Bring on the empty orchestra

GIVEN the unprecedented technological advances that humankind has made in the last 100 years, it might seem that the primeval cave, protected by boulders, barricades and fire against wolves and rough weather, is now only a remote ancestral memory. Ironically, however, the very technological advances, of which we are so proud, have helped us create another kind of cave around ourselves. In this new and updated cave, we are protected against the vagaries of the social and the meteorological environment by an array of machines that grow ever more sophisticated from month to month.

The extent to which we have ceded our human powers to machine surrogates and delegates is piquantly captured by that delightful Japanese portmanteau word, karaoke. The word combines the elements "kara", meaning empty, and "okesutra", which is the Japanese form of the English "orchestra". The image of an empty orchestra producing music - of an ordinary singer who is transformed into a soloist with the support of a pre-recorded backing - leads us to one of the central myths of our age. And, let us make no mistake, it is a myth of transformation.

But it is a transformation myth with a difference. While such myths, in earlier epochs, involved the inner change of the self through grace or enlightenment, its dismemberment and reconstitution at a higher level of integration and awareness, the myth of self-transformation by karaoke enshrines a pretend- transformation, a temporary glory dependent on technological props. Tragically, and entirely in keeping with the propensity of contemporary culture towards the emptying, dissolution and fragmentation of experience, this contemporary myth of transformation emphasises the concealment of absence rather than the renewal of presence. In this sense, the soloist buoyed up in the karaoke bar is rather like the ordinary conjuror who manipulates a forbidding magician's mask to play the Wizard of Oz in L. Frank Baum's engaging tale.

We tend, increasingly, to be absent, elsewhere; and while we are absent, elsewhere, it is our mechanisms and prostheses, our electronic and cybernetic extensions that speak, act, and even alter reality on our behalf. Sometimes, this choice of mediating reality through a technological buffer has the effect of cocooning us from direct experience. At other times, it saves us the bother of direct expression and even borrows glory for us. At yet other times, it delivers us a version of actual events in which all the roughness and immediacy of the original has been planed down for our easeful benefit.

In the matter of the reproduction of music, for instance, we now tend to subordinate the reality of the performance - with all its unevenness, its live brilliance or dullness, its action-in-the- moment quality - to the perfection of the doctored recording. The slickness of tracks that have been electronically engineered ensures that errors are deleted, unpredictable mutations and other blips sorted out: the music seems to have been produced by humans who can make no mistake, and precisely because of this, the performance seems scarcely credible, scarcely even a human production. For is it not dual-edged fallibility, the proneness to error but also the risk that stimulates creativity, that is the definitive mark of the human presence?

In the production of music, too, many of us now resort to devices like synthesisers and samplers, which save us the trouble of mastering a voice or an instrument. In film, as revolutionised by dedicated software, actors need not act too consistently well, because expressions and gestures can be cut-and-pasted from one reel to another. In life, likewise, we have answering machines and voice mail, which save us the trouble of speaking for ourselves or entering into direct encounter with possible interlocutors.

These technologies of delegation and surrogacy will, in time, allow us to retreat into an impenetrable privacy, while our cybernetic extensions act as our deputies. Although they are described as interactive systems, such gadgets actually lock us into a human-machine relationship, a dependency structure that permits us to lapse into a serene passivity in relation to the rest of the world (or into the condition that the contemporary Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller likes wittily to describe as "inter-passivity"). In other words, we are empty to the world, absent from the textures of human relationships, sitting in the audience watching the events of our lives unfold.

The individual self, it would appear, is increasingly being split into two. While one part performs the motions of social living, the other becomes committed to extreme privatism and withdrawal from the negotiations and transactions of the public sphere. This situation may seem, at least superficially, to bear a resemblance to that enshrined in the immortal Upanishadic image of the two birds sitting on a branch - while one eats a fruit, the other watches the first one eat. But what is the inward significance of this image of the twin aspects of the self? It suggests that one can be both the performer of one's actions, full-bloodedly relishing the pleasure of experience, and also the witness of one's actions, reflecting on experience with calm detachment.

In the contemporary situation that we have been looking at - in which technologies of delegation and surrogacy act as distancing devices, to promote and sustain an extreme privatism - the two modes of the doer and the witness have been strangely fused. So that the act of reflecting on experience has itself become a way of savouring experience, relishing it from a distance without involving oneself in it. In the regime of the distancing devices, reality is never closer than a simulacrum, a virtual replica, a replay-mode version of itself: the war in Iraq and the massacre in Bosnia happen on television; the voices and instruments of Mali and the Andes are contained in a disc; all inquiries are held at bay by the beep on our answering machines. We can rewind and fast-forward them at will, re-set them: the hard practical consequences of decision and intervention having been removed, reality becomes almost an artefactuality.

Worst of all, those aspects of reality that are edited out of the simulacrum/simulation version simply fall out of our world- picture: as the sports commentator Harsha Bhogle observed recently, Indian children, growing up in a mediatic environment dominated by Western channels, know far more about the somewhat less than locally relevant Formula One racing and ice hockey than they do about the regional or national-level sports situation.

Again, for the same reasons, it is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) cosmology that defines the world for many young individuals in metropolitan India, rather than the local but paradoxically less visible actualities.

In the regime of the distancing devices, it is through a distracting pleasure rather than a discipline of attention that we extend our consciousness: they provide us with a way of remaining effectively absent while providing the illusion of presence, an emptiness that masquerades as a fullness. If we were to update the Upanishadic image for our own epoch, we might see the self less wholesomely, as a single bird on a branch, pecking at a virtual fruit that pixellates in its beak.

RANJIT HOSKOTE

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Discrimination that must be cast away
Next     : At home, away from home