Who is Watching You III
Posted by James Collins
From Robert Solomon's introduction to Existentialism (1974):
As Camus tells us, 'at any streetcorner the absurd can strike a man in the face.' Imagine yourself involved in any one of those petty mechanical tasks which fill so much of your waking hours--washing the car, boiling an egg, changing a typewriter ribbon--when a friend appears with a new movie camera. No warning: 'Do something!' he commands, and the camera is already whirring. A frozen shock of self-consciousness, embarrassment, and confusion. 'Do something!' Well of course one was doing something, but that is now seen as insignificant. And one is doing something just standing there, or perhaps indignantly protesting like a housewife caught in curlers. At such moments one appreciates the immobilization of John Barth's Jacob Horner, that paralyzing self-consciousness in which no action seems meaningful. In desperation one falls back into his everyday task, or he leaps into an absurd posture directed only toward the camera. It is the Kantian transcendental deduction with a 16mm lens: there is the inseparable polarity between self and object; but in this instance the self is out there, in the camera, but it is also the object. A sum (not a cogito) accompanies my every presentation. 'How do I look?' No one knows the existential attitude better than a ham actor.
Enlarge this moment, so that the pressure of self-consciousness is sustained. Norman Mailer, for example, attempted in Maidstone a continuous five-day film of himself and others which did not use a developed script, leaving itself open to the 'contingencies of reality.' His problem was, as ours now becomes, how to present oneself, how to live one's life, always playing to the camera, not just as one plays to an audience but as one plays to a mirror. One enjoys making love, but always with the consciousness of how one appears to be enjoying himself. One thinks or suffers, but always with the consciousness of the 'outer' significance of those thoughts or sufferings. A film of one's life: would it be a comedy? a tragedy? thrilling? boring? heartrending? Would it be, as Kierkegaard suggests, the film of 'a life which put on the stage would have the audience weeping in ecstasy'? Would it be a film you would be willing to see yourself? twice? infinitely? Or would eternal reruns force you to throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse this Nietzschean projectionist? And who would edit this extravagant film of every detail--of yet undetermined significances--of your life? How would the credits be distributed? Each of us finds himself in his own leading role--the hero, the protagonist, the buffoon. John Barth tells us that Hamlet could have been told from Polonius' point of view: 'He didn't think he was a minor character in anything.'
What does one do? 'Be yourself!' An empty script; myself sounds like a mere word that points at 'me' along with the camera. One wants to 'let things happen,' but in self-conscious reflection nothing ever 'just happens.' One seizes a plan (one chooses a self), and all at once demands controls unimaginable in everyday life. Every demand becomes a need, yet every need is also seen as gratuitous.