Robert Ashby was speaking in his personal capacity. ie @ = e) Q cr rz © @ by Alison Webster dome anc don It was "one amazing day" for one year only. And if you haven't visited the Dome by now then you've missed it. And if you've missed it, you've avoided a wonderfully rich and interactive snapshot of the world we live in and its underlying philosophy and values. In that sense, the fact that the Dome has been a transient collection of contemporary culture is entirely appropriate.
ET's throaty whisperings in the Talk Zone are reminiscent of the so-called "hypnopaedia" (sleep teaching) in Huxley's Brave New World - a subliminal message is made clear through gentle repetition. In the Talk Zone the message is commercially inspired (BT is the sponsor), simple, but none the less true for that: "it's good to talk".
The Zone begins with a video featuring a series of dramatic scenes - of death and dying, riot and war, human joy and human misery. It's startlingly moving, and culminates with this message: "The difference is what we say to one another." The challenge facing humanity in the new millennium, the Zone has it, is the challenge of better communication.
I visited at the same time as reading Don's latest:
Philosophy’s Own Religion. One of the most exciting chapters is entitled "The web of communication" - for it explores the very Dome-esque concept of "space/s'. Don explains how several times in the West since the Middle Ages, new worlds of thought and communication have opened up. And the pattern, in terms of people's reactions, is as follows: first, such a new world will be described metaphorically as a new "space". Second, enthusiasts for the new space or world locate in it the criteria for truth and challenge established authority, so third, traditionalists spring to the defence of the old order, which they declare to be far more "objective" and trustworthy. As for the new space - of the mind, cyberspace or whatever - it is, they say, arbitrary and dreamlike. It lacks substance (p. 95). Don identifies five such spaces, historically: the "Republic of Letters"; the space of individual subjective experience (the "inner life"); public opinion or the "general will" and linked with it, the "climate of the times"; the mediascape (the world of stars and celebrities), and finally: cyberspace.
Our current "condition", as Western Europeans, is one of exile. We are, Don says, "troubled by nostalgia for the lost and sacred unities of medieval culture.
We feel that we are wandering in the wilderness.As our knowledge has grown too great for the individual to cope with, our world-picture has become painfully fissured. We just can't get it together again. The five 'spaces' were developed by way of helping us to model the world and to cope with the difficulties, but they cannot solve them entirely" (p. 101).
For me, this perfectly expresses the Dome experience. Its centrepiece is a fantastically colourful show which is drama and dance and music - fairytale, myth, magic and morality-tale all in one, and in three dimensions. And it's designed so that you can't possibly watch the whole thing at once - you can only select little bits, knowing that even as you concentrate on those, you are missing much else.
And so it is with the Zones. You can't hope to come away having comprehensively surveyed and experienced them all. Or even one of them. It's just not possible. The Dome challenges you to be satisfied with the partial and the transient. Just as Don has been doing in the last several of his books.
The Dome and Don seem to agree that the key (a key) to making the most of the new postmodern space in which we all live is talk and conversation: “the world is generated by, held within and sustained by our own endlessly humming conversation" (p. 102). Theodore Zeldin, another writer who's made his name through talking about talking, agrees. "That is the aspect of conversation that particularly excites me: how conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world" (Conversation, p. 4).
Don's conclusion is this: "We ‘live along the wires’, becoming ourselves in and through our various exchanges with others - exchanges that are always mediated and supported by the public realm in which they take place. So important is this point that one may say that public space occupies in modern culture the position that God used to occupy” (p. 106).
The Dome doesn't make sense. Sense has to be made of it. That's the real reason, I suspect, why some people hate it (though interestingly, the only people I know who hate it are the people who haven't been). It was busy when I went, and that felt appropriate. For if Don and the Dome and Zeldin are right, individualism has had its day. Meaningmaking can no longer be a solitary activity. The Dome will soon be dead. Long live conversations about the Dome!
Don Cupitt, Philosophy’s Own Religion, SCM Press, £12.95.
Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life, Harvill, £6.99.