The Convivial Society

Back in 2019, Colin Horgan published an essay discussing the role of convenience in shaping our techno-social order. “It’s convenience, and the way convenience is currently created by tech companies and accepted by most of us,” Horgan argued, “that is key to why we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.” While I’m inclined to qualify the “we all chose” element of this claim, particularly under pandemic conditions, the line nonetheless aptly captures what I suspect may be a familiar feeling, the feeling, that is, that we are somehow working at cross-purposes against ourselves. It’s the feeling that our efforts, however well-intentioned or feverish, are not only inadequate but somehow self-defeating. Or, alternatively, it’s the lack of satisfaction lampooned in the popular comedic bit from a few years ago about how “everything is amazing but nobody is happy.”

Of course, part of the problem is that everything is not, in fact, amazing. Being able to access the internet on a transatlantic flight, a key element of the routine, hardly amounts to a just society conducive to human flourishing. And, naturally, many among us might feel as if they are always spinning their wheels and getting nowhere because existing social structures are stacked against them, often deliberately so. Having acknowledged as much, though, it’s worth exploring another dimension of the problem, what we might call the paradox of control, which is the subject of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s recent book, The Uncontrollability of the World. It’s a short book, coming in at just over 100 pages, but it develops what is, in my view, an essential insight into one of the key assumptions structuring modern society.

“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern,’” Rosa writes, “is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the modern world controllable.” “Yet,” he quickly adds, “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.”

In other words, the more we seek to control the world, the more it will fail to speak to us, and, consequently the more alienated and dissatisfied we will feel. I might even put it this way: Rosa aims to show that how we set about to find meaning, purpose, or happiness more or less guarantees that we will never find any of them. The rest of the book is an elaboration of this basic dynamic.

Philosophically, Rosa develops his thesis from the observation that human experience is grounded in the perception that “something is present,” and that this awareness even “precedes the distinction between subject and world.” Gradually, we learn to distinguish between the self and the world, but these are “two poles … of the relationship that constitutes them.” The question for Rosa is “how is this something that is present constituted.” In other words, how does our mode of relating to the world shape our perception of it?

Rosa’s “guiding thesis” on this score is that “for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression,” an apt phrase that seemed, sadly, immediately useful as a way of characterizing what it feels like to be alive right now. The world becomes a series of points of aggression when, as Rosa puts it, “everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.” If our response to this is a measure of befuddlement—how else would we go about living if not by seeking to know, to master, to conquer, to make useful?—then it would seem that Rosa is probably right to say that this is a bedrock assumption shaping our thinking rather than being a product of it.

And, as he goes on to say, because we encounter the world in this way, then “the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.” We’ll return momentarily to the idea of resonance, a critical concept to which Rosa devoted an earlier book, but for now we should simply note that, in Rosa’s view, a failure to experience resonance “leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”

Rosa acknowledges that relating to the world primarily by seeking to control or manage it is hardly a new development. This “creeping reorganization of our relationship to the world,” Rosa writes, “stretches far back historically, culturally, economically, and institutionally.” Indeed, the modern project, dating back at least to the 17th century, particularly in its techno-scientific dimensions, can be interpreted as a grand effort to tame nature and bring it under human control. And, of course, as C. S. Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man, the drive to control nature was eventually turned on humanity itself.

But in Rosa’s view, this “creeping reorganization” has, in the 21st century, “become newly radicalized, not least as a result of the technological possibilities unleashed by digitization and by the demands for optimization and growth produced by financial market capitalism and unbridled competition.” For example, Rosa cites the various tools we deploy to measure and optimize our bodies: “We climb onto the scale: we should lose weight. We look into the mirror: we have to get rid of that pimple, those wrinkles. We take our blood pressure: it should be lower. We track our steps: we should walk more.” “We invariably encounter such things,” Rosa notes, “as a challenge to do better.” A bit further on, Rosa adds, “More and more, for the average late modern subject of the ‘developed’ western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list. The entries on this list constitute the points of aggression that we encounter as the world … all matters to be settled, attended to, mastered, completed, resolved, gotten out of the way.”

Why are we like this? Rosa provides a two-fold answer: “the normalization and naturalization of our aggressive relationship to the world is the result of a social formation, three centuries in the making, that is based on the structural principle of dynamic stabilization and on the cultural principle of relentlessly expanding humanity’s reach.”

By “the structural principle of dynamic stabilization,” Rosa means that “the basic institutional structure of modern society can be maintained only through constant escalation.” Modern society according to Rosa “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.”

I trust that, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, this claim about dynamic stabilization will have struck you as vaguely familiar. It is more or less what Ivan Illich was arguing nearly fifty years ago. In fact, I think it would be fair to describe Rosa’s book in its entirety as being Illich in another key. Just a few pages in, I turned to the index to see if Illich was cited because it was already evident that there would be a deep affinity between what Rosa was arguing and Illich’s work, something I continued to think right down to the last page. Alas, he was not, and I will resist the temptation to note the various points at which Illich anticipated Rosa’s argument. (Dear reader: there were many.)

Dynamic stabilization, then, means that should our institutions cease growing and expanding, society would become unstable. It’s worth noting that this is not simply the way societies work. Indeed, modern society, for better and for worse, may be unique in this regard. I think that it was in the aftermath of September 11th that this point was driven vividly home to me by the immediate and evidently panicked insistence that, above …

If you’ve joined the Convivial Society over the past two or three months, this installment requires a brief introduction. I’m always ready to acknowledge my extensive debts to an older generation of scholars and writers, who have shaped my thinking about technology. Among those scholars, Ivan Illich has played an especially important role. The newsletter’s title, for example, pays tribute to his Tools for Conviviality. So last summer, as we were growing accustomed to life in Zoom-world, I began a newsletter-based reading group around Illich’s work, and that group led to an ongoing series of conversations with some of Illich’s friends and colleagues, all of whom have been extraordinarily generous with their time and encouragement. This installment, then, is the latest in that series.

