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Aden Date's avatar

One square I can't quite circle is whether living in, or under Modernity itself can be a kind of "depth and mystery" introducing "viable desire." I can, and do, sustain myself largely by taking reprieve from modernity in the nooks and crannies untouched by its totalising logic: Nature, art, the company of others, and so on.

However, sooner or later I must return to my computer and get to work, pay my mortgage with my labour, and deepen my 'expertise' within a byzantine bureaucracy. I find myself then wondering if my practices are just more sophisticated forms of "human techniques." Is Vipassana-style insight meditation substantively different from Westernised McMindfulness, if the end-result is still that I wind up back in my computer chair picking through my inbox? Is Jenny Odell spending time in the rose garden any different to spending hours tending to a virtual farm in Stardew Valley, if the result is always that I end up back in my shoebox apartment?

These are genuine, rather than rhetorical questions. My impulse is that our rest and relaxation ought be in service of some viable, shared alternatives to Modernity, yet such a perspective risks turning rest and renewal into a project (which would be very Modernist of us). We also risk a kind of hydraulic experience of life, in which we are constantly oscillating between the enervating nature of modernity and the innervating practices we develop (or rediscover) to sustain ourselves through modernity. Again, this is Ellul's observation of "human techniques." Plenty of rest and renewal practices have been developed as alternatives to Modernity, only to ultimately become incorporated within it. Buddhist Meditation might be the exemplar here, but there are many others.

I don't have any answers. This is a predicament, rather than a problem. However, I find myself thinking of a story Tyson Yunkaporta tells in Sand Talk. He talks about sitting in an airport with Old Man Juma, an Aboriginal elder. Tyson finds himself angry at and within the airport, which he experiences as a symbol of Modernist hell - a feeling I suspect will be familiar to a lot of readers. Juma, by contrast, can see the 'Dreaming' (which we might shorthand as the suprarational Australian Aboriginal 'depth and mystery' par-excellence) in the flows of the airport itself. For Juma, it is all still 'pattern,' and even the destructive excesses of Modernity are part of this bigger 'Dreaming.' The perception is different, and so what Yunkaporta finds draining, Juma finds renewing.

Perhaps there's something in this about paying careful attention to Modernity itself, about learning what it has to teach us. This is, I think, something I'm personally not ready to do, but it may be something worth aspiring towards.

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Matt's avatar

I really appreciated your response to the problem of exhaustion brought on by contemporary culture. Loving attention to the particularities of reality provides a renewing energy and potential for satiation, unlike the dizzying skimming of our culture optimized for the endless growth of compounding interest.

The solution (directing a loving gaze toward reality) seems both simple and difficult. Difficult especially because the worst parts of modern culture work so directly and intentionally against reality. Their technique is optimized toward fantasy.

I'm also left thinking about how we attend toward reality together. Murdoch writes from the perspective of individual struggle. But I wonder how to expand that struggle to a shared effort. Odell gives some hints - curation - similar to Matthew Crawford's advice. Just like we have gym buddies, do we need attention buddies?

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