Tuesday, June 14, 2005
(10:07 AM) | Brad:
'Interesting'; or, Some Thoughts Tangentially Related to Sovereignty
'It'll be interesting to see what happens in the Nov. 2006 elections,' 'It'll be interesting what becomes of Iraq,' 'It'll be interesting to find out how long we can sustain our consumption of oil,' . . . interesting, interesting, interesting.Is there any more palpable evidence of the disconnect between action and thought than the proliferation of this word in popular political discourse? Wary of an opinion or perspective that lends itself too closely to action or conviction -- due to factors ranging from time to money to apathy to a general sense of being disempowered -- we've become a people wholly focused on that which is "interesting." Or, in other words, of being observers, spectators.
Consumed by the linearity of cause-and-effect, we crave to see tangible effects, in order that our respective causes might be proven valuable. In an increasingly complex world in which effects are no longer clearly related to single causes, though, strict linearity has been devalued. The whole is far more complex than the sum of its parts, we've learned. A book, for example, is no longer simply a bound collection of words and sentences, or even the single effect of an author's conscious intention; rather, it is all of this and more, as our sense of the book emerges from an understanding of its genre(s), audience, marketing, ideology, etc. -- all of which, even more complexly, brings the perspective of the reader to the fore alongside that of the author. That book I see on the shelf, then, is not, cannot be, necessarily anyway, the same book you see.
I don't mean to rant about basic epistemology here; rather, my point is simply to say that a similar devaluation of the strict linearity of cause-and-effect is even more pronounced in contemporary society, wherein the etiology of world events is not necessarily incumbent upon logic. Things like emotion . . . money . . . markets . . . power, and all manner of things called 'sovereign', they do not necessarily fit into our logical equations. They, in turn, effect and affect changes in the world in ways, seen and unseen, that we cannot even imagine -- changes for good and for bad, of benevolence and of evil, or, as the case may be, somewhere in between.
Of course, none of this new. The difference now seems to be that, in this age of irony, which I don't think is too far removed from the age of religious faith, we revel in the knowledge that things don't always follow to form, we rejoice in the ostensible 'chaos' a butterfly's flapping wings inaugurates: we replace action and conviction for spectatorship, in order that we might see what happens -- 'my, that's interesting' -- rather than consciously participating in what is happening, or what we may indeed make happen.