For over thirty years, David Cayley worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, producing numerous interview and documentary programs, including two programs devoted to Illich’s work. The first of these also became the book Ivan Illich in Conversation, which remains an excellent introduction to Illich’s thought. The second became Rivers North of the Future, which provides a sketch of Illich’s unique and stimulating interpretation of the modern world.

In our conversation you will hear about the backstory to those interviews and about the relationship between Cayley and Illich, which took shape around them. And, of course, you’ll hear about a lot more, too.

You can also find the audio of the Illich interviews on Cayley’s website, which includes a remarkable archive of his programs over the years. (Notable examples include his interviews with George Grant, Charles Taylor, and Richard Sennet.)

Finally, Cayley is the author of a forthcoming intellectual biography of Illich, which I feel pretty confident saying will be the best guide to Illich’s life and thought for years to come. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey will be published this month by Penn State University Press, and you can order your copy here [30% discount code: NR 21].

My conversation with Cayley follows earlier conversations with Carl Mitcham, Gustavo Esteva, and Gov. Jerry Brown.

I remain grateful to each of them, as I am to David Cayley, for their hospitality.

I trust you’ll enjoy the conversation.

Cheers,

Michael

Welcome to an unusually brief installment of the Convivial Society. An analogy came to mind, and you can tell me what you think. I vowed to keep it short, under 1,000 words. So this remains suggestive, and I’ll be eager to see if it generates any interesting insights or otherwise proves to be a helpful framing.

In 1979, the late sociologist Peter Berger published a book titled, The Heretical Imperative. As the subtitle explained, it was a book about “the contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation.” According to Berger, any form of religious affirmation in modern societies necessarily arises out of a context of pervasive religious pluralism. In such a context, choosing your religion, or choosing to have none, becomes an imperative. You can’t quite escape the awareness of having made a choice, a choice which could have been otherwise.

As it turns out, the Greek root of the word heresy can be translated as “to choose for one's self.” Thus Berger’s heretical imperative, or the imperative to choose. Unlike in certain pre-modern settings, where you’d likely be born into a religious tradition and live your life in a rather insulated and homogenous social setting that never gave you much occasion to question it, in the modern world getting religion, even if that means remaining faithful to your parent’s faith, is experienced as a choice you’ve made rather than something that is simply given in the nature of things. 

So, just as for Berger the sociological structures of modern society generated the heretical imperative, so, too, I would like to propose, the technological structures of digital media generate the hermeneutical imperative. 

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It critically explores the methods we deploy to interpret texts of all sorts. It’s often associated specifically with the interpretation of religious texts or the modern tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. I’m using the term to suggest that the proliferation of media artifacts and the growing colonization of our experience by varieties of digital mediation have generated an imperative to self-consciously interpret. 

Is that really a new situation, you may ask. Yes and no. It is true, I would grant, that human experience has always been marked by explicit or implicit acts of interpretation. But, three considerations …

(1) Acts of interpretation become more explicit when we confront symbolically encoded human artifacts or media objects. In a walk through the woods, I’m engaged in certain kind of mostly pre-conscious interpretative work—reading the landscape, we might say. Walking through a museum, on the other hand, involves interpretative work of a different and more conscious nature. To the degree that our experience is mediated by digital devices, it takes on the quality of a walk through a (very weird) museum full of works of human artifice calling forth our interpretations. 

(2) Also, if I’m right about our experience of digitization generating a primary experience of the Database rather than the Narrative, then the need to be always interpreting becomes all the more apparent. For one thing, digitally mediated relations themselves become media artifacts and media objects. In the face-to-face company of those we know relatively well, our interpretative labor is less acute. We likely have a repertoire of habitual interpretive paradigms on which we can draw, and the less obviously mediated character of in-person exchanges means that the interpretive work likely remains pre-conscious. However, when the person becomes an avatar communicating through text, image, meme, film, GIF, etc., then the interpretative burden intensifies. 

And, of course, while most of us know that narratives require interpretation, they also supply interpretations in such a way that it is possible to naively assume that a narrative is simply relaying a transparent account of things. So, when our primary experience is of the Database, then we find ourselves in the position of supplying the interpretative labor a trusted narrative would’ve provided for us. 

(3) I’ve already been hinting at a critical difference: self-consciousness. As is often the case, the conditions of digital media make explicit and conscious what had been previously implicit and unnoticed. And this development can have profound consequences, which can be difficult to describe. 

Perhaps an example will help. Consider the case of someone who deploys a certain style of naive literalism to a religious text, which assumes that reading the Bible, for example, does not involve any “human interpretation.” When they read the text and tell you what it means, they don’t see themselves as interpreters but merely reporters of what the text obviously says. I’ve called this a naive approach not because it is gullible, although that may also be true, but because it is unaware of itself. It has not been troubled by indeterminacy or doubt. It is aware of only one right reading, which it takes for granted. For such a person to become aware of themselves as interpreters is to induce a crisis of faith. They come to see their own reading as just that and as one among many.

So, yes, humans have always been interpreters of experience, but the nature and scope of the interpretive work has changed, and, most importantly, we’ve become aware of it.

We might say, then, that the conditions of pervasive digitization have rendered the full range of human experience a text to be interpreted. Condemned to preform ever more baroque hermeneutical maneuvers we are deprived the satisfactions of a naive experience of reality. Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us.

Meanwhile, public discourse increasingly takes on the quality of interminable debates carried on by individuals with fundamentally different hermeneutical styles and, consequently, interpretations of reality.

And, of course, there is no magisterium to settle matters for us. Indeed, those institutions that functioned analogously to the magisterium but for matters of public interest—the press, the expert class, etc.—have been rendered just another set of interpreters. They may still see themselves as the orthodox sect, of course. But that is no guarantee their interpretive authority will be recognized by others.

Berger noted that multiple responses were possible in the face of the heretical imperative, and the same is true for hermeneutical imperative. Suffice it to say for now that the best hermeneutics require virtues of the head and the heart.

