness
to the future. So don’t they really indicate something about the objective character of artworks?
Those astonishing objects that we can barely begin to admire.

Listing favourites. Beware!

People seem taken by listing and comparing their lists of favourite films (or books, plays, music
etc). To think that we are good at observing ourselves and that we are hardly likely to make a
mistake is sheer complacency. We are fooled by the fact that no one else can say we are
wrong⎯and for just this reason we are likely to fib⎯and by the notion that we are one self. And
then we will have to live with that one self that made that list and therein misrepresented itself.

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Doesn’t this just go to show what a careless trick an ego can be? Undertaken in indolence,
characterised mendaciously, and made up to come back to haunt us.

Skilled workers.
In the observation of artworks, the makers, like the audience, observe their own their own
experience of the work emotionally. The emotions are more or less skilled workers when it comes
to unconscious self-observation. Artworks themselves go further. They stimulate emotions in
order that they too may be observed doing their work of observation. No wonder artworks have a
reputation for piling emotion on emotion. An orgy of self scrutiny. Meanwhile, gratification is a
harsh form of self-denial, a severe limitation of the senses. Gratification is a name for the
repression of sensuous experience, for its limitation to just one sense⎯an assault on pleasure.
Gratification is used for the psychic and social functions of habit and self-deception. Artworks are
only merely gratifying when they want us to bring our senses to bear on gratification.

Making up freedom
Freedom is like originality, only in the ethical or political sphere: we can’t predict it either. Yet
afterwards, we see that an action was free and (like a promise) that we must sometimes keep its
freedom up. And we also see thawt it wqas merely random and that it reveals its own logic. These
considerations should remind us that, by virtue of its generation through time and society,
freedom is coupled with responsibility. Freedom and originality are made up by narratives that
have evolved in the same social environment. Just as an individual must make up and keep up its
own freedom, society must make up and keep up freedom in the lo9ng selection process of
reflexive reification⎯in order for freedom to be a fact. This has happened at the same time that as
society has been making up its instrumental reflexive sciences of itself and ourselves. Sure, the
possibility of freedom arises from the aporetic condition of any human science that wants to be
empirical and predictive. Sure, freedom seems to be a baseless pretence that is only thinkable in
the void of accidentality and causal indetermination that arises from our epistemological
shortcomings. But happily making a virtue of this, we just do it.

Natureculture
Nature is the great creator⎯the self-generating is how Aristotle put it. Even human creation is
human nature and social nature. Yet now, what we once invoked as nature⎯but monotonously
refer to as ‘the environment’⎯ is cultural: all the bits selected and managed as national parks; the
bits restored, reconstructed and reconnected; not to mention those vast oceans that we are still
managing by neglect and ruination. We are making it all up in nature’s image, according to norms
derived from ecology’s facts like biodiversity; and norms derived from technocratic melancholy
like the pristine, the indigenous, and wilderness. Though still more or less unconscious of it, we
have a poetics of nature, a society of nature. Mighty nature’s self-generation is mediated by wild
social nature.

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