In the past few days, I am trying to find comfort in knowledge, that accepts the paucity of hope in this world and yet doesn’t distrust it. I have always been sceptical of self-awareness that ends in cynicism, for I believe it does more harm than an innocent naivety. It confuses intellect with hopelessness. Yet, every day I give into the same decoherence. It is becoming harder to appreciate the residual beauty, in an imperfect world. I’ve been reading Emil Cioran, and his undue pessimism often tends to bring a hope that arises from its negation. He writes, “A book is a suicide postponed.” and I hope if I cannot give you a book, I can at least offer you some words.
I have been thinking about the cultural myths that we exist in, and how to feel anything that feels authentic. This article is an attempt to subvert the bleakness of existence by its own exposition. It is to leave something human, something that says, at least we are here.
The Myth of Success
In the last few months, the world continues to crumble. I view it with my voyeuristic gaze that is fed everything from the safe distance of drawing out all substance from it and neatly arranging it into a consumerist platter. It provides the illusion that the world revolves around me, and while reality unfolds in complex ways, it should or will always align with my individual reckoning.
Within this hyper individualization or alienation, there is also a web of commodification, where every individual becomes the consumed by virtue of being a consumer. In a simple analogy from eighth grade biology, in a food chain- a worm is eaten by a bird, a bird by a cat, a cat by a lion, and a lion on its death again by the worm, thus forming a complete cycle. When extrapolated and combined in an entire ecosystem, this food chain forms a complex food web. In the cultural context, we start with the aim to capture a piece of reality. A piece of reality is consumed by its recording. The recording changes to content, highly specific to the mode of communication. The mode of communication exposes the content to multiple individuals. The individuality leads to varied ideologies/interpretations. The multiple interpretations to multiple emotions, the multiple emotions to numerous modes of expressions, and finally the numerous modes of expression further feeding into reality itself. Reality mediates on itself, thus forming an intermeshed cultural matrix. Reality in itself gets enclosed in a loop of being both the consumed and the consumer, the prey and the predator as it consumes and regurgitates its own ideologies, myths and narratives.
In the cultural moment that we exist in, the most pertinent example is the commodification of successful individuals to the point of deification. While deification induces a sense of religiosity, it also robs individuals of their humanity by reducing them to an idea. The idea of success, is always more important than the successful individual itself. It is achieved either by creating an impenetrable mystery around the individual or a complete transparency. Both the mechanisms that seem to work in complete isolation from each other have the same underlying aim, which is to create an inherent emptiness, within the strive for success, which can only be filled by constant stimulation. In fact, the very fabric of culture, which involves both you and I works in the way that the commodification of success is inevitable. It is because success (in its conventional sense) is an anomaly. The only way to explain an anomaly is to intermesh it within the web of commodification, and to make it into a commodity itself, to create the illusion of distribution, that everyone is equally entitled to success and it is always both within reach and almost outside of it.
The process of mystification of success is essential to the task, where the curiosity for unfolding the mystery becomes the stimulus. A great example of the mystification of success becomes the art world. The idea of a reclusive writer or a mad painter spilling paints in their isolation is elevated to such a romantic height, that the mystery of the artist becomes attached to the art itself. The romantic frenzy is more glamorous than the mundane task of actually sitting in a closed room, doing almost nothing watchable for hours. The voyeuristic feature of watchableness is fundamental to the mystery required for the commodification of an artist.
In an interview, David Bowie says, “I think the great fight is that the art world — the established art world is fundamental to the task that the mystery is kept in place because once it falls into the hands of the proletariat, that the ability to make art is inherent to all of us, it demolishes the idea of art for commerce and that’s no good for business. So I think there is always a great coming together of the commerce establishment which the art world is basically, to protect its own. The perfect example is that there were many signers or graffiti artists working in the late 70s and early 80s. Why should it be that only two or three of them should be taken from the sea of signers working in New York, some of them incredibly talented and then elevated to a point that there was something particularly special about those three guys. It behooves the art establishment to raise them to a higher plateau as fast as possible to make them unavailable aesthetically to a low art market and it does that continually. It extends its parameters quite widely to capture the new thing and elevate it from low art to high art successfully enough to raise the commerce proposition that goes along with it.”