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”— Wendell Berry, “To know the dark”

Welcome to the latest installment of the Convivial Society, especially to those of you who are relatively new around here. This is a full newsletter with a longish essay and much else. Also, this time around, I’m not addressing a crisis de jour, and I hope that comes off as a feature rather than a bug. Over this past year, I have found myself writing about current events a good deal more than usual. This is fine, but I’m glad to return to another mode of reflection, one in which I feel myself more at home. One note about the title: I’d say that this is the question ultimately raised by the essay rather than one it answers definitively. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it.

Reading Dante’s Divine Comedy poses any number of challenges to modern readers. This should not, I’ll quickly add, deter modern readers from the attempt, which, in my view anyway, will more than repay the effort. In any case, one of these challenges may be the curious astronomical dimensions of Dante’s poem. You may know, for example, that each of the three cantiche that make up the poem—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends on the same Italian word, stelle, or, in English, stars. Moreover, the final portion of Dante’s journey, related in Paradiso, is literally a journey through what we think of as space and what Dante, and his contemporaries, imagined as a series of concentric spheres with earth its center and the realm of God beyond the farthest sphere. It’s also clear that Dante believed the starry heavens were meant to draw our eyes toward God. At one point, he refers to the stars as God’s “lure.”

But perhaps most interestingly, in the middle part of his journey, as he ascends the mountain of purgatory, which Dante imagines as an island in the southern hemisphere, the character of Dante displays a remarkable awareness of where the stars and planets are located in the sky at any given moment. He frequently alludes to the position of the sun relative to the constellations of the Zodiac, and he is intimately familiar with the paths of the planets (including the moon) through the sky as well as the seasonal position of the stars. Within the first few lines of Paradiso, he casually invites readers to imagine the time of year when the sun rises where four circles—the horizon, the equator, the zodiac, and the colure of the equinoxes—intersect to form three crosses in conjunction with Aries! I’m inclined to think that few modern readers would even know where to begin with such instructions.

I can’t speak to whether Dante’s astronomical proficiency was common in his time—after all, Dante was not exactly your average medieval Florentine—but he did have the same experience of the starry sky as human beings had enjoyed for millennia before him and centuries after. Of that much we can be sure.

As science journalist Jo Marchant explained in the opening pages of her recent book, The Human Cosmos, the earliest existing examples of Paleolithic art may very well have included elaborately coded depictions of the night sky. Marchant’s book goes on to explore the remarkable role the stars have played in human thought and culture since then. In short, human beings have payed meticulous attention to the stars and experienced them as a source of wonder, admiration, and even reverence. Seen in this light, our own relationship to the night sky appears as a remarkable, and perhaps tragic, anomaly.

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon. I suspect that some of you reading this may be among those who have never seen the arc of our galaxy grace the night sky. For my part, I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the opportunities afforded to me to witness the undiminished night sky over the course of my four decades on planet earth.

I began to think about the loss of the night sky as I was reading about the latest SpaceX launch carrying another batch of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. SpaceX currently aims to place 12,000 of these satellites in orbit and is seeking permission to eventually place upwards of 40,000. The goal is to create a global broadband network making the internet accessible to even the earth’s most remote regions. Musk has said that, thanks to Starlink, anyone “will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed.” With the latest launch a few days ago, there are now 952 Starlink satellites in orbit. By comparison, there have been about 8,000 total satellites put into orbit since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. We should note, too, that SpaceX is not alone in these efforts. Amazon’s Project Kuiper has also secured FCC approval to put 6,236 satellites in orbit.

Musk’s ambitions have caused more than a little controversy among astronomers, who fear that this blanket of satellites will hamper their efforts to study the universe from earth-based telescopes. Since the launch of the first Starlink satellites in 2019, which were brighter than 99% of the other 200 orbiting human artifacts visible to the naked eye, SpaceX has responded to these concerns with measures to darken the satellites and equip them with visors to reduce their impact on earth-based astronomical observations. But while these measures have helped to some degree, scientists say the problem remains. Starlink satellites remain brighter than a recommended 7th-magnitude threshold, which would put them beyond visibility to the naked eye.

The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky. That process has been underway for more than two centuries and has been the consequence of what are now much more mundane technologies that we hardly think of at all. But I began to think of the ambitions of the Starlink project as somehow amounting to a final twist of the knife. Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure. One might also interpret the development in more symbolic terms, almost as a modern-day Tower of Babel, which is to say as a defiant and hubristic gesture of human self-sufficiency, a self-referential enclosure of the human experience, a literal immanent frame (to borrow a term from philosopher Charles Taylor).

But Starlink was only a point of departure leading me to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted. The loss of the stars, after all, could only happen because of a more general loss of darkness. Our relationship to the night, like most human things, is not simply given. It has a history, which varies from culture to culture. The conflicting and evolving way human cultures…

Last Wednesday, I was working on the draft of a newsletter I had intended to send out later in the week. Of course, that was before my Twitter feed was taken over by the failed coup or insurrection or seditious mob, or whatever else one may call it, which stormed the Capitol to interrupt the certification of the electoral college votes and, as far as some participants were apparently concerned, hang the Vice President of the United States. 

I’m fully aware of the insignificance of my own judgments on these matters, but let me nonetheless make clear at the outset that, however dispassionate the following discussion may seem, I consider the actions of mob, its enablers, and its apologists reprehensible and seditious. Moreover, I regret to add, the proceedings were, in my view, merely one particularly dramatic symptom of a grave, possibly fatal condition, which will not magically resolve itself come January 21st.

It’s hard to know where to begin, of course; the situation has many interlocking layers. The most notable and disturbing elements have been well covered, and we continue to learn more about the event each day. The picture, it seems, only grows darker. For my part, I’ve been especially interested in thinking through the role of digital media in these events and what it portends for the future. Here, then, are a few reflections for your consideration along those lines. 

In light of the complexity and gravity of the situation, which transpired just days ago (although it may already seem like weeks), I feel obliged to stress that this is a tentative exercise in thinking out loud. I’ll begin with a few comments about the labels and categories we use to think about digital media before turning to a more direct analysis of last week’s events and what they reveal about our media environment. More than is usually the case, the following discussion lacks a tight, well-ordered structure, so I’ve supplied the numbering to provide some sense of how my thoughts were grouped together. Think of what follows not so much as an argument but as a series of interlocking perspectives on the same phenomenon. 

