Abject survival on the ice

At 3:30 A.M. on the 26th of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull, running before a southeast gale, slammed bow first into an iceberg. The captain ran forward in the darkness and laid his hands to the wall of ice even as it continued past them, ripping open the ship's starboard side. They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were without food or water. They survived, with the death of but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe. A man who left their deck shelter to commit suicide spotted two Danish brigs on the 2nd of May. The survivors, save the captain, were all frostbitten. "The rescue," writes a historian of the arctic whale fisheries, "was one of those providential affairs of which many instances could be related."

I think of a final image of devastation: the remnant of several whaling crews found in a frozen stupor behind a sea wall of dead bodies, stacked up to protect them from the worst of the heavy seas in which their small floe rolled and pitched. (p. 218)

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

Aboriginal mindset

Hunting in my experience--and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land--is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are bought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something "means"and to be concerned only that it "is." And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships--fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven's distant voice--become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern--which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and smells--takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration.

The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational, nonlinear comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are normal, is, I believe the conscious working mind of an aboriginal hunter. It is a frame of mind that redefines patience, endurance, and expectation. (pp. 199-200)

from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

The polar bear as object of amusement

The most disturbing and deplorable aspect of nineteenth century encounters with polar bears was a perverse manipulation of the bond between a female and her cubs, a common amusement of sailors aboard whaling and sealing ships. William Scoresby tells of an incident involving walrus hunters who had set fire to a pile of blubber to attract bears. A female and two cubs drew near. The female settled her cubs at a short distance and then started trying to hook pieces of blubber out of the fire. The men watched from the safety of the deck as she fought with the flames. They threw her small bits of blubber, which she took to the cubs. As she approached them with the last piece, the men shot the two cubs  dead. For the next half hour she "laid her paws first upon one, and then the other, and endeavored to raise them up." She walked off and called to them, she licked their wounds. She went off again and "stood for some time moaning" before returning to paw them "with signs of inexpressible fondness." Bored or perhaps mortified, the men shot the female and left her on the ice with her cubs.

Sometimes a cub was taken alive, for a zoo or as a present for someone. In November 1876, a Sir Allen Young shot a female and one of her cubs from the deck of a steamship. The other cub he lassoed as a gift for the Prince of Wales. The cub fought wildly until it was secured with chains to ringbolts in the deck. The female was butchered and the cub wrapped in her skin in the hope of appeasing him. Three or four days later the cub succeeded in tearing free of the ringbolts. He was then placed in a small cage, where he remained for the duration of the voyage. The cub roared for hours on end and pulled at the length of chain still around his neck. He was tormented by the ship's dog, which stole his food and bit his paws. The origin of the meat he was fed can be imagined. By the time the ship reached England, the cub lay prostrate in his cage, convulsing and panting. He died a week later. "Had he lived," wrote Frank Bruckland, reflecting the attitudes of the age, "he would, no doubt, have been an honor to his country and his race." (pp. 111-113)

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

interpellation in the era of social media

Interpellation is one of those tricky words that emerges, in my education, from the reading of Chris Weedon's "Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory." Borrowing from Louis Althusser's work, Weedon presents this concept, interpellation, as an ideological process of furnishing a subject for an individual to adopt through power-laden processes of hailing. In the context of Althusser's work, this would be the various functions of a state apparatus to officialize a person's status by any number of demographic categories and the more functional processes that a person goes through as a matter of ageing through the state. Interpellation is the functional front-end of that process. It's the 'hey you' the very act of language, verbal or written, which 'addresses' an individual in a particularizing way, which produces the kinds of subjectivity that a person assumes to be official for as long as this subjectivity is useful in conducting state-official business, economic affairs, and simply living at an address. It's these multiple and overlapping ways and functions of address, which establish a persistent functional subjectivity through which a person engages in the larger society. Weedon further clarifies that aside from the process of establishing a self- and other-recognition through interpellation, it is also a form of misrecognition, that is, the individual "assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity" (p. 30). This will be my jumping off point.

