Home | Philosophy Essays | Philosophy Links | Linguistics Essays | Linguistics Links | About me | Journal
I still find it hard to work out what it is I like so much about teenage homepages, particularly those by girls (boy's pages tend to be just a list of links to "cool software" and games tips, which just goes to show that girls mature earlier). One reason is that at heart I'm probably still a teenager. OK, I don't worry about spots anymore (though I still get them - I may be 38, but I have the complexion of an 18-year-old). But I still sometimes worry my little head with most of the questions that fill the lives of intellectually precocious teenagers, like "Does God exist?" "What should I do with my life?" and so on. On the other hand, I don't worry about the music I like or what I wear (though my wife does), so I suppose I must have grown up in some ways.
Another reason I like these pages and sometimes admire their authors is the incredible courage it takes to lay open your life and soul on the web. Remember that anyone can read a web-page, including your parents, teachers and ex-boy/girlfriends. I'm quite happy to give my opinions on just about anything, but to talk about my innermost feelings to a potential audience of millions - no thank you. I'm either too old, too male or too British for that. I used to keep an old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary of the workings of my soul, but I gave up because even I found it embarassing to read. Nevertheless, I congratulate those who do have this courage. Sometimes it's boring to read through loads of diary pages about how so-and-so had a row with their parents and how James is really cute but he won't look at her, but sometimes you get flashes of real fellow-feeling, a realisation that someone thousands of miles away, many years younger (or occasionally older) is going through the same stuff as you are now, or that you went through when you were that age.
This is not confined to remembering your spots, your first kiss or your awful maths teacher, though (actually, my maths teacher was rather a nice old fellow, even if I could never understand his preference for logarithm tables over electronic calculators). For example I've just found a page by a teenage Canadian (Christy's Garden) who shares my enthusiaism for both Epicurus and Epictetus, and, like me, is trying to reconcile their diametrically opposed philosophies. I hope she'll let me know if she manages it.
On the other hand, there are some things about homepages that make me reach for the Back button. Some of these are:
This kind of warped logic reminds me of various claims to "homelands". As far as I'm concerned, your homeland is either where you were born and raised, or where you live now - nothing else counts. For example, while I have nothing much against the Israelis, I find some Zionist claims that the area now covered by Israil is their ancestral home utterly ludicrous. It seems to be based on the claim that about 3,000 years ago God helped their ancestors dispossess the Caananites, which apart from casting God in the role of imperialist and mass murderer, establishes an extremely dubious precedent. The Serbs also claim that Kosovo is their homeland. I could claim that Germany is my homeland - or Wales, whichever branch of the family I choose to trace back. Or I could go back even further and, as an Indo-European speaker, lay claim to either a bit of steppe north of the Black Sea, or Anatolia, depending which linguistic theory you support. If the second one should prove true, this would be a nice irony, since Anatolia is where I've ended up.
No, it's the sheer pleasure of being able to do what I want without having to consider what somebody else wants that's nice. Marriage (or living together - there's no essential difference) has many joys, but it can be wearing to have to constantly consider your significant other's thoughts, feelings and general well-being. Maybe I take my marital duties too seriously, but when I'm in the house with Nalan, I'm continually thinking about what she wants, what would make her happy, or what I'm doing that might annoy her. I worry that it's been too long since I dusted, ironed or washed the car. This is particularly ironic, given that I regard all of these as useless activities. Dust blows off, creased clothes look OK, and I hate cars anyway - the sooner mine turns into a mass of scrap metal, the better.
My wife says that I always try to escape responsibility. This is probably true, but I have to ask what is so great about responsibility per se. You take on responsibilities because you can't get what you want without them - if you want to spend time (and/or your bed) with a person, you have to consider their happiness; if you want a job, you have to do the work; if you want babies (not that I do) you have to change nappies, and so on. What I can't understand is responsibility for the sake of it. People on a responsibility trip seem to be waiting for their teacher to write "A very responsible student" on their school report.
Nevertheless, the responsibility word-virus dies hard. I find that I have to force myself to lie in bed in the morning when I don't need to get up. At the moment I'm making an effort of will to make myself drink that extra glass of raki, carry on typing at the computer and stop thinking about what will happen tomorrow, because tomorrow is Saturday and I don't have to get up and go to work.
Hah, I've changed my mind. I didn't drink the extra glass of raki, but made myself a strong coffee and a cheese toastie. Is this responsibility? God forbid - I just want to carry on partying with myself till morning. Give me a hot modem and I'm happy.
