The Convivial Society, No. 10
"Contemporary man ... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it."
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
I've had a draft of a blog post hanging around for a year and a half or so. I've returned to it a handful of times, but I've never finished it—in part, because I've never quite imagined myself actually publishing it. For one thing, it drew on my personal life in a way that I tend to avoid. For another, it was just weird, or, at least, I couldn't quite help feeling that it was weird.
I thought about it again today, and, when I did, it occurred to me that maybe a newsletter was just the place for it. I don't know, you can be the judge.
I had been trying to write about a difficult stretch of time and also about my surprise, in retrospect, at how well I sustained it, all things considered. The weirdness lay in what I had come to think of as the reason for my resilience, such as it was. I first began writing the draft a year or so after the fact. I started off by noting that for a period of 15 months, I could have counted on two hands how many full nights of sleep I'd had. One might have guessed that this had something to do with the first few months of my first child's life, but you would've been mistaken. The main cause of my sleep-deprived existence was my ill and aging beagle.
During the early part of that stretch, she was diagnosed with Cushing's Disease, which, combined with advanced aged—she was 16 years old then—made for a very weak bladder. There were periods of time during which a higher dose of medication would make for some good nights. On those good nights I would be out with her once or twice. Those good nights were few and far between. More often, I was making three to four trips outside each night, roughly every two hours or so. Finally, in March of 2016, I decided the time had come to say goodbye.
As I later thought back over this exhausting stretch, which included a host of other stressful developments (won't bore you with the details, aversion to writing about private life, etc.), including days during which I taught from 9AM to 9PM, I'm not entirely sure how I held up at all, physically, mentally, or emotionally. But, as I've already suggested, I had a theory.
I began thinking about all of this when, several months later, better rested and under less stress, I found that I was nonetheless more tired than I'd been when I was barely sleeping. I began to wonder why this might have been the case. I had no obvious answer. I was only a few months older, so I didn't think I could just chalk it up to aging, which accounts for much else these days. Then something occurred to me.
Each night, when I went outside—at, say, midnight, two, four, and six—I would have little to do but gaze at the sky. I did this night after night for a little over a year. After awhile, I could go outside and discern the time simply by observing the position of the stars. I knew, both during the night and during the day, where the moon would be and what phase it was in. I watched the planets wander their way across the night sky. I noted the changing angle of their paths and the moon's as well. My gaze was not exclusively skyward, either. I was also during this time more attentive to the flora and fauna in my tiny corner of the world and how they changed through the year.
I came to think that this had something to do with my resilience. If I tried to describe how I felt then, a feeling that became more distinct as it gradually subsided, the words that came to mind included grounded, centered, or tethered. I know, I cringe a bit myself. If I try again, I might say that I felt well-oriented to the world or well-enplaced. To put the matter another way, I might say that I felt less alienated, more integrated.
I suspect some might be tempted to offer a spiritual-but-not-religious sort of account of all of this, but I'm not too keen on such explanations. I might suggest instead that how I felt had more to do with my being a body in the world.
We tend to be good Cartesians. We pay close attention to what we think, even when we are dealing with how we feel. Of course, most of know that our bodies are important. Many of us, in fact, may be obsessed with the health of the body. But chiefly this means that we turn to regimens of diet and exercise, often in order to combat the stresses that arise from how we otherwise neglect our bodies.
I poked around for any literature that might help me make sense of what I was trying to understand, but I didn't have any luck and I didn't try very hard. But, being who I am and caring about what I care about, I suspected that if attunement to place or embedded embodiedness had something to do with it, then it signaled that my odd sense of well-being had something to do with the prolonged experience of an alternative attunement to the world arising from the apprehension of an a-technological rhythm of time. In other words, I'd managed to get synced to a rhythm that was, for lack of a better word, more natural. I know. Nature is a construct, etc., etc. Bear with me.
In the last newsletter I posted an excerpt from Erazim Kohák's The Embers and the Stars. In it, Kohák made clear that he did not write "to extoll the virtues of a putative 'natural' life." Note his quotation marks around natural. But, he also wrote, "Surrounded by artifacts and constructs, we tend to lose sight, literally as well as metaphorically, of the rhythm of the day and the night, of the phases of the moon and the change of the seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein."
He goes on to note how odd it is of us to think of talk about an "awareness of an integral place in the cosmos as mere poetic imagination or as 'merely subjective.'" He then inverts our Cartesian assumptions:
"It is what we are accustomed to treating as 'objective reality'—the conception of nature as a system of dead matter propelled by blind force—that is in truth the product of a subject's purposeful and strenuous activity, a construct built up in the course of an extended, highly sophisticated abstraction ... In a real, though not customary sense, it is what we mislabel 'poetic imagination' that is, 'objective,' a spontaneous experiential given. It is our image of nature as dead and mechanical—and the image of the human as either a robot or a rebel—that is 'subjective,' a product of the subject's active imagination rather than a given of lived experience."
Earlier, Kohák had noted that "the notion of a fundamental discontinuity between humans and their natural world should have come to appear evident is itself a curious phenomenon." "Humans," he reminds us, "notoriously, live their lives in and as their bodies whose rhythm is integrated with the rhythm of nature."
