Improvisation

Judith Butler writes in her book Undoing gender (2004) that "(Gender) is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint (Page 1)". By this she means that gender is today better understood not as the "protocategory", but when one  "accept that gender, as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to a continual remaking, and that "anatomy" and "sex" are not without cultural framing. " (p 9 and 10) Through this she dismisses gender as a biological category and defines it as a cultural one - and again as a cultural category that is continuously changing.

 One might say that by doing so, she and other gender theorists are finally killing off one of the last of Nietzsche's Gods - the protocategory gender. But gender to Butler, is not really about female or male, it is the example of a defining category and thus the metaphor for how we use categories to frame ourselves and the rest of the world around us. It is also the metaphor for the the limits and possibilities that arise within this approach to life as she says in the interview with Roth: "We are being formed through institutions, we are being called names". Interestingly, Butler is very sensitive to the restraints that are put upon us by the way society, that is ourselves, defines the categories, and it seems to me that Butler is trying to find a way to live within society, but live freely and with pleasure. But Butler seems to think that a complete freedom from norms is impossible. She writes: "Individuals rely on insitutions of social support in order to exercice self determination" (p. 7) and further "One only determines "one's own" sense of gender to the extent that social norms exist that support and enable that act of claiming gender for oneself." (p. 7) Her solution to this problem is improvisation. As Roth describes it, the improvisation happens the moment the individual starts adapting and changing an already existing standard. The improvisation is a way of combining culture and our biology: "We are to an extent driven by what we do not know and cannot know and this drive (Trieb) is precicely what is neither exclusively biological nor cultural, but always the site of their dense convergence" (p. 15) This convergence of biology and culture creates a freedom and is a possibility to combine the norms and the individual freedom. 

 To Butler, it seems to be impossible to live without being acknowledging the actual or possible oppression of social norms. To Emerson, the social norms are blatantly rejected as limiting for the individual: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. " (7458) It is through this reliance on our personal beliefs and convictions that we invent ourselves, that we define ourselves, but this is an invention, and it is not something that should necessarily affect others; it is entirely personal:" My life is for itself and not for spectacle" (7484) he writes. In a way Emerson's approach has similarities to Butler's. They both find that the individual needs to personally be engaged in the building of their identity or as Emerson writes: "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think." (7496) and his focus on the personal engagement is underscored: "Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself" (7496). 

As Butler questions the limitations of the values of a category: " Am I a gender after all"(p. 16) , she is joined by Emerson in his rejection of consistency or as he says: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do"(7532). The urge for consistency in our categorization will hold us back and prevent us from following Emerson's maxim to "live ever in a new day" (7532). So in a way both Emerson and Butler argues for an activist approach to the the invention of ourselves. But where the social norms should simply be ignored by Emerson, they are considered as the  starting points for improvisation by Butler. 

Butler, J (2004) Undoing Gender http://books.google.ca/books?id=U4Zq_ZdwgHkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=judith+butler+undoing+gender&hl=no&sa=X&ei=vXSEUYmhNIfbrAHLvYCABA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA

Butler/Roth: Coursera interview

Emerson, R.W. (2011) The complete Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The complete works collection. Kindl edition http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Unabridged-Transcendentalist-Transcendentalism-ebook/dp/B004PYDDHE/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367635271&sr=1-4&keywords=emerson+ralph+waldo

Coming to terms with the past...

"Why drag about this corpse of your memory " (kindle 7524/23479) Emerson asks, "(...) live ever in a new day."To Sigmund Freud this comes out as impossible to avoid as "much of the old is still there",  and using Rome as a metaphor for the human mind he continues, "but buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives (...)" (kindle p 8 of 106)". Now Freud himself is not referring to specific memories as such, he is referring to developmental stages and "The fact that in mental life the retention of the past is the rule rather than a surprising exception." (p. 11/106)". The memories of Freud are therefore not personal memories as the ones Emerson referred to, but remnants of emotions and needs in the primal human. 

Interestingly, Emerson uses a similar picture of one thing building upon the other, but contrary to Freud he believes that "whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away" (7609/23479).  To him, it is therefore important to leave old memories behind. Still, he concurres with the notion that some aspects of ourselves are hard to avoid. He writes: "I suppose no man can violate his nature"(kindle 7540) , but further down he continues"(...) Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions" (7548/23479). 

 Freud agrees with the hardship in changing ones nature. The purpose of our existence he writes is that we "strive for happiness" (15/106) and pleasure "arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs"(16/106). These needs or drives to find pleasure are primary, originating in the human being long before being civilized. At the same time, these drives are not memories we individually can erase, they are unconscious needs, stored in our minds through history, that we seek to satisfy or reject. 

