trivialities

some thoughts on keeping a journal:

I have kept a journal ever since I was seven. With very few exceptions, I have written in it everyday, even if it is just one sentence. I go through a ton of pens and paper; half of my closet is densely packed with remnants of these daily scribbles. In the past, when I finished a notebook, I would sometimes hesitate before adding it to my colossal collection—Do I really want to add another book of trivialities to take up even more space?—then remember how fond I am of my colorfully illustrated volumes from my childhood and my newest one would be spared.

Once every year or so, I wipe the dust from their covers and look through them. The older, the better: writings grounded too close to my present are not as interesting as the testimonies of an existence that I have lost long ago. I find patterns, an aspect of the whole that I could not see in the moment. From seven until nine, they were mostly sticky images pressed onto paper with cray-pas that would still cling to my twenty-five-year-old fingers; the text was mostly an explanatory accompaniment. From ten to fourteen, words slowly start to take over most of the page and the images come as an afterthought at the end of each entry. Age twelve also marks a shift from writing entirely in Korean to entirely in English. By age fifteen, images disappear altogether, but there still must have been some interest in the journal as something visual, as I would often use ink in various colors (or maybe it was just trendy to use brightly colored ink at the time). From age sixteen to seventeen, images reappear briefly, but as “ideas” supplementing my angry manifestos. From eighteen on, only black ink, all text, mostly legible and neat handwriting, coherent and full sentences. There is also a shift back to writing in Korean, with occasional English words or phrases.

I always wonder what the trajectory would have been like if I had not moved to States. Would I have so readily and viciously cast out images from my daily meditations? Regardless of the fact that it was infinitely uncomfortable to convey my thoughts in English, once I came here, I insisted upon writing all my entries in that broken grammar and consistently incorrect spellings. My obsession with mastering those cruel and foreign words deemed all else as secondary. In the beginning, the image afterthoughts were a treat after a grueling one-hour of writing three sentences—drawing felt free without the constraints of grammatical and syntactical rules—but I eventually seemed to have found these treats a luxury I could no longer afford; a sense of dire urgency took over when kids continually teased me at school and I could still not speak back.

Voluntary silence can be empowering, but an involuntary one scars for life. I imagine it must feel something like a singer suddenly losing her voice from an accident. The developed consciousness is there but speech is no where up to that level. Thus my journal became both the training and battle grounds with language. Rather than that of negotiation, the relationship has long been my attempts to conquer it, subordinate it, thrust it in the position at my mercy. This is one reason why anger so permeates my language; it has given me power, but only after so much pain and sacrifice.

Now I call my journal writing “meditations.” Though it always has been both, to some degree, it is no longer a tense site of struggle but a calm place of refuge from all outside noises. It is a place where I can finally hear and feel myself. Call it a present inwardness, to modify Marilynne Robinson’s term. When my main battle was with language, I did not notice a significant disparity between the life as I lived it daily and the times of reflection while writing, as life was the writing, the language. But as I grew older, I found my journal a necessity, a means by which I could confirm my own existence. Otherwise, I still feel, I would become swallowed up by the world, both by those of the physical and cyber spaces.

Navigating the physical space of New York City, to say the least, can be overwhelming. Every sound, sight, smell, feeling competes for my attention: too much to hear, see, smell, feel at once, but I try. I try to take it all in patiently, one at a time, but most times, it requires an incredible proficiency at multitasking.

Hence all the ears plugged into a device. Music isolates a person into a single sensory experience, or, at least, foregrounds all the others. Music is the bubble, the refuge from the aggressive excess of what happens outside. When we turn up the music, we choose what assaults our ears. I bitterly laugh when I think about the popular media reports in the early 2000s of studies on the dangers of loud music on headsets and psychological consequences of creating this bubble. Because mp3 players were only the smallest fraction of a much larger phenomenon that has, over the years, grown monstrously out of control at an alarmingly accelerated rate.

When this single-channel sensory refuge expands into a double or even triple—that is, when the device provides not only music but visual and other information—the space shifts from acting as the cozy, dark corner of a closet to a fully outfitted bomb shelter. Smartphones indicate this expansion of alternative space: not only can we shut off the sensory surplus around us through music, but browse through pictures, read news articles, play games, communicate via social media networks, and so on. Mobile access to the internet is the ultimate expansion of this previously bounded refuge into infinity. We can never exhaust the possibilities of activity in cyber space: there always exists another universe, another galaxy that we have left untouched but we know exists.

