Notes towards a definition of Procrustean Seeing

[imomus]

Question: What do these statements have in common?

"James Blunt is just as much a "rock" act as, say, the Arctic Monkeys." (Caroline Sullivan, from an article entitled "Rock of all Ages" in The Guardian.)

"But surely every genre or revived genre has been the same." (Reader comment after the same article.)

"Are European or Japanese news stands so different?" (Reader comment after Click Opera entry about American news-stands.)

"Any old legitimised artist is pretty much as good or as useless as any old legitimised anything else." (Reader comment after Click Opera entry on being an artist.)

"What will we do when the new ethics breaks down under the weight of the same inherent flaws as the old ethics?" (Reader comment after Click Opera discussion of ethics in art.)

Answer: These are examples of what I call "Procrustean Seeing".

Who is or was Procrustes?

"Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches", was arguably the most interesting of Theseus's challenges on the way to becoming a hero. He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed." (Mythweb)

When Theseus served up poetic justice, fitting Procrustes to his own bed by cutting off his head and feet, it may have been the end of a man, but it was just the beginning of a metaphor. Now, when we speak of a "Procrustean bed", we mean an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.

The enemies of Socialism have often likened its emphasis on equality to Procrustes. But I'm not talking about equality of result, but equality of perception, making one size of thought fit all possible instances and cases. What's annoying about this response is that it declares a commentary which notices difference or specificity (the specificity of American magazines, for instance) irrelevant or unremarkable by declaring that all magazines are more or less the same.

In terms of my "seven deadly intellectual sins", Procrustean Seeing is a deadly combination of "pompous univeralism" and "moronic cynicism". It usually contains the idea that there's no point in distinguishing one thing from another (in other words, recognizing difference) because "it's all the same wherever you go". (Cue up my rant against Paul McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory" song.)

I don't say it's motivated by evil. Procrustean Seeing has a lot of admirable motives. It may be motivated by an anxiety about declaring one thing better than another, a desire to avoid judgementalism. It may be motivated by the idea of equality of opportunity. Hey, we all have an equal opportunity to become fascists, disregard trifling historical details about Prussian militarism, and don't throw the first stone, because we all live in the same glass house! Procrustean Seeing can also be an attempt to prevent outgroups having negative stuff projected onto them, to prevent people from being isolated and bullied. (Cue Sting's song about how "the Russians love their children too".)

The trouble is, Procrustean Seeing is Panglossian. Like Dr Pangloss, it prefers to put its head in the clouds and see universal unity. The glass is half full, not half empty! All is for the best (or, reassuringly, the worst) in the best (or worst) of all possible worlds!

A bigger problem: Procrustean Seeing, one-size-fits-all, is teleological. Teleology (from telos, meaning end, purpose) is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature. It's a bit like anthropomorphism, the tendency to project human-like characteristics onto animals. It projects the kind of meanings we can understand onto a universe which doesn't share our conceptions. It assumes there are purposes in the way the universe is structured, the kind of purposes we ourselves have. As I sang in my song "The Sadness of Things", "for you, when things go wrong, they go wrong for all the right reasons... and the universe exists for the convenience of your feelings".

But why would it "all be the same in the end"? What would be the reason that nothing would be different from anything else? Why would such a strange universe exist? So that, like Procrustes, we could "correct" difference with mutilation and murder? Does pompous universalism always contain this implicit threat, the idea that we won't recognize your difference from us so that, should we come to invade you and (for instance) destroy your museum, nothing will really be lost?

Donald Rumsfeld, as he stood on the steps of the demolished Iraqi art museum, is said to have asked: "How many vases do they need, anyway?"

Donald, you utter bastard, those weren't just vases, they were encoded cultural particularities, the very DNA of character. They were difference itself. Let's not smash it up, either with our deeds, or with our thoughts.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

In my defense, though, I'll say that my claim to universality in that news-stands piece wasn't as big as the claims I'm criticizing here. I was only claiming that wherever you cut American phenomena you discover America. Whereas my opponents there were claiming that wherever you cut American phenomena you discover, in fact, the entire world. In other words, I was arguing for specificity and difference (at least at the national level), and they were arguing for universality and sameness.

