View allAll Photos Tagged Untethering
A face, lost and full of sorrow
self-portrait
I was doing fine. I was pulling through a season of healing and had just started going out again, the slow thaw of rekindling relationships with friends and acquaintances, of being present in simple joys like just saying hello to people, having an evening out, feeling the sun on my face. And then...
The Q word--that stupid, infernal Q word: Quarantine. I can be alone...for small intervals of time, but, ultimately, I am a social creature seeking connection or even just to charm you and make you laugh. I've watched more TV than I have in my entire life, movies, painted walls, grouted floors, read books, decided to try new things, brush up on skills, improve myself, blah, blah, blah. I have started to unravel--a frayed ribbon being pulled away from the spool with increasing momentum. An unmistakable untethering. I feel hollowed out all over again and lost in a place of neverwhere.
All rights reserved: Spoken in Red/ Jennifer Rhoades Photography
My work is protected by copyright and may not be altered, posted, published, or used without my written consent and authorization.
A Port of Buenos Aires worker is resting on the dock prior to the untethering of ms Zaandam.
Cruise ships sail up the Rio de la Plata into the heart of the city.
Terminal de Pasajeros Benito Quinquela Martin is located about a ½ mile from the city centre.
La Ligue Hydrakiste - or 'Hydracist League'- is a splinter group born from the infamous popular organization Society of Heracles. Its name refers to the Hydra, a mythical creature whose many different individual free-thinking heads are part of a greater whole.
Diverging from the Society over ideological differences, the League is even more radical in its ideas on reform, equality and rebellion. They ardently reject all forms of authority or state and are proponents of maximum individual freedom. They believe in a classless society based on the free grouping of independent individuals, unshackled by the restraints of Gods or Kings.
While there is no nominal leader of the League and it largely operates in cells, Nestor Antonin can be seen as one of the chief founders and ideological masterminds. A student of Emilien Dorée, Antonin - or Nestor X, as he sometimes labels himself, thanks to his remarkable scar and to flaunt his untethering of personal past or present in order to live for the Cause - politically radicalized while fighting in the mercenary group the Red Brigade and came to the conclusion that the Heraclists are no different than any other "ruler", merely sugarcoating their power with popular slogans.
The only way forward for the working class is absolute freedom and rejection of state. An idea which has led the equalists of the Society to mockingly refer to the League of Hydracists as 'Land Rats', refering the the pirate Sea Rats of the New World.
Whereas the Society of Heracles originated in philosophical debate clubs and then later mostly used its force in a defensive way to protect the poor or to protect its rallies, the combative roots of the League are reflected in their approach to violence which they deem as 'absolutely necessary' in order to further the Cause. This translates into arson, robbery and attacks upon the properties of class enemies and the government.
Note: Yay, I've got access to my collection again! I'm not sure if I'll be able to post regularly again, but at least I've got the possibilities again. Hopefully I can try my hands at another MOC sometime, but with summer hitting Belgium I'll probably try to enjoy the sun more, which means less (LEGO) time inside :D .
Two more Port of Buenos Aires workers at cruise ship Terminal de Pasajeros Benito Quinquela Martinare are resting on the dock prior to the untethering of ms Zaandam.
Is this part of their union contract or did they party like a typical BA Porteño until 7 AM and then came to work?
BA locals are referred to as porteños (“people of the port”) because so many of the city’s inhabitants historically arrived by boat from Europe.
In ordinary parlance I know this pretty little plant as Vernonia, named after an early plant collector in Maryland, USA, William Vernon (c.ca.1666/7-c.1711/15). That's the name it was given by that indefatigable German botanist Christian Friedrich Lessing (1809-1862), replacing great Linnaeus's tag Conyza cinerea. Since then it's had many names: Blumea esquirolii, Seneciodes cinereum, Cacalia cinerea, Calea cordata, Serratula cinerea and others. Until H. Robinson in 1990 proposed the Very Scientific Cyanthillium cinereum. This is now the accepteed name, but no-one will mind if we continue to call it Vernonia among ourselves!
Vernonia has a pretty little lilac-purple flower that's hard to photograph just right because of problems with depth of focus. As I was pondering it in a field with its brothers and sisters, two young men Mugni and Wiwin, slipped down from the hill and in the shade of a Pandan sat watching me. Soon they scurried around and brought me a bouquet of our Vernonia. Hardly a word could be spoken but they waxed enthusiastic together when I showed them how to look through my magnifying glass. So much intricacy they'd apparently not expected. Then, untethering one of those Lombok brown cows, they were gone leaving me to ponder photography angles in the Warm Sun.
Photos from the yearly "Spirit" event in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
Each year Kirklees Council put on an amazing free street-performance event in Dewsbury town centre, bringing in some of Europe's top street performance troupes to entertain the townfolk.
This year was saw french Compagnie de Quidams performed "Herberts Dream", where en-robed white characters on stilts silently walk amongst the crowd, before inflating into 4 metre high volumous characters that light up, after which they dance and wonder through the crowd, rubbing the faces of the public with their giant hands!
For the finale, they gather and dance around some stationary orbs in the middle of the street, before untethering them to allow them to slowly float into the sky, finally creating moons.
The tips of the trees seem to be untethering the waxing Wolf Moon. In Cary, NC. PROJECT365 - 01/14/2014
L.M. Sacasas
Technology, Culture, and Ethics
THE FRAILEST THING
The Interrupted Self
APRIL 21, 2018 ~ MICHAEL SACASAS
In Letters From Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, written in the 1920’s, Romano Guardini, related the following experience: “I recall going down a staircase, and suddenly, when my foot was leaving one step and preparing to set itself down on another, I became aware of what I was doing. I then noted what self-evident certainty is displayed in the play of muscles. I felt that a question was thus raised concerning motion.”
“This was a triviality,” Guardini acknowledges, “and yet it tells us what the issue is here.” He goes on to explain the “issue” as follows:
Life needs the protection of nonawareness. We are told this already by the universal psychological law that we cannot perform an intellectual act and at the same time be aware of it. We can only look back on it when it is completed. If we try to achieve awareness of it when we are doing it, we can do so only be always interrupting it and thus hovering between the action and knowledge of it. Obviously the action will suffer greatly as a result. It seems to me that this typifies the life of the mind and spirit as a whole. Our action is constantly interrupted by reflection on it. Thus all our life bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted, broken. It does not have the great line that is sure of itself, the confident movement deriving from the self.
It seems to me that the tendency Guardini identifies here has only intensified during the nearly 100 years since he wrote down his observations.
As an aside, I find works like Guardini’s useful for at least two reasons. The first, perhaps more obvious, reason is that they offer genuine insights that remain applicable in a more or less straightforward way. The second, perhaps less obvious, reason is that they offer a small window into the personal and cultural experience of technological change. When we think about the difference technologies make in our life and for society more broadly, we often have only our experience by which to judge. But, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, or we can’t remember what we have never known. And this is especially the case when we consider what me might call the existential or even affective aspects of technological change.
Returning to Guardini, has he notes in the letter on “Consciousness” from which that paragraph was taken, literature was only one sphere of culture where this heightened consciousness was making itself evident.
I can’t know what literary works Guardini had in mind, but there is one scene in Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that immediately sprung to mind. Early on in the story, which begins with Ilyich’s death, a co-worker, Peter Ivanovich, has come to Ilyich’s home to pay his respects. Upon entering the room where Ilyich’s body lay, Peter Ivanovich is uncertain as to how to proceed:
Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether one should make obeisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made a slight movement resembling a bow.
I’ve come to read this scene as a microcosm of an extended, possibly recurring, cultural moment in the history of modernity, one that illustrates the emergence of self-consciousness.
Here is Peter Ivanovich, entering into a socially and psychologically fraught encounter with the presence of death. It is the sort of moment for which a robust cultural tradition might prepare us by supplying scripts that would relieve us of the burden of knowing just what to do while also conveying to us a meaning that renders the event intelligible. But Peter Ivanovich faces this encounter at a moment when the old traditions are only half-recalled and no new forms have arisen to take there place. He lives, that is, in a moment when, as Gramsci evocatively put it, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In such a moment, he is thrown back upon himself: he must make choices, he must improvise, he must become aware of himself as one who must do such things.
His action, as Guardini puts it, “bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted.”
