LinkedIn.com is the business world’s Facebook. As social
media goes, it’s pretty useful, but it has a few attributes that I find utterly
creepy. One of the little “features” is the fact it automatically generates a
notice to all the members in one’s “network” when you achieve a 5 or 10-year
work anniversary.
LinkedIn.com asks your contacts to “Congratulate So-and-So on their Work
Anniversary!!” I suppose some people like this, but I most assuredly do NOT. I
have looked for a way to keep it from sending out notices to people in my
network, but I have failed.
So, consequently, when I reached the five-year mark at my
current job, I received a number of congratulatory emails and “likes,”
including one from a poet friend I have known for many years, and through that
time have been condemned by for being associated with the oil industry: “Congratulations!
May oil rain down on you.”
It does not seem like much of a congratulatory message to me
– seems more like the old Chinese curse, “May you have an interesting life.”
The mental image his “congratulations” invoked is that of big
vats of boiling oil being poured down from the turrets of a medieval castle as
I attempt to scale the walls. Attacking the fortified castle is, in my own
mind, a gesture that is partly heroic, as I seek to connect with whatever is
inside the castle, and partly a “conversation” with all the fantasies and
narratives of adventure and romance that involve risk and a grand vision.
If I’m storming a castle, I’m in the service of a grand
vision of “the new.” Officially, my vision involves trying to determine how to
use new technologies to improve petroleum exploration and production efforts. In
reality, it’s a quest for the “new” – and it’s probably, at least on one level,
a deliberately Pollyanna-esque quest.
My vision is my ostensible subject. In literary critical
terms, we can say I’m manifesting an example of the Bakhtinian dialogical
imagination. Mikhail Bakhtin, if you may
recall, was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, and linguist who wrote The Dialogic Imagination in which he
points out all utterances and conversations have intertextuality embedded
within them, and it’s impossible to extract them. The intertextuality has to do with
references, allusions, and concepts that come in from texts that are either in
the general zeitgeist are in a specific context.
Bakhtin’s view of embedded intertextuality extending far
beyond the text itself was evoked as well in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in which literary critic Harold
Bloom seeks to show how deep intertextuality in poetry not only invokes
previous ideas and authors, but also seeks to subvert or re-envision them.
“May oil rain down on you” invokes voices: his, mine, and
all the works of literature, philosophy and art that intrude with their
fragments, phantasmic energies, ghosts, and the “trace” of ideas and
intellectual histories. These are intellectual repositories I interact with
even if I’m not completely aware of them.
I respect the fact that my poet friend actively protested
the construction of a pipeline near the south New Jersey shore where he lives.
He rode out Superstorm Sandy from his high-rise apartment on the beach that
had, as I understand it, inadequate electricity, water, and worse for weeks and
weeks.
“May oil rain down on you.”
The same oil he wishes on me will rain on him as well. There
is no way to avoid it.
I see his note as a desperate, last feverish hope for a
restoration of a world that is essentially dualistic, rather than the place it
really is, where everything is interpenetrating and interdependent.
There’s no real differentiation in our roles; we’re just in
different places on a continuum. No really goes without consuming petroleum
products, and the “moral high road” is largely an illusion.
In fact, in Baudrillardian terms, there is no moral high
road in terms of one’s choices. Further, a unique, differentiable “footprint”
is a fiction created to inspire the creation of a “virtue yardstick” and the
possibility that one might be saved by means of his or her actions.
The reality is the socially agreed upon construct, the
“virtue yardstick” which one uses to measure one’s environmental footprint.
So, although no one really avoids consuming the world’s
resources, people are social animals and they like to organize themselves into
groups, and they like to rank them. There will always people willing to set
themselves apart as the priest class (closely related to the madman class,
where madness & divine visions are potentially interchangeable … the old
“vates” or prophets of Plato’s days).
But even if you manage to place yourself in the priest
class, it’s not as comforting as a dualistic vision of reality, which gives you
neat, easy moral clarity and “either/or” decisions.
Yet another intrusive thought distracts me with images of large
vats of boiling oil being poured down on the heads of hapless warriors. I
wonder where the high road is in this scenario.
If you’re the one pouring the oil, are you guilty of murder?
You can argue that you were simply defending the castle, but what did your
castle represent? You’re trying to keep
your own ideas intact.
Or, perhaps you’re protecting your own intertextuality and
trying to keep it free of outside invaders. You don’t want the ideas of the
general zeitgeist to intrude your
own, or at least you’d like to control them.
Well, all I can say is, “good luck with that.”
Controlling what influences your own message is about as
easy to accomplish is controlling the automatically generated messages, the
“Congratulate so and so on their work anniversary!” messages your social
networking site sends out.