(1) Reading through the torrent of commentary on the assault on the Capitol has left me with the sense that we’ve still not quite figured out how exactly to talk about the relationship between digital media and human experience. 

Much of the discussion has centered on the moderation policies of social media companies, particularly given their role in the organization of the assault on the Capitol. Some have commented on the role of social media during the assault. And others have sought to examine whether digital media played a more fundamental role in these events and, by extension, our cascading national omni-crisis. Each of these deserves our attention, as does much else, of course. For my part, I’ve been thinking about related matters for some time now under the assumption that digital media—like writing, printing, and electronic media before it—occasions profound social and political change. This is not, in my view, a techno-determinist position. I fully acknowledge that new technologies interact unpredictably with existing values, institutions, and social structures. Moreover, all along the way, people make choices, although perhaps increasingly constrained and conditioned by the new media infrastructure once it has become entrenched. But I remain convinced that media ought to be understood ecologically rather than additively. When a new species is introduced into a natural ecosystem, you don’t just get the old ecosystem plus a new species. You may very well end up with an entirely new ecosystem or even a collapsed ecosystem. Thus, when digital media restructures human communication in roughly 25 years time (dating roughly from the early years of the commercial internet), we should expect significant social and political change. The challenge is to make sense of it midstream, as we still are. 

(2) As events unfolded and also in their immediate aftermath, it seemed as if the reality of what was happening was difficult to ascertain. What I have in mind is not simply a case of what we tend to mean when we say something like “I still can’t believe x happened,” which almost always communicates the opposite of the literal sense. Rather, it seems to me that we were confronted with a rather more nebulous sense of unreality, one grounded in a similar inability to clearly parse the relationship between digitization and our experience of the world, which is in turn related to the unfathomable proliferation of digitally mediated reality. We are, of course, well along an established trajectory dating back decades, which has been alternatively theorized, for example, as involving the rise of pseudo-events, spectacle, or hyperreality. 

(3) It’s not uncommon to hear someone claim that “Twitter is not real life.” The phrase is generally meant to convey the position that only a relatively small percentage of the population are active Twitter users, thus Twitter is not really representative of reality. Consequently, those whose understanding of reality is shaped largely by their time on Twitter are not really perceiving real life or at least don’t have a good grasp of what really matters in real life.

There is, mind you, a measure of truth to this, but claiming that Twitter is not real life tends to obscure more than it illuminates. What it obscures are the porous boundaries between Twitter and non-Twitter, a fact which has for the past four years been driven home to us on a nearly daily basis. Better to say, for example, that Twitter mediates reality, as does Facebook, Instagram, CNN, your local NPR station, a textbook, a smartphone camera, and your native language. It is not a matter of real life in opposition to mediated reality. The challenge is simply to understand the nature and consequences of the various mediations that together shape our understanding of the world we all share. 

While I think it is ultimately unhelpful to speak about digitization generating unreal phenomena or to think of it as a set of activities that are somehow sealed off from the so-called “real” world, it is nonetheless revealing that we reach for this language. It suggests both a lack of trenchant categories with which to describe digitization and, consequently, our inability to fully the integrate the consequences of digitization into our thinking about the world. 

(4) Speaking of the digital sphere as a place or even a space is part of the problem. Digital tools do not generate places in the ordinary sense of the word, they mediate relationships, in part precisely by disassociating the self from place. It seems to me that if you think of “online” as a place, it is easier to imagine that this place is somehow detached from the so-called real world—you leave here and go there. However, if you think instead of digitized relations, then that temptation seems to lose its plausibility. The key is to understand the nature of these relations. 

Let’s speak, then, of digital tools, digital media, and digitized relations. The three are clearly interdependent—you don’t get digitized relations without either digital tools or their products—but I think it will be useful to keep these distinctions in mind. When it is helpful to think of the three together as a package, I will simply refer to the digital or digitization for brevity’s sake. (Much in the same way that we speak of electrification or industrialization.) 

(5) It is certainly true that the total relevant media environment includes network television, cable news, and talk radio. Many have rightly pointed out that, for example, our present situation cannot entirely be blamed on Facebook, Twitter, or any other digital media platform when television and radio also command such large and devoted audiences. This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t account for the degree to which digital is now the master medium, in the sense of being the technical infrast…

“Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one's whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”— Ivan Illich, “To Honor Jaques Ellul” (1993)

Consider the following words spoken by a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 novel, The House of Seven Gables:

“Then there is electricity, the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence! … Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but a thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

A bit overwrought, perhaps, but it expresses something of the wonder, dread, and exhilaration which attended the growing understanding of electricity in the mid-19th century. Roughly the same historical context had already yielded Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with its imaginative debt to galvanism, the late eighteenth century fascination with the relationship between electricity and biological life.

Hawthorne’s language in this passage calls to mind the way, a century later, Marshall McLuhan would talk about electronic forms of communication. “With the arrival of electric technology,” McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, “man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.”

I would guess that this is the the kind of claim that makes McLuhan seem a bit too esoteric or even a little bizarre to some readers. But if we sit with it for just a moment, I think we’ll find it both fairly straightforward and also illuminating (no pun intended). The relationship between networks of electronic communication and the nervous system, which also communicates via electrical impulses, seem obvious enough, of course. McLuhan is suggesting that the networks of electronic communication extend the functions of the biological nervous system beyond the physical limits of the body.

So let’s take a look at a handful of places where McLuhan leans on the concept of electronic communication as an extension of the nervous system and see where this might lead us. Bear in mind that McLuhan is writing in the 1960s, and these observations predate the advent of the internet as we know it. McLuhan has radio and the television chiefly in mind, with the telegraph as a distant predecessor. He is, however, already thinking about how the computer will affect these networks of electronic media.

So here is McLuhan explaining the analogy a bit further: “It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience.”

In other words, global networks of electronic media augment our field of experience. Whereas the field of experience constituted by our biological nervous system was anchored to the body’s location in space and time, electronic media as an extension of the nervous system generates a field of experience that is potentially global in scope.