So, perhaps, there was something to my theory about why I remained relatively resilient through such a difficult stretch of life, although articulating the precise nature of the relationship may be difficult. In any case, from Kohák's perspective, that the explanation struck me as odd may, in fact, be the most interesting and telling thing about the whole affair. For what it's worth, I continue to think we ordinarily operate at several removes from rhythms and patterns that have been part of the human milieu since time immemorial, and surely that is of some, not altogether benign, consequence.
One last observation. Kohák pairs an understanding of humans as "either robot or a rebel" with our misapprehension of nature as "dead and mechanical." There's a lot to unpack in that, but, at the very least, it should lead us to question whether our understanding of freedom is not also warped by our inability to perceive our place in rather than against the non-human world. Freedom, to put it briefly, is not found in the absence of all constraints; it is found, rather, in our submission to appropriate constraints—life-giving and life-sustaining constraints, we might say—and, yes, in our resistance to constraints that undermine our capacity to flourish as the sort of beings we are. Fleshing out and applying that distinction is, of course, an immensely complicated business, especially when we have in view matters of public and not merely private consequence.
News and Resources
"The goal is to automate us": John Naughton interviews Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capital.
"From interpretation to identification: a history of facial images in the sciences of emotion": A 2004 paper by John McClain Watson.
A bibliography of sources on the topic of attention put together by historian of science D. Graham Burnett.
'Rule of Trust': The Power and Perils of China’s Social Credit Megaproject: "The unbounded and uncertain notion of 'trust' and the unrestrained employment of technology are a dangerous combination in the context of governance. We conclude with a caution that with considerable sophistication, the Chinese government is preparing a much more sweeping version of SCS reinforced by artificial intelligence tools such as facial-recognition and predictive policing. Those developments will further empower the government to enhance surveillance and perpetuate authoritarianism."
This Company Is Helping Build China’s Panopticon: “We’re not really thinking very far ahead, you know, whether we’re having some conflicts with humans, those kinds of things,” he said. “We’re just trying to make money.”
How Instagram Is Changing Our Living Spaces: “'Instagram is inundated with new content all the time,' Marrujo told me. 'If you don’t have an image that pops, people just scroll past.' Maybe the indifferent scroll is what we fear most of all."
Interview with Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab, on the accelerating rate of collective memory decline. An interesting but somewhat frustrating exchange. They discuss Postman and the effects of shifting media, but, in my view, kind of miss some important elements of Postman's work. (Don't want to be too harsh about an interview exchange, though.) In any case, I think we need to take account of both the decay of a certain kind of internalized memory as well as of the prodigious databases of externalized memory that we're generating.
New Feelings: Selfish Intimacy: "I wanted just to be there, enjoying the mundanity of a place that would soon be mythological to me. I also wanted to tour it like a stranger and send away dispatches — to friends who would never see it, to myself who could never go back, to no one in particular." This is a terrific piece, by the way. It explores matters of documentation, privacy, and intimacy that I think will resonate widely.
A conversation with Dr. Pamela Long about her book, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome.
On the weird global media event (2015).
Start-Up Wants to Project Giant Billboards in Space
Brave New World was published on January 25th in 1932. Here is an essay from 2007 by Caitrin Keiper discussing the book's reception.
Two video clips:
Drone or X-wing fighter?
David Bowie on the internet in 1999 (beginning around the 8 minute mark)
Re-framings
David Samuels, "Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother?":
"Beauty is the ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, being a subjectivity that is rooted in our biology, yet at the same time rooted in external absolutes like mathematical ratios and the movement of time. As the critic Giovanni Basile writes in an extraordinarily perceptive critical essay, 'The Algebra of Happiness,' the utopia implied by Zamyatin’s dystopia is 'a world in which happiness is intertwined with a natural un-freedom that nobody imposes on anyone else: a different freedom from the one with which the Great Inquisitor protects mankind: a paradoxical freedom in which there is no ‘power’ if not in the nature of things, in music, in dance and in the harmony of mathematics.'
Against a centralized surveillance state that imposes a motionless and false order and an illusory happiness in the name of a utilitarian calculus of 'justice,' Basile concludes, Zamyatin envisages a different utopia: 'In fact, only within the ‘here and now’ of beauty may the equation of happiness be considered fully verified.' Human beings will never stop seeking beauty, Zamyatin insists, because they are human. They will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder their desires according to the logic of machines."
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Romano Guardini, "The Machine and Humanity" (1959):
"Every technical action involves the possessing, using, and shaping of nature ... In the course of history, the culture factor in existence has become stronger, while the natural factor has become weaker ....
"The process seems unavoidable, Still, this question arises: What will be the effect of this constant weakening of the natural factor that still remains in human existence? Each new machine means that something we previously mastered with the help of our organic intellectual equipment is now left to a technical construct. We thus make an object of something that used to be subjective, part of life's initiative. This means release—we are freed ....
The fact that the machine brings a measure of freedom hitherto unknown is in the first instance a gain. The value of freedom, however, is not fixed solely by the question 'Freedom from what?' but decisively by the further question 'Freedom for what?'"
Recently Published
Some recent posts on the blog:
Privacy Isn't Dying, We're Killing It (a title that was, on second thought, a bit too click-baitish)
The Discourse Is Poisoned, But You Already Knew That
Technology Is a Branch of Moral Philosophy
The Virgin and the Data Center
Resolution to write more frequently: still intact.
Steady drip of new readers: welcome.
Cheers,
Michael