Coming Into Being : Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness

Rating:
Summary: A scholar and intellectual, at full gallop
Review: At a time when the question, "Who are America's intellectuals?" was circulating, and the mention of Susan Sontag in this regard left me queasy, I remembered my exhilaration reading Thompson's books in the 70's and 80's and wondered what he was doing lately. I didn't finish this book--some of the "texts" weren't of that much personal interest--but the first three-fourths were wonderful. The introductory essay, which was prophetic in its emphasis on the terrorist-fundamentalist forces at work in the world--is alone worth the price of admission. A brilliant, incisive mind with an insatiable curiosity to expand its range, and we are the beneficiaries.

With Thompson in the lists, I think we Americans can hold our own with intellectuals the world over.

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Thompson Mind-Jazz
Review: Reading this book is a bit like watching a Baz Lurhrmann film like "Moulin Rouge" or "William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet." Although the text, superficially, is the printed record of a 1992-1994 lecture series, the lectures themselves were not designed as a linear narrative exposition, but in Thompson's words, operated as a form of mind-jazz -- an improvisational riff on ancient texts.

The texts function in the book very much the way an archetypal storyline does in Luhrmann's films -- as a structural anchor for a great whirl of pop references and images that have no temporal relationship to one another but are perceived to occupy the same ideational space. When this strategy works, the results are exhilarating.

Thompson's focus is the living interaction of consciousness and communicative form -- the way in which a consensual instrument of communication serves as the performance of tacit assumptions about what it means to be human. Influenced in this enterprise by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Thompson demonstrates in diverse communicative fields -- art, literature, religion, myth, history, archaeology, poetry, pop imagery -- how new possibilities for meaning take hold in a culture, relegating displaced forms to folk art, and setting in motion fundamentalist movements in which the frankly archaic returns nativistically, a vocabulary wielded by those disenfranchised by the process of ideational change.

Thompson has been taken to task, in this respect, for the so-called Whig fallacy of history -- that is, for treating past social orders as though they'd been groping along, step by step, to reach our own point of conscious development. But these reviewers are equally irritated by Thompson's multidimensional approach to his subject, regarding it as a rejection of western narrative convention.

It seems to me that the book's structure is more profitably understood as a deliberate reflection of the thesis that Thompson is advancing: that all variants of a conscious perspective exist at once as performances of that perspective, whether or not they served to reflect or influence the society in which they found expression. This thematic consistency both unifies the material and allows for expansive variation, much as an ostinato binds a musical composition while allowing for constantly changing contrapuntal parts.

Although some of his ideas are certainly familiar from post-modern theory, Thompson rejects the nihilism and political utilitarianism that so often attend a deconstructionist perspective on great literature. He appeals, rather, to the reader's imagination, that intermediate psychological ground between matter and spirit, where language serves as a form of currency: a means of exchange between the sensorium and dimensions that lie beyond its direct perceptual acquisition.

This felicitous analogy allows Thompson to introduce the evidence of texts that are not usually understood to have relevance in a technologically oriented society. Like a marriage contract, whose value is not in its material existence as a piece of paper, some texts operate as a "consensual instrument," allowing, as Thompson puts it, a domain of meaning to come into play.

Like Thompson's other books, this one is not an easy read. It's in the business of limning texts as performances of the worldview in which they were generated, determined not only by culture but by gender and adaptive context. And it attempts, by its very form, to invoke as well as to describe what Thompson calls a hermeneutic of the imagination.

Understanding our current state of cultural organization as a bifurcation point, a time in which the traditional forms of literate civilization are undergoing an electronic meltdown, Thompson regards the present communicative medium as the concrete performance of a state of consciousness that is collective rather than individual. Our consensual vocabulary for understanding this evolution, however, is unremittingly technological, which has paved the way for immense corporate interests to define the emerging global landscape. Spirituality, accordingly, is devolving into archaic personal cosmologies.

"Coming into Being" is an attempt to jump, feet first, into that perceived breach between science and mysticism, between abstract scholarship and embodied folk wisdom, between self and Other, between being and Being, in order to celebrate the many textual images, both ancient and contemporary, of their potential integration. I loved this book -- even its recapitulation of "The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light" as though it were a text like any other, important for its ideas and images and not because Thompson happened to write it.

Rating:
Summary: A scholar and intellectual, at full gallop
Review: See my review of the hardback with 284 pages and twelve essays compared with 336 pages and fifteen essays. Hint: the last three essays bring Thompson's thoughts to a higher and more mature plane. Hence the hardback should merit four stars and the paperback rates five stars with me. Buy it! Gordon E. Beck, Ph. D., Emeritus Professor, The Evergreen State College, Olympia.

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book. It has ALL of Thompson's work.
Review: See my review of the hardback with 284 pages and twelve essays compared with 336 pages and fifteen essays. Hint: the last three essays bring Thompson's thoughts to a higher and more mature plane. Hence the hardback should merit four stars and the paperback rates five stars with me. Buy it! Gordon E. Beck, Ph. D., Emeritus Professor, The Evergreen State College, Olympia.