Never, ever use Windows '98. If you can't do without the games, copy Windows '95 from a friend; otherwise use Linux.I realise that this constitutes an incitement to break the law (copying Windows, that is, not installing Linux), but then Microsoft don't seem to be too fussy about legal niceties either, if recent court cases are anything to go by. Yesterday I watched an interview with Francis Fukuyama. He is far from being my favourite social theorist, but he did make a good point that however much the advocates of global capitalism try to minimise the role of the State, they are quite happy to call on it when the need arises. The example he gave was Microsoft, who whine about the government's interference in their attempt to completely dominate the software market, but, when they find that the Chinese are pirating Windows, "wonder where the Microsoft aircraft-carrier is". Really, if I was worth $97,000,000,000, I wouldn't be bothered if people in Third World countries pirated my product. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Anyway, enough of this anti-Microsoft ranting - I'm trying to remember what I was going to write about before Windows crashed on me.
Last night I watched The English Patient again. I was actually much more moved by it the second time, because the first time I was only interested in watching Juliette Binoche, and wasn't so interested in the main plot. This time I took in the full tragedy of the film, which at times makes King Lear look like Heidi. Even so, I still paid far more attention when Binoche was on-screen.
My wife is familiar with this obsession, and while pottering around the house took pains to jokingly make disparaging remarks about my goddess. She had a point when she said that Binoche doesn't have a particularly sexy body, but that really isn't the point. It is her face, her voice and her body-language that drive people like me to an almost religious devotion. On second thoughts, forget the "almost". Obviously if God exists, It does not resemble a human being, but if It did, that human would be Juliette Binoche.
What is it that inspires this devotion amongst Binoche fans? It's certainly not just sex-appeal. La Binoche has as great an effect on women as on men - I have a female student who shares my obsession, and like me, is puzzled by the fact. Binoche is a very good actress, but there are better - Jodie Foster, for example, who fills me with awe as an actress, but leaves me rather cold as a person.
Unfortunately, Binoche's presence on the web has declined. Whatever her divine attributes may be, she obviously is not hip to cyberspace, and, under the influence of some unnamed malevolent being, has decided that the WWW is a vehicle for porn-addicts, child-molesters and the like. She has broken off correspondence with sites like www.binoche.com and has even, apparently, taken legal action to stop her pictures being shown on some web-sites. This strikes me as a bit like God taking out an injunction to close churches.
Exaggeration like this aside, what interests me most is this tendency for even the most rational of us to idolise people, ascribing qualities to them which they don't possess, or, more commonly, which they possess to some extent, but not to the impossible extent we like to imagine. Obviously I don't really believe in the divinity of Juliette Binoche. I'm sure her armpits smell if she doesn't wash, and she may well pick her nose into the bargain. She is as human as any of us, and behind that beautiful face there must be at least a few unpleasant thoughts from time to time. Maybe she filches spoonfuls of her friends' desserts when they're not looking. I don't know.
This means it's time to get semiotic. In Saussurean terms, what I know of Binoche is a signified, not a signifier (these words have the opposite meaning to what you would expect - the signified is what we would normally call a sign). In the simplest sense, the words "Juliette Binoche" are not the same as the person, but bear an arbitrary relationship to them. This is the essence of Saussure's linguistics, and you might be tempted to say "Huh, big deal." Saussure was only concerned with language, and his aim was to show that signs (i.e. words) only have a meaningful (i.e. not arbitrary) relationship with each other. But what about a sign like a picture of Binoche? Obviously the picture is not the person, but the relationship is not arbitrary either. Juliette's parents could have named her Marie-Claire or Fido, but they couldn't really have given her a different face.
If we move on to Charles Sanders Peirce, we get a slightly more useful model for my Binoche obsession. Rather than a simple and arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, we have a triad: the Object (Binoche herself, or Binoche as depicted), the sign or "Representamen" (the name "Binoche" or a photograph of her) and, resulting from the two, the Interpretant, which is "the proper significate effect," i.e. what is supposed to happen on hearing the name or seeing the photograph. What makes a name and a photograph different is that the former is a Symbol whereas the latter is an Icon. Symbols relate to their objects in a purely conventional way, while Icons have some resemblance to their objects. This is related to some rather weird ideas Peirce had about "Firstness", "Secondness" and "Thirdness", but fortunately this particular example is pretty simple.
So far, so good, but this is not enough to explain the obsession. What makes Peirce's theory fun is that each Interpetant is also a Representamen, or sign. The new sign relates to a new Object, leading to a new Interpretant, and so on, which has the wonderful name of "unlimited semiosis". To oversimplify things (and oversimplifying is the only way I can understand Peirce) this is like the association of ideas that patients used to produce on psychiatrists' couches when such things were still fashionable, or the "stream of consciousness" typical of daydreaming or experimental writing. What is important is that, at least as I see it, it is not a simple linear stream. The process branches out, doubles back on itself and produces feedback loops. The photograph is not a simple sign that represents an actress (which is what a Saussurean view would imply) but, through its Interpretant, sparks off a whole complex of signs, many of which feed back into the Icon, or photograph. At a basic level, I don't see a photograph and just think, "Oh that's Juliette Binoche," I access a whole load of images from her films and the characters she plays in them, which then charge the photograph with extra meaning. When I watch The English Patient (tragedy), I am also at some level watching Three Colours, Blue (redemption), The Lovers of the Pont Neuf (???) and even A Couch in New York (comedy). In this way, a complex and emotionally-charged "Binocheness" becomes the Interpretant of the Icon. Wow, look at that last sentence - I'm starting to sound like a post-modernist.