 This too separates Freud's idea of memories from Emerson's. Freud's "drives" a common for all humans, whereas Emerson's memories are clearly personal. He  also finds that if they hold us back from living fully enganged in our present day, he calls them an "impertinence and an injury" (7619).  Emerson says that the human being "cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time" (7628).  Interestingly both Emerson and Freud are critical of how society limits our pleasure. 

Freud believes that an important part of the evolution of society is that "the members of a society restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction; whereas the individual knew no auch restriction.". Slowly as civilization evolves, it becomes harder and harder for the individual to satisfy it's primal need, and thus the individual suffering is increased.  To Freud the history is therefore the approach to express how we cannot escape neither society nor our own suffering within theselimits. Emerson on the other hand says that if you need to "cast off the common motives of humanity" (7697) to live so that one is true to oneself, then that is the path to pursue. History or memory should not be allowed to hold you back, you can live freely. 

An approach such as this is not possible within Freud's argument. First of all is it impossible for us to reject our history, or rather our drives, which is how history manifests itself in our minds. He writes that in addition to hard work, we must have "the recognition of love as a foundation of civilization"(p. 48). This is because the man "loathes to dispense with his sexual object, the woman, and the woman loathe to surrender her child (...)" (p.47). Historically, these were the reasons we created civilization, today these reasons remain within us as drives. As we continue to live in civilizations, controlling another primal drive, the agression, becomes imperative. The constant fight to control our agression means that "civilized society is constantly threatened with disintegration" (p. 61)

Within Freud's understanding, actually breaking with our innate memories or our history is, as stated above, impossible, as they are no longer a part of something we can't control. His approach to the problem is therefore to become aware of ones needs. And where the the freedom for Emerson lies in liberating oneself from the demands of society to rely solely on the idividual mind and wishes, such a liberation is not really possible to Freud. 

Emerson, R. W. (2011) "Self reliance" from The complete Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The complete Works Collection. Kindle edition. 

Freud, S. (2002) Civilization and its discontent. Penguin. Kindle edition. 

Progress

Up until my child was born, I believed myself " free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown"  as Horkheimer and Adorno describes it (p.11). But by this transition - the unknown re-entered my world, and fear took hold of me. 

In the spirit of enlightenment, I therefore followed Kant's motto: "Have courage to use your understanding" and thus plunged into the peer reviewed research done on the subject. Worried that my child was at the verge of death, watching Hans Rosling (3) told me that the odds are 200:1 that my child will live past it's fifth anniversary, compared with data from the late 1800s where my child's chances of survival were 2:1 (4). The reassuring power was enormous. "This is progress, " I thought, "and it is good."   

But not everyone is as ethusiastic about progress as I am. Nietzsche seems to think that progress is that: "the people have triuphed - or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them - "in other words, the progress as he sees it, is a world where the masses rule the few. Where "The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of of the common man is completely triumphant" ( IX p. 169).  But on the other hand, he does not seem to consider improved life expectancy rates for children an aspect of progress, in his mind progress seems to be about culture. The bourgeois culture he describes seems impermeated by what he calls "Slave ethics, (..)" and it "begins by saying no to an "outside", an "other"" (X p 170). The progress he describes limits the strong, and tries to bind them by morals that are better applied to the weak. The weak "lives hidden, shuns all that is evil, and altogether asks very little of life (...)" (XIII - p 178). The progress makes us "no longer see anything these days that aspires to grow greater (XII p. 177)". We are lulled to mediocrity by the morals of the weak. 

As a parent I do feel the impact of morals. Parenting is the test where your children's performance on emotional, physical and intellectual charts show your ability as a parent. The statistical averages control our approaches to parenting, and as the progress of science makes masses dominate the cultural life, everything that is good is something the masses approves of. But although it might seem like progress it is in fact regression according to Horkheimer and Adorno: "The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not been already heard, to touch with their hands what has previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness that supersedes that of vanquished myth." (Horkheimer and Adorno p 28).  We are forced to accomodate because: "Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear." Choosing outside the standardized box of parenting is almost impossible.

Horkheimer and Adorno are telling me that I might have found a way of reducing my fears through enlightenment, but the knowledge I have used to control it, is a frame as limiting as the previous religious beliefs. Although I believe that I choose, I follow a logic defined by a few and : "What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collective". (Horkheimer and Adorno p.16).  As I and all other parents I know plunge into the peer reviewed and enlightened science of raising children, we are plunging ourselves into a system where we are being subdued by the powerful, the one's with knowledge, and we become ourselves the slaves of this system of beliefs. The progress is therefore illusory, where there previously were the rules of religious and social morals - the golden rules - that formed our parenting, today it is the scientific statistical means that are our guidelines. The measureble progress thus forces the social control. 

