I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention‘ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping us escape from the panicked banalities of the digital distraction debate, by reconstructing the existential stakes which tend to get lost amidst the moral panic. I couldn’t agree more with this, nor could I express it with the clarity he does:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

But increasingly I’d insist on recognising their psychic foundations. Recognising the moral force of attention is preciously, particularly when it helps us recognise the existential stakes of our daily habits and the choices we make (or fail to make) in relation to them. But I find the implicit ontology of the person underpinning these accounts increasingly implausible, at least in the sense of lacking an adequate account of the psychic foundations of moral attention. There’s so much to explore here but, as one suggest, we could connect the argument Sacasas makes to the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald, which I summarise here from an earlier blog post:

Loewald was concerned with the possibility of “deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire” (quoted on pg 181). This leads to “an adult reality that has been wholly separated from infantile fantasy” existing in “a desiccated, meaningless, passionless world” (pg 194). This conceives of language as the “life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality” (pg 181). Following Heidegger Loewald sees language in terms of what Taylor calls world-disclosure, with the capacity to “generate and link domains of experience” (pg 185). The quality of this link is the “difference between a present that is haunted by the past and a present that is enriched by the past” (pg 194).

For Loewald we need “links to the affective density of the unconscious, without which ‘human life becomes sterile and an empty shell’” (pg 195). He conceives of transference as a resource for change in this respect, rather than an obstacle to analysis; in transference there is a “revitalization, a relinking of the past and the present, fantasy and reality, primary process and secondary process” (pg 195). To talk of ghosts becoming ancestors isn’t just a matter of making peace with the past, it’s working with the power of the past to enrich the present, as Mitchell quotes Loewald on pg 194:

In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.

Such a ghost is, as Mitchell describes it, “a piece of the past filled with passionate intensity, that was split off, through repression, from her present experience” (pg 197). Repression for Loewald is a failure of this link, a rigidity in differentiation which collapses the space in which resonance is possible.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/01/27/making-ghosts-into-ancestors/

This opens up the possibility of a subtle relationality in which the integration of our past experience (or lackthereof) shapes how we relate to present external experience. The richness and the vibrancy, the “sheer entertainment value” of the world’s “views, sounds, and smells” to use Arendt’s phrase, only shows up for us through the integration of the past experience into the present reality. I think this fits well with the argument Sacasas is making and opens up an additional horizon through which we can understand our propensity to get caught in deadening loops:

Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

The risk is that without this we lapse into a moral athleticism, in which only those who have cultivated themselves (with the time, energy, cultural resources and confidence to do so) can really experience the incipient beauty which can be found in each moment. There might be some truth to this as an empirical generalisation which we need to grapple with, but introducing the psychic dimension complicates the analysis so it’s no longer a matter of cultivation vs habituation. Overcoming that dichotomy opens up a very interesting sociotechnical & existential terrain to explore.

Claude Opus has questions 🧐

• How might we cultivate practices and design environments (both technological and physical) that support the kind of patient, invitational attention Sacasas describes? What individual and collective habits could help keep us vitally linked to the “affective density of the unconscious”?
• In an age of pervasive digital mediation, how do we balance the benefits of new connective technologies with the need to preserve space for unstructured, open-ended engagement with the world and with our own interiority?
• What role might practices like psychoanalysis, meditation, artistic creation, and immersion in nature play in re-enchanting our experience and rekindling the “passionate intensity” of the past in the present moment?
• How can we democratize access to the time, space, and resources needed for cultivating enchantment, so that it doesn’t become an elite pursuit? What social and political changes might be necessary to make this possible?
• What new language and conceptual frameworks do we need to articulate the existential stakes of attention in a hypermediated age? How can we translate these often abstract-sounding ideas into compelling visions and practical agendas for change?

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/29/the-moral-force-of-attention-and-their-psychic-foundations/

#arendt #attention #distraction #HansLoewald #integration #LMSacasas #psychoanalysis #relationality #trauma

This pronouncement by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (maxim 34) is an obvious overstatement but it makes the point effectively. There can be something particularly valuable about the ideas which occur to us when we are walking. In his claim that “Assiduity is the sin against the holy spirit” Nietzsche contrasts sitting ideas to walking ideas. The meaning of assiduity is “constant or close attention to what one is doing” but the etymology tells an interesting story about how this meaning emerged.

It developed this meaning through the 15th century from the Latin assiduitatem meaning “continual presence”. Assiduity is the quality of the attention which arises from our continual attention. But this originally derived from assiduitatem: ad- (“to, towards, at”) +‎ sedeō (“sit; settle down”). This is the attention facilitated by being sat in relation to something. To point ourselves at something, to remain with it, to immerse ourselves in it. To sit and focus. To be at our desks. To be assiduous has positive connotations which are, in many sense, justified. If we are unable to sit with a task, we are unable to complete things. If we are unable to sit with a task, we are unable to develop our skills. If we are unable to sit with a task, we are unable to push ourselves. These practical requirements are why assiduity has been seen as a virtue.