It is so easy to get lost in the virtual world, especially by leaving the body behind. I associate presentness with my body; I need to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, to know I am still here. I sometimes get the impression that words on the internet are like floating, disembodied ideas. When I see my hand moving over my journal, I know my words come from me. It is my voice, with my handwriting, which, otherwise, a digital device would convert to “Arial” or “Times New Roman.” This daily writing is my way of fetching my words back to myself as a physical being; no one else but I, in this time and space, could have produced them. I need this solitude, the brief moment of present inwardness. Only then do I feel safe from external sensory assault while I reclaim my receding body from cyber space, and can remind myself how much I love and hate the language that now confirms my existence.  

ivory tower

a heavily academic paper which i thought i messed up but for which i received fairly decent feedback.

Sublime Tactics and Political Domination:

the Radicalism of Schiller’s Education as Emancipation

It is impossible to speak of the sublime without a discussion of politics: that is, the power relations between the perceiver and perceived. Immanuel Kant describes the sublime as the feeling invoked within us when we look upon something that is “large beyond all comparison” and that gives our eyes the illusion of perceiving the idea of infinity (Kant 103). By likening this feeling to one felt by the Christian god, Edmund Burke describes its effect in similar terms: “whilst we contemplate so vast an object […] and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him” (Burke 68). The object of the sublime is awe-inspiring and terrible precisely because our sense cannot possibly grasp it all at once; before it we also strongly apprehend the inadequacy of our sensibilities and imagination. In other words, we feel that we are at the mercy of the object that overwhelms us with its vastness.

Longinus, in possibly the first extensive exposition on the topic, devotes his work to the analysis and application of these mechanisms in practical speech—specifically, in political oration. The author’s primary interest in the sublime is its potential to exert power over the listener. Among the various other stylistic techniques that the author considers, what he calls phantasia, or visualization, is an especially potent weapon. This is because this particular technique specifically targets is the imagination; “when combined with factual arguments,” Longinus writes, “it not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them” (Longinus 223). Misleading them and concealing all these devices is key to this mastery: the author punctuates his discussion of the different tools and methodologies with frequent reminders to prevent the audience from becoming aware of their use, as knowledge would disperse the illusion (Longinus 231). Indeed, Kant condemns oratory precisely because of its basis on deceitful manipulation. He calls it “the art of using people’s weaknesses for one’s own aims” and that it “is unworthy of any respect whatsoever” (Kant 198).

For Burke, obscurity plays a significant role in the feeling of sublime. He likens the source of fear and terror to that of darkness and tales of ghosts and goblins. We fear uncertainty, what we cannot apprehend in its completeness while also “[i]t is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions” (Burke 61). It is from this double effect of fear and respect that the sublime derives much of its power to dominate us.

In this equation, then, the other side of fearful ignorance is omniscience. If the object of the sublime is not a natural phenomenon but a person, the situation becomes a dominant-subservient relationship that often results in a systematized political economy. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punishment, 1975, argues that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon functions on this political relationship between knowing and unknowing. The architectural design of this prison structure places a single surveillance tower surrounded by a circle of individual cells. The person in this tower—protected from gaze by Venetian blinds and angular wall—receives an unobstructed view into the activities of every inmate, while the inmates, on the other hand, are denied any view into the interior of the tower, let alone each other’s cells. Foucault writes that “Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable” (Foucault). The only knowledge that the prisoners have is the fact of their being watched; they know nothing about the identity of the watcher or whether the watcher is even inside the tower. The inmate “is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication” (Foucault). This partial knowledge is the ingenious aspect of Bentham’s creation: only a glimpse and denial serves to maintain control on a psychological level.

In natural occurrences of the sublime, there is a second part to the initial feeling of subservience: the feeling of the imagination’s inadequacy is quickly succeeded by an affirmation of our power of reason. Kant describes the two-step process as a kind of sacrifice in the name of morality, the object of humanity’s perpetual ambition toward a higher purpose. Thus, the sublime is a negative pleasure: only after we feel that “the imagination […] is depriving itself of its freedom” do we receive the affirmation of our “supersensible power” which surpasses that of anything in nature (Kant 129, 131). The experience is more rewarding because of the deprivation, as it is “one that serves our inner freedom” by revealing our moral potential (Kant 131).

When this second part—the reward that “expands the soul”—is removed, only deprivation remains, and the sublime becomes exploitative power (Kant 135). In his analytical, Kant inserts a brief critique of the government and religion for doing precisely this:

That is also why governments have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with such accessories: they were trying to relieve every subject of the trouble, yet also of the ability, to expand his soul’s forces beyond the barriers that one can choose to set for him so as to reduce him to mere passivity and so make him more pliable (Kant 135).