And so the trap closes. The progress that liberates a woman's energy from childbaring and repeated infant death, also creates a mass culture that keeps you locked within the confines of science and social norms. But in a world where individuality is the new mass phenomenon, is Emerson's definition "To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius." still valid? 

Literature: 

Easterlin, R.

Emerson, R. W. 

Horkheimer and Adorno

Kant, I.

Nietzsche, F. 

Rosling, H.  

The ordinary

In 1917 the French artist Marcel Duchamp submitted the artwork, The Fountain for a large exhibition of contemporary art in New York. As the work of art not only was a ready-made, but also a urinal, the artwork was dismissed from the exhibition. Even though Duchamp also previously had made artworks from ready-made objects, the seeing the ordinary as art, was not yet possible.

Traditionnaly the function of art was to recreate the sublime - to tell the story of Gods or Kings. But for the French poet Beaudelaire, recreating beauty is futile: "L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu" (Le Confiteor de l'artiste), and the beauty that once was there, degenerates quickly into the horrendous: "La chambre paradisiaque, (...) toute cette magie a disparu au coup brutal frappé par le Spectre."(La chambre double). He searches for the beauty in traditional art, but when he tries to look into Venus eyes, "(...) l'implacable Vénus regarde au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de marbre." (Le fou et la Vénus). 

So, the artist begins a search for intensity and beauty. His hunting grounds are the noisy, dirty, crowded and suffocating city. The setting for his poems are the everyday life as in "Les yeaux du pauvre" or "Un plaisant". But from this seemingly ordinary surface, the poets finds the extraordinary: "Quelles bizarreries ne trouve-t-on pas dans une grande ville, quand on sait se promener et regarder? La vie fourmille de monstres innocents." (Mademoiselle Bistouri). Although the poet dislikes the ordinary, it still becomes a network of possibilities for the sublime experience. But it is an experience exclusive for those who knows how to look out for intensity and the beauty where it is hidden to everyone else. One might say that Beaudelaire to an extent lives according to Emerson's maxim: "To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius."  (7417 /23479 Kindle version Emerson Complete essays).

Still, Beaudelaire is not interested by the ordinary in itself, it is the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary that inspires him.

Woolf has a different approach to the ordinary. Mrs. Ramsey, the character everything orbits around in To the Lighthouse, is a beautiful woman, a wife and a mother. She is surrounded by charachters who's professions in life are unordinary, Mr. Ramsey a philosophy professor, Lily Briscoe, a painter, Mr. Carmicheal, a poet etc. but as Lily Briscoe observes " Mrs. Ramsey cared not a fig for her painting".  What she wishes for Lily Briscoe is" that she must, that Minta must, they must all marry (...) an unmarried woman missed the best of life", (part 1, 9). Mrs. Ramsey insists upon the ordinary, in this case a traditional life for an early 20th century woman, as a path to fulfillment and happiness. 

And the novel does prove her right. The character who are working on projects in art and philosophy all doubt themselves. Mr Ramsey needs Mrs Ramseys approval and sympathy, "Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride (part 1, 1)" walking with Mrs. Ramsey, or as Lily Briscoe thinks of her painting inally finished ten years after it was started "it would be hung in the attic, she thought, or it would be destroyed" (3, 14). Mrs. Ramsey's love for her family and guests, remains within them as memories even ten years, or as Lily Briscoe remembers: "she brought together this and that and then this; and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (...) something, this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking- which survived; after all these years complete, so that she dipped into it to re- fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art" (part 3 chap 4) . It is the ordinary that fosters the sublime. 

One might say that where the ordinary for Beaudelaire primarily is the camouflage of the extraordinary, the ordinary for Woolf is the soil out of which art and beauty grows. To Duchamp the ordinary is a way of challengind your notion of art.  As the 20th century progresses, popular culture mixes with fine art,  and where the distiction previously had been sharp between fine art and popular culture - the borders become blurry. The ordinary becomes the new source of inspiration for the extraordinary.

Duchamp, M. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htmBeaudelaire, C. Le Spleen de Paris. http://baudelaire.litteratura.com/le_spleen_de_paris.php#.UWtZHSs710s Woolf, V. To the Lighthouse. http://www.polyglotproject.com/books/English/to_the_lighthouse

The psychology of money week 2 in progress

Do we really understand how money works and how it influences us?