Emphasizing the speed electronic networks of communication, McLuhan noted that “when information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant.”

The notion of a field of inconclusive awareness (or unified field of experience) is more or less the same dynamic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan noted when he made the following observation: “In the past, news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

Contrary to how he is sometimes (mis)read, McLuhan was not exactly sanguine about this state of affairs. “To put one's nerves outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain,” McLuhan argued, “is to initiate a situation ... of dread.” But McLuhan was deeply interested in understanding rather than deriding the psychic consequences of these transformations occasioned by new technologies.

Note how he tells us in the paragraph I cited above that the “old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant.”

There are two important parts to this claim, first the distinction between psychic and social, and, second, the idea that patterns of adjustment have become irrelevant. Regarding the latter, I take him to mean that whatever means of organizing and coping with information, stimuli, perceptions, etc. we deployed in the old age of pre-electronic media were now no longer up to the task.

Regarding the former, the distinction is a common one. We are accustomed to distinguishing between the individual and society. But I think McLuhan is also implying that we can speak of a social or collective consciousness in the same way that we might speak of a person’s consciousness. And that, along similar lines, we can speak about disorders of the corporate psyche in the same way that we might speak about disorders of the individual psyche.

I find it helpful to think along these lines by taking memory as a case in point. Clearly, we have our personal memories, and, certainly, even these memories have a social dimension. When we gather with old friends or family members, we might mutually spur each other to recollections of shared events that no one member of the group would have arrived at on their own. But I think it is meaningful to also speak about how societies remember (to borrow the title of Paul Connerton’s book on the theme).

A society’s memory is not merely the sum total of all the memories of the individuals that make up that society. In fact, in certain respects, it may be said to exist independently of individuals. It is true that such memories are not always subjectively realized in human consciousness, but they do not, for that reason, cease to effect the social body. We might even speak of such memories as suppressed or repressed, and, in this way, also potentially traumatic. Naturally, we do not look for these memories in structures of individual consciousness, but rather in the material structures of society: the layout of its cities, its architecture, its allocation of resources, its place names, etc.

So, for example, the layout of a city may continue to reflect decisions made decades earlier with overtly racist intent. Whether or not any individuals consciously remember such decisions, the material substrate carries the memory, as it were, just as the body often carries memories the mind has forgotten. And such memories continue to work themselves out in the life of the city, whether a critical mass of the city’s populace becomes consciously aware of them or not. In this way, we might even speak of them as traumatic memories. Only when they are brought to conscious awareness is there any hope of escaping their disordering consequences. But awareness is, I think, a double-edged sword. At least, we might say that awareness can in its own way become paralyzing for both individuals and society.

So, if we allow for the usefulness of the concept of collective consciousness we can entertain the idea that the consequences of the internet, for example, are felt not only privately but also collectively. This may seem like a banal observa…

“All technical progress exacts a price. We cannot believe that Technique brings us nothing; but we must not think that what it brings it brings free of charge.”— Jacques Ellul, “The Technological Order” (1962)

In case you’ve ever wondered, I don’t exactly have a grand research project or even a clearly defined area of interest. You might, in fact, should I ever have occasion to bore you with the details, be surprised to learn just how haphazardly I stumbled into writing about technology. Several years ago now, I reflected a bit on the work of tech criticism, by which, of course, I mean not a reflexive hostility to technology but rather the effort to think well about its meaning and consequences. The gist of it was that, generally speaking, the tech critic thinks and writes for the sake of something other than technology itself, whether that be, for example, the environment, the just society, or the good life. And this is as it should be. Technology is properly a means toward an end, and we get into trouble precisely when it becomes an end in itself.

My writing, I suspect, probably reflects this rather unfocused interest in matters technological, cultural, and moral. Insofar as I have a “thing,” however, I’d say that it is an interest in exploring and applying the work of an older, now mostly forgotten tradition, loosely defined, of technology criticism. It’s an effort I once called, and still occasionally refer to as the recovery of the tech critical canon. If it ever seems that I am saying something new or different, it is more likely the case that what I am saying is simply a variation on some older theme and that it appears novel or original only to the degree that it has been forgotten or ignored.

My explorations along these lines tend to alternate among different strands of this tradition. At times the media ecological strand is top of mind, and the work of scholars like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman becomes more prominent in my thinking. If you’ve been reading the newsletter of late, for the better part of this year really, you already know that my attention has more recently been mostly on the work of Ivan Illich, one of the few critics to whom I’d attach the epithet “radical,” suggesting one who gets to root of things. The names of others come readily to mind—Lewis Mumford and George Grant among the dead and Albert Borgmann, Wendell Berry, Carl Mitcham, and Langdon Winner among the living. Hannah Arendt, while not ordinarily thought of as a philosopher of technology, strictly speaking, has also served me well in this regard. 

Of late, I’ve had occasion to turn again to the work of Jacques Ellul, the 20th century French scholar, lay theologian, and sometime member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Ellul was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center for his labors on behalf of Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. While the homage to Illich’s notion of conviviality is evident in the title of this newsletter, I also intended to evoke the title of Ellul’s best known work, The Technological Society.

Of course, it is not that I think Ellul, Illich, or any of the other individuals I’ve mentioned were infallible in their judgments or that they foresaw all of the particular challenges we now face, but I do continue to be struck by the prescience of their analysis and the enduring relevance of their insights. I should add, of course, that I do highly value the work of contemporary writers, many of whom I read with considerable profit. The older critics, however, do have one decided advantage, and that is the advantage of not taking for granted the techno-social configuration that is more or less our default cultural setting and which thus inevitably shapes our thinking about technology. To be clear, this is not necessarily a matter of their keen insight or clear vision, it is, in large measure, simply a matter of chronological vantage point. They came up in a different age, so their experiences allowed them to perceive aspects of the modern technological project that we are more likely to miss if only because we have no similar point of contrast in our experience to illuminate the distinctive contours of our own age. What I’m suggesting, though, is that their work can become just such a point of contrast for us. At least, it has served that function for me (and I hope, by extension, for you as well). Many of their categories and frameworks remain useful, and they point us to alternative ways of being with technology. Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t find occasion to deploy the work of one of these thinkers to make sense of present circumstances. 

