29 June 2008
j is for judgement
[Some books on judgement leering ominously at you]
Judgement frightens me. Far from being the 'free-play' of the faculties, as Kant would have it, I think of judgement as something like a slab of finality, a giant irreversible lump of doom. Although it happens all the time, I refuse to believe that people ever really revise their opinion of someone after the first time they've met them. Or if they do, they merely add new information that covers over, but doesn't entirely remove, the initial judgement. It's like a palimpsest! Yes, indeed, all personal relations are a giant palimpsest of revised and revisable opinions written on a single surface. This is why getting drunk around people is a bad idea, as the scriptio inferior comes to the top and you fixate on one little thing, and think that that's them. 'You're so bitter!', 'you're so funny!', 'you're so complicated!' etc.
I like to think there's a qualitative difference between being critical (useful, important) and being judgemental (scary, dubious). But I often mistake criticism for judgement, taking light, easily-fixable comment for absolutist, ontological assertion. So a remark like 'you could change the wording of the third paragraph to make it more readable' becomes 'everything you've ever done is rubbish, everything you do or will do is rubbish, and besides, you don't even deserve to use letters, you uppity little imp'. I think it's a confidence thing...
At one point, I really did receive a weight of judgement against me (all unfair, obviously). I used to dream of courtrooms and trials and the anguished pointlessness of trying to defend oneself, confusing value judgement with legal judgement like some kind of oneiric numpty. Last night I dreamt I was a CSI though, so things are looking up.
The free-floating judgement of contemporary life, the Big Other made flesh through the channelling of tabloid condemnations (love rat, irresponsible role model, bad mother) is designed to put barbs in your head that extend far beyond the realms of mere sex, drug use and child care: but what do the others think? is the anxious motto of our age - the Big Brother house is the attempt to get a concrete answer to the unanswerable question: 'what do people really think of me?' The Facebook aps that ask you to 'compare people' or to 'say what you really think I'm like' are vain attempts to get closer to the 'really think', the impossible idea that there really is a space in which all opinion of you resides, and more to the point, that it is all true.
