Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 21:30:06 -0400
From: Stirling Newberry <allegro-AT-thecia.net>
Subject: PLC: "So you don't much like Civilisation...


...Mr Savage"

And so begins the conversation which Aldus Huxley has spent the book
<i>Brave New World</i> preparing us to read. It is the conversation between
Mustapha Mond - former physicist and world controller - with a boy born of
a civilised pair of parents, but into circumstances far beyond the
normality of the society that Mond is an elite member of.

The conversation is nominally about all of the things that a perfectly
stable consumer society must abandon to have its peace and happiness. On an
over level it is, and here the term must be construed in its 19th century
meaning, "liberal" critique of social democracy.

But as even the author would later admit - the character of the savage
really did not have the background to engage in such a conversation.
Instead the point must be made symbolically. The ghost who stands behind
the Savage is: William Shakespeare.

- - -

First to ask the question: why couldn't he have started here? It would only
have taken a small amount of exposition to put everything in place and have
the converstation run forward.

Obviously because it would not have been as effective. But the intent would
litteraly have been the same, and assuming a skillful writer as Huxley is,
the meaning as well. But it would not have been litterarily the same.

What is different is the experiential difference rather than the
existential difference. The difference is that the reader has lived through
the book to this point - and traced through it the various symbols which
are to be brought to bear in the philosophical and political points that
Huxley wishes to make.

In otherwords it is not a question of meaning at all in any sense of
information - but in the sense of the meaning to the reader of the
experience.

As strange distinction? Not at all to the mathematician - who might know
something is true "as regards to content" to use Goedel's phrase - but who
wishes to know if it can be constructed. The pratical political author has
a similar point - it is all well and good to know that affairs would be
better if men behaved differently, but how does one get them to that state?
Human goodness might be true as regards to content - but is it
constructable within the axioms of human behavior?

- - -

Does that imply that a work of art only means itself? Well - here where the
Savage is defending Othello to Mond -

<BLOCKQUOTE>
The savage went silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted
obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to
pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people
used to call high art. We've sacrficed the high art. We have the feelies
and the scent organ instead."

"But they don't mean anything."

"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the
audience."

"But they're... they're told by an idiot."

</BLOCKQUOTE>

According to Huxley - if we can take him at his character's word where he
plays Mond as a kind of Screwtape to the ideas being presented: meaning is
not intent. After all the intent of the "feelies" is, as Mond explains,
happiness. Their meaning is but themselves. There is the desired effect of
the work on the audience, and the desired effect of that desired effect.
There is what he wants you to understand, what he wants you to feel having
understood, and what he wants you to do as a result of having felt. And
they are different things.

It is this correlation between "meaning" - as one could find it in the
work, and the intent of the work in its desired effect - that is a question
that has been circled around in the preceding days. Here then is an
explication of the answer. The "Meaning" of something is not the substance
of the work - but what the work - as a whole thing - evokes to a person.
While a work can "mean" something that most people capable of reading would
agree to, the "Meaning" must - *necessarily* be different, since it
requires not merely interpretation of symbols, but engagement of memory,
desire and imagination to the relationship of those symbols.

Obviously the "meaning" - the value as one would find in the symbols of the
feelies - is one thing, but its Meaning to the members of the audience
differs. The Savage reflects differently upon this content than the
audience does. Hence the Meaning - to him, the potential for action and
emotion that it creates in his psyche when he reflects on it - is different
from the Meaning for other people.

Necessarily a work must then - to Huxley - mean something other than itself
to Mean something other than the audience. And the audience must then want
there to be a meaning other than a reflection of itself.

- - -

But then is "Meaning" in the capital sense always diffused and defered?

Again from Huxley: this time after the savage has whipped himself in public
while a crowd of onlookers chanted and egged him on.

<BLOCKQUOTE>
That evening the swarm of heliocopters that came buzzing across teh Hog's
Back was a dark cloud ten kilometres long. The description of the last
night's orgy of atonement had bene in all the papers.

"Savage!" called the first arrivals, as they alighted from their machine.
"Mr. Savage!"

There was no answer.

The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and waled into a
shuttered twilight. Through an archway on the further side of the room they
could see the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors.
Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.

"Mr. Savage!"

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles the feet tyrned
towards the right,; north, nort-east, east, south-east, south-south-west;
then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards
the left. Sout-south-west, south, south-east,east . . . .

</BLOCKQUOTE>

The meaning of a thing becomes resolved by acting upon it. The sleep
lessons point to the same conclusion: people have the thoughts implanted in
their heads. But they do not "mean" anything in the sense that they are not
parsed until the person says them, and then acts upon them.

It is action which forces a direct interaction between the <i>potential</i>
which the meaning creates, and the actuality. The <i>potential</i> and
<i>defered</i> meaning is not a state of being - but rather an unstable
state actively held in place by non-resolution.

The only way to maintain it is to have the meaning be subordinated to the
Meaning, and to then declare that the real meaning is that which is in
accordance with that Meaning. Either the potentiality must flow outwards
into action, or the self must impose its Meaning upon the meaning.


Stirling Newberry
business: openmarket.com
personal: allegro-AT-thecia.net
War and Romance: http://www.thecia.net/users/allegro/public_html




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