School Days--Episode 5--The Schizoid Man
As episode 5 starts, the Prisoner is helping a young friend, Alison, practice her ESP with a set of Xener cards. She also is learning photography, and he is willing to help her out with that, as well. The Village is now a campus.
He flashes the sign of his grade
It's a fine episode, with McGoohan giving a typically brilliant performance. He plays both Number 6, who is being treated by everyone in the Village as though he were actually Number 12 (who is one of them); as well as playing the real Number 12 who is pretending to be Number 6 in order to make the real Number 6 believe that he might really be Number 12 after all. Got that?
The new Number 2 accomplishes this by having Number 6 abducted in the middle of the night. The Prisoner is then forced to undergo a barrage of rigid conditioning in order to instill in him characteristics of Number 12. Such peculiarities include left-handedness and a penchant for flapjacks. The universal signifier for evil twindom, sinister facial hair, is also provided.
In War and Peace in the Global Village, a work that might well be subtitled A Skeleton Key to the Prisoner (and which I previously lifted several quotes from Finnegan's Wake), Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore write:
...the work of Pavlov, in revealing the fact of conditioned reflexes, had a totally different meaning for the Russian and the European. Pavlov had been unable to condition his dogs in his experiments until he had completely conditioned the laboratory environments in which they lived. Until precise thermal and auditory controls were introduced into the laboratories the conditioning did not occur. The bell did not elicit salivation. To the European it was not the conditioning of the laboratories but the fact of automatic salivation that created the excitement. Indeed, the ordinary psychological effect makes no mention of the laboratory conditioning. The Westener lives in a man-made environment, mechanically conditioned and time structured... [But] to the Russian, the exciting event in Pavlov's experiment was not the conditioning of the dogs but of the laboratories. But to the Westerner, the revelation that he was a preconditioned robot, thanks to his own ingenuity and machinations, was a most disagreeable discovery...The portentous discovery [Pavlov] made was that any controlled environment, any man-made environment, is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists....
And everyone knows that somnambulists are especially open to suggestion. This is not just pertinent to the Village, or the prison, or the mall, but especially to the schoolyard. Ignatius Loyola, and John Dewey centuries later, certainly understood this in their own ways.
Ratcliffe College, Patrick McGoohan's alma mater
Schoolchildren are expected, by pragmatic necessity more than nefarious intent, to adopt new, obedient personalities in the classroom. As anyone who has spent any time in a classroom can tell you, though, the obedient child is a Platonic ideal that one is always striving for. Be that as it may, over time accretions of habit, conditioning, and mild trauma produce socially competent, albeit befuddled and neurotic, drones who are ready to go forth to toil in the Dark Satanic Cubicle. Once there they will be fruitful and engender the next batch of kiddies. The Society of the Spectacle must have a steady stream of new viewers, after all.
Given that he is now forced to do everything left-handed, the Prisoner loses all his previous prowess in fencing, boxing, and shooting. He is bullied mercilessly by Number 12 as a result. 12 treats him with the exasperated, condenscending air of an upperclassman.
Just as he is starting to crack, though, The Prisoner finds evidence that he is, in fact, Number 6, in one of Alison's photographs. The issue then becomes how does he de-condition himself of the habits of Number 12?
As we all know from our own life stories, whether it is dieting or smoke cessation or recovery from addiction, or even just really, really liking flapjacks, most people go about the process of de-conditioning by attempting to not do something. The problem with trying to dehabituate one's self by telling yourself you can't do something is that what you're really saying, as Fritz Perls was fond of pointing out, is that you won't do something. That is, that you will not. But willing a negative is like proving a negative...it's simply an untenable proposition. Will is a positive force.
This, then, is the way of the Fool, the ascetic course set upon by the new initiate. In the long term, meditation and yoga are effective tools for complete deconditioning, where, as we discussed in Free For All, shock and trauma are effective tools for personality con- and de-struction in the short term. Thus the Masonic initiation drama, as well as the horrors of hazing. In the 20th century, both Gurdjieff and Crowley devised independent systems of conditioning which continue to be highly influential in both the eso- and exo-teric worlds. Gurdjieff's influence extends from the Enneagram to the New York City Ballet to Norman Vincent Peale (Peale's main speechwriter was an acolyte of Gurdjieff's); Crowley's to Scientology to EST to NLP to The Secret.
I must draw this to a close, so suffice it to say that shock himself out of it he does, so after Number 12 is summarily dispatched by Rover, The Prisoner proceeds to pretend to be Number 12 intentionally in order to escape. But he is not quite ready to cross the next threshold. After being hoodwinked, literally and figuratively, he fails the next test.
School is still in session.
to be continued--be seeing you!
School is still in session.
to be continued--be seeing you!
