Utilitarianism versus Moral Imperative.
I’ve been looking over some notes from tutorials today and at the end of January when I had a meeting with the head of course he wrote Utilitarianism versus Moral Imperative on my notes.
We’d been speaking about creating a cyclical work that was made to be destroyed and remade and destroyed in a continuous cycle. This was also at the time when he suggested I watched Funny Games by Michael Haenke. According to the director the reason for making this film was to make a moralistic comment about the influence of media violence on society. For example whilst Peter and paul torture the family they turn to the camera and wink at you. You suddenly feel guilty for gleaning pleasure from the scenes of violence you are witnessing.
Of course it’s just a film and we can enjoy being scared and disturbed because we know it’s not really happening. The problem is that we will build up a tolerance to violent images so that it takes more and more to affect us.
Recently Sky news were ridiculed for their portrayal of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. They’d added a soundtrack which was not at all dissimilar to a Hollywood action thriller. If we see reality as if it were a movies does this then mean that on some level we are entertained by the suffering of others?
This reminds me of what Luc Boltanski was saying about suffering in the conversation between his brother Christian and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Refereeing to a guy seeing people being massacred or dying of hunger on TV ‘the person watching certainly has ways to act; through speech, by speaking to others and engaging them in his emotions’ And so he shouldn’t be seen as inactive or perverse because he saw these images. So why did Haenke make the film? To get the message you have to witness the violence and become aware of yourself as a viewer of violence for pleasure.
Back to Utilitarianism and Moral Imperative. Just to think about that in terms of the materiality of paper.
Utilitarianism
The means should justify the end
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Paper manufacturing did cause a number of skilled people to be replaced by machines but more people had access to paper which they could use to document their ideas, communicate, use for packaging, print newspapers etc.
Also now today we have to fill in dozens of forms for every action we take, everything must be documented. In this way a clear paper trail can be followed and theoretically people will be judged by their personal paper trail rather than who they know and how charming or attractive they are.
Moral Imperative
a principle originating inside a person’s mind that compels that person to act
I make, I use my body to make. To make a sheet of paper by hand is laborious and possibly a huge waste of my time and energy. But the process of making paper for me symbolises our ability to change and transform and to overcome situations that seem immovable, like grief, loss, despair and isolation.
We are not what we are on paper. We have souls, emotions, idiosyncracies, relationships; that is what makes us who we are not the papertrail that follows us.
If we use numbers only, like Utilitarianism, we are limiting our understanding of greatest. Here there is no account of quality only quantity. I am not just 1 female living in Dorset just as Gadaffi is not just 1 male living in Libya.