Money is an incredible invention - without we would have to do barters all the time. The world would be a lot more difficult. Money on the other hand creates an incredible mechanism where all of a sudden everything can be traded - and all of these exchanges we do not need to worry about - Ariely calls it an invention equal to the wheel.

Opportunity cost
Psychologically - what is money all about? We should think of money in the sense of opportunity cost - in other words:  whenever one buys something one should think what else could I have spent this money on? What are you actually giving up by choosing one thing over another? But this is difficult - when was the last time you thought about this? When people were asked this question at a car dealers most people were not able to answer, and did a substitution in stead. (On should, according to Ariely, in these cases do the calculation and say that this is 700 lattes, four nice vacations etc). It is also made hard by the way money function in our environment. If one has a short term horizon, that is how you plan, but today in an enviroment with morgages, loans and credit cards, this horizon is harder to spot. Because of this we make shortcuts. Which is why the case of the $1000 dollar stereo compared to the $1000 stereo +  $300 worth of music the latter is more appealing, whereas in the $ 1000 stereo comparde with the $700 stereo, the previous is more attractive. We therefore set a higher value for a specific item than the monetary value for the item.

Relativity
To trick ourselves, we often think of money in relative terms rather than absolute terms. Our check account doesn't care where a given amount of money was saved, but we do - we would rather save a proportionally larger amount than a smaller amount. We make very quick decisions on large amounts of money, whereas we can contemplate small amounts of money for a long time. We are also happier if we consider us on the top part of the salary scale than in the lower part. According to Ariely, we are not willing to sacrifice income for happiness. Diminishing returns.

The Pain of paying
Most people find it harder to pay with cash than to pay with credit card. "The pain of paying is magnified when our feelings about spending moneare coupled with consumption". The rational thing when one goes on a cruise is to pay when the cruise is finished, but usually that makes us enjoy the cruise less as we contemplate the sum that we are about to part with. This is because "the pain of paying adds a moral tax to our consumption. Timing and method of payment changes our enjoyment. So one would therefore increase one's pain of paying for everyday consumption this can be done by spending money, getting notfications whenever money is spent, increase salience, but sometimes we want to lower the pain of pain so that enjoyment can be higher and that one does something one wouldn't normally do.

What is an ideal gift - it removes the pain of paying for people. A great gift is a gift you receive, but where the pain of paying is removed.

Mental accounting
Once money is assigned to a given purpose, it is intransferable. It therefore means that we assign money to certain mental categories, and this makes us feel in particular ways about this money. Unassigned money, on the other hand, we treat differently. This is also why people find it reasonable that they have checking accounts with low interest rates, but accept credit cards with very high interest rates.

Although money it itself is fungible, people don't treat it as such. Therefore mental accounting is a good thing, but doing a constant evaluation of spending is just not possible, so to control our spending, we assign different sums to different "departments".

Fairness and reciprocity
It is hard for us to pay for expertise, but if we see someone struggling to do a job, we are more willing to pay for it. We are willing to pay for incompetence, but also for the effort we see that people put into it. Fairness in many ways is about marginal costs, if the fix cost is low and all the additional costs are marginal, we are willing to pay for it. To show people our hard work is therefore important as a way of getting what we should. Our willingness to pay something should be based on the value of something, but it is very hard to assess this, therefore we add the effort as a part of acquiring this thing or service.




Literature: 
Byuing behaviour
Opportunity cost 
How credit card payments increases (...):
Psychological consequences of money

Desperate housewives - philosophy version

According to Dan Ariely, humans hate making decisions. To overcome this difficulty, or even avoid it, we use strategies like "self-hurding". When we self-hurd, we follow our routine. The choices we think we make are actually not new choices, but only a repetition of the same choice that has been made a long time ago. If the choices are personal, the original reason is forgotten, and if we choose accoring to tradition, it wasn't even made by us in the first place. 

As society transforms from the traditional societies of the 18th century to modernity, the social framework that has engulfed Europeans disappears. The societies become more transparent. In this mix of destitution, scientific progress, luxury, superstition and wealth, the modern individual emerges in late 19th century. A core characteristic with this modern individual is our ability to choose. In this text I will discuss how Nietsche and Freud uses history as an approach to the problem of choice.      

To Nietszche, our choices are to a great extent limited by our history. As individuals in a modern society, we are caught in a moral framework, a framwork created by the common man as a result of discontent with the superiours resources. He writes: "The Lords are a thing of the past and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant" (Genealogy of Morals "First Essay IX"). In Second essay he continues:"The principles of common man has thus subdued the strongest will" and "With the help of custom and the social strait jacket, man was in fact made calculable" ("II"). We must therefore understad that our founding principles  "were created in "older civilisations" that either created or permitted them" ( Second Essay V). To sum up, through history our freedom to choose has been limited. 