“Peter Ivanovich,” we go on to read, “continued to make the sign of the cross slightly inclining his head in an intermediate direction between the coffin, the Reader, and the icons on the table in a corner of the room. Afterwards, when it seemed to him that this movement of his arm in crossing himself had gone on too long, he stopped and began to look at the corpse.”
He is not inhabiting a ritual act, he is performing it and badly, as all such performances must be. “He felt a certain discomfort,” the narrator tells us, “and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door — too hurriedly and too regardless of propriety, as he himself was aware.”
I’m not suggesting that Tolstoy intended this scene as a commentary on the heightened consciousness generated by liquid modernity, only that I have found in Peter Ivanovich’s awkwardness a memorable dramatic illustration of such.
Technology had a role to play in the generation of this state of affairs, particularly technologies of self-expression or technologies that represent the self to itself. It was one of Walter Ong’s key contentions, for example, that “writing heightened consciousness.” This was, in his view, a generally good thing. Of course, writing had been around long before Tolstoy was active in the late 19th century. He lived during an age when new technologies worked more indirectly to heighten self-consciousness by eroding the social structures that anchored the experience of the self.
In the early 20th century, Guardini pointed to, among other things, the rise of statistics and the bureaucracies that they empowered and to newspapers as the sources of a hypertrophied consciousness. We might substitute so-called Big Data and social media for statistics and newspapers. Rather, with regards to consciousness, we should understand the interlocking regimes of the quantified self* and social media as just a further development along the same trajectory. Fitbits and Facebook amplify our consciousness by what they claim to measure and by how they position the self vis-a-vis the self.
It seems to me that this heightened sense of self-consciousness is both a blessing and a curse and that it is the condition out of which much of our digital culture emerges. For those who experience it as a curse it can be, for example, a paralyzing and disintegrating reality. It may, under such circumstances further yield resentment, bitterness, and self-loathing (consider Raskolnikov or the Underground Man). Those who are thus afflicted may seek for renewed integrity through dramatic and/or violent acts, acts that they believe will galvanize their identity. Others may cope by adopting the role of happy nihilist or liberal ironist. Still others may double-down and launch out on the self-defeating quest for authenticity.
“Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark,” Guardini wrote as he closed his letter on consciousness. “They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness becoming more and more deeply the root of our life.”
All of this leads him to ask in conclusion, “Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?”
_________________________________________________
* For example: “Now the telescope is turned inward, on the human body in the urban environment. This terrestrial cosmos of data will merge investigations that have been siloed: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology, biochemistry, nutrition, epidemiology, economics, data science, urban science.”
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7 thoughts on “The Interrupted Self”
davidjsimpson1952
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 12:20 PM
I actually disagree quite strongly with this analysis. Peter Ivanovich’s problem, which I think Tolstoy is describing quite clearly, is that he is a shallow social conformist (as indeed is Ivan Ilyich until his death), a ‘modern man’, who has simply forgotten, or not learned how to behave in the traditional way, but does not have the autonomy or courage to decide for himself how to behave, in any situation. So he is all at sea. Ivan Illyich on the other hand is perfectly happy to conform, and knows how to do so, and lives an utterly false, shallow, meaningless, but ‘successful’ life, albeit unhappy at a deeper level, until his death agony and spiritual liberation / resurrection (unobserved by anyone, who simply see him dying in apparent agony).
Guardini is typical of a self-conscious individual (and perhaps of many modern people, especially intellectuals) – yes, you cannot think your way down stairs, you have to physically do it, and your intellect is simply an impediment – but an accomplished sportsman is absolutely aware and conscious of what he/she is doing, they are just not doing it with their mind – they have trained and practiced their whole being – mind, body and spirit (for lack of a better term) to do a particular thing well – they are and must be undistracted, particularly by their own mind not being completely engaged in the action itself, in the present moment and nowhere else. Especially not for example thinking about what they will do to win the match, or regretting or dwelling on a previous mistake. ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ is a shorthand for being 100% engaged with the current action (not looking where you hope to hit it, or watching someone in the crowd, or admiring the skill with which your playing the shot).
