A Bakhtinian Hell (or, Where We Are Living Today)

Today I read a post on the Lost Art Press blog about a recent memorial gathering for Jennie Alexander.

It struck me that when he writes about
"the woodworking world," Chris Schwarz really means "the horizon of my personal experience of the woodworking world," or more succinctly, "my world."

I'm writing this not to impugn*, mock, nor condemn Chris Schwarz, but rather because noticing that solipsistic moment prompted me to think.

The dictionary I have on my desk defines "solipsism" as "the theory that the only knowledge one can have is knowledge of oneself or of one's own state of mind." Perhaps there's a more accurate term for what I'm thinking about, which is an assumption (correct or not) that what one sees is all there is to see.

Rather than a moral failing, or a psychopathology, I think this is a common mental habit. This solipsistic habit is part of what makes social media, and the internet in general, so harmful.

We get lulled into this mental habit at least in part because of the vast volume of material ("content," in the parlance of our times) available online. We can't possibly see everything. Just reading a single tweet by the president plus the responses to it would take all day long or more. The common term for this phenomenon is "rabbit hole," which I think is an inadequate metaphor. A real rabbit hole is dug out from the ground, and surrounded by solid earth; one can walk over it without falling in or even knowing it's there. There's a sense, when we use the term, that everyday, ordinary life is going on above ground, and we're separated from it when we go down a rabbit hole. But the entire internet is made up of rabbit holes; there is no solid ground, or matrix, out of which the rabbit hole has been dug.

To emphasize: it's all hole. To mix metaphors: it's all hole and no cheese.

This is certainly no new observation; I've been reading and hearing statements like it since the early 1990's. I restate it as a reminder that the volume of content online is so vast that one can look anywhere on the web and find a "world." Here I'm defining "world" as a mass of content that a) coheres by referring sufficiently to adjacent content and b) requires enough attention and time to grasp that c) it can fully occupy the viewer's consciousness, to the exclusion of any other content. 

The nature of the internet is such that new online worlds are constantly created. The problem is that, since so many of us occupy/are occupied by online worlds, and since many (most? all?) of us have the solipsistic tendency, they take on far greater importance in our minds than they merit.

Here enters Bakhtin. My definition of online "world" owes a lot to the discursive world referred to in the title of his best known book, Rabelais and His World.

Certainly, Bakhtin is not the only thinker to describe a novel as the articulation of its own, or its author's, worldview. However, his formulation of worlds not simply described by, but embodied as, multiple competing languages (as in Rabelais and His World and The Dialogic Imagination) is pertinent to this discussion. It's also a bit beyond my scope here. And I'm simply too out of practice to delve into Bakhtin off the cuff. I'll leave that adventure for another day! But it's worth having that adventure, for Bakhtin's idea of dialogue between and among multiple competing mutually-mostly-intelligible languages helps get a notion of what's going on online, and what's going on online can in turn be thought of as suggesting some limits to Bakhtin's thought - - - it seems to me that the lack of recursion or reference, despite the potential to have it, suggests that worlds made entirely of discourse endlessly fragment and tunnel onward, rather than staying in dialogue.

Meanwhile back here on earth, many of us find ourselves het up about the president's tweets, or current orthodoxies in the online woodworking world. The cure for solipsism is to move around with eyes and mind open. Nothing is as big as it looks to the solipsistic mind. Step outside and watch the trees as their buds open, observe a bee dip into the pond for some water, hear the excitement of a crow off in the distance, go to the hardware store and meet a woodworker who isn't posting videos on YouTube.

A roundabout way of saying: upset by the internet? Get some perspective.


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*My memory tells me that "impugn" is usually used to describe a specific abstract trait of a person: "Deborah impugned my character in her speech to the board." I'll go check Fowler and let you know . . .