The world around us is fascinated by that which is not there. By this I mean that which is not tangible; a sliver of representation of something meant to be found in real space. That which is an abstraction. As culture morphs and flows it seems to progressively strip down concepts, ideas, and images until they are shells of what they once were.
Take modern art for instance, as
this article does. It follows paintings of trees as they move from depictions of real trees to lines meant to represent the tree in abstract. Your mind has to fill in the blanks. Or take this gorgeous image, for example.
It is a person, but only when you don’t look directly at it. In being incomplete, it is wide open to interpretation. Each individual viewer is encouraged to supply their own completing fetal image.
Stuart Ewen’s fantastic book
All Consuming Images highlights this trend of abstraction as well, citing several examples.
-The fashion world used to advertise with paper dolls dressed up is rich, detailed depictions of clothing. Gradually the designs moved onto magazine covers, and sketches of clothes became more and more about the lines and less and less about the textures and colors. Nowadays two lines can represent a woman’s body and the clothes covering (however much of) it.
-Old cathedrals used to be stately, solid, stone buildings. They were imposing structures, meant to convey the power of the church. Then the Gothic style took over, and rather then using stone to impress, architects turned to light. How light filled the place - how God filled the place - became significant.
-Important buildings used to be built with a huge floor plan, but now they are built narrow and tall. These buildings, skyscrapers, make the pedestrian look up at the tops of them, where the buildings often end in a vanishing point. Abstraction.
-Money, an abstraction of value in itself, used to be coinage and then paper currency. But we deemed cash too weighty and created credit cards, an abstraction of an abstraction. Green-colored cards, like laminated dollar bills, are the entry level cards. The higher up we go in terms of card class - Silver, Gold Platinum - the more valuable our abstraction is. When we hit the top, the Black credit card, we reach nothingness. Void. It is the point where money must not matter. And now we have PayPal and online cash transfers, and if they take over we might never have to see visual representations of money again.
Having electronic money is easier, they say. In fact, the less humans have to handle things, the more efficient the world is. Everything is becoming more and more digital, and hence, they tell us, more efficient. You used to have to go to a theater to see a film. Then you could rent it on video. Then DVD came along. Now you can download Blu-Ray movies from iTunes. Amazon’s Kindle device lets you download and read books in digital, clicking buttons to turn pages. How efficient is that? You never even have (or get) to touch what you buy.
Folk and rock music are often recorded in a way to recreate experiences. Classical music has definite themes and is meant to evoke certain images. It has emotion. Techno, on the other hand, combines sounds and rhythms that don’t happen in nature - they are synthesized, making the listener create a virtual soundscape. One person can listen to a track and say they hear a freight train going through a tunnel of suspended water; to another person, like Simon Reynolds(link), that track could depict “an ice cream truck doing rounds on one of Saturn’s moons”. It is abstract music for infinite, subjective, interpretations.
The Internet is full of these abstractions. They are what “social news” sites like Digg and reddit are based around. When everything on the Internet is screaming in demand for your time, you have to choose what you will spend it on based on interesting abstractions. What ends up being popular are things that can be effectively condensed into a (preferably witty) fifteen-word summary sentence. The problem here is that not every great, worthy idea can be
- A) be condensed in this way or
- B) be given the treatment by someone who knows how to do it effectively.
Equally problematic is when someone who knows how to condense effectively is working on nothing but inane “news” items and, more often then not, they conjure up misleading sentences that do nothing but grab attention, resulting in us reading disappointing-yet-effectively-packaged non-news items and passing up the important ones. I have to face this dilemma on my blog all the time - how to construct interesting yet not blatantly misleading post titles.
Before friendship moved online, it used to mean bowling or playing board games on Friday nights. Then it meant playing video games together. Now it means having a digital Facebook connection. Facebook is an abstraction of a social circle.
We have tweets - abstractions of consciousness. Impulsive ideas that we feel need to be broadcast so others can try and decipher our thoughts.
What, you may ask, then, are the implications of this? So what? Isn’t more efficient better? Isn’t making things open to interpretation a more tolerant way of expression? A way of accommodating other peoples’ views and ideas? Perhaps. But we have to ask, “in what direction does that lead us?” If efficiency and single-minded goals are our objective, then we are on the right track. But should everything be streamlined to maximum efficiency?
We are now in an era where seemingly anything and everything can be considered “art.” If you don’t understand it, well, then that art isn’t for you I guess. When ideas are depicted in the abstract, they are often intentionally ambiguous. They are everything to every one. As our ideas of value become less and less concrete, value becomes harder and harder to define. If relativity was the essential theme of postmodernism, then abstraction is the theme of post-postmodernism.
As more and more things in our lives - friendships, art, music, money - move into the abstract, it is easier for even more things, perhaps things never meant to be represented in the abstract, to move there. The abstract is meant to represent something, but if we are conditioned to only think in abstract terms then one person’s abstract is another’s reality. This is only true, however, in a limited sphere, and the thoughts in this abstract sphere are guided by the person or institution from whose hands the abstraction manifests. The creator controls the thoughts.
This shift towards relativity of value, control through ambiguity, and the results of combining them with concrete things illegitimately dragged into the abstract realm is my primary concern. There are some things that, frankly, I don’t think belong in the abstract. I think that the less friendships are ‘open to interpretation,’ the healthier they will be. I have learned that earmarking, highlighting, and writing in the margins of books I own is a valuable memory device. I notice that when I use cash, I am more hesitant to spend.
How many things must their be in our daily lives that we need to pull out of abstraction? Our views of love? God? Life?
_DZ