There is a certain type of intellectual activity, where it is possible to both think, and be aware of what and how you are thinking – the opposite of daydreaming or fantasy. But most modern people, apart from the really happy, effective ones, are living in an almost constant state of distraction, of a lack of proper attention to what they are actually trying to do. And that is undoubtedly in part one of the more pernicious effects of modern information technology. It is designed to distract.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:00 PM
I’m not sure that I disagree with your disagreement. On the one hand, I’m not wedded to my interpretation as anything like a definitive take on what Tolstoy intended. It is more the case that Ivanovich’s interrupted, self-conscious action struck me as an image of the condition I’m trying to get at. Your reading of Ivanovich, and the general drift of the knowledge, is, as far as I’m concerned, basically correct. That said, what if we were to ask why exactly Ivanovich behaves the way he does, or, alternatively, what the sources of his shallowness may be? I wonder if the significance I’ve imported onto this scene is necessarily at odds with what your suggesting.
I also agree very much with your discussion of an embodied form of attentiveness that is characteristic of the accomplished sportsman or musician or dancer, etc. But that form of attention is, as you suggest, very different than the sort of attention to the self that I think Guardini is analyzing. Some years back, in fact, I wrote about embodied practices as an antidote to the hyper-self-consciousness that characterizes many in our time, myself not excepted: thefrailestthing.com/2012/10/05/low-tech-practices-and-id... See also: iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/04/79...
So, I’d say that, yes, distraction is clearly a problem, and modern information technology is part of the problem (addiction by design, etc.), but I’d also say that it heightens a certain kind of attention or, to put it another way, directs the attention toward the self in a way that aligns with the kind of disordered consciousness that Guardini writes about.
Reply
julian a
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 9:08 PM
I agree with @davidjsimpson1952. The cultivation of mindful awareness in Buddhism is precisely the sort of simultaneity of conscious awareness and action that it seems Guardini considered exceptional, if not impossible.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:03 PM
Thanks for the comment, Julian. See my reply above to David. The sort of awareness you describe is, I believe, of a different sort than the consciousness Guardini finds problematic, in part, I suspect, because it is not, strictly speaking, mental, or at least not merely mental.
Reply
Daniel David
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 1:19 AM
Excellent…this topic (the intensifying self-consciousness of modern humans) has preoccupied me for a few years now, and I think it’s under discussed. Your mention of irony reminded me; I frequently have the thought that the rise of the ironic attitude is tied to the need to remain ever more socially flexible. The ironic mode is an effective way to remain uncommitted to either seriousness or flippancy. It allows our remaining to remain loosely defined, like a legal contract, until the concrete details of the situation become clear enough to settle on a firmer stance.
I haven’t read a ton of sociology from the early-to-mid-twentieth century, so if you know of other sources on this I’d be interested. Some few thinkers I am aware of seemed to notice this growing self consciousness, though: I feel it lurking throughout Erving Goffman’s work, particularly when he mentions things like the “bureaucratization of the spirit,” which we all undergo “so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous performance at ever appointed time.” Surely this new self consciousness is partially a product of a new and more intense social consciousness, born of new pressures and the feedback of new forms of representation.
Georg Simmel seems to have been convinced it was tied to the rise of the modern city. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” he writes “The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” And prior to that, he asserts that, of the more famous responses to modernity (Nietzschean, socialist), “the same fundamental motive was at work,
namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social- technological mechanism.”
I’m also reminded me of a talk by Alasdair McIntyre called “A Culture of Choices and Compartmentalization,” but I haven’t read it recently enough to say more than that.
Part of the difficulty here is that even realizing the burdens of an over-abundance of self consciousness does little to cope with them; in fact, it’s much the opposite. But what I think is clear from Simmel and Goffman especially (and we’ve come some way since then, haven’t we?) is that this reserve and hyper-attentive presentation has become a fixture of social life – a necessity. Where humans once gathered resources, we now focus much more on collecting attitudes and cultural snippets as a kind of social currency. And, if that’s correct, it implies that communication is a lot more work than it used to be.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:23 PM
As it has been for you, so, too, has this been an area of interest for me for some time. I do tend to think it is a crucial aspect of the modern (post-, meta-, etc.) identity. Really, it is at the heart of all of our identity-talk, which is somehow both cause and symptom of the condition. I tend to see it as the product of the formative impact of increasingly sophisticated technologies of the self and the untethering of the self that is characteristic of modernity (the physic consequences of everything melting into air). I think it may have been you who noted in a comment (to which I never replied, my apologies if so) a certain resemblance to communitarian thought in some of what I’ve written. That would be a fair assessment. My thinking on this bears a similar stamp. Along those lines, I’ll have to look up the piece by MacIntyre, I don’t think I’ve come across it before. Several years ago, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated covered much of this ground in a useful way.
