[From book review]
Philosophers from the ancient Greeks onward have worried that technological innovation would suborn the pursuit of truth and wisdom through ease, superficiality, and distraction. In Plato’s Phaedrus, no less a figure than Socrates lamented the invention of writing for its deleterious effects on memory, argument, and knowledge. Socrates imagined the Thamus, king of the Egyptian gods, chastising Teuth, inventor of the alphabet: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories … [Y]ou give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Late in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant identified excessive distraction as the enemy of an Enlightened mind.
[. . .]
Crawford’s greatest service is to spur our thought, to enjoin his readers to pay attention to the struggle of paying attention.
[. . .]
Attention, this is to say, isn’t ours to direct freely. It is, in his words, erotic; it pulls us out of our heads into the world around us. Giving in to attention’s pull can be an exhilarating experience.
[. . .]
Thinking about the cook’s feeling of success after a difficult service or the racer’s excitement at entering “the zone” during a race gives credence to Crawford’s description of attention’s erotic quality. It’s also important to remember, he urges, that this erotic quality is born out of constraint.
[. . .]
analyzes video gambling as sites of the thanatotic self-negation created by a world devoid of true agency.
[. . .]
Take, for instance, Crawford’s analysis of video slots and virtual poker. He argues that gambling’s malevolence lies not in the misplaced hope for the once-in-a-lifetime jackpot it inspires, but in the illusory sensation of skillful development each wager fosters. Playing a machine that comes closer and closer to a winning combination with each pull, the gambler feels that he’s gaining the upper hand on the one-armed bandit. But the odds are rigged in more ways than one: the exercise of the will is, at best, a “pseudo-action;” a simulation of autonomy, experience, and mastery in a carefully managed environment. Gambling alternately fosters and frustrates autonomous agency, sending the modern ego into fits of directionless anger and self-loathing that spiral into destruction. It is the antithesis of real skill and the gambler is the inverted craftsman: endlessly feeds quarter after quarter into the slot, he is searching for some dark nirvana, for the total sublimation of the active, thinking self in the emptiness of automatic routines.
[. . .]
When it comes to justifying its existence, Crawford rightly argues, the gambling industry has no problem turning to the very same discourse of individualism that its operations so clearly unmask as hollow. Such arguments bear some resemblance to the Western-Marxist tradition of critical theory. Theodor Adorno saw fascism reflected in slippers and capitalism embodied in automatic doors; Crawford sees liberal individualism instantiated in slot machines. Both unite cultural and philosophical critique in analyses of the strange collusion between industry and entertainment in the creation of a fragile modern subjectivity.
[. . .]
Crawford would have done well to direct his efforts to the real confrontations that bear directly on his anthropology of attention and theory of tradition. Consider, for instance, the varied arguments for a physically embedded, socially embodied human condition put forward by, inter alia, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, and, perhaps most radically, Derek Parfit. These philosophers deserve more than the cursory treatment they receive or total neglect they suffer in The World Beyond Your Head. Crawford, it seems, subscribes to a narrowly circumscribed philosophical canon. Certainly the most striking omission from this canon is Martin Heidegger. Crawford’s belief that we encounter our world as laden with pre-given meanings and significances, his claim that we act in the world through the pragmatic use of skill in the pursuit of projects, and, above all, his argument that true individuality consists in both the rejection of the dominant opinion of an anonymous public and the authentic embrace of tradition — in short, the entire scope of the book’s argument — relies heavily on the recondite philosophical anthropology the young Heidegger developed in Being and Time. Moreover, Crawford’s dim evaluation of the dominant philosophy of the subject — as a sovereign self at once isolated from the world yet imperiously demanding authority over it —resonates deeply with the later Heidegger’s trenchant critique of Western metaphysical thought and its concomitant humanistic worldview. Modern technology, Heidegger argued, encapsulated this view of man as an all-powerful subjectum, a tyrant who orders, manipulates, and controls the things of the world. Heidegger urged a clearer thinking that would abandon this position in favor of a humble view of man — of human being — as subordinate to the larger sway of Being.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/are-you-out-of-your-mind
Are You Out of Your Mind?
By Charles Clavey
Are You Out of Your Mind?
By Charles Clavey
October 5, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment