Thursday, December 08, 2005

"Coffee is For Closers"

That quote is from Glenngary Glenn Ross which was written by the talented David Mamet who also wrote the screenplay for Ronin, and Wag the Dog.

The quote is spoken by Alec Baldwin's character Blake, a lawyer. It is a great quote, mostly because of the way it pithily captures the nearly pathological over-the-top "Conquer not just compete" attitude that pervades corporate America. Successes unlike cookies are not sometimes food, or so we are often led to believe. We in the Malaise of Modernity feel compelled to outdo ourselves and each other in a race to oblivion. The tasks before us increase exponentially, while our abilities to deal with them are reduced periodically with the various distractions that populate our life-world. Sidetracked by fear of failure, annihilation by acts of terror, general existential ennui all serve to undermine the increased demands upon our active selves. Our attention is consistently drawn away from that which makes us who we are. Though the movie was sub-par the line from I Heart Huckabees, "How am I not myself," repeated ad nauseum as a kind of conscious clearing mantra-is useful in understanding this notion of drawing away that was referred to previously.

Aside
I Heart Huckabees is an abomination
The overdone, under-thought, overconfident underwhelming manner in which the movie pretends to be philosophical is really sort of disappointing and nearly embarrassing to watch. I will not pretend to tell you, "what they are really talking about," but in watching the movie, I would suggest that a reasonably sophisticated individual even if he or she lacked any formal instruction in philosophy would quickly realize how asinine the, overwrought-pyschobabble-masquerading-as-intelligent-dialogue double-talk really is.
Again, I Heart Huckabees is an abomination.
End Aside

Perhaps the act of blogging represents an outlet, by which individuals can individuate themselves from the blur of distractions and reclaim some sense of the self. Ironically, what better way to make this claim than to do it in the very medium that has taken this sense of blur and turned it into a hyper-reality. In an attempt to make one clear call for ourselves in a sea of distraction we use the Internet the single biggest ocean of distraction on the planet. Our waves of being as it were, emanate from a center-the self. Maybe this self is constructed electronically, but all selves are constructed. Perhaps this center lacks the embodied nature of our experience, and this truly not to be under-emphasized, but perhaps without the body this self has the opportunity to reconstruct a body, an electric body or what Morpheus tells Neo in the Matrix is, "the residual self image, a mental projection of the digital self." This electrical body, though it may lack certain essential features of what it means to be a self; it does allow a flexibility which though may exist in the "meat-world" is only truly evident in the "digital-world."

In other words, the freedom to redefine who and what we are, which we may believe we do not have in the physical world suddenly becomes accessible to us, at least imaginable to us, in this world. The reason that so much is invested in the creation of handles (usernames for the non-311it3) and avatars isn't because of fear of being discovered or being "found out" in fact many would like to be recognized or gain some level of web-notoriety (which explains the proliferation of not only blogging sites but blog-award sites); it is recognized for the most part that if one takes some basic precautions our "identity" is secure. No, the reason for that phenomenon lies in our not so hidden desire to be something other than what our bodies and our roles in society have defined us. The evasive, self-deprecating computer programmer can be the suave sophisticated polemical blogger, the archetypal 97-pound weakling can be the Madden 2006 champion, the misunderstood Goth chick can be a creative genius. Of course there are many issues that are both psychologically unhealthy and potentially sociopathic that arise when there is a confusion between the two selves or if one self dominates the other, but overall the overwhelming majority of bloggers, message board participants and online gamers have a general constructive desire to become something more, to realize potential in a world that does not allow them to otherwise.

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