L.M. Sacasas
Technology, Culture, and Ethics
HOME
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THE FRAILEST THING
The Interrupted Self
APRIL 21, 2018 ~ MICHAEL SACASAS
In Letters From Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, written in the 1920’s, Romano Guardini, related the following experience: “I recall going down a staircase, and suddenly, when my foot was leaving one step and preparing to set itself down on another, I became aware of what I was doing. I then noted what self-evident certainty is displayed in the play of muscles. I felt that a question was thus raised concerning motion.”
“This was a triviality,” Guardini acknowledges, “and yet it tells us what the issue is here.” He goes on to explain the “issue” as follows:
Life needs the protection of nonawareness. We are told this already by the universal psychological law that we cannot perform an intellectual act and at the same time be aware of it. We can only look back on it when it is completed. If we try to achieve awareness of it when we are doing it, we can do so only be always interrupting it and thus hovering between the action and knowledge of it. Obviously the action will suffer greatly as a result. It seems to me that this typifies the life of the mind and spirit as a whole. Our action is constantly interrupted by reflection on it. Thus all our life bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted, broken. It does not have the great line that is sure of itself, the confident movement deriving from the self.
It seems to me that the tendency Guardini identifies here has only intensified during the nearly 100 years since he wrote down his observations.
As an aside, I find works like Guardini’s useful for at least two reasons. The first, perhaps more obvious, reason is that they offer genuine insights that remain applicable in a more or less straightforward way. The second, perhaps less obvious, reason is that they offer a small window into the personal and cultural experience of technological change. When we think about the difference technologies make in our life and for society more broadly, we often have only our experience by which to judge. But, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, or we can’t remember what we have never known. And this is especially the case when we consider what me might call the existential or even affective aspects of technological change.
Returning to Guardini, has he notes in the letter on “Consciousness” from which that paragraph was taken, literature was only one sphere of culture where this heightened consciousness was making itself evident.
I can’t know what literary works Guardini had in mind, but there is one scene in Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that immediately sprung to mind. Early on in the story, which begins with Ilyich’s death, a co-worker, Peter Ivanovich, has come to Ilyich’s home to pay his respects. Upon entering the room where Ilyich’s body lay, Peter Ivanovich is uncertain as to how to proceed:
Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether one should make obeisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made a slight movement resembling a bow.
I’ve come to read this scene as a microcosm of an extended, possibly recurring, cultural moment in the history of modernity, one that illustrates the emergence of self-consciousness.
Here is Peter Ivanovich, entering into a socially and psychologically fraught encounter with the presence of death. It is the sort of moment for which a robust cultural tradition might prepare us by supplying scripts that would relieve us of the burden of knowing just what to do while also conveying to us a meaning that renders the event intelligible. But Peter Ivanovich faces this encounter at a moment when the old traditions are only half-recalled and no new forms have arisen to take there place. He lives, that is, in a moment when, as Gramsci evocatively put it, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In such a moment, he is thrown back upon himself: he must make choices, he must improvise, he must become aware of himself as one who must do such things.
His action, as Guardini puts it, “bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted.”
“Peter Ivanovich,” we go on to read, “continued to make the sign of the cross slightly inclining his head in an intermediate direction between the coffin, the Reader, and the icons on the table in a corner of the room. Afterwards, when it seemed to him that this movement of his arm in crossing himself had gone on too long, he stopped and began to look at the corpse.”
He is not inhabiting a ritual act, he is performing it and badly, as all such performances must be. “He felt a certain discomfort,” the narrator tells us, “and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door — too hurriedly and too regardless of propriety, as he himself was aware.”
I’m not suggesting that Tolstoy intended this scene as a commentary on the heightened consciousness generated by liquid modernity, only that I have found in Peter Ivanovich’s awkwardness a memorable dramatic illustration of such.