Social media allows individuals to engage with a larger whole of society in an interactive manner. A key to allowing this interactivity, one which sustains its glitter and draw for the individual, is the ways in which a layer of markup language coded onto the content a person shares affords that person the possibility of finding and being found as a result in a search query. The ideological component here results from a potential for 'leveling up' afforded by assuming one of any number of popular categories of existence. One can make or be the content within a vine of any topical significance to a certain strata of taste within the social media's user community. This always ground-level potential that any moment is pregnant with the possibility of becoming famous incentivizes individuals to engage as searchable categories within social media. This leads to two kinds of activity that I recognize. First it lends itself to a self-awareness that in any situation one could contribute to content that others may find entertaining or engaging in some other way. With that and the numeracy of views and the sheer content of interactive responses to what one posts registers by the individual poster as a form of fame. Secondly, this potential for fame has the potential for systematically distorting one's interest for engaging with a social media community through the inducements to become one of any specific trend-savvy categories in whatever context these operate. And with fame comes an added economic inducement to garner advertising dollars as one becomes a brand ambassador or simply a content generator for others' consumption. The power of 'leveling up' rests in this outcome of being a shareable and searchable information object within a visually represented social media space.

The upshot of this is simply that the potential for fame and for having the recognition of others reinforces the ontological condition of the searchable subjects for which an individual becomes, qua content. For example, if a woman gets hit by her boyfriend and she takes a picture of her bleeding nose and posts it on her social media for others to find, share, and spread she becomes content within an ever growing awareness of certain acts, which are categorically sorted, searched, and shared along the faultlines of their discretionary nature as data objects. This image could be one of many examples of #metoo or of #violenceagainstwomen or any number of trending meta-communicative content labels. And what this wider recognition does is carry the potential for crowding out forms of private individuality in dealing with the act depicted by allowing that wider recognition to be the louder voice naming the individual who had become content. This would be a hypothetical yet quite possible current example of that form of misrecognition that comes by way of interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I grant that any one person may find solace from public recognition and at least intelligibility to a larger public in any one of the ready-made content labels, i.e., hashtags, that have currency in a social media environment. What I am trying to tease out is how the affordance of this social media space plus the possibilities afforded by search categories, which lend a sense of category-based ontology to the person posting their content under it, distort agendas for both being and sharing. For example, would a woman feel empowered to be abused by her significant other? Would she feel empowered to challenge others into shaming her? Do gender nonbinaries feel empowered to share their daily struggles through self-revelatory social media posts and even enhance their status as such? Do various racists and mass shooters feel empowered by available communities to engage in extreme acts of violence for the cause they feel they are forwarding? In other words, does social media afford, in the psychology of the individual, a chance for the effects of group polarization to take hold?

Let me explain.

The theory of group polarization posits that two underlying forces lead members of a group to act and think in more extreme ways than they would when alone. The first, social comparison, states that people in the presence of others use their perception of the values and beliefs of the group as a gauge and adapt their behaviors to appear more desirable to the group. The second, influence, should be self-explanatory. For the sake of acceptance and the positive regard of the group, the group can induce individuals to do and act in ways they wouldn't normally. While people are engaged in the time-delayed mediated environment of social media this does disengage some of the group dynamics at play in the theory of group polarization. Nevertheless, the perception of others and their acceptance is likely magnified to an nth degree by a perceived scope of an audience of millions and the potential of 'going viral' with a post. And so in a situation like this one must wonder how social media provides an acutely strong form of perceived pressure to conform to a, once again, perceived peer group. This would be yet another permutation of misrecognition caused by interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I harp on the 'psychology' of web-based social interactions only to suggest that a majority of what happens on-line is purely cognitive, that is, in the 'heads' of individuals. It is their personal perceptions, their star struck feelings for a person talking directly to them, phone screen to phone screen--camera in; video stream out--on a nearly daily basis to a growing fan base that provides an empirical basis for what may be occurring. And any number of topics find a growing fan base for analysis and reactions to any number of things, from games, to vines, to memes, to songs, you name it. Social media may be recreating, in the atomized contexts of one-to-one consumption, the sharing of relevant information about the world from one to many but with a feeling of intimacy afforded by the medium and the consumption contexts.

In the past I have felt that everyone sinking into their glowing rectangle at the expense of the people around them was a pernicious undoing of our culture. I may have to rethink that technologically spun version of the rapture. After all, we are still engaging with others, just in systematically different ways and upon lines rarified by content specificity. Let's just consider that we're losing, potentially, an ability to engage with others a la carte as we increasingly interact in content dependent arenas with others.

hunting a gentle leviathan

"The pursuit of this animal was without restraint. A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right, a 57-foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work." (p. 4)

from Barry Lopez's "Arctic Dreams"