This gesture disciplines the masses to make them more manageable. In a sense, it is the containment of a multitude into finitude, the opposite of an untamable sublime. Friedrich Schiller, too, criticizes this reductive strategy of state control: “Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its citizens by means of classification, and to receive humanity only at second hand, by representation, the governing section finally loses sight of it completely” (Schiller 41). Like so many inmates in Bentham’s Panopticon (number 42, number 43, number 44...), the demystified and generalized citizens become interchangeable parts under a few that hold the knowledge and power of the sublime’s full spectrum.

The key to reclaiming power and freedom, then, lies in a reinsertion of mystery, chaos, and complexity. Since its beginnings, modern science as well as philosophy seem to have acted from a vengeance, a vehement mission to strip all things of their obscurity to lay them bare under the glaring light of rationality. Condemned and openly scorned are ideas of the sacred, spiritual, and subjectivity. Certainly, demystification soothes anxieties resulting from uncertainty, but it is questionable whether we are happier human beings in our comfort of supposed knowledge, as the pinnacle of this hierarchy—that is, reason over sense—seem only to be a privilege of a small minority.

Schiller, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795, argues that happiness comes with freedom, and these in turn are not frivolities, but absolute necessities for the betterment of society. He blames the hierarchy of reason over sensibility—often championed in the name of progress—as the source of the degenerate and selfish state that he sees in his contemporary world. Forcefully imposing order onto citizens only has a limited influence. Instead of a hierarchy, he calls for a balance of these two apparent dichotomies, that is the only way that could produce a perfect and complete being.

An aesthetic education—in contrast to a rational-centric education dominant during his time of writing as well as for us today—cultivates both aspects of a human being and thus emancipates both. The suppression of either, that is, “[p]artiality in the exercise of powers […] inevitably leads the individual into error, but the race to truth” (Schiller 44). Though generally regarded as two conflicting poles, their penchant for either extreme make Christianity and philosophy guilty of the same crime: “The old principles will remain, but their will wear the dress of the century, and philosophy will lend its name to an oppression which was formerly authorized by the Church” (Schiller 47). Choosing either or will always keep people in chains, merely bearing different names. The problem, then, must be addressed on the fundamental level, that is, education.

Freedom from the oppression of either can only be achieved through beauty and art. Thus through this solution, the figure of the artist—or genius, according to Kant—and the very process of artistic creation emerge as emancipators. To Kant, the creative process empowers the maker through its freedom:

the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. […] We may even restructure experience […]. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association […]; for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature (Kant 182).

In other words, the process not only allows us to feel our own freedom in the moment, but also opens up possibilities of freedom in the future by restructuring experience into something new, untethered by the constraints of our given structure of reality. Here, Kant forms the modern conception of the mysteriously gifted artist, with originality—creation of the new—as “the foremost property” that cannot be learned, nor passed directly onto others because “he himself does not know” (Kant 175, 177). The artist/genius, veiled in mystery, assumes a god-like power, that can only wield its fullest potential through proper training and education. Schiller essentially calls for an education that will shape every human being into an artist, who can take full advantage of his/her potentials to free themselves and the whole of society: “Beyond question Man carries the potentiality for divinity within himself; the path to divinity, if we may call a path what never reaches its goal, is open to him in his senses” (Schiller 63).

Of course, this power, too, has potential to abuse and manipulate. However, what is so pertinent about Schiller’s educational proposition is that such a balanced education will breed noble human beings. To successful results of this education, abuse of power to dominate others would not be desirable; in fact, it would be repulsive to do so. Since a noble disposition cannot be taught or imposed, a person must wish him/herself to reach this state. Hence, the aesthetic education would drive each to voluntarily seek a moral life because he/she recognizes it as his/her higher purpose to attain.

Schiller’s proposal has not only the attainment of truth and the freedoms of individual citizens at stake; it is, most importantly, a way to maintain order in society. According to him, happy and harmonious individuals lead to a happy and harmonious society, which essentially must be an egalitarian society. “[S]ince the way to the head must lie through the heart,” only when freedom is granted will an individual wish to act nobly, not merely act out of obligation (Schiller 50). “A noble spirit is not satisfied with being itself free; it must set free everything around it,” and the result becomes a cooperative and productive society (Schiller 111). Freed from constraints and passivity, the individual wills him/herself to activity and order emerges naturally (Schiller 124). In a language that strangely resembles the optimism of early Communist writings in our modern history, Schiller declares that in an aesthetic State, knowledge becomes not just for the few, but the “common property of the whole of human society” (Schiller 139). The power of the sublime, then, returns to Kant’s two-fold definition: from shrinking in fear, we rise again in defiance to meet that power and to surpass it.

Works cited:

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1968. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Discipline & Punishment, 1975. Foucault.info. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. <http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html>.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1987. Print.

Longinus. On the Sublime. trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004. Print.