Technology had a role to play in the generation of this state of affairs, particularly technologies of self-expression or technologies that represent the self to itself. It was one of Walter Ong’s key contentions, for example, that “writing heightened consciousness.” This was, in his view, a generally good thing. Of course, writing had been around long before Tolstoy was active in the late 19th century. He lived during an age when new technologies worked more indirectly to heighten self-consciousness by eroding the social structures that anchored the experience of the self.
In the early 20th century, Guardini pointed to, among other things, the rise of statistics and the bureaucracies that they empowered and to newspapers as the sources of a hypertrophied consciousness. We might substitute so-called Big Data and social media for statistics and newspapers. Rather, with regards to consciousness, we should understand the interlocking regimes of the quantified self* and social media as just a further development along the same trajectory. Fitbits and Facebook amplify our consciousness by what they claim to measure and by how they position the self vis-a-vis the self.
It seems to me that this heightened sense of self-consciousness is both a blessing and a curse and that it is the condition out of which much of our digital culture emerges. For those who experience it as a curse it can be, for example, a paralyzing and disintegrating reality. It may, under such circumstances further yield resentment, bitterness, and self-loathing (consider Raskolnikov or the Underground Man). Those who are thus afflicted may seek for renewed integrity through dramatic and/or violent acts, acts that they believe will galvanize their identity. Others may cope by adopting the role of happy nihilist or liberal ironist. Still others may double-down and launch out on the self-defeating quest for authenticity.
“Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark,” Guardini wrote as he closed his letter on consciousness. “They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness becoming more and more deeply the root of our life.”
All of this leads him to ask in conclusion, “Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?”
_________________________________________________
* For example: “Now the telescope is turned inward, on the human body in the urban environment. This terrestrial cosmos of data will merge investigations that have been siloed: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology, biochemistry, nutrition, epidemiology, economics, data science, urban science.”
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The Ethics of Ethical Tools
In "Culture"
Louis C.K. Was Almost Right About Smartphones, Loneliness, Sadness, the Meaning of Life, and Everything
In "Culture"
Facebook as Rear Window: What Hitchcock and Gadamer Can Teach Us About Online Profiles
In "Culture"
POSTED IN MISCELLANEOUS
CONSCIOUSNESSROMANO GUARDINISOCIAL MEDIA
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Hot Off the Digital Presses: A New Collection
7 thoughts on “The Interrupted Self”
davidjsimpson1952
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 12:20 PM
I actually disagree quite strongly with this analysis. Peter Ivanovich’s problem, which I think Tolstoy is describing quite clearly, is that he is a shallow social conformist (as indeed is Ivan Ilyich until his death), a ‘modern man’, who has simply forgotten, or not learned how to behave in the traditional way, but does not have the autonomy or courage to decide for himself how to behave, in any situation. So he is all at sea. Ivan Illyich on the other hand is perfectly happy to conform, and knows how to do so, and lives an utterly false, shallow, meaningless, but ‘successful’ life, albeit unhappy at a deeper level, until his death agony and spiritual liberation / resurrection (unobserved by anyone, who simply see him dying in apparent agony).
Guardini is typical of a self-conscious individual (and perhaps of many modern people, especially intellectuals) – yes, you cannot think your way down stairs, you have to physically do it, and your intellect is simply an impediment – but an accomplished sportsman is absolutely aware and conscious of what he/she is doing, they are just not doing it with their mind – they have trained and practiced their whole being – mind, body and spirit (for lack of a better term) to do a particular thing well – they are and must be undistracted, particularly by their own mind not being completely engaged in the action itself, in the present moment and nowhere else. Especially not for example thinking about what they will do to win the match, or regretting or dwelling on a previous mistake. ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ is a shorthand for being 100% engaged with the current action (not looking where you hope to hit it, or watching someone in the crowd, or admiring the skill with which your playing the shot).