Now, I could go further and look at the question from the standpoint of Lacan, Derrida or whoever, but the risk of making a fool of myself, great enough to start with, increases as I adopt the views of philosophers I understand even less than Saussure and Peirce. What interests me is this idea of "Binocheness", which implies that there is something in this tangle of signs that I can name as a kind of super-sign.
Now, I would hazard a guess that as signs acquire an ever-greater complex of Interpretants and evolve through ascending levels of super-signs (or "connotative signs", as Barthes more prosaically called them) they get kind of metaphysical. "Binocheness" sounds almost Platonic, and it is tempting to reverse the process and think of a Platonic Idea of Binoche, of which the "actual" Juliette Binoche is simply a shadow. Where Plato got it wrong (in my arrogant opinion) was the "simply a shadow" part. Reading Plato, most people get the feeling that he was looking at the world backwards. It takes a supreme effort of imagination to think of the Idea of a table as being more real than the physical piece of wood. On the other hand, it doesn't take quite such a leap of faith to believe in "Binocheness". We are so used to believing in abstractions like "mind", "love" or "democracy" that one more shouldn't make much of a difference.
Unfortunately, English is not well suited to abstraction. While continental philosophers were getting carried off into metaphysics (and later, semiotics), the prosaic Anglo-Saxons were still debating things like "What do I really mean when I say 'this table'?" Trying to talk about semiotics in English can all too easily make you sound like a complete prat (as is probably the case with this diary entry). We have a limited set of abstractions, which is why "tableness" sounds silly, but "freedom" doesn't. People get away with saying "I believe in democracy" but not with "I believe in Binocheness."
But this is simply a matter of linguistic habit. When Hindus talk about Krishna, they can mean either a particular person with blue skin and a fondness for cow-girls, or they can mean a metaphysical principle. This is one reason why it's so easy to get deified in India, not because people think that if you sit cross-legged for long enough you turn into a god, but that they recognise that you embody an aspect of the cosmos that is worth putting your name on. From this perspective, worshipping Juliette Binoche - or Binocheness, to be more precise - doesn't sound so silly after all.
To finish this before I myself reel off into unlimited semiosis, a few words form Binoche herself that seem somehow appropriate:
"Being an actress is to forget yourself, to radiate charm. To give something that was brought you: maybe the grace, the strength and the last element, the one that brings a fragrance to your mind: the absence."
Now obviously this man's knowledge of art history is as great as most Americans' knowledge of geography. However, before he came out with this illuminating statement, it was widely assumed that he had mistaken the famous Surrealist, not for an American, but for a Satanist. Turkey is undergoing a wave of moral panic (no etymological pun intended) about Satanism, after a particularly gruesome murder in Istanbul last week. Since Satanism is primarily a reaction against Christianity, it is rare in Muslim countries, so shock has been compounded by ignorance, with bizarre results. Police have raided heavy metal bars and record shops, and anyone with long hair and an Iron Maiden T-shirt is seen as a potential ritual murderer (personally, I'd arrest anyone wearing a Boyzone T-shirt, but purely on aesthetic grounds). In the most bizarre incident, police took down some Star Wars posters, thinking that they were advocating Satanism. Darth Maul, I can understand, but apparently even Queen Amidala was seen as too Satanic for the public good. Too much make-up obviously has a corrupting effect on public morals.
Amusing though this may be, we can't really blame the Turkish homicide squad for most of this, since they have enough to do sorting out bloodfeuds, mafia turf wars and straightforward crimes of passion without taking a "spot the Satanist" course. Moreover, we would do well to remember the Satanist child abuse scare of the 1980's. In one case in Orkney, the house of a suspected Satanist child abuser was raided, and black robes, crucifixes and other regalia were seized. When the suspect was interviewed, the conversation went something like this:
"Are these yours, Sir?"Moral panic seems to be pretty universal, though I hear that some countries (the UK included) suffer from it more than others. It's almost as though every year there is a new folk-devil: Satanists, child abusers, drug addicts, terrorists ... all eating away at the fabric of society. In fact if we were to believe the mass media, the fabric of society would by now have been eaten away so much as to make it resemble a sweater that had been left for a year in the company of a thriving colony of moths.
"Yes."
"And what do you use them for, then?"
"I'm a priest."
Now, it is possible to make out a case that the social fabric is, if not exactly moth-eaten, not quite as tightly knit as it used to be. On the other hand, that's not always such a bad thing. Tight-knit communities can be pretty nasty too. In a city, a virgin is sacrificed to Satan; in a village a non-virgin is stoned for God. In the end, dead is dead. In the meantime, don't panic.