I was watching a video on ted.com about choices. Here it is:
Essentially, one of Sheena Iyengar's tenets in selling merchandize is that by categorizing items you can make the customer believe there is a greater selection than there actually is. The example she gives is displaying magazines. By putting them in sections, consumers believe there is a wider choice if there is only 400 as compared to 600 uncategorized magazines. You see, the greater the options presented to us the harder it is to make up our minds. By giving us only 12 choices compared to 24, and then categorizing those 12 choices into three categories, people will feel better off. Why is that and how the hell does this relate to a class on oral tradition? Josh Foer is lectured in "Moonwalking with Einstein" that chunking makes things easier to remember. I have also found this true throughout my life. It's easier to tackle reading assignments if I tell myself I will take a break at page 100, or memorize A through K first. I also chunk poem sections together. For example, in Kubla Khan there is a break between the first five lines, and even when I memorized the presidents' names, I placed Washington through Johnson together, and then Lincoln through Coolidge. When Foer talks about ancient Greek texts and how there were no breaks between words, sentences, or paragraphs, I cringed. I cannot imagine trying to read something with no separation. I have come across text blocks on the internet, and let me to tell you, I get an immediate "too long, not reading" when I see it.
One has to wonder why humans are like this. We feel a natural urge to group things together and cut the universe apart. Kingdoms, Genuses, Species, Centuries, Years, Weeks, Days, Nations, Counties, Cities, some would argue Age, Gender, and Race--these things are all arbitrary yet useful. Visions of wiggling fishes getting caught by nets leaps to mind. In the 20th century, Deleuze (1925-95) and Guattari (1930-92) talked about striated spaces in a criticism of Modernism, and how by separating things too much, we are left at where we began in the first place, meaninglessness. They offer a new rhyzome mentality and a nomadic mindset which I will not get into here--partly because I don't remember it entirely myself. The best image to understand their idea is an empty square. A line is drawn through it, making two rectangles, and then another the opposite direction, and then again and again, until the square has so many lines drawn through it, it's black. This is the threat of Modernism and categorization. I like to think of the blank square as the wholeness of the universe, or the image of the mother, a living, breathing creature. The constant line drawing is the force of Saturn--he is trying to consume the universe and make it a dead thing (IT from a Wrinkle in Time, Voldemort, Palpatine). And the one trying to prevent it is rational wisdom, Apollo, the sun god, shining his light. In previous Sexson classes we have discussed how geometry, structure, identity, and order are the realm of men, Octavian and Theseus, and the wiggly kingdom of overflowing rivers and nature are the home of women, Titania and Cleopatra. Is this our masculine and feminine energies waging war on each other? It is impossible to grasp the universe in all its complexity without ordering it in someway, but there is also the danger of boxing it in so much that we steal the life and wonder from it--I am getting close to Post-Modernism here, which I will avoid.
So what is the point of all this? To be careful. You don't want to be Saturn (time) with his scythe slicing pieces off the cosmos--IT's kingdom with houses lined up and little kids bouncing balls in unison, bleh! You don't want to be a giant of lore eating up living things and literally pooping them out, rendering matter dead and chaotic. You have to be careful how you chunk. This is mostly a warning to myself because I also have a habit of doing this. I love sorting my life into eras or even an episode of a fictional television show called "The Suite Life." I am wretched with my collecting of news stories. If I see a funny image online I steal it and put it in a folder on my computer for later (want to know how many times I have looked at those images once they are collected? not a once). I guess sorting also gives the sorter a false sense of having a grasp on something because he placed it somewhere--of course, this sense of owning is not necessarily true, but it makes the mind feel better. Now that I am constructing mammary palaces, oh wait, memory palaces, I have a whole new way to box things up and make them my own. But in the end, this organizing may be the worst affliction of Western man, his inability to realize the relationship between things once they are boxed. Life and Death aren't seen as opposite signs of the same coin, completing each other. Americans are so obsessed by our fear of death that we fetishize it in our movies, news, and overall culture--and one has to remember that we are controlled by our fears and institutions can use this, religion, governments, corporations. Believe me, Saturn (time) will get you eventually, whether you like it or not (as another Saturn-a-like, Borg-Picard said: 'resistance is futile!'). Or maybe not, if this guy has anything to say about it. Again, this rationality thing--that compassionate sun god.
No comments:
Post a Comment