Wholes vs Happenings

Cyclopean Vision vs Poly-sensual Engagement (Part #6)

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The totalizing role performed by spectacles for post-industrial society -- why they "work" -- may be contrasted with the rural context, from which people tend to migrate (especially the young) and to which many of wealth yearn to "return" (on retirement). It could be argued that the attractor for such a return is the sense of psychosocial wholeness absent from the fragmentation of urban life as experienced -- through its unassimilable complexity. This wholeness is not simply spatial in that the complete range of functions essential to community health can be comprehended through the human scale of the idyllic village -- in its simplicity. It is also temporal through engagement in the short and long-term rhythms that characterize the cyclic nature of village life.

The difficulty is that the larger happenings of urban life are powerful attractors in contrast with the minor happenings characteristic of the slow pace of interwoven rural patterns -- a more wholesome (healthier) life that may be difficult to furnish. Perversely however those happenings of urban life tend to be characterized by their short-term nature, whereas it is the long-term context that characterizes those of rural life. Spectacles effectively "come to the rescue" through a totalizing function that provides urban dwellers with both a sense of wholeness and longer-term context -- a ("pre-packaged") comprehensible sense of simplified complexity. Spectacles meet a need in an unwholesome globalizing world -- as a characteristic pathology. The urgency of happenings in the short-term obviates any need for larger meaning.

Spectacles offer a matrix for an integrative experience sought in urban fantasies about the village idyll. Such happenings offer a surrogate sense of experience of more comprehensive patterns of life -- perhaps to be termed a "near-life experience".