INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The essay below, a provocative summary of the relationships between theoretical
psychology, industrialization and our own sorely wounded collective
and individual consciousness, is by Franetta McMillan. She is a
writer, poet, photographer and visual artist long recognized in her
home state of Delaware. But her work – as the following so vividly
demonstrates – is relevant everywhere we wrestle
with the legacy of our species' conceptual divorcement both from the
macrocosm of Nature and from that personal microcosm of Nature we know as selfhood.
Ms. McMillan is a partner in an
evolving anthology of literature, art and politics entitled Broken
Turtle Blog:
http://brokenturtleblog.blogspot.com/
I heartily recommend it. Ms. McMillan
responded via Broken Turtle Blog after she read my essay
entitled “The Stolen Prerequisites of Liberation: Why Change Is
Impossible” (see link below), and it was through BTB that
Ms. McMillan and I began the dialogue of which “Modernity and the
Devolution of Consciousness” is the newest part. (Originally Ms.
McMillan wrote “Devolution” as an open letter in response to my
“Seasonal” piece – the photo/prose/poem of 3 August – but I
thought her words so thought-provoking I asked her to let me repost
them here as an essay in its own right, with her permission of course
and my own enormous thanks for this blog's first-ever guest-writer
contribution.)
For new readers, the OAN piece that began our dialogue is here:
Please note I had intended to post Ms.
McMillan's work nearly three weeks ago, but I've been delayed by an
affliction of serial vexations – more obstructions (including an
abscessed tooth) than I ever imagined could befall a single, small,
seemingly simple but nevertheless vital blogging project. My deepest
apology for the delays. – LB/26 August 2010
*****
THAT THREE-ELEVATOR ANALOGY I used to
describe capitalism? It's based on the classic analogy used to
explain the three reinforcement systems used in behaviorist
psychology. Positive reinforcement is the elevator works all the
time; negative reinforcement is the elevator that never works (or the
one that works so badly it always gives you motion sickness), and
partial reinforcement is the elevator that works erratically.
When I was a senior in college, and
finally getting around to taking the required course in experimental
psychology, my professor, Dr. Barry Schwartz, made a startling
confession during the last class of the semester: he'd become
disenchanted with behaviorism. The reason? He didn't believe
behaviorism was “natural.” The complex systems of reward and
punishment and the corresponding mechanistic view of the human psyche
– especially as used in the workplace – really only made sense if
the work at which you were employed was never more than emotionally
unfulfilling drudgery.
Schwartz used the example of the
assembly line. If you were to make a car from scratch, you would feel
some pride in it because it really would be “your” car.
Presumably you would be more involved with your work because you
would be an integral part of the process of manufacture from start to
finish. But as part of an assembly line, you are a cog in a machine.
You might feel some pride because you are part of a group, but as an
individual, you are no longer unique. You are an interchangeable
part. By itself, your work is meaningless. So it follows you must
search for external cues to give your work meaning. Work becomes
fulfilling only because you get paid, not because it has any
intrinsic value of its own.
Schwartz had come to the conclusion
that behaviorism was often used as a ruse to get people to do
meaningless, dehumanizing things. Moreover, he argued, its
mechanistic view of human psychology would eventually produce a
society of nasty, mindless and compliant automatons: Moron Nation,
Borg drones.
Eventually Dr. Schwartz wrote an entire
book, The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern
Life, sharply criticizing what up until then had been a large
part of his life's work. I remember sitting in that class and being
absolutely stunned, not so much because of his blistering criticism
of people like B.F. Skinner (whom I had always found kind of boring
anyway) but because of his suggestion that the Industrial Revolution
and the rise of modern capitalism had changed our consciousness so
profoundly.
***
Next I remembered an article I had read
in the 5 January 1997 issue of The New York Times Sunday
Magazine. It covered the usual ground about most people being
extremely sleep deprived and how bad that is for our health.
But the most interesting point the
article made was how much the nature of human sleep had changed due
both to the availability of electricity and the broader forces of the
Industrial Revolution. We tend to think of sleep as a solid chunk of
unconsciousness, usually seven to eight hours long, peppered by
dreaming, but this isn't really natural sleep at all. Because of the
alleged miracle of electric light, we live every day as if it were
illuminated by the extended sunshine of the Summer Solstice. (And
that's if we're lucky enough to work daylight hours, 9-5. Those who
do shift work live “days” Mother Nature never intended.)
Anyway: a man named Thomas Wehr decided
to see what would happen if people lived as if there were no electric
light. How would they sleep if, when it was dark, it actually got
dark?
Well, first they slept like bandits,
making up their sleep deficits. But eventually, during these
simulated winter nights (about 14 hours of darkness in the Washington
D.C. Area), they slept 8.75 hours a night, but they spent nearly the
whole 14 hours at rest. Apparently there's this whole state of
“sleep” the modern world never gets. There is a twilight state,
not quite sleep, not quite wakefulness, which has its own distinct
set of brainwaves.
Wehr believes that by condensing our sleep cycle, we have learned to sleep a less human sleep and closed ourselves off from altered states of consciousness that used to be routine. The twilight state (Wehr calls it “quiet rest”) is closely linked to the dream state (it follows REM sleep at least twice a night, sometimes more), and it may provide a natural link between waking and dreaming consciousness. When we cut our sleep time, we may have cut this link as well, which is why notions like the Dreamtime seem so foreign to many of us.
