Doublethink

'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. (George Orwell 1984)

History is not just a record of the past; it is a means by which a society and individuals in that society define themselves. In an oral society, people define themselves through mnemonic devices that transfer the overarching ideas of a metanarrative, and not so much the details or the specifics of that truth. Whoever controlled the present could simply alter the details of the narrative. When writing became the predominant media, the metanarrative became more substantive. Facts were recorded, and the records were filed and archived. In order to control history, leaders of the present had to either completely eradicate this material and make new documents or edit and omit existing documents from the historical records: think Stalin, Hitler, Mao. It was all a very lengthy and recognizable process that usually accompanied the discrediting and/or killing of the old guardians of this information, but they were never able to destroy it all and the metanarrative continued below the grid.

With postmodernism and New Media, we’ve taken all the work out of changing history and have stopped caring about metanarratives of truth and facts of the past altogether. The overload of information available on the internet has allowed everyone to create their own histories, an activity promoted in academic institutions. To further complicate this issue, new media is impermanent, allowing the “unending series of victories over your own memory” Orwell feared. It may seem that this hyper-availability of information is a freeing experience allowing the individual to control their own destiny, make their own reality, interpret events by their own experiences, etc., but I would argue an opposing viewpoint. By neglecting experiential reality for interpretative reality imposed by virtual information, the individual is at the mercy of a temporal existence more fleeting than life itself, both unaffected and ineffectual in the grand scheme of things. Meanwhile, the metanarrative continues on without them, and they are ruled by the people who do think about the big picture and their place in it.

Consider Kaprow’s article “’Happenings’ in the New York Scene”. The artists are living a temporal existence, no longer seeking to pass along hard-learned truths to present and future societies. Instead, they create one time events that attempt to convey an emotion or a response; it doesn’t matter what that response is, as long as it’s a response: something to make the viewers feel some connection to the humanity and the world around them, and all the time perpetuating the problem by not creating something sustainable that the viewer can experience in anyway outside of the interpretation of their own memory because they can't go back and view/experience it again. When we go to a gallery and view a painting, watch an old movie, read some piece of the canon, it’s not just an appreciation of our interpretation that we experience; it’s a connection to the past: to the millennia old metanarrative of mankind: a connection we’re giving up in the name of self-worship while simultaneously becoming increasingly more depressed and self-destructive.

Break out the Soma! Er . . . I mean Prozac!