Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

(I think) Sam Jacob thinks we are at once subsuming and exploring our individual identity within our cultural identity via Kate Moss:

Every culture has its centre of gravity, every era its ground zero - a vanishing point that everything disappears into and flows out of. Often it's an abstract idea like beauty, truth, valour, or honesty. And often that quality is personified in figures like John Bull or Liberty, Right now and right here, that might well be Kate Moss.

Last month saw the Kate Moss / Top Shop launch that had been anticipated in magazines as varied as Vogue & Take a Break. We've seen this kind of deal before - celebrity-designers with ghost-written collections for high street retailers, (most recently Madonna's terrible Weimar lesbian outfits for H&M). We've had high fashion designers knocking out mass-market clobber causing riots at opening time. This time it feels different - and it's a lot to do with the protagonists. Both Kate and TopShop fascinate because they scrape across the normal stratification of culture.

It's a collision of the everyday with the singularly unique, of high style with high street of individual liberty and mass consumption. They are opposites that folds in on product like a Klein Bottle, a non-orientable surface with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" that keeps on flowing into itself. Counter culture flows into shop counter.

I find the interplay of identity contexts Sam is grappling with here quite fascinating. The concept of a governing quality for a culture at any given point in history is also attractive at first glance, but I suspect that that quality is in the eye of the perceiver. Surely there is a whole, evolving web of attributes that inform the direction and focus of a culture, and the particular one that Sam sees as primary may be secondary to another observer? An intriguing piece, nevertheless.

Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Cultural and social aspects of task function

Another intriguing post from Joshua Porter:

In his book The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski challenges the widely-held notion that “form follows function”. Using the example of knives and forks vs. chopsticks, Petroski shows how the development of eating tools was as much the result of cultural and social issues as about the task itself. Investigating how Eastern and Western cultures have evolved completely different designs that do essentially the same task (conveying food to mouth), Petroski asserts that the difference is crucial.

Ah, but perhaps the question of whether form follows function or not all depends on how narrowly or broadly one defines the function of a “task”? If the task’s function is to convey food to mouth in a way that satisfies cultural and social mores, then the form of the implement—chopstick, fork etc.—exactly follows function. I vote for the application of Occam's Razor here!

Culture as identity performance practice

Grant McCracken writes: "[S]ome of the most interesting people these days are hybrids."

But surely us self-conscious humans have always been complex and multi-faceted, at least to the extent that our cultural and social environment is rich and varied?

Whether, where and when we perform that complexity is another question. To show what is inside is a vunerable, risky business. Our complexity may or may not be esteemed by particular others; quite naturally, we may or may not allow those others to witness it.

The constant interplay between our Inner and Outer selves is patterned by our evolving culture. In a way, then, culture can be understood in this context as "performance practice" for our mysterious and ultimately unknowable selves.