In calling it a ‘sin’ Nietzsche is drawing attention to the limitations of assiduity. The single-mindedness involved in it is limited and limiting. It closes down possibilities rather than opening them up. Nietzsche cites Flaubert’s maxim that ‘On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assi’: One can think and write only when sitting down. This is what he’s pushing back against with such force, in a book with the subtitle how to philosophize with a hammer. There is so much lost if we imagine thinking can only take place when sitting down. If thinking is defined in terms of its assiduity, thinking is diminished for Nietzsche, who was a compulsive walker. As Audrey Watters reflected in a recent essay (HT L.M. Sacasas):

Walking is how I get to know a place, it’s how I know a place. Yes, I could look at a map. Yes, I could ride the bus (take a cab, drive a car, whatever) with a similar purpose in mind. I could look out the vehicle’s window and see where I’m headed — if you are driving, your eyes had better be on the fucking road though. But there’s something about the pace with which I move while walking that allows me to see more, to process more. When I run or ride, I’m moving too quickly (even if I’m not moving all that quickly); my surroundings are a blur – not from speed so much as from cognition.

Walking lets you read the world — and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-world-reveals-itself-to-those-who-walk/

There are modes of engagement with the world which cannot be accessed assiduously. They involve opening out to receive what Hannah Arendt once described as the “almost infinite diversity” of the appearances we find in the world, “the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells” (pg 20). They involve coaxing the sight and sound into your life, as C Wright Mills once advised an unhappy friend:

The trouble with you and what used to be the trouble with me is that you don’t use your goddamned senses; too much society crap and too much mentality and not enough tactile and color and sound stuff going on. So now if you’re like I was a year ago, you’ve got to coax the sight and sound back, carefully tease it to life aain and it will fill you up.

“Society crap” and “too much mentality” is where a restrictively assiduous approach to thinking gets you. In contrast the value of walking ideas comes from the process through which you derive them, the openness and non-linearity which comes through ambulation. L.M. Sacasas notes the Latin phrase: “solvitur ambulando which means “it is solved by walking”. Psychologists increasingly talk about this in terms of mind-wandering: letting your mind drift in ways not defined by a task. But there’s a risk that a recognition that problems are solved through walking lends itself to an impulse to solve problems by walking. If you instrumentalise walking as a creativity device, you are not thinking through walking in the sense advocated by Nietzsche. It has to by definition be more open than that.

Or at least that’s what I found myself thinking about when walking home late last night. My headphones had run out of battery and I realised how I’d become prone to continually having a soundtrack when walking through the city at night*. In the morning when I walk to work, usually about 35 minutes across the city, I greedily consume the sights and sounds of Manchester on a weekday morning. I hate commuting but I love this walk, even as I battle the routinisation which inevitably comes from 2.5 years of it. If I’m late for work and I get the bus after the tram, I inevitably feel something is missing.

But in the evening I default to music and I was hit last night by the sense I’ve lost something in the process. It’s exactly when I’m tired that the assiduity of immersing myself in music is what I want most but need least. Those are the points when I want to let my mind unfurl after a complex day, full of ambiguous events which need to condense into meaning. Those are the points at which walking ideas are most likely to emerge.

If you want to enjoy writing then walk. If you want to enjoy walking then be there while you’re doing it.

Not with my hand alone I write:
My foot wants to participate.
Firm and free and bold, my feet
Run across the field – and sheet.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude in Rhymes: 52

*I’m fully aware of the privilege involved in doing this, even though for a long time I wasn’t.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/09/how-to-enjoy-writing-13-only-ideas-won-by-walking-have-any-value/

#audreyWatters #Flaubert #LMSacasas #manchester #Nietzsche #Thinking #urbanism #walking

"I began this post with the (now laughable) intent of offering a few brief comments on Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto published in October of last year...

I would frame the manifesto as a revivalist sermon, or more specifically perhaps, a jeremiad, calling for repentance and a return to the religion of technology. Such a sermon is a response to the process of secularization, which has accelerated in the last decade."

#LMSacasas, 2024

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/secularization-comes-for-the-religion

#religion #technology

"But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being met, particularly given the way that Ring allows Amazon to also profit from partnerships with police departments."

#LMSacasas, 2020

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/what-do-human-beings-need-rethinking

#Amazon #Ring

I always enjoy reading L.M. Sacasas’ thoughts on the intersection of technology, society, and ethics. This article is no different. In addition to the quotation from G.K. Chesterton which provides the title for this post, Sacasas also quotes Wendell Berry as saying, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/04/10/the-madman-is-the-man-who-has-lost-everything-except-his-reason/

"On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.

We no longer encounter the past principally as a coherent narrative informing our present and future action into the world. The past, is now encoded in ponderous databases, and it can be readily and endlessly re-interpreted, reshuffled, recombined, and rearranged. This activity is what now consumes our time and energy."

#LMSacasas, 2022

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/we-are-not-living-in-a-simulation