The mystery is maintained through all forms of material commodities, through books, movies, quotes, all places where the mystery of the artist is more important than the art itself. A movie or a book on an artist extends this myth further by claiming to demystify an artist, while always staying at a safe distance from the art, the very process of creation, thus creating a double blind in the sort that now when the mystery about the artist as a person has been demolished, we still know nothing about their art. One might just say that the very purpose is not to teach you to paint like Van Gogh, but to extend the myth further by using the stimulus of curiosity and turning it into a material commodity, that one can hold to feel closer to a certain imitation of success.
However, the complete antithesis of mystification is the demystification of success, to provide complete transparency into the life of a successful individual, where the individual in itself is commodified. Every little aspect of their life is broadcasted and transmitted. The stimulus of curiosity is overloaded with an unending stream of consumption. To generate a sense of community, by producing a hope that anyone can achieve success by making a caricature of a complex individual into a highly likeable and relatable character, who gives a comfortable naive hope while smiling through a screen. The myth herein is the democratization of success — to make an individual’s success into a collective myth, while generating revenue through the collective attention span, advertisements and sometimes the mere monetization of the emotional investment in one’s own illusory success, as one begins to feel like an extension of this successful individual. The interesting part about this myth is that the individual does not need to consent to be mythologized. In the absence of consent, the voyeuristic gaze still manages to generate all the desired effects, by imposing and probing into every aspect of the individual’s life, from the food they eat to the time they wake up and take a dump. In a lot of ways, the demystification of success follows the mystification, a sort of post-postmodernist take on celebrity culture.
To think of how we cannot escape this fetishization and commodification of success needs the understanding, that success is the cornerstone of progress, both individual and collective. The cultural fabric is elastic, and it functions in self-adapting loops wherein the successful individual, has very little control of their own commodification. Iconoclasts become standards for the future. Any disruption is eventually consumed and made into a system.
The macabre biological metaphor here is that everything you consume, will eventually consume you.
We exist as voyeurs, with or without choice. There is inherent irony in being a part of the cultural discourse that does critical analysis, where critical analysis in itself becomes a commodity of a sub-culture. Maybe the awareness helps at the end of the day. Maybe if I extricate myself from the very myth of success, there is still hope, or maybe the spiritual gurus have commodified that too. I do not really know where we go from here, but I know I can attempt to be honest, and human. The next part is an attempt to put my own inherent humanity in words.
I am searching for a way of being emotional, which isn’t sentimental or nostalgic. Sentimentality, when personal feels like irreverence to reality- an egoistic imposition. Sentimentality, when mediated feels like manipulation. I am prone to look at most sentimentality with scepticism, a slithering feeling that makes an idealised, unattainable reality. Nostalgia, on the other hand is the listless searching of time, of a past that never existed in the present. Memory fails us, and we conjure up nostalgia to make up for the failure of memory. Both sentimentality and nostalgia make an emotion of lack, sentimentality through the lack of overabundance, the lack of an exaggerated reality and nostalgia through its own absence.
I am searching for a way of being emotional, which isn’t exciting, which prods into the very substance of things and creeps into the fabric of life. I often think of such emotion as dust setting in a corner of my room. There is the dual element of natural observation and surprise in the realisation, that through time, a tiny corner of the world can change in such minute moments that it feels like continuity. I want to feel like a continuous set of moments, to not be broken into time, to look back and still feel like I could savour a part of me that isn’t lost as I grow up.
All writing is a form of personal sentimentality. I hope you can extract the sentimental out of it, and take something back that gives you hope. Before I leave, I want to end with this song, quoting the lines which I hold to be a simple profound truth:
“In the end, it’s all about, the love you’re sending out.”