And this debate is complicated by the fact that America does actually consider itself a kind of Aleph or Utopia, the place which is no place and all places, the model, the Universal. This is, I think, America's most sinister and incorrect belief about itself. It's what I was addressing in the entry Post-American (http://imomus.livejournal.com/179537.html).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Two more thoughts: the comment about news stands being the same all over the world is an attempt to shift my emphasis on the American-ness of the American news stand towards an emphasis on the sameness of the press all over the world. In other words, this commenter would prefer us to look at inherent properties of the printed media than at national differences.

Also, I've noticed a lot of Americans feel comfortable with statements about individuals and about universals (ie they'll happily make statements about "everyone in the world" or about "individuals"), but not about groups, the intermediate level between those two. In other words, if difference has to be located, Americans would prefer it to be located either nowhere (universals) or everywhere (specificities, individuals).

[(Anonymous)]

BUt what I don't understand is how does one make comments about larger things like what America is, when we haven't experienced all of America. And by that I mean that I certainly haven't and when I read your bit about the magazine stands it seemed obvious that you were talking about the urban experience on the east coast of the US. Cities that are far removed from the cultures of areas like suburban California, the pacific northwest, and certainly the bush-states in the middle. Further saying "America" to me seems like a universalism rather than the groups within that define it.Groups that I think many americans would identify themselves with, before recognizing themselves as Americans.

I wonder if Americans are obsessed with being "United" because historically and at the present moment we just aren't. Certainly there are enclaves throughout the country in which English is not the Lingua Franca, and the televised christian holidays don't happen.

I grew up on the east coast with a family of Korean-Americans on my left and Indian-American family on my right. So which group should I attempt to aggrandize my own feelings about? With all the possibilities that were presented, the seemingly simple idea of "American" is usually the last to occur.

So yes I do have trouble talking about groups, cause I have so much trouble recognizing where the borders begin and end.

Yet at the same time the majority of American humor and media is based around parceling everyone into groups of people as in the whole hyphenated american debates.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Group-orientated societies tend to devalue differences between individuals within a society (intra-societal), and 'individualistic' societies tend to devalue the differences between different societies (inter-societal). Apparently.

Sloppy thinking is still sloppy thinking, even when you do it.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

The point is that one glance at one newstand at one subway stop is too specific to draw universals from. The interpretation that can be extracted from that one specific observation doesn't have any necessary connection with the larger abstraction that is "America."

You do it all the time, and it's as sloppy as Procrustean thinking.

As I pointed out, you can look at tentacle rape manga as emblematic of how fucked up Japan is, but that doesn't make it true.

Your comments about the U.S. are mirrored by milions in the U.S. but while reading your essays, one would NEVER know that because in your writings all Americans are the same.

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

The difference between your 1st and 2nd replies is quite interesting though: on the one hand recognition that no two objects can be the same; on the other the universalisation of such a seemingly impossible heterogeny as "America." Would be keen to know not so much what you would define America as, but rather how you would justify defining it in non-purely geographical terms at all. Of course, I accept "America" like "Britain" or "Japan" are convenient sociological shorthands; but, bearing in mind your first reply, are they really shorthands with meaningful content?

I don't think to ask this question is to commit any particular fallacies: although I agree with you that pure empiricism definitely is fallacious (in the first place, you'd have to deny there was any mental content prior to experience!), it seems that recognising fundamental dissimilarity in all objects merely raises interesting problems about how we come to group them together and classify them, especially when talking about societies or groups of people, it seems to me: in what ways ARE, eg, New York and the Arizona desert more similar than, say, New York and Tokyo (apart from relative geographical proximity)? Maybe this would be the topic of another post, though, as you suggest...