Electrify / Pacify
In the current media landscape where advertising is the primary source of revenue, these companies are incentivized to hook us with a stream of never ending content that is meant for consumption rather than contemplation and understanding.
A large diet of this type of content diminishes our freedom to choose to engage with anything that is difficult, that needs time and effort to understand, both in our personal lives and the wider world.
This installment was inspired by a conversation with a friend. I don't recollect how the conversation started but we ended up talking about these three examples.
First, Mark Fisher. He was a philosopher and cultural theorist. In Capitalist Realism he shares his observations from teaching in college in England in the late 2000s.
Ask students to read for more than couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers here is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'.
To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Second, Sherry Turkle. She is a sociologist who spent time with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in Paris in the early 1970s. She questioned him about some of his ideas that she was struggling with and he explained them to her in terms she clearly understood. This prompted her to ask him why he didn't explain his ideas in simpler terms in his work. She talks about this in her biography, The Empathy Diaries.
Once, I was bold or perhaps naive enough to ask him why he didn't explain things this simply in his writing, and he said that he wanted people to struggle with themselves as they unpacked his work. Reading psychoanalytic texts should be self-analytic. Ecrits should be read in little bits and puzzled over. It's like reading poetry. You don't try to speed-read. The idea is to have an experience that changes you.
And finally, Maria Popova. She is an essaying who writes at The Marginalian. During her conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast in 2015 said spoke about this instinct against difficulty. You can listen to the full episode here.
As a culture — you’re right. We seem somehow bored with thinking. We want to instantly know. There’s this epidemic of listicles. Why think about what constitutes a great work of art when you can skim “The 20 Most Expensive Paintings in History?”
I’m very guided by this desire to counter that in myself because I am, like everybody else, a product of my time and my culture. I remember, there’s a really beautiful commencement address that Adrienne Rich gave in 1977 in which she said that an education is not something that you get but something that you claim.
I think that’s very much true of knowledge itself. The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it.
The true material of knowledge is meaning. The meaningful is the opposite of the trivial, and the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia. The only way to glean knowledge is contemplation, and the road to that is time. There’s nothing else. It’s just time. There is no shortcut for the conquest of meaning. And ultimately, it is meaning that we seek to give to our lives.