There is a certain type of intellectual activity, where it is possible to both think, and be aware of what and how you are thinking – the opposite of daydreaming or fantasy. But most modern people, apart from the really happy, effective ones, are living in an almost constant state of distraction, of a lack of proper attention to what they are actually trying to do. And that is undoubtedly in part one of the more pernicious effects of modern information technology. It is designed to distract.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:00 PM
I’m not sure that I disagree with your disagreement. On the one hand, I’m not wedded to my interpretation as anything like a definitive take on what Tolstoy intended. It is more the case that Ivanovich’s interrupted, self-conscious action struck me as an image of the condition I’m trying to get at. Your reading of Ivanovich, and the general drift of the knowledge, is, as far as I’m concerned, basically correct. That said, what if we were to ask why exactly Ivanovich behaves the way he does, or, alternatively, what the sources of his shallowness may be? I wonder if the significance I’ve imported onto this scene is necessarily at odds with what your suggesting.
I also agree very much with your discussion of an embodied form of attentiveness that is characteristic of the accomplished sportsman or musician or dancer, etc. But that form of attention is, as you suggest, very different than the sort of attention to the self that I think Guardini is analyzing. Some years back, in fact, I wrote about embodied practices as an antidote to the hyper-self-consciousness that characterizes many in our time, myself not excepted: thefrailestthing.com/2012/10/05/low-tech-practices-and-id... See also: iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/04/79...
So, I’d say that, yes, distraction is clearly a problem, and modern information technology is part of the problem (addiction by design, etc.), but I’d also say that it heightens a certain kind of attention or, to put it another way, directs the attention toward the self in a way that aligns with the kind of disordered consciousness that Guardini writes about.
Reply
julian a
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 9:08 PM
I agree with @davidjsimpson1952. The cultivation of mindful awareness in Buddhism is precisely the sort of simultaneity of conscious awareness and action that it seems Guardini considered exceptional, if not impossible.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:03 PM
Thanks for the comment, Julian. See my reply above to David. The sort of awareness you describe is, I believe, of a different sort than the consciousness Guardini finds problematic, in part, I suspect, because it is not, strictly speaking, mental, or at least not merely mental.
Reply
Daniel David
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 1:19 AM
Excellent…this topic (the intensifying self-consciousness of modern humans) has preoccupied me for a few years now, and I think it’s under discussed. Your mention of irony reminded me; I frequently have the thought that the rise of the ironic attitude is tied to the need to remain ever more socially flexible. The ironic mode is an effective way to remain uncommitted to either seriousness or flippancy. It allows our remaining to remain loosely defined, like a legal contract, until the concrete details of the situation become clear enough to settle on a firmer stance.
I haven’t read a ton of sociology from the early-to-mid-twentieth century, so if you know of other sources on this I’d be interested. Some few thinkers I am aware of seemed to notice this growing self consciousness, though: I feel it lurking throughout Erving Goffman’s work, particularly when he mentions things like the “bureaucratization of the spirit,” which we all undergo “so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous performance at ever appointed time.” Surely this new self consciousness is partially a product of a new and more intense social consciousness, born of new pressures and the feedback of new forms of representation.
Georg Simmel seems to have been convinced it was tied to the rise of the modern city. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” he writes “The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” And prior to that, he asserts that, of the more famous responses to modernity (Nietzschean, socialist), “the same fundamental motive was at work,
namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social- technological mechanism.”
I’m also reminded me of a talk by Alasdair McIntyre called “A Culture of Choices and Compartmentalization,” but I haven’t read it recently enough to say more than that.
Part of the difficulty here is that even realizing the burdens of an over-abundance of self consciousness does little to cope with them; in fact, it’s much the opposite. But what I think is clear from Simmel and Goffman especially (and we’ve come some way since then, haven’t we?) is that this reserve and hyper-attentive presentation has become a fixture of social life – a necessity. Where humans once gathered resources, we now focus much more on collecting attitudes and cultural snippets as a kind of social currency. And, if that’s correct, it implies that communication is a lot more work than it used to be.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:23 PM
As it has been for you, so, too, has this been an area of interest for me for some time. I do tend to think it is a crucial aspect of the modern (post-, meta-, etc.) identity. Really, it is at the heart of all of our identity-talk, which is somehow both cause and symptom of the condition. I tend to see it as the product of the formative impact of increasingly sophisticated technologies of the self and the untethering of the self that is characteristic of modernity (the physic consequences of everything melting into air). I think it may have been you who noted in a comment (to which I never replied, my apologies if so) a certain resemblance to communitarian thought in some of what I’ve written. That would be a fair assessment. My thinking on this bears a similar stamp. Along those lines, I’ll have to look up the piece by MacIntyre, I don’t think I’ve come across it before. Several years ago, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated covered much of this ground in a useful way.