As one example, while reading through Ellul recently, I was reminded of his discussion of what he called “technical humanism,” and it caught my attention because of the recent discussions of both the documentary The Social Dilemma and the Center for Humane Technology with which the film is associated. Several individuals connected with the center, former Google employee Tristan Harris most prominent among them, appear in the documentary about the social ills of social media. 

In my feeds, people responded to the The Social Dilemma, which came out in October, in much the same way that they responded to the Center when it was first launched a few years back, which is to say with more than a healthy dose of skepticism and frustration. As far as I can tell, a good bit of the frustration stemmed from the fact that the documentary, and to a similar degree the work of the center, ignored the labors of contemporary academics and activists, who had been raising the alarm about social media companies long before the wayward technologists experienced their ostensible moral awakenings. Fair enough, I say. But then I immediately think about how Ellul and company were likewise marginalized and even scorned, often by contemporary scholars, who were all too ready to dismiss their work. But this is merely a self-indulgent digression—back to what Ellul had to say about technical humanism. 

Writing in The Technological Society, which was first published in 1954, Ellul noted that “the claims of the human being have thus come to assert themselves to a greater and greater degree in the development of techniques; this is known as 'humanizing the techniques.’” But Ellul, who had up to that point in his book gone to great lengths to demonstrate how technique had thoroughly captured society, was not impressed.

Ellul defined technique as (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Ellul understood that what mattered most about modern technology was not any one artifact or system, but rather a way of being in the world. This form of life or fundamental disposition precedes, sustains, and is reinforced by the material technological order. 

So, Ellul went on, if we seek the “real reason” for humanizing technology “we hear over and over again that there is ‘something out of line’ in the technical system, an insupportable state of affairs for a technician. A remedy must be found." 

But, Ellul invites us to ask, “What is out of line?” “According to the usual superficial analysis,” Ellul answers, “it is man that is amiss. The technician thereupon tackles the problem as he would any other. But he considers man only as an object of technique and only to the degree that man interferes with the proper function of the technique.”

In other words, he continued, “Technique reveals its essential efficiency in discerning that man has a sentimental and moral life. These factors are, for technique, human and subjective; but if means can be found to act upon them, to rationalize them and bring them into line, they need not be a technical drawback. Of course, man as such does not count.”

This humanizing of technology presumes the existing techno-social status quo and ultimately serves its interests…

You can listen to an audio version of the essay by clicking Play above.

Jane Jacobs opened her mid-twentieth century classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, with a discussion of the peculiar nature of cities. In the course of this discussion, she devoted all of three chapters to a single aspect of city life: the uses of sidewalks. I’ve always found the second of these three chapters especially interesting. In it, Jacobs examines the myriad incidental contacts generated among people who daily make use of a shared sidewalk—the nods, the smiles, the brief conversations, etc.

Let’s think for a bit about Jacobs’s analysis and take the sidewalk as an example of what I recently called the material infrastructure of social life, and, more specifically, as a space of public rather than private consequence. As Jacobs observes, the point of “the social life of city sidewalks” is precisely that it is public*, bringing together, as she puts it, “people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.”

In other words, Jacobs is describing the multiple, usually brief and inconsequential, contacts people who live on the same city street will have with one another over an extended period of time. These contacts are mostly with people who are not necessarily part of our circle of friends, but who, because of these contacts, become something more than mere strangers. And that seems like a crucial, often ignored category because it informs, as Jacobs recognizes, whatever vague understanding we have of the public writ large.

Jacobs acknowledges, of course, that, taken separately, these contacts amount to nothing, but the sum of such contacts, or their absence, becomes absolutely consequential. At stake, in her view, is nothing less than the trust that is essential to any functioning civic body.

“The trust of a city street,” she writes, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop ….”

Again, as Jacobs explains, most of these contacts are “utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands […]—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

“The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street,” she insists. And, what’s more, “Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.” (I’ll trust you to fill in the Illichian digression on that last observation!)

In the course of her analysis of the little publics sustained by the city sidewalks, she also offers an astute observation about the nature of suburban social life. As a built environment, the suburbs make it very difficult to cultivate the casual acquaintanceship generated by the countless contacts that inevitably arise from the shared city sidewalk. In a suburban setting, you either invite people into your home or, with vanishingly few exceptions, they remain strangers altogether, and Jacobs is realistic about how few people we are likely to invite into our homes. The materially induced tendency, then, is to know relatively well those who are most like us and, those who are not, hardly at all. What is lost, we might say, is the category of what Aristotle called civic friendship.

All of which raises the question: From where exactly will “a feeling for the public identity of people” arise? How might “a web of public respect and trust” be fostered? We’ll come back to that in a bit, but first let’s consider how these dynamics have been impacted by our contemporary technological milieu.

On this score, I’m particularly struck by the degree to which we are encouraged to displace or outsource the sort of micro-interactions, which generate the human contacts Jacobs finds so valuable. Sometimes this is a matter of unintended consequences; sometimes it is a matter of intentional design and expressed preferences.

As an example of the former, consider one unintended consequence of GPS. We tend to think of GPS displacing the paper map, which is true enough but not quite the whole story. The paper map was not the only method we used to find our way when we were in need of directions. We were just as likely to ask someone for directions to where we wanted to get. And, if it happened that I lost my way or that my directions proved inadequate, I’d likely pull over or stop someone to ask directions. In other words, in circumstances where we would have had occasion to interact with another person, we now turn to a device.

As an example of the latter, consider the move toward automated tellers, online banking, or self-checkouts in retail spaces. In these cases, a fairly common opportunity for a brief human interaction has been lost. The proliferation of home delivery services and online retail also promise to relieve us of the need to venture out into the spaces that previously presented us with opportunities for casual human contacts. We’ve tended to frame these developments with questions about employment and labor, which are perfectly legitimate frames of analysis, but Jacobs encourages us to imagine a different kind of cost, which is also much harder, if not impossible to quantify.

Consider as well how digital devices confront us with the subtle temptations of telepresence. We have the capacity and perhaps the proclivity to take partial leave of our immediate surroundings, including a tacit permission to forego the sorts of contacts Jacobs discussed by presenting as one who is presently conducting business elsewhere or otherwise preoccupied.

In fact, the trajectory toward a situation where we find ourselves ensconced within relatively comfortable zones of affinity, familiar at first hand chiefly with those who are mostly like us, is longstanding. One might see it, as Richard Thomas did in a manner not altogether dissimilar from Jacobs’s analysis of the sidewalk, in the architectural shift from front porches to back patios, and all that such a shift entails and implies about our social lives.

As Thomas observed, “Nineteenth century families were expected to be public and fought to achieve their privacy. Part of the sense of community that often characterized the nineteenth-century village resulted from the forms of social interaction that the porch facilitated. Twentieth-century man has achieved the sense of privacy in his patio, but in doing so he has lost part of his public nature which is essential to strong attachments and a deep sense of belonging or feelings of community.” The chef’s kiss comes with the advent of the doorbell camera, which casts our gaze into the public as a mode of surveillance rather than civic interest.

It’s not that any one instance of these cases is significant or necessarily “wrong.” Rather, as Jacobs suggested, it is the case that they become consequential in the aggregate. In other words, we should be attentive to the sort of people we become as a result of the mundane social liturgies, engendered by our material environment, which we daily enact with little or no reflection.

I should grant that Jacobs had in view not merely chance interactions, but recurring encounters with people who shared a city block over time and thus would gradually become familiar to one another. For those who have not lived on a city block in this manner, of course, these recently outsourced human interactions are simply a further attenuation of our public lives, that is to say of our lives insofar as they intersect with those who are not a part of our private circles.

But let’s return to the question of how we imagine the public when we have so severely constricted the c…

“To be sane in a mad timeis bad for the brain, or worsefor the heart.” — Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment”

I’ve been reading a fair amount about the meaning and significance of place over the last several weeks, and in the course of that reading I encountered an observation made almost in passing by the renowned Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan. “In the past,” Tuan wrote, “news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

I find historical observations of this sort instructive. They need not be profound, and, upon reflection, they tend to have an “of course that was the case” quality to them. But, that said, they are not, in fact, the kind of thing we routinely think about. The value of such observations lies in the striking point of contrast they offer to our situation, which then allows us to perceive more clearly an aspect of our experience that is so thoroughly ordinary we are tempted to think that this is just the way things have always been and, hence, must always be. Until, that is, a simple observation suddenly reveals the historical contingency of our situation and, consequently, affords us the simultaneously obvious but potentially revolutionary realization that things could be otherwise.

In this case, Tuan reminds us that until relatively recently, roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, the speed at which news or information could reach us was meaningfully correlated to place—the greater the distance the longer it took for news to get to you. News from afar, like light from distant stars, was always from the past.

The results of this correlation could be unfortunate, of course—recall, for instance, the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought nearly three weeks after the War of 1812 was formally concluded. But, at the same time, place and distance acted as filters of sorts on reality, concentrating a person’s attention, by default as it were, upon the world before them, which may now strike us as a feature rather than a bug. In a recent conversation with a student about Tuan’s observation, she put it this way: place, and by implication distance, regulated our information intake. It was likely that we would know most, and first, about what was nearest (and likely dearest) to us.

The contrast with our situation could hardly be more pronounced, of course. Not too long ago, for example, regardless of where you were in the world, if you happened to be on Twitter at the right time, you would have seen several videos of a massive explosion in Beirut mere minutes after it happened, followed, of course, by wildly speculative real-time commentary about its causes and consequences. This is but one relatively vivid and memorable example out of the innumerable cases we encounter daily.

Our present digital deluge of indiscriminately instantaneous information is not altogether without precedent. It lies rather on a trajectory that has already taken us through the age of electronic media. In the mid-1980s, for example, Joshua Meyrowitz noted a familiar pattern. “Nineteenth century life,” Meyrowitz observed in No Sense of Place,

entailed many isolated situations and sustained many isolated behaviors and attitudes. The current merging of situations does not give us a sum of what we had before, but rather new, synthesized behaviors that are qualitatively different. If we celebrate our child’s wedding in an isolated situation where it is the sole ‘experience’ of the day, then our joy may be unbounded. But when, on our way to the wedding, we hear over the car radio of a devastating earthquake, or the death of a popular entertainer, or the assassination of a political figure, we not only lose our ability to rejoice fully, but also our ability to mourn deeply.

The kind of incident Meyrowitz described is, of course, no longer limited to moments when we have access to broadcast media like radio or television. Upon reading this paragraph I naturally thought about the emotional roulette we play each time we glance at our social media feeds, which are always with us. You never quite know what news you’ll encounter and how it will mess with you for the rest of the day. As a recent song I rather like puts it, “Turning on my phone was the first mistake I made.”

In other words, ubiquitous connectivity means that we experience very few “isolated situations,” in Meyrowitz’s sense, and that we inhabit a psychic realm of perpetual affective dissonance and discord, buffeted by unrelenting crosswinds of data and information.

It’s a small quibble, but I’m not sure the word isolated is the word I’d use here. We tend to think of isolation as a generally negative experience giving the word a pejorative connotation. I’d prefer to speak about the integrity of a situation, how it holds together as a distinct experience. What Meyrowitz is describing, and what digital media accentuates, is the loss of situational integrity entailed by the varieties of tele-presence enabled by digital technology. The boundaries of my situation are always fuzzy and permeable. My here is always saturated by countless elsewheres. Place fails to bound my now.

And it is not only a matter, as in his example, of experiencing the full and singular emotional depth of an occasion. To take another instance of the same pattern, it is also true, as has been frequently noted, that the boundaries between work and rest have likewise blurred so that we tend to do neither well, assuming we enjoy the sort of work which can and ought to be done well.

Meyrowitz premised his analysis of electronic media on a fusion of the frameworks provided by Marshall McLuhan and sociologist Erving Goffman, who theorized human identity as a function of the roles we play in a variety of front stage and back stage settings. But Goffman assumed these settings would be bounded in place with relatively clear and concrete boundaries, the door separating the seating area of a restaurant and the kitchen, for example. We knew where we were and thus how to be. McLuhan’s work taught Meyrowitz that electronic media dissolved boundaries of that sort, generating a measure of disorientation with regards to where and when we are, which in turn throws our sense of who we are and how we ought to be into a bit of confusion.

“The electronic combination of many different styles of interaction from distinct regions,” Meyrowitz concluded, “leads to new ‘middle region’ behaviors that, while containing elements of formerly distinct roles, are themselves new behavior patterns with new expectations and emotions.” It would seem that this middle region, as Meyrowitz puts it, is now more or less where we live, to the degree we adopt the default settings of our techno-cultural moment. Consequently, we are all, with mixed results, improvising and navigating our way through it.

But let’s come back to the idea that place and distance, which is another way of saying the parameters of experience drawn by the body, regulated our information economy with regards to the quantity of information we encountered and its quality. By quality I mean not only whether the information was good information, which is to say accurate or truthful, but also relevant, important, pertinent, or personally valuable. Whatever the relative merits of such a situation or whatever ills of provincialism it may imply, what strikes me is the degree to which such filters were simply given. We might think of them as default settings about which we would have been largely unreflective. We, on the other hand, bear the epistemic and affective burdens of information superabundance regardless of whether we deem information superabundance itself to be a blessing or a curse. Either way, we have to grapple with its personal and social consequences.

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.” — Ivan Illich, interview (1996)

[Welcome back friends to the Convivial Society. This latest installment has been a while in coming, and it’s not short. The gist of it is this: thinking with Arendt about the material dimensions of a common world and a common sense with a view to better understanding our experience of digital culture. I hope you find it helpful.]

I’ve been thinking about tables of late, literally and figuratively. Chiefly, what I’ve had in mind is the table as an emblem of hospitality, and, relatedly, as an example of the material infrastructure of our social lives or the stuff of life that sustains and mediates human relationships. This owes something, of course, to the great importance Ivan Illich placed on hospitality, especially as it took shape around a table. But here I’m turning to the work of another theorist in order to think through some of the more vexing and at times disturbing features of public life.

Thinking about the table has drawn me back to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, first published in 1958. This work is notable for Arendt’s discussion of the distinctions among what she calls the private, public, and social realms. The political arena of the ancient Greek polis was her model for the public. The private realm was the realm of the household. The social realm was a more recent development, it was the realm of mass society. It was not a private realm, but neither was it a realm in which the individual could meaningfully appear in the full integrity of her particularity. I won’t take the time to explain those distinctions at greater length here, except as they relate to Arendt’s use of the table as a recurring metaphor, a metaphor which will, I think, usefully illuminate aspects of our digitally mediated experience. I suspect, in fact, that ultimately it would be useful to develop a fourth category, the digital, to extend Arendt’s analysis of the private, public and social. You might take what follows as some initial thinking toward that end.

The Common World of Things

Arendt’s figurative use of the table had tucked itself away in my mind from the time I first read The Human Condition around 2010. It always struck me as an evocative image, but it was not until recently that I began to see more clearly its significance.

“To live together in the world,” Arendt wrote in the paragraph that first caught my attention, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”

So there it is: our life together is built upon a world of things, which, like a table, gathers and distinguishes us. The point may at first seem somewhat trivial, but we’ll find that there’s some depth here as soon as we start unpacking Arendt’s argument.

These lines I just cited appear in the course of Arendt’s discussion of the public realm and its relation the world. Both of these terms, public and world, are technical terms in her work.

“The term ‘public’ signifies the world itself,” she explains, “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.” She goes on to clarify that the world is not simply synonymous with the earth, which she thinks of as related to our “organic life.” The world, in her sense, is related “to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”

We might say that the world as she means it is more or less co-extensive with what the historian Thomas Hughes called the human-built world—it is our cultural habitat and also what I’m calling the material infrastructure that sustains it. In this light, then, the table is not simply a metaphor, it is a case in point, a microcosm of the larger social order, which itself takes shape around an array of material artifacts.

We’ve already seen that for Arendt the world of things that constitutes the public is like a table in that it alternatively gathers, relates, and separates individuals. In other words, by virtue of being around a table a set of individuals are simultaneously related together as a group while also distinguished from one another. It is a role played by all the elements that make up the material infrastructure of social life. The question we need to bear in mind, of course, is this: How exactly are we being gathered and how exactly are we being related to one another?

Permanence and Stability

“The existence of a public realm,” Arendt observed, “and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

Here we once again encounter the table, or, at least, what the table illustrates: a gathering and relating of individuals. This gathering and relating function is attributed to a community of things, which I’m reading as a network of materiality mediating human relationships. The curious additional insight is the indispensable quality of permanence, a feature that also speaks to a distinct mode of materiality.

“If the world is to contain a public space,” Arendt argues, “it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.” Further on, she writes,

“The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.

Arendt’ insistence on a measure of permanence and stability across time recalls Simone Weil’s discussion of a stable ground upon which a human life may be rooted. In The Need for Roots, Weil argued that rootedness was an essential human need and, she added, “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

Like Arendt, Weil is here insisting upon a trans-generational common world, although she is less explicit about its material base. And, yes, of course, I’ll add that Ivan Illich made similar observations. In discussing society’s substitution of the better for the good, for example, Illich warns that “at this point the balance among stability, change, and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation.” Note especially the past/future orientation of that last clause, and, perhaps especially, the notion of having “bearings for innovation.” Another subject for another day.

But one last note on the matter of permanence: For Arendt the permanence of the world of things not only grounds our common experience of the world but also human identity. “The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life,” Arendt wrote, “and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”

But let’s turn now to the epistemic implications of Arendt’s notion of a common world.

A Common Sense

The world of things turns out to have important psychological and epistemological functions in Arendt’s analysis, and this is were I think her line of thinking gets really interesting. We might say that Arendt takes the world of commo…