***
Okay. What does this have to do with your photo of your garden, your epiphany in the parking lot, or reconnecting with Nature as referenced in “Seasonal: to Subvert the Taboo against Acknowledging Our Mother”? I guess my point is this: the world we've invented for ourselves has changed us profoundly, has even altered us physically. I believe the way to the Mother is through the body, but for a long time we've behaved like machines. How do we find our way back? Or can we go back? If not, how do we dream a bridge forward? – Franetta McMillan/3 August 2010; rev. 14 August 2010
*****
IN RESPONSE: Once again the
synchronicity implicit in this dialogue astounds me. I had been
struggling for several months with how to preface a pair of reports
that accurately describe two encounters with what I think of as the
“Otherness” that haunts the edges of our lives and vision.
Though each of these events was
decisive in my commitment to the 24-year project that became
“Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” (the book of photographs and text
destroyed by fire in 1983), I was terrified that disclosure of any
such experiences of my own might open me to denunciation as a lunatic
or a superstitious idiot. Thus – save in conversations with a few
trusted friends – I never mentioned these incidents at all, not
even obliquely in discussions of the influences that shaped the
photographic collages that were the work's primary illustrations –
never mind one of the encounters actually provided the book with its
working title. Now, much more recently, the fearful
something-to-lose facades of youth and maturity replaced by the angry
robbed-to-nothingness defiance of old age – and despite recognition
my sudden urge to share this material signaled an entirely new
evolution of sensibilities – I had no idea how to solve the
associated problems of form and content.
But then Franetta sent me
her comments on capitalism's brutal reshaping of human consciousness.
The first of my incident reports (for
that – a name intended to minimize their inherent psychodrama – is how I try to view them), was already written; I will post it here in
a few days. The second – a narrative of the incident that gave
birth to the “Pale Dancer” image – is under construction and
will follow soon afterward.
Each of the experiences so described – both born of times when I was relatively exempt from industrial oppression (thank you Franetta for showing me another hitherto-unrecognized probability of cause-and-effect) – are relevant not so much as individually defining autobiographical moments, but because they typify the greater metaphysical biography of the entire Counterculture.
As I learned during the
now-forever-lost work on “Dancer” – especially via the hundreds
of interviews and conversations that made up its textual backbone –
such encounters exemplify the phenomenon that inspired, reinforced
and unified the Counterculture, providing its eerily spontaneous
glimpses into long-suppressed reality: the “mother-and-child
reunion” of physics and metaphysics now implicit in the Gaea
Hypothesis; the forbidden paradigm the late Helen Farias described
with such ironic eloquence as “that which I always knew to be true
but was never allowed the vocabulary to describe.”
Within the context of the material
provided by Franetta, my descriptions of these individual moments –
call them core visions in deference to their pivotally evocative
power – bring into sharper focus the emerging collective mindset
characteristic of what the late Walter Bowart so aptly labeled
“Revolution in Consciousness.” Franetta's analysis also shows us
something of just why the Ruling Class found the Counterculture so
threatening – arguably (based on the magnitude of the operations by
which the Revolution in Consciousness was suppressed), far more of a
challenge to capitalism's imposition of Moron Nation powerlessness
than even the most revolutionary forms of Marxism might have been.
In the often hyperbolic parlance of the
era, the Weathermen and other self-proclaimed political radicals
seemed – as I once wrote in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek
alternative-press essay – “mere insurrectionists, out to change
nothing more than the socioeconomic climate.” But the real
revolutionaries – the true Counterculture – were those I
described as “Seismologists – the crypto-radical Seismology
Faction...out to fault the very bedrock of civilization.”
Supposedly authored by an imaginary
deep-cover agitator whose nom de guerre was “Aengus L.
Forsythe,” the piece ran in a Northwest Passage edition
of August or September 1970.
I intended this “Forsythe Saga” as
a kind of satire, to be thought provoking even as it fulfilled its
primary purpose of annoying the legions of Agency spooks and FBI
secret policemen then descending on Bellingham and every other
Counterculture stronghold. But the text contained important truths.
Poets like Robert Graves, Gary Snyder, Diane DiPrima and Tim
Buckley, visionaries like Farias and Bowart, the rest of us who
consciously served the Muse on the many variations of the Sacred
Quest (for myself, the path of the photographer as a latter-day
silversmith; of photography as choreographies of light set forever in
alchemical silver) – our collective intent truly was revolutionary.
We sought to resurrect and preserve those dimensions of consciousness
Graves refers to as “one story and one story only” and Snyder
describes as different from anything in Western culture “since the
destruction of Knossos.” And there was an entire generation who
shared our visions.
Even then, long before “global
warming” had become the deceptively gentle euphemism for terminal climate
change and capitalism had revealed itself as the ultimate expression of species failure, we
were living proof of Marshall McLuhan's hypothesis of prophetic art
and Carl Jung's theory of generational prophecy. We sensed we had
already been marked for extermination, that the Ruling Class was
methodically herding us onto its Expressway to Extinction, the
deathcamp autobahn from patriarchy to Christian theocracy to
capitalism to Moron Nation and now finally to the Last Exit:
capitalism's tyrannosauric fulfillment in a Fourth Reich slave planet
doomed to become as barren as present-day Mars.
And now again the telling relevance of Franetta's contribution to this work: for what was the Revolution in Consciousness but our last desperate effort to rebuild the societal bridge to the life-sustaining gardens of Dreamtime? – LB/26 August 2010
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