Photos from the yearly "Spirit" event in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
Each year Kirklees Council put on an amazing free street-performance event in Dewsbury town centre, bringing in some of Europe's top street performance troupes to entertain the townfolk.
This year was saw french Compagnie de Quidams performed "Herberts Dream", where en-robed white characters on stilts silently walk amongst the crowd, before inflating into 4 metre high volumous characters that light up, after which they dance and wonder through the crowd, rubbing the faces of the public with their giant hands!
For the finale, they gather and dance around some stationary orbs in the middle of the street, before untethering them to allow them to slowly float into the sky, finally creating moons.
Photos from the yearly "Spirit" event in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
Each year Kirklees Council put on an amazing free street-performance event in Dewsbury town centre, bringing in some of Europe's top street performance troupes to entertain the townfolk.
This year was saw french Compagnie de Quidams performed "Herberts Dream", where en-robed white characters on stilts silently walk amongst the crowd, before inflating into 4 metre high volumous characters that light up, after which they dance and wonder through the crowd, rubbing the faces of the public with their giant hands!
For the finale, they gather and dance around some stationary orbs in the middle of the street, before untethering them to allow them to slowly float into the sky, finally creating moons.
Photos from the yearly "Spirit" event in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
Each year Kirklees Council put on an amazing free street-performance event in Dewsbury town centre, bringing in some of Europe's top street performance troupes to entertain the townfolk.
This year was saw french Compagnie de Quidams performed "Herberts Dream", where en-robed white characters on stilts silently walk amongst the crowd, before inflating into 4 metre high volumous characters that light up, after which they dance and wonder through the crowd, rubbing the faces of the public with their giant hands!
For the finale, they gather and dance around some stationary orbs in the middle of the street, before untethering them to allow them to slowly float into the sky, finally creating moons.
After putting in long hours over the past two days in trying to cobble together a custom demo with too many moving parts for a customer, I arrived in Columbus, Ohio. Rather than stay in my hotel room, I opted to head out to a high-end mall area that's in the same vicinity of my hotel (in fact it's why I chose the hotel). The area has really grown since my last visit to the city.
I did a little shopping at the Apple Store where I picked up an iTrip Auto for my iPod Nano (both of which I love), and a replacement AirPort Express for one I lost some time ago. The iTrip Auto is great for charging my Nano while listening to tunes on those drives in cities where I'm unfamiliar with the stations, or in-between cities where there's little in the way of radio.
The AirPort Express is a fantastic tool for untethering from the uncomfortable hotel desk, but it also works great at customer locations where all you typically have is a single ethernet drop and at least two sales guys that want connectivity. The latest release of the product in which I specialize also has features that will demo better across multiple computers.
After my heavy shopping I had a light dinner at one of the restaurants at the mall, and then made my way back to the hotel.
Hannah-Rose Albinus
BFA Printmaking 2023
Rubbings from surface engravings on my great grandmother’s hairbrush, graphite, kozo paper, thread
A muleteer untethering his pack pony. Geech campsite. UNESCO World Heritage-listed Simien Mountains National Park, Ethiopia.
These guys get it. Have you seen any mobile work ads other than theirs? Has anyone communicated as well to you about where you're going to be? It feels like there's a ton of talk about mobile and the coming untethering of people from the desktop. But who's pointing the way? This isn't just text messaging folks. This is, "how am i productive wherever i want to be? How do i detach yet lose less than i gain?" laptops are a partial answer. People want more flexibility though. They want smaller, faster, simpler. Enter the phone.. A simpler, smaller networked device. And microsoft is leading the masses towards its vision. Leading manufacturers and service providers to the devices to build, the theories to test and the business models to survive. No one else is leading are they? You should invest in leaders, folks.
*moblogged from my non-smart phone. Wish i had one at the moment*
A new device harnesses the energy created by natural human walking to simultaneously light more than 40 commercial LEDs. The technology could revolutionize the way we charge small electronic devices, reducing dependence on non-renewable power sources and untethering users from fixed charging stations.
Credit: Zhong Lin Wang, Georgia Tech.