last night i watched abbas kiorostami's film "abc africa"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281534/
which is mostly about the consequences of aids and malaria in uganda: among these consequences is a population of about 2 million orphan children. the film is primarily about one of the organizations that has been set up to attempt to deal with this issue---on a small scale, but in very interesting ways involving small communities of women. it is well worth watching.
i mention this because i also found the film overwhelming in terms of information: it was shot using a handheld digital camera, and much of the film is basically walking or driving through some of the communities affected. it was the hand held camera that was problematic for me: first because finding myself bouncing along to someone else' bodily rhythm made me kinda nauseous, and second because the handheld camera placed you THERE, in the space being filmed, as if you were there in real time. something about the artificial distancing mechanisms you rely on with regular film and television footage not being there in this case made the film a difficult intellectual and visceral experience---almost too much information.
i stumbled across this thread, and from the title expected it to be about personal relationships, i dont know why exactly, but there we are.
and i was thinking about this question of whether it is better to know or not know about the world, about what is happening: and it seems to me a complicated political and psychological question.
i think that you have to look, that you have to try to know what is going on around you: not to do it seems to be to consign yourself to being less than alive in some basic ways---you are certainly less than free if you do nto actively engage with the world around you. but what that engagement means is not so simple.
what you look at is to a great extent conditioned by the totality of experiences that you have had that express themselves in your basic political orientation (totality here doesnt mean that they are all somehow "present" in your mind as such, these experiences: they are mostly an accumulation of traces and references and effects)---and so what you research, what you look at ends up being caught up, from the outset, in a ciruclar relationship with your political orientation--your political orientation is simultaneously an indicator, in that it points you toward information about the world, and a distancing device, in that the discourse of politics gives you ways to order that information so you can process it without doing yourself psychological damage.
both are obviously important: they come down to the question of how you become able to look.
being able to look requires that you have ways available to you to process what you are looking at: otherwise, what you see simply burns you up.
and it is true, like powerclown said earlier, that the world is both really fucked up and really beautiful at once---and it is important to remember both. but there is no either/or: and in the end, what shapes what you are able to look at is in the end a psychological question is a political question is an information organization question is an ability to distance yourself from waht you are seeing question. if you do alot of research work, you sometimes think that you are able to get quite close to "reality"--but this is as much an effect of what the organizational systems that you use to classify/sort information as it is of any meaningful sense of proximity. what you can see, then, is a direct function of what you can hold together within your field of vision: what you can handle, what does not burn you up like icarus flying into some informational sun. and what you can handle is a function of what you can repress, what you have to repress, what it is about that which you find, that which you are looking at that you have to eliminate or make abstract in order to enable yourself to hold together anything like a coherence to what you are seeing.
i have spent many years researching modalities of social collapse, thinking and writing about vertigo as a social phenomenon. i wonder sometime about the psychological effects: what it does to me in other areas. i have to say that i do not always have a clear sense of that. doing history is strange: everything about it tends to make information into elements within some huge television show, and integrating it via narrative form contributes to a vast illusion of control/mastery over the world--as if the world is a huge text that you can pick up and read or put down and forget about
: as if life is an accumulation of objects and knowing the equivalent of making lists. you can know all this is at the least problematic, maybe even false: but you use these systems anyway because, well, there isn't much choice.
maybe this has some strange effects: it helps us forget the the fact that we cannot really see very much about ourselves, about our actions and motives, about those we love, about love itself: we do not know much about our immediate environments. when we walk down a sidewalk, we take in only a very limited amount of information about what we pass through--but we have to limit information or we would not be able to move. we do not know what time is: we cannot represent it, so it slides through our logic--but we are it---but we do not know it. we do not know how the systems of biological systems that we are work, how they hold together, how they co-ordinate information. we do not know what memory is, how exactly it works, how much of our experience is made up of memory, whether and how memory is individual or social or both or neither.
so much basic stuff we do not understand.
we construct representations of the world for ourselves, but we do not think about the logic created by the acts of representing. we do not wonder about what we know and how we know it. but we think we can construct meaningful systems of information about the world. and we live in those systems. because they let us make decisions about which aspects of the many many things we do not know about or do not understand we are going to take on at a given moment. the ability to focus your attention is the ability to limit information. the ability to speak coherently is the ability to limit information and sequence it. nouns substitute categories for particularities. sentences give you the impression that there is a discrete pronoun (subject) that interacts with a world external to itself (verb) and that the world is a collection of things (direct object): is that how we operate in the world? how do you know? maybe we limit ourselves to a very significant degree when we decide that there are no fundamental problems with the ways in which we stage or represent our most basic relations to and with the world.
is it better to know or not know?
what does knowing mean?
i suspect this is now officially rambling.
so i'll stop here.