To enforce the common man's morality Nietszche writes that "Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attached with torture, blood sacrifice. (" Second essay 2 III") . History is therefore a constant repetition of pain and suffering to enforce the ethics of the common man, to create a memory. History has trapped us in mediocrity, and as our freedom is limited by our civilisazion, it is only the very few of us who do not live by Ariely's self hurding strategy. History lives thus in man through the limitations of society. We are trapped by morals that are forced on us through violence, and as most of us are common, we like it that way. 

Freud on the other hand writes that "primal man discovered that it lay in his hands, literally, to improve his lot on earth by working" (p 46). Man's ability to choose, seems therefore to have come as an épiphany. But also Freud seems to think that our real ability to chose is limited by our instincts, instincs that originate in the primal man."In the realm of the mind, on the other hand, what is primitive is so commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it(...)"(page 15)  History to Freud therefore seems to be the reasons for why we make decisions that make us unhappy in our civilized lives. 

Interestingly, the understanding of history seems to be important both to Freud and to Nietzsche. But  they choose different strategies to liberation from either intellectual and social slavery (Nietzsche) or unhappiness (Freud). To Nietzsche it seems as if the only solution is to cast the morals of society away and live strongly and intensely. To be free means not only to realize one's history, but also to discharge the norms of the society that has arisen from this history, to have the power to choose without moral concerns. 

Freud's is less revolutionary, but not less radical. According to him we must understand that our memories are our history. And when the memories are too painful, we escape into hysterics "Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and memory symbols of (certain) traumatic experiences" The origin and development of Psychoanalysis. We can neither change our reactions nor our history, but understanding both our personal history and society's provide us with the tools to live happier and more productuve lives. 

The history is of importance both to Nietzche and to Freud toward an understanding of the limits of society for Nietzsche and our emotional and social discontent for Freud. They both seem to search for ways to strengthen the individual's ability to choose. Nietzsche seeks to liberate the poweful , the only individual with a real choice, Freud wants to clarify our history so that we can accept the choices previously made.  

Nietzsche, F. Genealogy of Morals.http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm

Freud, S.(1961): Civilisation AND IT'S Discontent. Northon Company. http://archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDiscontents

Roth, M. S (2013) Lecture Intensity and the Ordinary

Violence in reality and violence in films

Inspired by Eva Sørhaug's amazing film 90 minutes, I wrote a letter comparing it's theme family violence to the violence we constantly watch as entertainment.  I didn't hear anything, but today I discovered that they published it online. Although the language at times makes me blush with embarrassment, I am quite proud that they put it out there...

And If you do get the chance to watch the film, do it. The theme is horrific, the production design is Scandinavian at it's most sober, the acting is raw - and the film itself  tells the stories we hardly ever hear.   

Aggression is a substantial part of the human character, and as an important drive of all comptetition, it is still one of the major contributors to human entertainment. It takes the shape as the need to vanquish the opponent or the drive toward the outstanding, either explicitly as in sports or implicitly as in making or breaking it in the art world. In this way the aggression is canalized into something the society considers constructive.

Explicit violence is in most circumstances considered to be the last solution. But of the Top 10 grossing films in the U.S., violence is a substantial part in seven of them. According to Business Insider, in half of all the highest grossing video games, the player takes the part of the killer (in most cases for a “good” cause, although not always so).

And last but not least, horrific murder stories are explained in length and detail in newspapers and broadcasting. For the majority amongst us, these are our only encounters with uncontrolled aggression. The aggression is estheticied in such a way that is does not really concern us.

It is therefore worth notifying that between 2000 and 2009, 326 children were killed by a family member — in 83 per cent of the cases by a parent. In 1999/98, more than 350,000 Canadian children between 6 and 11 reported that they had witnessed domestic violence according to Statistics Canada. That is 17 per cent of all Canadian children.

In 2009, less than a quarter of the victims of domestic violence stated that the violence came to the attention of the police, a decline from previous years. In recent high profile murder cases in the GTA area, family members are reported to be the aggressors.

TIFF 2012 is screening the important feature film 90 minutes, by Eva Soerhaug. The film is about family violence and will never figure on any highest grossing list. It gives an insight into a reality for many Canadian families, a reality that is rarely shared with the public.

Hilde Melby, Toronto

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2012/09/13/film_looks_at_family_violence.html