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Why Bother Building Scales The Strange World of Gurney Slade was a 1960 TV serial about a man who was trapped inside a TV programme, and his rebellion against the bland format of the show. It was not an immediate success, although an influential piece of work on later performers. Gurney’s diatribes, his fantasies and ruminations while out in the streets of London and in the countryside, were all part of a search for ways in which one might try and find - perhaps only temporary - escape. Laughter at the futility and pathos of it all. The joke was ultimately on Gurney himself, revealed in the final sequences to be no more than a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by the actor (Anthony Newley) who had been playing him. Gurney is trapped in his TV sitcom-derived universe. His entrapment becomes most apparent during the courtroom scenes in the fifth of the show’s six episodes, where he is tried for being insufficiently funny, and where various characters are brought out as witnesses. In a further scene, the same characters also turn to Gurney, as it emerges that as figments of his imagination, they have not been provided with any background stories and are thus constrained by their one dimensional states. The surreal interface between fiction and reality compares with the angst of Reginald Perrin just over a decade later, but nonetheless they are rants not merely against the surface conformity and conventions they find themselves in, but also an inner confinement, a containment for which no pressure valve has been provided. Gurney Slade was an example of a tradition of British Absurdist film, theatre and television which included such memorable works as One Way Pendulum (1964) in which among other events a man builds a model of the Old Bailey, where he is then put on trial by his own collection of speak your weight machines, and The Bed Sitting Room (1968) a black comedy set in a post-nuclear holocaust landscape, in which the survivors attempt to continue their lives as though nothing had happened. Do the struggles these characters depict point to an inevitable external pressure wherein an individual is corralled, guided inexorably - back into the same path they have tried to dislodge themselves from? In other words is this something which is pre-ordained - perhaps an inner instinct to return to the familiar, and to seek out those recognised patterns of existence, however unsatisfying. A drive that is inexorable and outside our conscious control. Does that imply we are also therefore, hardwired towards dissatisfaction? There are reasons to believe that this might be the case - a seed of dissatisfaction sown within us from an early age may very well be a relic from a time when complacency was a killer - to be restless, on the move, always looking for something else, better food sources, healthier sexual partners; the frustration is perhaps a more embellished expression of the primitive instinct and a need to stay refreshed and alert. At the same time, and countering this urge we are also conditioned to recognise particular features or patterns (for instance with social groups), and to gravitate towards what we identify with. Nonetheless the circumstances which Sartre and others describe are not merely the result of the friction caused between the demands of modern urban and industrial society over the pastoral instincts of the individual; although they are quite likely symptomatic of a deeper tension. It could be argued that even if one can identify a cause or a pretext, a catalyst if you like, whether it be a religious drive, or a settling of scores, or an attempt to please a distant parent, none of these things do more than illustrate or highlight the phenomenon. Trying to get to a root cause of the creative or vocational drive is not simply one of causes and effects. It is attempting to identify a mechanism embedded deep within the psyche. Albert Camus discussed it in his chapter in The Myth of Sisyphus on the 'Absurd Creation'. There is a certain spiritual and emotional plane, a kind of suspension of belief or a pulling-back from the world in the creative process. Among all the surface discussions about audience reception, whether or not a prospective exhibition affects one’s creative output, there is a certain state of mind which one can only describe as an inner crisis - a tension arising from pressure building up below, a blend of anxiety and elation, and a frisson of perversity as well. Sometimes the effect can be spontaneous (or near-spontaneous); other times more protracted. And these are of course merely the process. They do not adequately describe the deeper, seismic pressure from below which brings about these effects. So... Why Bother? There are absurd components to market research, and indeed to the questionnaire format generally. On the most superficial level the dry, neutral language, the rigid format, the protocols which must be strictly followed, with no room for intuition or caprice, are all fodder for the parodist. But these qualities in themselves are not, of course, unique to that profession or to indeed to questionnaires. Where the absurd lies in these exercises is in the suspension of belief - in the sets of agreements and the attendant assumptions that have to be adopted. One buys into a particular model of thinking when engaged in market research activities. There is the presupposed level playing field, which has been pre-engineered to assume a given sample of correspondents receive the same treatment, or that their responses will be processed in an unbiased way. In such a situation, all responses and interactions are carried out in isolation, to be free from cross-contamination or what Polling companies call “push-polling”; loaded questions, influence from other individuals, etc. Asger Jorn, best known as a member of both CoBrA and Situationist International, was also one of the few visual artists to have acknowledged Kierkegaard’s influence and to have touched on him in writing. Describing a world where “complete elimination of any notion of situation, of event” has occurred, any discussion of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith becomes a completely subjective experience, unconnected to that of anyone else, something outside the scope of meaningful assessment. Jorn invoked Afred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics (sic) in the fabrication of a religion whose absolute democracy and rejection of formal institution thus precluded its existence. “To its credit, Pataphysics has confirmed that there is no metaphysical justification for forcing everyone to believe in the same absurdity. The possibilities of art and the absurd are many. The logical conclusion to this principle could be an anarchist thesis: to each his own absurdity. The opposite is expressed by the legal power that forces every member of society to submit completely to the political absurdity of the state."[1] The measuring and quantifying which research questionnaires create and which have a palliative effect in diverting intellectual and analytical energy into exercises of tabulation, modelling and speculation, are worthy of Swift in their absurdity; they not only create their own meaning, they also manage to maintain and feed that meaning, so that it becomes itself an entirely self-sustaining, symbiotic rationale. Scales and the published results of surveys have a reassuring quality. They carry within them an air of authority, of sagacity, of usefulness. They are like the rolling news broadcast in their impact, with similar urgency and gravitas; and with similar biases. They are as much notable for what they omit as for what they include - and that provides a kind of abstracted, one-dimensional worldview which has an allure of its own - the strange satisfaction of a codified, detached, dessicated set of results. This kind of self-generating meaning, and the codified character of that information, has been a well-travelled path for writers at least as far back as Dickens; his Hard Times (1854) a satire on the Utilitarian Philosophy which had originated with Jeremy Bentham and was incorporated into the Liberal economics of John Stuart Mill. Mill’s policies would become an inspiration to a generation of politicians and free market economists a century later; the idea of the individual as a unit, measurable by the amount of labour they were capable of expending, the quantity of good they might be produce, the minimum required to sustain them - 'rationalization' - have their origins during this period, as does the codification of the individual person against various specific sets of criteria. In all of this there is a tacit agreement, a framework within which we shall all operate in order that our actions are validated. So it is with the questionnaire; within itself, its own biases, with nothing external to judge them against, become the absolutes. A world composed from questionnaire results is an absurd one, but the absurd reward is that we get to choose the shape of our imaginary universe. Yesterday’s answers are already redundant, indeed the data gathered during the course of the survey may well be no longer relevant once the results have been collated and the survey published. Then it will be time to prepare for the next round of questions, and today’s attitudes and values will be ticked off, and disposed of, for another day. |
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